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Image: Shira Inbar for The Verge

Day one of Prime Day is underway, and we’ve got the skinny on which tech deals are worth your attention (and maybe your money). Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale is here through July 17th, offering you a chance to save big on all kinds of gadgets and endless amounts of other junk you probably don’t need. And we’re here to help you separate the wheat from the chaff.
We’re surfacing discounts that are actually worth the time and attention of a voracious tech enthusiast — or just someone looking to at least save something on a nice little upgrade of an aging device.

Below, we’ve compiled our most comprehensive and wide-ranging roundup of Prime Day deals, which includes noise-canceling headphones, tablets, TVs, smart home accessories, and much more. Many of these deals require an Amazon Prime membership, though you can sign up for a free 30-day trial to access them (and always cancel later).
We try to pool together a little somethin’-somethin’ for everyone, but if you don’t find anything here that moves your needle, be sure to check out the full breadth of our coverage — including more specific posts covering categories like games, streaming devices, and a competing sales event that doesn’t require a subscription.

Prime Day deals spotlight

The best Prime Day deals on headphones and earbuds

The AirPods Max are on sale at Amazon for their all-time low of $394.99 ($155 off). Apple’s luxurious headphones are built from hefty aluminum and feature impressive sound with support for spatial audio. Just keep in mind they lack a 3.5mm jack and, instead, rely on Bluetooth unless you buy an optional Lightning to 3.5mm cable for $35. Read our review.
The Beats Studio Pro are down to $169.99 (a massive $180 off) at Amazon. The noise-canceling headphones may have a slightly outdated look (they look like many prior sets of Beats), but they’re an excellent value if you want flexibility across Android and iOS. Read our review.
The Beats Studio Buds are still a serviceable pair of noise-canceling earbuds even if they’re a few years old since they’re just $79 (around $70 off) at Amazon. Just keep in mind the newer Studio Buds Plus have a variety of improvements and an even more fun, see-through design for $129.99 ($40 off). Read our review.

Google’s Pixel Buds A-Series are selling for their usual all-time low of $69 ($30 off) at Amazon. They’re a little long in the tooth for a midrange pair of wireless earbuds, but they remain a great low-cost option for Pixel phone owners. Read our review.
Amazon is selling the Echo Buds with Active Noise Cancellation with a wired charging case for $34.99 ($85 off) or a wireless charging case for $44.99 ($95 off). It’s hard to beat the value of these ANC buds, even if other models have better noise cancellation. Read our review.

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds FE may be a little no-frills since they lack features like wireless charging and multipoint connectivity; however, at just $69.99 ($30 off) at Amazon, they remain Samsung’s cheapest pair of noise-canceling earbuds. Read our review.

The donut-shaped Sony LinkBuds are selling for $128 ($50 off) at Amazon, matching the best price we’ve seen on the open-style earbuds. Their unique design offers a comfy fit that allows outside noise in, helping keep you aware of your surroundings. Read our review.
If you don’t need a cutting-edge pair of headphones, it’s hard to deny how good Sony’s WH-1000XM4 still sound, especially when you can grab them at Amazon for $198 ($150 off). Plus, unlike the newer XM5 that has usurped them, the older XM4 fold down for more convenient storage and travel. Read our review.
Are you on a tighter budget but still want some noise-canceling headphones? Check out the Sony WH-CH720N, which are selling for $88 (about $61 off) at Amazon. They’re not as fancy as the pricier XM models, but they have up to 35 hours of battery life and weigh just 192 grams.

The best Prime Day deals on smart speakers and smart displays

Amazon is selling its new Echo Spot for $44.99 ($35 off), exclusively for Prime members. The semicircular smart display supports customizable clock faces and Alexa, allowing you to set your alarm and pull up the weather with your voice.
The fourth-gen Echo is on sale at Amazon for $54.99 ($45 off). The Prime-exclusive deal takes $35 off the spherical smart speaker, which can be easily used to control smart home features via Alexa or double as a Wi-Fi extender for Eero mesh systems. Read our review.
The Echo Show 5 (third-gen) is down to $49.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, nearly matching its all-time low. The latest Show 5 is one of Amazon’s smallest smart displays, making it ideal for just about any room in the house where you might want a little bit of music, news updates, or access to video calls. Ring owners can also easily integrate it with their video doorbells for live feeds of the front door.

The best Prime Day deals on tablets and e-readers

Apple’s latest iPad Mini is on sale at Amazon starting at $379.99 ($120 off) in its base configuration with Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage. The Mini was redesigned back in 2021 with a USB-C port and A15 Bionic processor, and it remains the go-to option if you want a smaller, 8.3-inch tablet from Apple. Read our review.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S9 features a lovely OLED screen, speedy performance, and some great speakers for a tablet. It’s currently on sale in several colors at Amazon with 128GB of storage and Wi-Fi starting at $599.99 ($200 off). Read our review.
Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids is selling for $149.99 ($20 off) at Amazon right now. The kid-friendly editions are often the low-key best value for a Kindle when they go on sale, especially since this incarnation of the 6.8-inch e-reader doesn’t have ads and includes a case and an extended warranty. Just keep the parental lock features turned off if you plan on using it. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on TVs and streaming devices

The best Prime Day deals on phones

The OnePlus 12R is selling for just $349.99 ($150 off) at Amazon. The midrange phone comes with a flagship-level processor and a large 6.78-inch display. It lacks wireless charging, but it makes up for it slightly with superfast 80W wired charging. Read our review.
The Samsung A35 5G is $299.99 ($100 off) at Amazon. It’s got surprisingly good specs for a budget-friendly phone, including IP67 water and dust resistance usually reserved for much pricier handsets. Read our buying guide.

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 FE is $449.99 ($150 off) at Amazon, which is a good deal for the colorful midrange phone (though it was $50 cheaper last holiday season). The S23 FE is one of Samsung’s rehashed “FE” models, meaning it has the processor of the older S22 flagship but offered at a lower price. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on laptops and computer accessories

If you need a basic, no-frills way to elevate your laptop to eye level, then this Nulaxy Laptop Stand is likely to get the job done. It’s on sale for just $15.86 ($6 off) when you click the on-page coupon at Amazon.
The Ugreen USB 3.0 Switcher, which allows you to share four USB ports across two computers, is down to $35.99 ($10 off) at Amazon. It’s particularly handy if you work from home and want to use the same accessories for work and personal computers.

Logitech’s Litra Glow is on sale for $45.11 (about $15 off) at Amazon. The compact streaming light has controllable brightness and a simple foot for mounting atop a laptop or monitor.

The best Prime Day deals on smart home tech

Ring’s Wired Doorbell Pro (formerly known as the Video Doorbell Pro 2) is selling for $149.99 ($70 off) at Amazon for Prime subscribers. This model may be a few years old, but it has excellent 1536 x 1536-resolution square video with HDR to show your whole porch. If your house has the wiring, it remains one of the fastest-responding video doorbells you can get. Read our review.

Amazon is selling its newer Ring Battery Doorbell Plus for $99.99 ($50 off) for Prime members. This is our top pick for battery-powered video doorbells thanks to its speedy response time and square head-to-toe view (1536 x 1536 resolution), which can also be found on the Pro models. Read our buying guide.

Amazon’s Smart Air Quality Monitor is down to $46.99 ($23 off) at Amazon for Prime subscribers. The compact monitor can give you voice alerts when air quality is low and trigger Alexa Routines to turn on a compatible purifier, dehumidifier, or fan. Read our review.
The Withings Body Smart scale offers a unique approach to weigh-ins, allowing you to focus less on the number and more on how you’re trending with gentle emoji. It’s available at Amazon for $79.95 ($20 off) in either black or white. Read our review.

A four-pack of Matter-compatible Kasa smart plugs are $39.99 ($30 off) at Amazon. Since these are Matter certified they are interoperable with Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home ecosystems, allowing you to control various non-smart appliances around your house with whichever compatible app you choose.
Amazon is selling the Google Nest Wifi Pro mesh router as a single unit for $149.99 ($50 off), a two-pack for $219.99 ($80 off), or a three-pack for $289.99 ($110 off). They’re easy to set up with the Google Home app and include support for Wi-Fi 6E — which is still great unless you want to be at the cutting edge with Wi-Fi 7. Read our review.
The Level Lock Plus is selling for $263.20 (about $66 off) at Amazon. Its simple, unbranded styling makes it one of the best-looking smart locks you can buy, and it is very simple to install. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on robot vacuums

The best Prime Day deals on smartwatches and fitness trackers

Polar’s H10 heart rate monitor chest strap is a great alternative to smartwatches that’s actually more accurate and works for anyone with tattoos on their wrists. It’s selling for $84.95 (about $15 off) at Amazon.
The Amazfit Band 7 is on sale for $41.99 ($8 off) at Amazon. It’s not a huge discount, but these inexpensive fitness bands are a rare breed these days. The Band 7 is comfortable on the wrist and offers two weeks of battery on a single charge (with an always-on OLED display). Read our review.

The Whoop 4.0 fitness tracker is selling for $199 (about $40 off) at Amazon. Whoop specializes in some heavy-duty fitness tracking with oodles of recovery data, though it comes with a $30 monthly subscription requirement, making it only for the most hardcore or deep-pocketed athletes. Read our review.

The best Prime Day Bluetooth speaker deals

It’s hard to beat the JBL Clip 4 in handiness and affordability, especially since the travel-friendly lock-shaped Bluetooth speaker is going for $48.30 ($31 off) at Amazon. The compact, water-resistant speaker sounds good for its size, and its built-in carabiner allows it to clip to all kinds of bags and straps. Read our buying guide.
The Tribit StormBox Micro 2 is a low-key fave of some of us here at The Verge, offering a 10W Bluetooth speaker that can get quite loud and easily attach to a bike’s handlebars or a hiking backpack. It’s currently available for $42.99 ($27 off) at Amazon after clicking the on-page coupon.

The best Prime Day deals on games and gaming accessories

Amazon is offering the 2TB version of Western Digital’s WD_Black SN850X NVMe SSD for $132.99 ($58 off) and the 4TB version for $255.54 ($444 off). These internal drives are very speedy, with 7,300MBps read speeds / 6,600MBps write speeds, making them a good fit for gaming PCs or a PlayStation 5 (with an added heatsink).

Samsung’s 512GB Pro Plus microSD card is down to $39.99 (about $15 off) at Amazon and can add a ton of storage to a Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, or Nintendo Switch.

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is selling for $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon. Last year’s Action Game of the Year is a return to form for FromSoftware, one that resurrects its long-dormant mech combat game with right mix of nostalgia and Dark Souls-like difficulty.

Final Fantasy XVI is currently matching its all-time low of $29.99 ($30 off) at Amazon. It’s the most grimdark of Final Fantasy games, telling a very cutthroat, Game of Thrones-like story. But the PS5 exclusive also features adorable chocobos. Read our review.
The incredibly charming Super Mario RPG remake for the Nintendo Switch is down to $39.75 ($20 off) at Amazon. The quirky classic is a turn-based RPG originally made by Squaresoft (long before its merger with Enix), offering a unique journey around the Mushroom Kingdom. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on charging accessories

The best Prime Day deals on Verge Favorites

The Nerf Pro Gelfire Mythic gel blaster is on sale for $31.49 ($48.50 off) at Amazon. The Gelfire Mythic propels water-infused gel pellets instead of the usual foam darts, and it comes with 10,000 of them.

Catan is selling for $37.49 (around $12 off) at Amazon. The iconic tabletop game of trading and building is one of those games that can easily consume many game nights if it really clicks with your family or friend group. Just try not to argue over sheep too much.

Amazon is selling the Lego Star Wars Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing for $34.99 ($15 off). It’s one of the most iconic crafts in all of Star Wars, and this small 474-piece Lego set is being retired, so get it while you can.
The Glocusent Book Light is a favorite among resident Verge bookworms, and it’s selling for $17.99 ($15 off) at Amazon. The neck-worn light easily illuminates what you’re reading without you having to clamp anything to your book.

The Solo Stove Bonfire 2.0 with Stand is selling for $241.49 ($103 off) at Amazon. The Bonfire 2.0 makes a great backyard addition for outdoor gatherings, and it also travels well if you want to light up some marshmallows at the beach.

If you’re looking for a basic charger for your car, the iOttie Easy One Touch Wireless 2 is on sale for $39.95 ($10 off) at Amazon. It can wirelessly deliver up to 7.5W of power to iPhones and up to 10W of power to Android phones, and firmly attaches to most car vents.

You can get a Zojirushi 5.5-cup rice cooker for $154.98 (about $78 off) at Amazon. These are some of the best rice cookers around and are known for their reliability — because you don’t want to mess around with poorly cooked rice.

Love Letter, a tabletop card game that’s a mainstay in our gift guides, is on sale for just $10.99 ($4 off) at Amazon. This game is the perfect ice breaker at parties, as it’s simple to pick up and play and it gets people casually competing with a fun card-counting mechanic.

