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Photo: Andrej Sokolow / Picture Alliance via Getty Images

On June 19th, a Phoenix police officer pulled over a Waymo vehicle that had been driving in an oncoming traffic lane. The car was apparently confused by some construction signs, and reportedly ran a red light before pulling over in a parking lot to let the officer talk to one of Waymo’s support representatives.
In about two-and-a-half minutes of bodycam footage published by local publication AZCentral, the officer told Waymo the car was driving in a construction zone when it “went into opposing lanes of traffic, which is real bad.” He then told a curious bystander what had happened, adding, “so I light it up and it takes off in the intersection.” A dispatch record reportedly said the car drove through a red light and ‘FREAKED OUT’ before it pulled over.

Waymo told multiple outlets that the vehicle drove into the oncoming lane because of “inconsistent construction signage,” and that it “was blocked from navigating back into the correct lane.” The company said the car drove away from the cop “in an effort to clear the intersection” before pulling into the parking lot where the traffic stop took place. The company reportedly said the stop lasted “approximately one minute.”
“UNABLE TO ISSUE CITATION TO COMPUTER,” say dispatch records, AZCentral writes. Arizona law does allow officers to give out tickets when a robotaxi commits a traffic violation while driving autonomously; however, officers have to give them to the company that owns the vehicle. Doing so is “not feasible,” according to a Phoenix police spokesperson quoted by trade publication Repairer Driven News earlier this year.
Waymo didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. The company told Fox 10 Phoenix that its cars “are three-and-a-half times more likely” to avoid a crash than a human being. The company has said in the past that its cars are 2.3 times less likely to end up in a police-reported crash.

Even so, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating almost two dozen incidents involving the Alphabet-owned company’s vehicles. In recent months, the cars have been recorded endangering other road users, and both Cruise and Waymo have had a history of interfering with emergency responders. The company also had to recall its vehicles last month after one collided with a telephone pole.

Photo: Andrej Sokolow / Picture Alliance via Getty Images

On June 19th, a Phoenix police officer pulled over a Waymo vehicle that had been driving in an oncoming traffic lane. The car was apparently confused by some construction signs, and reportedly ran a red light before pulling over in a parking lot to let the officer talk to one of Waymo’s support representatives.

In about two-and-a-half minutes of bodycam footage published by local publication AZCentral, the officer told Waymo the car was driving in a construction zone when it “went into opposing lanes of traffic, which is real bad.” He then told a curious bystander what had happened, adding, “so I light it up and it takes off in the intersection.” A dispatch record reportedly said the car drove through a red light and ‘FREAKED OUT’ before it pulled over.

Waymo told multiple outlets that the vehicle drove into the oncoming lane because of “inconsistent construction signage,” and that it “was blocked from navigating back into the correct lane.” The company said the car drove away from the cop “in an effort to clear the intersection” before pulling into the parking lot where the traffic stop took place. The company reportedly said the stop lasted “approximately one minute.”

“UNABLE TO ISSUE CITATION TO COMPUTER,” say dispatch records, AZCentral writes. Arizona law does allow officers to give out tickets when a robotaxi commits a traffic violation while driving autonomously; however, officers have to give them to the company that owns the vehicle. Doing so is “not feasible,” according to a Phoenix police spokesperson quoted by trade publication Repairer Driven News earlier this year.

Waymo didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. The company told Fox 10 Phoenix that its cars “are three-and-a-half times more likely” to avoid a crash than a human being. The company has said in the past that its cars are 2.3 times less likely to end up in a police-reported crash.

Even so, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating almost two dozen incidents involving the Alphabet-owned company’s vehicles. In recent months, the cars have been recorded endangering other road users, and both Cruise and Waymo have had a history of interfering with emergency responders. The company also had to recall its vehicles last month after one collided with a telephone pole.

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GE Profile’s newest nugget ice maker is an expensive upgrade to your summer drinks, but, for some, it may be worth it.

Some smart home gadgets could be considered essential. A smart thermostat can save you money, and a smart door lock can prevent you from getting locked out. But, unlike those gadgets, it’s hard to argue you need the smart GE Profile Opal Ultra 2.0 Nugget Ice Maker ($579, or $629 with the side tank). However, you may want this gadget — because it makes The Good Ice.
Nugget ice is a hill many will die on — my family included
Yes, $630 is a lot of money for any countertop gadget, let alone one that just freezes water. Spending this much on a connected gadget whose smarts are largely limited to scheduling and asking Alexa to make more ice feels like an even bigger stretch. But nugget ice is a hill many will die on — my family included. It just makes drinks taste better, they cry. Anything that encourages my children to hydrate is a big win in my book.

Mmmmmm. Nuggets!

In case you’re unfamiliar with nugget ice (aka chewable ice, Sonic ice, pellet ice, or, as my family calls it, “the good ice”), it is small pieces of ice made from layers of flaked ice frozen together. It is really quite addictive and goes well in everything from a tall glass of water to iced tea and lemonade. It’s practically required if you’re making Tiki cocktails.

Nugget ice can turn a room-temperature drink into a cold drink in seconds and doesn’t melt as quickly as crushed ice. It’s also really fun to chew on. My daughter likes to get a glass full of ice and chow down.
Sadly, there isn’t a fridge that can make true nugget ice. Samsung makes one that produces “ice bites,” which are small ice cubes, but these are apparently not the same thing. So, it’s go countertop or go to the drive-in.

In the week I’ve had the Opal on my kitchen counter, it has become my family’s favorite kitchen gadget. They love scooping its nuggety goodness into a tall glass of lemonade or filling up their Tervis cup before tackling the summer heat.
The Opal is super easy to set up, simple to use, and makes ice very fast — up to 38 pounds a day. It doesn’t require plumbing, just power, but you will want the optional water tank if you want a continual flow of ice. We only have to refill that every other day on average and have more than enough ice for all four of us.
The Opal is my family’s favorite kitchen gadget
The biggest downside so far is the Opal Ultra is noisy. The tubing makes a high-pitched whining noise as the water filters through, and the ice production clunks gently. But here’s where those smarts do come in handy — you can schedule when it’s making ice in the Smart HQ app to avoid interfering with movie time — or just tell Alexa or Google to turn it off.
The Opal was first launched in 2015, and the Ultra is the fourth version of GE Profile’s popular nugget ice machine. It comes with some behind-the-scenes improvements to make cleaning the unit easier. These include a new scale-inhibiting water filter, a reusable air filter, and alerts that tell you when it’s time to sanitize or descale (on the device and in the app).
All of these enhancements add up to — in theory — more time between cleaning / descaling and should keep the ice tasting better for longer. (The good news for current Opal owners is that the new water filter is compatible with existing models).

Upgrades with the Ultra include a magnetic scoop holder and a stainless steel scoop.

The cleaning / descaling process is lengthy. It requires a special solution (or vinegar, if you prefer) and up to a day of downtime as the stuff does its work. And you need to keep up with it if you want it to keep producing fresh ice. In my short time testing the unit, I’ve not had a descale alert appear, but the sanitize one did, which happens after 25 hours of ice-making.
The sanitizing process was largely painless and took about 30 minutes. However, combined with descaling — which you’ll need to do once every 2 weeks to 4 months based on your water hardness — this gadget requires a lot of maintenance. (GE Profile notes that if you use distilled water in the Opal, you probably won’t need to descale it, but you’ll still need to sanitize and clean.)
The Ultra comes in new colors and with a magnetic scoop holder and stainless steel scoop
Other updates with the Ultra from the current Opal 2.0 model include new colors (white or black in addition to stainless steel) and an upgraded touch display for powering on/off, connecting to Wi-Fi, and checking status. Plus, there’s now a magnetic scoop holder and stainless steel scoop — which makes it easier to store the scoop on the side of the unit and should help with cleanliness.
If you can get the Opal 2.0 on sale that’s probably the way to go. Overall, the Ultra’s upgrades feel like aesthetic and quality-of-life tweaks. You still have to manually clean the machine, even if potentially not as often. Plus, you can buy the new water filter and the new scoop with holder separately starting in August and use them with the Opal 2.0, although that may cancel out most of your savings.
The Opal 2.0 Ultra is very expensive, requires a lot of work to maintain, and takes up a sizeable chunk of my kitchen counter. But it does an excellent job of producing fresh, chewable, crunchable ice that makes any drink taste better. It’s also one of the few smart gadgets I’ve brought into my home that everyone in my family loves — which says a lot.
If you, too, crave good ice and go into this knowing the struggles you’ll need to endure to keep getting it, then you’ll be very satisfied with this gadget.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

GE Profile’s newest nugget ice maker is an expensive upgrade to your summer drinks, but, for some, it may be worth it.

