Technology

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is hosting Saturday Night Live this week. He’s coming in fresh from Wednesday’s successful Starship prototype landing but also on the heels of recent customer complaints about Tesla’s Solar Roof costs and last month’s deadly Tesla crash. If you have the desire to spend part of your Saturday finding out if the self-proclaimed Technoking makes a good comedy show host, here are the details. How do I watch? SNL airs on NBC, and it’s available to watch on the NBC website if you have a cable login. It will also be available on other live TV streaming services like Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, and Fubo TV. If you don’t catch it live, SNL episodes are available on Hulu and Peacock the next day. When does it start? It starts at 11:30PM ET on May 8th, which...

The ZTE Blade 11 Prime offers one standout feature in a field of largely similar sub-$200 phones: wireless charging. In the smartphone trickle-down economy, wireless charging is basically guaranteed on any flagship-level phone, but it’s still hit-and-miss among midrange phones and all but absent from the budget class. You’re much more likely to find a really big battery on a sub-$200 phone than wireless charging. Outside of that feature, the $192 Blade 11 Prime’s specs are much the same as competing models like the Galaxy A12 and Moto G Play. Like those models, it offers a 6.5-inch 720p LCD, though it includes a little more RAM (4GB compared to 3GB) and a little less battery capacity (4,000mAh compared to 5,000mAh). Verge Score 5.5 out of 10 Good Stuff Wireless charging in a budget phone G...

In March 2013, Irrational Games released BioShock Infinite, the third game in the bestselling BioShock shooter series. It should have been a triumphant moment — early reviews were strong, the game shipped millions of copies, and the developers started work on an expansion called Burial At Sea. But less than a year later, studio head Ken Levine called employees into the kitchen for an all-hands meeting. He told them that Irrational — the team behind one of the last decade’s most acclaimed and successful series, just weeks from releasing its final chapter — was shutting down. Irrational is one of several studios featured in Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. Press Reset is the second book from Jason Schreier, a Bloomberg journalist known for his detailed inside looks ...

Whether you’ve fully committed to the smart home ecosystem or are just dabbling in the space for the first time, picking up a smart speaker is a no-brainer for most people. If you haven’t yet grabbed an Amazon or Google smart speaker, however, Adorama is taking $31 off the Google Nest Mini as part of its latest flash sale through Sunday, May 9th. Simply use the promo code EXTRAOFF11 at checkout to knock an additional $11 off the listed sale price and receive free shipping. Like its predecessor, the second-gen Google Nest Mini offers a range of voice-activated features, only with bolder sound, capacitive touch zones, and an improved design that allows you to hang the device on your wall. At the core of the fabric-lined puck is Google Assistant, which allows you quickly set reminders, stream...

More than 200 Alphabet employees have signed a petition from Google childcare workers asking for a commute stipend. The petition calls for workers to be given an extra $1,500 per month to help pay for ride-shares, car rentals, or other transportation costs. Google is asking childcare workers and educators to return to in-person work on Monday, May 10th, while the company’s shuttle service remains suspended. Some make as little as $25 an hour. “Transportation isn’t just a nice-to-have for us, it’s fundamental if we want to do our job,” said Denise Belardes, a childcare worker, in a press release. “We’re not the ones making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. We do not have the option to work from home as other Googlers. We need this stipend.” Google maintains four childcare centers...

If you have ever wanted to see a bunch of mumbly nerds struggle to define what constitutes a “game,” well, is Epic v. Apple the trial for you! What is the difference between an “app” and a “game?” This sounds like a stoner question but instead occupied a fair amount of the morning in Epic v. Apple. Roblox, explained Apple’s marketing manager Trystan Kosmynka, was an app. See, games have a beginning, an end, and challenges. “There’s experiences within Roblox that we did not look at as a game,” Kosmynka said. We did establish that Minecraft is a game, though, so that’s nice for Microsoft. A screenshot of Roblox on the Apple App Store, as of May 7 at 8PM ET Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers did not understand this distinction and neither did I. But here’s the problem for Apple: if Roblox is a game...

