Technology

Amazon is taking a bigger step into cars today by integrating Alexa into Lamborghini’s Huracán EVO, and not just to ask questions or remotely control your home — it’s giving the assistant the ability to control settings inside the car, hands-free. The partnership was originally announced last year as part of Amazon’s push into cars, but the integration goes beyond Alexa’s usual bag of tricks. Alexa’s integration allows users to control “climate and comfort settings including air conditioning, heater, fan speed, temperature, seat heaters, defroster and air flow direction, as well as lighting,” Lamborghini says. (It can also pull up a screen showing you the car’s torque vectoring and traction control.) Of course, Alexa also has its own suite of skills for interacting with your smart home app...

Apple announced Wednesday that it’s building a big battery storage project at a Northern California solar farm it spearhead in 2015. But what the company didn’t share is that the battery packs will come from Tesla, The Verge has learned. The newly-announced setup, which will store up to 240 megawatt-hours of energy, was approved by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 2020, according to documents submitted last year. It will consist of 85 Tesla lithium-ion “megapacks” and be used to help power the company’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Monterey County’s planning chief confirmed that Apple will use the Tesla batteries in an email to The Verge. Apple declined to comment. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Tesla first announced the megapack battery system back in 2...

The PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller is an incredible input device, perhaps the most tangible example of “next-gen” gaming the new wave of consoles has offered to date. But you won’t necessarily see the upgrades just from looking at Sony’s controller. At first glance, there are few differences between the PS4’s DualShock 4 and the PS5’s DualSense, which share nearly identical button layouts. But the DualSense changes the game (literally) nonetheless, thanks to the near-magic of its adaptive trigger system, which can adjust the tension of the rear buttons to make it easier (or harder) to press them down in response to gameplay. It turns out that the answer to revolutionizing the controller isn’t to add more buttons but to make the ones we already have offer a deeper, better experience. ...

Robinhood is cutting out the confetti from its stock trading app, following accusations that the animation helped to “gamify” investing. Instead, the company is adding new animations that will celebrate trading milestones for users in a more somber manner. The celebratory digital confetti showers have been a controversial part of Robinhood’s app since 2016. In the past, Robinhood has argued that the friendly features “help investing fit easily into people’s lives.” But others — including the Massachusetts Securities Division — have argued that the confetti (along with other features, like free stock promotions) help to “gamify” stock trading for amateur investors who may not understand what they’re getting into. The less confetti-filled milestone animation in Robinhood’s app.GIF: Robinhood...

Netflix has acquired the rights to two Knives Out sequels, with Rian Johnson returning to direct the next whodunits and Daniel Craig reprising his starring role as Detective Benoit Blanc, Variety reports. Variety says the deal is worth $450 million, and Deadline reported that the deal would be “worth north of $400 million.” The original Knives Out was a huge hit, earning $311.4 million at the box office on its $40 million budget. As Netflix looks to compete with other streaming services like Disney Plus, Amazon’s Prime Video, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, and others, adding another franchise to its roster of IP could help Netflix keep subscribers over the long term. Plot details about the Knives Out sequels haven’t been revealed, and we don’t know if other actors from the first movie will be retu...

NBCUniversal is mulling whether to remove its films from HBO Max and Netflix and put new movies on its own streaming service, Peacock, according to Bloomberg. Right now, HBO Max has a deal to show Universal Pictures movies about nine months after their theatrical run, and Netflix has a similar one to let it show movies from Illumination Entertainment, according to Bloomberg. Both of those deals will currently expire at the end of the year, Bloomberg says. However, Comcast-owned NBCUniversal reportedly hasn’t made a decision about if it should pull the movies just yet. Execs are also “open” to making new licensing deals with companies, which could mean the films stay where they are or end up somewhere else that’s not Peacock, HBO Max, or Netflix. (Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversa...

While some Alabama Amazon workers were submitting their votes to unionize the company’s first US warehouse last week, something strange was happening on Twitter. Accounts seemingly belonging to warehouse workers were tweeting at users supporting the union or making unsavory comments about Amazon in general. Amazon’s anti-union Twitter army has been a subject of criticism and mockery for the last few years, inspiring a slew of accounts parodying actual Amazon ambassadors, but the Bessemer fight brought it all back into the spotlight. Over the weekend, one parody account, in particular, caught the attention of reporters and Amazon detractors across Twitter: @AmazonFCDarla. Darla’s profile picture looked fake, but the language used in her tweets was eerily similar to that used by real Amazon ...

Apple will remove the female voice as the default for its Siri assistant, according to TechCrunch. The change is effective as of today’s release of the sixth iOS 14.5 beta. Once this latest update is publicly released to all customers, iPhone and iPad users will be prompted to choose their preferred Siri voice during device setup. Previously, Siri defaulted to a female voice, and users would pick another option in settings after the fact. Alongside this change, Apple is also introducing two completely new voices for Siri that, according to TechCrunch, “use source talent recordings that are then run through Apple’s Neural text to speech engine, making the voices flow more organically through phrases that are actually being generated on the fly.” Those new voices are available to English spe...

Donald Trump has been kicked off of Facebook a second time after Media Matters for America raised questions about his appearances on daughter-in-law Lara’s page. Facebook has removed an interview with the former president that was posted by Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump. Lara posted screenshots of emails that appear to be from Facebook (complete with an obligatory 1984 reference), saying that a video of the interview was removed because it featured “the voice of Donald Trump,” along with a warning that posting further content would result in account limitations. The full text of the purported email from Facebook is below: Hi folks,We are reaching out to let you know that we removed content from Lara Trump’s Facebook Page that featured President Trump speaking. In line with the b...

Phone plans are notorious for including the worst kinds of jargon — things that seem to tell you what you’re signing up for but actually conceal a long list of conditions and exceptions. This is the industry that brought us the term “anytime minutes.” Seriously, have you ever really thought about that phrase? Anytime minutes. Even the 10-year-old Portlandia sketch where Kumail Nanjiani sells Fred and Carrie a phone plan is still painfully accurate. (Go watch it for such gems as “After you pay for it, it is free” and “It’s just a one-time fee that you pay annually.”) So it should come as no surprise that when wireless carriers call a service “Unlimited,” there are, in fact, limitations on it. T-Mobile recently brought attention to one of those practices known as “deprioritization” by introd...

Arizona House Bill 2005, a hotly contested piece of legislation that would have imposed developer-friendly changes to Apple and Google’s mobile app stores, is now on death’s door. The bill, which would have allowed alternative payment systems on Android and iOS that bypass the stores’ 30 percent cuts, mysteriously disappeared last week prior to a scheduled vote that could have sent it straight to the governor’s desk to be signed into law. The bill had just won a landmark victory in the Arizona House of Representatives earlier this month, and the state Senate was officially set to begin its vote at 3PM local time. HB2005 was the first bill on the agenda, yet it never came up. Now, it turns out that the Senate decided to pull the bill at the last minute, and its sponsor tells The Verge that ...

The Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective in 12- to 15-year-olds, the companies announced today in a press release. None of the children who received the vaccine in a clinical trial developed COVID-19, and they all developed strong antibody responses. There were no serious side effects. The study included 2,260 participants. Around half received the two-dose vaccine, and the other half received placebo injections. There were 18 cases of COVID-19 found in the placebo group and none in the vaccine group. Based on the study, the vaccine was 100 percent effective in this age group. The study was small, though, so it’s difficult to say if that number will hold up in a larger group. “But obviously, it looks good for the vaccine if there were zero Covid cases among the vaccinated...