Some smart home gadgets could be considered essential. A smart thermostat can save you money, and a smart door lock can prevent you from getting locked out. But, unlike those gadgets, it’s hard to argue you need the smart GE Profile Opal Ultra 2.0 Nugget Ice Maker ($579, or $629 with the side tank). However, you may want this gadget — because it makes The Good Ice.

Yes, $630 is a lot of money for any countertop gadget, let alone one that just freezes water. Spending this much on a connected gadget whose smarts are largely limited to scheduling and asking Alexa to make more ice feels like an even bigger stretch. But nugget ice is a hill many will die on — my family included. It just makes drinks taste better, they cry. Anything that encourages my children to hydrate is a big win in my book.

Mmmmmm. Nuggets!

In case you’re unfamiliar with nugget ice (aka chewable ice, Sonic ice, pellet ice, or, as my family calls it, “the good ice”), it is small pieces of ice made from layers of flaked ice frozen together. It is really quite addictive and goes well in everything from a tall glass of water to iced tea and lemonade. It’s practically required if you’re making Tiki cocktails.

Nugget ice can turn a room-temperature drink into a cold drink in seconds and doesn’t melt as quickly as crushed ice. It’s also really fun to chew on. My daughter likes to get a glass full of ice and chow down.

Sadly, there isn’t a fridge that can make true nugget ice. Samsung makes one that produces “ice bites,” which are small ice cubes, but these are apparently not the same thing. So, it’s go countertop or go to the drive-in.

In the week I’ve had the Opal on my kitchen counter, it has become my family’s favorite kitchen gadget. They love scooping its nuggety goodness into a tall glass of lemonade or filling up their Tervis cup before tackling the summer heat.

The Opal is super easy to set up, simple to use, and makes ice very fast — up to 38 pounds a day. It doesn’t require plumbing, just power, but you will want the optional water tank if you want a continual flow of ice. We only have to refill that every other day on average and have more than enough ice for all four of us.

The biggest downside so far is the Opal Ultra is noisy. The tubing makes a high-pitched whining noise as the water filters through, and the ice production clunks gently. But here’s where those smarts do come in handy — you can schedule when it’s making ice in the Smart HQ app to avoid interfering with movie time — or just tell Alexa or Google to turn it off.

The Opal was first launched in 2015, and the Ultra is the fourth version of GE Profile’s popular nugget ice machine. It comes with some behind-the-scenes improvements to make cleaning the unit easier. These include a new scale-inhibiting water filter, a reusable air filter, and alerts that tell you when it’s time to sanitize or descale (on the device and in the app).

All of these enhancements add up to — in theory — more time between cleaning / descaling and should keep the ice tasting better for longer. (The good news for current Opal owners is that the new water filter is compatible with existing models).

Upgrades with the Ultra include a magnetic scoop holder and a stainless steel scoop.

The cleaning / descaling process is lengthy. It requires a special solution (or vinegar, if you prefer) and up to a day of downtime as the stuff does its work. And you need to keep up with it if you want it to keep producing fresh ice. In my short time testing the unit, I’ve not had a descale alert appear, but the sanitize one did, which happens after 25 hours of ice-making.

The sanitizing process was largely painless and took about 30 minutes. However, combined with descaling — which you’ll need to do once every 2 weeks to 4 months based on your water hardness — this gadget requires a lot of maintenance. (GE Profile notes that if you use distilled water in the Opal, you probably won’t need to descale it, but you’ll still need to sanitize and clean.)

Other updates with the Ultra from the current Opal 2.0 model include new colors (white or black in addition to stainless steel) and an upgraded touch display for powering on/off, connecting to Wi-Fi, and checking status. Plus, there’s now a magnetic scoop holder and stainless steel scoop — which makes it easier to store the scoop on the side of the unit and should help with cleanliness.

If you can get the Opal 2.0 on sale that’s probably the way to go. Overall, the Ultra’s upgrades feel like aesthetic and quality-of-life tweaks. You still have to manually clean the machine, even if potentially not as often. Plus, you can buy the new water filter and the new scoop with holder separately starting in August and use them with the Opal 2.0, although that may cancel out most of your savings.

The Opal 2.0 Ultra is very expensive, requires a lot of work to maintain, and takes up a sizeable chunk of my kitchen counter. But it does an excellent job of producing fresh, chewable, crunchable ice that makes any drink taste better. It’s also one of the few smart gadgets I’ve brought into my home that everyone in my family loves — which says a lot.

If you, too, crave good ice and go into this knowing the struggles you’ll need to endure to keep getting it, then you’ll be very satisfied with this gadget.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

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E-bikes open up cycling sports to more people, and not just the cheaters. “Electric bikes are for cheaters” is the refrain sung by cocksure men in lycra, worried their weekend hobbies will be invaded by unfit neophytes on battery-powered gravel, mountain, and road bicycles.
It reminds me of the early internet when AOL users were considered inferior to the online elite who did the hard work of subscribing to a regional ISP. Back then, losing an argument with an aol.com email address was reason enough to sell your modem. Now, the ultimate humiliation is being overtaken by someone in street shoes casually pushing a throttle.
But make no mistake, electric sport bikes are becoming increasingly common on trails and roads, just as electrics are slowly replacing regular bicycles in cities around the world.
To understand the appeal, I decided to pick just one electric sport bike — the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp — to test on steep asphalt, rutted trails, loose gravel, mud, sand, and some green mushy stuff that smelled of doom. And to truly test its limits, I loaded the bike down with an absurd 50 pounds (23kg) of gear for a four day e-bikepacking trip.
And to test the performance of the e-bike, I was joined by an avid roadie who is currently training to ride over 800 miles (1,300km) from Amsterdam to Venice, Italy. He’s not only 10 years younger than me — he’s also fitter and carried just half the weight on his acoustic road bike.

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What follows is my e-bikepacking experience over nearly 150 miles (400km) and 4,265 feet (1,300m) of elevation change. It covers my evolving charging strategy, favorite gadgets and bike gear tested, and lessons learned from over 600 miles (1,000km) of in-the-saddle testing.
Spoiler: I’m not a convert, but I can appreciate how e-bikes make cycling sports accessible to more people, even bikepacking if you live in the right places.
Charging
The Veluwe is a sprawling forest system in the heart of the Netherlands, rich in woodlands, heath, and wetlands divided by sandy hills cut by glaciers. It’s not a place you’d expect to find an extensive network of e-bike chargers. Yet, I found them to be so plentiful on my four-day trip that I was able to shed my initial range anxiety.

There were more charging options available then you’d think.

Each of the three campsites I stayed at cost around €10 to €15 (about $11 to $16) per night and offered free e-bike charging. The charging facilities ranged from a luxurious covered garage — important for keeping the charging brick dry when it rains — to a simple extension cord that snaked out of a solar-powered tent.
Wild camping away from official sites — which isn’t allowed in the Netherlands — would have made the charging logistics more difficult. But it was certainly possible: three of the four cafes I randomly stopped at during the tour offered free public chargers run by companies like Ion and Laad.
The Specialized e-bike I rode (more on that later) takes about 3.5 hours to fully charge both the main battery and one range extender using the included 164W (54.6V/3A) charging brick. My days would usually end with about 20 percent (out of 150 percent) of battery power remaining, which would have meant scheduling three hours of charging breaks along the route had I been wild camping. That’s certainly doable if spread over multiple food stops, especially on the long summer days found in Northern Europe. Nevertheless, charging in one go each night at a campsite was more convenient and required less planning.

Frankly, I was surprised by all the charging options I found along my route — but really, I shouldn’t have been. The Dutch are rightly lauded for their bicycling infrastructure. In the last few years, e-bikes have outsold regular bikes across the Netherlands, and a new survey suggests that electric bikes are now the majority of bikes ridden. But long before VanMoof helped make e-bikes trendy for young Dutch riders, it was the over-60s you’d see being propelled along bicycle paths. These are the same people who now strap a pair of e-bikes to RVs parked at campsites in the forests. I can only surmise that this remote charging infrastructure emerged in support of boomer demand.
You might not be able to replicate my multiday e-bikepacking experience where you live, but you will eventually, especially in Europe with its shorter distances and fast rate of e-bike adoption. It’ll take a bit longer in the US with its massive scale and dominating car culture.
The bike
For this trip, I rode the $6,500 / €6,000 Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp drop-bar gravel / road e-bike. My European review bike was capped at a top speed of 15.5mph (25km/h) and 50Nm of torque from the company’s own 250W / 330W mid-drive motor. Buyers in the US will receive a faster Class-3 e-bike with a top speed of 28mph.

The Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp ready to ride after packing up all the gear.

There are several reasons why I chose the Creo 2 Comp for my first e-bikepacking adventure. First, it’s lightweight for an e-bike at just 14.47kg (32 pounds) making it almost 5kg (11 pounds) lighter than DJI’s attention-grabbing electric mountain bike. Impressively, the Creo 2 Comp is just 1.3kg (almost 3 pounds) heavier than my own hardtail MTB.
The Creo 2 Comp also features multiple attachment points for all the cages and racks needed to haul lots of gear, and a front shock built into the handlebar stem that allows for 20mm of travel. That’s not a lot of dampening compared to mountain bikes, but my hands definitely benefited after several hours of daily riding over rough gravel, tree roots, and bumpy single track.
Specialized’s two-wheeler also supports healthy tire volumes, including the chunky 29 x 2.2-inch variety commonly fitted to mountain bikes. My review bike came with the company’s smaller 700 x 42 Pathfinder Pro tubeless tires. They proved to be smooth rollers on pavement and gravel and plenty capable in sections of sand and muck that stopped my friend who rode on thinner tires.

My riding companion’s regular road bike, fitted with gravel tires.

But the main reason I selected the Creo 2 Comp was for its battery expansion. The electric gravel bike features a main 320Wh battery that can be easily supplemented with $450 160Wh range extenders. Specialized sent me two extenders for a total capacity of 640Wh. The company also sent me a Y-cable for dual-battery charging.
Unfortunately, that main battery is fully integrated into the frame and can’t be removed for charging. Specialized did this to help keep the weight down. But the Y-cable can only charge the main battery and one range extender simultaneously — not two range extenders — ruining my plan to keep the bike securely by my tent while the two smaller batteries were charging elsewhere. That meant leaving Specialized’s very expensive bike and one range extender charging outside in the rain on three occasions — twice overnight, and a few hundred meters away — protected only by a lightweight lock and rain fly made from a trash bag. Not ideal.
Another intriguing feature of the Creo 2 Comp is Specialized’s smart battery control. In Smart Control mode, you can enter the distance and duration of your planned travel, and the bike will adjust the pedal assist to ensure you don’t run out of power. I ended up not using this mode for a few reasons. First, Smart Control requires tracking the ride in the Specialized app, and I didn’t want to drain my phone’s battery unnecessarily (the bike doesn’t have a USB charging port for bike computers and phones). The second reason I didn’t use Smart Control is that I was easily getting about 68 miles (110km) from the internal battery and range extender combo, even with all that gear and riding in Sport mode — Specialized’s medium setting, which nicely balances pedal assistance with battery conservation. Without all the gear, I was getting closer to 93 miles (150km) from the battery plus extender.
And let’s face it: the real reason I chose the Specialized Creo 2 Comp for the trip is that it barely looks like an e-bike. But the motor’s audible whir made it obvious to anyone nearby that I was getting an electrical assist.
Planning
For this tour, I upgraded to the Komoot Premium ($59 / year) service to access its multiday cycling trip planner. My plan started with a premade gravel tour called the Green Divide created by Erwin Sikkens, which I segmented into a custom four-day journey that extended to my home in Amsterdam. Komoot also helped me add cafes and campsites along the way. I then exported the maps to my old Garmin 530 bike computer.

My modified Green Divide route on Komoot Premium.

When booking each campsite, I called ahead to confirm the availability of e-bike charging since I wanted to camp in the more isolated backpacking sections of the campsites, away from the busy charging poles used by all the parked RVs. Little did I know that this was a common amenity offered by every campsite I contacted in the area.
Komoot Premium also displays detailed weather reports along the route. It showed mostly tailwinds for my dates of travel allowing me to plan a quicker-than-average pace, but the rain forecast meant packing additional protection.
I brought along a $270 Spinshift jacket from Gorewear to fight back the cold wind and rain. My review jacket kept me warm and completely dry and packed down small into the jacket’s zip pocket. It fit snuggly with my arms extended on the Creo 2 Comp e-bike, especially when fully stretched into the drop-bar position. But that also meant that the stiff (thin and lightweight) Gore-Tex fabric bunched up a bit when just standing around — a tradeoff I’m always happy to make in a cycling jacket. The Spinshift performed far better than my friend’s rain jacket, which quickly filled with air (slowing him down) and caused him to overheat more frequently. The Gorewear Spinshift jacket isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the price.
If you’re in the US, you’ll also want to check if the trails along your route allow for e-bikes, especially if you’re on a fast and powerful Class-3. Europe’s less powerful pedal-assisted e-bikes have fewer such restrictions.
Baggage
The 14.47kg (32 pounds) Creo 2 Comp weighed a staggering 37kg (82 pounds) after loading it up with 1.5L of water and everything I needed for four days of camping in the rain and cold. For food, I only needed to pack breakfasts and energy snacks since lunches and dinners would be found at markets and cafes along the way.
Ironically, the heaviest items were all related to keeping the e-bike’s motor running. This included the two external range extenders, the massive charging brick, and the heavy-duty Y charging cable. I also brought along a CEE-to-Schuko adapter cable just in case I needed to charge the e-bike from one of those blue charging poles at campsites (I never did). I also never used the second range extender battery, but I was happy to have it in reserve.

I installed an extended rear axel to act as quick-release mounting points for the rack.

To support all that weight and volume, I had to fit the Creo 2 Comp with a rack and pannier bags. For this, I chose a carbon-fiber AeroPack rack and organization system from Tailfin to review. That 50 liters of waterproof on-bike storage proved to be fantastic, albeit expensive, at nearly €1,000 (almost $1,100).
The AeroPack rack I reviewed attaches to the seat post and to an extended rear axle I had to install on the e-bike — a procedure that took about 30 minutes. Tailfin’s 16L Mini Panniers and the entire rear rack that includes an integrated 18L top bag are designed for quick attachment and detachment. That was super helpful since I wanted my gear at my tent while the bike was charging far away.

All my small gadgets and cables went into the smaller Tailfin Packing Cube that cinches shut, while most of my clothes went into the larger 6L Cube.

The big Cube is a perfect fit for the top bag. The other two Cube are designed to stack on top.

I used Tailfin’s Packing Cubes to help keep things organized inside those deep storage bags. Most of my clothes went into the 6L Cube, which fit snugly into the AeroPack top bag. All my cables and small electronics went into the 2.5L Cube, and the toiletries and microfiber towel in the 3.5L Cube. Both of those organizers went into the waterproof panniers alongside items like my trusty JetBoil camping stove I’ve had for something like 15 years. All my stored gear stayed completely dry despite three days of on-and-off rain.
The rest of the bags were my own, including two feed bags for quick access to snacks, my lock, and a water bottle; a partial frame bag for my tools and first aid kit; and a small top-tube bag for a USB battery pack, wallet, and miscellaneous items needed during the ride.
I’ve never carried so much gear on a bikepacking trip before, but I never had a motor to help carry the load, either. Still, the Tailfin bags remained firmly in place with zero sway, which has never been my experience when using those elongated saddle bags that often go limp after a bit of rough riding and end up dragging on the rear wheel.
Tailfin’s setup is totally worth the price, in my opinion.
Sleeping
The other star of the trip was the $500 Hubba Hubba Bikepack 1-Person Tent MSR sent me to review. It’s tiny and weighs only 2 pounds 1 ounce (0.9kg) but has a long list of very smart features for bikepackers. Notably, it comes in a waterproof handlebar bag / stuff sack with plenty of attachment points for add-ons. It features thick spacers that give room for the bike’s cables and a compartment for tent poles that are shorter than normal to not interfere with steering.

