Meta’s ‘set it and forget it’ AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash

Meta’s ‘set it and forget it’ AI ad tools are misfiring and blowing through cash

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.

Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like spending a week’s worth of grocery money on a prime cut of wagyu at a steakhouse, only for the waiter to return with a floppy slider.

The Verge spoke to several marketers and businesses that advertise on Meta’s platforms who tell a similar story. Meta’s automated ad platform has been blowing through budgets and failing to deliver sales. Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms.

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty.”

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty,” Karl Baker, founder of meditation startup Mindfulness Works, wrote in a message to The Verge.

The faulty ad service in question, known as Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, is part of a full suite of AI-enabled ad tools that Meta pitches to businesses as a faster and more efficient alternative to manual ad campaigns. To create an ad campaign, advertisers upload their creative assets, pick their conversion goals (e.g., getting more customers to make purchases on Instagram), and then set their budget caps. Meta hyped Advantage Plus shopping campaigns during earnings calls as a carefree, “set it and forget it” automated solution to online ads. But that hasn’t been the case, marketers say.

Advantage Plus shopping campaigns have been unpredictable, seemingly working well on some days and then not so well on other days. The subreddit r/FacebookAds has become a sort of 24/7 help desk for Advantage Plus. Recent headings discussing the issues include “Advantage+ sucks,” “Is Facebook broken rn,” and “Is it just me?”

“People are always saying, ‘Is it me?’ or ‘Is it Meta?’” Baker said.

What Williams and many other marketers thought was a one-time glitch by Advantage Plus ended up becoming a recurring incident for weeks. “Since February 14th, [Advantage Plus] has overspent on numerous occasions and ignored the cost caps we have in place on it,” he said.

How is your Meta performance over the last 7 days?

— RC Williams (@thercwilliams) March 6, 2024

Problems have persisted into April. “We have a couple of clients for whom we completely stopped Advantage Plus due to these anomalies,” said Aniruddha Mishra, director of growth at Miami-based digital marketing agency Node Media. He noted that for some clients, CPMs on Meta were anywhere from three to four times more expensive than they were last year.

Advertisers say getting support from Meta has been a challenge, too. Meta laid off thousands of employees over the past year and gutted many of its customer support teams. As Digiday reported, Meta’s ad accounts teams were downsized, and many client inquiries are now being directed to AI chatbots. Several of the marketers that The Verge spoke to said that there’s been a noticeable decline in responsiveness from Meta since the transition.

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience.”

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience,” said Williams. “They didn’t tell us what actually happened.”

Meta eventually refunded 1-800-D2C for the incident, but Williams said it took him several tries to finally get someone from the company to acknowledge him. The company issued the refund almost a month after the incident.

While some users speculate that Advantage Plus is “glitching” or “broken,” Meta’s response has been to insist that the tool is functioning as it should.

“I’ve reached out to representatives at Meta, and I’ve been told that they’re not aware of any sort of glitch, which is truly shocking, because all my co-founder friends who work in e-commerce share this sentiment. They’re dealing with the same thing,” said Adriel Darvish, the CEO of a luxury handbag and jewelry service called Switch, in a phone interview with The Verge. “This is something universal that everyone is experiencing.”

pic.twitter.com/RZuulnWz8R

— Karl Baker (@KarlMindfulness) April 2, 2024

With the problems continuing to pile on, Williams said his marketing firm completely halted its use of Advantage Plus in early April. Instead, they’ve gone back to the old-fashioned method of buying Facebook and Instagram ads manually. Notably, going back to the pre-AI, pre-automated way of doing things hasn’t really taken a toll on the firm’s human labor force.

“Maybe an extra 10 to 20 minutes or so to build out the ad sets, but nothing crazy,” said Williams.

Meta first launched Advantage Plus shopping campaigns globally in the fall of 2022, when the state of online advertising was in an uncertain place. Just a year before, Apple had launched its App Tracking Transparency feature with iOS 14.5, giving users an easy way to opt out of the third-party app-based tracking that powers many online ads. Meta opposed the change, saying it would “change the internet as we know it” and threaten the future of many online businesses.

But Meta’s real concern was no doubt the threat to its own ad business, which chalked up a $10 billion dip in ad revenue in 2021 due to Apple’s changes. Targeted ads were no longer as effective since brands no longer had access to as much data, and they were becoming more expensive to boot. As a consequence, brands cut back on their online ad spend.

With Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, Meta promised that AI and machine learning models could effectively replace the big gaping hole left by Apple’s privacy update.

In lieu of tracking users, Advantage Plus uses the advertiser’s own first-party sales data to help target ads. But online advertisers would be effectively handing the reins over to Meta and no longer have access to the granular targeting controls and detailed analytics they did prior to Apple’s privacy changes.

Although there was a bit of a “learning curve” with Advantage Plus shopping, the tool gradually began to improve. Brands noticed their AI-driven Meta ad campaigns were performing well and poured more of their budgets into the platform. Adweek reported that by April 2023, marketers who had ditched Meta for TikTok ads and newer opportunities like connected TV were starting to come back.

Advertisers had a honeymoon period with Advantage Plus last year, especially as Meta began packing it with new features. “Advantage Plus was working so well at this point, for most of the clients, that almost 50 to 70 percent of their ad budget is on Meta’s Advantage Plus campaigns. There are so many targeting and evolutions they’ve done in the past year and a half. It delivers a really strong performance if you know how to tweak the right parameters,” said Mishra.

In an email to The Verge on April 15th, Meta spokesperson Kash Ayodele said the company had fixed a “few technical issues” with the Advantage Plus ad platform. “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers. We recently fixed a few technical issues and are researching a small amount of additional reports from advertisers to ensure the best possible results for businesses using our apps.”

But marketers are still complaining about underperformance on the platform. “Things have recovered for many, but not all. It’s been a very turbulent end to Q1 and beginning of Q2,” wrote media buyer David Herrmann in a direct message to The Verge.

The dramatic increase in cost per click (CPC) and CPM is not just a Meta problem — online ads as a whole are getting costlier due to what marketers say are increased inefficiencies, which automation has only made worse. This significantly decreases profits for individual advertisers. And fixing this problem may be more complicated than fixing a “glitch” or series of glitches on Advantage Plus, especially since the millions that Meta as well as Google have poured into automated advertising hasn’t led to more successful ad campaigns.

