Author: News Room
The Apple Watch Series 10 is a great smartwatch for iPhone owners, but it’s overkill if you want to track the basics and little else. In those instances, the latest Apple Watch SE might be the better buy, especially when you can get it at a steep discount. Fortunately, Apple’s entry-level watch is available at Amazon and Best Buy in its 40mm base configuration starting at $169 ($80 off), which is $20 shy of its all-time low.The second-gen SE can track all the essentials, allowing you to keep tabs on your daily steps, your heart rate, and your sleep quality.…
Ted Carstensen, the head of the United States Digital Service (USDS) organization that has been renamed to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is resigning instead of taking the “Fork in the Road†buyout offer for federal employees. “I write to let you know that I have decided to resign from USDS and today will be my last day,†Carstensen said in an internal memo to colleagues that was seen by The Verge. “I am not taking the fork, but after discussions with my family and other trusted advisors I decided that it is time for me to pursue…
Google Photos is adding its digital SynthID watermarks to photos that have been edited using the Magic Editor’s generative AI feature. The new feature is rolling out “this week” according to Google, and is intended to make it easier for people to quickly identify images that have been manipulated using the “reimagine” tool in Magic Editor.SynthID is a watermarking system created by Google’s DeepMind team that embeds a digital metadata tag directly into images, video, audio, and text to identify if they were created or altered using AI tools. The watermark is already being applied to images that are entirely…
To do this, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington used a method known as distillation — which allows smaller models to draw from the answers produced by larger ones — to refine s1 using answers from Google’s AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Google’s terms of service note that you can’t use Gemini’s API to “develop models that compete with” the company’s AI models. The Verge reached out to Google with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.The researchers based s1 on Qwen2.5, an open-source model from Alibaba Cloud. They initially started with a…
Peloton was a pandemic darling — one of the businesses that seemed to find its purpose as something more than a cultish fad when the world shut down. And then, everything went horribly wrong. First, the supply chain issues with monthslong delays for bikes that irked new customers. Then, a disastrous recall affected both of its treadmills: the Tread Plus, because it injured several users and killed a small child, and the regular Tread, which hadn’t even launched yet because of a wobbly screen.And on top of all that, Peloton failed to account for a world reopening after the first…
Traditional cameras might now be outnumbered by smartphone snappers by a huge margin, but there’s nothing quite like having physical controls under your thumb and fingers. The Leica Lux Grip lets iPhone owners trade touchscreen tapping for actual buttons that mimic the feel of the firm’s high-end heroes – only for a lot less cash. Some of the most fun I had taking photos with a smartphone last year was with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and its Photography kit add-on, and iPhone owners have long had third-party options like Shiftcam’s SnapGrip – but none come close to matching the Lux…
Customers on AT&T’s network are getting one more tool to help them decide when to pick up the phone: an indication of why a business is calling you, right from the incoming call screen. It’s a continuation of the branded calling feature that AT&T and TransUnion introduced last year, and only works on Android phones.This feature starts with the business making the call, which can choose to display a message like “refill reminder” or “delivery service.” The message will also show up in the call details page. There’s nothing that the receiver needs to do in order to see the…
Warner Bros. has made it easier to watch some of its movies online for once, bucking a trend of wiping them from existence. As spotted by Gizmodo, the official Warner Bros. Entertainment YouTube channel has quietly added more than 30 full movies to a playlist over the past month that you can watch here for free.Most of these offerings aren’t available on the Warner Bros. streaming platform, Max. There’s no explanation as to why the entertainment giant has made these movies free to watch on YouTube, or why this perplexing set of films was selected, but it’s one less barrier…
The Zenfone 12 Ultra officially launches today, but unlike previous generations, this one won’t be sold in the US.As expected, the 12 Ultra is a de-gamer-ified ROG Phone 9 Pro with a big screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, and a unique gimbal-like stabilizer in the main camera. It’s the same formula Asus followed with the Zenfone 11 Ultra, which was a fine device but failed to stand out in a sea of other big Android phones. Now, this edition isn’t even making landfall on our shores.As you’d expect of a phone with gaming DNA, the 12 Ultra offers a…
Things at Sonos are getting worse before they get better — if they’re going to get better. Today the company laid off approximately 200 employees, The Verge has learned. The news was announced at around 4PM ET, and a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad was posted on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”Conrad clearly sees…
US consumers may already be seeing additional fees on shipments from China after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Chinese goods took effect on Tuesday.Clint Reid, the founder and CEO of a company that offers software to help with cross-border commerce, posted screenshots on X showing additional charges added to a shipment from DHL:Another X screenshot appears to show DHL requesting an import duty on a shipment from Hololive. We’ve seen a similar screenshot on Reddit. One Reddit user in a retro gaming handheld emulator community shared a screenshot of an email from Keepretro asking if a buyer would pay an…
With new U.S. Executive Orders, court decisions, and many companies making changes to their DEl programs in recent weeks, we sat down with Fiona Cicconi to learn how Google is thinking about this.Can you tell us how we’re thinking about this across the company?First, I want to be clear: we’ve always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly. That’s exactly what you can expect to see going forward. Our users come from all across the U.S. and around the world, and…