Technology

In a new support document on its website, Apple dives a little deeper into the details around the upcoming launch of lossless audio on Apple Music. Apple now says that both the HomePod and HomePod Mini will support lossless audio after a future software update. That’ll be good news to people who’ve invested in one or a pair of Apple’s smart speakers. Two HomePods grouped in stereo playing a lossless source? Yeah, that’s going to sound wonderful. Apple isn’t yet giving any timetable for when this software update will be released, however. The document also clarifies that the Apple TV 4K will only support standard lossless audio when the ALAC files become available in June. Apple has said that in most cases, the “Hi-Res Lossless” tier will require external devices like a USB DAC. Apple uses ...

It started with a tweet from Roadshow editor-in-chief Tim Stevens. A picture of a chair that seemed to effortlessly skim the line between office chair, La-Z-Boy recliner, and Victorian throne. An utter affront to design, taste, and style. This chair: Stumbled across this chair online today. I find its middle-management, aspirational evil overlord aesthetic oddly chilling. pic.twitter.com/0I41mxQNjF — Tim Stevens (@Tim_Stevens) May 20, 2021 The tweet first crossed my timeline yesterday, and my mind has been consumed for the past 24 hours by the very existence of this chair. Why does it exist? Has anyone actually bought one? Does the chair come with a menacing-looking cat to hold when spinning around to fire your minions? Are you required to shout “I’ll get you next time, Gadget?” when you e...

We have poked a considerable amount of fun at the Apple TV’s Siri Remote over the years, and we’re pleased to say it’s finally fixed — except for the headsmacking decision not to stick the company’s AirTag UWB locator technology into one of the few gadgets absolutely, positively guaranteed to get lost in your couch cushions someday. Why? Today, Apple VP Tim Twerdahl answered that burning question in perhaps the most unsatisfactory way imaginable: simply, that the new TV remote’s thick enough you shouldn’t need to worry about that much anymore. Here’s the whole exchange between Twerdahl and MobileSyrup’s Patrick O’Rourke: Q: Was there ever any thought to adding some sort of AirTag-like technology in the Siri remote? I’m always losing the remote in my couch cushions and it seems like it woul...

A quarter of the deep links in The New York Times’ articles are now rotten, leading to completely inaccessible pages, according to a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, who worked with the Times’ digital team. They found that this problem affected over half of the articles containing links in the NYT’s catalog going back to 1996, illustrating the problem of link rot and how difficult it is for context to survive on the web. The study looked at over 550,000 articles, which contained over 2.2 million links to external websites. It found that 72 percent of those links were “deep,” or pointing to a specific page rather than a general website. Predictably, it found that, as time went on, links were more likely to be dead: 6 percent of links in 2018 articles were inaccessible, while a w...

Shopping for a laptop can be stressful — doubly stressful if you or your children will be learning online for the first time. Kids of different ages have a range of different laptop use cases and different needs. And as the choices for best laptop and best Chromebook evolve, so do students’ needs. So I spoke to some experts on the subject: students themselves. My recommendations here are meant to accommodate a variety of preferences and price ranges. But they’re a jumping-off point rather than an exhaustive list: every student is different. Before making a decision, you’ll want to make sure you read reviews and try out devices yourself if you can. I’ll do my best to keep this article up to date with items that are in stock. Best laptop for students Google’s Pixelbook Go has solid battery l...

Apple called CEO Tim Cook to conclude three weeks of testimony in Epic v. Apple — and with the end of the trial approaching, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers engaged Cook in a surprisingly tense exchange over Apple’s business model. Rogers noted that most of Apple’s App Store revenue comes from games, and she asked Cook why developers can’t use other payment methods to sell in-app purchases, or at least tell users they can make those transactions elsewhere. “If they wanted to go and get a cheaper Battle Pass or V-Bucks, and they don’t know they’ve got that option, what is the problem with Apple giving them that option?” she asked. “If we allowed people to link out like that, we would in essence give up our total return on our [intellectual property],” Cook said bluntly. Apple has talked repeat...

