The Mac Pros biggest problem is the MacBook

The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

Apple’s latest Mac Pro targets professionals with highly demanding computing workloads. But we talked to those professionals, and they don’t want it — because Apple’s other computers are just too good.

Apple’s latest Mac Pro was finally revealed at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference as a machine for the most power user of power users. The video discussed audio engineering, color grading, and video transcoding. Apple’s product page mentions code compiling, animation, compositing 8K scenes, 3D rendering, and “analyzing enormous datasets.” This isn’t just for pros, Apple seems to claim; it’s for capital-P Pros.

Exactly who these pros are and why the Mac Pro is the perfect device for them remains somewhat unclear to me, even after testing the new machine for a few days and speaking to various professionals that Apple is ostensibly targeting. That’s in part because Apple, on the same day it announced the Mac Pro, also announced a smaller, M2 Ultra Mac Studio with the exact same RAM, storage, and processor options. The former, nevertheless, costs at least $3,000 more and carries a towering starting price of $6,999.

I wanted to know whether Apple’s purported target demographic — people who spend their days animating, making visual effects, and doing various other tasks generally associated with big, powerful computers — were actually interested in purchasing this machine. So I asked a bunch of them, and the answer, basically across the board, was no. Not because the Mac Pro is bad but because Apple’s other computers, namely its laptops, have just gotten too good.

Zach Passero, who does editing, animation, and visual effects for films, has been a diehard Mac Pro user for over a decade. “I’m still a big champion of the old trash can,” he says, referring to the oft-maligned 2013 design. He was skeptical when the M1 Max chip was announced — he’d never envisioned that a laptop could handle his heavy workload. But he gave the 16-inch MacBook Pro a shot and was surprised — and a little bit sad — to find that it felt just as fast as his older desktop. “Video editing, even doing effects, compositing, animating — it has been a smooth and fluid process,” he says. “I’m like, ‘This might actually suffice for a while.’”

Passero still loves the Mac Pro, but he can’t justify buying the latest one when his laptop is so good. “There’s something about my experience using the M1 chip where I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I need the full Mac Pro,’” he says, with some disappointment in his voice.

Vikram Bodicherla, a staff privacy engineer at WhatsApp, previously owned two Intel-based Mac Pro models — one for home and one for work. The minute the M1 Max came out, he jettisoned both of them. Like Passero, Bodicherla now spends his day — he works on mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as “server-side stuff” — on a MacBook Pro with the M1 Max. He can build much faster. He hasn’t even considered buying Apple’s new desktop. “I don’t really need any other computer,” he says.

Kevin Ford, who shoots and edits documentaries, has been using the Mac Pro for years. He’s owned both the tower models and the trash can. But he switched to the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max a few weeks ago, and he’s not looking back — it can do everything he needs. He can cut 4K and 6K footage. He can color correct. He can even create graphics and titles. As a bonus, he can now do it all on the road; the last project he cut, which is now on Netflix, was done entirely in hotel rooms and airplanes.

“I’m very practical when I’m looking at a piece of equipment — what will allow me to do what I need to do for the best cost?” Ford says. “If the cheese grater was priced at a certain point, would that have been more attractive to me? Possibly.” But, he adds, his new MacBook is “working very well.”

We tested our machine with a Pro Display XDR.

But it’s not just that the MacBook has gotten better with the release of Apple’s M-series chips. The Mac Pro, with the release of the Mac Studio, has also gotten significantly more confusing.

The Pro I received to test vastly outperforms Intel models from 2019 — even those with Apple’s fancy Afterburner card that cost thousands of dollars more. But it’s a step backward from those other models in another way: modularity.

The 2019 Mac Pro was endlessly configurable, and ports could be swapped out and upgraded as users needed. Much has changed. Spec choice is now more limited (there are only two processor options, for example, and memory is now capped at 192GB where previously up to 1.5TB was available). The 2023 Mac Pro’s memory is not upgradeable after purchase for the first time in the model’s history.

And now, of course, the Mac Studio is here. And while the Pro delivers impressive performance, you can now get that same performance in a less expensive and much more compact chassis.

I had similarly specced models of the Pro and the Studio on hand to test. Both included Apple’s 24-core M2 Ultra processor with 76 GPU cores, as well as 128GB of unified memory. While the two look quite different, and the Mac Pro has a couple extra ports, I can confirm that their performance is close to the same.

It’s much bigger than the Studio, but the numbers are not far apart.

The primary advantage that the Mac Pro can claim over the Studio is the fact that the former has PCIe expansion slots — six full-length PCIe Gen 4 slots, specifically, as well as a half-length Gen 3. These, in theory, allow for some degree of modularity, where a user could slot in additional storage, IO, or other peripherals.

Except: that doesn’t include external GPUs, which mitigates the utility of these slots for graphic use cases significantly. The Mac hasn’t supported Nvidia cards for quite some time, and Apple’s own silicon doesn’t support AMD’s GPUs, either. Further muddling this matter is the fact that most PCI-E cards can now be used with Thunderbolt via an external enclosure — you specifically need to require the PCI-E 4 x16 speeds in order to gain a tangible benefit from those extra thousands of dollars.

The slots, with those caveats, didn’t blow anyone I spoke to out of the water. “Would it be nice to have? Yeah, totally… if it wasn’t a machine that started at $7,000,” said Evan Stone, a senior iOS engineer at the software development agency MartianCraft. (Stone also works on the MacBook Pro with M1 Max, and he’s a fan; he has one for work and another at home.)

Passero used to be a huge fan of the Mac Pro’s expandability, but his new MacBook performs so well that he doesn’t feel the need to add anything extra. “The new silicon chips and these built-in GPUs that they have, and the neural networks, I’m finding that most of my needs are met,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Do I just settle in and see how this goes?’”

Sadly, no SD slot..

The lack of support for external GPUs makes the feature particularly confounding for graphic professionals. “GPU support, that’s what we mostly use PCIe for,” said Tom Lindén, who runs a 3D animation agency. Other than a capture card, he says, “there are not that many expansion cards that would be useful.”

The only aspect of the Pro that Lindén finds particularly compelling for his studio is its double ethernet port. “We’re simulating huge simulations, so fast networking is really important,” Lindén says. “I don’t know how much we’d be able to utilize two slots — like if that would help the speed.” He thinks for a moment. “I guess it could, probably.”

“I would probably just get the Mac Studio and be done.”

Emilio Guarino, a music producer and engineer, thinks that feature is mostly useful for “edge case kind of scenarios” in his field. “If you’re doing game development, I’ve seen session files where the track count is like two or three thousand. You might need the added expansion for that,” he says. “But if I’m just doing commissions or just building virtual instruments and samples... I would probably just get the Mac Studio and be done.”

What about additional storage? People mostly shrugged. “I’ve never really hit that limit, and I have a very large chunk of the company’s code base on my computer,” WhatsApp’s Bodicherla says — companies as large as his, he explains, generally have processes in place that mean their engineers don’t need to hold unreasonable amounts of data on their personal machines. “If you’re doing a huge ML model, it might make sense to download everything. But even then, I feel like for running that one odd job, you could always go to, like, a server cluster,” he muses.

“I can’t justify paying double for a machine that has a couple of slots,” said Danny Nathan, founder and CEO of the product design and venture studio Apollo 21.

In general, the attitude among the professionals I spoke to was not skepticism so much as confusion.

“I don’t know why they made two different products,” said Vyacheslav Drofa, a UX director at Alty, which engineers mobile applications for banks, as he looked bemusedly at the Studio’s and Pro’s identical spec sheets.

