Technology

Amazon Prime Day, the company’s annual shopping holiday, will take place on Monday, June 21st through June 22nd, the company officially announced today. The forthcoming summer dates mark a return to form; the retail giant has historically held its shopping extravaganza in mid-July but postponed last year’s event until October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its most recent earnings report, Amazon previously confirmed this year’s Prime Day would take place in Q2. Like previous years, you can expect to find discounts on true wireless earbuds, 4K TVs of all sizes and panel types, video games, and more. Outside of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Day has become one of the best opportunities to get deals, whether they’re for gifts or yourself. Amazon says that this year’s Prime Day “will f...

Even as Disney’s marquee streaming service celebrates Pride Month with a prominently positioned carousel of LGBTQ+ titles on its homepage, the company has found itself at the center of a sexual orientation discrimination lawsuit brought by an executive employee. The complaint (PDF), as reported earlier by Deadline, was filed today in a California superior court on behalf of television executive Joel Hopkins, lawyers confirmed to The Verge. Hopkins had been with the company since 1994. The suit alleges that around the time that he was promoted to vice president of production finance for Touchstone Television in 2000, it became known that Hopkins identified as gay. At this time, despite his tenure and previous promotions within the company, Hopkins “experienced an ongoing pattern of discrimi...

Confirming what The Verge reported back in April, Ikea tonight listed a new Symonisk “picture frame with Wi-Fi speaker” product on its website. The device, which is listed for $199, has not yet been announced — but it’s one of two new collaborations between Ikea and Sonos set for release in the near future. According to the likely-to-be-removed website, the Symfonisk picture frame measures 22 inches high, 16 inches wide, and 2 inches deep. Ikea says customers will be able to choose between “various interchangeable fronts,” and the frame will be offered in either black or white finishes. Like the previous two Symfonisk products, the picture frame is designed to blend into your home decor and not stick out as an obvious tech gadget. Image: Ikea “You can choose to hang it on its own on the wa...

We recently noticed that Alienware’s just-announced X15 and X17 thin and vaguely light gaming laptops are conspicuously missing a port — and it’s not because they’re thin-and-light, it turns out. Alienware has just confirmed to The Verge that it has discontinued the Alienware Graphics Amplifier external GPU, and so these laptops won’t need that proprietary port anymore. The company isn’t saying whether it’ll offer a future eGPU, but pointed us to off-the-shelf Thunderbolt ones instead. The Alienware Graphics Amp was first introduced in 2014 for $299 and designed to be a companion to the company’s midrange Alienware 13, giving it the vast majority of the power of a desktop graphics card plus four extra full-size USB ports when docked. I liked the combo well enough. But over the years, Alien...

After months of government bans on DJI drones, with lawmakers questioning whether the company was sending information to the Chinese government, the Pentagon has now admitted that the drones being used might actually be safe (via The Hill), releasing a report saying that two “Government Edition” DJI drones are “recommended for use by government entities.” Last year, the Department of the Interior grounded all its drones, citing concerns of potential spying by the Chinese government, and the Department of Commerce put DJI on its Entity List after the company allegedly provided the Chinese government with surveillance tech for its Uyghur Muslim detention camps. That second claim isn’t being addressed at all today. The report isn’t necessarily an all-clear for DJI’s relationship with the gove...

The Rimac C_Two concept has evolved into a production-ready electric hypercar called the Nevera, and it’s still just as absurd as it was three years when it first broke cover at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show. Powered by a 120kWh battery pack, the Nevera uses four electric motors — one for each wheel — to put down an almost unbelievable 1.4MW of power, which Rimac says is roughly equivalent to 1,914 horsepower. The quad-motor setup can push the car to 60 miles per hour from a standstill in just 1.85 seconds. It has a top speed of 258 miles per hour. What’s more, Rimac says one of the things it worked on over the last three years was improving the battery pack’s liquid cooling system, meaning drivers can use that peak power for longer before the batteries start to complain. It costs a cool $2.4...

