Twitter’s rebrand to X may actually be happening soon
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
Around 12AM ET last night, Twitter owner Elon Musk started tweeting — and did so for hours — about the Twitter rebrand to X, the one-letter name he’s used repeatedly in company and product names forever. It started with a tweet saying “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” followed by a second tweet adding that “if a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk then, over the next several hours, gestured at the change in between other posts and replies, tweeting things like “Deus X,” or replying to other users talking about it. At one point, he joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,” and sat silently for almost an hour before unmuting and confirming he would be changing Twitter’s logo tomorrow, adding “we’re cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”
As for what the new logo will look like, Musk didn’t comment specifically, but pin a gif that was posted by Sawyer Merritt, a Twitter user who offered the logo, which he said was used for his discontinued podcast.
The letter “X” has been on just about everything Musk has touched for the last two-plus decades. X.com was the original name for Paypal; it’s in his SpaceX company name; it’s in the name for the Tesla SUV; and he has said he wants to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app.” Maybe that’s what he’ll do with the X.com domain name he bought back from Paypal in 2017.
Finally rebranding the site will be the clearest declaration yet that this is no longer the same social network that it was before Musk purchased it last year. But it’s far from the only change in the Musk era of Twitter.
How my smart home almost saved my vacation
This Ecobee smart thermostat alerted me to a potentially catastrophic scenario in my home while I was on vacation. But there was little I could do about it from afar.
When my HVAC unit failed while I was out of town, my smart thermostat warned me, and the rest of my connected home helped me figure out what was going on.
They say the worst part about a vacation is coming home. I only partially agree with that theory. I love sleeping in my own bed. and cuddling my cat, dogs, and bunny slightly compensates for not being in Belgium eating a waffle for breakfast. But this summer, my homecoming was almost a complete disaster. I say almost because, thanks to my smart home, I at least had a heads-up about what awaited me.
It started on the tarmac at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. After a nine-hour flight from London, I switched on my phone and was greeted with the usual barrage of notifications. Among them was an alert from the Ecobee SmartThermostat: “Problem with cooling,” it said. Tapping the alert told me that, “For the past 4 hours the thermostat has been calling for cool, but the room temperature has increased by 8.6F.”
The Ecobee app confirmed that both thermostats in my two-zone system were reading between 88 and 91 degrees despite being set to 78. That was only a few degrees cooler than the ambient temperature outside my home in South Carolina, where, according to The Weather Channel app, temps had been hitting the high-90s all week.
This alert warned me something was up with my HVAC system.
Using a Google Nest floodlight camera, I checked the outdoor HVAC unit.
One thing I’ve learned in my decade-plus of living in a smart home is the importance of verification. Just because your smart garage door controller app says the door just opened doesn’t mean it did.
(I discovered this the hard way when the open/close sensor fell off my garage door one afternoon when I was at a soccer tournament for the weekend. Thinking it had somehow spontaneously opened, I used the app to close it. The next day, I got a call from a neighbor asking if I knew my door had been open all night. This is why I recommend putting a camera in your garage if you plan to open and close the door remotely!)
Before panicking too much about my slowly boiling home (which currently contained at least one living creature — my bunny rabbit), I checked the other temperature sensors in my house.
The Climate tab in the Apple Home app showed me at a glance that everything was not alright in my home. These are temperature readings from the Apple HomePods, Hue motion sensors, and the Ecobee thermostat.
The bedroom was a comfortable 78, thanks to the still-working mini split unit. Luckily, this was where the bunny was living, and I checked she was okay with a camera I had set up near her hutch.
Now I had confirmed the problem was my main HVAC unit, which is about nine years old and had been struggling through a week of feels-like temperatures in the low 100s.
But what was wrong?
Using a Google Nest floodlight camera near the outside unit, I could hear that the AC condenser was still running, and the Ecobee app also told me that the system was actively trying to cool. But, frustratingly, it couldn’t offer any more info, and there was no remote troubleshooting option or action I could take.
My dilemma now, at 8:30PM, sitting on an airport runway 300 miles from home, was do I call the HVAC company’s emergency line and send a tech out to my unoccupied home at significant expense (I could let them in, thanks to a smart lock), or deal with it when I get home?
I opted to wait because I was only a few hours from home. Opening the door to 90-plus-degree heat was not a fun homecoming. But at least we were prepared for it.
Thankfully the bunny was okay!
I called the HVAC company in the morning, and they sent out a tech — 24 sweaty hours later. Thankfully, he quickly diagnosed the problem: a fried capacitor. He fixed it in five minutes, to the tune of $300.
While I consider this a smart home success story, it highlights that the connected home’s current state is all notification and no action. We can know everything about our homes but can’t do much about it — at least not from afar.
A really smart home would alert you to a problem, identify it, offer solutions, and — with your consent — fix it for you. Much like our cars have become self-diagnosing computers, so could our homes.
Some proactive solutions are available today but generally require expensive tech and proprietary systems. For example, Moen’s smart water system can shut off your water if it detects a leak or run it at a trickle through a faucet if temperatures are predicted to go below freezing. But the system relies on all-Moen hardware, and the smart water shutoff valve starts at around $600.
The Ecobee SmartThermostat can monitor your home’s temperature and can send alerts for drops or spikes in temperature as well as problems with heating or cooling.
The HVAC tech told me he’d seen several capacitors go bad just that week, as units struggled to handle the intense, prolonged temperatures. With more connected homes, it’s easy to see how the company could have used that data to fix my problem more quickly, possibly even before it happened, given enough historical data about my system.
But this potentially smarter solution would involve more direct integration between my thermostat, HVAC system, and the service provider. A smart thermostat fully integrated with my unit that could identify the capacitor had gone bad, then order the part and send a technician to install it, all before I even landed in Atlanta, is an exciting, entirely plausible concept.