“The offering across the board from Apple has gotten so powerful that, frankly, the Mac Pro feels a little unnecessary,” echoes Nathan, who has owned a number of Mac Pros throughout his career but is now very happy with his 14-inch MacBook. “I think we all appreciate it for what it is and what it demonstrates, but at no point has anyone said to me, ‘So when are we getting an office load of these?’”

Here’s where the ports live.

Many people across industries, who were confident that the Mac Pro wasn’t a good investment for them, spitballed about who it might be ideal for but weren’t exactly sure. Maybe architects need it, Stone suggested. “Really, really tough machine learning tasks,” posited Serhii Popov, a software engineer at Setapp. 3D rendering, Guarino proposed, but only if you’re doing a lot of it. DevOps, others said. But there was one use case that pretty much everyone suspected might tangibly benefit from the Mac Pro and its plethora of slots: VFX.

David Lebensfeld, founder and VFX supervisor at Ingenuity Studios, was dubious. “That doesn’t seem like something a VFX studio would use,” he said after I described the product. Nobody on Lebensfeld’s team has expressed interest in the Mac Pro — there has been “zero chatter” about the product, he says.

Lebensfeld’s company is all in on Windows and Linux, and that’s common for studios of Ingenuity’s size. Switching over to the Mac Pro, given its price point, would just be impractical. Lebensfeld gets better value out of Windows PCs, which support the latest GPUs from Nvidia and can be equipped with the exact parts and specs that each team needs. When a part breaks, they can grab another one off the shelf.

In fact, some of the VFX and animation professionals I contacted for this story declined to be interviewed because they simply don’t know much about Macs — they just aren’t widely used in that industry at this point. The reality is that these types of studios need to keep their hardware functional and up to date. Replacing a full Mac Pro system — let alone a fleet of them — regularly would be an absurd cost.

“It feels like they’re gonna put this chip in every laptop and iPad that they can, and then later, they’re gonna fuse 20 of them together, and that’s the Pro.”

Lebensfeld speculated that the Mac Pro might be better for small businesses and independent artists who work with heavy graphics. But Lindén’s smaller studio is also fully a Windows shop, decked out with high-end Nvidia cards (which decisively outperform the M2 Ultra in programs like Blender), largely for the same reason. “We like to keep updating our machines with new hardware when we need to,” he says.

Deborah Wright, a digital sculptor, has the same hang-ups; she also uses a Windows PC. “I really, really love Mac... but it’s become prohibitively expensive,” she says. “Part of the attractiveness of a PC is my ability to customize the heck out of it,” she adds. “You buy a Mac, and you hold onto it for a few years. Buying a PC, you’re switching out your hardware pretty regularly.”

Wright suspects her next purchase might be a MacBook Pro, which, while not modular, is at least more affordable. “Their displays are just exquisite,” she says. “Velvet on the eyes.”

But the larger issue among the professionals I spoke to, and one that will likely take many more product cycles for Apple to truly fix, is one of trust. Apple, the business behemoth that it is, still has a reputation to build in the enterprise space. In order to become a go-to purchase for studios, Apple doesn’t just need to make the Mac Pro more competitive on price — it needs to reestablish itself as a brand that industries can rely on for years to come. And it needs to make some amends.

“Apple doesn’t really have a great history of servicing this market,” Lebensfeld said. “Do you want to hang millions of dollars of equipment purchases on a company where you know this isn’t their main focus?” He added, “It really feels like an afterthought. It feels like they’re gonna put this chip in every laptop and iPad that they can, and then later, they’re gonna fuse 20 of them together, and that’s the Pro.”

The middle handle is what you use to open the case and jam some PCI cards in.

And while Apple’s decision to overhaul Final Cut Pro was over a decade ago, studios still haven’t forgotten. Almost all of the video professionals I spoke to brought it up. “Every filmmaker in the world was using this,” Lebensfeld complained. “And they lost that whole market. They just don’t take it seriously.”

“They really did screw us over on that,” Ford, the documentarian, agreed. “I was really upset.”

I searched high and low and ended up connecting with over 20 professionals for this story in order to locate someone who enthusiastically wanted to buy the Mac Pro. I found exactly one: Drofa. He loves the cheese-grater design.

“The killer feature is when somebody comes and says, ‘Okay, you have a Mac Pro,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I can make a cheesesteak,’” he explained. Asked about the Mac Studio, he replied, “I don’t trust that small thing.”

TikTok is discontinuing its BeReal clone

TikTok is discontinuing its BeReal clone

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

TikTok is killing off its BeReal clone TikTok Now, according to notifications being sent to users. Multiple Twitter users have posted screenshots of the message in different languages, which says that ByteDance is “updating the TikTok experience and [is] discontinuing TikTok Now.” News of its discontinuation comes a little over nine months after TikTok Now was officially announced, although it’s unclear exactly when the feature will disappear for good.

TikTok Now was launched in September with the stated aim of fostering “authentic and spontaneous connections on TikTok.” But it was hard to ignore the fact that its format (asking users to capture a moment once a day using the front and back cameras of their phone) was all but identical to BeReal, which exploded in popularity last year.

TikTok’s twist was that TikTok Now supported up to 10-second-long videos in addition to just still photos. In the US, TikTok Now has been available in the main TikTok app, while owner ByteDance also launched a dedicated TikTok Now app in other regions around the world. Social media consultant Matt Navarra confirmed to The Verge that he was shown the notification announcing the discontinuing of TikTok Now within the main TikTok app on iOS.

TikTok is killing its BeReal clone TikTok Now pic.twitter.com/8uPn88HQV4

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) June 27, 2023

Although TikTok’s notification doesn’t give an exact reason for why TikTok Now is being discontinued, it’s hard to ignore the fact that BeReal isn’t the viral sensation it once was. “They’re over being real,” was The New York Times’ conclusion in April, when it cited a 61 percent drop in BeReal daily active users between October 2022 and March 2023 according to third-party data. Per Apptopia, user numbers had dropped from around 15 million to under six million people in March, the NYT reported.

Although BeReal disputes these numbers (“BeReal has over 20 million daily active users around the world” it wrote in April), anecdotally I’m seeing far fewer mentions of the app on social media platforms these days. Regardless of the exact figures, it feels like the viral spotlight has moved on.

TikTok hasn’t been the only social media company to experiment with adding BeReal-style features to its app. SnapChat launched a dual-camera feature in August, which traded the daily notification and limits of BeReal for more editing and layout options. Meanwhile Instagram has also been testing its own take on the feature called “Candid Stories.” My colleague Casey Newton has taken to referring to these kinds of copycat features as “murder clones.” In other words, they represent an attempt by dominant social media apps to fend off would-be competitors by aping their unique features.

A spokesperson for TikTok did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. As of this writing, the service’s support page about TikTok Now has not been updated to mention a shutdown.

Ford targets US and Canadian engineers in latest wave of layoffs

Ford targets US and Canadian engineers in latest wave of layoffs

The layoffs are connected to Ford’s growth plan announced back in 2021. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A new wave of layoffs primarily targeting Ford Motor employees in engineering roles in the US and Canada are expected to take place this week as part of the company’s latest cost-cutting efforts. Leaders of the teams impacted by the job cuts received confirmation on Monday, according to CNBC News, while employees are expected to be notified over the next few days.

Ford declined The Verge’s request to clarify how many employees would be affected by the layoffs. Roles are expected to be cut across all three of Ford’s business units — Ford Blue (the company’s arm for vehicles with traditional combustion engines), Ford Pro (its commercial vehicle services and distribution business), and Model e (focusing on electric vehicles).

“People affected by the changes will be offered severance pay, benefits and significant help to find new career opportunities”

The layoffs are related to the Ford Plus growth plan announced in 2021 — restructuring efforts designed to reduce costs, according to T.R. Reid, Corporate & Public Policy Communications for Ford Motor, in an email to The Verge.