The waterproof and nicely ventilated tent and rainfly kept me completely dry in lots of rain, even a thunderstorm. The uniform rectangular shape made it easy to set up and provided plenty of headroom to sit upright. The Hubba Hubba tent also features plenty of internal pockets to store gear and a large vestibule outside the side entry to keep my shoes, helmet, bags, and other bits out of sight and dry while I slept. I also made good use of the internal and external clotheslines to dry my gear.
The Hubba Hubba Bikepack tent is hands down the best lightweight tent of the dozens I’ve tried over the last three decades. It’s clearly been designed by people who spend a ton of time cycling away from civilization. Still, $500 is very expensive. My friend’s $110 NatureHike Cloud tent (which I also own) is only slightly heavier, and he seemed just as comfortable and dry. You don’t absolutely need the Hubba Hubba for bikepacking — but you’re right to want it.
Rounding out my sleep gear was a very comfortable and warm $200 NeoAir XLite NXT four-season air mattress that Thermarest sent me to test. And despite measuring a thick three inches (7.6cm), it packs down small and light at 13 ounces (370g). I appreciated the WingLock Valve that let me inflate (and deflate) it quickly without exhausting myself using the included pump sack and some good ol’ Bernoulli physics.
Thermarest also sent me a down-filled Vesper 32F/0C Quilt to review; $400 for a trail blanket is expensive, but it weighs just 15 ounces (425g) and packs down into an impossibly small ball. Despite being lightweight, it was a bit too warm when falling asleep in 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), but I was happy to have it when temps dropped down to 48F (9C) a few nights — Thermarest says the quilt’s sweet spot is around 41F (5C). It’s silky soft to the touch and stretches around the NeoAir XLite NXT to prevent slippage and drafts.
I slept reasonably well with this setup or at least as well as I do at home. But I just can’t get comfortable with any inflatable pillow I’ve tried. Someday, I’ll find the perfect pillow, but the Trekology Aluft Pro I bought on Amazon isn’t it.
Gadgets
As a nerd, I brought far more gadgets than a typical person would. That meant bringing several USB power banks along to keep everything charged over a period of four days: two 10,000mAh (40Wh) batteries and one 27,000mAh (100Wh) behemoth. That’s far more than I’d normally bring, but again, I had a motor and tons of storage.
Some gadgets I always bring with me on bikepacking trips. These include my iPhone in a QuadLock bike-mount case and my Apple Watch — both set to low-power modes. I also brought a GoPro with extra batteries that I never even used. My aging but formidable Garmin 530 bike computer provided turn-by-turn navigation. To my delight, it was able to read power, cadence, and speed data off the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp after I manually added each bike sensor.
I also had to bring the little SRAM AXS battery charger that came with the bike just in case its wireless electronic shifter died. Something that nearly happened to me earlier during 370 miles (about 600km) of preparation for the trip.
Naturally, I also brought along plenty of gadgets to review.

The Baseus over-the-ear slug let me hear sounds around me while also providing better quality than bone-conduction units favored by many cyclists.

I tested a pair of $60 Baseus Eli Sport 1 open-ear Bluetooth headphones to be sure that I could still hear everything around me. Most riders prefer bone-conducting headphones for this purpose, but I’ve never been a fan of the flat sound. With the rain-proof Eli Sport 1, I could slip on just one of the two over-the-ear slugs for the duration of the ride to hear the navigation. They’re so lightweight and comfortable that I’d forget I was wearing one by the end of the day, and it never fell off my ear, even on the roughest trails or when taking off my helmet and sunglasses. At night, I could pop on the second slug and listen to music or watch videos with real bass, though anyone nearby could hear the audio bleed into the quiet even at modest volumes. The case also kept the headphones charged for the duration of the trip despite heavy all-day usage. For the price, they proved to be outstanding, but I should note that Amazon says it’s a frequently returned product.

The Milo communicator mounted to the top tube where it didn’t perform as well as I had hoped — probably too far from my mouth. Will try on an arm band and handlebar mount next time.

I also tested a pair of Milo Communicators. I’ll have a full review coming later, as these need to be tested in a few more scenarios. My first impressions are mixed. They were invaluable in finding out that my friend had fallen off his bike in a gnarly sand patch a few hundred meters behind me, but they frequently failed to clearly deliver insults and warnings when both of us were riding full out over noisy gravel, wind, grunts, and woo-hooing. We had the Milos mounted on the bikes, and that might have been too far away to properly isolate our voices (the company offers several mounting options). It’s promising tech, so more on this later.

Yes, that’s a HoverAir X1 drone in my mouth, something I wouldn’t try with a DJI.

I’ve also been testing a HoverAir X1 drone for the past few weeks. And honestly, I think I love it. It’s so easy to grab and set aloft without needing any type of controller. And like they say, the best drone is the drone you have with you, and I wasn’t about to bring a DJI drone on this trip. A full review is coming.

The FlexTail Tiny Repeller S kept my tent lit and free of mosquitos, but more testing is required.

Last but not least is the Flextail Tiny Repeller S combination bug repellent and lantern. It kept my tent mosquito-free and well-lit at night, but I need to test it in a few more scenarios, which requires a full review. That one is coming later this summer after I test it in an RV, but so far, so good.
Truthfully, if this hadn’t been a work assignment I would have left most of my electronic devices at home. I love technology’s ability to bend nature to my will, but it can be very distracting from just living in the moment and creates a lot of charging stress where no stress should be.

E-bikepacking is indeed, a thing.

Conclusion
Let’s be clear: the vast majority of people don’t need to spend nearly $10,000 on an electric bike, top-of-the-line camping gear, and premium bike bags to go bikepacking.
If you’re already moderately fit, then you’d be amazed at what you can do with a bunch of bungee cords strapped to a regular ol’ second-hand mountain or gravel bike — and you’ll never need to worry about finding a charger. You can even splurge a little on inexpensive bikepacking gear from brands I’ve used, like Naturehike and Rhinowalk.
But e-bikepacking is most definitely a thing and will become more popular as the charging infrastructure spreads to more wilderness areas around the world. That motor is a game changer, allowing for heavier loads to be carried (even trailers with pets and small kids), tall mountain passes to be flattened, and for people with lesser abilities to get outside and do more.
Notably, e-bikes can help recreational riders join their hardcore cycling partners and friends on their long weekend rides. After which, they’ll be regaled with stories full of grit, cadence, and power stats while gobbling back all those spent calories.
My e-bike allowed me to keep up with my younger and fitter riding mate — basically leveling the field. He got his training sessions in, and I got the camaraderie I was seeking. I got a solid workout in myself since European pedal assist cuts out at 15.5mph (25km/h), and we’d regularly be traveling at speeds above 19mph (30km/h) whenever things flattened out.
Despite the immense amount of fun I had on the very capable Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp, I won’t be trading in my trusty hardtail mountain bike for an electrified version any time soon. I still enjoy the exercise and simplicity of conquering terrain with a pure mechanical assist.
I get the urge for gravel, road, and mountain bikers to dunk on e-bike riders, but let’s not reflexively call them all cheaters. Cheating is an act of dishonesty to unfairly gain an advantage over another, and plenty of people buy electric sport bikes after an honest assessment of their own limited abilities. They give people new options for enjoying the benefits of being active and upright on two wheels, even as they get older. And that’s something we should be celebrating.
But I was definitely cheating, and I will miss listening to my friend’s exclamations anytime he fell behind on long climbs or found his little baby tires stuck in the mud or sand that I had already traversed.
To everyone else: apologies if I knocked you off the Strava segment leaderboard — you should try harder.
All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

E-bikes open up cycling sports to more people, and not just the cheaters.

“Electric bikes are for cheaters” is the refrain sung by cocksure men in lycra, worried their weekend hobbies will be invaded by unfit neophytes on battery-powered gravel, mountain, and road bicycles.

It reminds me of the early internet when AOL users were considered inferior to the online elite who did the hard work of subscribing to a regional ISP. Back then, losing an argument with an aol.com email address was reason enough to sell your modem. Now, the ultimate humiliation is being overtaken by someone in street shoes casually pushing a throttle.

But make no mistake, electric sport bikes are becoming increasingly common on trails and roads, just as electrics are slowly replacing regular bicycles in cities around the world.

To understand the appeal, I decided to pick just one electric sport bike — the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp — to test on steep asphalt, rutted trails, loose gravel, mud, sand, and some green mushy stuff that smelled of doom. And to truly test its limits, I loaded the bike down with an absurd 50 pounds (23kg) of gear for a four day e-bikepacking trip.

And to test the performance of the e-bike, I was joined by an avid roadie who is currently training to ride over 800 miles (1,300km) from Amsterdam to Venice, Italy. He’s not only 10 years younger than me — he’s also fitter and carried just half the weight on his acoustic road bike.

What follows is my e-bikepacking experience over nearly 150 miles (400km) and 4,265 feet (1,300m) of elevation change. It covers my evolving charging strategy, favorite gadgets and bike gear tested, and lessons learned from over 600 miles (1,000km) of in-the-saddle testing.