Pandemic: Fall of Rome is down to $22.99 ($6 off) at Amazon. The four-player co-op board game has you working together to stave off the fall of the Roman empire, and just like the original Pandemic, which was about a worldwide biological outbreak, even losing can be a whole lot of fun.
The 14-ounce Yeti Rambler can keep your hot drinks hot and your cold drinks cold for hours on end, and it’s currently just $19.50 ($10.50 off) at Amazon. It’s the humble, logical alternative to those pricey Ember mugs many of us love so much.

Image: Shira Inbar for The Verge

Day one of Prime Day is underway, and we’ve got the skinny on which tech deals are worth your attention (and maybe your money).

Amazon’s annual Prime Day sale is here through July 17th, offering you a chance to save big on all kinds of gadgets and endless amounts of other junk you probably don’t need. And we’re here to help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

We’re surfacing discounts that are actually worth the time and attention of a voracious tech enthusiast — or just someone looking to at least save something on a nice little upgrade of an aging device.

Below, we’ve compiled our most comprehensive and wide-ranging roundup of Prime Day deals, which includes noise-canceling headphones, tablets, TVs, smart home accessories, and much more. Many of these deals require an Amazon Prime membership, though you can sign up for a free 30-day trial to access them (and always cancel later).

We try to pool together a little somethin’-somethin’ for everyone, but if you don’t find anything here that moves your needle, be sure to check out the full breadth of our coverage — including more specific posts covering categories like games, streaming devices, and a competing sales event that doesn’t require a subscription.

Prime Day deals spotlight

The best Prime Day deals on headphones and earbuds

The AirPods Max are on sale at Amazon for their all-time low of $394.99 ($155 off). Apple’s luxurious headphones are built from hefty aluminum and feature impressive sound with support for spatial audio. Just keep in mind they lack a 3.5mm jack and, instead, rely on Bluetooth unless you buy an optional Lightning to 3.5mm cable for $35. Read our review.
The Beats Studio Pro are down to $169.99 (a massive $180 off) at Amazon. The noise-canceling headphones may have a slightly outdated look (they look like many prior sets of Beats), but they’re an excellent value if you want flexibility across Android and iOS. Read our review.
The Beats Studio Buds are still a serviceable pair of noise-canceling earbuds even if they’re a few years old since they’re just $79 (around $70 off) at Amazon. Just keep in mind the newer Studio Buds Plus have a variety of improvements and an even more fun, see-through design for $129.99 ($40 off). Read our review.

Google’s Pixel Buds A-Series are selling for their usual all-time low of $69 ($30 off) at Amazon. They’re a little long in the tooth for a midrange pair of wireless earbuds, but they remain a great low-cost option for Pixel phone owners. Read our review.
Amazon is selling the Echo Buds with Active Noise Cancellation with a wired charging case for $34.99 ($85 off) or a wireless charging case for $44.99 ($95 off). It’s hard to beat the value of these ANC buds, even if other models have better noise cancellation. Read our review.

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds FE may be a little no-frills since they lack features like wireless charging and multipoint connectivity; however, at just $69.99 ($30 off) at Amazon, they remain Samsung’s cheapest pair of noise-canceling earbuds. Read our review.

The donut-shaped Sony LinkBuds are selling for $128 ($50 off) at Amazon, matching the best price we’ve seen on the open-style earbuds. Their unique design offers a comfy fit that allows outside noise in, helping keep you aware of your surroundings. Read our review.
If you don’t need a cutting-edge pair of headphones, it’s hard to deny how good Sony’s WH-1000XM4 still sound, especially when you can grab them at Amazon for $198 ($150 off). Plus, unlike the newer XM5 that has usurped them, the older XM4 fold down for more convenient storage and travel. Read our review.
Are you on a tighter budget but still want some noise-canceling headphones? Check out the Sony WH-CH720N, which are selling for $88 (about $61 off) at Amazon. They’re not as fancy as the pricier XM models, but they have up to 35 hours of battery life and weigh just 192 grams.

The best Prime Day deals on smart speakers and smart displays

Amazon is selling its new Echo Spot for $44.99 ($35 off), exclusively for Prime members. The semicircular smart display supports customizable clock faces and Alexa, allowing you to set your alarm and pull up the weather with your voice.
The fourth-gen Echo is on sale at Amazon for $54.99 ($45 off). The Prime-exclusive deal takes $35 off the spherical smart speaker, which can be easily used to control smart home features via Alexa or double as a Wi-Fi extender for Eero mesh systems. Read our review.
The Echo Show 5 (third-gen) is down to $49.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, nearly matching its all-time low. The latest Show 5 is one of Amazon’s smallest smart displays, making it ideal for just about any room in the house where you might want a little bit of music, news updates, or access to video calls. Ring owners can also easily integrate it with their video doorbells for live feeds of the front door.

The best Prime Day deals on tablets and e-readers

Apple’s latest iPad Mini is on sale at Amazon starting at $379.99 ($120 off) in its base configuration with Wi-Fi and 64GB of storage. The Mini was redesigned back in 2021 with a USB-C port and A15 Bionic processor, and it remains the go-to option if you want a smaller, 8.3-inch tablet from Apple. Read our review.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S9 features a lovely OLED screen, speedy performance, and some great speakers for a tablet. It’s currently on sale in several colors at Amazon with 128GB of storage and Wi-Fi starting at $599.99 ($200 off). Read our review.
Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids is selling for $149.99 ($20 off) at Amazon right now. The kid-friendly editions are often the low-key best value for a Kindle when they go on sale, especially since this incarnation of the 6.8-inch e-reader doesn’t have ads and includes a case and an extended warranty. Just keep the parental lock features turned off if you plan on using it. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on TVs and streaming devices

The best Prime Day deals on phones

The OnePlus 12R is selling for just $349.99 ($150 off) at Amazon. The midrange phone comes with a flagship-level processor and a large 6.78-inch display. It lacks wireless charging, but it makes up for it slightly with superfast 80W wired charging. Read our review.
The Samsung A35 5G is $299.99 ($100 off) at Amazon. It’s got surprisingly good specs for a budget-friendly phone, including IP67 water and dust resistance usually reserved for much pricier handsets. Read our buying guide.

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 FE is $449.99 ($150 off) at Amazon, which is a good deal for the colorful midrange phone (though it was $50 cheaper last holiday season). The S23 FE is one of Samsung’s rehashed “FE” models, meaning it has the processor of the older S22 flagship but offered at a lower price. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on laptops and computer accessories

If you need a basic, no-frills way to elevate your laptop to eye level, then this Nulaxy Laptop Stand is likely to get the job done. It’s on sale for just $15.86 ($6 off) when you click the on-page coupon at Amazon.
The Ugreen USB 3.0 Switcher, which allows you to share four USB ports across two computers, is down to $35.99 ($10 off) at Amazon. It’s particularly handy if you work from home and want to use the same accessories for work and personal computers.

Logitech’s Litra Glow is on sale for $45.11 (about $15 off) at Amazon. The compact streaming light has controllable brightness and a simple foot for mounting atop a laptop or monitor.

The best Prime Day deals on smart home tech

Ring’s Wired Doorbell Pro (formerly known as the Video Doorbell Pro 2) is selling for $149.99 ($70 off) at Amazon for Prime subscribers. This model may be a few years old, but it has excellent 1536 x 1536-resolution square video with HDR to show your whole porch. If your house has the wiring, it remains one of the fastest-responding video doorbells you can get. Read our review.

Amazon is selling its newer Ring Battery Doorbell Plus for $99.99 ($50 off) for Prime members. This is our top pick for battery-powered video doorbells thanks to its speedy response time and square head-to-toe view (1536 x 1536 resolution), which can also be found on the Pro models. Read our buying guide.

Amazon’s Smart Air Quality Monitor is down to $46.99 ($23 off) at Amazon for Prime subscribers. The compact monitor can give you voice alerts when air quality is low and trigger Alexa Routines to turn on a compatible purifier, dehumidifier, or fan. Read our review.
The Withings Body Smart scale offers a unique approach to weigh-ins, allowing you to focus less on the number and more on how you’re trending with gentle emoji. It’s available at Amazon for $79.95 ($20 off) in either black or white. Read our review.

A four-pack of Matter-compatible Kasa smart plugs are $39.99 ($30 off) at Amazon. Since these are Matter certified they are interoperable with Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home ecosystems, allowing you to control various non-smart appliances around your house with whichever compatible app you choose.
Amazon is selling the Google Nest Wifi Pro mesh router as a single unit for $149.99 ($50 off), a two-pack for $219.99 ($80 off), or a three-pack for $289.99 ($110 off). They’re easy to set up with the Google Home app and include support for Wi-Fi 6E — which is still great unless you want to be at the cutting edge with Wi-Fi 7. Read our review.
The Level Lock Plus is selling for $263.20 (about $66 off) at Amazon. Its simple, unbranded styling makes it one of the best-looking smart locks you can buy, and it is very simple to install. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on robot vacuums

The best Prime Day deals on smartwatches and fitness trackers

Polar’s H10 heart rate monitor chest strap is a great alternative to smartwatches that’s actually more accurate and works for anyone with tattoos on their wrists. It’s selling for $84.95 (about $15 off) at Amazon.
The Amazfit Band 7 is on sale for $41.99 ($8 off) at Amazon. It’s not a huge discount, but these inexpensive fitness bands are a rare breed these days. The Band 7 is comfortable on the wrist and offers two weeks of battery on a single charge (with an always-on OLED display). Read our review.

The Whoop 4.0 fitness tracker is selling for $199 (about $40 off) at Amazon. Whoop specializes in some heavy-duty fitness tracking with oodles of recovery data, though it comes with a $30 monthly subscription requirement, making it only for the most hardcore or deep-pocketed athletes. Read our review.

The best Prime Day Bluetooth speaker deals

It’s hard to beat the JBL Clip 4 in handiness and affordability, especially since the travel-friendly lock-shaped Bluetooth speaker is going for $48.30 ($31 off) at Amazon. The compact, water-resistant speaker sounds good for its size, and its built-in carabiner allows it to clip to all kinds of bags and straps. Read our buying guide.
The Tribit StormBox Micro 2 is a low-key fave of some of us here at The Verge, offering a 10W Bluetooth speaker that can get quite loud and easily attach to a bike’s handlebars or a hiking backpack. It’s currently available for $42.99 ($27 off) at Amazon after clicking the on-page coupon.

The best Prime Day deals on games and gaming accessories

Amazon is offering the 2TB version of Western Digital’s WD_Black SN850X NVMe SSD for $132.99 ($58 off) and the 4TB version for $255.54 ($444 off). These internal drives are very speedy, with 7,300MBps read speeds / 6,600MBps write speeds, making them a good fit for gaming PCs or a PlayStation 5 (with an added heatsink).

Samsung’s 512GB Pro Plus microSD card is down to $39.99 (about $15 off) at Amazon and can add a ton of storage to a Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, or Nintendo Switch.

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is selling for $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon. Last year’s Action Game of the Year is a return to form for FromSoftware, one that resurrects its long-dormant mech combat game with right mix of nostalgia and Dark Souls-like difficulty.

Final Fantasy XVI is currently matching its all-time low of $29.99 ($30 off) at Amazon. It’s the most grimdark of Final Fantasy games, telling a very cutthroat, Game of Thrones-like story. But the PS5 exclusive also features adorable chocobos. Read our review.
The incredibly charming Super Mario RPG remake for the Nintendo Switch is down to $39.75 ($20 off) at Amazon. The quirky classic is a turn-based RPG originally made by Squaresoft (long before its merger with Enix), offering a unique journey around the Mushroom Kingdom. Read our review.

The best Prime Day deals on charging accessories

The best Prime Day deals on Verge Favorites

The Nerf Pro Gelfire Mythic gel blaster is on sale for $31.49 ($48.50 off) at Amazon. The Gelfire Mythic propels water-infused gel pellets instead of the usual foam darts, and it comes with 10,000 of them.

Catan is selling for $37.49 (around $12 off) at Amazon. The iconic tabletop game of trading and building is one of those games that can easily consume many game nights if it really clicks with your family or friend group. Just try not to argue over sheep too much.

Amazon is selling the Lego Star Wars Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing for $34.99 ($15 off). It’s one of the most iconic crafts in all of Star Wars, and this small 474-piece Lego set is being retired, so get it while you can.
The Glocusent Book Light is a favorite among resident Verge bookworms, and it’s selling for $17.99 ($15 off) at Amazon. The neck-worn light easily illuminates what you’re reading without you having to clamp anything to your book.

The Solo Stove Bonfire 2.0 with Stand is selling for $241.49 ($103 off) at Amazon. The Bonfire 2.0 makes a great backyard addition for outdoor gatherings, and it also travels well if you want to light up some marshmallows at the beach.

If you’re looking for a basic charger for your car, the iOttie Easy One Touch Wireless 2 is on sale for $39.95 ($10 off) at Amazon. It can wirelessly deliver up to 7.5W of power to iPhones and up to 10W of power to Android phones, and firmly attaches to most car vents.

You can get a Zojirushi 5.5-cup rice cooker for $154.98 (about $78 off) at Amazon. These are some of the best rice cookers around and are known for their reliability — because you don’t want to mess around with poorly cooked rice.