“Delivering on the plan includes adjusting staffing to match focused priorities and ambitions, while raising quality and lowering costs. The actions we’re taking this week in the US and Canada are mostly (but not only) related to engineering roles,” said Reid. “People affected by the changes will be offered severance pay, benefits and significant help to find new career opportunities.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley claimed in February that the automaker has an annual cost disadvantage of $7 billion to $8 billion compared to its competitors. “We can cut the cost, we can cut people, we can do that really quickly and we’ll do whatever we need to,” Farley said at the time. Farley plans to reduce expenses related to those overheads by “mid-decade.”

In the SEC filing for Ford’s first-quarterly earnings report this year, the company estimated that it would incur charges between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in 2023 that primarily relate to “employee separations and supplier settlements.”

This isn’t the first wave of job cuts linked to Ford’s restructuring plans. 8,000 roles were cut from the Ford Blue business arm in July 2022 in a bid to remain “fully competitive with the best in the industry,” and 3,000 employees and contract workers from departments across the US, Canada, and India were laid off in August 2022. An additional 3,800 employees in Europe were laid off in February this year as part of the company’s shift to EV production.

A.I. and TV Ads Were Made for Each Other

A.I. and TV Ads Were Made for Each Other A string of uncanny videos show what generative A.I. and advertising have in common: They chew up the cultural subconscious and spit it back at us.

Tesla May Have Already Won the Charging Wars

Tesla May Have Already Won the Charging Wars Deals with Ford and G.M. will make it easier to find a charger but could give Elon Musk control of critical infrastructure.

New Samsung foldable leaks give us the best look yet at the Z Flip 5

New Samsung foldable leaks give us the best look yet at the Z Flip 5

Leaked renders of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5. | Image: SnoopyTech

With about a month to go until the next Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event, we may have a pretty comprehensive idea about what to expect from the next version of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and the Galaxy Z Fold 5. Several leaks over the last few days have revealed a lot about what the phones may look like — and what’s under their respective hoods — ahead of their official unveiling.

A Twitter leak from Revegnus on July 25th showed a photo of a folded phone that looks to be to be the Galaxy Z Flip 5 in a blocky, black case (via 9to5Google). The case hides a lot of the design, but what you can see backs up previous alleged renders. For instance, the screen on the back may be the same 3.4-inch 720 x 748 cover screen that’s been predicted. You can also make out the side-by-side camera lenses, another rumored update to the design.

Breaking) Flip 5 device leaks pic.twitter.com/9At8qe3j75

— Revegnus (@Tech_Reve) June 25, 2023

The phone looks like it folds flat, but it’s hard to say for sure with the case on it. Still, that could mean Samsung may use its new droplet-style folding technique that’s been rumored for the Galaxy Z Fold 5 as well, which the frequently reliable tipster Ice Universe has indicated in the past.

A droplet-style fold has been used already in competitors’ phones like the Oppo Find N2 and it should reduce the visible crease where the phones fold — something that has plagued folding phones since their inception.

Next up, prolific leaker SnoopyTech sent people on a bit of a scavenger hunt on Monday that led to sets of leaked renders of both the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and the Galaxy Z Fold 5 in various colors, using a binary-coded tweet as the first clue. When translated, it directed readers to Pastebin for more clues, and eventually, to renders and specs. I’ve collected some of the renders in the gallery below:

In the spec sheet SnoopyTech also included in the crumb trail, the colors are listed as Cream; Graphite; Mint; and Lavender for the Z Flip 5 and Icy Blue; Cream; and Phantom Black for the Z Fold 5.

Apart from new color shades and obvious design tweaks, other changes to Samsung’s foldables include upgraded Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 CPUs and a thinner chassis for both phones — partially backing up an April rumor that the Z Fold 5’s depth would be shaved.

According to SnoopyTech’s leaked specs, the Fold 5 will shrink from 14.2mm — the thinnest point of a folded Galaxy Z Fold 4 — to 13.4mm. The Z Flip 5 will also thin up, coming in at 15.1mm when folded versus 15.9mm at the thinnest point of a folded Z Flip 4. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 may also lose some weight, dropping 10 grams from last year’s model. Finally, the leak shows the Fold 5’s camera array may have a 12MP telephoto lens — other previous leaks have put its telephoto at 10MP, which the Fold 4 used.

There are two notable absences in SnoopyTech’s leak: no 128GB model and no 1TB model for either phone. While that doesn’t mean we won’t see those storage levels in the final phones, it’s worth looking out for next month. Otherwise, based on SnoopyTech’s listed specs, no other differences stood out — the specs for battery life, Wi-Fi connectivity, RAM, and more all point to mostly unchanged internals.

Lucid Motors strikes deal to power Aston Martins future lineup of EVs

Lucid Motors strikes deal to power Aston Martin’s future lineup of EVs

Photo by Tim Stevens for The Verge

Lucid Motors will supply powertrain technology to Aston Martin for the British brand’s future lineup of electric vehicles, the two companies announced Monday. The deal brings together two companies with deep ties to motorsports, as well as brand identities centered on performance luxury.

Under the deal, Lucid will supply Aston Martin with its electric motors and batteries that have been used to power the California-based company’s only model, the Lucid Air sedan. Aston Martin will then take that technology and plug it into its own bespoke EV models. Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson hailed the deal as “a landmark collaboration.”

Under the deal, Lucid will supply Aston Martin with its electric motors and batteries that have been used to power the California-based company’s only model, the Lucid Air sedan

Aston Martin, an iconic British luxury car brand with wins in Le Mans and F1 under its belt, plans to launch its first plug-in model, the mid-engine hybrid Valhalla, in early 2024, followed by a pure battery-electric vehicle (BEV) the following year. All of the company’s models will be hybrid or BEV by 2026 and purely electric by 2030.

Lucid’s dual-motor Air has distinguished itself in the crowded luxury EV market with its long-range and high-performance specs. The $154,000 Air GT, for example, includes a 112kWh battery that can put out 819 horsepower and propel the vehicle to 60 mph in about two seconds. The base model Air has an EPA range of over 500 miles — though it’s been found to get slightly less in testing.

Under the agreement, Aston Martin will pay a “technology access fee” of $232 million to Lucid, comprising $100 million in shares of the British company and “aggregate cash payments” of $132 million. Aston Martin will also commit to an “effective minimum spend” with Lucid on powertrain components of $225 million. In total, the entire deal is said to be valued at $450 million.

Both companies have had their respective financial difficulties. Aston has survived seven bankruptcies throughout its 110-year history, while Lucid has seen its stock price plummet since going public in 2021. The company, which is majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, recently announced a $3 billion stock sale amid its rapidly dwindling cash stockpile.

Until recently, Aston Martin has relied on Mercedes-Benz as its technology partner, but those terms appear to be changing. In a separate announcement on Monday, the company said the German auto giant would not be increasing its stake in Aston but would instead be maintaining its 9 percent ownership.

Updated June 26th 9:55AM ET: Updated to reflect the deal is valued at $450 million.

WinGPT is a new ChatGPT app for your ancient Windows 3.1 PC

WinGPT is a new ChatGPT app for your ancient Windows 3.1 PC

ChatGPT running on Windows 3.1. | Image: dialup.net

Someone has created a ChatGPT app for Windows 3.1 PCs. WinGPT brings a very basic version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT responses into an app that can run on an ancient 386 chip. It’s built by the same mysterious developer behind Windle, a Wordle clone for Microsoft’s Windows 3.1 operating system.

“I didn’t want my Gateway 4DX2-66 from 1993 to be left out of the AI revolution, so I built an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1, based on the OpenAI API,” says the developer in a Hacker News thread.

WinGPT is written in C using Microsoft’s standard Windows API and connects to OpenAI’s API server using TLS 1.3, so there’s no need for a separate modern PC. That was a particularly interesting part of getting this app running on Windows 3.1, alongside managing the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit versions of Windows and building the UI for the app.

Image: dialup.net

The icon file was designed in Borland’s Image Editor.

Neowin notes that the ChatGPT responses are only brief due to the limited memory support that can’t handle the context of conversations. The icon for WinGPT was also designed in Borland’s Image Editor, a clone of Microsoft Paint that’s capable of making ICO files.

“I built most of the UI in C directly, meaning that each UI component had to be manually constructed in code,” says the anonymous WinGPT developer. “I was surprised that the set of standard controls available to use by any program with Windows 3.1 is incredibly limited. You have some controls you’d expect — push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, edit boxes — but any other control you might need, including those used across the operating system itself, aren’t available.”

If you still have a Windows 3.1 machine gathering dust in an attic, garage, or basement, then you can download the WinGPT binaries for 16-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows over at dialup.net — the most appropriate domain name I’ve ever seen for old Windows apps.

UK police blame Android SOS feature for influx of false emergency calls

UK police blame Android SOS feature for influx of false emergency calls

Android’s Emergency SOS feature is so easy to activate that users in the UK are accidently calling emergency services. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

An Android feature designed to help users contact emergency services is making life difficult for first responders in the UK. The BBC reports that police forces across the nation have reported an influx of false emergencies to the 999 switchboard (The UK’s equivalent of 911) in recent weeks which have largely been attributed to the Emergency SOS feature for Android phones.

Law enforcement in Scotland, and the English counties of Wiltshire, Devon, Cornwall, and Gloucestershire have reported receiving a higher number of silent or abandoned calls since an Android update released between October 2022 and February 2023 introduced an Emergency SOS calling feature to more Android phones. The BBC reports that each errant call can take around 20 minutes to deal with as operators ensure it wasn’t made by someone who is otherwise unable to verbally communicate an emergency situation.

The update added a new SOS emergency function for devices to call 999 through the power button being pressed 5 times or more.

These ‘silent calls’ as they are named, are directed to police control rooms and the result has been a significant increase in silent calls.

— National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) (@PoliceChiefs) June 17, 2023

The SOS feature allows Android users to quickly contact emergency services by pressing their device’s power button multiple times. The action is easy to perform accidentally, however, resulting in a deluge of “butt dialed” false emergencies.

Earlier this month, the National Police Chiefs Council highlighted the issue on Twitter, noting that users can disable the Android feature to lessen the burden on emergency responders. “Calls to 999 where the operator cannot hear anyone on the line (silent calls) are never just ignored. Call handlers will then need to spend valuable time trying to call you back to check whether you need help,” the account tweeted on June 17th. “If you do accidentally dial 999, please don’t hang up. If possible, please stay on the line and let the operator know it was an accident and that you don’t need any assistance.”

Introduced with the release of Android 12 on Google Pixel phones back in 2021, Emergency SOS is designed to make it easier to call for help in situations where users may otherwise be unable to physically dial. While the feature has technically been available for almost two years on Pixel phones — with similar issues reported by Pixel users shortly after its release — Emergency SOS has taken a while to arrive on other Android phone brands because device manufacturers are responsible for rolling out the feature (with customizations) to their own devices. Essentially, Emergency SOS has only recently rolled out to enough Android phones to draw significant attention to the issue.

Google reccomends disabling Emergency SOS until Android device manufactureres can update the feature.

Google has responded to the situation, informing the BBC that phone manufacturers are responsible for offering the Emergency SOS feature and managing how it will work on their respective devices.

“To help these manufacturers prevent unintentional emergency calls on their devices, Android is providing them with additional guidance and resources,” said a Google spokesperson to the BBC. “We anticipate device manufacturers will roll out updates to their users that address this issue shortly. Users that continue to experience this issue should switch Emergency SOS off for the next couple of days.”

To disable it head into the device settings and search for “Emergency SOS.” From there you switch the toggle to “off.”

The issue with accidental calls to emergency services isn’t unique to the UK or to Android. Law enforcement across Europe and Canada have similarly reported a significant increase in accidental emergency calls related to Android’s Emergency SOS feature. Apple has also experienced issues with its own emergency calling, such as the Crash Detection feature on the iPhone 14 being activated when users ride on rollercoasters.

Here come the electric buses

Here come the electric buses

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Make way for the electric buses.

The US Department of Transportation and the Federal Transit Administration is sending out $1.7 billion from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to 46 states and territories to fund the acquisition of 1,700 buses — over half of which will be zero-emission models.

The new awards will bring the total number of zero-emission buses funded by the infrastructure law up to 1,800, which is more than double the number of clean buses on the roads today. That still only represents a fraction of the roughly 60,000 buses that are currently in operation in the US, but officials hailed it as an important step toward updating the nation’s aging transit fleet with an eye toward fighting climate change.

The new awards will bring the total number of zero-emission buses funded by the infrastructure law up to 1,800

“These are unprecedented levels of investment when it comes to putting modern cleaner buses on the road,” US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said in a briefing with reporters. “These projects will improve and increase bus service and bus reliability, so more people can get to where they need to affordably on time. And it’ll lower costs for local taxpayers. It’s simply a better commute when you’re on one of these cleaner buses.”

Each awardee is set to receive millions of dollars to fund the purchase of new buses, update garage facilities to install charging infrastructure, and retrain drivers and mechanics to support their maintenance and upkeep. The funds, which will go to urban and rural communities, as well as Indian reservations, are being distributed from the FTA’s Grants for Buses and Bus Facilities and Low- and No-Emission (Low-No) Vehicle programs.

Examples include $104 million to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to convert its Lorton, Virginia, bus garage into an EV-supporting facility; $33.5 million to King County Metro Transit in Seattle, Washington, to buy approximately 30 battery-electric buses; and $23.3 million to Iowa City to replace four diesel buses with electric models.

The Biden administration was quick to tout the economic development advantages of its clean bus investments. According to Buttigieg, all of the acquired buses will be manufactured in America, and the funds will also be put toward workforce development to ensure that transit employees have the skills to operate and maintain this new generation of vehicles.

“These are unprecedented levels of investment when it comes to putting modern cleaner buses on the road”

But not all of the new models will be zero-emission. At least half of the buses will be powered by natural gas or “another fuel source that makes our air far less toxic,” Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA, said.

“We know for some agencies zero emission isn’t the answer yet,” Vanterpool added. “But they want to replace their older diesel or gasoline buses with something better for their community.”

Combined with last year’s announcement, there are now 3,300 new vehicles on the road that are either zero-emission or powered by less polluting forms of fuel. Today’s announcement accounts for an additional 700 zero-emission buses, including battery-electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

Transit agencies continue to struggle to recover ridership in the years since the pandemic. Challenges like changing commuter habits, staffing shortages, and declining revenue continue to plague most transit systems in the US. Experts continue to worry about the possibility of a transit “death spiral” — a cycle of terrible service leading to even fewer riders, leading to even more terrible service, and so on.

It’s unclear whether cleaner buses will necessarily improve transit’s future, though few would dispute it’s better for the environment and for the health of people who live in the communities serviced by transit. Some critics have argued that the money would be better spent on improving service rather than on acquiring an expensive new fleet — especially when the production of these new buses remains very much a work in progress.

For example, Nova Bus, a Canadian manufacturer that makes zero-emission models, announced recently that it would be closing its facility in upstate New York to refocus on its locations in Quebec.

But Buttigieg said cleaner buses go hand in hand with improved service and reliability. “We’re putting historic funding into making public transit cleaner, safer, more reliable and more resilient,” he said, “because it is absolutely essential to our daily lives.”

