Technology

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel has been very busy Contributors: Verge Staff On July 29th, the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee held a hearing with four of the biggest figures in tech: Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. But while the CEOs’ testimonies got most of the attention, the subcommittee also published a treasure trove of internal documents from the companies, providing an unexpected look into the internal workings of some of the largest and most secretive companies in the world. Some of those documents have gone into building the antitrust case for breaking these companies up — or at least heavily regulating them. But others simply give a glimpse into how the world’s largest tech companies operate, ...

The latest electric vehicle startup to cash in on a new wave of hype and investment in the space is Li Auto, a five-year-old Chinese company that started trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday after raising $1.1 billion in an initial public offering. It’s the second Chinese EV startup to become a publicly traded company in the United States, following Nio’s 2018 IPO and subsequent listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Another, XPeng, will reportedly be next. With Tesla recently becoming the world’s most valuable automaker, there is suddenly a renewed focus on funding EV startups. Fresh money has been rushing into the likes of Rivian, Nikola, Fisker, Karma, and even suppliers like Velodyne and Hyliion over the last few months from both the public and private sectors. While most of the ones goi...

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee has just released a huge trove of internal documents from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google as part of its vast investigation into the tech industry. The documents reveal the internal machinations of companies that are typically highly secretive — and they even include a few buried emails from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which we’ve shared below. Two sets of emails discuss the decisions that, to this day, keep iPhone and iPad users from buying digital books in Amazon’s apps. (You have to use a web browser as a workaround.) In one email from November 2010, marketing chief Phil Schiller wrote to Jobs, internet services lead Eddy Cue, and product marketing head Greg Joswiak about how Amazon was marketing the Kindle mobile app at the ti...

Less than a day after announcing that the controversial Saudi megacity Neom would become a major sponsor of the League of Legends European Championship, Riot has reversed the decision. The news comes after fans, LEC staff, and Riot employees criticized the decision, due largely to the Saudi government’s long history of human right abuses, which extends to the creation of Neom itself, a city billed as a kind of sci-fi wonderland. In a statement, Alberto Guerrero, Riot’s director of esports for the EMEA region, said: As a company and as a league, we know that it’s important to recognize when we make mistakes and quickly work to correct them. After further reflection, while we remain steadfastly committed to all of our players and fans worldwide including those living in Saudi Arabia and the ...

Earlier this year, Motorola burst back into the flagship phone world with the Motorola Edge Plus, a $999 smartphone designed to go toe to toe with top-tier phones like the Galaxy S20 Ultra or OnePlus 8 Pro. And now it’s following that up with the Motorola Edge, a less expensive, less powerful version that promises sub-flagship features at a sub-flagship $699 price. A cheaper Edge I’ve already talked plenty about the hardware on the Edge Plus in my review of that device earlier this year, so I’ll largely refer you there, seeing as the Edge’s design is identical in all but the color it comes in (a shimmering rainbow-finished black that aggressively picks up fingerprints) and the number of cameras on the back. In short, though, it’s a well-made slab of aluminum and glass that’s fairly unremar...

NASA’s latest Mars rover — a six-wheeled SUV-sized robot named Perseverance — successfully launched from Florida this morning, embarking on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet. Once it reaches Mars, it will attempt a harrowing landing to the surface and start exploring the planet’s terrain, hoping to solve the biggest lingering mysteries about Mars’ past. The primary focus of Perseverance’s mission is to find out if Mars ever hosted life some 3.8 billion years ago. The rover is equipped with multiple instruments to search for signs of ancient microbes that may be lurking in the rocks and dirt on Mars. But most important of all, Perseverance is decked out with a sophisticated drilling system, designed to dig up samples of the planet’s surface, package them, and leave them in stra...

Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad’s lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. It is one of Microsoft’s all-time iconic brands. It’s also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received. In just a few weeks, though,...

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 5G, the 5G version of the foldable phone it released earlier this year, is now available for preorder as an unlocked device on Samsung.com. Prices start at $1,499.99, a $70 premium over the previous LTE version. Along with 5G connectivity, that price gets you a slightly upgraded Snapdragon 865 Plus processor. Otherwise, the two phones are almost identical. Samsung is widely expected to announce a host of new devices at its Galaxy Note 20 Unpacked event on August 5th, including the new Galaxy Z Fold 2. The Z Fold is a tablet-sized device that folds to become the size of a smartphone, while the Z Flip is a more traditional flip phone device that folds in half to become more compact. The Z Fold 2 will reportedly also support 5G. We initially expected the Z Flip 5G to m...

On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its next rover to Mars, the beginning of a years-long mission to figure out if the Red Planet ever hosted life. The rover, called Perseverance, is equipped with instruments to look for evidence of ancient Martian microbes, but its prime goal is to excavate samples and leave them on Mars — so that one day they can be returned to Earth for study. There’s even a tiny helicopter aboard named Ingenuity. Perseverance’s ride to Mars is the Atlas V rocket, made and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Atlas V rockets have previously flown four NASA missions to Mars, including the Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2012. For this flight, the rocket is equipped with four small boosters at its base to give the vehicle an extra boost ...

Google One, the cloud storage service that Google launched back in 2018, will now backup your iOS or Android phone for free with your Google account. The iOS app will be able to backup your photos, videos, contacts and calendar events, consolidating what’s offered by different services like Photos and Drive into one place, Android Authority notes. Meanwhile the Android app, which could already backup a range of files from your phone, will now offer backups without a Google One membership. Along with backing up your files, Google One is also being updated to make it easier to manage which files are being stored. This storage management feature is available from either the app or the web, and will let you manage files saved from Drive, Gmail, and Photos in one place. A new storage manager wi...

Samsung posted better than expected earnings for the second quarter of 2020, with operating profit up 23 percent year-on-year to 8.15 trillion won ($6.84 billion) despite a 6-percent fall in revenue. The Korean conglomerate says it experienced a greater recovery from the impact of COVID-19 than it had initially forecast and managed to optimize its expenditure, even though sales of devices like smartphones were down from last year. Samsung expects smartphone sales to rise next quarter due to the launch of the Galaxy Note 20 and an unnamed foldable phone, likely the leaked Galaxy Z Fold 2. Its display business, which supplies panels for other device makers, saw demand fall but had earnings boosted due to a “one-time gain.” This is understood to be a compensatory payment from Apple after the ...

On Wednesday, lawmakers squared off with the chief executives of the tech industry’s four most powerful players, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Even though each company is under antitrust scrutiny for different reasons, the committee used this week’s hearing to point out similarities between all four, making the case for future regulatory reform. Since last June, lawmakers have been engaged in a sweeping antitrust investigation into the tech sector, honing in on how some of the most notable names in the industry have grown too big by allegedly stifling competition. Lawmakers have heard hundreds of hours of testimony and obtained over one million documents throughout their investigation, a process that made it difficult for CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ...