It must be earnings day, because Tesla is making a Robotaxi announcement. The company said in a post on X that it was launching its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa, attaching a pair of maps that show each city's service area. No word on fleet size or whether interested customers would be able to hail a vehicle right away. The timing of the post is noteworthy, considering later today Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected to provide an update on the progress of the company's Robotaxi service during its second quarter earnings call. Adding two new cities to the docket probably sounds like progress to some investors. Robotaxi now in Tampa …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Kindle Paperwhite, our favorite Kindle, is down to $124.99. | Image: The Verge If you’ve been thinking about picking up a Kindle before school starts, or for your next vacation, now’s a good time to do it. As part of its Black Friday in July sale, Best Buy has brought the Kindle Paperwhite back down to its all-time low of $124.99 ($35 off). It’s the Kindle we recommend for most people because it has a bunch of features. It’s waterproof and features a sharp 300ppi, 7-inch display, it offers an adjustable warm light for reading at night, and it has great battery life that can last for more than a month on a single charge.Kindle Paperwhite (12th-gen)Where to Buy: $159.99 $124.99 at Best Buy (with ads) $159.99 $124.99 at Target (with ads)Best Buy has also discounted nearly every other Kindle model. The Kindle Kids is a good deal even for adults. It’s down to $99.99 ($30 off), and includes the same hardware as the standard Kindle, but with some extras: a kid-friendly cover, no ads, a two-year worry-free guarantee, and six months of Amazon Kids Plus. If you read comics, the Kindle Colorsoft is also on sale starting at $159.99 ($90 off). It shares many of the Paperwhite’s strengths but adds a color E Ink display that displays color at up to 150ppi. The Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, which has 32GB of storage and wireless charging, is on sale for $219.99 ($60 off).If you want an e-reader that doubles as a digital notebook, the Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft are worth considering. They’re on sale starting at $379.99 ($120 off)  and $479.99 ($150 off), respectively. Each offers an 11-inch display with an included stylus for writing notes, annotating Kindle books, and marking documents. They also include notebook templates and AI-powered tools that can summarize notes or clean up messy handwriting. The biggest difference is that the Scribe Colorsoft adds a color E Ink display, making it a better choice for reviewing color documents or organizing notes with different colors.Read our reviews of the Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. Kindle Kids (2024)Amazon’s Kindle Kids is identical to the standard Kindle — meaning it packs a 300ppi display and support for USB-C charging — but comes with a case, an extended two-year warranty, and six months of Amazon Kids Plus.Where to Buy: $129.99 $99.99 at Best Buy $129.99 $99.99 at TargetKindle Colorsoft (16GB)Amazon gave its Kindle lineup a much-needed jolt with the introduction of the Kindle Colorsoft last year, its first color E Ink ebook reader. Now it’s back with a cheaper 16GB model that offers many of the same perks, including up to eight weeks of battery life and a 7-inch display that’s great for comics and graphic novels.Where to Buy: $249.99 $189.99 at Amazon $249.99 $189.99 at Best Buy $249.99 at TargetKindle Scribe 32GBThe third-gen Kindle Scribe 32GB is even bigger than its 10.2-inch predecessor; it offers an 11-inch display with 300ppi resolution and the same great battery life that Kindles are known for. Where to Buy: $499.99 $379.99 at Best BuyKindle Scribe ColorsoftThe Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is Amazon’s first note-taking e-reader with a color screen. It features an 11-inch display, a slimmer design, an improved interface, an updated stylus, and a new AI-powered search feature that can quickly summarize documents.Where to Buy: $629.99 $479.99 at Best Buy (32GB) window.HYPE_DESK_CONFIG = { productImageUrl: "https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/07/b5e045d6-98c4-4f42-903a-b50e7860ae0b-2_79920c78-4486-41e1-9bad-f8e06378150b.avif", productImageAlt: "Apple Watch SE 3", productTitle: "Apple Watch SE 3", shortDescription: "The full Apple Watch experience at a smarter price.", longDescription: "The Apple Watch SE 3 is the smartwatch that does everything you actually need without the price tag of the flagship. The S10 chip keeps it fast and responsive, health and fitness tracking is comprehensive, and the integration with iPhone is seamless. A great first Apple Watch or a meaningful upgrade from an older model, available refurbished on Back Market at a price that makes the decision easy.", purchaseUrl: "https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=18275&awinaffid=173843&campaign=VergeHypeDesk&clickref=Article1&platform=dl&ued=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.backmarket.com%2Fen-us%2Fp%2Fapple-watch-series-se-3-2025-gps-cellular-40-mm-aluminium-starlight-sport-band-white%2Fb5e045d6-98c4-4f42-903a-b50e7860ae0b", purchaseLinkText: "Shop At Back Market" };Some more ways to saveNow through August 28th, the Google Store is throwing in a free Pixel Watch 2 when you buy a refurbished Google Pixel 7 with 128GB of storage for $329. The deal also includes a free Pixel 7 case. Though both devices are a few years old, the Pixel 7 boasts a spacious 90Hz OLED display, an IP68 rating for full water and dust resistance, and wireless charging. As for the Pixel Watch 2, it offers reliable fitness tracking based on Fitbit’s software, along with solid performance, all-day battery life, and good integration with Google’s ecosystem, though the offer is limited to the 41mm size. Read our review of the Google Pixel 7 and Google Pixel Watch 2.Best Buy’s selling both the Ring Battery Doorbell 2K and Indoor Cam Plus bundled together for $69.99 ($70 off). Together, they let you keep tabs on both your front door and an indoor space in 2K resolution, with features like motion alerts and two-way talking. The Indoor Cam Plus also includes a removable privacy cover, while the battery-powered doorbell offers a 140-degree field of view and up to 6x zoom to help you get a closer look at visitors.The rechargeable Gooloo F3 Air Duster is down to $33.99 ($16 off) at Amazon, which is one of its better prices in recent months. The cordless cleaner features a 5,000mAh rechargeable battery and a capable motor, along with three speed settings for blowing dust out of keyboards, PCs, car interiors, and other hard-to-reach spaces. It also weighs less than half a pound, making it compact enough to slip into a pocket.