Of course, this would need human intervention, including physically and digitally allowing the HVAC company access to my home. This could be similar to how a home security monitoring service works today (something Ecobee also does, incidentally).
This chart, accessible through Ecobee’s web interface, illustrates how the temperature in my home was out of the norm. Access to this type of data could be used by a home monitoring service to be alerted to a possible problem, as long as you’re willing to share.
A similar thing happened with my Samsung Family Hub smart fridge a few months ago. It alerted me something was wrong with its temperature readings through the SmartThings app, and, after I contacted them, Samsung remotely diagnosed the problem and sent a technician with the correct part to repair it, reducing potentially two expensive visits into one.
This type of connectivity-powered service is a persuasive argument for the smart home. But it requires a lot of trust. And while I would love to have turned up to a cool house at midnight after a full 12 hours of traveling — with two kids, five suitcases, and a grumpy husband — rather than the humid mess we had to manage, I’m not sure I want to give up the privacy and data necessary to make that happen.
The biggest barrier to realizing the smart home's potential is this tension between the convenience we crave and the data and access necessary to make it happen. I’m glad I knew there was a possible boiling bunny scenario in my home, but I want my house to be smart enough to do something about it. How we get there, however, is still a puzzle that needs to be solved.
Photos and screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The Nothing Phone 2 is mostly fine on Verizon — if you’ve got good 5G coverage
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Sometimes you’ve just gotta break the rules and go for it. I attended Nothing’s New York City product drop last week and got my hands on the Nothing Ear 2s and the Nothing Phone 2. Now, I’m a longtime Verizon customer, which seemed like a major hurdle for actually testing out this phone and its flashing glyphs. At one point, Nothing had mentioned “limited” support for Verizon on its website, but the company has since removed the carrier from its tech specs altogether — never a good sign.
But as I’ve come to find out, as long as you’ve got an active SIM that was already in another Verizon-certified phone, you can toss that into the Nothing Phone 2 and get going without any immediate headaches. When I tried doing so, the phone’s mobile data lit up, calls and texts worked fine (including RCS messaging), and I’ve so far avoided any hangups. The automatic SMS scolding me for using an unauthorized device never came.
Over a week or so of trying out the Phone 2 as my full-time device, I’ve noticed the network indicator showing 4G, 4G Plus, 5G, and 5G Ultra Wideband. Even the VoLTE (voice over LTE) icon is present at nearly all times. I’m a little unclear what 4G Plus translates to in Verizon parlance; maybe that’s LTE Advanced, or maybe the phone is just getting confused about what network it’s on. But it’s rolling with the punches either way. I’ve traveled across Manhattan and Brooklyn with no obvious service disruptions so far. But this is NYC we’re talking about; 5G, as underwhelming as it so often is, can be found everywhere.
Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge
Well look at that. It just kinda... works.
The experience could be a little more unpredictable elsewhere. And in the case of the Nothing Phone 2, that’s because it completely omits support for band 13. That frequency band is pretty vital to Verizon’s 4G LTE network. For a lot of the country, it’s essential. So if you venture far from a city or crowded suburbs and start drifting away from 5G coverage, that’s where you’ll likely start hitting some pain points and lose signal — and this is the reason why Verizon is unlikely to ever fully certify Nothing’s latest phone.
I’m a tech reviewer and usually have a few different phones at my disposal. So I’m not sweating my time putting Nothing’s $599 phone through its paces around the city. But if I were driving seven hours upstate to visit my father in New York’s “North Country,” there’s zero chance I’d gamble and keep my SIM this thing.
Do I find the glyph system gimmicky? For the most part, yes. I’ve got the upper right LED assigned to Messages, and it’s admittedly nice to know when I’ve received a text if my phone is flipped over. Outside of the lights and network limitations, I’m a fan of this phone overall. The Phone 2 manages what I’d consider excellent battery life, has a very nice and vibrant display — I’m picky about screens, people — and I like the software tweaks that Nothing has made.
Being able to place quick settings toggles directly on the lock screen is surprisingly useful. I’m running pretty basic right now and I’m sure there’s more I could do, but so far so good. The Phone 2 hums along and I’ve barely noticed a single hiccup during my time with it. And the shots I’m getting from the camera are satisfactory more often than not.
All of this is to say that if you’ve got Verizon and are curious about giving the Phone 2 a shot, it’s doable. You’ll get your texts and calls. Data works quite well. But you shouldn’t depend on Nothing’s device in this scenario. Outside of 5G coverage areas, you’re unlikely to have as robust of a signal as you would on other phones that support Verizon’s full range of bands. So keep another, actually-certified phone within reach if you decide to splurge on this new gadget.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is getting a musical episode
Image: Paramount
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds had a pair of surprise announcements at San Diego Comic-Con today. First, the show is stepping out of its weekly release schedule with a new episode tonight — a crossover with Star Trek: Lower Decks will debut on Paramount Plus in a few minutes, at 7PM ET, Deadline reports. And that’s not all — the series is also getting a musical episode in early August called “Subspace Rhapsody.”
Deadline points out that this is the first musical episode in Star Trek history, and the publication isn’t wrong, but the franchise has boldly gone there before... sort of. There was a Deep Space Nine episode, called “Chrysalis,” where a group of eccentric, genetically-engineered people break out into an a capella song after one of them has an operation to restore her speaking voice.
