Technology

Samsung on Tuesday announced the Galaxy A12 and A02S, two new entry-level phones set to launch next year in Europe. Both offer a lower barrier to entry for anyone looking for a modern Android smartphone. The A12 is designed to be a successor to the A11, sporting a 6.8-inch HD+ display with a notch for the 8-megapixel front-facing camera, an octa-core processor, a fingerprint sensor on the side, and a 5,000mAh battery. Photos are covered by a quad-array of cameras on the back, including a 48-megapixel main sensor, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, and a pair of 2-megapixel sensors to help out with macro and depth shots. The A02S is slightly less impressive: it has the same display and battery but with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (though you can expand storage with its microSD slot). The phone is ...

A few weeks ago, I put on some rubber boots, grabbed a shovel, and went gold prospecting. There’s allegedly gold throughout the river systems near my home in western Washington state, and I made it my goal to find some. I went partly to tick another “things The Verge paid me to do” box and partly to demystify one of the most enduring and unique commodities in the world. Gold has been highly valued for pretty much as long as humans have been formally valuing things. It’s been used as jewelry, money, a dental filling, a garnish, a critical component in electronics, and even a medicine. It’s malleable, conductive, harmless to ingest, noncorroding, and captivating to look at. A big part of gold’s value is predicated on its scarcity. But the… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make M...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Whether you’re shopping for a student, an older relative, or anyone in between, a laptop can make a great gift. And the internet’s largest retailers are offering all kinds of laptops at discounted prices this Black Friday, whether you’re looking for a convertible, a Chromebook, a gaming rig, or anything else. Note that for some models, only certain configurations may be on sale. Make sure to double-check the specs of the item you’re buying to make sure they’ll suit your workload (and that you’re actually getting the discount) before you check out. HP deals A number of HP laptops are on sale through Best Buy’s online store. One of them is the HP Envy x360 13 2-in-1, a portable convertible laptop that offers exceptional value for its… Continue reading&...

Microsoft is in the early phases of rolling out its xCloud streaming service on mobile devices, but TVs are the next logical step. In an interview with The Verge, Xbox chief Phil Spencer has revealed we’ll likely see an Xbox app appear on smart TVs over the next year. “I think you’re going to see that in the next 12 months,” said Spencer, when asked about turning the Xbox into a TV app. “I don’t think anything is going to stop us from doing that.” Spencer previously hinted at TV streaming sticks for Microsoft’s xCloud service last month, and this latest hint suggests we might see similar hardware or an Xbox app for TVs during 2021. Microsoft is currently working on bringing xCloud to the web to enable it on iOS devices, and this work… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Mone...

Google Pixel 5 and Pixel 4A 5G | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google’s line of products has expanded quite a bit over the years, and a bunch of them are discounted for Black Friday. You can find discounts on Nest smart speakers and smart displays, mesh Wi-Fi routers, Pixel phones, Stadia gaming setups, and smart thermostats. Most of the sales are available at a variety of retailers; we’ve linked the most popular ones for each below. If you’re looking for even more Black Friday deals, be sure to check out our continuously updated list of the best deals. Google Pixel phone deals There aren’t a lot of sales on Google’s Pixel phones this year, but if you’ve been eying a Pixel 5 or a 4A 5G, there are a couple of ways to save a few bucks. Pixel 5 activated on Verizon for $499 at B...

Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images Elon Musk has passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the world’s second richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The Tesla CEO’s net worth now sits at around $128 billion, after increasing by $100 billion this year. There is a sizable gap between Musk and the number one spot, which is currently held by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who has a reported net worth of around $182 billion. In January, Musk ranked 35th on the list, Bloomberg reports. For an idea of how the wealth of these men compares to the average American household, check out this amazing data visualization produced earlier this year in which every pixel represents $1,000. Musk’s rapid ascent up the list has mainly been driven by Tesla’s share price…. Continue read...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple on Monday announced an extension to its deadline for requiring in-app purchases for online events and classes offered within iOS apps to June 30th, 2021. Apple previously adjusted what types of events are subject to its in-app purchase policy and standard 30 percent cut back in September, with the original intention of requiring in-app purchases in all appropriate apps by December of this year. Apple cited the coronavirus pandemic, writing in a developer update posted to its website, “As the world fights COVID-19, we recognize that adapting experiences from in-person to digital continues to be a top priority.” This deadline extension means developers have more time to temporarily reap the full profits of their sales Requiring… Continue re...

US President Donald Trump speaks with General Motors CEO Mary Barra during a meeting with automobile industry leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 24th, 2017. | Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images General Motors announced today that it is abandoning Donald Trump’s effort to take away California’s ability to set fuel efficiency standards. The company, along with Fiat Chrysler and Toyota, previously backed Trump’s efforts to roll back fuel efficiency standards. Under the Clean Air Act, California has historically been allowed to set its own emissions standards, which are tougher than federal guidelines and typically set the bar for the entire auto industry in the US. California is the largest auto market in the US and the 10th largest in the wor...

A California grand jury has indicted Apple’s head of global security on charges that he tried to bribe Santa Clara County officials to procure firearms (CCW) licenses, according to a news release. Santa Clara district attorney Jeff Rosen alleges that Thomas Moyer offered 200 iPads — worth about $70,000 — to Capt. James Jensen and Undersheriff Rick Sung in the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office, in exchange for four concealed firearms licenses for Apple employees. The charges came after a two-year investigation. “In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter began showing a warning if you tried to retweet a tweet that had been labeled for potentially including misleading information. Twitter is now planning to expand that warning functionality to when you try to like a labeled tweet, the company announced on Monday. The functionality is rolling out on the web and iOS globally this week, and it will come to Android in the coming weeks, Twitter tells The Verge. Adding a warning decreased quote tweets of misleading information by 29 percent, the company said. It seems Twitter is hoping this new warning shown before likes of labeled tweets will reduce the amount of likes on labeled content. Giving context on why a labeled Tweet is misleading under our… Continue readi...

Image: stacksmashing Intrepid developers have done the expected and necessary: Doom now runs on Nintendo’s recently released Game & Watch portable. The Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. was designed to run three games, but successfully porting Doom shows it can handle others if you have a lot of patience (via Hackaday). This version of Doom is not perfect, of course. In order to get the game to run even at the slower speed shown in the video below, sound had to be disabled and textures had to be simplified to fit the game on the small portable. And getting that far wasn’t easy: programmers stacksmashing and Konrad Beckmann had to trick the Game & Watch to offload its firmware by injecting code into the external storage accessed by the Game & Watch’s tiny… Continue readi...

Photo by VCG / VCG via Getty Images Today, China successfully launched its most ambitious mission to the Moon to date — this one designed to bring a handful of lunar rocks back to Earth before the end of the year. If successful, it’ll be the first time in nearly half a century that dirt from the Moon has been returned to Earth and the first time that China has retrieved materials from another world. The mission, called Chang’e 5, is the latest in a long line of lunar missions that China has been conducting over the last decade. In 2013, the country made its first soft landing on the Moon with Chang’e 3, making China just one of three nations to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface. Then in December 2018, China launched Chang’e 4 and successfully put a lander and rover on… Continue r...