Super Mario Bros. Wonder director Shiro Mouri (left) and producer Takashi Tezuka (right). | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a game filled with oddball ideas. Thanks to magical flowers that, once collected, introduce some unexpected new element, players experience everything from a bunch of Piranha Plants simultaneously bursting into song to Mario turning into a sentient pile of goo. It has so many ideas, in fact, that director Shiro Mouri wasn’t sure the team could pull it off. “At first when I heard that we’d be creating one wonder effect per course, and that all of the courses are going to have different wonder effects,” he tells The Verge, “I thought: ‘That’s stupid. That’s impossible.’”As it turns out, the problem wasn’t so much coming up with ideas. The developers at Nintendo brainstormed a lot of potential powers — around... Continue reading…

“I’ve never seen a performance quite like that.” | Collage by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Victor J. Blue, Bloomberg, Getty Images ‘It’s his nature.’ Continue reading…

How much of an open-source fan are you? As good as the biggest and best products can be, nothing can beat an app or tool that lets you see exactly what it's doing. If you've always wanted to see what was going on inside your GPU, you're in luck; someone has created their own home-made open-source graphics processor, and while it won't be a staple in gaming PCs any time soon, it's still an amazing feat.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Apple plans to release a new lineup of iPad Pros with OLED displays in early May, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The company is also reportedly planning to launch an iPad Air with a larger 12.9-inch display for the first time.According to Gurman’s sources, the new iPad Pro models will feature Apple’s in-house M3 chip, along with a revamped Magic Keyboard with a bigger trackpad. The iPad Air, on the other hand, is rumored to come with the last-generation M2 chip and two display sizes: the standard 10.9-inch option and a larger 12.9-inch one. The current iPad Pro models use M2 chips, while the Air has an M1.It’s been nearly two years since Apple released an updated iPad. Bloomberg says that, though the company... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Apple is suing a former employee for leaking confidential information, including unknown details about Apple’s Journal app, the development of the VisionOS headset, and more, to journalists and employees of other companies. The lawsuit, filed ten days ago in California state court (24CV433319, pdf), says Andrew Aude also leaked regulatory compliance strategies, employee headcounts, and other product hardware characteristics. As reported previously by MacRumors, in at least one message, the company says Aude claimed he leaked information “so he could “kill” products and features with which he took issue.”Apple referenced many of the communications in the lawsuit:Between June and September 2023 alone, Mr. Aude connected with a Wall... Continue reading…

As cool as modern hardware is, there are plenty of examples of older tech had that a certain look and feel that still looks great today. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to bring the past into the present and re-live the technology that got us to where we are today. 8BitDo has been making retro mechanical keyboards for a little while now, and the company has just announced its new Commodore C64-themed keyboard that you can preorder right now.

Illustration: The Verge Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s chief product officer of responsible AI, tells The Verge in an interview that her team has designed several new safety features that will be easy to use for Azure customers who aren’t hiring groups of red teamers to test the AI services they built. Microsoft says these LLM-powered tools can detect potential vulnerabilities, monitor for hallucinations “that are plausible yet unsupported,” and block malicious prompts in real time for Azure AI customers working with any model hosted on the platform. “We know that customers don’t all have deep expertise in prompt injection attacks or hateful content, so the evaluation system generates the prompts needed to simulate these types of attacks. Customers can then get a... Continue reading…

Microsoft OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps out there, especially for Windows users. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft OneDrive and other Microsoft products like Word, Excel, and Teams. This integration opens the door to easy file sharing and collaboration, but it offers much more even if you’re not a part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Getty Algorithms might help hotels illegally collude on prices, even if no humans from those businesses actually talk to each other about them, according to US antitrust enforcers.The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission jointly submitted a statement of interest in Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment, a case brought before the US District Court of New Jersey. The class action case was brought by New Jersey residents who rented rooms in Atlantic City hotels and alleged that several of those hotels engaged in an illegal price-fixing conspiracy through the use of a common pricing algorithm.The plaintiffs are trying to show that the hotels violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits “conspiracy in restraint of... Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images New York City will soon start testing out technology that uses AI to detect guns at subway turnstiles, Mayor Eric Adams said on Thursday. Adams’ announcement comes one week after an altercation at a subway station in Brooklyn in which a man was shot with his own gun after pulling it on another passenger.Adams said the city is partnering with Evolv, a Massachusetts-based weapons detection company whose detectors are used in schools and venues across the country. Evolv, however, has faced scrutiny over the accuracy of its machines, as well as two government probes and a class action lawsuit by shareholders.The pilot will start in 90 days, in accordance with the POST Act, which requires the New York City Police Department to disclose the... Continue reading…

When looking at the best CPUs and the best GPUs, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the investment that'll be required, which is exactly why a chip like Ryzen's 8600G is such a compelling choice, packing in both processing and graphics capabilities. However, you'll still need some solid memory. You can look at list after list of the best RAM out there, but why bother with that when we've got the ultimate memory choices specifically for the 8600G below?

Microsoft announced this month that it will be discontinuing the Windows Subsystem for Android — the thing that makes it possible to run Android apps on Windows PCs — in a year's time. The feature wasn't used by many, but that isn't the fault of Windows users. Android apps were irrelevant on Windows because the implementation of them was fundamentally unintuitive. A feature that enables phone apps to run on a desktop operating system is the kind of thing only Apple can do well thanks to its unparalleled cross-platform integration.