Technology

I know I am very late to the party (by like five years) but just started watching Grace and Frankie on Netflix and can I just say how wonderful it is to see amazing actresses like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin at the height of their powers? Goals, I tell you. Lots of new trailers this week, including one I am extremely excited for: The new series based on Stephen King’s 1978 book The Stand, about a deadly pandemic that forces survivors to choose between good and evil factions. Hey, how’s that for newly relevant?! One of the characters in the trailer even remarks about someone who will “keep us safe in these uncertain times,” so. [embedded content] The Stand The Stand remains one of King’s best novels, a massive tome with more than a hundred characters and intertwining plots. It was the subjec...

Twitter disabled some sharing options on a tweet from President Trump on Sunday, and labeled it for violating its rules against spreading coronavirus misinformation. In the tweet, the president said he had “A total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday. That means I can’t get it (immune) and can’t give it. Very nice to know!!” Even with the label, the tweet is still available for those who click through the warning, in keeping with Twitter’s position that keeping tweets from elected officials visible is in the public interest. And attempts to share the tweet bring up an alert that reads “We try to prevent a Tweet like this that otherwise breaks the Twitter Rules from reaching more people.” The labeled tweet is still able to be quote-tweeted, however. The president’s asse...

The first time you boot up an Xbox One game on an Android phone can be surreal. Earlier this month, I opened the Game Pass app on a Pixel 3A phone, connected an Xbox One controller via Bluetooth in the device settings, and tapped the “play” button on the page for Halo 5: Guardians. After a somewhat lengthy loading time, there I was on the menu screen, ready to play the exact same Halo 5 campaign that I left unfinished back in 2016. It surprised me that my save file was intact and accessible in the cloud, letting me pick up right where I left off. The best part: I didn’t even have to unpack the Xbox One where I originally played the game. It’s sitting unplugged in a box, exactly where I left it since moving back to the East Coast at the end of the summer. xCloud is a rough draft version of ...

Courtney Atencio rides low to the ground, swerving in and out of long, empty California streets. In one video, she grabs the back of a Toyota Camry and cruises along behind it. In another, she’s with her pals, practicing tricks at a local skate park. Every time, Atencio’s clips are undeniably cool, and they quickly become flooded with comments from fans asking for tips on how to start skating. Atencio didn’t start skating or her TikTok account to achieve fame, but she quickly found communities in both that she never experienced when she was growing up. “When I was 14, guys would make fun of me for trying to go to the skate park because I’m the only female there,” Atencio told The Verge. “Having TikTok, to be able to show girls that you’re not alone, you can still skate, you don’t even list...

Computer manufacturers shipped 79 million personal computers in the third quarter of 2020, an uptick of 13 percent year-over-year with Lenovo leading the pack, technology analyst firm Canalys reported. Looking at worldwide desktop, laptop, and workstation shipments, Canalys found Acer shipped 5.6 million units last quarter for a 15 percent increase from the year-ago quarter. That was the largest percentage increase from 2019. But Lenovo shipped the most units in the third quarter, at 19.3 million, an 11 percent increase from last year, followed by HP with 18.6 million, a 12 percent year-over-year uptick. Dell shipped 11.9 million units in Q3 which was actually a decrease of 0.5 percent from the year prior, while Apple shipped 6.3 million units for an increase of 13.2 percent. Earlier this ...

NASA has delayed the launch of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission until early- to mid-November, the agency announced Saturday. The mission eventually will bring three NASA astronauts and an astronaut from Japan’s JAXA space agency to the International Space Station. Originally scheduled for October 31st, the planned six-month mission was delayed to allow time to resolve issues with the first-stage engine gas generators on the Falcon 9 rocket, NASA said in a statement. When it does launch, American astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, plus Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will be aboard SpaceX’s first operational crewed mission to the ISS. Crew-1 is among six planned missions SpaceX plans to send to the ISS under a contract with NASA, awarded in 2014 as part of the Commerc...

