Technology

Tesla has started adding a wireless phone charger and USB-C ports to Model 3 vehicles built at its Fremont, Calif. factory, Elektrek reported. As first reported by Drive Tesla Canada, the features were already available in Tesla’s Model Y, and the carmaker began adding them last month to its Chinese-made Model 3 vehicles. The Model Y, which Tesla began delivering to US customers in March, comes standard with the Qi wireless phone charger, but until now, it’s only been available to Model 3 vehicles as an aftermarket add-on, according to Elektrek . Tesla lowered the prices of its Model 3, Model S, and Model X in North America last month, as well as the prices of the Model S and Model X cars sold in China. Its Chinese-produced Model 3 cars didn’t see a price reduction. The price cuts were rep...

SpaceX launched 58 new Starlink satellites on its Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday morning, and three satellites from Planet tagged along for the ride. The SpaceX satellites are part of its growing Starlink constellation, which it’s building to provide internet connectivity on Earth. The company has permission to launch some 12,000 satellites as part of the project. The Falcon 9 rocket launched the satellites, then returned safely to Earth, landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The Planet satellites are part of that company’s existing SkySat constellation, which includes just over a dozen washing machine-sized craft that generate high-resolution images of our home planet. Three more Planet satellites will go up on SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 Starlink launch in J...

Twitter has reinstated the account for markets blogging site Zero Hedge, and says its decision to suspend the account for “platform manipulation” earlier this year was a mistake, Bloomberg reported. The January suspension of its Twitter account followed a report from Zero Hedge suggesting that a Chinese scientist had created the coronavirus in a lab, a theory that has since been widely debunked. Zero Hedge says in a post on its site Saturday that Twitter told them the suspension was for violating its rules against abuse and harassment, and reiterated its position that the suspension was “motivated by reasons other than the stated ones.” Its post argues Zero Hedge did not dox the scientist in question, but used publicly available information in its report. In its January blog post, Zero Hed...

Even if the world’s biggest video game expos have been canceled this year, we’re being treated to an unprecedented array of virtual events in their place — and today, what’s been dubbed the Summer Game Fest will continue with the PC Gaming Show and the Future Games Show, starting at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. Here’s what to look forward to, and how to watch. The PC Gaming Show What: The PC Gaming Show will showcase “new games, never-before-seen gameplay footage, and announcements from some of PC gaming’s biggest and most interesting developers.” You can see the full lineup of developers involved here. The event will be two hours long, though unlike previous years, it will be pre-recorded instead of shown live. The event was originally scheduled for June 6th, but was delayed to June 13th to “make sp...

Father’s Day in the US is coming up on Sunday, June 21st. That’s next week, so you still have time to do some shopping. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic still has many retail stores shuttered, we recommend doing most of your shopping for dad online. Though, if you’re running short on time to buy a gift, you might be able to arrange a curbside pickup depending on the store. There are a lot of things you can get for the dad in your life, but of course we are here to recommend some tech gifts we think they’ll like. You’ll find a few deals that we know about specific to Father’s Day below, followed by some good offers we’ve had on the site recently. There will be more deals next week, so stay tuned for those later on. Nomad is offering a 20 percent discount on all of its leather cases and char...

It’s not often the humble bicycle finds itself at the center of national upheaval. Images of police officers using bicycles to harass people peacefully demonstrating the killing of unarmed black people this past week, in addition to cops violently seizing and confiscating protesters’ bikes, have prompted an unusually forceful response from the cycling community. One bike company even went so far as to sever ties with police departments. BikeCo, the official distributor of Fuji Bikes in North America, announced it was suspending the sale of its bikes to police departments after viewing videos of NYPD officers using Fuji-branded mountain bikes to threaten and corral protesters. “We have seen instances in the last week where police have used bicycles in violent tactics, which we did not inten...

There’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and a rotation of other reporters and editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are: During the first part of the show, Verge reporter Megan Farokhmanesh and games editor Andrew Webster take over to run through everything announced at Sony’s virtual event on Thursday — from all the games to the long-awaited reveal of the PS5 design. A little over 14 minutes into the show, Dieter and Nilay discuss first impressions of the Android 11 beta that was released this week, Google countersuing Sonos for patent infringement, and the potential announcement at Apple’s WWDC about switching MacBooks to ARM processors. Last but not least, Verge rep...

Wonder Woman 1984 and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet are being delayed as studios grapple with when they can start releasing their biggest movies in theaters around the world. Tenet will now open on July 31st, instead of July 17th. It’s the second delay for Wonder Woman, which was originally slated to premiere June 5th, then August 14th, and will now arrive on October 2nd. “We’re especially thrilled, in this complex and rapidly changing environment, to be bringing Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet,’ a global tentpole of jaw-dropping size, scope and scale, to theaters around the world on July 31,” Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said in a statement to Variety. “It’s been longer than any of us could’ve imagined since we’ve seen a movie on the big screen, and to acknowledge Chris’...

Sony has finally shown off what the PlayStation 5 will look like, but there’s one very big question about the design that’s still unclear: just how big is the PlayStation 5? We’ll likely have to wait until Sony gives official dimensions (or shows the physical box next to something else for scale) of the controversial design to know for sure, but that isn’t stopping fans on the internet from doing their best to estimate things. And based on early guesses, the PS5 is going to be huge — perhaps even the biggest mainstream console in years. The image below, created by Reddit user u/GREBO7, shows an estimate of how the PS5 fares compared to other recent Xbox and PlayStation consoles, including the upcoming Xbox Series X. Noticeably, the Playstation 5 is incredibly tall, with a ResetEra thread e...

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is already looking to dig more tunnels in Las Vegas, Nevada, after it finished excavating the first two under the city’s convention center last month. Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom tweeted a map last week that shows a proposed set of tunnels that would run west from the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the Wynn and the Encore, hotel casinos owned by Wynn Resorts. This week, Wynn Resorts announced that, working with The Boring Company, it had submitted a land-use application for that project. Resorts World Las Vegas, a new complex being built just northwest of the Wynn and the Encore by Malaysian resort conglomerate Genting, says it has also submitted an application for a similar connector to the LVCC. Late Friday, The Verge obtained the both sets ...

Just weeks after the launch of HBO Max, which added to the already confusing HBO product lineup of HBO, HBO Go, and HBO Now, WarnerMedia is making some changes in an attempt to reduce some of the confusion about which app is for which purpose. A short primer on HBO Max, before I go further: HBO Max is AT&T’s new streaming service that lets you access the entire HBO library plus additional content like Cartoon Network shows and the Studio Ghibli movies. You can subscribe to HBO Max directly for a $14.99 monthly fee, but it’s also offered for free from many cable providers if you subscribe to HBO, and it’s free as part of some AT&T wireless, internet, or TV plans. We’ve compiled a guide for which subscriptions give you access here. HBO Max is really an expanded and rebranded version ...

Light, the company behind the Nokia 9’s unique array of five rear cameras, has given up on its unconventional effort to revolutionize the cameras in our pockets. In a statement to Android Authority, Light said it’s “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.” Light set out to overcome the limitations of small camera sensors — like those in our phones — by cramming a ton of cameras (each with different focal lengths) onto one device and combining the data from all those modules. Its proof of concept for this was the $2,000 L16 camera. In a review, my colleague Sean O’Kane credited the L16 as being an engineering marvel and said it indeed delivered better image quality than most mobile devices. But it still lagged well behind mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, and clearly wasn’t cut out for ...