It looks like the tone of that DS9 sequence is basically going to be this entire episode, from the delightfully silly teaser:
The updated release schedule for the season, per Deadline, is now:
Saturday, July 22 – Episode 207, “Those Old Scientists”
Thursday, July 27 – Episode 208, “Under the Cloak of War”
Thursday, August 3 – Episode 209, “Subspace Rhapsody”
Thursday, August 10 – Episode 210 (Season Finale), “Hegemony”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is my favorite live-action Trek series since Deep Space Nine. Anson Mount is a perfectly charming stand-in for Captain Kirk, Ethan Peck is settling into his Spock role nicely, and the introduction of Carol Kane this season as a new species of long-lived, I-don’t-have-time-for-your-shit engineer is inspired.
But beyond the characters, the show has done a great job taking the series back to its episodic filler TV format, with moral parables or entertaining jaunts that tie up (mostly) neatly at the end, while also setting up continuity that the show reliably comes back to later. It’s not perfect — sometimes, the crew gets itself out of a tight spot with too-convenient coincidences or remarkable and unjustified logical leaps — but it can feel like a breath of fresh air after Discovery and Picard each explored a darker version of Trek, with more intrigue and a perhaps more cynical take on the potential for mankind to really shake its darker impulses.
That’s not to say there’s no place for that in Trek, and both shows are good, even great, in their own right, but it’s nice to get back to an old-timey version of the space drama that doesn’t take itself so seriously all the time.
My first MP3 player had everything I needed
The iRiver iHP-120 multi-codec jukebox. Nineteen years old and still going.
The iRiver iHP-120 was a gadget nerd’s MP3 player. It had a wired remote, a radio, a voice recorder, two optical ports, and loads of physical buttons. I’ve had it for half my life.
The spring of my freshman year of college, my mom sold my drum set. I used the money to buy an MP3 player. Sorry. A multi-codec jukebox.
There is a certain type of person who, when faced with a sleek, friendly, easy-to-use Apple product, will rail on about all the features it doesn’t have, all the things you can’t do with it, all the ways the walled garden is a trap. This person has existed since the dawn of time. I used to be that guy. I still am, sometimes, but I used to be, too. And so, in the spring of 2004, when the iPod had been out for two and a half years, I spent $330 on an iRiver iHP-120. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
The iHP-120 was so physical. Where the iPod was gray and white, the iRiver was a black brick with silver rails and visible screws. It had a 1.8-inch 20GB spinning hard drive. It had a joystick on the front. It had four physical buttons and a lock slider on the sides. It had an FM radio. It had an equalizer button. It had a 3.5mm headphone jack plus a pair of optical / analog combo jacks: one for line-in, one for line-out, which meant someone else could plug in a second pair of headphones. It came with a lapel mic and a wired remote. The remote had an LCD screen, headphone jack, and three control dials, so you could leave the MP3 player in your backpack, fish the remote out, and clip it to the backpack strap.
The wired remote for the iRiver iHP-120 let me keep the main unit in my backpack. In retrospect, it’s a little much.
Is this too much stuff? Maybe! The wired remote, in particular, tended to add a bunch of static, so I didn’t use it much. Can’t say I ever used the optical ports, either.
But I used the MP3 player constantly. Not just for listening to MP3s (it also supports lossless FLAC and Ogg Vorbis!) but also to record interviews for my journalism classes. I recorded my friends telling mildly scandalous stories (on the record! not secretly). I dragged and dropped whole collections of dubiously tagged MP3s from my friends. Before I had a laptop, I used it to transfer my schoolwork between the library computers and my dorm room desktop.
I got a gummy case for it, with a belt clip. I joined a forum about it. At some point, I replaced the iRiver firmware with Rockbox. Some folks replaced the hard drives on theirs with CF card adapters and later replaced the CF cards with SD-to-CF adapters. I never quite got that far.
Eventually — either in late 2006, when I got one of those Windows Mobile smartphones with the sliding keyboards, or in 2008, when I got an iPhone — I stopped carrying the iRiver everywhere, but I hung onto it. Its hard drive became a fossil record of my musical taste in the years before streaming: a 4GB “various artists” folder, just a ton of Elliott Smith and Mountain Goats albums, a collection of mashups from my first year in San Francisco. The 30 best-rated albums on Metacritic in 2008, regardless of genre. A recording of my friend Bill talking about his time in the Jesus People commune. All those recorded interviews and essays. Every so often, I’d pull it out and let the memories wash over me.
I’d almost forgotten about scarcity. My kids barely interact with physical media, and it’s hard for them to understand the idea of, like, when I was a kid, if you didn’t have a physical copy of something — an album on cassette or CD, a movie on VHS or (later) DVD — and it didn’t happen to be on, you just didn’t have access to it. In high school, I carried a portable CD player and one of those enormous binders of CDs. When I got the iRiver, I filled it with those same CDs, which I’d (very slowly!) ripped to my computer, plus whatever MP3s I’d borrowed from friends’ computers and the dorm network. It was basically a more portable version of that binder full of CDs. I listened to what I had, and what I had stayed on there. It was a totally different ball game than the overabundance we take for granted today.
The other day, I fished the thing out of a drawer and turned it on again. It worked fine, but all the files were gone. I figured I must have deleted them at some point. I felt weirdly sad. Then I hit the “rebuild database” option in the menu. It found a thousand files in the recycle bin. Nothing had been lost at all.
How to use external storage on your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X / S
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
As your console game collection grows, you’re going to need more space to store it — and the internal storage inside your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X / S isn’t going to last forever. That may leave you in a situation where you’re regularly uninstalling and reinstalling games, juggling them around to fit the available space.
You have options. The PlayStation 5 has an internal slot for expanding the onboard storage that’s pretty easy to access by popping off a couple of panels and turning a single screw. On the Xbox side, you can buy storage expansion cards that plug into a designated slot on the back of the console for a quick and easy (if often expensive) upgrade.