Shortly before the Epic v. Apple trial, Epic Games made an interesting announcement: it would offer the indie game storefront Itch.io as an app on its own Epic Games Store. The Fortnite publisher was going to trial with the aim of making Apple offer competing app stores on its iPhone and iPad, so the move showed that Epic was willing to open up its own store in the same way. On the fifth day of court, however, Apple tried to turn Itch.io into a liability — by telling Epic Games Store general manager Steven Allison about “so-called adult games” that were “so offensive we cannot speak about them here.” Itch.io is one of relatively few non-game apps on the Epic Games Store, along with software like the Brave browser. It’s also, as we’ve previously described it at The Verge, “small and weird.”...

Last May, TiVo attempted to muscle in on Roku and Amazon with an HDMI streaming dongle of its own — the $70 TiVo Stream 4K, which traded in the company’s traditional live TV + DVR functionality for the likes of Sling TV, Netflix, HBO and YouTube. It now appears that attempt was so unsuccessful, the company’s planning to abandon its Android TV dongle efforts entirely. Xperi Holdings CEO Jon Kirchner explained in an earnings call (via Zatz Not Funny) that it no longer feels it can compete using Android TV — the company likes to think its differentiator is a content guide that surfaces and lets you search for shows and movies across a variety of apps, but now that Google’s already baked something like that into its new “Google TV” layer on top of Android TV and sells it for just $50, TiVo doe...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk — the first or second richest man in the world, depending on the phase of the Moon — will host Saturday Night Live this weekend (the first or second funniest show that airs on Saturday evenings, depending on if anything else is on TV). The event is a strange confluence of things that The Verge covers: a powerful tech leader with ambitions that are as huge as his blind spots, and someone destined to barrage you with so many dad jokes that one is bound to land at some point. Plus maybe Dogecoin? (A meme gone so awry that it’s shaping the actual landscape of the physical world is definitely some Verge shit.) So what can we expect when Musk takes the stage late on Saturday evening? Using a bit of algorithmic trickery and some advanced machine learning (aka The Verge staff t...

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has tweeted an apology about a bug that deleted users’ story posts on Thursday. The timing was unfortunate for activists trying to raise awareness about missing Indigenous women, with organizations Red Dress and National Day of Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG, abbreviated by some as MMIWG2S to include two-spirit people) questioning whether their posts had somehow been erased deliberately. According to Instagram, however, the bug affected stories, archives, and highlights of Instagram users across the globe. Mosseri and Instagram’s statement about the deletions say this isn’t the case and that the stories were not removed because of anything content-related. He specifically addressed the Indigenous people’s concerns. “This d...

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 on The Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter talk with Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson and senior editor Tom Warren about the first week of the Epic Games v. Apple trial. Adi and Tom are among the group of Verge newsroom staff who are reporting and live-tweeting important moments from the ongoing trial, so they join the podcast to discuss their takeaways and discoveries throughout the week from questioning, testimonials, and documents in court. You can listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear the full discussion. Further reading: You Deserve to Make Money Even When you ...

Today, there’s only one official way to play Google’s Stadia game streaming service on your 4K TV — the last-gen Chromecast Ultra, connected to the company’s proprietary Stadia Controller over Wi-Fi. That’s because Google hasn’t yet brought Stadia to the new-and-improved $50 Chromecast, and its predecessor didn’t support Bluetooth, meaning the only way to pair a controller was to loop through Google’s servers in the cloud. But Google now has a workaround, 9to5Google reports. There’s a new “bridge mode” hidden in the latest version of the Stadia app on Android that should let you send controller signals from your phone — letting you play Stadia with your phone’s touchscreen, or even connect another gamepad to your phone. You’ll be able to use your phone to change your TV’s volume, too, acco...