Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last March, Panic launched a curated game shop called Catalog for its Playdate handheld. And one year later, the company says it has sold more than 150,000 games through the store. “We want to let everyone who enjoys games know that there is a vibrant game dev community making hundreds of inventive and thoughtful games for Playdate,” Arisa Sudangnoi, head of Playdate developer relations, said in a statement. The news comes exactly two years after the handheld first launched.At the beginning of 2024, Panic revealed that it had sold 70,000 Playdate units, and it now says that more than half of those users — 38,000 — have purchased a game through Catalog. For context, the Playdate launched with a “season” of 24 games from notable... Continue reading…

Nothing is churning out new earbuds at a faster clip than smartphones. The company just introduced the Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a), priced at $149 and $99, respectively. Together, they mark Nothing’s fourth and fifth products in the headphone category. First came the original Ear 1, which stood out for its partly transparent design but suffered from bugs and inconsistent audio performance. Then, Nothing went after a different audience with the open-style (and oddly named) Ear Stick. And a year ago, the company shored up reliability and sound quality concerns with the Ear 2. Now it’s back for another go-round. And guess what? Yep, they still look pretty much exactly the same.The Nothing Ear and Ear (a) both preserve the design that... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google fired 28 employees in connection with sit-in protests at two of its offices this week, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge. The firings come after 9 employees were suspended and then arrested in New York and California on Tuesday. The fired employees were involved in protesting Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government cloud contract that also includes Amazon. Some of them occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian until they were forcibly removed by law enforcement. Last month, Google fired another employee for protesting the contract during a company presentation in Israel.In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security,... Continue reading…

In Microsoft Teams, you can use the Avatar feature if you're feeling video fatigue and don't want to appear in the video while attending a meeting. It simply creates a 3D avatar of yours, which animates based on your audio cues, without a webcam. However, Microsoft has gone a step further and developed a new AI technology that can take the concept of webcam-free video conferencing to the next level.

Recently, users started noticing that if you want certain apps installed on your PC, specifically StartAllBack, you'd be blocked from updating to Windows 11 version 24H2, and if you try to install the app afterward, you'll be blocked from doing so, too. Soon after, a list of blocked apps showed up online.

Image: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Two prominent Senate Democrats are calling for increased scrutiny of autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) like Tesla’s Autopilot, arguing that the unimpeded flow of highly automated vehicles on public roads in recent years risks exacerbating the traffic safety crisis in the US. Automakers and tech companies say the technology can lead to safer streets. But there have been a number of high-profile incidents in recent years involving fully autonomous vehicles, as well as hundreds of crashes and dozens of fatalities in vehicles equipped with advanced driver-assist systems. The two senators, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Ed Markey (D-MA), argue that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s regulatory... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist — it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt. Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years — rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition. But those Income Sharing Agreements (ISAs)... Continue reading…

MrBeast’s 252 million YouTube subscribers are nipping at the heels of T-Series. | Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images Despite his immense popularity and online presence, Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) has never been the most subscribed channel on YouTube — though that may not be the case for long. T-Series, India’s largest music label and movie studio, currently holds the top spot with 263 million YouTube subscribers, but MrBeast is rapidly closing in on that figure with 252 million subs.With its leading position now threatened, T-Series published a new video on Monday encouraging viewers to subscribe to the channel. It opens with the quote “I want to put India and my people at the top of the international platform,” attributed to T-Series founder Gulshan Kumar (who passed away in 1997), before calling for prospective subscribers to “make history... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge I’ve always hated the fact Gmail only gives us five predefined categories — “Inbox,” “Social,” “Promotions,” “Updates,” and “Forum” — that we can’t customize. When the feature first launched in 2013, it felt like such an obvious omission I assumed Google would address it with a future update. But it’s been over 10 years, and the tabs are still as limiting as they were back then. That’s why I felt like I hit the jackpot last week when I stumbled upon CloudHQ’s Gmail Tabs, a free extension that adds flexibility Gmail should have had from the beginning. Basically, the desktop app extension lets you turn labels you’ve created or search queries into tabs you can pin at the top of your inbox right above Gmail’s useless “Social,”... Continue reading…

About a week ago, we learned that Microsoft has begun to show full-screen ads in Windows 10, urging customers to upgrade to Windows 11 even though there is still more than a year to go before the former runs out of support. This move drew a lot of attention considering the company had come under fire in the same week for the slow performance of the Start menu, which had also begun showing advertisements for apps. However, it seems like the Redmond tech firm is not done notifying users about how they can improve their Windows experience, as can be determined from a recent Windows 10 Insider update.

When looking for the best CPU, AMD's Ryzen line is a popular choice, and the Ryzen 7 8700F is a worthy pick. However, you'll still need some solid RAM to take full advantage of your chip. Across many different capacities, pricepoints, and speeds, we've got great options for everyone.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Nothing has announced that it plans to more deeply integrate ChatGPT with its smartphones and earbuds. The move will give the company’s customers quicker access to the service. “Through the new integration, users with the latest Nothing OS and ChatGPT installed on their Nothing phones will be able to pinch-to-speak to the most popular consumer AI tool in the world directly from Nothing earbuds,” the company wrote in a blog post. And yes, the new Nothing Ear and Ear (a) are both supported.Spokesperson Jane Nho told me by email that “gradual rollout of the integration will commence on April 18th with Phone 2 followed by Phone 1 and Phone 2A in the coming weeks.” Once the update lands, you’ll be able to query ChatGPT using the company’s... Continue reading…