Amazon has recently changed its terms of service to allow its customers to bring lawsuits against the company instead of having to go through an arbitration process. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company made the change after over 75,000 Echo users were organized to file individual arbitration cases, which would have left Amazon on the hook for millions of dollars in fees. Unlike lawsuits, arbitration cases are handled by a third party instead of a judge or jury. According to the American Arbitration Association’s rules (which Amazon was bound by in its old terms of service), the company involved is responsible for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in fees when a consumer brings a case against it — and those numbers add up quickly if a law firm is able to coordinate larg...

If you’re hunting for a set of truly wireless earbuds that offer great sound quality, noise cancellation, water resistance, a comfy fit, and other handy features, refurbished Apple AirPods Pro at Woot cost just $155. These originally sold for $249, but some retailers offer them new for around $200. This model is a “grade A” unit with “minimal cosmetic damage” at most, and with “like-new functionality.” These are covered with a 90-day warranty through Woot. Apple AirPods Pro (refurbished) $155 $249 38% off Prices taken at time of publishing. Normally $249 new, Apple’s AirPods Pro wireless earbuds with noise cancellation are available refurbished at Woot for $155. These include a charging case, the AirPods Pro themselves, and a Lightning to USB-C cable. One of the best leftover Memorial Day ...

Mozilla launched a redesign for Firefox on Tuesday, and one of the changes you might notice first is a whole new look for tabs. Firefox tabs are now bigger than they used to be, and the one that’s in focus will float above the toolbar near the top of the browser. In Chrome or Safari, by contrast, the tab that’s in focus looks like it is attached directly to the toolbar. Here’s a screenshot I took to give you a better idea of what the new tabs look like. And if you want an idea of just how much bigger the new tabs are in the new design, check out this screenshot a Verge staffer took comparing the new to the old. Left: new Firefox. Right: old Firefox. Mozilla says this new detached design was made to encourage people to move their tabs around. “We detached the tab from the browser to invite ...

Instacart has big plans to automate parts of its grocery delivery business, reports Bloomberg, but the company’s schemes look as much like bluster as ambition. Bloomberg details a plan for the gig-work grocery-delivery network to build “automated fulfillment centers around the US, where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup while humans gather produce and deli products.” Some centers would be built next to grocery stores while others would be “standalone” operations. Instacart would partner with a supermarket chain to handle inventory, contract out the automation side of things to a robotics firm, and take care of processing orders and deliveries itself. If it works, the system would automate out huge portions of the company’s freelance workforce. It doesn’t seem ...

AMD has announced its Radeon RX 6000 series of mobile GPUs. The company claimed that the new chips, built on its RDNA 2 architecture, deliver the best performance we’ve ever seen from AMD graphics. It made particularly ambitious claims about its flagship Radeon RX 6800M, which it claimed would run modern AAA games at frame rates comparable to or better than those of Nvidia’s mobile RTX 3080. Company claims are just company claims, of course. I’ve been testing a system with a Radeon RX 6800M for the past few days. The results I’ve seen so far are a mixed bag, and while the RX 6800M doesn’t decisively outperform Nvidia’s top RTX chips, it’s doing a better job than I’d expect at the price range we’ve been given. To see how the RX 6800M performed, I was sent an Asus ROG Strix G15, one of the f...

Discovery is merging with WarnerMedia, and it’s now announced a new name for the combined company: Warner Bros. Discovery. According to The Wall Street Journal, the name was first revealed during a staff meeting today. The merger was announced last month. AT&T said it would spin off WarnerMedia — the entertainment giant containing Warner Bros., HBO, DC Comics, and CNN, among many others — and that Discovery would take over the new company. But they didn’t have a new name prepared on the day the deal was announced. Discovery CEO David Zaslav will be in charge of the merged group. WarnerMedia is by far the bigger company though, with around three times the 2020 revenue and a roster of iconic characters and properties. Discovery brings to the table a huge archive of reality TV shows and a...