News

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 […]

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 started Last year, […]

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 […]

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over […]

Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and […]

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we […]

I can't remember the last time I got excited about a fan. Normally, I just buy whatever Vornado or Dreo model fits my budget, but that was before I started testing the battery-powered Standing Circulator Fan from SwitchBot. As the name indicates, the SwitchBot fan is a 3D circulator – a fancy way of saying […]

Nothing's next budget phone is the latest victim of RAMageddon. As 9to5Google reports, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis announced in a post on X that a follow-up to the CMF Phone 2 Pro won't be coming this year: We were working on a successor but with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build […]

Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first […]