An upcoming 5G deadline could cause airline delays starting July 1st

An upcoming 5G deadline could cause airline delays starting July 1st

With the 5G C-band rollout complete, there may be some flight delays. | Image: The Verge

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Friday there may be some airline delays or cancellations starting July 1st if the last remaining passenger jets haven’t upgraded their altimeters to deal with 5G interference, per a report from The Wall Street Journal report. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) maintains that 5G C-band signals could interfere with radio wave emitters passenger jets use to measure how far they are from the ground, which pilots rely on when landing with low visibility.

Though airlines aren’t actually required to get the new equipment in place until February 2024, those passenger jets that haven’t been certified for operation around C-band 5G signals by the first of July will not be allowed to land in certain low-visibility situations.

Most of the US domestic airline fleet is prepared, with over 80 percent of planes having been upgraded, but about 65 percent of international jets flying to the US still need fixing. The global airline group International Air Transport Association told WSJ that carriers would do their best to avoid disruptions, and that they were favoring aircraft with the required altimeters for flights to the US. Air India says all of its planes are so equipped.

Broadly, the article says airlines believe there will be little-to-no impact. In the US, most airlines say they expect to have their fleets fully upgraded by July 1st, though Delta Air Lines and JetBlue will both miss that date, with 190 planes and 17 planes outstanding respectively, says the WSJ report. The Airlines for America trade association blamed global supply chain issues for the difficulties hitting the deadline.

The Federal Communications Commission and wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon hit a wall with 5G expansion in 2021 when the FAA initially expressed its concerns about 5G C-band interference with aviation gear, kicking off a lengthy feud over where carriers could turn on their towers and with how much signal power.

The full expansion of the crucial band, which strikes a balance between the slow-yet-ubiquitous low-band 5G and the ultrafast-but-easily-stifled millimeter wave 5G, was initially paused until January 2022, but it saw further delays — first to July 5th, 2022 and then to July 1st of this year.

At the moment, the only flights that could face setbacks are those aboard planes that haven’t had the 5G-interference-busting equipment installed and would be landing in low-visibility circumstances. For instance, a JetBlue spokesman told WSJ there could be “limited impact” in Boston on low-visibility days beginning on July 1st.

Reddit says accessibility upgrades for moderators are coming to its mobile apps soon

Reddit says accessibility upgrades for moderators are coming to its mobile apps soon

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit will make “accessibility improvements” to many moderator tools in its official mobile apps by July 1st, the company announced on Friday.

Some moderators rely on third-party apps because Reddit’s apps have what they characterize as “significant accessibility challenges,” and the accessibility community has expressed concerns over how they will moderate on mobile after popular apps like Apollo shut down on June 30th due to potentially expensive API pricing changes. It seems this roadmap, which promises improvements to features like the moderation queue and the ModMail messaging system on Android and iOS, is intended to assuage those fears.

Based on the replies to the announcement post, however, many are still unhappy with the company’s plans. “A multibillion dollar corporation forcing disabled people (including the profoundly disabled) to simply ‘learn new tools,’ and to stop using the accessibility tools they’re used to — the tools they depend on — to access / moderate the communities they depend on — is cruel,” wrote PotRoastPotato, a moderator who has advocated for disabled communities as part of the recent protests across Reddit. “As long as there are disabled users who depend on and are accustomed to the accessibility features of third-party apps, these apps need to be preserved,” PotRoastPotato added in an email to The Verge.

Reddit’s roadmap notes that some features won’t be available until late July or sometime in August, and some are critiquing the company for that choice. “Why are these not blockers that you are forcing Reddit to delay API changes for?” one user wrote. “Do you find it acceptable to have an inherently worse moderator accessibility experience while pulling the rug out from underneath the community?”

“We applaud Reddit for prioritizing these features, but would prefer a top-down corporate response that gives the product team enough time and addresses the broader community’s concerns,” the moderators of r/Blind said in a statement to The Verge. They added that Reddit has invited the mods to help test the features, but the team has asked Reddit if this will be contract work and hasn’t yet heard back.

Accessibility advocates have been among the most vocal protestors of Reddit since it became clear that the future of third-party Reddit apps was in jeopardy. In response to their outcry, Reddit said earlier this month that it will exempt accessibility-focused apps from its API changes, and at least three have received that exemption: RedReader, Dystopia, and Luna. But the API changes are also partially responsible for the planned June 30th shutdown of r/TranscribersOfReddit, a community that transcribes images, audio, and video for about 100 others.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman does seem committed to making accessibility changes; in response to a comment in his AMA that criticized Reddit’s approach to accessibility, Huffman said that “for our own apps, there is no excuse” and promised that “we will do better.” But the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment about if it would make changes to its plans in response to concerns from the community in Friday’s post. According to Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, “We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.”

Here’s Reddit’s full roadmap the company’s post, which is titled “Accessibility Updates to Mod Tools: Part 1.” In the post, Reddit promised to share another update on Friday.

How mods access Moderation tools (by July 1)

ModQueue (view, action posts and comments, filter and sort content, add removal reasons, and bulk action items) (by July 1)

ModMail (inbox, read, reply to messages, create new mail, private mod note) (by July 1)

User Settings (manage mods, approved users, muted users, banned user) (by July 1)

Community Settings (late July)

Ban Evasion Settings (late July)

Additional User Settings (late July)

Remaining mod surfaces (August)

Formula E team caught using RFID scanner that could grab live tire data from other cars

Formula E team caught using RFID scanner that could grab live tire data from other cars

Stoffel Vandoorne drives in the Portland ePrix today. | Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images

During the Formula E qualifying round in Portland, Oregon, today, the DS Penske team was fined €25,000 after it surreptitiously installed an RFID scanner at the entrance to the pit, which the FIA stewards said could collect data from other race cars and give them an advantage. The team’s racers, Stoffel Vandoorne and Jean-Éric Vergne, were also hit with a pit lane start penalty for today’s race — meaning they will have to wait at the end of the pit lane until all of the other cars have driven past before entering the race.

The FIA Stewards explanation for the penalty was provided to The Verge via email:

The Stewards were advised by the Technical Delegate that the competitor had installed RFID scanning equipment in the pit lane entry this morning that was able to collect live data from all cars. Firstly, it is forbidden in general for competitors to install or place any equipment in the pit lane. Secondly, the collection of data by this method gives the competitor a lot of information, which is a huge and unfair advantage. Taking all the circumstances together, the Stewards feel that the given penalty is appropriate.

RFID chips have been used in Formula E tires for the entirety of the still-young motorsport, primarily to track the condition of tires, including temperature and tire pressure, and encourage their efficient use, according to a 2014 article in Tyrepress.

For the 2023 season, Formula E has switched to a new “Gen 3” car design and a new tire manufacturer, going from Michelins to the Hankook iON. A Motorsport.com report from off-season testing discussed how much of a challenge that presented for the teams and a possible reason why attempting to glean data from the entire field was something Penske would even try.

For the 2022-2023 season, the series picked up a sponsorship from Hankook tires, which a report in Motorsport indicated presented challenges for the drivers, who had been used to the same Michelin tires for the previous 8 seasons.

Teslas NACS plug will be required at EV charging stations in Washington and Texas

Tesla’s NACS plug will be required at EV charging stations in Washington and Texas

Tesla’s North American Charging Standard is gaining steam. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla has had a very good month, at least when it comes to its EV charging standard. Washington state wants to require electric car charging companies to use Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) in order to be part of the state’s program to support electric vehicles, according to Reuters. The state’s proposed mandate would put Tesla’s technology in state- and- federally-funded charging sites in the future, though Washington hasn’t decided quite how that will look.