Love Letter, a tabletop card game that’s a mainstay in our gift guides, is on sale for just $10.99 ($4 off) at Amazon. This game is the perfect ice breaker at parties, as it’s simple to pick up and play and it gets people casually competing with a fun card-counting mechanic.

Pandemic: Fall of Rome is down to $22.99 ($6 off) at Amazon. The four-player co-op board game has you working together to stave off the fall of the Roman empire, and just like the original Pandemic, which was about a worldwide biological outbreak, even losing can be a whole lot of fun.
The 14-ounce Yeti Rambler can keep your hot drinks hot and your cold drinks cold for hours on end, and it’s currently just $19.50 ($10.50 off) at Amazon. It’s the humble, logical alternative to those pricey Ember mugs many of us love so much.

Read More 

You’re telling me this took 14 years to develop? | Image: David Pierce / The Verge

The new Calculator app in iPadOS 18 is, at first glance, wildly unimpressive. When I installed the new operating system, which is now in public beta, I tapped the Calculator icon expecting something that felt uniquely tablet-focused and powerful. I got, well, the iPhone’s Calculator app — only slightly larger. It’s a nice addition to the iPad, sure, but there’s nothing here that took 14 years to make.
The Calculator app doesn’t really matter, though. I suspect you’ll hardly ever use it. What’s actually extremely cool and innovative about iPadOS 18 and iOS 18 is that there is a calculator baked into the operating system itself. Tap in the text box in Messages and type “225/4=” and it’ll automatically tell you that your friend owes you $56.25. You can type out your equation in the body of an email, then tap to replace it with just the final answer. So far, this works in basically any text box but only in Apple’s built-in apps; I suspect we’ll see it everywhere as apps update. It’s the kind of feature that immediately becomes second nature.
But on the iPad, at least, it’s Math Notes that really shines. Instead of forcing you to work within the confines of calculator buttons, Math Notes lets you do your arithmetic however you like. You can create a Math Note from within the Calculator app, but the easier strategy is just to open up the Notes app and start drawing. Write “56 + 48 + 35 * 4 / 6 =” and, a second or two after you write the equals sign, the answer pops up (127.33, in case you’re wondering). Write a bunch of numbers in a column, draw a horizontal line underneath, and Notes will sum them up for you automatically. Change a number, and it’ll change the total.
You can do impressively wonky things within Math Notes, including solving equations and generating graphs. Its ability to work with variables is the most impressive thing I’ve seen: if you write out your equation and then change a variable, it’ll rewrite all your answers and redo all your graphs in real time. A lot of the more complex stuff is great for students and physicists and maybe not many others, but it’s extremely fun to play with. Oh, and fair warning: like any AI system, it will not be right all the time. YouTube is already full of fun examples of Math Notes getting things wrong.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Math Notes can handle a lot… but it is easily confused.

Even in the best case, Math Notes is extremely exacting. It requires you to write neatly and carefully, for starters, which has been a challenge for my terrible handwriting. If the iPad doesn’t recognize a number or letter in an equation, it adds a dotted red border to the unknown bit and essentially asks you to try again. (I’ve had pretty good luck with number recognition, for what it’s worth, and a much worse experience with letters and other symbols.) You’ll also get the red border if the iPad can’t figure out the equation you’re trying to solve or if something is missing in your syntax. It doesn’t try to solve your problems or even tell you what they are — it’s like the Check Engine light in your car, just telling you something’s wrong.
Even in the best case, Math Notes is extremely exacting
In my testing so far, there are also lots of beta-type quirks left for Apple to work out. If you write an equation that takes up most of the screen, the solution will sometimes either appear on top of the equation or spill over the edge of the screen where you can’t see it anymore. Another feature in iPadOS tries to match your handwriting — and use AI to ever-so-slightly improve it as you write — but what it writes looks nothing like what I write. The app also gets tripped up easily by other things on your notes: I can write a list of numbers, and it works fine, but as soon as I write “food” next to one of those numbers and “beer” next to another, it gets confused.
There are a couple of obvious, simple things it can’t do. You can’t use one of the generated solutions in another equation — if you try to, say, divide that answer by six, it doesn’t recognize what you’re trying to do at all. The Math Notes answers aren’t actually part of your note, really. They’re more like a layer on top that you don’t get to touch or interact with. It’s weird.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Math Notes + Quick Notes = best scratchpad ever.

My favorite use for Math Notes so far has been through the iPad’s Quick Notes feature. I grab the Pencil, swipe in from the bottom left corner of my iPad, and up pops a small note above whatever I’m doing. I write out whatever I’m trying to work out, get the answer, and I’m done. Now, I’m neither a student nor an engineer, the two demographics Apple seems to have most in mind, and as Math Notes improve, I suspect a lot of people will appreciate the ability to write notes that update and move in real time. For the rest of us, it’s the best way yet to figure out the rough cost of a weekend away or figure out who owes what once it’s all over.
I’m still not sure why it took Apple this long to put a calculator app on the iPad, but credit where credit’s due: the company found a uniquely touch- and tablet-friendly way to implement one. I just hope your handwriting is better than mine.

You’re telling me this took 14 years to develop? | Image: David Pierce / The Verge

The new Calculator app in iPadOS 18 is, at first glance, wildly unimpressive. When I installed the new operating system, which is now in public beta, I tapped the Calculator icon expecting something that felt uniquely tablet-focused and powerful. I got, well, the iPhone’s Calculator app — only slightly larger. It’s a nice addition to the iPad, sure, but there’s nothing here that took 14 years to make.

The Calculator app doesn’t really matter, though. I suspect you’ll hardly ever use it. What’s actually extremely cool and innovative about iPadOS 18 and iOS 18 is that there is a calculator baked into the operating system itself. Tap in the text box in Messages and type “225/4=” and it’ll automatically tell you that your friend owes you $56.25. You can type out your equation in the body of an email, then tap to replace it with just the final answer. So far, this works in basically any text box but only in Apple’s built-in apps; I suspect we’ll see it everywhere as apps update. It’s the kind of feature that immediately becomes second nature.

But on the iPad, at least, it’s Math Notes that really shines. Instead of forcing you to work within the confines of calculator buttons, Math Notes lets you do your arithmetic however you like. You can create a Math Note from within the Calculator app, but the easier strategy is just to open up the Notes app and start drawing. Write “56 + 48 + 35 * 4 / 6 =” and, a second or two after you write the equals sign, the answer pops up (127.33, in case you’re wondering). Write a bunch of numbers in a column, draw a horizontal line underneath, and Notes will sum them up for you automatically. Change a number, and it’ll change the total.

You can do impressively wonky things within Math Notes, including solving equations and generating graphs. Its ability to work with variables is the most impressive thing I’ve seen: if you write out your equation and then change a variable, it’ll rewrite all your answers and redo all your graphs in real time. A lot of the more complex stuff is great for students and physicists and maybe not many others, but it’s extremely fun to play with. Oh, and fair warning: like any AI system, it will not be right all the time. YouTube is already full of fun examples of Math Notes getting things wrong.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Math Notes can handle a lot… but it is easily confused.

Even in the best case, Math Notes is extremely exacting. It requires you to write neatly and carefully, for starters, which has been a challenge for my terrible handwriting. If the iPad doesn’t recognize a number or letter in an equation, it adds a dotted red border to the unknown bit and essentially asks you to try again. (I’ve had pretty good luck with number recognition, for what it’s worth, and a much worse experience with letters and other symbols.) You’ll also get the red border if the iPad can’t figure out the equation you’re trying to solve or if something is missing in your syntax. It doesn’t try to solve your problems or even tell you what they are — it’s like the Check Engine light in your car, just telling you something’s wrong.

In my testing so far, there are also lots of beta-type quirks left for Apple to work out. If you write an equation that takes up most of the screen, the solution will sometimes either appear on top of the equation or spill over the edge of the screen where you can’t see it anymore. Another feature in iPadOS tries to match your handwriting — and use AI to ever-so-slightly improve it as you write — but what it writes looks nothing like what I write. The app also gets tripped up easily by other things on your notes: I can write a list of numbers, and it works fine, but as soon as I write “food” next to one of those numbers and “beer” next to another, it gets confused.

There are a couple of obvious, simple things it can’t do. You can’t use one of the generated solutions in another equation — if you try to, say, divide that answer by six, it doesn’t recognize what you’re trying to do at all. The Math Notes answers aren’t actually part of your note, really. They’re more like a layer on top that you don’t get to touch or interact with. It’s weird.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Math Notes + Quick Notes = best scratchpad ever.

My favorite use for Math Notes so far has been through the iPad’s Quick Notes feature. I grab the Pencil, swipe in from the bottom left corner of my iPad, and up pops a small note above whatever I’m doing. I write out whatever I’m trying to work out, get the answer, and I’m done. Now, I’m neither a student nor an engineer, the two demographics Apple seems to have most in mind, and as Math Notes improve, I suspect a lot of people will appreciate the ability to write notes that update and move in real time. For the rest of us, it’s the best way yet to figure out the rough cost of a weekend away or figure out who owes what once it’s all over.

I’m still not sure why it took Apple this long to put a calculator app on the iPad, but credit where credit’s due: the company found a uniquely touch- and tablet-friendly way to implement one. I just hope your handwriting is better than mine.

Read More 

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The Apple Watch often sees its fair share of limited-time discounts throughout the year, but Amazon’s Prime Day offers a chance for someone to shop deals across most available models all at once.

For this Prime Day, we’re seeing some worthwhile sales across the range of the 2022 Apple Watch SE, Apple Watch Series 9, and even the pricey Apple Watch Ultra 2. Most of these require an Amazon Prime subscription, but Amazon’s excellent $100 discount on the Ultra 2 does not.
While most Apple Watches are pretty similar at their core (iOS notifications on your wrist, fitness tracking, health metrics, etc.), it’s the extra features added or omitted from some models that often determines which is right for you — as well as your budget, of course. Be sure to check out our buying guide for some additional advice from our resident wearables reviewer, Vee Song, and let us highlight what deals you can nab for the right Apple Watch for you this Prime Day.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The Apple Watch often sees its fair share of limited-time discounts throughout the year, but Amazon’s Prime Day offers a chance for someone to shop deals across most available models all at once.

For this Prime Day, we’re seeing some worthwhile sales across the range of the 2022 Apple Watch SE, Apple Watch Series 9, and even the pricey Apple Watch Ultra 2. Most of these require an Amazon Prime subscription, but Amazon’s excellent $100 discount on the Ultra 2 does not.

While most Apple Watches are pretty similar at their core (iOS notifications on your wrist, fitness tracking, health metrics, etc.), it’s the extra features added or omitted from some models that often determines which is right for you — as well as your budget, of course. Be sure to check out our buying guide for some additional advice from our resident wearables reviewer, Vee Song, and let us highlight what deals you can nab for the right Apple Watch for you this Prime Day.

Read More 

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

We’re in the middle — or maybe just at the beginning — of a revolution in portable gaming. From the Switch to the Steam Deck to the Playdate to the Pocket, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to consoles that fit in your backpack. But what if you really only play one game, and that game doesn’t work on most of those consoles? You’re in for a lot of Wi-Fi testing, a lot of questions about remote play and cloud streaming, and some complicated buying decisions.
On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Sean Hollister and Alex Cranz join to help us solve a very specific gaming problem. We start by talking about the Steam Deck, debate the merits of the Switch, the ROG Ally X, and a bunch of other options… and then somehow end up back on the Steam Deck. Did we really solve anything? Who knows! But we have a lot to talk about.

After that, Victoria Song joins the show to test some microphones. A new crop of headsets and smart glasses promises to be great for everything from phone calls to metaverse gaming, but how do they actually sound? We endure several seriously chaotic pairing situations to try out the Razer Anzu, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, the Meta Quest 3, and the Apple Vision Pro. The end result certainly surprised us.
Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about the North Focals, and whether a startup might have nailed the future of smart glasses five years ago. Next time you go to the eye doctor, should you get smart glasses instead? We have thoughts.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with consoles:

Handheld consoles are the future of gaming
Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster
The Asus ROG Ally X is official — and I took a peek inside
Nintendo Switch OLED review: screentime

And on smart glasses:

Razer’s new Anzu smart glasses break from the pack with truly wireless audio
Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: a turning point
Meta Quest 3 review: a great VR headset but not quite a mixed reality winner

And on the North Focals:

North Focals glasses review: a $600 smartwatch for your face
Employees warned North that its Focals AR glasses were overpriced and too male-focused
Google buys AR glasses company North

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

We’re in the middle — or maybe just at the beginning — of a revolution in portable gaming. From the Switch to the Steam Deck to the Playdate to the Pocket, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to consoles that fit in your backpack. But what if you really only play one game, and that game doesn’t work on most of those consoles? You’re in for a lot of Wi-Fi testing, a lot of questions about remote play and cloud streaming, and some complicated buying decisions.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Sean Hollister and Alex Cranz join to help us solve a very specific gaming problem. We start by talking about the Steam Deck, debate the merits of the Switch, the ROG Ally X, and a bunch of other options… and then somehow end up back on the Steam Deck. Did we really solve anything? Who knows! But we have a lot to talk about.