Spoiler: I’m not a convert, but I can appreciate how e-bikes make cycling sports accessible to more people, even bikepacking if you live in the right places.

Charging

The Veluwe is a sprawling forest system in the heart of the Netherlands, rich in woodlands, heath, and wetlands divided by sandy hills cut by glaciers. It’s not a place you’d expect to find an extensive network of e-bike chargers. Yet, I found them to be so plentiful on my four-day trip that I was able to shed my initial range anxiety.

There were more charging options available then you’d think.

Each of the three campsites I stayed at cost around €10 to €15 (about $11 to $16) per night and offered free e-bike charging. The charging facilities ranged from a luxurious covered garage — important for keeping the charging brick dry when it rains — to a simple extension cord that snaked out of a solar-powered tent.

Wild camping away from official sites — which isn’t allowed in the Netherlands — would have made the charging logistics more difficult. But it was certainly possible: three of the four cafes I randomly stopped at during the tour offered free public chargers run by companies like Ion and Laad.

The Specialized e-bike I rode (more on that later) takes about 3.5 hours to fully charge both the main battery and one range extender using the included 164W (54.6V/3A) charging brick. My days would usually end with about 20 percent (out of 150 percent) of battery power remaining, which would have meant scheduling three hours of charging breaks along the route had I been wild camping. That’s certainly doable if spread over multiple food stops, especially on the long summer days found in Northern Europe. Nevertheless, charging in one go each night at a campsite was more convenient and required less planning.

Frankly, I was surprised by all the charging options I found along my route — but really, I shouldn’t have been. The Dutch are rightly lauded for their bicycling infrastructure. In the last few years, e-bikes have outsold regular bikes across the Netherlands, and a new survey suggests that electric bikes are now the majority of bikes ridden. But long before VanMoof helped make e-bikes trendy for young Dutch riders, it was the over-60s you’d see being propelled along bicycle paths. These are the same people who now strap a pair of e-bikes to RVs parked at campsites in the forests. I can only surmise that this remote charging infrastructure emerged in support of boomer demand.

You might not be able to replicate my multiday e-bikepacking experience where you live, but you will eventually, especially in Europe with its shorter distances and fast rate of e-bike adoption. It’ll take a bit longer in the US with its massive scale and dominating car culture.

The bike

For this trip, I rode the $6,500 / €6,000 Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp drop-bar gravel / road e-bike. My European review bike was capped at a top speed of 15.5mph (25km/h) and 50Nm of torque from the company’s own 250W / 330W mid-drive motor. Buyers in the US will receive a faster Class-3 e-bike with a top speed of 28mph.

The Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp ready to ride after packing up all the gear.

There are several reasons why I chose the Creo 2 Comp for my first e-bikepacking adventure. First, it’s lightweight for an e-bike at just 14.47kg (32 pounds) making it almost 5kg (11 pounds) lighter than DJI’s attention-grabbing electric mountain bike. Impressively, the Creo 2 Comp is just 1.3kg (almost 3 pounds) heavier than my own hardtail MTB.

The Creo 2 Comp also features multiple attachment points for all the cages and racks needed to haul lots of gear, and a front shock built into the handlebar stem that allows for 20mm of travel. That’s not a lot of dampening compared to mountain bikes, but my hands definitely benefited after several hours of daily riding over rough gravel, tree roots, and bumpy single track.

Specialized’s two-wheeler also supports healthy tire volumes, including the chunky 29 x 2.2-inch variety commonly fitted to mountain bikes. My review bike came with the company’s smaller 700 x 42 Pathfinder Pro tubeless tires. They proved to be smooth rollers on pavement and gravel and plenty capable in sections of sand and muck that stopped my friend who rode on thinner tires.

But the main reason I selected the Creo 2 Comp was for its battery expansion. The electric gravel bike features a main 320Wh battery that can be easily supplemented with $450 160Wh range extenders. Specialized sent me two extenders for a total capacity of 640Wh. The company also sent me a Y-cable for dual-battery charging.

Unfortunately, that main battery is fully integrated into the frame and can’t be removed for charging. Specialized did this to help keep the weight down. But the Y-cable can only charge the main battery and one range extender simultaneously — not two range extenders — ruining my plan to keep the bike securely by my tent while the two smaller batteries were charging elsewhere. That meant leaving Specialized’s very expensive bike and one range extender charging outside in the rain on three occasions — twice overnight, and a few hundred meters away — protected only by a lightweight lock and rain fly made from a trash bag. Not ideal.

Another intriguing feature of the Creo 2 Comp is Specialized’s smart battery control. In Smart Control mode, you can enter the distance and duration of your planned travel, and the bike will adjust the pedal assist to ensure you don’t run out of power. I ended up not using this mode for a few reasons. First, Smart Control requires tracking the ride in the Specialized app, and I didn’t want to drain my phone’s battery unnecessarily (the bike doesn’t have a USB charging port for bike computers and phones). The second reason I didn’t use Smart Control is that I was easily getting about 68 miles (110km) from the internal battery and range extender combo, even with all that gear and riding in Sport mode — Specialized’s medium setting, which nicely balances pedal assistance with battery conservation. Without all the gear, I was getting closer to 93 miles (150km) from the battery plus extender.

And let’s face it: the real reason I chose the Specialized Creo 2 Comp for the trip is that it barely looks like an e-bike. But the motor’s audible whir made it obvious to anyone nearby that I was getting an electrical assist.

Planning

For this tour, I upgraded to the Komoot Premium ($59 / year) service to access its multiday cycling trip planner. My plan started with a premade gravel tour called the Green Divide created by Erwin Sikkens, which I segmented into a custom four-day journey that extended to my home in Amsterdam. Komoot also helped me add cafes and campsites along the way. I then exported the maps to my old Garmin 530 bike computer.

When booking each campsite, I called ahead to confirm the availability of e-bike charging since I wanted to camp in the more isolated backpacking sections of the campsites, away from the busy charging poles used by all the parked RVs. Little did I know that this was a common amenity offered by every campsite I contacted in the area.

Komoot Premium also displays detailed weather reports along the route. It showed mostly tailwinds for my dates of travel allowing me to plan a quicker-than-average pace, but the rain forecast meant packing additional protection.

I brought along a $270 Spinshift jacket from Gorewear to fight back the cold wind and rain. My review jacket kept me warm and completely dry and packed down small into the jacket’s zip pocket. It fit snuggly with my arms extended on the Creo 2 Comp e-bike, especially when fully stretched into the drop-bar position. But that also meant that the stiff (thin and lightweight) Gore-Tex fabric bunched up a bit when just standing around — a tradeoff I’m always happy to make in a cycling jacket. The Spinshift performed far better than my friend’s rain jacket, which quickly filled with air (slowing him down) and caused him to overheat more frequently. The Gorewear Spinshift jacket isn’t cheap, but it’s worth the price.

If you’re in the US, you’ll also want to check if the trails along your route allow for e-bikes, especially if you’re on a fast and powerful Class-3. Europe’s less powerful pedal-assisted e-bikes have fewer such restrictions.

Baggage

The 14.47kg (32 pounds) Creo 2 Comp weighed a staggering 37kg (82 pounds) after loading it up with 1.5L of water and everything I needed for four days of camping in the rain and cold. For food, I only needed to pack breakfasts and energy snacks since lunches and dinners would be found at markets and cafes along the way.

Ironically, the heaviest items were all related to keeping the e-bike’s motor running. This included the two external range extenders, the massive charging brick, and the heavy-duty Y charging cable. I also brought along a CEE-to-Schuko adapter cable just in case I needed to charge the e-bike from one of those blue charging poles at campsites (I never did). I also never used the second range extender battery, but I was happy to have it in reserve.

To support all that weight and volume, I had to fit the Creo 2 Comp with a rack and pannier bags. For this, I chose a carbon-fiber AeroPack rack and organization system from Tailfin to review. That 50 liters of waterproof on-bike storage proved to be fantastic, albeit expensive, at nearly €1,000 (almost $1,100).

The AeroPack rack I reviewed attaches to the seat post and to an extended rear axle I had to install on the e-bike — a procedure that took about 30 minutes. Tailfin’s 16L Mini Panniers and the entire rear rack that includes an integrated 18L top bag are designed for quick attachment and detachment. That was super helpful since I wanted my gear at my tent while the bike was charging far away.

