Technology

Don’t get me wrong; we’re excited about Nintendo’s new OLED Switch — the number of preorders in The Verge newsroom confirms it. But what about the more powerful Switch that so many of us thought was around the corner? A new Bloomberg report suggests that the global chip shortage is why plans fell through for a “Switch Pro” with upgraded hardware from Nvidia and 4K resolution. The outlet previously reported on the device and backs up those reports by saying it’s identified at least 11 developers, like Zynga, who have received 4K Nintendo Switch development kits. Specifically, Bloomberg claims employees heard from Nintendo that they should design games to target the higher resolution. In response, Nintendo told Bloomberg its reporting was “inaccurate” without specifying which parts. A more p...

Virgin Galactic is cleared to resume flights of its SpaceShipTwo space plane, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Wednesday, after capping a safety investigation into issues that came up during the company’s July flight carrying its founder Richard Branson. During that mission, SpaceShipTwo strayed from its designated airspace on its descent from space, and Virgin Galactic didn’t tell the FAA about it when it was supposed to. With the investigation now closed, the FAA required Virgin Galactic to make changes “on how it communicates to the FAA during flight operations to keep the public safe,” it said in a statement. Virgin Galactic said that includes “updated calculations to expand the protected airspace for future flights” and “additional steps into the Company’s flight procedu...

Coinbase continues to innovate in the crypto space and at Governors Ball Music Festival this past weekend, the company introduced limited-edition concert merchandise in the form of NFTs, as well as an NFT gallery experience on festival grounds. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the New York City music festival, the on-site gallery was exhibited from September 24 to 26, showcasing GIFs of memories from years past, including a snapshot of a “Gov Ball”-emblazoned hot air balloon, crowds of festival-goers lounging on a grassy lawn and a slow-motion clip from King Princess’ 2019 set. The experience also featured a futuristic photo and video booth, where visitors could commemorate their visit to the festival in digital form. Have you been to the photo booth inside the NFT gallery yet?...

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company is suing NASA, and Elon Musk has joined the conversation to share his take on the controversy. NASA awarded Musk’s SpaceX a $2.9 billion USD lunar landing contract back in April, choosing the company’s Starship as the vehicle that would carry astronauts to the Moon on a mission that could take off as early as 2024. While it was initially expected that the space organization would offer two lander contracts between the three competing companies, SpaceX was the sole beneficiary, beating out rival Blue Origin in the decision. In August, Bezos filed a complaint against NASA in federal court, challenging what its lawyers called an “unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals.” At the 2021 Code conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Musk spoke about the sit...

Google Maps has new features that should make it easier for users to see wildfires, tree canopy, and locations without formal addresses. It’s all aimed at helping communities be “safer, more sustainable, and discoverable,” according to the company. A new wildfire layer on Maps will begin rolling out globally this week, Google announced today. It’ll show most major fires, those prompting evacuations, across the world. Red splotches and pins on the layer will indicate where blazes are and how far they’ve spread. By tapping on any single wildfire, users can see more information, like how many acres have burned, what percentage of the fire has been contained, and links to local emergency resources. The map is updated about every hour. It uses data that’s gathered by satellites that are then pr...

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say — and repeated in an interview this past Sunday — that “search is not a solved problem.” That may be true, but the problems he and his team are t...

Sure, why not. Stack Overflow has teamed up with tech retailer Drop to release this cute little keyboard called The Key. It’s programmed to do exactly two things: copy and paste. The product started as an April Fools’ Day joke earlier this year — Stack Overflow users were shown alerts claiming that they had a limited number of copy / pastes and that they could only lift that cap by purchasing The Key. Users, as Stack Overflow’s blog post notes, were disappointed to find out that The Key was not a real thing they could buy. So, you can buy it now. It’s up for preorder on Drop’s website for $29. Per the company, the next batch is shipping on December 13th. What more could you need?Image: Drop As you can see, we have three buttons here. We have C, and we have V. I’m not sure what the third bu...

The iPhone 13 Pro Max can charge a bit faster than other models, according to tests done by YouTuber ChargerLAB (and backed up by other tests), which show that the phone sips up to 27 watts of power when plugged into a compatible charging brick. If you have a 13 Pro Max and want to fill up its massive battery as fast as possible, you may want to look into getting a 30W charger that, according to tests cited by @duanrui1205, can charge it from zero to full in less than 90 minutes. This appears to be an upgrade from the previous generation — 9to5Mac reports that the iPhone 12 caps out at around 22W charging speeds. That’s about a 5W boost, which is nothing to sneeze at. The benefit of a bigger charger is limited to the Pro Max, according to @duanrui1205, who said that the smaller iPhone 13 P...

Yesterday, Amazon announced its “home robot” — a wheeled device named Astro that has a display, an array of sensors, and a camera that periscopes out the top of its body like a mast. In advertisements for Astro, Amazon presents the device as an engineering breakthrough and the realization of a long-held sci-fi dream: to build a robot that can help around the house. This is rubbish, of course. What Astro is — for better or worse — is a camera on wheels. Astro definitely can’t get a beer for you The physical limitations of Astro are obvious. It has no arms or manipulators; no way to interact with the world other than bumping into objects at shin height. It can’t navigate steps, and, according to employees who worked on the robot and spoke to Vice, it is fragile and prone to self-destruction....

Every year ahead of the League of Legends World Championship, developer Riot tries to get everyone excited with a new song. This year’s anthem is called “Burn It All Down” from American band Pvris, and it definitely fits into the tradition of music to get players amped up. But it also comes with a bonus: a music video that turns some of the game’s best players into anime heroes. (Journalist Ashley Kang has a great thread detailing who is who.) It’s the kind of short that makes you want a full League esports anime, and it even transitions to a 3D art style at the end, in a nod to the upcoming Netflix series Arcane. This year’s iteration of Worlds will take place in Iceland starting October 5th; it was originally slated for China but was forced to move due to pandemic-related restrictions. E...

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin “gambled” with its Moon lander proposal last year by hoping NASA would be willing to negotiate its $5.9 billion price tag, agency attorneys argued in blunt legal filings obtained by The Verge. NASA, cash-strapped with a tight budget from Congress, declined to negotiate and turned down Blue Origin’s lunar lander in April and picked SpaceX’s instead, sparking ongoing protests from Bezos’ space company. NASA officials haven’t talked much about Blue Origin’s legal quarrels beyond occasional acknowledgements that the company’s protesting — first at a watchdog agency and now in federal court — is holding up the agency’s effort to land humans on the Moon by 2024. But in hundreds of pages of legal filings The Verge obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request, agency at...

In a new attempt to stem the flow of anti-vaccine misinformation, YouTube said Wednesday that it won’t allow videos that claim vaccines approved by health authorities are dangerous or don’t work. The platform is also banning prominent anti-vaccine accounts, including Joseph Mercola’s channel and the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-linked Children’s Defense Fund. YouTube pulled ads from anti-vaccination content in 2019, and said in October 2020 that it would remove videos that pushed misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines. The new policy expands to block misinformation around other vaccines, including the flu shot, the HPV vaccine, and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Videos that inaccurately claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism or that the flu shot causes infertility, for example,...