“The performance of accounts and campaigns hasn’t intrinsically increased [over the last three years],” noted Hawke Media’s Areen Mayelan.

When ad campaigns are automated, such as with Meta’s Advantage Plus, “things get brushed under the rug,” said Mayelan. Everything from loose keywords to loose audiences to low-quality ads all effectively become inefficiencies that increase the cost of ads for brands. “Inefficiency results in an increase in CPCs and CPMs, because you’re creating artificial ‘competition’ where there otherwise might not be.”

Meanwhile, Meta only stands to benefit from the boost in ad revenue. According to Meta’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, its ad business is doing just fine. Ad revenue amounted to $35.64 billion for the quarter, an impressive jump of 27 percent from this time in 2023.

The Delta emulator will soon turn your iPad into a giant Nintendo DS

The Delta emulator will soon turn your iPad into a giant Nintendo DS

Delta is about to get better on the iPad. | Image: Riley Testut

The Delta emulator made a huge splash when it hit the Apple App Store earlier this month, quickly rocketing to the top spot in Apple’s free apps, where it remains today. Now, developer Riley Testut says an iPad-specific version is “near completion,” and will be released with Delta version 1.6. Testut says the app is already available for his Patreon supporters through “the regular AltStore,” which I take to mean the non-EU-specific one, rather than the Apple-approved AltStore PAL.

Of course, the iOS version already works on the iPad (and the Vision Pro, where I’ve been playing Metroid Prime Hunters). But a native version would let it take advantage of the full iPad screen real estate for better skins, including one that turns your tablet into more of a gigantic (or not so much, if you’re on an iPad Mini) Nintendo DS Lite. It also apparently will support iPad Split View:

After releasing the iPadOS native version of Delta, Testut says he will turn to bringing “device-to-device multiplayer” to the app. Multiplayer already works in Delta, but on a single device — which is nice for playing on a TV using AirPlay (although that introduces a lot of lag for me). Being able to play with other people on their own devices, especially if the app supports doing that over the internet, would be a very welcome change!

@verge

The best part about Delta Emulator: it’s for your TV, too. #deltaemulator #emulator #gameboy #gametok #retrogames

♬ original sound - The Verge

In a reply farther down the chain, Testut also says that Sega Genesis emulation is coming soon as well, as it’s currently in beta. It sounds like that also won’t happen until after the iPad version of the app is out, though.

I’m excited for the iPad version of the app to hit. Until then, I’ll be over here panic-drawing rainbows in Kirby Canvas Curse, which already works great with the Apple Pencil.

The OLED iPad Pro could launch with an M4 chip

The OLED iPad Pro could launch with an M4 chip

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge

Apple is preparing for its big AI coming out party in this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference; that much you can count on. But apparently, the company is going to start that party a little early with the OLED iPad Pro that it’s expected to unveil on May 7th. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s “a strong possibility” the tablet will launch with an M4 chip and its accompanying neural engine, making it Apple’s “first truly AI-powered device.”

Writing in his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the company could use its May event to explain “its AI chip strategy without distraction,” freeing it to focus on exactly how the iPad Pro and its other M4 devices will use the company’s AI offerings in iPadOS 18. Those could include on-device Apple-developed features and deeply-integrated chatbots from one or more other companies like Google or OpenAI.

Of course, both of the next Pro models are also expected to get a big OLED upgrade and some new accessories. One of those accessories — the next Apple Pencil — will have haptic feedback, Gurman writes. What would be the point of the haptic feedback? He doesn’t say, but just noodling on the idea here, I could see some fun applications like adding a sort of simulated texture feature when drawing with the Pencil. (Imagine drawing in Photoshop and “feeling” the roughness of the paper!)

I can’t imagine driving a tiny motor all the time would be great for the Pencil’s battery life, though. Maybe that’s where rumors of Apple Pencil support for the Vision Pro come in. Who knows exactly what Apple is planning there if that’s true, but haptics would make sense for helping you feel a little more connected to what you’re doing in virtual space. That’s all in addition to rumors of a new squeeze gesture and magnetic tips that allow users to swap them quickly for different styles for different purposes.

Back to the iPad Pro, though, Gurman has been calling this the most significant redesign of the iPad Pro since 2018, but most people may not see what it has in its guts as part of that. In his reporting today, he only called out the OLED screen as the other noteworthy part of the new tablet.

As much as I think it should do more, I’m pretty OLED-pilled and that might be enough for me to begrudgingly upgrade. But is it enough for others? CAD drawings that showed up in February pointed to a slightly thinner iPad with rounded edges like the iPhone 15 Pro, but for plenty of people, that wasn’t much of a redesign at all, and they might take an iPad Pro with that look the same way.

But Apple making the tablet the point of its AI spear could help answer the question of who the next iPad Pro is for, since, I’d wager, the Venn diagram of people interested in AI and those who want to buy an overpowered tablet probably has decent overlap. But I don’t expect most people will go for the iPad Pro for its AI features when a bigger iPad Air is (probably) sitting right there, (most likely) being much cheaper, though. But hey, maybe that changes once Apple finally tells the story of its on-device AI features, or at least once the reality of those features becomes clear when iPadOS 18 shows up in the fall.

Battle of the best robovacs (that iRobot doesn’t make)

Battle of the best robovacs (that iRobot doesn’t make)

We put the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra head-to-head against the DreameBot X30 Ultra to find out which of these Roomba competitors’ flagship robot vacuums is the best.

There are an absurd number of robot vacuums available today, but based on my testing of dozens of bots, just a handful of manufacturers are leading the pack when it comes to innovation, choice, and really good cleaning machines. These include Roborock, iRobot, and Dreame. Each has recently released new flagship models: the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, the DreameBot X30 Ultra, and iRobot’s Roomba Combo J9 Plus.

I’ve reviewed the Combo j9 Plus, and I still recommend Roombas if you’re looking for either a high-end robovac or a budget bot, in large part due to their repairability, ease of use, and reliability. But the competition is getting very good, and with iRobot’s future looking shaky following its break up with Amazon, I figured it was time for a deeper dive into its strongest competitors. Here, I pit the X30 Ultra against the S8 Max V Ultra to see which one is the best.

The Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra ($1,799.99) is a robot vacuum and mop with a charging dock that fills the robot’s onboard water tank, cleans and dries its mop pads, and empties its onboard dustbin. It features a whopping 10,000Pa of suction and a camera for obstacle detection and avoidance. Its mop vibrates up to 4,000 times a minute to scrub your floors and raises up to 20mm to avoid carpet.

The S8 MaxV has a new flexi arm that pushes its spinning side brush out further to get into corners better and a side mop that helps clean along edges. A new on-device voice assistant can take direct commands, so you don’t need to use the app or a third-party speaker to control the robot (although it works with Alexa, Google Home, and Siri Shortcuts). It’s also one of the first robot vacuums that will support Matter, although that feature hasn’t been turned on yet.

The DreameBot X30 Ultra ($1,699.99) has many of the same features as the S8 MaxV Ultra, including a charging dock that auto-empties, washes the mops, and fills the robot’s water tank, plus a camera for obstacle detection. It has 8,300Pa suction and uses dual spinning mop pads that it can automatically remove when it vacuums — my favorite feature. It can also lift the mops if needed (up to 10.5mm).

Uniquely, the Dreame can extend its mops out to reach baseboards and even under low furniture, as far as 4cm; this is surprisingly effective at getting up grime from edges.

I let these two bots battle it out in my home over 10 days, testing their cleaning prowess, mopping chops, navigation skills, and unique features — such as an arm and mops that do the splits. I also evaluated the design and usability of their multifunction charging docks and how well they meet their promise of hands-free cleaning. I put their companion apps through their paces, diving into all the settings and features these machines offer in their quest to clean your floors. Read on to find out which one came out on top.

Dock design and function: bigger is beautiful unless you can plumb it

Despite being bigger the Dreame’s dock (left) looks better.

While Roborock has redesigned its dock into something smaller and more aesthetically pleasing (it was the first to release a multifunction dock, and those early days were characterized by hulking monstrosities), it’s still one of the ugliest out there. Dreame, on the other hand, has perfected the stylish dock look, and while it’s bigger than Roborock’s, it’s much prettier.

Dreame’s dock is also slightly more functional. While both models will wash the mops with hot water and dry them with heated air, which helps deal with the smell and mess, Dreame has little wipers that clean the mop area for you, whereas Roborock’s mop tray needs manual cleaning. However, Roborock has the option to connect directly to your plumbing, doing away with the bulky water tank-look entirely. You do need to get a specific model for this, which costs $100 more. While Dreame sells an add-on kit to its existing model for this function, it’s only available in Asia. A North American model — the X40 — is coming later this month, but it costs nineteen hundred dollars.

Winner: Tie

Navigation and obstacle avoidance: they both dodged the poop

The Roborock stares down the fake poop and goes on its way.

Both models use lidar to map and navigate your home. They both mapped the house quickly and accurately and responded correctly to requests for room-specific cleaning and zone cleaning — meaning they didn’t get lost. These robots both have front-facing cameras for AI-powered obstacle avoidance, and they both nimbly avoided fake dog turds, socks, shoes, and bundles of cables.

However, each had weak spots. The Dreame successfully sucked up a pile of Cheerios, which the Roborock thought was an obstacle, but the Dreame got stuck on a stray iPhone cable that the Roborock dodged. Roborock also loves to eat pencils. In the end, though, they were both rarely derailed compared to non-camera-powered robots I’ve tested, and that’s the biggest benefit of AI-powered obstacle avoidance unless you regularly let your pet poop in your house.

This is the first Roborock since the excellent S7 MaxV Ultra to feature a camera for object detection (all the other models use 3D obstacle detection, which is not as effective). But Roombas with the same feature are still the best at knowing what’s in its way and successfully avoiding it or cleaning it when necessary. Also worth noting: if you have a bed skirt or fabric around your sofa, lidar-powered robots will see it as a wall, whereas a VSLAM-powered model, like the Roombas, will push right through and clean under your bed.

Winner: Tie

The S8 MaxV Ultra’s robot arm reaches out to get debris out of corners.

Vacuuming power: Roborock sucks hardest and has an arm …

Both bots have super suction power and did an excellent job getting up every last bit of larger debris, such as rice and oatmeal, on hard floor. But Roborock’s dual-brush system did a better job on carpet, and its rubber roller design means less hair tangle. Dreame sent me its new $50 anti-tangle tri-cut brush (sold separately) that cuts the hair, and I didn’t have to deal with any tangles, which was nice. But the Roborock was tangle-free without buying an extra accessory, and its dual brushes did better at getting dirt and hair up off the carpet.

Roborock’s flexi arm is also a great upgrade. It’s designed to help the bot clean corners better by reaching the spinning brush out to swipe up the dirt. I have seen this in action at CES, but it happens in the flash of an eye, and despite spending a lot of time hovering over the bot, I never actually saw it work in my home. But the debris I put in the corners to test it was gone, so I guess it worked?!

The Dreame (left) has a single roller brush, whereas the Roborock has two rubber brushes that are better at getting dirt off carpet and sucking up messes in one pass than the Dreame.

Auto-cleaning modes are a new feature I’m starting to see on high-end robots. They eliminate the bother of having to set specific cleaning modes for different rooms — such as cleaning the kitchen and entryway twice but the dining room once. Both Roborock and Dreame have versions of this AI-powered cleaning mode. Dreame calls it CleanGenius, and Roborock’s is SmartPlan. I found them both very useful for just hitting go and not having to plan the route but still ending up with spotless floors.

These modes also turn on a feature that sends the robot back to clean areas it determines that need more attention. This was hard to test effectively in the time I’ve had with them, but it’s an interesting feature I’ll be keeping an eye on. Anything that involves less of me spending time with an app and more of the robot doing things on its own is a good thing.

I really liked Roborock’s “Recommended Routines,” personalized cleaning sequences that again mean less programming by you. There’s an After Meals one that tackles the kitchen and dining room and a Pet Supply option for cleaning around pet food areas (the robot can identify pets, pet beds, and pet bowls), along with a few other useful options.

