Technology

The Apple Watch SE 3 is at an all-time low of $199, making the sleeper hit of last year’s Apple Watches an even better value. While the Series 11 and Ultra 3 were iterative updates, the SE 3 was a wide-ranging glow-up that added an always-on display, gestures like double tap and wrist flick, a […]

It's no secret that just about every aspect of video games is getting more expensive. Game consoles are getting regular price hikes, PC components are spiking in cost, and the golden age of affordable handhelds is over, all largely due to the global RAM shortage, which has had a similarly costly impact on PC gaming, […]

The history books are littered with the corpses of corporate record labels started by companies that had no business being in the music industry. Bose thinks it can be the exception to the rule. It thinks it can be Red Bull. And, while Bose has more of a right to dip its toes into the […]

Cold Court is a brother-sister duo from Philly that seems to love nothing more than shoving all of their influences together in a messy soup that at least superficially resembles the hyperpop you've come to expect from acts like 100 Gecs. But, where songs like "Dumbest Girl Alive" goofily wink at pop punk and emo, […]

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Polymarket has been paying people to film themselves placing fake bets and celebrating fake wins on social media. WSJ identified over 1,100 deceptive clips and talked to creators who, despite not stating as such in their videos, confirmed the company paid them to create the clips. The videos […]

If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would just bump around your house, looking for something to suck up, until its battery died or its (way too small) tank filled up. Not that it mattered, though. You probably […]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Last year, […]

The Xperia 1 VIII marks an attempt at a step change for Sony's flagship phone line. Not only has it had an aesthetic overhaul, but Sony has also revamped the camera system, dropping the continuous optical zoom telephoto that's defined the last four generations of Xperia phone. It's not all different. Sony staples like a […]

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over […]

Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and […]

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we […]