The latest tech news about the world’s best (and sometimes worst) hardware, apps, and much more. From top companies like Google and Apple to tiny startups vying for your attention, Verge Tech has the latest in what matters in technology daily.
More confirmation that price hikes and RAM cuts are coming our way.
From necessities to nice-to-haves, we’ve gathered 28 products that will make this year at school the best it can be.
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.
Instead, the company is just going to build its vibe coding tool directly into Gemini. Around 800,000 pre-ordered the mobile app after it was announced in May, but Google has decided to just make Gemini its one-stop AI shop. The robust web platform isn’t going anywhere, though, for those with bigger vibe-coded aspirations.
And that’s a good thing, because its own 8GB Surface Laptop 13 struggles so much that it’s a tough buy. Microsoft’s other new areas of “focus” include making Windows onboarding and family controls easier to set up and making “voice [control] more natural and fluid” across apps.
[Windows Insider Blog]
Batman: Caped Crusader - Chronicles lets you and up to three friends tackle mysteries based on the Caped Crusader Prime Video show. It’s a clear example of Amazon’s recent push to tie its gaming efforts more closely with its streaming properties.
As spotted by Android Authority, the new, unofficial Gen1Recomp port for the trio of classic Pokémon games also lets you easily add mods, like one that updates the games with cool 3D voxel graphics. You’ll need to use your own game ROM, though.
At $75 early bird Kickstarter or $90 retail, the Sharge Disk Pro 2 Ultra is a magnetic USB-C hub that doubles as a Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 dock, triples as a bring-your-own-SSD, and unlocks speedy ProRes storage for iPhone. Update: Here’s my full hands-on preview.
A judge rejected Perplexity’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which accuses the AI startup and three data-scraping services of vacuuming up Reddit’s content without permission. Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, says in a statement to The Verge that the ruling “brings us one step closer to holding bad actors accountable:”
Reddit supports responsible access to public content, but we oppose companies that bypass our protections, ignore our rules, and profit off our communities without permission.
As Dexerto reports, Green says he wasn’t reading an AI prompt in a clip from a recent Ask Hank Anything video, but confessed that he’s been using AI “to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics.” In a Reddit post, he said he needs to “readjust” now.
I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs...with doing more and more and more and more...is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.
Saw this on 9to5Google. Bad name, IMO. I prefer the previously-rumored “Pixel Glow” is better.
[9to5Google]
You’ll have fewer robot floor cleaners to choose from and higher prices.
“As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people,” Snap says.
Content that’s been “enhanced or edited using Snapchat’s AI creative tools” may still be recommended, and they include “transparency indicators.”
”Stop the Slop!” says CEO Evan Spiegel. “We’re keeping it real on Spotlight.”
Update: Added Spiegel’s post.
[Snap Inc.]
The Wall Street Journal gets into the “staggering” fundraising efforts launched by President Donald Trump and his team, including the tech giants making multimillion-dollar donations:
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
[The Wall Street Journal]
The servers for Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, which launched in 2024, will close down on October 30th, Kotaku reports. The shutdown follows an earlier announcement that the game would “progressively transition away from blockchain functionality.”
This not a brand-new way of thinking about what we should and shouldn’t offload to AI, but I hadn’t seen it before. From Bruce Schneier:
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.
[Schneier on Security]
Android Authority points to a report from Smartprix that says Nothing’s “repositioning itself as an AI-first company,” with a slate of upcoming devices that includes AI-enabled earbuds and a smart speaker from its CMF brand. Nothing’s also reportedly planning to launch a new smartwatch and second-generation Nothing headphones.
Applied without scary needles or noise.
Per The New York Times:
Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar systems last year. Nine others, including New Jersey, Virginia and Colorado, have joined it, and lawmakers in California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and several other states are considering doing so.
Here’s my review from 2024 in Europe where these so-called “balcony solar systems” have been gaining traction for years.
The company that showed off a working modular concept phone at MWC is teasing a bezelless concept for the IFA show in September. It looks nice, and attracts attention, but don’t expect to buy it (from Tecno) anytime soon.
Sony sold 1.6 million PlayStation 5 consoles, about a third fewer than last year at this time, and says it has plenty of memory for the foreseeable future:
Regarding the impact of memory market conditions on PlayStation 5 hardware, we have secured the quantity of memory necessary to meet our projected sales volume for FY26, and there is no change to our plan for hardware profitability for FY26 to remain similar to FY25.
In other words, there shouldn’t be any major PS5 restock panics or severe manufacturing shutdowns leading into big game launches (like GTA VI), but price increases are always on the table to maintain profitability.
A little over a week after OpenAI said that its rogue AI agent accidentally hacked Hugging Face, Anthropic is disclosing three “incidents” where a Claude model, during cybersecurity evaluations, was inadvertently able to access the internet due to a misconfiguration and “gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”
Anthropic discovered the intrusions after reviewing its cybersecurity evaluation transcripts in the wake of OpenAI’s disclosure.
Gemini Spark in Chrome can do things like “scheduling viewings for apartments you’ve saved or researching flight options and starting the booking process,” according to Google. However, a human will have to push the button on tasks like making payments.
Spark is also now available on Google’s AI Pro tier in 160 more countries. It initially was available only on the more expensive AI Ultra tier, and just recently came to AI Pro in the US.
This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.
The company’s Q2 2026 shareholder letter mentions that “we’re reimagining how users and communities connect, share, and consume content through a modernized video experience on Reddit.” Wonder if it will make Reddit yet another app with a vertical video feed. The platform turned on video replies in May.
Daily active uniques also reached 130 million users. However, the company is facing “headwinds in users coming from search,” says CEO Steve Huffman.
Apple has reportedly been seeking permission to buy memory from CXMT, a blacklisted Chinese supplier.
“We urge Apple to abandon any effort to incorporate memory from CXMT, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), or any other Chinese state-backed supplier into any of its products,” the Senators wrote in a letter to CEO Tim Cook.
[U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York]
As spotted by 9to5Google, you can change the background to different colors and images, including uploading your own, and set the background to refresh everyday, like on the desktop version of Chrome. The new backgrounds are under “Customize new tab page” in Chrome’s three dots menu.
A recent study from the Oversight Board found that leading AI systems are less likely to criticize authoritarian governments than democratic ones.
It’s a wild finding — but wait? Why is Meta’s Oversight Board studying systems from OpenAI and Anthropic in the first place? Board member Suzanne Nossel joined me on The Vergecast to discuss the findings and why the Oversight Board’s future might involve looking at more than just Meta.
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