Technology

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that the company is moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, where it has been building a new factory for a little more than a year. Musk said Tesla will continue to operate its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, CA, and that he even plans to try and increase production there by 50 percent. “Just to be clear, though, we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” he said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. “So this is not a matter of Tesla leaving California.” Musk had previously threatened to pull Tesla’s entire operations out of California because he disagreed with the shelter-in-place orders the state leaned on early in the coronavirus pandemic. Tesla even sued the county that the company’s California ...

Microsoft has agreed to have an independent third-party study the potential impact of it making its devices easier to repair and to make changes based on those findings by the end of 2022, according to Grist and the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow. The agreement was made after As You Sow filed a shareholder resolution asking Microsoft to look into the potential impact that it could make by making it easier for consumers to get their devices repaired. As You Sow has withdrawn its resolution in return for Microsoft conducting the study and making parts and documentation more available to repair shops that aren’t official Microsoft service providers based on the study’s results. As You Sow calls Microsoft’s commitment “an encouraging step,” but it’s worth keeping in perspective that it ...

Sony Pictures Entertainment has released a new trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, the next live-action film based on the popular horror video game franchise, ahead of the movie’s November 24th release in theaters. The movie, which is a reboot for the film side of the franchise, looks to be filled with Resident Evil hallmarks. It takes place in Raccoon City, series mainstays Claire Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, and Chris Redfield are all featured, something about the Umbrella Corporation is apparently at the heart of the conflict, and the main characters look like they will spend some time fleeing zombies in a spooky mansion. (There’s even a part in the trailer where a zombie dog shatters a window.) Here’s the official synopsis of the film, if you want to know a b...

The 2022 Geneva International Motor Show, slated to happen in February, has been canceled as the COVID pandemic persists and the auto industry struggles with a global chip shortage. Organizers said Thursday that there are still too many “uncertainties” related to the pandemic and the shortage for automakers to commit to the show, which usually serves as a showcase for wild supercars, concepts, and prototypes. The hope is to have “a more impactful show in 2023” with more virtual presentations. “We have pushed very hard and tried everything to reactivate the Geneva International Motor Show in 2022,” Maurice Turrettini, who runs the committee in charge of the show, said in a statement. “Despite all our efforts, we have to face the facts and the reality: the pandemic situation is not under con...

Eidos-Montréal and its subsidiary Eidos-Sherbrooke are switching to a four-day workweek, the game developer announced on Thursday. The Square Enix-owned company is currently working on the next big Marvel video game adaptation, Guardians of the Galaxy. “This initiative is another step towards the embodiment of the studio’s values, building a healthy, creative, and sustainable work environment for our employees,” studio head David Anfossi writes in the company’s blog. “The idea is not to condense the working hours into four days, but rather to review our ways of doing things and our quality time invested, with the aim of working better!” A 32-hour workweek Eidos-Montréal says that both studios will be closed on Fridays in the next few weeks, “without changing the working conditions currentl...

The ambiguous finish to the Epic v. Apple trial opened a tiny crack in Apple’s control over in-app payments on the iPhone — and now, a small developer is trying to crawl through it. A company called Paddle has announced its own in-app payment system that will take a smaller cut than Apple’s system — 5 to 10 percent, instead of the 15 to 30 percent cut claimed by Apple. It’s a way around the commission fees that started the fight with Epic in the first place and likely to be the beginning of a new fight for developers. Paddle’s system is designed to take advantage of the Epic v. Apple verdict, which required Apple to allow external payment links. Prior to the verdict, an App Store rule had banned “external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms” — but...

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures. It’s a half-hour-long documentary featuring the key players at Palm and Handspring: Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligan, and more. It’s one of our most ambitious video projects to date, and we can’t wait to show it to you. Handspring may no longer be a household name, but it was briefly one of the fastest growing businesses in American history, selling Visor personal ...

Ever since it was introduced in 2015, Apple CarPlay has represented a notable upgrade over the user interfaces most cars have by default, but many of our concerns about it, and Android Auto, come up due to their limitations. Newer features like dual-screen support and third-party apps like Google Maps could help, but there are still huge parts of the driving experience that exist outside of Apple’s control panel. Now, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that Apple’s “IronHeart” push envisions tying settings like climate controls, seat positioning, and even specific surround sound tweaks to your iPhone. This is a gap that Google has closed by cutting deals with automakers like Polestar, Ford, Honda, and GM to use Android Automotive as the basis for their UI. According to Bloomberg, while Appl...

The US Department of Justice has created a team to investigate cryptocurrency-related crime. The National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) will handle investigations of “crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and money laundering infrastructure actors,” the agency said in a news release. Mixing and tumbling services can obscure the source of a cryptocurrency transaction, by mixing it with other funds. Cryptocurrency is “used in a wide variety of criminal activity,” including ransomware demand payments, money laundering, and for the illegal sales of drugs, weapons, and malware, the agency noted. Several high-profile ransomware cases have involved demands in cryptocurrency, including the Colonial Pipeline attack in May, where the company reportedl...

Microsoft is celebrating the 20th birthday of Xbox with a couple of new, translucent accessories, including a wireless controller and a wired gaming headset. They’ll launch on November 15th, 2021 — marking 20 years to the day — and preorders are available now. Starting with the controller, Microsoft says its translucent look is a callback to the see-through controllers that shipped with the original Xbox debug kits. There are splashes of the brand’s signature green on the Xbox home button, as well as around the D-pad and rear grips. Microsoft colored the components silver so they’d be easier to see through its casing. Internally, though, it’s the same model as the one that ships with the Series S and Series X consoles, with Bluetooth support for connecting to mobile devices and PCs. This c...

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service (xCloud) is now fully powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware. Microsoft tells The Verge it recently completed the upgrade, which improves both framerates and game load times for players streaming Xbox games over the web. While Microsoft has moved Xbox Cloud Gaming to 1080p and 60fps streams in recent months, the company has yet to unlock the full potential of custom Xbox Series X hardware to deliver 4K streams. It’s not clear when this will be available, but Microsoft has been moving towards delivering Xbox Cloud Gaming beyond just mobile devices and browsers. Microsoft is currently working on a dedicated Xbox app for TVs that will allow Xbox players to stream games without a console. Standalone streaming devices that you can plug into a TV or monito...

British Satellite broadcaster Sky is moving away from the satellite dishes that have defined its TV service for decades. Sky Glass is launching today, an ambitious effort to sell television sets that stream Sky TV content over Wi-Fi directly to consumers. There’s no external box, no satellite dish, and no need for a soundbar. Sky calls the all-in-one TV “no fuss.” Although announced for the UK today, Sky has global aspirations for Glass TV “built on technology borne of the collaboration as part of the Comcast Corporation.” As such, we might be looking at the platform underpinning Comcast’s rumored XClass TVs for the US. Sky Glass TVs will be available in three sizes: 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch. Each 4K TV will stream Sky’s TV channels, and integrates in voice control (Hello Sky) and 21 ...