Technology

Elon Musk‘s SpaceX is now reportedly worth $100 billion USD, making it the second-most valuable privately held company. Musk’s aerospace company has surpassed the $100 billion USD mark due to a sale of existing stock, according to CNBC. The agreement made between new and existing investors allowed SpaceX to sell up to $755 million USD in stock from insiders priced at $560 USD a share, which increased the company’s value to $100.3 billion USD. The new value is solely based on the secondary sale of existing shares and entails no new capital. In February of this year, SpaceX was valued at $74 billion USD at $419.99 USD a share. Therefore, the new valuation and showcases a 33% increase in share price. The company is now one of the rare “centicorn” companies in the world, which occurs when a st...

The beloved, intriguingly political, and mysterious sci-fi show The Expanse’s final season on Amazon is nigh. Season 6 is coming December 10th, and the company just dropped the final trailer at New York Comic Con and on YouTube (you can watch it immediately above). It’ll run for just six episodes, airing each Friday on Amazon Prime Video and ending on January 14th, 2022. If you’ve been devoutly following The Expanse, you know things are bad in the universe of the show. Earth’s on fire, beloved characters have died, and a mass murderer is gaining an awful lot of support. Here’s how Amazon describes season 6: The sixth and final season of The Expanse picks up with the solar system at war, as Marco Inaros and his Free Navy continue to launch devastating asteroid attacks on Earth and Mars. As ...

No matter how much Apple hypes Ceramic Shield — the special glass mixture introduced with the iPhone 12 — and the build quality of the metal and glass sandwich that is the modern iPhone, expensive phones need cases. Maybe you ordered one alongside your new iPhone 13, but if you didn’t, may I propose an exciting and undeniably useful option — a giant case that rockets hard candy into your mouth (via Gizmodo). YouTube creator and inventor Matty Benedetto is responsible for the DIY case, which he calls the Candy Catapult. It’s 3D printed from flexible TPU filament with a hard candy container back for your poison of choice, be it M&Ms, Skittles, or Reese Pieces (only sickos would mix all three). To actually launch the candy out of the case, Benedetto added a pinball machine-esque spring-lo...

The new Apple Watch Series 7 was announced alongside the iPhone 13, iPad, and iPad Mini, but it’s the final device of Apple’s new fall products to launch. This newer model sits atop Apple’s current lineup of smartwatches, which still includes the SE and Series 3 rounding out the line. Featuring a slightly revamped design and larger display, the Series 7 comes in either a 41mm (up from 40mm) configuration starting at $399 or a 45mm (up from 44mm) configuration — each with optional cellular radios if you want to pay for service with your carrier. After Apple’s initial announcement billed them for release “later this fall,” we now know the new models are set to release on October 15th, and you can preorder them now through Apple, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. What’s new The Apple Watch Serie...

The all-electric Mercedes-Benz EQS is chock full of luxury and tech features. Now we know it will be competitive with some of its six-figure rivals in regards to range, as the official estimates are finally in from the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency says the rear-wheel-drive version should get around 350 miles on a full battery. Buyers of the all-wheel-drive version should expect a little less, around 340 miles. That’s roughly even with Tesla’s new triple-motor Model S Plaid, which the EPA says is good for about 348 miles on a full charge on 21-inch wheels. Tesla says the Model S Plaid on 19-inch wheels should get closer to 400 miles, but that claim hasn’t been evaluated by the EPA just yet. A dual-motor Long Range Model S is supposed to eclipse 400 miles, though that car has ...

Hackers ambushed Twitch this morning and replaced game directory images with photos of Jeff Bezos. Redditors were among the first to notice the switch around 5 a.m. ET. “The banner for GTA 5 is Jeff Bezos’ face now,” one user wrote on the Twitch subreddit. Other users reported seeing Bezos in the header photos for the games Dota 2, Minecraft and Apex Legends. More Twitch shenanigans are afoot. All game directory header pictures on the Web version of Twitch are now showing a closeup picture of Jeff Bezos. It’s been like this for the last 2 hours. pic.twitter.com/LcKP9jGMCC — AnEternalEnigma (@AnEternalEnigma) October 8, 2021 In 2014, Twitch was acquired by Amazon, which is likely why the hackers used a photo of Bezos to troll gamers. And while the stunt would typically appear to be a r...

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories. This week, Nilay and Dieter bring in Verge policy editor Russell Brandom and managing editor Alex Cranz to cover the series of unfortunate events for Facebook: the 60 Minutes whistleblower interview on Sunday, the massive Facebook outage on Monday, the whistleblower Senate hearing on Tuesday, and the fallout and response the following days. The Vergecast crew discusses whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony, how these events stood out amongst the various Facebook scandals of the past, and what could happen next with tech regulation. Later in the show, the team shift gears into the light...

If you’ve updated your PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you may have noticed that when you click on a link for a website, a PDF document, or a variety of other file types, you will now be sent to Microsoft’s Edge browser. In its new version of Windows, Microsoft seems to have become especially aggressive in pushing its own apps over the apps that had been installed as defaults before the upgrade. In other words, Edge suddenly became your default browser. Normally, the first time you go into another browser that is not Edge — say, Google Chrome — the not-Edge browser will ask if you’d like to make it the default instead. However, the process for changing your defaults in Windows 11 has become more complicated than it was in Windows 10. So you may not get that handy request. Switch default ...

After several rumors, Rockstar Games has confirmed that Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas are each getting HD remasters. They’ll be released in a package called Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. The collection is coming to PC (via the Rockstar Games Launcher), PlayStation, Xbox, and, more surprisingly, the Nintendo Switch will host them, too. It will come to iOS and Android in the first half of 2022. Pricing and release date info hasn’t been shared. The company hasn’t explicitly mentioned what kind of technical improvements were made, nor has it shared any footage yet. But it says that each of the games has gotten “across-the-board upgrades including graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements.” The company chose to take the faithful r...

The newest version of the immensely popular Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo Switch OLED model, is now available online. So far, they’ve popped up at GameStop, but they quickly went out of stock. Though, a few Verge staffers have found success buying one through Nintendo’s online shop. The key to their success was persistence and patience (and a lot of refreshing that seems hopeless, until it’s not), and of course, you’ll need to login to your Nintendo account to make the purchase there. We’ll add more retailers throughout the day as they appear online. Best Buy is one of the few retailers so far that hasn’t released its launch day stock of Switch OLED consoles, so maybe keep that page open and ready. The Switch OLED model is the top end of Nintendo’s current console lineup, coming in at $350...

The new Nintendo Switch OLED Model doesn’t have a Pentile screen. That might not mean much to you, and it wasn’t something we were able to confirm definitively during our review process — other than to say that the screen is a huge improvement. Which it is. But there’s been speculation ever since the OLED Switch was announced that its panel might use Pentile technology, which could have had big implications for image quality. Nintendo devices don’t tend to have the best screens, after all. Pentile is a trademark owned by Samsung that refers to various subpixel matrix layouts most commonly used in OLED display panels. In casual conversation, or as casual as conversations about OLED subpixel layouts can really be, Pentile is now essentially shorthand for “not full RGB,” meaning that red, gre...