After that, Victoria Song joins the show to test some microphones. A new crop of headsets and smart glasses promises to be great for everything from phone calls to metaverse gaming, but how do they actually sound? We endure several seriously chaotic pairing situations to try out the Razer Anzu, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, the Meta Quest 3, and the Apple Vision Pro. The end result certainly surprised us.

Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about the North Focals, and whether a startup might have nailed the future of smart glasses five years ago. Next time you go to the eye doctor, should you get smart glasses instead? We have thoughts.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with consoles:

Handheld consoles are the future of gaming
Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster
The Asus ROG Ally X is official — and I took a peek inside
Nintendo Switch OLED review: screentime

And on smart glasses:

Razer’s new Anzu smart glasses break from the pack with truly wireless audio
Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: a turning point
Meta Quest 3 review: a great VR headset but not quite a mixed reality winner

And on the North Focals:

North Focals glasses review: a $600 smartwatch for your face
Employees warned North that its Focals AR glasses were overpriced and too male-focused
Google buys AR glasses company North

Read More 

The Apple Watch, and a bunch of Android smartwatches, are discounted for Prime Day. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is here, and with it a whole bunch of deals on Apple Watches, Android smartwatches, or even just a regular ole fitness tracker. Fall product launches are right around the corner, but if you’re on a budget, now’s a great chance to snag discounts on higher-quality materials and last year’s premium devices.
Wading through thousands of deals can be a pain, especially when you factor in the dozens of smartwatch models, sizes, colors, and materials. Never fear — we’ve already done that for you and compiled the best deals out there. (Just make sure you have a Prime membership to access them!) And when you’re done checking out smartwatches and fitness trackers, you can head back to our main Prime Day deals page for more.
Apple Watch Prime Day Deals

The 41mm GPS Apple Watch Series 9 is almost 30 percent off at $279.99 in starlight. It’s also available in midnight, pink, and silver. Just keep in mind it likely doesn’t come with the blood oxygen feature enabled due to an ongoing dispute with Masimo.
The 45mm GPS Apple Watch Series 9 is down to $309.99 from $429 in midnight and silver.
The 45mm LTE Apple Watch Series 9 is $409.99, or 22 percent off, in midnight, pink, silver, and starlight. If you want fancier materials, the gold stainless steel version is 15 percent off at $679.99.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is $100 off at $699. The Ultra doesn’t go on sale quite as often as the other watches — or for quite as much, so this is a pretty good deal.
The 40mm GPS Apple Watch SE (second gen) is nearly 32 percent off at $169.99 in starlight. You can also get it in midnight and silver.
The 40mm LTE Apple Watch SE (second gen) is $80 off at $219.99 in starlight. It’s available in midnight and silver too. This is the better option if you want to give to a child for phone-free calling.
The 44mm GPS Apple Watch SE (second gen) in midnight is $199.99, down from $279. It’s also available in starlight and silver.
The 44mm LTE Apple Watch SE (second-gen) is $249.99, a discount of 24 percent. It’s available in starlight, silver, and midnight.

The best Android smartwatch Prime Day deals

The 40mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 is roughly 47 percent off at $159.99 in graphite. It’s also available in gold. The main things you’re missing with the last-gen Galaxy Watch 6 is Samsung’s newer 3nm processor and a new BioActive Sensor. Otherwise, you’ll still get the upgrade to WearOS 5 and OneUI 6 Watch.
The slightly snazzier Bespoke version of the 40mm Galaxy Watch 6 is $189.99, a mark down of about 42 percent.
The 40mm LTE Galaxy Watch 6 is now 33 percent off for $234.89 in graphite. The gold version is 30 percent off at $244.99.
A spiffy Bespoke version of the 44mm Galaxy Watch 6 with a milanese band is $219.99, a 42 percent markdown.
The 44mm LTE Galaxy Watch 6 is $273, down from $379.99 in silver.
But if you love a physical rotating bezel, the 43mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 Classic is down to $312.99, a 22 percent markdown. The LTE version is 18 percent off at $369.99.
The larger 47mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 Classic is $50 off at $379. The LTE version is $399.99, down from $479.99.

The Google Pixel Watch 2 with Wi-Fi is down to $269.99 from $349.99 in obsidian. It’s also available in gold and silver.
The LTE Google Pixel Watch 2 is $100 off at $299.99 in obsidian, gold, and silver.
The excellent OnePlus Watch 2 is $209.99, a 30 percent markdown. It’s an impressive alternative to both Samsung and Google, with long battery life, WearOS 4, and a chic design.
Here’s another good Google / Samsung alternative: the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5. It’s 35 percent off at $227.49. It’s a fitness-focused watch with great battery life. The only potential downside is Mobvoi has taken a while to get WearOS upgrades to users.
The Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro is 20 percent off at $279.99. This watch has even longer battery life than the regular TicWatch Pro 5.

Best fitness tracker Prime Day deals

The Fitbit Charge 6 is $99.95, down from $159.95. The Charge 6 is a very capable fitness band and our favorite of the current Fitbit lineup.
If you’re looking for a kids’ smartwatch, the Fitbit Ace LTE is 22 percent off at $179.95. This is a great option for parents who want to keep track of their children, while still being an entertaining way to stay fit for kids.
All Horizon Oura Rings are 15 percent off. Since sizing is very important for smart rings, that includes if you buy the $10 sizing kit — you’ll get a 45-day window to buy the ring for 15 percent off.
The RingConn smart ring is 25 percent off at $209.25. It’s a more affordable alternative to the Oura Ring. It’s got all the basic tracking, plus a neat charging case and zero subscription.
The already affordable Amazfit GTR 4 is 20 percent off at $159.99. This is an excellent budget alternative to Fitbits and Garmins if all you want is a crisp screen, long battery life, and basic fitness tracking.
The Amazfit Band 7 is $41.99, about 16 percent off. This is a good no-frills fitness band for folks who just want the absolute step tracking basics.
Whoop, a popular recovery tracker among athletes, is offering a 12-month membership for $199 (usually $30 a month or $239 if paid annually.)
The Withings ScanWatch 2 is 15 percent off at $297.46. The chic hybrid analog smartwatch is lightweight, adds a temperature sensor, and has 30 days of battery.
The Withings ScanWatch Horizon is 30 percent off at $349.95. It’s a snazzier looking hybrid smartwatch that covers basic health tracking with a chic mechanical watch design.
The Polar H10 chest strap is 15 percent off at $84.90 in the small size, and 25 percent off in the larger size at $74.99.
The Wahoo TICKR FIT heart rate armband is down to $67.99, down from $79.99.

The Apple Watch, and a bunch of Android smartwatches, are discounted for Prime Day. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is here, and with it a whole bunch of deals on Apple Watches, Android smartwatches, or even just a regular ole fitness tracker. Fall product launches are right around the corner, but if you’re on a budget, now’s a great chance to snag discounts on higher-quality materials and last year’s premium devices.

Wading through thousands of deals can be a pain, especially when you factor in the dozens of smartwatch models, sizes, colors, and materials. Never fear — we’ve already done that for you and compiled the best deals out there. (Just make sure you have a Prime membership to access them!) And when you’re done checking out smartwatches and fitness trackers, you can head back to our main Prime Day deals page for more.

Apple Watch Prime Day Deals

The 41mm GPS Apple Watch Series 9 is almost 30 percent off at $279.99 in starlight. It’s also available in midnight, pink, and silver. Just keep in mind it likely doesn’t come with the blood oxygen feature enabled due to an ongoing dispute with Masimo.
The 45mm GPS Apple Watch Series 9 is down to $309.99 from $429 in midnight and silver.
The 45mm LTE Apple Watch Series 9 is $409.99, or 22 percent off, in midnight, pink, silver, and starlight. If you want fancier materials, the gold stainless steel version is 15 percent off at $679.99.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is $100 off at $699. The Ultra doesn’t go on sale quite as often as the other watches — or for quite as much, so this is a pretty good deal.
The 40mm GPS Apple Watch SE (second gen) is nearly 32 percent off at $169.99 in starlight. You can also get it in midnight and silver.
The 40mm LTE Apple Watch SE (second gen) is $80 off at $219.99 in starlight. It’s available in midnight and silver too. This is the better option if you want to give to a child for phone-free calling.
The 44mm GPS Apple Watch SE (second gen) in midnight is $199.99, down from $279. It’s also available in starlight and silver.
The 44mm LTE Apple Watch SE (second-gen) is $249.99, a discount of 24 percent. It’s available in starlight, silver, and midnight.

The best Android smartwatch Prime Day deals

The 40mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 is roughly 47 percent off at $159.99 in graphite. It’s also available in gold. The main things you’re missing with the last-gen Galaxy Watch 6 is Samsung’s newer 3nm processor and a new BioActive Sensor. Otherwise, you’ll still get the upgrade to WearOS 5 and OneUI 6 Watch.
The slightly snazzier Bespoke version of the 40mm Galaxy Watch 6 is $189.99, a mark down of about 42 percent.
The 40mm LTE Galaxy Watch 6 is now 33 percent off for $234.89 in graphite. The gold version is 30 percent off at $244.99.
A spiffy Bespoke version of the 44mm Galaxy Watch 6 with a milanese band is $219.99, a 42 percent markdown.
The 44mm LTE Galaxy Watch 6 is $273, down from $379.99 in silver.
But if you love a physical rotating bezel, the 43mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 Classic is down to $312.99, a 22 percent markdown. The LTE version is 18 percent off at $369.99.
The larger 47mm Bluetooth Galaxy Watch 6 Classic is $50 off at $379. The LTE version is $399.99, down from $479.99.

The Google Pixel Watch 2 with Wi-Fi is down to $269.99 from $349.99 in obsidian. It’s also available in gold and silver.
The LTE Google Pixel Watch 2 is $100 off at $299.99 in obsidian, gold, and silver.
The excellent OnePlus Watch 2 is $209.99, a 30 percent markdown. It’s an impressive alternative to both Samsung and Google, with long battery life, WearOS 4, and a chic design.
Here’s another good Google / Samsung alternative: the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5. It’s 35 percent off at $227.49. It’s a fitness-focused watch with great battery life. The only potential downside is Mobvoi has taken a while to get WearOS upgrades to users.
The Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro is 20 percent off at $279.99. This watch has even longer battery life than the regular TicWatch Pro 5.

Best fitness tracker Prime Day deals

The Fitbit Charge 6 is $99.95, down from $159.95. The Charge 6 is a very capable fitness band and our favorite of the current Fitbit lineup.
If you’re looking for a kids’ smartwatch, the Fitbit Ace LTE is 22 percent off at $179.95. This is a great option for parents who want to keep track of their children, while still being an entertaining way to stay fit for kids.
All Horizon Oura Rings are 15 percent off. Since sizing is very important for smart rings, that includes if you buy the $10 sizing kit — you’ll get a 45-day window to buy the ring for 15 percent off.
The RingConn smart ring is 25 percent off at $209.25. It’s a more affordable alternative to the Oura Ring. It’s got all the basic tracking, plus a neat charging case and zero subscription.
The already affordable Amazfit GTR 4 is 20 percent off at $159.99. This is an excellent budget alternative to Fitbits and Garmins if all you want is a crisp screen, long battery life, and basic fitness tracking.
The Amazfit Band 7 is $41.99, about 16 percent off. This is a good no-frills fitness band for folks who just want the absolute step tracking basics.
Whoop, a popular recovery tracker among athletes, is offering a 12-month membership for $199 (usually $30 a month or $239 if paid annually.)
The Withings ScanWatch 2 is 15 percent off at $297.46. The chic hybrid analog smartwatch is lightweight, adds a temperature sensor, and has 30 days of battery.
The Withings ScanWatch Horizon is 30 percent off at $349.95. It’s a snazzier looking hybrid smartwatch that covers basic health tracking with a chic mechanical watch design.
The Polar H10 chest strap is 15 percent off at $84.90 in the small size, and 25 percent off in the larger size at $74.99.
The Wahoo TICKR FIT heart rate armband is down to $67.99, down from $79.99.

Read More 

Image: Lucid

Lucid claims it’s achieved a “landmark” 5 miles-per-kilowatt-hour efficiency with its 2025 Air Pure electric sedan, making it one of the most energy-efficient vehicles ever produced. When it starts deliveries, Lucid said it will have a record 146 MPGe and an EPA-estimated range of 420 miles.
The Air Pure is Lucid’s most affordable model starting at $69,900. For the new model year, the battery was slightly reduced in size from 88kWh to 84kWh. It also includes the new energy-saving and cold weather-fighting heat pump technology that was first included with the company’s $249,000 “Sapphire” model and later added to the Touring and Grand Touring models.
Lucid is taking a risk that luxury EV shoppers will care as much about abstract specs like efficiency and MPGe as they do about more dependable premium features like leather seats and expensive stereos. The Lucid Air Pure’s place at the top of the efficiency heap could also be short-lived as other luxury automakers like Mercedes-Benz are also developing their own hyper-efficient EVs. Concepts like the Vision EQXX have an efficiency of 8.4 miles per kWh.
For 2025, every model from the Air Pure to the Air Grand Touring will now have Lucid’s “DreamDrive Premium” Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), which comes with 3D surround view cameras and a blind spot display. There’s also a new-generation control unit with “triple” processing power and twice the memory of previous models, promising faster infotainment performance and responsiveness.
The latest Lucid Air lineup also includes the Grand Touring with 512 miles of range (down from 516) for $109,900 and the Touring with 406 miles of range (down from 410) for $77,900.