Adding external storage drives can help ease the pressure, too, giving you plug-and-play access to gigabytes or even terabytes of additional storage. And because you’re simply attaching an external drive, this isn’t a complicated or time-consuming operation — though there are a few technical points of order that you need to be aware of.
How to add an external drive to a PS5
Once system files are taken into account, there’s only about 667GB of internal storage space on a PlayStation 5. Considering that a game such as Horizon Forbidden West can take up almost 90GB on its own, it’s clear that serious gamers are going to come to a point where that space runs out.
As noted earlier, the PS5 comes with a slot for expanding the internal storage via an M.2 SSD, and you can find out how to perform the upgrade here. The console will treat the SSD almost like internal storage, and you can run games straight from it.
Image: Tom Warren / The Verge
It’s not difficult to open up a PS5 and install an M.2 SSD, but it’s even easier to just plug in an external drive.
Plugging an external drive into a spare USB port on the PS5 is quicker and easier, but it comes with more caveats. You can use these drives for storing and playing PS4 games, but they can only store PS5 games. (When you want to actually play them, you’ll need to move them back to the internal storage.)
Still, it’s more convenient than having to wait for PS5 games you’ve bought to be downloaded again. Any SSD or HDD you plug in must be between 256GB and 8TB in size and support 5Gbps transfer speeds or better — commonly referred to as USB 3.0, USB 3.1, and USB 3.2, or sometimes “SuperSpeed USB.” This means most modern drives will work but not old USB 2.0 ones. You can double-check compatibility with the seller when buying.
Once you’ve bought your new SSD or HDD storage (or repurposed a drive from elsewhere), plug it directly into one of the large USB-A ports on the back of your PS5 or the small USB-C port around front, as Sony recommends. The USB-A port on the front of the PS5 won’t support external storage, and you also shouldn’t use a USB hub to connect the drive to your console.
Before you can use an external drive, you need to format it.
Before you can use a drive, you’ll need to format it.
Open Settings (the cog icon at the top of the interface).
Pick Storage > USB Extended Storage > Format as USB Extended Storage to start the process.
To move PS5 games to external storage:
Open Settings and choose Storage > Console Storage > Games and Apps.
Select a game, then Select Items to Move, and you can pick one or more titles to move over to the drive you just connected.
It’s the same process for moving them back: just pick USB Extended Storage instead of Console Storage in the Storage menu to find the games you want to move.
It’s simple enough to move games between internal and external storage.
Note: any PS4 games you install will automatically place themselves on the attached external drive. While this is probably the most convenient place to keep them, if you want to switch this for any reason — for example, if you’re not going to have your external drive always connected to your PS5 — you can. From Settings, select Storage > Installation Location > PS4 Games and Apps.
You can eject the drive in Settings via Storage > USB Extended Storage > Safely Remove from PS5. You can also wipe it by selecting the three dots just to the right of the Safely Remove from PS5 button, then Format as exFAT. (exFAT drives can be read by both Windows and Mac as well as Linux machines.)
How to add an external drive to an Xbox Series X / S
When it comes to the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, you get 1TB or 512GB of internal storage space, respectively — though, in reality, it’s not that much when system files are taken into account. There’s no internal expansion slot like there is on the PS5, so if you need more room, you have to go external.
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
The Xbox Series X has an easily accessed external slot for an expansion card.
The official Storage Expansion Card option is the best choice here because you’re ensured a seamless and high-speed storage experience, but it’s also the most expensive (although prices have fallen drastically recently). Only Seagate and Western Digital make these cards at the moment, in 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB capacities, and they slot straight into the dedicated slot on the back of the Xbox.
You may have to format your external drive in order to use it.
Alternatively, you can use your own choice of SSD or HDD and plug it into any spare USB port on the Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S as long as they offer a capacity of 128GB or more and speeds of USB 3.0 or faster. This will be cheaper, but you won’t be able to run games made for the current-generation Xbox from the drive, only store them — they’ll need to be moved back to internal storage if you want to play them. (Games made for older Xbox consoles can be stored externally and will run from an external drive, too.)
The steps for installing and working with the Storage Expansion Card or an external drive are almost the same, with the only difference being that you might have to format an external SSD or HDD if you haven’t used it before.
If you’re using a Seagate or Western Digital storage expansion card, plug the card into the designated slot around the back: it’s just above the power cable socket on both consoles and is labeled Storage Expansion.
If you’re using a different external drive, you can plug it into any of the USB ports on the front or back of your Xbox. If it’s a new drive or a drive you’ve used for something else, you may then see a prompt on the screen asking for permission to format it to make it ready for use.
With any type of storage, you’ll see a message asking if you want to change the location settings for storing games — you can do this when prompted if you want, but the same screens can be found by opening Settings (via the cog icon at the top of the interface), then System > Storage devices.
You can change the default installation locations at any time.
Choose Change installation locations to tell your Xbox where to save new Xbox Series X / S games, backward-compatible (older) games, and apps by default. In each case, you can pick an internal or external drive or choose Let Xbox decide, which means a choice will be made for you based on where the most storage space is available.
If you want to change the location of a game, go back to the Storage devices screen, choose an internal or external drive, and then click Move or copy. Select one or more of your games and then Move selected to transfer them to an external drive for storage or the internal drive for playing.
Also on the Storage devices screen, when you choose an external drive, you’ll see a Change how drive is configured option. This lets you specify whether the drive is being used with one or multiple Xbox consoles: the latter lets you easily switch games between Xboxes. However, if you choose that, games won’t be updated automatically. To manually update games, select the drive, then choose View content > Manage > Updates.
When you’re removing a drive from your Xbox, power down the console first before unplugging it. To wipe it, select it on the Storage devices page, then choose Format.