I used Tailfin’s Packing Cubes to help keep things organized inside those deep storage bags. Most of my clothes went into the 6L Cube, which fit snugly into the AeroPack top bag. All my cables and small electronics went into the 2.5L Cube, and the toiletries and microfiber towel in the 3.5L Cube. Both of those organizers went into the waterproof panniers alongside items like my trusty JetBoil camping stove I’ve had for something like 15 years. All my stored gear stayed completely dry despite three days of on-and-off rain.

The rest of the bags were my own, including two feed bags for quick access to snacks, my lock, and a water bottle; a partial frame bag for my tools and first aid kit; and a small top-tube bag for a USB battery pack, wallet, and miscellaneous items needed during the ride.

I’ve never carried so much gear on a bikepacking trip before, but I never had a motor to help carry the load, either. Still, the Tailfin bags remained firmly in place with zero sway, which has never been my experience when using those elongated saddle bags that often go limp after a bit of rough riding and end up dragging on the rear wheel.

Tailfin’s setup is totally worth the price, in my opinion.

Sleeping

The other star of the trip was the $500 Hubba Hubba Bikepack 1-Person Tent MSR sent me to review. It’s tiny and weighs only 2 pounds 1 ounce (0.9kg) but has a long list of very smart features for bikepackers. Notably, it comes in a waterproof handlebar bag / stuff sack with plenty of attachment points for add-ons. It features thick spacers that give room for the bike’s cables and a compartment for tent poles that are shorter than normal to not interfere with steering.

The waterproof and nicely ventilated tent and rainfly kept me completely dry in lots of rain, even a thunderstorm. The uniform rectangular shape made it easy to set up and provided plenty of headroom to sit upright. The Hubba Hubba tent also features plenty of internal pockets to store gear and a large vestibule outside the side entry to keep my shoes, helmet, bags, and other bits out of sight and dry while I slept. I also made good use of the internal and external clotheslines to dry my gear.

The Hubba Hubba Bikepack tent is hands down the best lightweight tent of the dozens I’ve tried over the last three decades. It’s clearly been designed by people who spend a ton of time cycling away from civilization. Still, $500 is very expensive. My friend’s $110 NatureHike Cloud tent (which I also own) is only slightly heavier, and he seemed just as comfortable and dry. You don’t absolutely need the Hubba Hubba for bikepacking — but you’re right to want it.

Rounding out my sleep gear was a very comfortable and warm $200 NeoAir XLite NXT four-season air mattress that Thermarest sent me to test. And despite measuring a thick three inches (7.6cm), it packs down small and light at 13 ounces (370g). I appreciated the WingLock Valve that let me inflate (and deflate) it quickly without exhausting myself using the included pump sack and some good ol’ Bernoulli physics.

Thermarest also sent me a down-filled Vesper 32F/0C Quilt to review; $400 for a trail blanket is expensive, but it weighs just 15 ounces (425g) and packs down into an impossibly small ball. Despite being lightweight, it was a bit too warm when falling asleep in 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), but I was happy to have it when temps dropped down to 48F (9C) a few nights — Thermarest says the quilt’s sweet spot is around 41F (5C). It’s silky soft to the touch and stretches around the NeoAir XLite NXT to prevent slippage and drafts.

I slept reasonably well with this setup or at least as well as I do at home. But I just can’t get comfortable with any inflatable pillow I’ve tried. Someday, I’ll find the perfect pillow, but the Trekology Aluft Pro I bought on Amazon isn’t it.

Gadgets

As a nerd, I brought far more gadgets than a typical person would. That meant bringing several USB power banks along to keep everything charged over a period of four days: two 10,000mAh (40Wh) batteries and one 27,000mAh (100Wh) behemoth. That’s far more than I’d normally bring, but again, I had a motor and tons of storage.

Some gadgets I always bring with me on bikepacking trips. These include my iPhone in a QuadLock bike-mount case and my Apple Watch — both set to low-power modes. I also brought a GoPro with extra batteries that I never even used. My aging but formidable Garmin 530 bike computer provided turn-by-turn navigation. To my delight, it was able to read power, cadence, and speed data off the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp after I manually added each bike sensor.

I also had to bring the little SRAM AXS battery charger that came with the bike just in case its wireless electronic shifter died. Something that nearly happened to me earlier during 370 miles (about 600km) of preparation for the trip.

Naturally, I also brought along plenty of gadgets to review.

The Baseus over-the-ear slug let me hear sounds around me while also providing better quality than bone-conduction units favored by many cyclists.

I tested a pair of $60 Baseus Eli Sport 1 open-ear Bluetooth headphones to be sure that I could still hear everything around me. Most riders prefer bone-conducting headphones for this purpose, but I’ve never been a fan of the flat sound. With the rain-proof Eli Sport 1, I could slip on just one of the two over-the-ear slugs for the duration of the ride to hear the navigation. They’re so lightweight and comfortable that I’d forget I was wearing one by the end of the day, and it never fell off my ear, even on the roughest trails or when taking off my helmet and sunglasses. At night, I could pop on the second slug and listen to music or watch videos with real bass, though anyone nearby could hear the audio bleed into the quiet even at modest volumes. The case also kept the headphones charged for the duration of the trip despite heavy all-day usage. For the price, they proved to be outstanding, but I should note that Amazon says it’s a frequently returned product.

The Milo communicator mounted to the top tube where it didn’t perform as well as I had hoped — probably too far from my mouth. Will try on an arm band and handlebar mount next time.

I also tested a pair of Milo Communicators. I’ll have a full review coming later, as these need to be tested in a few more scenarios. My first impressions are mixed. They were invaluable in finding out that my friend had fallen off his bike in a gnarly sand patch a few hundred meters behind me, but they frequently failed to clearly deliver insults and warnings when both of us were riding full out over noisy gravel, wind, grunts, and woo-hooing. We had the Milos mounted on the bikes, and that might have been too far away to properly isolate our voices (the company offers several mounting options). It’s promising tech, so more on this later.

Yes, that’s a HoverAir X1 drone in my mouth, something I wouldn’t try with a DJI.

I’ve also been testing a HoverAir X1 drone for the past few weeks. And honestly, I think I love it. It’s so easy to grab and set aloft without needing any type of controller. And like they say, the best drone is the drone you have with you, and I wasn’t about to bring a DJI drone on this trip. A full review is coming.

The FlexTail Tiny Repeller S kept my tent lit and free of mosquitos, but more testing is required.

Last but not least is the Flextail Tiny Repeller S combination bug repellent and lantern. It kept my tent mosquito-free and well-lit at night, but I need to test it in a few more scenarios, which requires a full review. That one is coming later this summer after I test it in an RV, but so far, so good.

Truthfully, if this hadn’t been a work assignment I would have left most of my electronic devices at home. I love technology’s ability to bend nature to my will, but it can be very distracting from just living in the moment and creates a lot of charging stress where no stress should be.

Conclusion

Let’s be clear: the vast majority of people don’t need to spend nearly $10,000 on an electric bike, top-of-the-line camping gear, and premium bike bags to go bikepacking.

If you’re already moderately fit, then you’d be amazed at what you can do with a bunch of bungee cords strapped to a regular ol’ second-hand mountain or gravel bike — and you’ll never need to worry about finding a charger. You can even splurge a little on inexpensive bikepacking gear from brands I’ve used, like Naturehike and Rhinowalk.

But e-bikepacking is most definitely a thing and will become more popular as the charging infrastructure spreads to more wilderness areas around the world. That motor is a game changer, allowing for heavier loads to be carried (even trailers with pets and small kids), tall mountain passes to be flattened, and for people with lesser abilities to get outside and do more.

Notably, e-bikes can help recreational riders join their hardcore cycling partners and friends on their long weekend rides. After which, they’ll be regaled with stories full of grit, cadence, and power stats while gobbling back all those spent calories.

My e-bike allowed me to keep up with my younger and fitter riding mate — basically leveling the field. He got his training sessions in, and I got the camaraderie I was seeking. I got a solid workout in myself since European pedal assist cuts out at 15.5mph (25km/h), and we’d regularly be traveling at speeds above 19mph (30km/h) whenever things flattened out.

Despite the immense amount of fun I had on the very capable Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp, I won’t be trading in my trusty hardtail mountain bike for an electrified version any time soon. I still enjoy the exercise and simplicity of conquering terrain with a pure mechanical assist.