For its very first gaming chair, it looks like Razer decided to largely copy one of today’s oft-cited favorites: the new $499 Razer Iskur is a dead ringer for the similarly-priced Secretlab Omega and Titan. You can compare the design, the recline mechanism, the stitching — heck, just look at those nigh-identical 4D armrests below — and the inspiration is plainly clear. And yet Razer explicitly tells The Verge it’s not a collaboration with Secretlab, saying the chair was “designed and developed in-house.” Perhaps they share a manufacturer, though? But Razer is also clearly pitching the Iskur as a step ahead of Secretlab in terms of spinal support, as you can see in this thinly veiled comparison image: Image: Razer Aside from being a distinct hybrid of the Secretlab Omega’s smaller bucket se...

Razer’s Blade Stealth 13 is one of the best portable gaming laptops you can buy. Today, the company is giving it a refresh: it just announced a “late 2020” model of its 13-inch rig. The only really big change from the Blade Stealth 13 that came out earlier this year seems to be the processor. The upcoming Blade is powered by a chip from Intel’s newest generation, the Core i7-1165G7. That comes with a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of (upgradeable) storage. Razer claims that it’s “up to 2.7 times” faster in content creation and “more than 20 percent faster” in office productivity than the previous generation. Image: Razer The other noteworthy change is that there’s now an FHD OLED touchscreen option, which Razer says will cover 100 percent of the DCI-P3 space. (This would be fo...

Last January, we showed you Razer’s awesome-looking Tomahawk Elite desktop PC case, with its gull-wing doors and auto-lifting lid for excessive heat. This January, I told you about the stunning Razer Tomahawk prebuilt desktop, with slide-out upgradable Intel NUC Element modules and space for the latest GPUs despite its tiny 10-liter frame. As far as we can tell, no product called the “Razer Tomahawk” has actually ever shipped. But that isn’t keeping Razer from trying again today with a pair of practical-looking PC cases for rolling your own system. Image: Razer The new $199 Razer Tomahawk A1 (ATX) and $179 Tomahawk M1 (Mini-ITX) are fairly standard if quite flexible cases with a few features that set them apart — primarily, a pair of tempered glass panels with rear hinges so they can swive...

Huawei has tweeted that it will reveal its Mate 40 series on October 22nd, likely the last of its phones to have Kirin chips— at least for the foreseeable future— due to the ongoing economic pressure from the US. Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business unit, said at a conference August 7th that “this year may be the last generation of Huawei Kirin high-end chips.” The US has accused Huawei of building backdoors into network infrastructure, ostensibly to aid Chinese government spying efforts. Huawei has denied the Trump administration’s accusations of spying. But the Trump administration placed Huawei and 114 of its affiliates on its Entity List in May 2019, which meant US firms were unable to sell technology to the company without explicit US government approval. It also meant Google...

President Donald Trump says he’s recovered from COVID-19. Outside doctors say it’s too soon for him to return to public events, he’s coughing on Fox News, and he’s taking a potent steroid that can mask symptoms — but Trump says he’s not sick anymore. And he’s crediting that recovery to an experimental drug made by the company Regeneron, which he said on Wednesday was a “cure.” “They gave me Regeneron, and it was, like, unbelievable. I felt good immediately,” he said in a video recorded at the White House. There’s no evidence that the Regeneron drug had anything to do with how good Trump did or did not feel. There’s hardly any data that the drug, which is a cocktail of artificial antibodies against the coronavirus, works at all. So far, all we have are a few bits of information on a small g...

Aside from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Day has become one of the biggest shopping moments of the year. It’s a two-day stretch wherein Amazon Prime members will likely find some of the best prices yet on popular tech products like games, gaming consoles, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more. And with Prime Day 2020 happening so close to the year’s end, this week could be a good time to snag some gifts. Of course, not all of the best Prime Day 2020 deals will live on Amazon. Many other retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Walmart, and many more will also run competing deals you’ll probably want to know about. 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 know about price drops on products you...