Author: News Room
According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you’re going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I’ve found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that’s about as…
Rolls-Royce has revealed the Spectre Series II, and the updated EV gets meaningful engineering upgrades alongside a raft of new interior options that push Bespoke craftsmanship to new extremes. The headline numbers are genuinely impressive. Range is up 18-percent to 390 miles on the WLTP cycle, and charging times are down 14-percent. Power rises to 442kW with 1015Nm of torque. If that’s not enough, the Black Badge version unlocks 500kW through Infinity Mode and a staggering 1100Nm in Spirited Mode – making it the most powerful Rolls-Royce ever built. The design is unchanged, which I think is the right call…
Introduction Incredibly, the BYD Ti7 already sells at a rate of 15,000 units a month in China. Over there, it lives under the slightly-less-snappy-than-BYD banner of FangChengBao; the UK is set to get essentially the same car I’ve just driven, but with BYD badging later in 2026. It’ll come with a four-wheel drive, plug-in powertrain complete with impressive EV only range of up to 79 miles, a premium seven seat interior and, naturally, a small mountain of top tech. I think it could do really well for buyers looking for value but with a big, bold persona that looks like…
Few things are more panic-inducing than plugging in a dead phone and seeing absolutely nothing happen. And if you’ve run into that problem on an iPhone 17 or iPhone Air recently, Apple says it now has a fix in the form of a free iPhone update. Spotted by MacRumors the company has released iOS 26.5.1 – a small software update aimed specifically at the iPhone Air and the entire iPhone 17. According to Apple’s release notes, the update addresses an issue that could prevent wired charging from working properly when the battery was nearly empty. Apple says the bug affected…
Microsoft is kicking off its yearly Build developer conference in San Francisco today, sandwiched between the recent Google I/O and Apple’s upcoming WWDC event. While tickets to attend Build in person are sold out, the conference is being streamed for free online, with CEO Satya Nadella opening with a keynote at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT.A cursory glance at the featured speakers and virtual sessions suggests that Build will predominantly focus on AI, which isn’t surprising given this is a developer event in 2026. The keynote description also says that Nadella and Microsoft leaders will be sharing “how Microsoft is…
Amazon turns Prime Day is back! It’s a day (yes) where Prime members (got it) get exclusive access to stacks of special deals. Amazon Prime Day is the yearly extravaganza where Amazon chucks out stacks of deals. As in 2025 Amazon isn’t doing it for just 24 or 48 hours any longer – instead, it’ll be taking place over four whole days from 23 to 26 June, which is interesting timing considering the FIFA World Cup will be in full swing by that point. It’s a little earlier than usual, too – Amazon has held it in July previously. Deals…
Trying to work out who owes what after a group dinner could soon become a lot less painful, if new rumours are anything to go by. According to a new report, Apple is apparently preparing a Wallet feature for iOS 27 that will let iPhone users split a bill, simply by taking a photo of a receipt. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that the tool will be built into Apple Wallet and Apple Cash, letting iPhone users photograph receipts and automatically generate payment requests. It could be announced as soon as next week’s WWDC 2026 keynote, before arriving later this year…
Say what you like about electric cars, but one of the biggest hurdles for convincing people to get one is the charging – particularly out on the road. Things are getting better but Chinese car make BYD wants to make the task even simpler with its Flash Charger technology, which has the potential to take on Tesla’s visionary charging infrastructure worldwide. BYD even plans to bring it to the UK and, boy, do we need it. BYD’s Flash Chargers are just that; fast with electricity being dispensed at up to 1,500kW per connector using a compatible vehicle, which is up…
The ROG Ally X20 was one of the best kept secrets of this year’s Computex show. Maybe it was because Intel had announced announced a slew of G3 Extreme-powered gaming handhelds a day earlier, but an updated version of the Asus-built, Xbox-badged gaming handheld that only arrived six months ago wasn’t on my bingo card. Officially revealed at ROG’s press conference as the ‘one more thing’ following a procession of special edition computer components (launched to mark the gaming division’s 20th anniversary), the Xbox ROG Ally X20 seemed to address every pain point I had with the Xbox ROG Ally…
Zenith has launched the G.F.J. Calibre 135 Double Signed with Naoya Hida & Co. It’s a ten-piece limited edition watch that brings together Swiss watchmaking and Japanese independent craft in one beautiful (and slightly unexpected) collab. The watch is built around the Calibre 135 – Zenith’s most decorated movement, widely regarded as the standout from the golden age of observatory chronometer competitions. Naoya Hida has been fascinated by the movement since the 1990s, so, rather than a brand slapping a co-signature on an existing product, this feels like a genuine meeting of minds. The case is 39mm in platinum and…
Asus and Qualcomm have teamed up to redefine “small yet mighty”. The Ascent QN10 is the first mini PC of its kind to launch with Snapdragon X2 internals, packing enough power to rival the Apple Mac Mini – which is rarer than rocking horse droppings right now thanks to memory supply shortages – yet takes up barely more desk space than a can of coke. This ain’t your low-power home server box to replace a Raspberry Pi or Intel N100 mini PC; the Snapdragon X2 Elite is a full throttle chipset with an impressive amount of gaming grunt, dedicated NPU…
Some news: The Vergecast is now a daily podcast! Starting today, we’ll be posting every weekday, with even more gadgets and rankings and conversations and feelings and podcasts-within-podcasts. We’re excited for all the ways this new schedule lets us tell new kinds of stories, experiment with new tech and new formats, and involve you even more in the show.(The other immediate change to know about: We’ll be publishing the show in the afternoons going forward, so we can include the day’s biggest news in our 90 Seconds on The Verge segment. The goal is to always be live before 4PM…