I get the urge for gravel, road, and mountain bikers to dunk on e-bike riders, but let’s not reflexively call them all cheaters. Cheating is an act of dishonesty to unfairly gain an advantage over another, and plenty of people buy electric sport bikes after an honest assessment of their own limited abilities. They give people new options for enjoying the benefits of being active and upright on two wheels, even as they get older. And that’s something we should be celebrating.

But I was definitely cheating, and I will miss listening to my friend’s exclamations anytime he fell behind on long climbs or found his little baby tires stuck in the mud or sand that I had already traversed.

To everyone else: apologies if I knocked you off the Strava segment leaderboard — you should try harder.

All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

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Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

It may sound funny to say this, but PDF files — electronic copies of printed documents — are still around and are still very useful. Short for Portable Document Format, PDFs allow you to create a digital version of a paper document, letting you store and access them a lot easier than having to rifle through a filing cabinet.
While there are a variety of PDF apps available — Adobe Acrobat being the most well-known — you actually don’t need to download one to create a PDF from an existing paper document with your iPhone or iPad. You can just use Apple’s Notes.
Create a PDF from a paper document
Here’s how to create a PDF on your iPhone (the process on your iPad is very similar):

Go to your Notes app and create a new document by selecting the icon in the lower right corner.
Select the Attach icon (the paper clip). From the pop-up menu, tap on Scan Documents.
Center your phone over your paper document. (It’s a good idea to place it on a plain, contrasting surface; it makes it easier for the app to find the edges.) Notes will find the document, indicate it via an orange overlay, scan it, and then drop a thumbnail image in the lower-left corner of the screen.
If your document has more than one page, then all you have to do is move on to the next (you’ll see text at the bottom of the screen that reads Ready for next scan). Be quick; if you hold the phone over the same document for too long, you’ll just get another scan of the same one.

Screenshot: Apple

From the pop-up menu, tap on Scan Documents.

Screenshot: Apple

Once the doc’s been scanned, either tap Save or tap the thumbnail to edit it.

Once you’ve scanned all your documents, and if you’re relatively sure everything is as you wish, you can just select Save in the lower right corner. Otherwise, tap on the thumbnail of your scan so you can edit it.
At this point, you can use the icons at the bottom to adjust the margins of your scan, change it from color to grayscale or black and white; rotate it; or delete it. If you’re really unhappy with your scan, you can resort to the Retake button in the top right.
When you’re finally happy with the results, tap Done in the top left corner, and then Save in the lower right corner.

Create a PDF from a file
If you have existing documents that you want to save as PDFs — in your File app, on Safari, in Photos, or in other apps — you can do that as well, using either Markup or Print, depending on what is available from the app you’re using.

Open the file and find the Share icon.
Scroll down to and tap on either Markup or Print.
If you tapped on Markup, you can first draw on the PDF if you want using the Markup tools. When you’re ready, select Done > Save File To… Now you just have to select where you want to save the PDF, and what to call it.
If you tapped on Print, then look for the thumbnails at the bottom of the resulting Options page. Long-press on your chosen thumbnail and then tap it, and it will generate a PDF.
Selecting the Share icon in the lower left corner will now let you save the new PDF to Files or another app.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

It may sound funny to say this, but PDF files — electronic copies of printed documents — are still around and are still very useful. Short for Portable Document Format, PDFs allow you to create a digital version of a paper document, letting you store and access them a lot easier than having to rifle through a filing cabinet.

While there are a variety of PDF apps available — Adobe Acrobat being the most well-known — you actually don’t need to download one to create a PDF from an existing paper document with your iPhone or iPad. You can just use Apple’s Notes.

Create a PDF from a paper document

Here’s how to create a PDF on your iPhone (the process on your iPad is very similar):

Go to your Notes app and create a new document by selecting the icon in the lower right corner.
Select the Attach icon (the paper clip). From the pop-up menu, tap on Scan Documents.
Center your phone over your paper document. (It’s a good idea to place it on a plain, contrasting surface; it makes it easier for the app to find the edges.) Notes will find the document, indicate it via an orange overlay, scan it, and then drop a thumbnail image in the lower-left corner of the screen.
If your document has more than one page, then all you have to do is move on to the next (you’ll see text at the bottom of the screen that reads Ready for next scan). Be quick; if you hold the phone over the same document for too long, you’ll just get another scan of the same one.

Once you’ve scanned all your documents, and if you’re relatively sure everything is as you wish, you can just select Save in the lower right corner. Otherwise, tap on the thumbnail of your scan so you can edit it.
At this point, you can use the icons at the bottom to adjust the margins of your scan, change it from color to grayscale or black and white; rotate it; or delete it. If you’re really unhappy with your scan, you can resort to the Retake button in the top right.
When you’re finally happy with the results, tap Done in the top left corner, and then Save in the lower right corner.

Create a PDF from a file

If you have existing documents that you want to save as PDFs — in your File app, on Safari, in Photos, or in other apps — you can do that as well, using either Markup or Print, depending on what is available from the app you’re using.

Open the file and find the Share icon.
Scroll down to and tap on either Markup or Print.
If you tapped on Markup, you can first draw on the PDF if you want using the Markup tools. When you’re ready, select Done > Save File To… Now you just have to select where you want to save the PDF, and what to call it.
If you tapped on Print, then look for the thumbnails at the bottom of the resulting Options page. Long-press on your chosen thumbnail and then tap it, and it will generate a PDF.
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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge. Getty Images

The bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company came after months of chaos, cash crunch, and corporate upheaval. Redbox’s field service technicians thought they had seen it all.
Stores had unplugged thousands of the company’s iconic red DVD rental kiosks. Payroll and expense reimbursements had been late. Several employees say their corporate gas cards have been declined. They had read article after article about companies suing Redbox and its corporate parent over unpaid bills. Some of them had dug into financial data, puzzling together an alarming picture of a company drowning in debt. Still, the email they got on a Tuesday in mid-June came as a shock.
“Please stop what you are doing and return home immediately,” the message read, adding: “You will be paid for the rest of the day.”
The sudden work stoppage initially appeared to be due to liability issues. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which had acquired Redbox in August of 2022, had informed employees earlier that day that it had been dropped by its health insurance provider; Redbox management seemingly didn’t want to have uninsured workers in the field to service and repair the company’s kiosks.
However, a follow-up email revealed deeper concerns. “We have entered an unforeseen and unprecedented situation for our company,” a senior Redbox manager wrote. The email referenced Chicken Soup’s inability to service its massive debt, as well as its CEO’s sudden decision to push out the entire board of directors. “It is disrupting our day-to-day operation, and we are temporarily halting all field activity until we have clarity on our path forward,” the email added.

Management telling hundreds of employees to stop working out of an apparent frustration with a company’s leadership is unprecedented – but it wasn’t surprising to former employees we spoke to at Redbox. The company has been on a dizzying rollercoaster ride ever since getting acquired two years ago. After failing to pay numerous bills, Redbox and its owner have been sued over a dozen times by companies, including CVS, 7-Eleven, and NBCUniversal.
When asked about the numerous lawsuits, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s corporate communications SVP, Peter Binazeski, told me in March that the company could not comment on ongoing litigation; the company did not respond to a number of follow-up questions about its legal and financial situation.
Attempts to settle with NBCUniversal failed after Chicken Soup missed a required $4 million payment, and Redbox is on the verge of having its entire car fleet repossessed.
So, how did things go so wrong for Redbox? I’ve spent months pouring over lawsuits, regulatory filings, and internal emails, as well as talking to a number of current and former Redbox employees, to find an answer to that question. Many of those conversations took on increasing urgency in June, when, in a matter of weeks, people’s worries shifted from wondering whether they’d have a job by the end of the year to whether there would be a paycheck by the end of the week. And when the paychecks finally stopped coming, employees realized that this may be the end for the last major company to still rent out DVDs.
And it could be: Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for bankruptcy at the end of June.