Winner: Roborock

Mopping prowess: Dreame’s mop moving and mop removal is genius

The Dreame can push its mops out to scrub baseboards and also swing the robot’s body to extend the mops further to get under things like my dishwasher here.

Dreame’s auto-detachable mop pads are still the best way I’ve seen to deal with the “how does a robot mop and vacuum without messing up your carpet” conundrum. When it’s cleaning carpet, it goes back to its dock, takes off its mop pads, then goes and vacuums. Genius. It can also raise its mop to about 10mm if needed to save time, so it can still traverse carpet to mop further away rooms. Roborock’s mop isn’t detachable, although you can manually remove the pad itself. It does lift a lot higher, up to 20mm, but there’s still a chance of contaminating high-pile carpets unless you tell it to avoid carpets.

Dreame’s dual oscillating mop pads also do a better job of getting wet messes off the floor than Roborock’s single flat pad. While Roborock’s mop vibrates up to 4,000 times a minute, Dreame successfully removed all the dried ketchup and OJ in my tests, whereas Roborock left a trace behind.

The other thing Dreame does very well is clean baseboards and edges. It uses a “MopExtend RoboSwing” technology that extends its mop out to reach the baseboard and also swings the robot toward the edge to push the mops under things like my fridge and dishwasher, getting the grime that other cleaning methods miss. Roborock’s Extra Edge Mop system, new on the S8 MaxV Ultra, does give the bot a bit more mopping reach — a small spinning mop pad extends slightly out from the right of the robot, but it’s not a patch on the Dreame.

Winner: Dreame

Apps, video cameras, voice control, and Matter, oh my!

These high-end robovacs have a dizzying amount of features accessed through their apps; which is where you set up the map (name rooms and add furniture to help the robot understand your home better). This was easy to do on both, and they have very similar apps.

However, Roborock’s app is more refined, more stable, and slightly more user-friendly. Both have so, so many settings menus to dive into to customize everything from how often the bot washes its mop and when it empties its bin to which direction it cleans your hardwood floors (yes — you can select “along the grain”). But Roborock makes it easier to get to what you need. It also never crashed on me, whereas Dreame’s often showed the robot offline or made me wait a while before I could access it.

One neat feature is that both can act as roving home security cameras. Roborock even claims it can go look for your pet — although it failed to find my 80lb pup when he was sitting right in front of it. To be fair, it was dark, and he looks like a rug. You can also drop in on the robot’s camera and see and talk to people in your home — yes, that’s as weird as it sounds, but there could be a use case. The camera feature is not enabled by default on either Dreame or Roborock and requires a set of actions and a code to access it remotely.

The Roborock on patrol for a pet. It didn’t spot my dog here, but it can be set to snap pictures of your pet whenever it sees them.

Only Roborock has built-in voice control, a new feature with this model. The wake word is Hello Rocky, and it worked very well, responding promptly and understanding my commands. You do have to wait a beat after activating it to say the command, which takes a bit of getting used to. Dreame can respond to voice commands from Alexa, Google Home, and Siri shortcuts (as does Roborock), but the single-purpose use here makes the experience much better.

Hello Rocky gave me much more control than any of the third-party integrations. I could ask it to empty the bin, skip here, stop drying, and more, along with all the standard commands like clean the kitchen and go back to the dock.

Finally, Roborock supports Matter, which gives it an edge. While none of the major smart home platforms support robot vacuums in Matter yet, most have said they will soon. The fact that Roborock’s S8 MaxV Ultra is already Matter-certified means you’re ready for that future if and when it arrives. Dreame has said it will support Matter in its newest vacuums but has not made any announcements about the X30.

Winner: Roborock

Which bot’s the best?

The Dreame X30 Ultra (left) and the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra are both impressive robot vacuum mops.

Both robots perform exceptionally well at mopping and vacuuming, and their all-singing-all-dancing docks make floor maintenance virtually hands-free. But the Roborock beats the DreameBot overall thanks to its superior vacuuming performance, easier-to-use app, and built-in voice control. Its dual roller brushes, side brush, and 10,000Pa suction demolished all the dry dirt in my tests. And while the Dreame is better at mopping, the Roborock is still very good.

If mopping is what you really want, the DreameBot’s oscillating mops do a better job with wet spills and dried-on gunk, like ketchup. The mop removal feature meant I didn’t have to worry about my white, high-pile carpet at all. If you have a lot of carpet or high-pile rugs scattered around your home or prefer the nicer-looking dock, Dreame may be a better choice, but otherwise, the Roborock will suit you very well.

If you are sold on these bots but can’t stomach the price, both brands have cheaper models that do almost as much. The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra costs $1,600 and has lower suction power, no camera (so no AI-powered obstacle detection), and no voice assistant or Matter. Dreame’s previous flagship model, the L20 Ultra, is currently $1,500 and slightly better in a few areas. It does have lower suction power but can remove its mops and extend them (though not as far as the X30). However, its auto-emptying wasn’t as reliable.

I should note that Dreame has just announced the X40 Ultra, which will be available for an eye-watering $1,900 and will have a model with a direct water hookup. The X40 also adds a flexi arm — just like Roborock’s — and 12,000Pa of suction. But it still only has one roller brush, and the brushes are key to cleaning. Also, yes, I do think these robots are breeding.

The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down

The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down

Brick by brick. | Illustration by Myriam Wares for The Verge

Apple’s reckoning isn’t just the end of an era for the company — it’s a reflection of the smartphone’s fall from beloved gadget to commodity.

I was sitting in a suburban Cincinnati Starbucks when I realized everything was going to change.

It was early 2008, and a friend was showing me his new phone. He loaded a website and passed his iPhone across the table, and I scrolled down the page. It was slow and clunky, but it was real. “There it is,” he said. “The internet on my phone.”

It was like seeing the moment that something fragile falls out of your hands. You know it’s going to be everywhere, but for a second, it isn’t. And everything did change, though not all at once. In the early days, the iPhone was powerful — exciting even — but not dominant. I carried a work-issued Blackberry Curve well into 2012. People had a lot of different phones back then, actually; Nokias, Motorolas, HTCs, Palms. But over time, they were seemingly replaced one by one in the hands of everyone I knew, all with the same device: the iPhone.