A Mystery in the E.R.? Ask Dr. Chatbot for a Diagnosis. At a medical school in Boston, instructors are using ChatGPT in training exercises to help teach students how to think like doctors.
Save $50 on the wireless earbuds with the hands-down best noise cancellation
The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II have yet to be beat in the ANC department. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge
The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II, the noise-canceling champs of the wireless earbud world, are once again on sale for $249 ($50 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. Alternatively, you can pick up a refurbished pair from Bose for an additional $50 off, complete with a one-year warranty.
If you really value peace and quiet while listening to music or podcasts, Bose’s latest pair of wireless earbuds are for you. The QC Earbuds II do an impressive job of blocking out the outside world, whether you’re walking on the street or nodding off on a plane. Because of this, they make for a terrific pair of travel earbuds — even if they do lack of wireless charging.
Regardless of which model you choose, the latest version of Amazon’s in-house TVs offer a nice value with good specs, including support for 4K HDR and HDMI 2.1, low latency for gaming, and a Samsung Frame-like mode that will display artwork when in standby mode. Plus, as an Amazon product, it’s got Alexa voice assistant functionality built in.
Microsoft is currently selling its flagship Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 for $139.99 ($40 off). This is the all-black version that’s bundled with all the added accessories, including the zip-up travel case with passthrough charging, extra sticks, an alternate D-pad, and the optional rear paddles.
The Elite Series 2 may be a little long in the tooth compared to Sony’s more recent DualSense Edge controller — not to mention the newer, cheaper options from third-parties that use drift-free Hall effect sticks — but it remains a great gamepad with a mostly unrivaled premium feel in the hands. It’s still the only official Xbox controller with a built-in rechargeable battery (which some may prefer over dealing with AAs), and in addition to working wirelessly with Xbox Series X / S consoles, it’s also compatible with Windows PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.
A few more deals before you get back to your weekend:
Best Buy is running some nice one-day deals on LG TVs. It includes the 42-inch LG C2 OLED for its all-time low price of $799.99 ($200 off) and the 55-inch version for $1,099.99 ($200 off). I personally use the 42-inch C2 for double-duty as my computer monitor (because I’m a mad lad) and console gaming, and while it takes getting adjusted to using one for productivity the C2 offers a great value for a lovely OLED panel with 4K 120Hz and HDMI 2.1 on all four inputs.
Also, don’t sleep on those LG Class 80 QNED TV discounts at Best Buy. The 50-inch version is selling today for $749.99 ($150 off) and the extra-large 75-inch model is $1,499.99 ($300 off). They may not be OLED, but these LED TVs offer 120Hz refresh like the C2 and two of their four ports support HDMI 2.1 for gaming at 4K and up to 120 fps.
The first-gen Apple Watch SE in larger 44mm size with cellular is on sale at Walmart for just $149 ($210 off). This is an excellent price and value if you don’t feel you need an always-on display for your Apple Watch, and in addition to being $180 cheaper than the equivalent second-gen SE this deal comes with a blue and green Sport Loop band. The SE of 2020 has the same processor as the Apple Watch Series 6, which is still plenty fast today, and should continue seeing updates for some years to come. Read our review.
Eneba is offering one of its weekend gift card deals (running through July 24th at 7AM ET) with a bit of a twist. You can get a three-month Xbox Live Gold membershipfor $9 after fees with code XLGUS. Why would you want that when Xbox Live will soon change to a new Xbox Game Pass Core tier in mid-September? Well, the kicker here is that if you subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate that $9 value will extend your sub by 50 days. And only time will tell if Xbox Live prepaid cards will remain something you can continue getting to do those conversions in the future.
If you need some lengthy USB-C to USB-A cables on the cheap, you can get a two-pack of 6.6-foot ones from Jsaux at Amazon for $8.54 (about $2.50 off) when you click the on-page coupon.
A Mystery in the E.R.? Ask Dr. Chatbot for a Diagnosis. At a medical school in Boston, instructors are using ChatGPT in training exercises to help teach students how to think like doctors.
Elon Musk's best idea for stopping spambots is making you pay for extra Twitter DMs
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Twitter will “soon” implement daily limits on the number of direct messages unverified accounts will be able to send in “an effort to reduce spam,” the company announced on Friday via its Twitter Support account. In other words, to send unlimited DMs, you’ll need to pay for a Twitter Blue subscription.
In its tweet, Twitter didn’t specify what the daily DM limit may be. On a support page, the company said the changes would be implemented beginning Friday.
When reached for comment, Twitter’s press email didn’t auto-reply with a poop emoji; instead, it sent an automated message promising that “we’ll get back to you soon,” a change Twitter owner Elon Musk announced on Thursday.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
The link goes to a Twitter Blue subscription page.
Musk has focused a lot on a perceived problem of spam on Twitter. In April 2022, before Twitter had officially accepted his offer to buy the company, Musk tweeted that if the bid succeeded, “we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”
But a month later, he said the then in-progress Twitter acquisition was “temporarily on hold” while he waited for details to support Twitter’s calculation that bots / spam only accounted for less than five percent of its monthly active users; days later, he asserted that the deal “cannot move forward” until Twitter proved the estimate. The acquisition eventually went through later in the year.
Last week, Twitter introduced a DM setting that the company said was also intended to help reduce spam — but like this news, it doubles as another way to push Twitter Blue. If you have your DMs open, Twitter’s new setting moves DMs from verified users that you don’t follow into the secondary “message request” inbox instead of your main inbox. But that change, which Twitter switched everyone with an open DM inbox over to, also turns off the ability for people who don’t pay for Twitter Blue to message you at all. You can switch back to allowing message requests from everyone, but you have to know where to look.