Image: Lucid

Lucid claims it’s achieved a “landmark” 5 miles-per-kilowatt-hour efficiency with its 2025 Air Pure electric sedan, making it one of the most energy-efficient vehicles ever produced. When it starts deliveries, Lucid said it will have a record 146 MPGe and an EPA-estimated range of 420 miles.

The Air Pure is Lucid’s most affordable model starting at $69,900. For the new model year, the battery was slightly reduced in size from 88kWh to 84kWh. It also includes the new energy-saving and cold weather-fighting heat pump technology that was first included with the company’s $249,000 “Sapphire” model and later added to the Touring and Grand Touring models.

Lucid is taking a risk that luxury EV shoppers will care as much about abstract specs like efficiency and MPGe as they do about more dependable premium features like leather seats and expensive stereos. The Lucid Air Pure’s place at the top of the efficiency heap could also be short-lived as other luxury automakers like Mercedes-Benz are also developing their own hyper-efficient EVs. Concepts like the Vision EQXX have an efficiency of 8.4 miles per kWh.

For 2025, every model from the Air Pure to the Air Grand Touring will now have Lucid’s “DreamDrive Premium” Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), which comes with 3D surround view cameras and a blind spot display. There’s also a new-generation control unit with “triple” processing power and twice the memory of previous models, promising faster infotainment performance and responsiveness.

The latest Lucid Air lineup also includes the Grand Touring with 512 miles of range (down from 516) for $109,900 and the Touring with 406 miles of range (down from 410) for $77,900.

Read More 

Image: Richard Parry for The Verge

Back in 2005, a small firm offered a tantalizing vision of the future of computer keyboards.
What if your keyboard was filled with tiny screens that showed you exactly what any given press would do, each built into a crystal-clear key? The keys would morph and shift as you needed, transforming from letters and numbers to full-color icons and app shortcuts, depending on what you were doing.
Readers and tech bloggers adored the idea. “It’s about time someone shook up this stagnant keyboard market,” declared Engadget. “The concept is fantastic,” wrote Gizmodo. Slashdot lit up.
The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require over 100 built-in screens using display technology that wasn’t readily available at the time. With all the excitement, the firm decided to make it real.

The journey to create the Optimus Maximus would take years and end in multiple commercial failures. But Art Lebedev’s vision and the technology created along the way would live on and ultimately find widespread success — a success that’s been hidden inside another popular product: Elgato’s Stream Deck, a small desktop accessory covered in morphing, full-color keys.
By the time Elgato came to release its first Stream Deck in 2017, Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards had faded into history. But there’s more linking the two devices than a core idea. In fact, the Stream Deck hardware came from precisely the same company that developed the Optimus Maximus’ keys. In a very real sense, Art Lebedev’s work laid the foundations for what Elgato would go on to create.

In 2010, Elgato was in “crisis mode.”
For around a decade, the German video capture company had been selling its TV tuners to people who wanted to watch and record live television via a connected computer. But by 2010, it was clear that the market for such devices was disappearing fast. On one side, broadcast TV was becoming increasingly encrypted, limiting what Elgato’s devices could do. On the other, the streaming revolution, led by Netflix and YouTube, was cutting out the humble TV tuner entirely.
“You’re on a sinking ship, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do,” recalls Elgato’s Julian Fest, whose parents originally founded the company in 1999.
Elgato started to take a hard look at its business, and it noticed one number that didn’t quite make sense.
Elgato knew how many TV tuners it had sold, but people had been registering far more copies of the company’s EyeTV recording software than its own customers would need. When it emailed those customers, it found out they were using a rival piece of hardware, the Hauppauge HD-PVR — and not to record broadcast TV. They were recording gameplay from their PlayStations to put up on YouTube. Right under Elgato’s nose was a new market opportunity.

Armed with over a decade’s worth of video encoding knowledge from its TV tuner days, a direct connection to Hauppauge’s customers, and Hauppauge’s own quarterly earnings reports to know just how many HD-PVRs it sold, Elgato decided to release a rival capture product specifically tailored to gamers. The result was the Game Capture HD, released in 2012.
Three years later, when Fest took over as Elgato’s general manager, it seemed clear that the market for online gameplay videos was poised to explode. With Amazon acquiring the live streaming service Twitch for almost $1 billion in 2014, Fest was on the lookout for ways Elgato could double down. Perhaps it could offer a way to not just capture gameplay footage but also to help Twitch streamers control their broadcasts in the moment.
“If you looked at the state of Twitch and live streaming at the end of 2015, it was intriguing, but it was also kind of boring,” Fest tells The Verge. “Everybody’s stream was like, ‘Here’s my gameplay, here’s my webcam,’ and that’s it.” He figured that simplicity was because of all the different jobs a streamer has to handle during broadcasts: between playing the game, reading the chat, and entertaining an audience, it’d be difficult to also run a dynamic broadcast filled with changing layouts and eye-catching transitions.
Unless, Fest thought, there was a way to offer advanced broadcast controls without distracting a streamer from other tasks. The company found its answer in a popular German TV show where the host had a so-called “nipple board” of buttons in front of him, built into a giant desk. “Every time you pressed one of these buttons, it would play a funny clip that his team had found on TV,” Fest recalls. The team wondered if Elgato could use a similar array of buttons to control a livestream.
Elgato had its idea — now, it needed to find the right buttons to make it a reality.

Art Lebedev had never intended to make a massive splash in the keyboard business. Timur Burbaev, who served as the keyboard’s industrial designer, tells The Verge that the initial idea came about shortly after he joined in 2003. The keyboard was just meant to be a concept, similar to its Lavatrix washing machine, to show off the studio’s design chops and drum up more business in the free time between projects.
In July 2005, the company released a series of concept images of what it called the “Optimus keyboard.” It had the same basic layout as a full-size computer keyboard but with a twist: “Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment,” the website still reads.

One image shows how the keys could change to show an array of Photoshop tools; another shows dedicated controls for Quake. (This was 2005, after all.) On the left edge of the keyboard are macro keys that can be programmed to open specific programs, illustrated with a series of delightfully 2005-era logos like Internet Explorer and QuickTime. Although the images are renders rather than real photographs, the close-ups make an effort to show individual pixels present on the screens of the keys, a small imperfection that provides a tantalizing hint of reality. Nearly two decades later, the imaginary device still looks fantastic.
It was hard to ignore the amount of interest the design was getting. The team called an emergency meeting to discuss. “Back then, we just realized that if you get such a positive response, then let’s risk it and just produce it,” Burbaev says. It was “a clear indication” that the team should try and make it for real. The long and difficult journey of producing what would become the Optimus Maximus had begun. “No one imagined how much time and energy and especially investment it would take,” Burbaev says.
A big early decision was working out what kind of screen technology to use. The first iPod with a color display had only just been released, and the iPhone had yet to make its debut. Candybar-style phones like the Nokia 1110 and Motorola C139 reigned supreme. Art Lebedev thought LCD screens of the era were too dim and offered terrible black levels, while E Ink screens had terrible response times and no backlighting at all. OLED seemed like the best choice.
But this was long before OLED displays were routinely shipping in mainstream smartwatches, smartphones, and TVs. “The problem with OLED displays was that you could potentially find such a small OLED display in 2006 but a) it would cost you a fortune and b) it would have a massive resolution,” Burbaev says. They were meant for military users to show tactical information like maps on tiny screens, not Quake icons on a keyboard.

Art Lebedev decided its “only option” was to dive headfirst into the OLED display business. Burbaev believes his was one of the first companies to ship a product with these kinds of small, low-cost, low-resolution OLED screens. Doing so involved placing what Burbaev describes as a “very strange” order with a Taiwanese manufacturer with some prior experience. He adds that two managers from Art Lebedev ended up living in Taiwan for half a year while they were being made.
Not only did Art Lebedev need to find screens small enough to fit under each of its keys but it also needed to find a way for them to coexist with keys that you could actually type on. The final keyboard ended up being a bit of a fudge: the screens didn’t actually move. Instead, the company built a moving plastic keycap that moved around each screen. But even this solution had its challenges, Burbaev says. This plastic keycap needed to not only be transparent enough to show the display but also tinted enough to not reveal the ugly inner mechanism of each screen and durable enough to withstand scratches.
All of this meant the development process for the Optimus Maximus was long and difficult, and Wired featured the keyboard not once but twice in its annual vaporware roundups. Art Lebedev was unusually open about the troubled development process, cataloging its progress making the keyboard on a LiveJournal blog. We’re used to receiving such updates in an era of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, but the approach felt novel at the time — and it shows just how slowly development went. It took months just to arrive on a keycap design, studying various possibilities along the way. The company’s first OLED manufacturer went bust before managing to deliver its pricy $10 keys, forcing Art Lebedev to hunt down a new Taiwanese supplier.
Finally, after years of development, hundreds of preorders, and dozens upon dozens of blog posts and concept images hyping up every aspect of the idea, the Optimus Maximus began shipping in February 2008.

What was this legendary keyboard actually like to use? In a word: “Terrible.”
“Let’s put it this way, we sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute,” Engadget wrote after its first few weeks of testing. “The Optimus Maximus is terrible for touch-typing,” CNET concurred in its July 2008 review, noting that “the tightly packed keys make for lots of mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your words per minute.” In 2018, retro keyboard YouTuber Chyrosran22 called the keys “fishy fuck nuggets with a capital F” that are “extremely terrible” to type on.
These are issues that would be hard to forgive on any keyboard, but the Optimus Maximus also carried a $1,600 price tag in 2008 (north of $2,200 in today’s money). At that price, it had to be perfect, and the reality was far from it.
So Art Lebedev came up with another, cheaper way to make screen-filled keys work: one big screen. In 2012, it released the Optimus Popularis, a more compact keyboard that placed one large LCD display under all its transparent keys, with no need for any individual OLED screens or mechanical switches underneath. Instead, you’d type on lenses that would activate the keyboard’s single large screen, with each lens held floating in place by an aluminum frame. This basic idea is the key to every LCD keyboard we’ve seen since, from the Elgato Stream Deck to Razer’s discontinued Switchblade UI to the Finalmouse Centerpiece.
Yet fundamental problems remained. Not only was Art Lebedev’s new keyboard only slightly cheaper (it still cost north of $1,000) but also the Optimus Popularis was an absolute pig to type on. Art Lebedev was kind enough to send one to us for the purposes of this story, and we had ambitions to write this entire piece on the Popularis. But after half an hour, we gave up. It was a struggle getting the keyboard to register keypresses in the first place. Its space bar, in particular, is a nightmare that refuses to actuate unless you press it firmly enough in exactly the right spot, which is nearly impossible if you want to type at any sort of speed.
Even in 2024, in an era of phones that are not just smart but that can literally fold in half, we still find ourselves wishing Art Lebedev had been able to deliver on its 2005 concept images. It’s a really beautiful idea with huge amounts of promise. But even if Art Lebedev never truly delivered, it did a lot of the vital iteration to get there.

Four years after the Optimus Popularis’ failure, a strikingly similar gadget appeared on Indiegogo. The “Infinitton” contained just 15 individually customizable LCD keys, much like another old Art Lebedev concept dubbed the Optimus Aux. But this time, gadget lovers didn’t praise the idea to high heaven — the keypad missed its first crowdfunding goal of $30,000 and barely made that money a year later on Kickstarter.

But for Taiwanese manufacturer iDisplay, the Infinitton was far from a disappointment — it was a decade-old idea finally paying off.
That’s because iDisplay was the company that built those OLED and LCD keys for Art Lebedev all those years ago, the Russian design firm and Elgato both confirmed to The Verge. It never stopped working on them. “The success of Optimus Maximus kept me interested to continue the research and development of the built-in screen keys,” iDisplay cofounder Jen Wen Sun tells us via translated email. By 2017, he’d racked up over a dozen patents on the tech and says he sold the screens into broadcast equipment, airplanes, and cars along the way.
The company was originally formed in 1998 and worked on buttons for the gambling industry, he tells us, surviving off small-scale R&D projects while he kept trying to sell casinos on his push-button screens. Casino owner Bally’s was once interested, he says, but a deal never panned out.
Back in Germany, the Infinitton caught the attention of Elgato’s Julian Fest, who was researching how to turn his screen-equipped streaming controller idea into a reality. “As we’re thinking about this controller, this crowdfunding campaign comes out and we’re looking at this box and we’re like ‘Oh, this is perfect. We need to talk to these guys,’” Fest recalls.
By the time Elgato started talking to iDisplay, the Taiwanese company had already solved many of the hardware challenges needed to turn a thousand dollar-plus keyboard into a relatively affordable $149 computer accessory. It could use small off-the-shelf screens similar to what you might find in a car’s infotainment system. And iDisplay had a simpler job on its hands crafting the Stream Deck’s bubble wrap-esque button feel because it didn’t have to worry about people needing to type at 50-plus words per minute. That feel had been crafted before Elgato ever touched it.

