Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge This week, DirecTV announced it intends to buy Dish, Sling TV, and the rest of EchoStar’s television business for a dollar (while also taking on all of Dish’s debt), combining almost 20 million satellite TV subscribers from two companies that have been circling one another for decades.But it’s not just DirecTV and Dish. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, General Electric, GM, News Corp, Tumblr, and the various incarnations of Time Warner have also gotten mixed up or split up while trying to bridge the gap between communications and media over the years.Here’s a partial timeline of the events that might end with these two companies joining together at last.AOL, meet Time Warner At the turn of the 21st century, it was obvious that the internet... Continue reading…

Hedging one’s bets, I suppose. | Photo by Gregg DeGuire/Getty Images After the podcast where Ben Horowitz repeatedly congratulated himself for being brave enough to support Donald Trump in public, it turns out Horowitz will also be donating to Kamala Harris. Or so he says.“As I mentioned before, Felicia and I have known Vice President Harris for over 10 years and she has been a great friend to both of us during that time,” Horowitz wrote in an email to his venture capital firm obtained by Axios. “As a result of our friendship, Felicia and I will be making a significant donation to entities who support the Harris Walz campaign.”“Like, how do you walk that back?”I... listen. Two things. First, one of the most striking things about the podcast Horowitz made with his a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen was how... Continue reading…

If you have recently experienced a slow Wi-Fi speed on all your connected devices for no apparent reason, it's possible that someone is piggybacking on your Wi-Fi network and taking up the juice. This can be really frustrating, especially when you are on a limited internet data plan or require high-speed internet for your work. Not only that, if someone is sneaking through your Wi-Fi network, there's always a privacy risk.

Illustration: The Verge You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a robot clean your floors. Here’s our pick of the most cost-effective bots you can buy right now. Continue reading…

Affinity Photo is lauded as the best alternative to Adobe Photoshop. While the Affinity suite can easily be compared to Adobes Creative Cloud offering, there are many direct comparisons between Photoshop and Affinity available to educate you on making the switch. Many of Photoshops tools and features are available in Affinity Photo, but there are still more than a handful of Photoshop features which are not available in Affinity software.

Garmins aren’t just multisport behemoths anymore. | Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge Garmin may be best known for its hardcore fitness watches, but it’s got an extensive line of lifestyle offerings, too. Continue reading…

Image: MKBHD via YouTube MKBHD’s new wallpaper app has received its first big update after users criticized the app over pricing and the advertising setup for free accounts. On Friday, the Panels account announced on X that people using the app for free can now download high-resolution images — not just standard-definition ones — by watching a single ad.The app previously required users to sign up for a $11.99 per month (or $49.99 per year) subscription to access images in full resolution. It also required free users to watch two ads before downloading standard-definition wallpapers. Panels has since taken this requirement away and will now let users download standard-definition images without seeing ads.Major update #1: We’ve been focusing on app... Continue reading…

A personal computer (PC) is a device used to access websites, play video games, create works of art, keep in touch with loved ones, store lots of data, and much more. Mobile devices such as laptops or smartphones can now do many more tasks that were traditionally only available to PC owners. A network-attached storage (NAS) server is a device that can store a considerable amount of data and run various services. This can all be achieved on a PC, so what are the major differences between a NAS server or enclosure and a desktop PC?

Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp 2024 in Europe. | Image: WordCamp The lines between the WordPress open-source project, the nonprofit backing it, and the commercial arm owned by Automattic are blurring. Continue reading…

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge WordPress and its cofounder Matt Mullenweg are embroiled in a public battle against the third-party hosting provider WP Engine. Continue reading…

Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge After months of waiting, now Android users can take the Arc Search app for a spin. It’s now available as an open beta on the Google Play Store after developers teased an Android version of the app in August.Arc is The Browser Company’s take on web browsing, billing itself as offering better customization options than competitors. The Arc Search app also comes with an AI feature, called “Browse for me,” that searches the web for your query and comes up with a summary based on its sources. The app also automatically archives old tabs, blocks ads by default, and gets rid of data-tracking popups, which has me tempted to switch away from Edge. While Arc initially launched as a Mac-only desktop browser, the Arc Search app launched widely... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Intel may have one less worry on its very full plate: it believes it has now fully addressed its desktop CPU instability woes with 13th and 14th Gen “Raptor Lake” chips. While the company says there’s still no fix for processors that are already damaged, it confirms to me that the “Vmin Shift Instability” is the root cause of the unusual instability and crashes that these desktop CPUs have been demonstrating for many months.And, Intel says, the four sets of mitigations it’s now shipped are the fix for the problem. “Yes, we’re confirming this is the cause and that it is fixed,” Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford tells The Verge. That’s good! It also wasn’t clear until now. As of August 30th, Intel was still telling us that “Vmin... Continue reading…