A few weeks ago, Musk also instituted “temporary” rate limits on reading tweets, and under those limits, Twitter Blue subscribers could read far more tweets than unverified users. It’s unclear if those rate limits are still in place.
Meta, Google, and OpenAI promise the White House they’ll develop AI responsibly
The White House is bringing in AI’s top seven companies Friday to make a series of voluntary promises to protect users.
The companies — Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI — have all agreed to a series of asks from the White House to address many of the risks posed by artificial intelligence. The promises consist of investments in cybersecurity, discrimination research, and a new watermarking system informing users when content is AI-generated.
The companies have entered into these agreements voluntarily, so there are currently no consequences if they fail to live up to their promises. Many of these commitments are not expected to roll out on Friday, but the companies are expected to work on implementing them immediately.
In a call with reporters Thursday, a White House official said that the Biden administration was currently working on an executive order to address some of the risks posed by AI. The official declined to give specifics but said actions could take place across federal agencies and departments.
Over the last few months, the Biden administration has met with tech executives and labor and civil rights leaders to discuss AI. In May, the White House announced more funding and policy guidance for companies developing artificial intelligence tech, including $140 million to the National Science Foundation to launch seven new National AI Research (NAIR) Institutes. Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and other companies also agreed to allow their language models to be publicly evaluated at this year’s Def Con.
Friday’s announcement comes nearly a month after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) launched his plan for Congress to regulate the technology without dampening innovation. The plan, the SAFE (Security, Accountability, Foundations, Explain) Framework, doesn’t provide specific policy requests but calls on lawmakers to work together to create rules to address AI’s potential to harm national security, cause job loss, and create misinformation.
“AI could be our most spectacular innovation yet, a force that could ignite a new era of technological advancement, scientific discovery, and industrial might,” Schumer said of his plan last month.
Schumer’s plan also included a series of briefings for senators on the technology. Next week, he will host the third briefing. The first two meetings explained the technology and presented its risks for national security.
Since Schumer’s announcement, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation to regulate the tech. Some new rules limiting how the Defense Department could use generative AI have made their way into this year’s must-pass National Defense Authorization Act. Senators are expected to vote to approve the measure sometime next week, according to CNN.
As for the White House summit, representatives from all of the seven companies are expected to convene at the White House on Friday for a physical signing of these commitments. The White House has not said what time the event will take place.
Cowboy insists it’s not the next VanMoof as it raises prices to ‘stay healthy’
The new Cowboy Cruiser. | Image: VanMoof
Company launches cheaper Core e-bike configurations while predicting profitability starting this quarter.
Cowboy and VanMoof are two very similar e-bike companies, which is why we’re all wondering if Cowboy will be next to file for bankruptcy now that the era of free VC money is over and profitability is key to survival. This week Cowboy introduced a cheaper no-frills e-bike configuration ahead of yet another price increase. Moves that have only intensified scrutiny of the boutique Belgian startup.
Nevertheless, Cowboy CEO Adrien Roose tells me that the electric bike maker is on more secure footing, despite all the similarities.
For example, both European e-bike makers took on millions from investors in recent years while posting heavy losses during periods of rapid scale up. Both focus on direct-to-consumer sales of premium, software- and sensor-laden e-bikes assembled from lots of custom parts, and both Cowboy and VanMoof had to secure additional funding earlier in the year to deal with unforeseen operational challenges in a post-pandemic e-bike marketplace that has cooled off considerably.
Image: Cowboy
From left-to-right: the Cruiser ST, Cruiser, and Classic.
This week, Cowboy launched a less expensive (but still not cheap) $2990/€2490 “Core” configuration of its Classic, Cruiser, and Cruiser ST models that offers fewer features, like replacing the maintenance-free Gates Carbon belt drive with an oily chain-drive, as it raises prices elsewhere. That’s eerily similar to VanMoof’s product trajectory with the launch of the cheaper scaled-back S4 after raising prices on its overwrought S5 flagship, all just two months before the company went public about its dire financial situation.
Cowboy’s Core e-bike configurations only come in black, lack a wireless charger under the integrated phone mount, and ship with a slower charging brick. Cowboy told Dutch-language Bright magazine that the upcoming price increase from $3490/€2990 to $3790/€3290 on August 1st for its belt-driven (now called “Performance” configurations) e-bikes was required to “stay healthy” (more on that later). Those same e-bikes were priced at €2490 when launched in Europe two years ago and as low as $1990 when first introduced to the US — back when startups could sell their electric bikes at a loss due to the seemingly endless supply of investor capital.
Cowboy aims to further justify the difference between the Core and Performance configurations through software. Moving forward, Cowboy e-bikes configured for Performance will benefit from the otherwise optional $300/€300 Cowboy Connect software features like adaptive power, crash detection, and three new Google Maps features to share live journey info, alert the rider to upcoming hazards, and the ability to choose a route based on the best air quality. Cowboy Connect also unlocks the e-bike maker’s first Apple Watch app. All nice to have, I guess, but certainly not critical to the operation of an e-bike.
So yeah, like VanMoof, Cowboy e-bikes are high-tech proprietary computers-on-wheels with a feature set that can, at times, verge on gimmickry. Nevertheless, Cowboy wants you to know that it’s different.
“Cowboy is in a very different position to VanMoof,” insists Cowboy CEO Adrien Roose in an email exchange with The Verge. “Our key stakeholders including our investors, supply chain and distribution partners and employees are fully supportive of the business plan we are executing.”
The big difference between Cowboy and VanMoof is the prospect of profitability: Cowboy has repeatedly said that it’s close, after having posted EBITDA losses of around €21 million over the last few years; but VanMoof never was, having reportedly lost nearly €80 million in each of the last two years.