Elgato essentially turned the Infinitton into the Stream Deck. That first Stream Deck, Fest says, “was really just on a hardware level an iteration of what these guys did.” Look at the original Stream Deck next to the Infinitton, and the resemblance is clear; it’s the same three-by-five grid of buttons turned on its side and with a new housing. “We tried to keep it as simple as possible,” Fest says.
The way Fest describes it, the main thing Elgato brought to the table when it started working with iDisplay was focus. In its Kickstarter campaign for the Infinitton, iDisplay pitched the accessory to anyone and everyone. It was for designers, traders, and musicians. It was for architects, engineers, and programmers. It was for video designers and photographers and business professionals.
In contrast, Elgato knew exactly who it wanted its Stream Deck to be for: streamers. It held a six-month private beta to collect feedback from its intended users, and it poured a lot of effort into making sure the device integrated nicely with OBS, the industry-standard streaming software. “The big new component then was building software that was tailor made for live streamers,” Fest says. “What we did is we took something existing and just repositioned it for an audience that actually understood and appreciated what this thing could do.”

That’s not to say Elgato didn’t have any challenges to overcome while developing the Stream Deck with iDisplay. Fest says a big one was ensuring that the Stream Deck could not only send information to a computer but also receive it back and show it to the user. Without being able to stay in sync like this, the Stream Deck risked being the glorified macro pad that critics claimed it was. “If you fire off a hotkey, you don’t know if that action succeeded,” Fest says. “What we wanted to ensure is that if you change a scene in OBS you can clearly see on your device [that] that scene is now active and the other one is not. Or if you mute yourself, you’re muted, and we can guarantee that you’re muted because we’re talking natively to OBS.”
The approach worked. iDisplay had sold just a few hundred units of its Infinitton via its crowdfunding campaigns, but the Stream Deck quickly became a staple of the Twitch streamer’s toolkit after its release in 2017. A year later, Corsair acquired Elgato for an undisclosed sum — and in 2022, it bought iDisplay, locking down its LCD keys.
Other companies have taken notice. In 2022, Razer introduced the Stream Controller, and a year after that, competing PC accessory manufacturer Logitech snatched up Loupedeck, which had worked with Razer on the rival streaming accessory.
Much like when it morphed its TV tuner into a game recorder, Elgato developed an audience for a technology rather than the other way around. It had been the missing piece of the puzzle since the beginning. But ironically, the audience for the Stream Deck has since expanded almost as wide as the one iDisplay hoped would embrace the Infinitton.
Fest says he knows of Stream Decks being used in the hundreds by organizations ranging from call centers to police dispatcher services. The UK’s Virgin Atlantic airline uses dozens of Stream Decks to simplify communications with pilots and air traffic controllers. Even SpaceX was an early customer, Fest says. (SpaceX did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) The simple genius of the Stream Deck is that it made LCD keys peripheral, useful for anything where you need a button that dynamically advertises what it’s doing.

Art Lebedev was right about one thing: there was indeed a market of people prepared to pay top dollar for premium-quality keyboards. But in retrospect, the Russian design studio bet that the market would go in the opposite direction of the one it actually went in. Instead of a software-based future filled with screens, keyboards embraced hardware, rediscovering mechanical key switches that had been around since the ’80s. Users began fixating on typing feel, seeking out tactile switches and clacky keycaps. The many compromises of LCD keys might have been too much to ask.
But Elgato didn’t need to find a balance between typing feel and screen because its Stream Deck aimed to complement a traditional keyboard, rather than replace it. “Everybody has opinions on how Stream Deck’s keys feel. Some absolutely love it. Some say it’s way too mushy. But for everybody, it’s usable,” Fest says. You can forgive a key that feels mushy if you only need to press it to mute yourself while streaming.
Which is not to say there’s no space for the kind of screen-based design that Art Lebedev and iDisplay worked to create. The gaming accessories company Finalmouse appears to be banking on exactly that with its forthcoming Centerpiece keyboard, which draws on the single-screen approach of the Popularis but combines it with a set of actual mechanical switches — translucent ones — to retain the feel of a mechanical keyboard.
Like the Optimus Maximus, the Centerpiece has already blown past its first promised ship dates and is entering the vaporware realm. But if it does arrive, perhaps function and form will finally be aligned.
As for Art Lebedev, it doesn’t consider the Optimus keyboard a failure. “You could argue how successful the project was in terms of return on investment,” Burbaev says, telling us how much business it drummed up for the studio even a decade later. Sometimes a new client would admit that they, too, were fixated by those concept images back when they were a kid.

Image: Richard Parry for The Verge

Back in 2005, a small firm offered a tantalizing vision of the future of computer keyboards.

What if your keyboard was filled with tiny screens that showed you exactly what any given press would do, each built into a crystal-clear key? The keys would morph and shift as you needed, transforming from letters and numbers to full-color icons and app shortcuts, depending on what you were doing.

Readers and tech bloggers adored the idea. “It’s about time someone shook up this stagnant keyboard market,” declared Engadget. “The concept is fantastic,” wrote Gizmodo. Slashdot lit up.

The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require over 100 built-in screens using display technology that wasn’t readily available at the time. With all the excitement, the firm decided to make it real.

The journey to create the Optimus Maximus would take years and end in multiple commercial failures. But Art Lebedev’s vision and the technology created along the way would live on and ultimately find widespread success — a success that’s been hidden inside another popular product: Elgato’s Stream Deck, a small desktop accessory covered in morphing, full-color keys.

By the time Elgato came to release its first Stream Deck in 2017, Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards had faded into history. But there’s more linking the two devices than a core idea. In fact, the Stream Deck hardware came from precisely the same company that developed the Optimus Maximus’ keys. In a very real sense, Art Lebedev’s work laid the foundations for what Elgato would go on to create.

In 2010, Elgato was in “crisis mode.”

For around a decade, the German video capture company had been selling its TV tuners to people who wanted to watch and record live television via a connected computer. But by 2010, it was clear that the market for such devices was disappearing fast. On one side, broadcast TV was becoming increasingly encrypted, limiting what Elgato’s devices could do. On the other, the streaming revolution, led by Netflix and YouTube, was cutting out the humble TV tuner entirely.

“You’re on a sinking ship, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do,” recalls Elgato’s Julian Fest, whose parents originally founded the company in 1999.

Elgato started to take a hard look at its business, and it noticed one number that didn’t quite make sense.

Elgato knew how many TV tuners it had sold, but people had been registering far more copies of the company’s EyeTV recording software than its own customers would need. When it emailed those customers, it found out they were using a rival piece of hardware, the Hauppauge HD-PVR — and not to record broadcast TV. They were recording gameplay from their PlayStations to put up on YouTube. Right under Elgato’s nose was a new market opportunity.

Armed with over a decade’s worth of video encoding knowledge from its TV tuner days, a direct connection to Hauppauge’s customers, and Hauppauge’s own quarterly earnings reports to know just how many HD-PVRs it sold, Elgato decided to release a rival capture product specifically tailored to gamers. The result was the Game Capture HD, released in 2012.

Three years later, when Fest took over as Elgato’s general manager, it seemed clear that the market for online gameplay videos was poised to explode. With Amazon acquiring the live streaming service Twitch for almost $1 billion in 2014, Fest was on the lookout for ways Elgato could double down. Perhaps it could offer a way to not just capture gameplay footage but also to help Twitch streamers control their broadcasts in the moment.

“If you looked at the state of Twitch and live streaming at the end of 2015, it was intriguing, but it was also kind of boring,” Fest tells The Verge. “Everybody’s stream was like, ‘Here’s my gameplay, here’s my webcam,’ and that’s it.” He figured that simplicity was because of all the different jobs a streamer has to handle during broadcasts: between playing the game, reading the chat, and entertaining an audience, it’d be difficult to also run a dynamic broadcast filled with changing layouts and eye-catching transitions.

Unless, Fest thought, there was a way to offer advanced broadcast controls without distracting a streamer from other tasks. The company found its answer in a popular German TV show where the host had a so-called “nipple board” of buttons in front of him, built into a giant desk. “Every time you pressed one of these buttons, it would play a funny clip that his team had found on TV,” Fest recalls. The team wondered if Elgato could use a similar array of buttons to control a livestream.

Elgato had its idea — now, it needed to find the right buttons to make it a reality.

Art Lebedev had never intended to make a massive splash in the keyboard business. Timur Burbaev, who served as the keyboard’s industrial designer, tells The Verge that the initial idea came about shortly after he joined in 2003. The keyboard was just meant to be a concept, similar to its Lavatrix washing machine, to show off the studio’s design chops and drum up more business in the free time between projects.

In July 2005, the company released a series of concept images of what it called the “Optimus keyboard.” It had the same basic layout as a full-size computer keyboard but with a twist: “Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment,” the website still reads.

One image shows how the keys could change to show an array of Photoshop tools; another shows dedicated controls for Quake. (This was 2005, after all.) On the left edge of the keyboard are macro keys that can be programmed to open specific programs, illustrated with a series of delightfully 2005-era logos like Internet Explorer and QuickTime. Although the images are renders rather than real photographs, the close-ups make an effort to show individual pixels present on the screens of the keys, a small imperfection that provides a tantalizing hint of reality. Nearly two decades later, the imaginary device still looks fantastic.

It was hard to ignore the amount of interest the design was getting. The team called an emergency meeting to discuss. “Back then, we just realized that if you get such a positive response, then let’s risk it and just produce it,” Burbaev says. It was “a clear indication” that the team should try and make it for real. The long and difficult journey of producing what would become the Optimus Maximus had begun. “No one imagined how much time and energy and especially investment it would take,” Burbaev says.

A big early decision was working out what kind of screen technology to use. The first iPod with a color display had only just been released, and the iPhone had yet to make its debut. Candybar-style phones like the Nokia 1110 and Motorola C139 reigned supreme. Art Lebedev thought LCD screens of the era were too dim and offered terrible black levels, while E Ink screens had terrible response times and no backlighting at all. OLED seemed like the best choice.

But this was long before OLED displays were routinely shipping in mainstream smartwatches, smartphones, and TVs. “The problem with OLED displays was that you could potentially find such a small OLED display in 2006 but a) it would cost you a fortune and b) it would have a massive resolution,” Burbaev says. They were meant for military users to show tactical information like maps on tiny screens, not Quake icons on a keyboard.

Art Lebedev decided its “only option” was to dive headfirst into the OLED display business. Burbaev believes his was one of the first companies to ship a product with these kinds of small, low-cost, low-resolution OLED screens. Doing so involved placing what Burbaev describes as a “very strange” order with a Taiwanese manufacturer with some prior experience. He adds that two managers from Art Lebedev ended up living in Taiwan for half a year while they were being made.

Not only did Art Lebedev need to find screens small enough to fit under each of its keys but it also needed to find a way for them to coexist with keys that you could actually type on. The final keyboard ended up being a bit of a fudge: the screens didn’t actually move. Instead, the company built a moving plastic keycap that moved around each screen. But even this solution had its challenges, Burbaev says. This plastic keycap needed to not only be transparent enough to show the display but also tinted enough to not reveal the ugly inner mechanism of each screen and durable enough to withstand scratches.

All of this meant the development process for the Optimus Maximus was long and difficult, and Wired featured the keyboard not once but twice in its annual vaporware roundups. Art Lebedev was unusually open about the troubled development process, cataloging its progress making the keyboard on a LiveJournal blog. We’re used to receiving such updates in an era of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, but the approach felt novel at the time — and it shows just how slowly development went. It took months just to arrive on a keycap design, studying various possibilities along the way. The company’s first OLED manufacturer went bust before managing to deliver its pricy $10 keys, forcing Art Lebedev to hunt down a new Taiwanese supplier.

Finally, after years of development, hundreds of preorders, and dozens upon dozens of blog posts and concept images hyping up every aspect of the idea, the Optimus Maximus began shipping in February 2008.

What was this legendary keyboard actually like to use? In a word: “Terrible.”

“Let’s put it this way, we sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute,” Engadget wrote after its first few weeks of testing. “The Optimus Maximus is terrible for touch-typing,” CNET concurred in its July 2008 review, noting that “the tightly packed keys make for lots of mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your words per minute.” In 2018, retro keyboard YouTuber Chyrosran22 called the keys “fishy fuck nuggets with a capital F” that are “extremely terrible” to type on.

These are issues that would be hard to forgive on any keyboard, but the Optimus Maximus also carried a $1,600 price tag in 2008 (north of $2,200 in today’s money). At that price, it had to be perfect, and the reality was far from it.