At the moment, the federal government requires at least four Combined Charging System (CCS) chargers at taxpayer-funded charging sites, and Tonia Buell, the alternative fuels program manager at Washington state’s Department of Transportation (DOT), told Reuters the state may require that at least two, or maybe all four, of the chargers also support NACS. CCS is the standard currently preferred by the federal government for cross-platform use.

It’s been a good week for Tesla’s NACS standard — Texas made a similar announcement on Tuesday, saying it would also start requiring electric vehicle charging companies to use the standard in order to receive federal dollars. The state’s DOT told Reuters via email that “the decision by Ford, GM, and now Rivian to adopt NACS changed requirements for Phase 1” of Texas’ rollout of a federally-funded electrification program.

Also on Tuesday, electric automaker and Tesla competitor Rivian announced its intention to adopt NACS for its future vehicles, which would give those cars access to the already-robust network of Tesla Supercharger stations throughout the country. Hyundai is also considering the standard, though it said it depends on customer interest, as Tesla’s chargers don’t charge at the higher rate supported by its own EV platform. Electric charging company BTC Power, which supplies DC and AC vehicle chargers to convenience stores and fleet operations, also announced its intention to support NACS.

With Ford and General Motors also announcing support for Tesla’s standard, NACS now has huge advantages over CCS in the fight to become the de facto standard for EV charging in the US.

Has Xbox really lost the console wars?

Has Xbox really lost the console wars?

Xbox chief Phil Spencer. | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge

FTC v. Microsoft day two was all about console wars and whether Xbox is really in a distant third place.

The second day of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing was really all about one man: Phil Spencer. The Xbox chief took the stand to discuss Microsoft losing the console wars, Sony’s aggressive and hostile competition, and to paint Xbox in a distant third place where it’s struggling to compete.

Spencer also revealed Microsoft looked at buying Zynga to improve its mobile gaming prospects and acquired Bethesda after learning that Starfield might become a PlayStation exclusive. He also, importantly, swore under oath that Microsoft won’t pull Call of Duty from PlayStation. That promise turned into some frustrations with the FTC’s line of questioning from Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley and some testy exchanges between the FTC’s lawyer, James Weingarten, and Spencer.

Oh, and Google turned up at the end to talk about Stadia in a rushed last-minute testimony.

Yeah, it was a lot. Let’s dig in to day two.

Can we please stop talking about the Nintendo Switch?

We kicked off the day with a sealed courtroom so that Jamie Lawver, senior finance director at Xbox, could deliver witness testimony about highly confidential Xbox financials. We don’t know what Lawver revealed to Judge Corley, but it set the stage for Spencer to appear and talk about the Xbox platform and the Nintendo Switch.

The FTC and Microsoft have been arguing about whether the Switch should be included in its definition of the console market for two days now and in multiple filings with the court. Microsoft wants the Switch included because then Xbox is in third place. The FTC argues that inside Microsoft it’s always competing and comparing Xbox to PlayStation, not Switch. It provided market analysis and metrics that Microsoft uses internally to back up its “high performance” console market of just the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X consoles. The reality is, as always, somewhere in the middle.

The FTC had consoles inside the courtroom on day two to show how visually different the Switch is from the PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles. “The PS5 and Xbox Series X shipped at the same time... from a form factor these two functionally look more equivalent,” said Spencer, commenting on the visual appearance of the consoles the FTC had hauled into the courtroom.

Photo by Philip Pacheco/Getty Images

FTC attorneys bringing a PS5 to court.

“It’s incorrect to say Nintendo isn’t a competitor,” argued Spencer, but earlier on, he admitted there were some clear hardware differences. “The Switch was designed for people to take on the go,” said Spencer. “Whereas the gen 8 [Xbox One] consoles require that they’re plugged into the wall and don’t have a screen. Nintendo built a different platform.”

To further drive home the FTC’s point, Spencer was questioned about how many frames per second (fps) the Xbox Series S / X consoles can support, how many fps the Switch supports, and even the differences in GPU teraflops. At times it felt like the FTC was minutes away from calling a PC gamer to the stand to testify about memory speeds, CPU cores, and thermal paste.

The reality is that the Nintendo Switch is still a game console. It can play some of the games that the Xbox Series S / X and PS5 also play, albeit rarely as well or at the same visual fidelity. Its catalog includes extraordinarily popular games like Fortnite that don’t fit the conventional triple-A model. And it’s already successful without Call of Duty and the types of triple-A games that people typically buy a PS5 or Xbox Series X for, thanks to Nintendo’s decades of investment in its strong lineup of exclusive titles.

If you’re a gamer that Microsoft and Sony both care about, you’re probably also a potential Switch customer. At the end of the day Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all competing for your gaming time and attention.

In the Epic v. Apple verdict it was decided that the Switch was potentially a future competitor to Apple and Google phones but not one yet. Nearly two years later, we’re in another antitrust case where the definition of the Switch is being debated. It’s a game console, folks. Move on.

The console wars and Xbox struggles

Ahead of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, we saw Microsoft argue that “Xbox has lost the console wars, and its rivals are positioned to continue to dominate, including by leveraging exclusive content.” In a court filing, Microsoft said it had a 16 percent share of console sales in 2021 (when you count the Switch) and 21 percent of the console install base.

So, “has Microsoft lost the console wars?” asked the FTC’s lawyer in court on Friday. Spencer paused for 10 seconds here to gather his thoughts, as he clearly knows this is a hot topic among Xbox and PlayStation fans.

“As the console wars is a social construct with the community, I would never want to count our community out, they’re big fans,” Spencer answered carefully. “If you look at our market share in the console space over the last 20 plus years, we’re in third place. We are behind Sony and Nintendo in console share globally.”

Spencer was then questioned about an email exchange with Xbox CFO Tim Stuart where the Xbox chief described Sony’s PlayStation platform as “hostile to Xbox’s survival.” Spencer then admitted Xbox hasn’t “effectively” competed with PlayStation:

Every time we ship a game on PlayStation... Sony captures 30 percent of the revenue that we do on their platform and then they use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market. We try to compete, but as I said, over the last 20 years we’ve failed to do that effectively.

Later in the day Spencer was then asked about Xbox targets. “So your business is not necessarily meeting its internal targets today, right?” asked the FTC’s lawyer. “It is not right now, no,” admitted Spencer. “Today, with the majority of our business residing as the third-place console business, we are not a robust business.”

But just two weeks ago, Spencer revealed gaming revenue at Microsoft is double what it was in the Xbox 360 era in a behind-closed-doors presentation after its Xbox Games Showcase. Spencer also said at that presentation that Xbox has more players than ever, and Microsoft is expecting $1 billion in PC gaming revenue this year. So the Xbox business is in pretty good shape, but Microsoft clearly has some even bigger targets.

If the Xbox business isn’t meeting targets and struggles to compete, why is Microsoft spending nearly $70 billion on Activision? Spencer explained it’s apparently all about the mobile opportunity:

The deal, as we’ve talked about, expands our business to the mobile platform... the existing business that we run today as the third-place console business is a very difficult business to drive profit and margin. So the opportunity for us to expand in a meaningful way onto mobile, the world’s largest gaming platform, was really both a strategic and business opportunity behind this deal.

And to back that up, Spencer was asked about how the Activision deal could help Xbox consoles:

FTC: If Microsoft is going to grow, particularly in a business like console, it can grow by taking share from its competitors

Spencer: There’s no console growth in our [Activision] deal model.

FTC: Do you have any intention of this deal helping you climb out of the number three spot?

Spencer: In console, we do not.

FTC: So that’s just a write off?

Spencer: I don’t understand how that’s a write off?

The FTC then immediately moved on to a new question.

