Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge I have six Amazon Echo smart speakers in my house, and I’ve tested more, but my favorite is the Echo Dot with Clock. I love how the fabric-covered LED dot matrix display makes time unobtrusively accessible, beaming its gentle white light from my dresser across my blackout-curtained dark bedroom. (It definitely beats asking Alexa the time.)So I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news: Amazon has discontinued the Dot with Clock in favor of a more expensive, less eye-pleasing model. “You can check the product page for the latest device availability, but once inventory of this generation Echo Dot with Clock is sold through it will not be restocked,” Amazon spokesperson Liz Roland tells The Verge. Amazon didn’t tell us why it’s going away. At... Continue reading…

Google Maps is pretty much the undisputed king of navigation services, even though there are some alternatives like Bing Maps, Waze (also owned by Google), and more. This is primarily because of two reasons: the first being Google commanding a huge marketshare both in the search space and mobile, along with the fact that Google Maps genuinely does offer some pretty advanced capabilities like Immersive View, Live View, and biking routes, among other things. However, the firm may now be gearing up to face some competition as Apple has announced the launch of Apple Maps beta on the web.

A new Nest Learning Thermostat appears to be imminent. | Image: MysteryLupin via X Leaked images posted on X by @MysteryLupin show a fourth-generation Nest Learning Thermostat and new temperature sensors, as well as several other thermostats: Nest E, Nest Learning Thermostat (3rd Gen). Missing from the pictures is the Nest Thermostat (2020), presumably because it’s not compatible with Nest’s room sensors.The new addition looks similar to the third-generation model but appears to have a more curved display while retaining the physical dial, as pointed out by 9to5Google. The display is likely a touchscreen, as with the third-generation model, and the image shows a new icon with three wavy lines. This indicates that the new thermostat is also an indoor air quality monitor, which would be a new feature for Nest... Continue reading…

AMD announced the Ryzen 9000 at last month's Computex event, claiming it's the most powerful desktop processor. The extent to which AMD's claim turns out to be true in real-world scenarios was expected to come out this month, as the Ryzen 9000 was originally planned to hit retail on July 31. But plans have now changed, and Team Red will have to wait a few more days for the Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs to hit the shelves.

Photo by Danielle Parhizkaran/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Amazon’s Prime Video has inked an 11-year deal that will bring NBA and WNBA games to the streaming service starting with the 2025-2026 season. Prime Video will air a total of 66 regular-season games and 20 playoff games each year. The league’s new agreements also include Disney and Comcast-owned NBC Universal, which will keep some games on the linear ESPN, ABC, and NBC channels. They’ll air on Disney’s upcoming standalone ESPN streaming service and NBC’s Peacock as well. As reported by The New York Times, all three companies have agreed to shell out billions for the rights, with Disney paying $2.62 billion annually, Comcast paying $2.45 billion, and Amazon paying $1.93 billion. Image: Amazon The deal represents a... Continue reading…

The first true Steam Deck competitor has arrived. Continue reading…

One of the downsides of buying the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 is that a lot of its features aren't available for all users. For instance, the ECG and blood pressure features are restricted to certain regions. Additionally, you can't use these features when the watch is paired with a non-Samsung phone, even in supported regions. These restrictions truly take away from the overall experience of using them, but thankfully, there's a workaround.

A graphic representation of a laser communications relay between the International Space Station, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration spacecraft, and the Earth. | Image: NASA/Dave Ryan NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back.The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. GIF: NASA Demonstration of the transmission’s journey. Engineers fitted an airplane with a portable laser terminal,... Continue reading…

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images FBI director Christopher Wray said on Wednesday that the person who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump searched the web for “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” one week before the rally shooting, as reported by the The New York Times.Investigators recovered the search from a laptop linked to 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, which refers to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. “That’s a search that’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. “That is the same day that it appears that he registered for the Butler rally.”As reported by the NYT, Wray said Crooks visited the site of the Butler,... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Bing’s new search experience puts AI-generated answers front and center while pushing traditional search results to the side. The new layout, which is rolling out for a small number of queries, fills your search results page with AI-generated summaries addressing various aspects of your question.Microsoft has shared an early look at what this search experience will look like... and it’s a lot. For the query “What is a spaghetti western?” Bing displays a summary explaining that it’s a “subgenre of western films produced by Italian filmmakers,” along with a series of bullet points of the genre’s key characteristics. Image: Microsoft I know that this feature isn’t fully rolled out yet, but as a Bing and Edge user (we... Continue reading…

An image representing AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 desktop parts. | Image: AMD AMD was set to launch its new Zen 5 processors on July 31st, including the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X, a chip it’s calling “the world’s most powerful desktop consumer processor.” Instead, it’s now announcing a one- to two-week delay “out of an abundance of caution.” The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X will now launch on August 8th, while the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X will go on sale on August 15th.This is not because AMD’s found any issues with the actual chips, spokesperson Stacy MacDiarmid tells The Verge. Rather, AMD discovered some of its chips didn’t go through all of the proper testing procedures, and the company wants to make sure they do. Here’s the full statement from AMD computing and graphics SVP Jack Huynh:We... Continue reading…

I might be fairly new to mechanical keyboards compared to many veterans in the community, but there's one thing I can confidently say there are a lot of nonsensical myths about mechanical keyboards floating around on the internet. For better or worse, the "mech keeb" community is still a niche one, so there are many more people outside of it than the ones in the know. So, a regular PC user might still have some misconceptions about mechanical keyboards that are far from the truth.