Joby flight at JFK airport. | Image: The Verge This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedLast year, two of the leading air taxi companies in the US, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, sued each other, with Joby accusing Archer of corporate espionage and Archer claiming that Joby was concealing its ties to China. Then, in February of this year, Archer filed a patent infringement suit against a different air taxi rival, Vertical A …Read the full story at The Verge.

Cold Court is a brother-sister duo from Philly that seems to love nothing more than shoving all of their influences together in a messy soup that at least superficially resembles the hyperpop you've come to expect from acts like 100 Gecs. But, where songs like "Dumbest Girl Alive" goofily wink at pop punk and emo, Cold Court are a bit more self-serious, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The opening track on the band's debut EP (^_^) / (aka Hands Up), "Nina", starts off sounding not unlike the dance punk bands that stormed the scene in the mid aughts like Franz Ferdinand or Test Icicles. But that all starts to change about a minute …Read the full story at The Verge.

The 1 VIII doesn’t look much like any Xperia that’s come before. The Xperia 1 VIII marks an attempt at a step change for Sony's flagship phone line. Not only has it had an aesthetic overhaul, but Sony has also revamped the camera system, dropping the continuous optical zoom telephoto that's defined the last four generations of Xperia phone. It's not all different. Sony staples like a 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD card slot remain, and a few specific design touches, like a thick front bezel that fits stereo speakers, have stayed intact. Sony's ambitious pricing hasn't changed either: The Xperia 1 VIII isn't launching in the US, but in the UK and Europe, it starts from £1,399 / €1,499 (about $1,850), r …Read the full story at The Verge.

I wanted to understand why so many developers treated Claude Code like a breakthrough, but my first few attempts left me underwhelmed. It could generate code, modify files, and fix obvious errors, yet none of them felt dramatically better than what I was already doing with a capable AI-powered IDE.

Android Auto is supposed to make driving simpler, but my dashboard slowly turned into a cluttered mess of unused apps, unnecessary notifications, and shortcuts I rarely touched.

If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would just bump around your house, looking for something to suck up, until its battery died or its (way too small) tank filled up. Not that it mattered, though. You probably loved your Roomba. You probably gave it a name.On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Roomba, and how it made vacuums lovable. The Verge's David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined by iRobot's co-founder and former CEO Colin Angle to trace the robovac revolution back to its origins, with a group of engineers try …Read the full story at The Verge.

Productivity advice often focuses on doing more in less time, but I've found that staying organized is usually the bigger challenge. For years, I was far more dependent on my browser than I realized. It wasn't just where I searched for information; it had become the center of my entire workflow. Almost everything I was working on passed through the browser at some point, and I gradually came to rely on it to keep track of ideas, resources, and ongoing work. As the amount of information grew, so did the effort required to manage it all. I wasn't struggling with productivity as much as I was struggling with organization. Eventually, I realized I needed a better system. Setting up a local workspace app changed that, making my workflow feel much more focused and intentional.

Windows 11 is one of the most widely used operating systems around, and for years, I've been vocal about making the most of its features. For instance, I've treated my workstation like a static appliance, relying heavily on the hibernation feature to preserve my workspace progress overnight. However, I built my current rig in 2020, and now I'm starting to worry about SSD failure rates and service life because it's still running the original Samsung 970 Evo 1TB M.2 NVMe boot drive.

The history books are littered with the corpses of corporate record labels started by companies that had no business being in the music industry. Bose thinks it can be the exception to the rule. It thinks it can be Red Bull. And, while Bose has more of a right to dip its toes into the media world than Build-a-Bear, there's little reason to believe it can succeed where so many others have failed.In an interview with Business Insider, Bose CMO Jim Mollica said the company had created Bose Studios as part of a move away from traditional "campaign-driven marketing." A big element of that is going to be Bose Records, a new label the company has …Read the full story at The Verge.

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Polymarket has been paying people to film themselves placing fake bets and celebrating fake wins on social media. WSJ identified over 1,100 deceptive clips and talked to creators who, despite not stating as such in their videos, confirmed the company paid them to create the clips.The videos posted on social media look legit at first, but there are subtle clues that betray them as fraudulent. For instance, when examined closely, one clip shows someone visiting "poiymarket.com" rather than polymarket.com. According to the Journal's investigation, none of the bets placed in the over 1,100 vide …Read the full story at The Verge.

The number of hard drive bays and NVMe slots is undoubtedly the most essential aspect of a Network-Attached Storage, as you wouldn’t want to be stuck with a 2-bay NAS with limited HDD capacity if you plan to house TBs of data on your storage workstation. But I’ve often seen newcomers disregard the RAM specs when picking up a new NAS. On paper, going for more than 4GB of RAM might sound like an unnecessary investment for a storage server, especially with the memory apocalypse causing DDR5 (and even DDR4) modules to hit obscenely high prices. But if you’re planning to work with TrueNAS or other hardcore server distros that are built on ZFS, it’s a good idea to arm your backup machine with ample memory.

Google Antigravity is one of the newest entrants in the IDE space, with Google positioning it as a VS Code replacement. It's an agent-first tool, but I don't really agree with looking at it purely as an IDE replacement.