Last week, Cowboy issued a press release titled “Cowboy on track to profitability with break even as of Q3 2023.” However, Roose now tells me that the company is “on track to achieve our goal of profitability within the current quarter, and on a full year basis next year.” Of course, profitability could be €1, but even that would be a first for the six-year old company after a history of losses. A profitable 2024 would certainly be notable.
Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
Cowboy co-founder and CEO Adrien Roose on a C4, aka Classic back at its launch.
Roose cites “meaningful revenue growth” for each month this year so far for his optimism about the quarter ending on September 30th, as well as “strong sales” through July following the launch of its more upright and comfortable Cruiser e-bike on July 3rd. “We expect sales to exceed our target which will make it the best month of the year so far.”
Roose lists a few other notable differences between Cowboy and VanMoof:
Cowboy assembles close to its customers in Europe. (VanMoof’s e-bikes were assembled and distributed to customers from its factory in Taiwan.)
Cowboy has evolved from a D2C-only business and now distributes its bikes through an expanding range of independent bike dealers and retailers. Through these bike dealers the company is also transforming its after-sales model. (VanMoof’s direct-to-consumer support was almost entirely performed at about 50 branded stores in select cities, whereas Cowboy is currently working with over 100 independent bike stores to sell, repair, and service its bikes with another 200 scheduled to come on board in Europe this year.)
To “stay healthy,” Roose candidly explains that the August 1st price increase is needed to ensure that reasonable profit margins exist for both Cowboy and its new network of independent bike shop partners. Roose also cites several other metrics to demonstrate the company’s relative operational health:
Cowboy inventory is down 50 percent from a year ago and its working capital position is stable.
Cowboy is achieving 40 percent gross margin on new bikes sold.
Production costs are down 20 percent.
So, while you might not like Cowboy’s price increase, that coupled with operational efficiencies across the board could be the difference between your expensive e-bike running for years, and, well... VanPoof! [Editor’s Note: credit to ex-Verge Dieter Bohn for sliding that and “VanOOF” into my DMs on the day VanMoof declared bankruptcy.]
Despite the opportunity VanMoof’s exit presents, which was recognized by Cowboy’s cheeky release of the Bikey app (that has earned the company oodles of goodwill in VanMoof communities), Roose seemed genuinely distraught over VanMoof’s demise when I met with him on a video call, a feeling that was also expressed by fellow Cowboy co-founder and CTO Tanguy Goretti.
“While a lot of individuals will be quick to jump guns and criticize VanMoof, I think they still deserve some recognition for their achievements,” wrote Goretti on Linkedin. “They have helped change the face of the industry and the perception of e-bikes since they started 14 years ago (!). They made it cool when it was a product mainly used by our grandparents. They truly had a positive impact on cities and not a small one.”
Reddit takes over one of the biggest protesting subreddits
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Reddit is now in charge of r/malefashionadvice, which for a time was the biggest subreddit still closed in protest of the platform’s API pricing changes. The subreddit is now open, meaning Reddit users can browse content in the community once again, though in a restricted mode, meaning only certain users can make new posts.
As we reported last week, the moderators of r/malefashionadvice, a subreddit with than 5 million subscribers, had taken the community private and were pushing its users toward Discord and Substack instead. At the time, the moderators expected to be removed after receiving a message from a Reddit admin (employee), ModCodeofConduct, telling them they would be replaced if they didn’t reopen.
Three former moderators of r/malefashionadvice tell The Verge that they were removed from the subreddit on Thursday. “We more or less have been expecting the removal for the past few days,” one former mod, who asked to go by “Walker,” says in an email to The Verge. Now, the community’s modlist currently has just one moderator: ModCodeofConduct. Though despite the subreddit’s “restricted” status, somebody was able to make a post on Thursday that encourages community members to join the Discord.
It sounds like that Discord is getting some traction. Another former mod, “Zach,” told The Verge last week that it had 2,000 users; now, he says it’s up to 5,000. “The community and regulars coming to the Discord have been, on the whole, courteous and good company,” Walker says.
Reddit didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. As of this writing, ModCodeofConduct is also the sole moderator of:
r/plumbingporn (also participated in the recent blackouts, per the Reddark tracker)
r/fordtransit (a community dedicated to Ford Transit cargo vans)
Now, based on the Reddark tracker, the biggest subreddit still private is r/streetwear. According to Zach, who told me last week that he is also a mod of that community, it has more than 4 million subscribers. The subreddit also has a Discord.
First announced in 2019, FedNow acts as a “common network” between banks and credit unions, making it easier for them to route funds across different institutions. So far, there are only 35 participating banks and credit unions, along with the US Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
Once it’s widely adopted, though, it will let you transfer funds between different bank accounts instantly or even pay your credit card bill on a bank holiday without worrying about it being late. And, if you have direct deposit, your paycheck should surface in your account as soon as you’re paid.
FedNow doesn’t compete with apps like Venmo or Zelle, which act as middlemen for peer-to-peer transactions, since there’s no app to install and it only operates between the banks or credit unions. However, it does require having both financial institutions as participants in the network, and it could take months or years for those numbers to grow substantially.
While the Federal Reserve has a $500,000 cap on the amount of money you can send, participating financial institutions will start with a default limit of $100,000, with the ability to raise or lower that amount. Financial institutions can also use negative lists to help protect against fraud.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t name the financial institutions that currently have access to FedNow, but it said in June that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, US Bancorp, and Wells Fargo are among those ready to support FedNow.
“The Federal Reserve built the FedNow Service to help make everyday payments over the coming years faster and more convenient,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell says in a statement. “Over time, as more banks choose to use this new tool, the benefits to individuals and businesses will include enabling a person to immediately receive a paycheck, or a company to instantly access funds when an invoice is paid.”