It sure sounds like Microsoft has realized console gaming is stagnant and there’s a mobile opportunity ahead, but we’ve heard some of this before. Spencer said in October that Xbox Game Pass subscriber growth had slowed down and we’ve seen Microsoft focus on PC Game Pass growth in recent months instead. Microsoft recently increased Game Pass for console prices, but not PC Game Pass ones. Spencer also said in 2019 that Microsoft’s gaming business isn’t about how many consoles it sells and, more recently, that losing the Xbox One generation was “the worst generation to lose” as gamers built their digital library.

But surely the Activision deal isn’t all about mobile, so what’s stopping Microsoft from using this giant acquisition to keep content from competitors and create Xbox exclusives? “If you could make a decision that would benefit Microsoft and harm Microsoft’s competitors in any of the markets we’ve been discussing, that would be good for Microsoft Gaming’s numbers, right?” asked the FTC’s lawyer, trying to show that Microsoft could harm the competition and boost its gaming revenues.

“We are trying to compete in the market by growing our business,” said Spencer. “Some of our business growth is obviously growth that our competitors would like to have, so in the end our growth is probably... from some of our competitors not realizing that growth themselves.”

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Xbox exclusives, Zynga, and Bethesda

The FTC argues that a big part of the Activision deal, much like Bethesda, will be Xbox exclusives. We heard on day one of this hearing that Bethesda’s Indiana Jones game is now Xbox and PC exclusive after Microsoft acquired Bethesda. What about other Bethesda games?

Spencer refused to confirm whether Elder Scrolls VI is an Xbox exclusive or not. “I think we’ve been a little unclear on what platforms it’s launching on, given how far out the game is,” said Spencer. “It’s difficult for us right now to nail down.” Spencer did previously hint that Elder Scrolls VI would be an Xbox exclusive, but the game is still years away.

“Have you had conversations at Microsoft about skipping PlayStation with Activision titles?” Spencer was asked by the FTC. “I don’t remember a specific conversation, but it would seem like a normal conversation for us to have,” admits Spencer.

It was also revealed that Microsoft had explored the idea of making Minecraft Dungeons exclusive, in a chat between Phil Spencer and former Xbox CMO Mike Nichols, where both agreed it should be exclusive to Xbox. Minecraft Dungeons eventually shipped on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

One of the biggest surprise revelations around exclusives was the reasoning behind Microsoft’s Bethesda acquisition. Spencer revealed that Sony regularly pays competitors to “skip our platform,” and Microsoft felt it needed to own Bethesda to compete:

When we acquired ZeniMax one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire... to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox. So the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business.”

So while Microsoft argues the Activision acquisition is about mobile, it’s also very clearly about Xbox consoles and having exclusive content so that Microsoft doesn’t slip even further behind the competition. Spencer argues that exclusives are “an established part of the console business, and Sony and Nintendo are very strong with their exclusive games.”

Microsoft also explored the idea of acquiring Zynga to boost its mobile efforts. “We entered into some discussions with a company called Zynga, it ended up getting acquired by Take-Two,” said Spencer, before admitting Microsoft spent a lot of time talking to Zynga. “In the end for our opportunity, we thought we needed to have something that was even bigger than Zynga was given our very small starting space in the mobile business.”

Image: Activision

A Call of Duty oath and FTC frustrations

Call of Duty has been the centerpiece of a lot of regulators’ concerns, particularly with Sony’s arguments against Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal and its filings with regulators. Sony has maintained that it fears Microsoft could make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox or even sabotage the PlayStation versions of the game.

We heard a bombshell email from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan read out in court earlier this week, revealing that he wasn’t actually worried about Call of Duty exclusivity and was “pretty sure we will continue to see Call of Duty on PlayStation for many years to come.”

Spencer has committed to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation multiple times, with Microsoft arguing it doesn’t make financial sense to pull the game from Sony’s platform and it would harm the Xbox brand if it did so.

“I would raise my hand, I would do whatever it takes,” he told Judge Corley in court. “My commitment is, and my testimony is, that we will continue to ship future versions of Call of Duty on Sony’s PlayStation 5.”

The “5” in that oath became a contentious part of the FTC’s questioning later on, though:

FTC: Can you swear under oath that without looking at any future terms that need to be hashed out, you’ll ship all the versions of Call of Duty that may exist on all the versions of PlayStation that make exist in the next 10 years?

Spencer: That’s my goal, yes.

After some intense back and forth over deal terms and agreements, Spencer elaborated:

That’s my goal, yes. If what you’re trying to propose is that Sony might change the terms of how we ship games on our platform then that would prohibit us from shipping on their platforms.

The FTC then wanted to see whether Microsoft would make the same Call of Duty promises about other Activision games. It was a particularly fraught exchange:

FTC: Would you make the same promise with respect to all of Activision’s content?

Spencer: I was asked specifically about Call of Duty. No, Activision ships games on mobile and many different platforms. They have some PC-only games like World of Warcraft. I don’t think there’s a blanket statement you can make for Activision Blizzard game content on PlayStation

FTC: What about Diablo? Can you promise it will ship on all future versions of PlayStation?

Spencer: Can I promise? I am able to promise, yes.

FTC: you’re able to bind Microsoft today? Are you able to bind the corporation here today?

Spencer: [silence]

FTC: I think the point has been made, I’m happy to move along.

Judge Corley: Why don’t we move along.

The exchanges between the FTC and Spencer didn’t get much better, and it was clear there was frustration at the line of questioning from Spencer and even Judge Corley.

At one point, Spencer hit back to correct the FTC lawyer on how acquisitions work:

FTC: Now you have a $70 billion upfront payment that you’re making for Activision, right?

Spencer: No, when you acquire something it’s not a payment. It’s like when you buy a house. You’re buying an asset that has value so it’s really a transfer of cash into an asset called Activision, that you believe retains the value that you acquired. So to try and characterize the $70 billion as somehow spent is incorrect. Financially, it’s really moving $70 billion in cash into an asset, which is a game publisher, that to us is actually worth more than $70 billion, so it is not spent.”

The FTC then returned to questioning focused on Spencer’s Call of Duty commitments. Judge Corley directly cut off the FTC’s questioning of Spencer after the regulator’s lawyer asked if Spencer could make a Call of Duty commitment to bringing the game to a Sony PlayStation cloud service. “I don’t think that’s it, I’m going to cut off the questioning there,” said Judge Corley.

The question was a strange one, because the FTC has been arguing that Microsoft’s cloud gaming agreements with Nvidia, Boosteroid, and others are “facially ambiguous and present significant questions,” despite Microsoft arguing they’re relevant. So if the FTC doesn’t think Microsoft’s cloud gaming deals with competitors other than Sony are relevant, why does it want to know about Call on Duty on Sony’s cloud service in particular? Since Judge Corley stopped the line of questioning, we might never know. The deals were enough to convince EU regulators to approve the acquisition, though.

The FTC also had some other bizarre lines of questioning on day two. Early on, Spencer revealed some inside information about why Minecraft still doesn’t have an optimized version on PlayStation 5. “Sony was reluctant to ship us PlayStation dev kits... it put us behind on our development for Minecraft on PS5,” said Spencer. The FTC characterized this as Microsoft then retaliating by still not providing an optimized version of Minecraft on PS5 nearly three years later.

“There is a version of Minecraft that runs on PS5,” says Spencer, but this isn’t an optimized version — it’s simply the PS4 version of the game. Then again, there still isn’t an Xbox Series S / X optimized version of Minecraft, so is Microsoft fighting back against its own platform too?

Image: Google

The Google Stadia controller.

Why did Google show up?

After Judge Corley abruptly ended Spencer’s time on the stand, Dov Zimring, Google’s former Stadia product lead, appeared. The FTC has been focusing on Microsoft’s cloud competition in this case, trying to show that the company sees cloud as a dedicated market and not just a feature.

