Technology

One Night in Miami | Amazon Prime Video I am currently suffering from The Crown withdrawal after finishing Season 4, and (like pretty much everyone) predicting we’ll see Emmy nominations for Gillian Anderson (Margaret Thatcher) and Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles). Also I’m very on board with this suggestion that Erin Doherty deserves her own Princess Anne spinoff series (please get on this asap, Netflix). She’s spectacular. I’m not quite ready to commit to a new streaming series yet so went to the backlog of movies I have queued up; I tried to get into Queen’s Gambit but honestly, I don’t get the hype about that movie, the dialogue is so clunky. I even went so far as to open an actual physical book yesterday (lol) before restarting Season 1 of The Crown (hi Claire Foy and John… Contin...

This is the new fourth-generation Echo speaker. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon has unveiled a heap of Black Friday deals to give you an early start on your holiday shopping. While we expect many more deals across all categories of tech for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these ones are focused on Amazon-made devices. This is especially good news since there are a bunch of new products seeing their first price cuts, including Amazon’s ball-shaped Echo speakers and Eero’s fastest mesh Wi-Fi routers. Plus, there are some solid deals on Fire TV streaming devices. Smart speakers and displays The smaller Echo Dot that takes the same globular form of the more expensive Echo is just $29 (usually $50) If you want the new spherical Echo Dot with a digital clock embedded in the fabric, that...

Photo by Andrew Lipovsky / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Charli D’Amelio is the first TikTok creator to hit 100 million followers. She’s the first by some distance, too — only two other creators have cracked 50 million. On TikTok, that makes her more than twice as big as Will Smith, three times as big as The Rock, four times as big as Selena Gomez, and five times as big as Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande. It also means she reached 100 million subscribers in record time. On YouTube, it took 14 years before any channel hit 100 million. D’Amelio only started posting to TikTok in May 2019, and the app has only been available (under its current branding, at least) since August 2018. TikTok doesn’t have many opportunities for creators to make money It’s a huge milestone for both her and ...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter’s new ephemeral tweets, known as fleets, are supposed to last for only 24 hours. But a new bug was causing fleets to not totally disappear, remaining accessible well past their expiration dates. First reported by TechCrunch, the bug allows fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users, but without notifying the fleet’s author. Twitter didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on Sunday, but told TechCrunch it was aware of the bug, accessible via a “technical workaround” which meant a fleet’s URL could be accessed after 24 hours had passed. “We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly,” a spokesperson said. The “workaround” referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets… Continu...

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Ahead of Black Friday 2020, one of the best Nintendo deals is available early. If you are looking to buy a Nintendo Switch, Best Buy has a bundle that includes the console, a digital code for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and three months of Nintendo Switch Online for just $300. It’s a unique deal — the Nintendo Switch costs $300, a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe costs $60, and three months of Nintendo Switch Online is $8. The Nintendo Switch included with the bundle is the updated model, as confirmed to us by a spokesperson at Best Buy. The updated Switch model includes two more hours of battery life than the original model. While in handheld, the updated Switch can be used anywhere between 4.5 hours to nine hours on a single charge, depending on… Continue rea...

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has an enviable camera | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge The iPhone 12 Pro Max is Apple’s biggest iPhone ever, with a 6.7-inch display that boasts a camera system our reviewer called “one of the most confident smartphone cameras.” In its latest teardown, iFixit shows how big this impressive camera actually is compared to other iPhones. iFixitThe iPhone 12 Pro Max camera is quite large The primary wide-angle sensor “dwarfs the iPhone 12’s sensor,” iFixit says, coming in around 47 percent larger. But it has the same 12 MP resolution as the smaller model. The 12 Pro Max’s sensor-shift image stabilization system— found on most DSLR cameras— adds bulk to the large main camera, iFixit found. The 12 Pro Max’s L-shaped battery is the largest among all current iPhone…...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Universal Electronics Inc. (UEI) has introduced its version of the notoriously unpopular Apple TV remote “specifically developed and designed” for cable, satellite, and MVPD (multichannel video program distributor) customers, the company announced. The remote uses Bluetooth low energy or infrared to connect with the box, has a microphone to speak commands to Siri, and its universal remote function allows control of TVs and audio devices from any brand or manufacturer. It has backlit keys, which activate via an ambient light sensor, a button to flip through channels, and a mute button, according to UEI. “We’re excited that customers worldwide will soon be able to enjoy this new remote, designed specifically for the growing number of… Continue re...

A volunteer in Los Angeles distributes food to people financially hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. | Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images Celebrating Thanksgiving during a pandemic is weird. It’s more stress, more risk calculations, more staying away from people you’d normally draw close to. It feels sucky and dark and I know there’s a lot of people like me who are going to be so grateful for 2020 to be over. But as much as this year has been the worst, it’s also shown us how we humans can be a lot better when we actually try. This year, I’m thankful for the researchers who have worked carefully and swiftly to develop extremely promising vaccine candidates. They took an impossible task and got it to the finish line in record time. I’m thankful for the volunteers who were willing to enroll...

SpaceX will launch a total of 12,000 satellites it needs for its Starlink space-to-ground internet service | Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images Beginning at noon PT/3PM ET Saturday, a group of SpaceX engineers working on the Starlink satellite project will answer questions on Reddit about its Better than Nothing Beta program. The ultimate goal of the Starlink program is to provide global internet coverage from space, and SpaceX launched the public beta test last month, after introducing a private beta over the summer. Beta users had to buy all of the Starlink ground equipment for $499 and then pay a $99 monthly fee for active service to participate in the program. An email to those invited to the public beta said users could “expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150M...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest shopping days of the year, a relentless, deals-packed weekend when you can find the best prices on tech products like laptops, 4K TVs, phones, and more. And of course, these good deals are all accessible online. You can count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, but if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking site. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, with their own special features. All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added products that you’re interested in keeping an… Conti...

A Moderna trial participant has his arm disinfected before before receiving the vaccine. | Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post via Getty Images Pfizer / BioNTech’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines have a lot in common: they’ve both been highly effective in clinical trials, they’re both gene-based vaccines, and they also each require two doses. That last point is pretty standard for vaccines. “If you look at all the FDA approved vaccines, the vast majority will require multiple doses,” says Otto Yang, an infectious disease specialist at UCLA Health. Here’s why some of the most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates are no exception. A vaccine works by exposing the body to a small part of the virus so that the immune system can learn to recognize it. More than one dose m...