Over time, they were seemingly replaced one by one with the same device: the iPhone

I didn’t cover smartphones then, but even just being adjacent to mobile tech, I could feel that the energy around a new iPhone launch was different. Normal people were aware of them, making them very different from the camera launch events I was covering. And they truly felt like events, something that made everyone stop and take notice. They reverberated across the country — from Cupertino all the way to suburban Cincinnati.

But over the years, the vibe slowly shifted. Last fall, coming off an intense couple weeks of testing the iPhone 15 Pro, I stopped by my wireless carrier’s local store. A sales associate and I chatted as he swapped my eSIM back to a physical SIM card. “What do you think of the new iPhones?” I asked. They were on the store shelves and had only gone on sale a few days ago. “Eh,” he said, “they’re phones.”

As much as Apple would like us to think otherwise, this is where we are: iPhones are just phones. To most people — even to someone who spends all day selling them — they’re just a tool, and getting a new one feels like an inevitability, not an event. Something about as exciting as upgrading your washing machine.

Phones have assumed a more appliance-like position in our consciousness; that much was inevitable. That’s not necessarily a problem for us, the consumers, but that’s definitely a problem for Apple. Despite its efforts to diversify over the years, it is still a company whose massive fortunes largely rest on one humble product: the iPhone. Apple has a vested interest in keeping us believing that the brand name on your phone matters.

Apple’s answer has been to build the walls of its garden higher and higher, making sure customers use its own products and nothing else. Now, those walls are threatening to come tumbling down.

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge

Apple has scaled back or outright eliminated live launch events for its other products — but not the iPhone.

We’re a long way from the “wow” moment of that first iPhone. It’s not all vibes, either. According to IDC, smartphone sales shrunk six out of the last seven years. The firm attributes some of that slump to improved device durability. Just about every flagship phone sold in the past few years, Apple’s lineup included, has offered full water resistance, meaning they’ll survive a brief dip in a body of fresh water. My 2016 iPhone SE did not survive such a fate.

IDC also points at something that’s a little harder to pin down: a “lengthened replacement cycle.” This is where we get into vibes territory: it just doesn’t feel as urgent to replace your smartphone every few years as it used to. In the real early days, lots of things about a smartphone were just bad. Battery life wasn’t great. Cameras were bad. Processors would chug, and console-quality mobile gaming was a distant vision. But all those things have gotten much better and increasingly irrelevant in the better part of the past decade.

Apple consistently ranks as one of the top three companies by revenue in the US, but it is the only company on those lists that makes most of its money from one very specific business: making and selling phones. When the smartphone market is in decline, Apple feels it in a way that Amazon and Walmart don’t.

So it’s been doing the logical thing for years, which is finding other ways to make money, and it’s been largely successful, particularly as it added the App Store and services like Apple Music. But its fortunes still rest disproportionately on iPhone sales: in Apple’s 2024 Q1 financials, it reports net sales of $119.6 billion in the three months prior to December 30th, 2023, with $69.7 billion attributed to the iPhone. Services — the second-highest business segment — contributed only $23 billion.

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Despite its best efforts, iPhone sales still make up a massive chunk of Apple’s sales.

Early in its life, the iPhone gained a reputation as a platform that perfected new concepts rather than pioneered them. It wasn’t the first to implement face unlock, high-refresh-rate screens, or telephoto cameras, but it could be relied on to implement new-ish technologies with the edges roughed out (well, usually). But as Apple amassed a pile of proprietary features and services in its walled garden — the App Store, iMessage, FaceTime, Apple Wallet, to name a few — and its dominance in the US grew, one thing became clear: the company had no interest in letting anything in that might threaten its position.

As those products took off, Apple deployed some defensive moves. Take iMessage: it launched in 2011 and reached 140 million users by 2012. In 2013, there was clearly an appetite for cross-platform compatibility. The benefits were obvious — seamless communication rather than a confusing mix of green and blue bubbles, SMS and not. And it wasn’t just a matter of Android users wanting in; keeping Android users out gives iOS users an objectively worse and less secure experience. Apple executive Eddy Cue pushed for an Android iMessage app in 2016, but Craig Federighi responded in an internal email that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.”

And Tim Cook, famously, thinks you should “buy your Mom an iPhone” if you want to use iMessage with her.

We can see the same strategy at work across the ecosystem — from FaceTime to watches, you’ll find a lot of friction if you try to take an Apple product outside of the garden. But while we can speculate about Apple’s motivations for peripherals and services, when it comes to iMessage, there’s no mystery at all: Apple kept it locked down for a decade to keep iOS users locked in. Executives at the company have said as much, both internally and out loud.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple keeps its customers and its platform under tight control.

Customer lock-in is only part of the equation — there’s also the platform itself and the people who develop for it. Unsurprisingly, Apple has also maintained a death grip of control over the app store since its inception, placing strict limitations on developers making apps for the platform and building it into a revenue-generating machine for the company.

The app store launched in 2008 with a key policy in place: Apple would get a 30 percent commission on every app sold. Later, when the company added in-app purchases, it would require developers to use Apple’s own payment processing — with the same 30 percent cut applied to every transaction. Over the years, the app store ballooned — from its initial 500 apps to “thousands” at the end of 2008 to its present-day total of 1.8 million. And in 2020 alone, it brought Apple more than $60 billion in revenue.

As the App Store grew, Apple’s strict controlling measures came under more and more criticism. Developers complained that the company’s app review process — deciding which apps get to go into the App Store and which don’t — was opaque and unfair. Complaints about the company’s 30 percent cut on purchases led Apple to drop its fee down to 15 percent on subscriptions after the first year. And smaller developers struggled to find a business model that worked between Apple’s commission fees and strict guidelines over how and when it could charge customers for their product.

By 2016, Apple was taking a much more reactive stance than in the early days — introducing policy changes more frequently and usually in response to criticism.

The result has been a patchy and confusing network of fixes. Certain types of apps were disallowed and then quietly re-allowed. App store policies made it difficult for services like Kindle and Netflix to exist on iOS since they let users access subscription content purchased outside of those apps. So Apple carved out an exception for these apps, but controversy ensued when an email app maker tried to apply the classification to its app. Apple’s strategy is starting to look a lot more like defense than offense.

