Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Netflix is moving beyond subscriber numbers. In its first quarter earnings results released on Thursday, Netflix announced that it will stop reporting quarterly membership numbers in 2025 because subscribers are “just one component” of its growth. The change comes after a quarter where it added 9.3 million subscribers, growing to more than 270 million members globally. Subscriber count meant everything in the early days of streaming. It allows investors, studios, and everyone else to gauge just how well a streaming service is doing compared to the competition, and Netflix has leaned on its lead in that area. But now, Netflix says it is flipping this idea on its head because it has multiple sources of revenue that don’t hinge solely on... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry.Today is my last day at The Verge, and this will be my final issue of Hot Pod. I’ll have one more story coming out in the next week or two. But until then, I wanted to offer some parting thoughts on the industry I have covered so closely for the past two years.I have this thing in my career where I always get to the party too late. I joined my college newspaper just as it was becoming clear that printing a daily no longer mathed out. I had a good year at the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC shortly before the beloved executive producer left and the program imploded. I missed the heady old days at Forbes when magazine writers would drink champagne on a... Continue reading…

Ursa is a new keycap profile for Topre keyboards. I want it. | Render: FKCaps Listen, I don’t want to be the guy who always posts about weird keyboard stuff. I have other interests. But I need to tell the dozens of Verge readers with Topre keyboards about these keycaps. Ursa is a new spherical doubleshot keycap profile for Topre that is available for group buy until May 15th. Reactions to the previous sentence will likely fall into three camps: I recognize some of those wordsAlready smashed that checkout buttonA keycap group buy? In 2024? In a new profile? For Topre boards? What could go wrong?I am usually a group three, but today, I am in group two. If you’re in group one, here is what some of those words mean. Topre keyboards, like the Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional, use different switches than... Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The Senate is moving forward on a vote to reauthorize a controversial program that allows warrantless surveillance of foreign “targets.” Before voting on the reauthorization bill, senators had to vote on a cloture motion to begin voting. The cloture motion passed 67–32, just one day ahead of the program’s expiration.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is set to expire at midnight on April 19th, a deadline some senators emphasized as they urged their colleagues to vote in favor of reauthorization. “It’s hard to overstate either the importance — the gravity — of allowing it to sunset, yet we are 36 hours away from that happening,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said on the Senate floor. “I understand that some of my... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge The next generation of Meta’s large language model Llama, which releases today to cloud providers like AWS and to model libraries like Hugging Face soon, performs better than most current AI models, the company said in a blog post.Llama 3 currently features two model weights, with 8B and 70B parameters. (The B is for billions and represents how complex a model is and how much of its training it understands.) It only offers text-based responses so far, but Meta says these are “a major leap” over the previous version. Llama 3 showed more diversity in answering prompts, had fewer false refusals where it declined to respond to questions, and could reason better. Meta also says Llama 3 understands more instructions and writes better code... Continue reading…

With the advancement of technology, some utterly bizarre products have hit the shelves over the past couple of decades. From an Android-powered oven and selfie toaster to Amazon Dash and the KFConsole. Some of these products were strange, some didn't make sense, some were awful, and others made you go "Huh?" Here are 16 products we found strange ... Do you remember any?

As funny as it was when the AI Pin utterly failed at translating Korean and Japanese, it also broke my heart. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Of all the things the Humane AI Pin promised, I was most intrigued by translation. In a demo, a man speaks to Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri in Spanish. The AI Pin automatically translates it to English. Chaudhri replies in English. Again, the AI Pin translates his words back into Spanish. There are notable pauses when the AI is processing, but it’s a powerful concept. Unlike with Google Translate, there was solid eye contact between both people. The AI voice sounded more natural and less robotic. And crucially, there were no screens. The language barrier was still there, but it was much more permeable. That’s not what happened when I tried it myself.I spoke some simple phrases in Japanese and Korean. Instead of translating, the AI... Continue reading…

The Meta Quest 2 and its bundled controllers. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Meta Quest 2 has been on sale for nearly a month, and today, Meta’s making that price permanent — $199 is the new sticker price for the virtual reality headset, the company announced today. That’s half what it originally cost in 2020, and Meta is permanently cutting the price of Quest 2 accessories like the Elite Strap with Battery (which I highly recommend) in half as well.The Quest 2 is currently being supplanted by the $500 Quest 3, of course, but it’s still an incredible entry point to VR, one that plays every Quest game except for a single Quest 3-exclusive title announced last month. It doesn’t have color passthrough vision or good mixed reality gaming, and I definitely prefer the Quest 3 for comfort and immersion, but I... Continue reading…

Most computers aren’t all-in-one devices. Unless you buy a laptop or a tablet, you need additional peripherals to make your computer work. These extras include a keyboard, mouse, and monitors. However, modern televisions generally are able to fulfill computer monitor functions, so what’s stopping you from using them interchangeably?

Anker is amongst the first accessory makers to rerelease MagSafe-compatible accessories that now support the Qi2 standard. | Image: Nathan Edwards / The Verge Qi2 brings MagSafe-like fast magnetic wireless charging for any device. Continue reading…

When was the last time your friends made you a playlist? | Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Writing about the decline of Pitchfork made me sad about the music industry — and also about the state of music discovery. Besides the fact that TikTok doesn’t prioritize music as anything other than background noise, it means that artists have to win the viral lottery in order to make a hit. And that’s entirely out of their control.But about two weeks ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Music League, a game where everyone in the league submits a song to a playlist, and a group of us started playing. About a day after the first one formed, I made two more: one for another friend group and one for family. Music League makes music social in a way that social media algorithms, ironically, do notI’ve enjoyed hearing new songs. The... Continue reading…

With almost every present-day smartphone launch, manufacturers have been dedicating a lot of time to showcasing their improved camera systems. Apple is no different. With the reveal of the iPhone 13 series, it previewed the Cinematic mode, Macro mode, Photographic Styles, and more. Similarly, the iPhone 14 event also gave us a peek at Action mode, the improved 48MP main sensor on the Pro models, and more. Now, the latest iPhone 15 Pro Max includes a new 5x telephoto lens.