It’s about time that the US implements an instant payment, as other parts of the world, including the European Union, the UK, India, and others, have long had similar systems. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty pumped about getting my paycheck faster.
Google’s rumored ‘Genesis’ AI tool for journalists could probably write this article
Illustration: The Verge
The New York Times cites anonymous sources in a report saying Google demonstrated Genesis for media execs from the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal owner News Corp, presenting “responsible” technology that takes in facts and spits out news copy. Two execs mentioned in the article “said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories,” while another saw it as more of a personal assistant / helper.
Without seeing it, judging the responsibility of the tool is difficult. but the examples of CNET / Red Ventures and, more recently, a flawed Star Wars list posted to io9 by its owners at G/O Media show the weaknesses of trying to use machines to boldly make the mistakes that human journalists are already more than capable of making on our own, thank you.
We’ve seen Bard and the Journalrecently reported that even Google’s AI model for hospitals “included more inaccurate or irrelevant content in its responses” than real doctors in testing. Other than that, Google’s fickle attention span for new products (we have a list) is presumably a concern for anyone considering the tool.
Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Eluded Authorities, Is Dead at 59 Mr. Mitnick, best known for a crime spree during the 1990s that involved the theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers from computers across the U.S., died from pancreatic cancer.
Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles The product, pitched as a helpmate for journalists, has been demonstrated for executives at The New York Times, The Washington Post and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.
Reddit protest updates: news on the apps shutting down and Reddit’s fights with mods
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Changes to the Reddit API have forced beloved apps like Apollo to shut down, and following the protests, mods are feeling threatened by Reddit.
It happened: popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader have shut down due to the company’s planned API changes.
Ever since Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig revealed he’d be on the hook for $20 million per year due to the changes, Redditors have been furious over how the updates might affect third-party apps. More than 8,000 of Reddit’s communities went dark as a part of a coordinated protest.
As the protests have gone on, Reddit has pushed moderators to reopen. While some have returned with their ownspins on the protest, Reddit has told some mods of at least one community that it “will not” stay private and warned moderators of some closed ones that it will remove them — and it seems like Reddit’s efforts may have worked.
Netflix is sticking to ‘sports-adjacent’ streaming instead of live sports, for now
Image: Netflix
There seems to be a lot of focus on streaming live sports, but based on comments from Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, it appears the company plans to largely stay out of that game for the moment. “We really think that we can have a really strong offering for sports fans on Netflix without having to be part of the difficulty of the economic model of live sports licensing,” he said during the company’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
That quote was the final part of a longer response about the company’s sports strategy. “We’re super excited about the success of our sports-adjacent programming,” he said, pointing to recent titles like Quarterback and Tour de France: Unchained. With the latter, he talked about how it did “exactly what we saw with Drive to Survive, which is introduce a brand new audience to a sport that’s been around for a really long time and [is] not very well understood. You do that through exceptional storytelling, not through the live-ness of the game.”
That strategy, Sarandos argued, lets Netflix “offer this wide variety of sports programming for sports fans that’s in-season year round” that leans on the company’s strengths in storytelling.
Sarandos also addressed the company’s upcoming first foray into live sports: a celebrity golf tournament in November. “We’re excited about that because it serves as a promotional vehicle for our sports brands like Full Swing and Drive to Survive,” he said. It’s probably a good thing that its first live sports event will be a low stakes play: while the live Chris Rock comedy special went off without a hitch, the planned Love Is Blind live reunion special was such a disaster that it had to be taped for on-demand viewing later.
Other big tech companies have made splashy live sports deals, like Google landing NFL Sunday Ticket and Apple launching a soccer streaming service with the MLS. While Netflix reportedly kicked the tires on F1 rights, based on Sarandos’ comments on Wednesday, it seems like Netflix might not chase huge live sports partnerships in the near term. Instead, you might want to get ready for a new documentary about a sport you didn’t even know existed.
(Disclosure: Vox Media Studios produced Full Swing, and The Verge recently produced a series with Netflix.)
They made a movie of that nightmarish ‘Dear David’ Twitter thread, and yes, there’s a trailer
Screenshot by Alex Cranz/The Verge
Back in 2017, illustrator and former BuzzFeed employee Adam Ellis penned a truly terrifying multi-month Twitter thread about his home potentially being haunted by a tiny ghost child. I reread the thread just before writing this article, and I’d like to confirm that even six years later, it is supremely creepy. It felt like a new form of storytelling with its blend of audio, video, photos, and microblogs posted over a long series of months. So I do definitely understand the desire to adapt it all into a more easy-to-track format like a film.
At the time, plenty of people responded to the viral thread with “Oh my god, that should be a movie,” and while we might have acknowledged it was a good yarn, we did laugh. (Largely because we were ignoring that by 2017, there were two adaptations of the Twitter account “Shit My Dad Says” and that Twitter had become a source of Hollywood adaptations.) But we’re in a post-Zola world now. We know a Twitter thread can not only be turned into content — it can be turned into actually good content.
But this new movie still feels like it could be... too late. It’s coming from BuzzFeed Studios, part of the deeply troubled BuzzFeed brand. It’s adapted from a thread of posts from Twitter, another deeply troubled brand. That’s a lot of baggage for the film to carry around.
But it’s also being directed by John McPhail, who directed the super zombie musical Anna and the Apocalypse. As much baggage as this film is carrying around, there’s a glimmer of potential in there, too.
While the trailer feels a little too rote, if it gets to at least 80 percent of the creep factor of Ellis’s thread, it could still be a very good time. But we won’t know until we actually see the film, which is currently slated to premiere on October 13th, 2023. I’ll be seeing it in theaters and, ideally, as far away from all rocking chairs as possible.
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