The tactics are different, but Apple’s situation now smacks of Microsoft’s in the ’90s. Back then, Microsoft was the dominant force in the PC market and made every effort to keep it that way by placing restrictions on Windows. Netscape emerged as a threat to Windows’ dominance, so Microsoft cut off its air supply by giving away its own web browser for free with Windows. Microsoft recognized that Java could make porting software from Windows to other systems easier, so it sabotaged Sun’s efforts and instructed its allies not to aid the company.

But you can only play whack-a-mole with the competition — or push back the barbarians at the gate — for so long.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The iPhone is at the center of the Department of Justice’s anti-trust case against Apple.

Apple’s reckoning started in the courtroom. In 2020, Epic sued Apple and Google over their app store practices — specifically, the 30 percent commission that Apple helped establish as an industry standard. The court ruled in favor of Epic, but Apple was ordered to let app makers direct users to payment methods outside of those offered by Apple. Then, in 2022, the European Union introduced legislation trying to reign in the power of big tech companies, Apple included. Apple responded to the pressure by promising to support RCS on the iPhone — a standard that updates the relatively ancient SMS/MMS protocol and includes more iMessage-like features.

The other shoe fell last month when the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple for operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market. The legal process is just starting, and when it eventually happens, the trial seems likely to drag on for years into the future. The DOJ’s antitrust case against Microsoft was introduced in 1998; appeals stretched into 2007.

Apple has already started implementing changes as a result of the new EU policies: adding a new app store commission structure, enabling third-party app stores, and creating a choice screen for users to pick their preferred web browser. But that’s unlikely to be the end of it — app developers aren’t happy with the company’s “malicious compliance” to new rules under the DMA, and European regulators are investigating Apple’s response.

Apple could have had more control over its destiny by opening up its services earlier

One new law or antitrust case might not be enough to bring down the garden walls, but for Apple, the past five years have amounted to an enormous pressure buildup — and it’s not stopping. Apple could have had more control over its destiny by opening up its services earlier, but it didn’t. Now, it’s being forced to react to regulation, creating different rules for iOS in different regions of the world. It’s hard to run a visionary, future-forward company with lawsuits and regulators as a constant distraction — just ask Bill Gates.

In the years that followed my first glimpse of the iPhone, I’ve used more phones than I could possibly recall or count. And over the years, I’ve seen them get faster, more reliable, and harder to distinguish from one another. A new technology can’t wow us forever; eventually, it’s everywhere. History has shown us that one company can only claim dominance over that technology for so long — and the bigger it gets, the more energy it takes to maintain it.

A little daylight is creeping into the walled garden now, and I’ll bet there are even brighter days ahead of us.

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FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence by using apps like Signal

FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence by using apps like Signal

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

FTC lawyers submitted a filing on Thursday that claims Amazon’s top execs used Signal’s disappearing messages feature to destroy evidence relevant to the agency’s massive antitrust lawsuit. (You remember the one? The FTC accused Amazon of creating a secret “Project Nessie” pricing algorithm that may have generated more than $1 billion in extra profits.)

Now, The Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos) reports that Amazon is just one of several companies recently accused of turning to encrypted messaging apps like Signal that can permanently erase messages automatically.

You may recall the government making similar arguments about Sam Bankman-Fried’s use of Signal during his trial for fraud and how that verdict eventually shook out. Deleted chats were also a sticking point for at least one juror in Google’s recent courtroom loss to Epic Games and came up in the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Google.

This week’s filing includes screenshots of a Signal chat between two Amazon executives who said, “Are you feeling encrypted?” and proceeded to turn on disappearing messages.

Image: Federal Trade Commission et al v. Amazon.com Inc

2:23-cv-01495-JHC

The FTC’s lawyers say Bezos, current CEO Andy Jassy, general counsel David Zapolsky, former CEO of worldwide operations Dave Clark, and other execs are all Signal users. Bezos is identified in the document as “a heavy Signal user” who instructed others to use the app, although the 2018 hacking of his personal cellphone may be part of the reason for that.

And because Amazon didn’t instruct employees to preserve messages sent in the app until more than 15 months after it was notified of the investigation, the FTC argues, “It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon’s actions and inactions.”

The FTC lawyers are pursuing discovery into Amazon’s efforts to preserve documents so they can figure out just how much information might be missing. Despite requests last fall for relevant documents about what advice Amazon gave to employees about ephemeral apps, the FTC claims that Amazon has so far refused to produce much of what was requested. If the judge finds that Amazon was negligent in failing to preserve data tied to the case, it could face sanctions, and things could get worse if the judge finds the failures were intentional.

How to stop being reminded of memories you don’t want to be reminded of

How to stop being reminded of memories you don’t want to be reminded of

Image: The Verge

Last year, on a perfect spring day that also happened to be my birthday, I took a car trip to a beautiful area of New York state. It was a lovely day. The new foliage was just coming out and flocks of migrating birds were flying overhead — just the right day for a bunch of photos and good memories.

Unfortunately, my reason for traveling upstate wasn’t for the flora and fauna, but to attend the funeral of my best friend. I took lots of photos on that day: of other friends who attended the service, of the river paths and local parks that my best friend and I used to walk together, and of the home she used to share with her parents, now empty. I took all of those photos because I knew it was probably the last time that I would visit that place.

And one year later, predictably, Google popped up in my notifications with an invitation to revisit the “wonderful” memories of that day. It was not something I needed — or wanted — a reminder of, especially a peppy reminder that assumed I had a wonderful time and wanted to share all those exhilarating memories with all my friends.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who finds these pop-ups less of a joy and more of an emotional arrow headed into your heart.

Of course, you can avoid these notifications by just pulling out of the internet or muting all of your notifications — but if you’ve got friends you want to keep in touch with or notifications that are important to you, that won’t work. In addition, you may like having some of these memory reminders appear — just not all of them. What if, say, you want to simply avoid photos of an ex or of the trip where you made a total fool of yourself?

Perhaps because of all the complaints, some of the more egregious offenders — Google Photos, Apple Photos, Facebook, and Microsoft OneDrive — have ways that you can stop them from appearing. Depending on the app, you can tweak your settings to avoid specific memory notifications — or stop them altogether.

