Amelia Krales General Motors’ shift from an internal combustion engine-producing company to one that makes electric motors is sputtering. EV sales are up, but growing slower than expected. The company’s next-generation Ultium platform, in particular, isn’t meeting expectations. GM’s new electric trucks and SUVs seem perennially delayed — or full of buggy software. I think I have an easy solution to a lot of these problems: bring back the Chevy Volt. Remember the Volt, GM’s scrappy Toyota Prius fighter from the mid-2010s? The company was lauded when it first came out in 2010 as a prescient bet on vehicles with electric powertrains. And it was undeniably a very good hybrid. The first-generation model got 36 miles of electric range before the gas... Continue reading…

The MSI Claw gaming handheld. | Image: MSI The MSI Claw will be one of the first handheld gaming PCs with an Intel Core Ultra processor inside — but despite what the company told us at CES 2024, it won’t have a variable refresh rate (VRR) screen. To my knowledge, the Asus ROG Ally is the only handheld with that dynamic gameplay smoothing display feature, and it’s one of its biggest advantages. I’m disappointed the MSI Claw won’t have it, too.Instead, MSI marketing specialist Anne Lee tells me you’ll be able to manually set the seven-inch 1080p, 120Hz screen to 48Hz or 60Hz if you want. MSI claims that still counts as “VRR” — but it doesn’t unless you’re taking the phrase in an exceptionally literal direction I’ve never heard a company argue before. VRR is the generic form of... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Vertical video platform TikTok wants users to turn their phones around and start shooting horizontal videos — long ones, too.TikTok appears to be incentivizing creators to start posting horizontal videos that are more than a minute long, according to a prompt seen by creators @candicedchap and @kenlyealtumbiz. The platform says it will “boost” these videos within 72 hours of posting. Creators who’ve been on TikTok for more than three months will be eligible for the viewership boost, as long as the videos are not ads or from political parties. The Verge reached out to TikTok for additional information but didn’t immediately hear back.Pushing for horizontal videos would be a big changeMost people who watch TikToks do so on their... Continue reading…

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Apple’s new plan to comply with the European Union’s tech regulations has already drawn criticism from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Spotify. Now Microsoft is weighing in with its own concerns, calling the App Store changes in the EU “a step in the wrong direction.”Apple has proposed a new Core Technology Fee for apps that want to operate on third-party app stores in the EU. It will require developers using third-party app stores to pay €0.50 for each annual app install after 1 million downloads. Apple will also still take a 17 percent commission from the developers who choose to use third-party payment processors. “Apple’s new policy is a step in the wrong direction,” says Xbox president Sarah Bond in a post on X. “We hope they... Continue reading…

There’s a lot to like about the Kobo Elipsa 2 compared to something like the Kindle Scribe, especially with today’s discount. | Image: Kobo As much as I like physical books, I’m planning a move and considering consolidating my collection to make that process more painless. You might be in the same boat, or perhaps you want a more convenient way to knock out your beefy reading list for the new year. If that sounds like you, you might want to consider the Kobo Elipsa 2E, which is currently on sale for $349.99 ($50 off) direct from Rakuten Kobo.In addition to reading ebooks on its large E Ink display, you can use the ad-free Elipsa 2E to take notes using the included stylus. In fact, we consider it the best ebook reader you can buy for that purpose — one that’s even better than the Kindle Scribe given you can write directly on any page in any book. (The Scribe only supports... Continue reading…

SmartLess Media/YouTube SiriusXM has inked a multiyear deal with SmartLess Media for exclusive rights around the flagship podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes as well as a number of other SmartLess shows. The three-year deal cost the satellite radio giant a total of $100 million, anonymous sources told Bloomberg, and brings the popular hosts into SiriusXM’s celebrity-packed roster, which includes Howard Stern, Kevin Hart, and Conan O’Brien.This also means that the flagship SmartLess podcast and SmartLess Media will no longer be under the wing of Amazon. In 2021, Amazon paid what Bloomberg reported was anywhere between $60 and $80 million for exclusive rights to SmartLess and any future shows developed by its podcast network. Under the... Continue reading…

Bundles freshly harvested chard. | Photo by Waltraud Grubitzsch/picture alliance via Getty Images One of the most ambitious assessments yet of our global food system calculates the health, environmental, and economic losses of business as usual. It also outlines what governments can do to reap trillions of dollars’ worth of benefits by producing food more sustainably. All in all, the damages caused by the current system — how food is produced, marketed, and consumed — add up to $15 trillion in losses a year. That includes health costs associated with poor nutrition, biodiversity loss, climate change, and other environmental harms. “In short, our food systems are destroying more value than they create,” says the report published today by economists and scientists with the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC). It’s time for a... Continue reading…

Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest investor, and the former company has injected billions of dollars into the latter company. Well, we're starting to see the investment pay off for Microsoft. While OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus has long been an expensive way to get the best AI features available, it has now been usurped by Microsoft's Copilot Pro subscription. As skeptical as many Windows 11 users were when Microsoft began going all-in on Copilot, the service has grown significantly since it was first shown in preview mode. We're now at the point where the following can be said definitively: Copilot Pro is a better AI subscription than ChatGPT. Here are four reasons why that's the case.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta’s latest update to its code generation AI model, Code Llama 70B, is “the largest and best-performing model” yet. Code Llama tools launched in August and are free for both research and commercial use. According to a post on Meta’s AI blog, Code Llama 70B can handle more queries than previous versions, which means developers can feed it more prompts while programming, and it can be more accurate.Code Llama 70B scored 53 percent in accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark, performing better than GPT-3.5’s 48.1 percent and closer to the 67 percent mark an OpenAI paper (PDF) reported for GPT-4. Built on Llama 2, Code Llama helps developers create strings of code from prompts and debug human-written work. Meta simultaneously launched two... Continue reading…

You can buy the portable power bank on sale at Amazon in a variety of colors. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Anker’s new Qi2-compatible chargers may be capturing all the attention, but that doesn’t mean older devices like the Anker 622 Magnetic Battery (MagGo) aren’t worth a look. The portable, 5,000mAh charger may not be as fast as Anker’s new Qi2 MagGo Power Bank, but it’s still one of our favorite models — one you can currently pick up for $34.99 (half off) at Amazon and Walmart.While the new 6,600mAh MagGo Power Bank recharges your phone twice as quickly, Anker’s magnetic Qi charger still delivers a respectable 7.5 watts of power to MagSafe-compatible phones. It also weighs a lot less, making it a better option if you want something you can easily slap onto your phone while on the go. Its foldable kickstand may not be as sturdy as the new... Continue reading…

iOS 18 beta 1 is around four months away from its official WWDC24 debut. In early June, we expect Apple to preview the upcoming iPhone software update for the very first time. And while details about this forthcoming release have been somewhat scarce, we've been reading some generic rumors about its potential offerings. According to a fresh report, iOS 18 could potentially be the biggest iPhone update yet.

Embracer Group, the company attempting to forge one video game publisher to rule them all, has just presided over another round of layoffs. Eidos Montreal is letting go of 97 game developers and support staff, the company announced today on X, shortly after Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier scooped that the studio has canceled an unannounced Deus Ex video game. Image: Eidos Montreal “The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio.” “The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio,” wrote Eidos Montreal. Eidos... Continue reading…