During Thursday’s testimony we learned that Microsoft was working on a separate “dedicated” version of Xbox Cloud Gaming in September 2022. That’s the same month Google announced its Stadia shutdown. Microsoft now says it’s no longer planning a separate version due to costs and usage.

The FTC spent a lot of time asking Zimring to discuss the technical aspects of Stadia, and he claimed it had “the best technology in the market,” at the time. “We had performance capabilities that didn’t exist in the [cloud] market like 4K,” said Zimring.

But Google Stadia failed because it didn’t have enough games and consumers weren’t interested in cloud gaming. “Our ability to have sufficient content... the number of games on the platforms as well as the blockbusters at a certain time,” were a big part of that failure, admitted Zimring.

Zimring also revealed that Google had experimented with running Stadia on Windows servers, but it was costly. “We had prototyped on Windows early on... the mission we had established at the very beginning was to enable revolutionary experiences... we saw Windows as limiting to innovate in that regard because we didn’t have control over the operating system,” said Zimring. “[Windows] would have doubled our total cost of operating on hardware that was equivalent to the 8th generation consoles, like the PlayStation 4.”

Zimring was called as a witness by the FTC, but Microsoft’s lawyer took time in questioning to establish that Stadia was trying to compete with consoles like Xbox and PC. “So Stadia competed with consoles, including Xbox?” asked Microsoft’s lawyer. “Yes,” confirmed Zimring. The FTC sees cloud gaming as a separate market to consoles, so Google’s confirmation it was competing directly with consoles could undermine that argument.

Microsoft also took the time to spell out in a back and forth exchange with Zimring that Activision content isn’t available on any cloud gaming services right now, but it would be if the deal closed thanks to Microsoft’s cloud gaming agreements with Nvidia, Boosteroid, and others.

Next week on FTC v. Microsoft

We’re only two days into this five-day hearing and we were supposed to hear PlayStation chief Jim Ryan’s pre-recorded video deposition today. Some filings with the court suggest parts of Ryan’s deposition could be sealed, so it’s still not clear how much we’ll get to hear next week.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will also appear next week, likely on Wednesday, and we’ve still got to hear from two Nvidia executives about cloud gaming and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. The hearing will resume again on Tuesday morning at 8:30AM PT / 11:30AM ET, providing everyone a working day of rest on Monday.

The Verge will be covering day three of the case closely on Tuesday, and you can follow all of our live coverage and daily recaps right here.

How to tell everyone on Gmail if youre in or not

How to tell everyone on Gmail if you’re in — or not

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Recently, a friend who has been on Gmail for a long time suddenly noticed the chat availability settings in the upper right of the web app. This notice was actually added to the Gmail page about two years ago when Google Chat was integrated into Gmail. It notifies anyone whom you’ve ever used Chat with that you’re at your computer (or phone) and available — or not.

Even though most people may not receive notification of your availability (especially if you don’t tend to use Google Chat), you may find the idea that somebody may know when you’re using your account... irritating. (At least, my friend did, and I can sympathize.) However, you can turn the notification off — or, at least, mark yourself “away” so that your presence will not be obvious to anyone who has access.

To switch your chat availability on the web version of Gmail:

To adjust your chat availability, first look for the button to the right of your search box. If you haven’t accessed it yet, it will probably show a green dot and read Active. Click on the box to see all your options for chat availability. These include:

• Automatic: this will show a green dot and the word “Active” whenever your activity indicates that you’re available.
• Do not disturb: this will mute your chat notifications, but only for a specific amount of time. You can specify a number of hours or create a schedule — weekdays between 5PM and 8AM, for example. However, you can’t create a permanent “Do not disturb” notice; I created one to go daily from 6PM to 6PM (so it would last 24 hours), and it automatically defaulted to expire in one week.
• Set as away: this will set your status as away and will not change until you switch it.

Google gives you several options for setting your chat availability.

Create a personal status

There are other status options available, which you can access by clicking on Add a status in the drop-down menu. There are several presets that you can add, including Be right back, Commuting, Out sick, or Vacationing. You can also create your own; however, as with Do not disturb, you have to set a time limit — although you get a later time range:

• Click on the button to the right of your search box.
• Select Add a status.
• Write your status message at the top of the pop-up box. A Clear status after drop-down menu will appear, using Today as the time limit. Click on that.
• Select Custom and choose a date, which can be up to a year from today’s date.

You can set your own custom status.

To set your chat availability on the Gmail mobile app:

You can also set your availability and create your own custom notice on your phone using the Gmail app for iOS or Android. Note that wherever you set your status, it will be reflected in all the devices that are using that same Google account.

• In the app, tap on the three parallel lines in the upper left corner.
• A menu will appear from the left; your current status will be on top. Tap on the status to change it or on Add a status to create your own option.

Open the side menu in Gmail to change your activity status.

As with Gmail’s web version, you can add your own status message.

Google Pixel devices finally have a real default weather app

Google Pixel devices finally have a real default weather app

Finally, a real Pixel Weather app. This particular forecast is for the birds, though.

Google finally has a default weather app to compete with Apple and Samsung. Though Pixel phones have long been able to display the current weather in widgets, tapping on those widgets just launched a basic screen with a cute weather frog and a handful of stats. It felt like a web page because that’s basically what it was.

With the launch of the Pixel Tablet earlier this week, Google has rectified that situation. Its new weather app — which is accessed via the same widgets as before, as there’s no icon to launch it — has a much nicer design without losing the playfulness of the older experience. It has 10-day and 24-hour forecasts; wind, humidity, barometric pressure, and UV index reports, plus current sun position and sunrise / sunset times. It also shows details for precipitation, wind, and humidity broken down by the hour. All of this is available in an easy to parse single screen with some fun animations for the current conditions.

The new app also has the ability to provide immediately upcoming precipitation information, including how intense it will be and long it will last before it stops. It can even provide this data up to 12 hours in advance thanks to its use of data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other sources. This information will only be displayed in the app when it’s relevant — if there isn’t any upcoming precipitation near you, it won’t show this data.

The new weather experience shows quite a lot of detail in an easy-to-parse way. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any radar maps.

Perhaps the only thing missing from this new weather experience is a radar view — if there is one, I’ve been unable to find it in the app. It’d also be nice to have an app icon to launch the weather app instead of having to rely on a widget. Like the barebones previous version, this new one is powered by the Google app, but it feels much more native and less like a dinky little website.

For now, the new weather app is limited to tablets, including the Pixel Tablet and the soon-to-launch Pixel Fold. 9to5Google reports that Google plans to bring it to other devices in the future, but there’s no timing for when that might happen. Android Police has some images of what it looks like running on a phone-sized screen, thanks to developers that were able to activate it on their devices.

Samsung devices already have a rather complete weather app preinstalled, but I’m hopeful that Google doesn’t keep this exclusive to the Pixel line and makes it more widely available. It wouldn’t be the first time Google extended Pixel-specific software outside of its own devices.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Russia invades Ukraine: the latest news on connectivity cryptocurrency and more

Russia invades Ukraine: the latest news on connectivity, cryptocurrency, and more

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

This even has implications for the ISS

On February 24th, Russia invaded areas of Ukraine near its northern, eastern, and southern borders. It’s a significant military action that could have alarming consequences, and more than 500,000 people had reportedly fled from Ukraine to neighboring countries as of February 28th.

Tech companies responded to the crisis in various ways, with a focus on trying to reduce online misinformation and avoid putting Ukrainians in danger. Google disabled Maps traffic data in Ukraine to protect citizens, for example, while Facebook removed a Russian misinformation network. But Russia has blocked Twitter and partially blocked Facebook. And there have been internet outages in Ukraine that have sparked concerns about the possibility of attacks on Ukraine’s internet infrastructure.

Read on for our latest coverage of the crisis.