Here is how to rein in unwanted memories from these four apps.

Google Photos

You can tweak the Memories feature in Google Photos to stop specific groups of photos or bring it to a total halt. The process differs depending on whether you’re using a desktop or mobile app.

(Yes, it would be nice if Google’s latest AI feature — whatever they want to call it — could do this for you with a single request, but as with so many other things, AI is not quite there yet.)

There are several ways you can tweak Google’s Memories notifications.

In the desktop app:

• Go to Settings (the cog in the upper-right corner) and scroll down to Memories.
• If there is a specific date that you don’t want to be reminded of (or several specific dates), select Hide dates > Add dates and add the date (or date range) you want to avoid.
• If there is a specific person or pet you don’t want to be reminded of, select Hide people & pets. You’ll see a collection of all the faces that Photos has found in your images. Click on one you don’t want to see, and it will be grayed out with a “don’t see” symbol. Click on it again if you want to restore it.
• If you don’t want any pop-up memories at all, disable Time-based memories and Themed memories.

In the mobile app:

• Tap your personal icon (in the upper-right corner) and Photos settings > Preferences.
• Select Memories.
• Choose Hide people or Hide dates to stop memories of specific people or dates. (These work in the same way as the “hide” feature in the desktop app.)
• To disable pop-up memories, select Notifications and disable Time-based memories or Themed memories.

Apple Photos

If your holiday memories are not great, you can block them.

You can block different types of Memories.

If you use the Apple Photos iPhone app, there are a variety of ways you can lessen or stop people or events from popping up when they’re not wanted via the app’s Memories features.

To control how often you see a specific person, pet, or other content:

• In the Photos app, find a picture of the person you don’t want to be reminded of.
• Tap the three dots in the top-right corner and select Feature This Person Less.
• Select Feature This Person Less or Never Feature This Person.

If you want to make certain content appear less often:

• Go to the For You tab in Apple Photos, select a memory, and tap the three dots in the upper-right corner.
• Tap on Feature Less and then Confirm.

If you’re the kind of person who gets irritated by being bombarded with holiday photos (and believe me, I sympathize), then you can specifically stop those in your main settings:

• In Settings, select Photos.
• Scroll down to Show Holiday Events and toggle it off.

And as long as you’re there — if you want to turn off Memories altogether on your iPhone (which will also cut off Featured Photos):

• Go to Settings > Photos.
• Scroll down to Show Featured Content and toggle it off.

Facebook

You can stop Facebook Memories from appearing completely.

Yeah, I know — it’s Facebook. But it’s also where a lot of your relatives are, so it’s hard to let it go. But you don’t have to let it constantly remind you of things you don’t want to be reminded of.

Using the desktop app:

• In the side menu, select Memories > Notifications.
• If you want to stop Memories altogether, select None under Notifications.
• If you want to stop Memories of specific people or dates, or using keywords, go to Hide Memories lower down on the page and select the appropriate category.

Using the mobile app:

• Tap your personal icon in the upper-right corner, and select Memories.
• Select the Settings (cog) icon.
• If you want to stop Memories altogether, select None under Notifications.
• If you want to stop Memories of specific people or dates, or using keywords, look for Hide Memories lower down on the page and select the appropriate category.

OneDrive

It’s not difficult to turn off OneDrive Memories, although the wording is a little obscure.

Microsoft, not to be left behind, offers OneDrive Memories. Luckily, it’s easy to turn off.

On the web:

• You can go directly to OneDrive’s Notifications option by going to this link; otherwise, if you’re using the website, click on the cog in the upper-right corner and go to Options > Notifications.
• You’ll see several choices for Send me email when. Uncheck the box next to On this day memories are available.

Using the mobile app:

• On the mobile app, tap Me (your personal icon in the lower-right corner), then Settings > Notifications.
• You can then disable notifications for On this day and Memories from last month.

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TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform

TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images

Here’s a roundup of all the news about a new law requiring parent company ByteDance to sell off its platform.

President Joe Biden signed a bill on April 24th that would ban TikTok, the short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, if the company doesn’t sell the platform off within a year. ByteDance has nine months from that date to divest itself from the app, with a potential three-month extension if the President is satisfied with its progress.

Discussions about banning TikTok, the short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, have seen politicians in the US and internationally accuse it of being a tool for propaganda and a security risk. Attempts to force a sale of TikTok first began under the Trump administration before culminating in the sudden, successful late-April legislative push.

Prior to the law’s signing, a slew of TikTok bans across the US barred the app from devices tied to universities and government hardware at the state, local, and federal levels.

While some experts say there’s no evidence the app has done any more damage or risked user privacy beyond what we’ve seen from companies like Facebook or Google, politicians nevertheless successfully passed a measure to ban TikTok entirely if they can’t force a separation from ByteDance.

Read on for all the latest news on a potential TikTok ban in the US.

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Zuckerberg says it will take Meta years to make money from generative AI

Zuckerberg says it will take Meta years to make money from generative AI

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don’t expect it to create profits anytime soon.

That was the message from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to investors during Wednesday’s call for the company’s first-quarter earnings report. Having just put its ChatGPT competitor in a bunch of places across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, much of the call focused on exactly how generative AI will become a money-making endeavor for Meta.

The company is already quite profitable, having grown net income to more than $12 billion on $36.5 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone. But its revenue growth is expected to slow going forward. At the same time, it’s spending more than ever on AI and the metaverse.

“Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stuck with us,” Zuckerberg said on the first quarter earnings call, drawing an analogy to the rollouts of Stories and Reels. “And the initial signs are quite positive here, too. But building the leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps, and this is likely going to take several years.”

He said that the Meta AI assistant has been “tried” by “tens of millions of people” since it was made widely available last week, though that’s to be expected given how prominently it’s now featured in areas like the Instagram search box. The real test will be whether Meta AI becomes a product that people come back to often and if lots of people want to use an AI assistant in social media apps.

Looking ahead, Meta sees multiple ways to monetize its assistant, which is free to use right now.

“There are several ways to build a massive business here, including scaling business messaging, introducing ads or paid content into AI interactions, and enabling people to pay to use bigger AI models and access more compute,” Zuckerberg said. “And on top of those, AI is already helping us improve app engagement, which naturally leads to seeing more ads and improving ads directly to deliver more value.”