Kotaku has revealed an Easter egg that’s been hidden on the original Xbox for almost twenty years, after a developer who worked on the console sent in a tip. The Easter egg, which has apparently remained secret until now, can show you the Xbox Dashboard Team’s names after you follow a byzantine set of steps (as is par for the course when it comes to some video game secrets). Kotaku was able to find someone with a working Xbox who could actually carry out those steps, which you can see in the publication’s video below. If you’ve got one of the consoles, you can try it out for yourself by ripping a CD as a soundtrack and calling it “Timmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” (using 26 “y”s to reach the maximum amount of characters allowed). After the rip is complete, going to the Xbox’s Settings > ...

There’s a quality that some long-running chat podcasts have that can feel like a brick wall for new listeners. Existing relationships, in-jokes, and context that friends and co-hosts have are additional barriers to feeling like you’re a part of the conversation. The casual hangout and chat format is tantalizing for its naturalism, but it also comes with parasocial relationships as baggage. Which makes HBO’s new late-night project, Pause with Sam Jay, so intriguing. It has hangout podcasts in its DNA, but it’s also out to reinvent a decades-old late-night format. Pause is co-created by Sam Jay, stand-up comedian and Saturday Night Live writer, and Prentice Penny, showrunner and executive producer of Insecure. It feels fresh for some obvious reasons. Jay is a Black queer woman in a field fil...

This morning, The Verge published a story about how Citizen — an app that appears to encourage vigilante justice — encouraged its users to hunt down the wrong person and presumably bring them to justice, in the mistaken assumption that person had started the 1,158-acre Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles last week. The company offered a $30,000 bounty. Now, we’re learning the same company is apparently planning to offer its own private security forces to users, according to a new report from Motherboard. In fact, one Citizen-branded patrol car has already been spotted in the wild: Motherboard’s report goes further than that, though, digging through internal documents and speaking to former employees who describe a “privatized secondary emergency response network” that would respond to an app...

Whenever we use an app continuously, any change to the UI of that app can cause stress — and during these stressful times, who needs more? For example, in a recent update, Instagram tweaked the way it asks its users to create carousels (groups of up to 10 photos or videos that rotate through a single post), and this is apparently causing a bit of confusion. This new method was pointed out in the Instagram account Digital Mums, where you can find some great tips on how to use various features of Instagram. If you’d prefer some text instructions on how to navigate the change, here you go: In your Instagram app (iOS or Android), select the “Add Post” icon (the plus icon on the top line) You’ll see a selection of your photos. You can change the source of your photos if you wish by clicking on ...

Twitch is launching a dedicated category for hot tub streams after claiming that it has received pushback from advertisers and viewers about how the trend has taken over the platform. The new “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” category is meant to let creators stream what they want, while also giving Twitch advertisers a more convenient way to prevent ads from running on streams that they don’t approve of. Earlier this week, Twitch pulled advertising from some hot tub streamers without warning. In a statement sent to The Verge today, the company said that was a mistake. “We did not alert impacted creators at the time, and we should have–our creators rely on us,” a spokesperson said. Twitch said the ads were suspended at advertisers’ request and that it’s now working with individual creators to...

Jack Edwards doesn’t want to be praised for doing what he considers the bare minimum: making his videos accessible to his deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Edwards began making book and lifestyle videos on YouTube five years ago, but he only started captioning all of his videos in January. “It was one of my goals this year to invest more time into making my channel more accessible for viewers,” he says. “I always think about the quote, ‘It’s a privilege to learn, rather than to experience,’ and that’s true for so many accessibility issues. I don’t rely on subtitles to enjoy YouTube content, so it’s easy to forget that others do.” Captions are up 30 percent year to year More creators like Edwards have been writing captions for their videos over the past year, providing subtitles so that mor...