So Art Lebedev came up with another, cheaper way to make screen-filled keys work: one big screen. In 2012, it released the Optimus Popularis, a more compact keyboard that placed one large LCD display under all its transparent keys, with no need for any individual OLED screens or mechanical switches underneath. Instead, you’d type on lenses that would activate the keyboard’s single large screen, with each lens held floating in place by an aluminum frame. This basic idea is the key to every LCD keyboard we’ve seen since, from the Elgato Stream Deck to Razer’s discontinued Switchblade UI to the Finalmouse Centerpiece.

Yet fundamental problems remained. Not only was Art Lebedev’s new keyboard only slightly cheaper (it still cost north of $1,000) but also the Optimus Popularis was an absolute pig to type on. Art Lebedev was kind enough to send one to us for the purposes of this story, and we had ambitions to write this entire piece on the Popularis. But after half an hour, we gave up. It was a struggle getting the keyboard to register keypresses in the first place. Its space bar, in particular, is a nightmare that refuses to actuate unless you press it firmly enough in exactly the right spot, which is nearly impossible if you want to type at any sort of speed.

Even in 2024, in an era of phones that are not just smart but that can literally fold in half, we still find ourselves wishing Art Lebedev had been able to deliver on its 2005 concept images. It’s a really beautiful idea with huge amounts of promise. But even if Art Lebedev never truly delivered, it did a lot of the vital iteration to get there.

Four years after the Optimus Popularis’ failure, a strikingly similar gadget appeared on Indiegogo. The “Infinitton” contained just 15 individually customizable LCD keys, much like another old Art Lebedev concept dubbed the Optimus Aux. But this time, gadget lovers didn’t praise the idea to high heaven — the keypad missed its first crowdfunding goal of $30,000 and barely made that money a year later on Kickstarter.

But for Taiwanese manufacturer iDisplay, the Infinitton was far from a disappointment — it was a decade-old idea finally paying off.

That’s because iDisplay was the company that built those OLED and LCD keys for Art Lebedev all those years ago, the Russian design firm and Elgato both confirmed to The Verge. It never stopped working on them. “The success of Optimus Maximus kept me interested to continue the research and development of the built-in screen keys,” iDisplay cofounder Jen Wen Sun tells us via translated email. By 2017, he’d racked up over a dozen patents on the tech and says he sold the screens into broadcast equipment, airplanes, and cars along the way.

The company was originally formed in 1998 and worked on buttons for the gambling industry, he tells us, surviving off small-scale R&D projects while he kept trying to sell casinos on his push-button screens. Casino owner Bally’s was once interested, he says, but a deal never panned out.

Back in Germany, the Infinitton caught the attention of Elgato’s Julian Fest, who was researching how to turn his screen-equipped streaming controller idea into a reality. “As we’re thinking about this controller, this crowdfunding campaign comes out and we’re looking at this box and we’re like ‘Oh, this is perfect. We need to talk to these guys,’” Fest recalls.

By the time Elgato started talking to iDisplay, the Taiwanese company had already solved many of the hardware challenges needed to turn a thousand dollar-plus keyboard into a relatively affordable $149 computer accessory. It could use small off-the-shelf screens similar to what you might find in a car’s infotainment system. And iDisplay had a simpler job on its hands crafting the Stream Deck’s bubble wrap-esque button feel because it didn’t have to worry about people needing to type at 50-plus words per minute. That feel had been crafted before Elgato ever touched it.

Elgato essentially turned the Infinitton into the Stream Deck. That first Stream Deck, Fest says, “was really just on a hardware level an iteration of what these guys did.” Look at the original Stream Deck next to the Infinitton, and the resemblance is clear; it’s the same three-by-five grid of buttons turned on its side and with a new housing. “We tried to keep it as simple as possible,” Fest says.

The way Fest describes it, the main thing Elgato brought to the table when it started working with iDisplay was focus. In its Kickstarter campaign for the Infinitton, iDisplay pitched the accessory to anyone and everyone. It was for designers, traders, and musicians. It was for architects, engineers, and programmers. It was for video designers and photographers and business professionals.

In contrast, Elgato knew exactly who it wanted its Stream Deck to be for: streamers. It held a six-month private beta to collect feedback from its intended users, and it poured a lot of effort into making sure the device integrated nicely with OBS, the industry-standard streaming software. “The big new component then was building software that was tailor made for live streamers,” Fest says. “What we did is we took something existing and just repositioned it for an audience that actually understood and appreciated what this thing could do.”

That’s not to say Elgato didn’t have any challenges to overcome while developing the Stream Deck with iDisplay. Fest says a big one was ensuring that the Stream Deck could not only send information to a computer but also receive it back and show it to the user. Without being able to stay in sync like this, the Stream Deck risked being the glorified macro pad that critics claimed it was. “If you fire off a hotkey, you don’t know if that action succeeded,” Fest says. “What we wanted to ensure is that if you change a scene in OBS you can clearly see on your device [that] that scene is now active and the other one is not. Or if you mute yourself, you’re muted, and we can guarantee that you’re muted because we’re talking natively to OBS.”

The approach worked. iDisplay had sold just a few hundred units of its Infinitton via its crowdfunding campaigns, but the Stream Deck quickly became a staple of the Twitch streamer’s toolkit after its release in 2017. A year later, Corsair acquired Elgato for an undisclosed sum — and in 2022, it bought iDisplay, locking down its LCD keys.

Other companies have taken notice. In 2022, Razer introduced the Stream Controller, and a year after that, competing PC accessory manufacturer Logitech snatched up Loupedeck, which had worked with Razer on the rival streaming accessory.

Much like when it morphed its TV tuner into a game recorder, Elgato developed an audience for a technology rather than the other way around. It had been the missing piece of the puzzle since the beginning. But ironically, the audience for the Stream Deck has since expanded almost as wide as the one iDisplay hoped would embrace the Infinitton.

Fest says he knows of Stream Decks being used in the hundreds by organizations ranging from call centers to police dispatcher services. The UK’s Virgin Atlantic airline uses dozens of Stream Decks to simplify communications with pilots and air traffic controllers. Even SpaceX was an early customer, Fest says. (SpaceX did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) The simple genius of the Stream Deck is that it made LCD keys peripheral, useful for anything where you need a button that dynamically advertises what it’s doing.

Art Lebedev was right about one thing: there was indeed a market of people prepared to pay top dollar for premium-quality keyboards. But in retrospect, the Russian design studio bet that the market would go in the opposite direction of the one it actually went in. Instead of a software-based future filled with screens, keyboards embraced hardware, rediscovering mechanical key switches that had been around since the ’80s. Users began fixating on typing feel, seeking out tactile switches and clacky keycaps. The many compromises of LCD keys might have been too much to ask.

But Elgato didn’t need to find a balance between typing feel and screen because its Stream Deck aimed to complement a traditional keyboard, rather than replace it. “Everybody has opinions on how Stream Deck’s keys feel. Some absolutely love it. Some say it’s way too mushy. But for everybody, it’s usable,” Fest says. You can forgive a key that feels mushy if you only need to press it to mute yourself while streaming.

Which is not to say there’s no space for the kind of screen-based design that Art Lebedev and iDisplay worked to create. The gaming accessories company Finalmouse appears to be banking on exactly that with its forthcoming Centerpiece keyboard, which draws on the single-screen approach of the Popularis but combines it with a set of actual mechanical switches — translucent ones — to retain the feel of a mechanical keyboard.

Like the Optimus Maximus, the Centerpiece has already blown past its first promised ship dates and is entering the vaporware realm. But if it does arrive, perhaps function and form will finally be aligned.

As for Art Lebedev, it doesn’t consider the Optimus keyboard a failure. “You could argue how successful the project was in terms of return on investment,” Burbaev says, telling us how much business it drummed up for the studio even a decade later. Sometimes a new client would admit that they, too, were fixated by those concept images back when they were a kid.

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The Verge

UK regulators are now formally investigating Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection AI staff, months after most of Inflection’s staff joined Microsoft’s new AI division. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now opening up a phase one merger investigation into the partnership, with a September 11th deadline over whether the investigation will progress into a second phase.
If the case progresses to the phase two stage, then it could present a stumbling block for Microsoft’s AI ambitions. The CMA last signaled a more in-depth review of Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2022, eventually forcing the company to restructure its deal and give up key cloud gaming rights in the UK and many other markets worldwide. It’s still early days for the CMA’s Inflection AI investigation, but the results could have an impact far beyond just the UK.
Microsoft hired Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman as part of the Inflection AI staff hirings. Suleyman left Google in 2022 to cofound Inflection AI, and he’s now CEO of Microsoft AI.
Regulators in the UK and EU have been increasingly looking at the AI partnerships and investments that Big Tech are making. The CMA also signaled interest in Microsoft’s Mistral AI partnership but decided that it didn’t qualify for investigation under its merger rules.
Microsoft was also recently charged with EU antitrust violations for bundling its Teams app with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. If Microsoft is found guilty of antitrust violations in the EU, the firm could face a fine of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual worldwide turnover. Microsoft also recently reached a settlement with a cloud industry group in Europe to avoid a potential antitrust battle.

The Verge

UK regulators are now formally investigating Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection AI staff, months after most of Inflection’s staff joined Microsoft’s new AI division. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is now opening up a phase one merger investigation into the partnership, with a September 11th deadline over whether the investigation will progress into a second phase.

If the case progresses to the phase two stage, then it could present a stumbling block for Microsoft’s AI ambitions. The CMA last signaled a more in-depth review of Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2022, eventually forcing the company to restructure its deal and give up key cloud gaming rights in the UK and many other markets worldwide. It’s still early days for the CMA’s Inflection AI investigation, but the results could have an impact far beyond just the UK.

Microsoft hired Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman as part of the Inflection AI staff hirings. Suleyman left Google in 2022 to cofound Inflection AI, and he’s now CEO of Microsoft AI.

Regulators in the UK and EU have been increasingly looking at the AI partnerships and investments that Big Tech are making. The CMA also signaled interest in Microsoft’s Mistral AI partnership but decided that it didn’t qualify for investigation under its merger rules.

Microsoft was also recently charged with EU antitrust violations for bundling its Teams app with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. If Microsoft is found guilty of antitrust violations in the EU, the firm could face a fine of up to 10 percent of the company’s annual worldwide turnover. Microsoft also recently reached a settlement with a cloud industry group in Europe to avoid a potential antitrust battle.

Read More 

It’s your phone. On your Mac. That’s really the whole thing. | Image: David Pierce / The Verge

One of the surprise hits of Apple’s WWDC 2024 was a new feature for desktops and laptops. In Sequoia, the new operating system due this fall and now in public beta, you can mirror your phone to your Mac.
I’ve been testing the new feature for a bit, and it really is what it sounds like. You open up the phone mirroring app, and it presents you to… your iPhone. Rounded corners and everything. You click on the bottom bar to go home and click and drag to go between apps, click with your mouse, and type with your keyboard. The only chrome in the app appears when you hover your mouse up at the top; there’s a button for going home and a button for opening the app switcher. You can’t even resize the window, which is currently way too small on my 4K monitor. It’s just your iPhone. On your Mac.
I know what you’re thinking, and yes: this would all be better if the Mac had a touchscreen or if it worked with your iPad. Alas. Even in our decidedly lesser reality, I’ve been testing the new feature, and I’ve discovered a surprising number of reasons it’s handy to be able to use my iPhone from my laptop. I’ve fired up phone mirroring to tweak my smart thermostat, which you can only do from the mobile app. I’ve used it repeatedly to AirDrop things between my devices, which I can now do without switching back and forth between them. I can now respond to texts from my work computer without logging in to iMessage on my work computer and control my music and podcasts without constantly digging my phone out of my pocket. I like the Apple Journal app, and now I type in it a lot more from my laptop than on my phone.
I think I’ve used it most for managing notifications, though. When you start mirroring your phone, you also start mirroring its notifications, so everything that buzzes your iPhone also buzzes your Mac. I never realized how often I grab my phone off the desk even while I’m sitting at my computer, and mirroring requires much less context switching. It has also made me acutely aware of just how many buzzes I get — if you use phone mirroring, be prepared to turn off a lot of notifications.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Phone mirroring only works if your phone is locked — but then connects pretty quickly.