A different path than OpenAI

In the next year or so, Zuckerberg suggested that usage of Meta AI could also improve the quality of its ads, which implies that the company will analyze the way people use its assistant to better understand what they’re interested in buying. This approach puts Meta on a different path than OpenAI, which has, so far, resisted advertising as a business model in favor of subscriptions and a nascent enterprise focus.

Apart from all of the generative AI stuff Meta is doing, Zuckerberg was bullish about the company’s smart glasses with Ray-Ban. He said on the call that they are sold out in “many styles and colors” and touted the device’s multimodal AI that recently became more widely available.

“I used to think that AR glasses wouldn’t really be a mainstream product until we had full holographic displays,” he said. “But now it seems pretty clear that there’s also a meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display.”

Steam will stop issuing refunds if you play two hours of a game before launch day

Steam will stop issuing refunds if you play two hours of a game before launch day

Eight years ago, Valve began offering no-questions-asked refunds for any game you buy on Steam — as long as you asked for that refund within 14 days of purchase and hadn’t played more than two hours of a game.

But when Valve started letting you play games ahead of their release dates with its “Early Access” and “Advanced Access” programs, it introduced a loophole: people could play for many, many hours ahead of launch and still request a refund after.

Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit.

Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today:

REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE

When you purchase a title on Steam prior to the release date, the two-hour playtime limit for refunds will apply (except for beta testing), but the 14-day period for refunds will not start until the release date. For example, if you purchase a game that is in Early Access or Advanced Access, any playtime will count against the two-hour refund limit. If you pre-purchase a title which is not playable prior to the release date, you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title, and the standard 14-day/two-hour refund period will apply starting on the game’s release date.

Compare to earlier this month:

REFUNDS ON PRE-PURCHASED TITLES

When you pre-purchase a title on Steam (and have paid for the title in advance), you can request a refund at any time prior to release of that title. The standard 14-day/two-hour refund period also applies, starting on the game’s release date.

Simple enough!

A cheaper Tesla is back on the menu

A cheaper Tesla is back on the menu

The Model 3 might get an affordable younger sibling in 2025. | Image: Tesla

Tesla says it will build more affordable electric vehicles — perhaps as soon as 2025 — refuting recent reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had canceled plans for a cheaper “Model 2” vehicle in favor of getting a robotaxi out the door. But Musk didn’t clarify whether the lower-cost EV would be a brand new model for Tesla or simplified versions of its current vehicles.

“In terms of a new product roadmap, there’s been a lot of talk,” Musk said during the company’s first quarter earnings call, addressing the concerns investors have expressed over the past month about the delayed plans for a low-cost EV. “We’ve updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models.” Musk said we might see the vehicles in early 2025, if not later this year.

“In terms of a new product roadmap, there’s been a lot of talk”

The vehicles will blend “aspects” of a next-generation platform with the current platform that undergirds the company’s top-selling Model 3 and Model Y. “This is not contingent on a new factory or massive new production lines, it’ll be made on our current production lines much more efficiently,” Musk said, predicting it could accelerate the company’s production to over 3 million vehicles a year.

Tesla has reported $21 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2024, a 9 percent drop year over year. Net income dropped 55 percent to $1.1 billion. The company sold fewer models this quarter as demand for electric vehicles cooled. Analysts say a more affordable model is crucial to Tesla’s future growth.

Musk started the call by addressing concerns that the market is emphasizing the development of hybrid vehicles over fully electric ones, which he believes is “not the right strategy.”

“We’ll talk about this more on August 8th.”

“We’ll talk about this more on August 8th,” Musk said, as he reemphasized that 7 million cars by the end of this year will be part of a robotaxi fleet. August 8th is the date Tesla plans to unveil a new robotaxi vehicle.

Although Tesla is again promising to release cheaper EVs, it hasn’t confirmed whether entirely new cheap models will come. It’s possible cheaper models could just be stripped down Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, which alone drive the majority of the company’s revenues.

Right now, you can buy a Model 3 for $38,990, which is nearly the cheapest the vehicle has ever been — but still not at the elusive $35,000 price point that was promised almost a decade ago. The company has promised that a simplified “unboxed” manufacturing process will bring down costs even further.

When asked directly by an investor about cheaper EVs like Model 2 and where Musk’s “heart is at,” Musk largely shut down on the subject. In contrast, he was happy to go on at length about autonomy, self-driving, and even aliens.

“If you have a great product at a great price, sales will be excellent,” Musk said at one point, responding to a question about value. He said Tesla will keep improving affordability to make the “value for money” better.

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Fortnite will let players hide mean emotes

Fortnite will let players hide mean emotes

YouTube

Fortnite is rolling out an update on Tuesday that includes a new setting that filters out “confrontational” emotes. The v29.30 update will let players “choose not to see” the following emotes: “Laugh It Up”, “Take the L”, “Whipcrack”, and “Make it Plantain.”

The four emotes won’t exactly be hidden per se, they’ll appear as still images in the game — but players performing them won’t dance and they won’t play music. Players can opt to only see these emotes from friends, or hide them altogether.

Though Fortnite has hundreds of different emotes, this group of four are controversial because of how and when players will use them. Fortnite players will often play emotes like “Laugh it Up” and “Take the L” after killing another player or winning a match. Players over the years have complained that emote use has gotten toxic and overly aggressive on the game, with a few players using them to anger other players, or as a sign of disrespect.

Epic Games

Epic Games has taken some flak for its emotes in the past — but for a completely different reason. Many of the emotes mimic popular dance moves, and multiple dance move creators have sued Epic Games accusing the game developer of ripping off their work. Back in February, Epic appeared to reach an agreement with celebrity choreographer Kyle Hanagami that led him to dropping his lawsuit over the “It’s Complicated” emoji.

Although emotes are a widely used feature in Fortnite, they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. This latest update appears to be a recognition on Epic’s part that, for at least some players, certain emotes just ruin the vibes. While those players won’t be able to block the emotes outright, they’ll certainly be able to make them less annoying.

pic.twitter.com/IVCk8eVuzk

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) April 22, 2024

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