Parents will also get a weekly email summarizing their teen’s Twitch activity. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Twitch is giving parents more control over how their children are using the streaming platform, including the ability to block them from broadcasting entirely. Parental controls are now available that allow guardians to link Twitch accounts with their 13- to 17-year-old children, providing account management features and a weekly email summarizing their teen's activity, including channels and hours watched.The controls can be used to prevent teens from livestreaming their own content and disabling Whispers, Twitch's private messaging feature. This includes blocking minors from sending or receiving DMs. Parents can also set flexible daily t …Read the full story at The Verge.

The most useful home lab upgrade I made this year didn’t involve a faster processor, another mini PC, or a rack full of blinking network gear. It was DNS, the background service most of us configure once and then leave alone until something refuses to resolve. I finally spent time cleaning up local records, using consistent hostnames, separating internal and external resolution, and deciding which services should handle different requests. None of it was exciting, but it changed how the whole lab felt every time I opened a browser.

SHANGHAI, CHINA - JULY 20 2026: People visit the booth of Kimi, an LLM developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot, during the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China, Monday, July 20, 2026. | Image: LONG WEI/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images Last week, two Chinese AI companies unveiled models they say can credibly compete with the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The response was swift and predictable. Markets wobbled, commentators declared Silicon Valley shooketh, and policymakers reached for the familiar language of arms races and wake-up calls. In one headline, The Associated Press said a Chinese model had taken the "US tech industry by surprise." Bloomberg described it as a "surprise breakthrough" that is "roiling markets" and sending global tech stocks tumbling over concerns it could force US firms to rethink their gargantuan spending on data centers, chips, and ot …Read the full story at The Verge.

My main Windows box has a 7TB boot drive with 5.3TB free, so I've never had a reason to care about disk space. That turns out to be exactly the problem. When storage is free, you stop looking, and Windows 11 is happy to fill the gaps you're not watching. Plenty of that bloatware can be removed with one PowerShell command, but those scripts clean the apps you can see in Settings, and those are the ones that were never bothering you anyway.

A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide "meaningful relief," offering authors around $3,000 for each book allegedly pirated by Anthropic.The $1.5 billion settlement is the "largest known copyright recovery in history," according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs. A group of authors - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson - first filed a copyright lawsuit against A …Read the full story at The Verge.

After building my homelab, carrying my MacBook wherever I traveled had become a habit. Not because I knew something would break, but because I‘d made a routine of checking the status every once in a while. Having it with me was insurance for my homelab; if something broke, I could pull out the MacBook and start troubleshooting immediately. But with time, carrying a laptop everywhere I went for tiny routine tasks started to feel excessive. That was when I started thinking about whether I could outsource some of these tasks to my Android phone.

Local LLMs are great. They’re very efficient, and at a time when API costs are increasing and AI tools are becoming more expensive to use, local LLMs are the way to go. I’ve been using Ollama to run Qwen 2.5 coder, and it’s quite good. The model is able to build things, fix bugs, and understand my requests almost as well as a Claude model, but of course, it has its limitations. It’s constrained by my hardware and its parameter count. It’s a 7-billion-parameter model, and the context window I can run locally is also smaller.

As component and RAM shortages drive prices higher, Apple is reportedly launching an "Apple Upgrade" program for leasing new devices. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, it will work similar to a car lease, with options to upgrade to a new device early, or keep or return the device at the end of the lease. Gurman says Klarna will be Apple's financial backer for the new program, which will require a soft credit check to sign up.Apple Upgrade is reportedly slated to launch on July 28th, replacing the current iPhone Upgrade Program and standard financing for new iPhones with a program available for most new iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watc …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a symbiotic - and sometimes frustrating - relationship between social media sites and the creators that depend on them. Platforms need influencers' and creators' content to keep consumers on their apps; the creators, in turn, need to be able to reach those audiences to justify creating their content in the first place. Creators want a seamless way to make and disseminate their content while being able to make money; audiences want a bottomless feed of entertaining things to look at. And platforms need to keep both parties relatively happy. Over the last few months, Instagram has added a slew of features that are helpful for creator …Read the full story at The Verge.

I am a very clumsy man. So clumsy, that I have AirTags hanging off practically every camera I own. Have I left my camera in an Uber? Yes. Have I left it on an airplane? Also yes. For me, finder tags are essential for my cameras.The problem is, strapping a finder tag to a camera is always cumbersome. I currently have them hanging off my camera straps like a phone charm circa 2001. They're ugly, and very much get in the way when I'm trying to focus on shooting. But Peak Design thinks it has a solution in its new Field Bracket system, which it launched today on Kickstarter, starting at $150 for early birds.The Peak Design Field Bracket is p …Read the full story at The Verge.