I was able to get phone mirroring working pretty quickly using my iPhone 15 Pro running the iOS 18 beta and my M1-powered Mac Mini running Sequoia. You have to input your passcodes a couple of times, and it’ll only work if you’re logged in to the same Apple account on both devices, but it only took me a couple of minutes to get going. (Some of my colleagues have had a harder time, though, and as always with beta software, you should tread very carefully.) There is one important part of the setup process to mention, though: you decide early on whether you’ll need to enter a password every time you want to access your phone. Unfettered access to a phone is a big deal, obviously, so choose wisely.
You can only mirror your phone when it’s locked — your phone shows a message that it’s being mirrored, and as soon as you unlock it, your Mac will say “iPhone Mirroring has ended due to iPhone use.” If you’re using mirroring on a MacBook, the swiping and scrolling gestures map pretty cleanly to your trackpad. Ditto if you’re on a desktop and using a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse. But I use a Logitech mouse, and that means a lot of stuff is broken. I can’t scroll in a lot of apps, and I can’t swipe left or right anywhere. When I open TikTok, I am stuck on the first video in my feed forever and ever. I hope Apple will support more devices or allow other devices to support mirroring, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Other than the input issues, most apps work like you’d expect. Not all, though. Hit “play” on a Netflix movie and the screen will rotate to full-screen landscape and show you nothing but a black screen. Netflix and other streaming apps clearly see your mirrored phone as an unsanctioned display and just won’t allow it. I’ve also had trouble getting the Phone app to mirror properly, which is odd — sometimes it’ll work, but other times, it just opens a black screen. That might be beta stuff, but I wouldn’t bet on the Netflix thing changing anytime soon.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
The phone mirroring app has a tiny bit of chrome but almost no options and almost no buttons.

The biggest thing missing from phone mirroring right now is drag and drop between devices, which would instantly be the best thing about it. Apple says it’s coming later this year, and I hope it’s easy to grab photos, files, and everything else from my phone. I’d also like to be able to copy text or links on my Mac and paste them onto my iPhone, which doesn’t work right now. There are ways notifications could work better, too: when you click an iPhone notification, it’ll always open the relevant iPhone app, even if you have the corresponding app on your Mac.
I had high hopes for phone mirroring as a remote monitoring setup for my iPhone camera, but while mirroring, you can’t access the iPhone’s camera or microphone at all. You also can’t use phone mirroring and Continuity Camera simultaneously, which is a shame because “I need something on my phone but my phone is currently my webcam” is a thing I encounter all the time and is the main reason I don’t use Continuity Camera.
Apple’s work with Handoff and Continuity has for years felt very cool but always slightly unfinished; this is very much the same. It works well, but there are a couple of obvious things it can’t quite do yet.
We’re still a few months away from macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 launching for real, so there’s time for Apple to add and improve some of the features in phone mirroring. Even in a short time, it has already become a frequent part of my daily Mac routine. I’m using my phone the same amount, but I’m looking at it a lot less. My Mac gets all my notifications now, and whenever I need to do something on my phone, I just fire up the phone mirroring app. It has felt for a while like Apple is trying to smush all its operating systems together to make all your devices feel like one device. Phone mirroring is a simple step in that direction, but it’s a seriously useful one.

It’s your phone. On your Mac. That’s really the whole thing. | Image: David Pierce / The Verge

One of the surprise hits of Apple’s WWDC 2024 was a new feature for desktops and laptops. In Sequoia, the new operating system due this fall and now in public beta, you can mirror your phone to your Mac.

I’ve been testing the new feature for a bit, and it really is what it sounds like. You open up the phone mirroring app, and it presents you to… your iPhone. Rounded corners and everything. You click on the bottom bar to go home and click and drag to go between apps, click with your mouse, and type with your keyboard. The only chrome in the app appears when you hover your mouse up at the top; there’s a button for going home and a button for opening the app switcher. You can’t even resize the window, which is currently way too small on my 4K monitor. It’s just your iPhone. On your Mac.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes: this would all be better if the Mac had a touchscreen or if it worked with your iPad. Alas. Even in our decidedly lesser reality, I’ve been testing the new feature, and I’ve discovered a surprising number of reasons it’s handy to be able to use my iPhone from my laptop. I’ve fired up phone mirroring to tweak my smart thermostat, which you can only do from the mobile app. I’ve used it repeatedly to AirDrop things between my devices, which I can now do without switching back and forth between them. I can now respond to texts from my work computer without logging in to iMessage on my work computer and control my music and podcasts without constantly digging my phone out of my pocket. I like the Apple Journal app, and now I type in it a lot more from my laptop than on my phone.

I think I’ve used it most for managing notifications, though. When you start mirroring your phone, you also start mirroring its notifications, so everything that buzzes your iPhone also buzzes your Mac. I never realized how often I grab my phone off the desk even while I’m sitting at my computer, and mirroring requires much less context switching. It has also made me acutely aware of just how many buzzes I get — if you use phone mirroring, be prepared to turn off a lot of notifications.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Phone mirroring only works if your phone is locked — but then connects pretty quickly.

I was able to get phone mirroring working pretty quickly using my iPhone 15 Pro running the iOS 18 beta and my M1-powered Mac Mini running Sequoia. You have to input your passcodes a couple of times, and it’ll only work if you’re logged in to the same Apple account on both devices, but it only took me a couple of minutes to get going. (Some of my colleagues have had a harder time, though, and as always with beta software, you should tread very carefully.) There is one important part of the setup process to mention, though: you decide early on whether you’ll need to enter a password every time you want to access your phone. Unfettered access to a phone is a big deal, obviously, so choose wisely.

You can only mirror your phone when it’s locked — your phone shows a message that it’s being mirrored, and as soon as you unlock it, your Mac will say “iPhone Mirroring has ended due to iPhone use.” If you’re using mirroring on a MacBook, the swiping and scrolling gestures map pretty cleanly to your trackpad. Ditto if you’re on a desktop and using a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse. But I use a Logitech mouse, and that means a lot of stuff is broken. I can’t scroll in a lot of apps, and I can’t swipe left or right anywhere. When I open TikTok, I am stuck on the first video in my feed forever and ever. I hope Apple will support more devices or allow other devices to support mirroring, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Other than the input issues, most apps work like you’d expect. Not all, though. Hit “play” on a Netflix movie and the screen will rotate to full-screen landscape and show you nothing but a black screen. Netflix and other streaming apps clearly see your mirrored phone as an unsanctioned display and just won’t allow it. I’ve also had trouble getting the Phone app to mirror properly, which is odd — sometimes it’ll work, but other times, it just opens a black screen. That might be beta stuff, but I wouldn’t bet on the Netflix thing changing anytime soon.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
The phone mirroring app has a tiny bit of chrome but almost no options and almost no buttons.

The biggest thing missing from phone mirroring right now is drag and drop between devices, which would instantly be the best thing about it. Apple says it’s coming later this year, and I hope it’s easy to grab photos, files, and everything else from my phone. I’d also like to be able to copy text or links on my Mac and paste them onto my iPhone, which doesn’t work right now. There are ways notifications could work better, too: when you click an iPhone notification, it’ll always open the relevant iPhone app, even if you have the corresponding app on your Mac.

I had high hopes for phone mirroring as a remote monitoring setup for my iPhone camera, but while mirroring, you can’t access the iPhone’s camera or microphone at all. You also can’t use phone mirroring and Continuity Camera simultaneously, which is a shame because “I need something on my phone but my phone is currently my webcam” is a thing I encounter all the time and is the main reason I don’t use Continuity Camera.

Apple’s work with Handoff and Continuity has for years felt very cool but always slightly unfinished; this is very much the same. It works well, but there are a couple of obvious things it can’t quite do yet.

We’re still a few months away from macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 launching for real, so there’s time for Apple to add and improve some of the features in phone mirroring. Even in a short time, it has already become a frequent part of my daily Mac routine. I’m using my phone the same amount, but I’m looking at it a lot less. My Mac gets all my notifications now, and whenever I need to do something on my phone, I just fire up the phone mirroring app. It has felt for a while like Apple is trying to smush all its operating systems together to make all your devices feel like one device. Phone mirroring is a simple step in that direction, but it’s a seriously useful one.

Read More 

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come through both postage-stamp small and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what came through was the blissfully high-res photo I’d hoped for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.
RCS support is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seems to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a begrudging gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the very end of its iOS announcements. But for many iPhone users, and certainly for the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users, RCS is a big deal.
RCS is not, however, a salve for all the world’s messaging problems. For one, the green bubble lives on. It’s not even a different shade when you’re using RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. The iPhone’s take on RCS is also not encrypted, because Apple is using the basic RCS standard — known as the RCS Universal Profile — and not Google’s more secure implementation. RCS is not “iMessage for Android.” It’s not going to convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just “better SMS.” But it is much, much better SMS.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
The bubbles are green, but the pictures are high-res!

When you’re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting gets a lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything else you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even the Tapback responses work properly now, as long as you’re using the standard options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any emoji as a Tapback, which works fine between iPhones but now prompts that annoying “David reacted to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight’” text in Google Messages. Google will presumably fix that in time — the Messages app has been solving for annoying, iMessage-using iPhone users for a while — but for now, it’s a little wonky.
It appears Apple sees its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. Best-case scenario, it’s two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it goes to RCS. And if RCS isn’t available, either because carriers don’t support it or there’s no data service or for any other reason, it’ll fall back to lowly SMS. It’s smart of Apple to not ditch SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you’ll never need to use it again.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Sometimes it’s SMS, sometimes it’s RCS. It’s very confusing, but it usually works!

For now, though, I’m still in SMS land a lot. The first time you send someone a message from your iPhone, it seems to mostly send it as an SMS; as soon as they reply, some connection gets made, and it’s RCS from then on, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation and it seems to flip back to SMS. (You can always see what kind of message you’re sending in the text box itself.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, though I do have my laptop and iPad both set up to send and receive texts, and I’ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages send much more slowly than they did before. These are the sorts of interface details that often show up in these early betas and often — but not always — get ironed out before launch.
There are also still some things that don’t work at all and probably never will. I don’t have access to any of iOS 18’s new text formatting options when I’m in an RCS chat, for instance, and if I send a message with balloons it sends it with no balloons and a dumb addendum to the message that says “(sent with balloons).” You can’t use iMessage apps over RCS or do inline replies. Apple very much wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it still very much is.
Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users have been clamoring for a better cross-platform way to share photos and videos — Tim Cook’s infamous “buy your mom an iPhone” line was actually in response to a question about texting videos — and that’s now basically a solved problem. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my kid’s face in the video she sent me. That may not sound like much in the year 2024, but it’s kind of the dream.

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come through both postage-stamp small and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what came through was the blissfully high-res photo I’d hoped for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.

RCS support is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seems to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a begrudging gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the very end of its iOS announcements. But for many iPhone users, and certainly for the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users, RCS is a big deal.

RCS is not, however, a salve for all the world’s messaging problems. For one, the green bubble lives on. It’s not even a different shade when you’re using RCS; it’s still just a green bubble. The iPhone’s take on RCS is also not encrypted, because Apple is using the basic RCS standard — known as the RCS Universal Profile — and not Google’s more secure implementation. RCS is not “iMessage for Android.” It’s not going to convince the billions of WhatsApp users around the world to switch. It’s just “better SMS.” But it is much, much better SMS.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
The bubbles are green, but the pictures are high-res!

When you’re RCS-ing, green-bubble texting gets a lot better. Both Android and iPhone users get typing indicators, read receipts, high-res media, and everything else you’d expect from a half-decent messaging app. Even the Tapback responses work properly now, as long as you’re using the standard options — !!, thumbs up, that sort of thing. In iOS 18, you can now send any emoji as a Tapback, which works fine between iPhones but now prompts that annoying “David reacted to ‘What do you want for dinner tonight’” text in Google Messages. Google will presumably fix that in time — the Messages app has been solving for annoying, iMessage-using iPhone users for a while — but for now, it’s a little wonky.

It appears Apple sees its messaging protocols as a three-tier system. Best-case scenario, it’s two Apple devices communicating, and Apple defaults to iMessage. If not, it goes to RCS. And if RCS isn’t available, either because carriers don’t support it or there’s no data service or for any other reason, it’ll fall back to lowly SMS. It’s smart of Apple to not ditch SMS entirely, but hopefully starting this fall, you’ll never need to use it again.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Sometimes it’s SMS, sometimes it’s RCS. It’s very confusing, but it usually works!

For now, though, I’m still in SMS land a lot. The first time you send someone a message from your iPhone, it seems to mostly send it as an SMS; as soon as they reply, some connection gets made, and it’s RCS from then on, at least until there’s a lull in the conversation and it seems to flip back to SMS. (You can always see what kind of message you’re sending in the text box itself.) I haven’t noticed any reliability or performance issues on my phone, though I do have my laptop and iPad both set up to send and receive texts, and I’ve found in my testing that both SMS and RCS messages send much more slowly than they did before. These are the sorts of interface details that often show up in these early betas and often — but not always — get ironed out before launch.

There are also still some things that don’t work at all and probably never will. I don’t have access to any of iOS 18’s new text formatting options when I’m in an RCS chat, for instance, and if I send a message with balloons it sends it with no balloons and a dumb addendum to the message that says “(sent with balloons).” You can’t use iMessage apps over RCS or do inline replies. Apple very much wants the iMessage experience to be better than RCS, and in iOS 18, it still very much is.

Still, RCS in iOS 18 is a huge win for texters everywhere. Users have been clamoring for a better cross-platform way to share photos and videos — Tim Cook’s infamous “buy your mom an iPhone” line was actually in response to a question about texting videos — and that’s now basically a solved problem. I know my wife read my text, and I can see my kid’s face in the video she sent me. That may not sound like much in the year 2024, but it’s kind of the dream.

Read More