Things actually appeared to be looking up when Redbox was acquired two years ago. Sure, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment seemed like an odd company to make this move, but there was a plausible backstory here: after the self-help book publisher was sold by its founders in 2008, the company’s new owners began to diversify its revenue streams, adding digital media properties and lifestyle products like pet food. Chicken Soup acquired a bunch of companies over the following years, including the film distribution outlet Screen Media and the pioneering free streaming service Crackle. Chicken Soup’s leadership painted the addition of Redbox as the next step in its quest to build an entertainment media empire.
Building that empire on the back of DVD rentals is not as crazy as it sounds. Netflix shipped DVD rentals to customers for 25 years and used the proceeds from that perpetually shrinking but highly profitable business to become the global streaming juggernaut that it is today. Redbox, founded in 2002, had long been a similar powerhouse in the DVD space, with consumers renting more than 6 billion discs to date. Chicken Soup planned to follow Netflix’s playbook, with CEO Bill Rouhana telling The Verge’s David Pierce last year that Redbox’s kiosks “could be the cash flow machine that allowed us to build out our digital business over the next decade.”
“The first few months were decent,” acknowledged a Redbox employee who spoke to The Verge on the condition that we do not publish their name for fear of retaliation. But soon, warning signs started to pop up. Chicken Soup’s stock price tanked in early 2023 and never recovered. There were some irregularities with paychecks being late. Then, stores started to pull the plugs on kiosks.
“When 7-Eleven pulled our machines, that was huge”
“When 7-Eleven pulled our machines, that was huge,” recalled a second Redbox employee, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. “That was our first big [warning] sign.”
The convenience store chain had Redbox kiosks in front of its stores nationwide, and Redbox was contractually obligated to pay 7-Eleven a percentage of the fees it got from every single rental. A lawsuit filed by 7-Eleven in June alleges Redbox stopped paying those fees last spring. 7-Eleven terminated its contract with Redbox in August of 2023 and demanded that the company pick up its kiosks but says Redbox never did. As a result, 7-Eleven franchisees began to unplug the machines and tape credit card readers shut. Countless inoperable kiosks remain in front of 7-Eleven stores to this day.
7-Eleven wasn’t the only retailer that had a falling-out with Redbox. CVS alleged in a February lawsuit that Redbox stopped paying commissions in Q3 of 2022. Illinois-based chain Sheetz stopped getting payments at the end of 2022, according to its own lawsuit filed in February. Publix pulled all kiosks sometime last year. Kroger began telling customers last month that its Redbox kiosks would stop working soon, and Portland-based Hannaford said it wouldn’t offer access to Redbox anymore by mid-June.
Redbox has not commented publicly on the lawsuits.
Company employees were left in the dark about these rifts. “[We would] find out by working in the field, and there’s a big sign on there that says: ‘As of May 20th, this Redbox is gone,’” said the first employee. “And we’re like: ‘All right, somebody else is suing us.’”
Among the companies suing Redbox and its corporate parent is Automotive Rentals, Inc., or ARI, from which Redbox leases over 400 SUVs and other cars for its service technicians. ARI alleges in its lawsuit that Redbox stopped paying its monthly leasing fees last September; the company terminated its lease agreement with Redbox in March and finally sued in May, alleging that it was owed $7.8 million in unpaid bills.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
A Redbox kiosk outside a CVS store. CVS has filed a lawsuit against the company for failing to pay commissions.

In a legal filing, Chicken Soup’s lawyers acknowledged the failed payments, writing that “defendants do not dispute that they owe Plaintiffs money — though there is significant question about how much.” The filing goes on to state that the company had “every intention of making Plaintiffs whole” as soon as it raised the necessary financing to do so.
Redbox employees didn’t initially know about this dispute, either, but they realized something was wrong when they suddenly weren’t able to receive routine maintenance services from ARI anymore. “We couldn’t get anything done,” said the first employee. This included oil changes. “I drive a lot, almost a thousand miles a week,” the employee said. “I’m almost 20,000 miles overdue.”
“There’s people who are 18,000 miles over getting [their] oil change done because [the company] can’t pay for it,” said the second employee. The problem apparently became so acute this spring that some employees were told they should just go out, buy some motor oil, and top off their cars themselves.
“I’m not popping that hood,” said the first employee. “I am not putting new oil in old oil. That is a no.”

It’s easy to dismiss Redbox as a relic of a bygone era. A company that’s survived long past its prime. The kiosk version of Blockbuster, destined to fail sooner rather than later.
Well before the Chicken Soup acquisition, Redbox leadership realized that times were changing, with people transitioning from physical media to streaming. “Everyone knew that this was eventually going to go away,” said a former Redbox executive, who spoke on the condition that we don’t publish their name as they are still employed in the industry. But they also saw that DVDs had a surprising staying power, especially with less wealthy and less connected consumers. Forty million people still rented physical discs from Redbox kiosks before the pandemic, according to the company’s leadership at the time.
Especially in smaller towns, Redbox kiosks represented a valuable lifeline. “A lot of rural areas don’t have the luxury of high-speed internet,” said the first Redbox employee. “Our kiosk is the only theater in town.” Multiple employees told me that they were often greeted on the street, with people asking about new releases or cheering them on when they fixed a kiosk that had been broken. “People [in these areas] really can’t afford four or five different streaming services,” said the second Redbox employee.
“Our kiosk is the only theater in town.”
Even so, Redbox executives were working on a digital future. Redbox tried to establish a Netflix competitor in partnership with Verizon in 2012 but shuttered the service two years later. In early 2020, Redbox tried again with a free, ad-supported streaming service that seemed a better fit for its lower-income customers and their slow transition to digital media. Redbox customers were late adopters, so executives believed that they had some time to grow the new digital service while renting out DVDs for years to come.
Then, the pandemic happened — and instantly blew up those plans.
With theaters shut down, productions put on hold, and consumers cooped up at home, Hollywood scrambled. Major studios threw out their release schedule and prioritized their own streaming ventures. Disney postponed the theatrical release of Mulan for months, only to eventually take it directly to Disney Plus. Warner Bros. released all of its 2021 movies on HBO Max.
The number of new releases at kiosks nosedived as a result. “Throughout the first three quarters of 2021, Redbox released 33 theatrical titles at the kiosk, which is typically what would have been released in one quarter pre-COVID,” the company told investors in late 2021. With few new discs in kiosks and some of the biggest titles going directly to streaming, even Redbox’s late-adopter customer base began to give Netflix and Disney Plus a look.
“The pandemic screwed everything up”
“There was deep concern” about this trend internally, according to the former Redbox executive, with some fearing that the company may lose its customers for good to the digital competition. “There was almost no way of bringing them back,” the former executive said.
The results on Redbox’s bottom line were disastrous: the company’s revenue declined from $829 million in 2019 to $546 million in 2020, and then to $289 million in 2021. “It happened really fast,” said the former Redbox executive.
“The pandemic screwed everything up,” said the first Redbox employee.

In the midst of that pandemic-fueled freefall, Redbox was facing corporate upheaval. Redbox’s owner at the time, private equity giant Apollo, began to look at ways to unload the asset. Discussions with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment began in early 2020, and the two companies signed a term sheet in November of that year. However, the deal ultimately fell apart, with Apollo opting for another route: it decided to take Redbox public via a SPAC merger.
SPACs were still all the rage back then, and Redbox seemed like the perfect candidate for meme stock traders looking to hype another company steeped in nostalgia. Chicken Soup’s management, however, thought the public offering was doomed to fail. “Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s plan was merely waiting for Redbox to implode,” alleged Keith Knee, a former consultant for Chicken Soup, in a lawsuit filed earlier this year.
“They are going to be back, and we are going to be able to get this company for two-thirds of what they are asking for right now,” Chicken Soup CEO Bill Rouhana allegedly told his chief strategy officer, according to the lawsuit.

Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty Images for Chicken Soup for the Soul
Chicken Soup for the Soul CEO Bill Rouhana in 2014.

Rouhana was right: the public offering quickly devolved into a disaster. Redbox’s stock price tumbled below $2 per share just four months after it went public, and the company went on to lay off 10 percent of its staff. That’s when Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment swooped back in, offering “a substantially lower price for essentially the same assets,” according to the Knee lawsuit. Redbox couldn’t afford to say no anymore, and the two companies announced that Chicken Soup would acquire the DVD kiosk company in May of 2022.
Chicken Soup took on $325 million in debt as part of the acquisition, but CEO Bill Rouhana promised everyone a quick turnaround. Revenues of the new combined company were supposed to total $500 million in 2022, and Rouhana painted himself as a buccaneer of sorts, capable of righting the ship amid rough seas.
“The industry is completely chaotic right now,” Rouhana told me when I interviewed him days after the acquisition closed in August of 2022. “It’s a total nightmare. It’s completely in a state of flux. I’m pretty comfortable with that because I believe in the value of the stuff we bought.” Rouhana told me that Redbox kiosks would be around another 10 to 20 years and that Chicken Soup would recoup its money “many times over” before they ultimately disappeared. He kept insisting that he was unmoved by any short-term challenges.
“I love chaos,” Rouhana said.

Soon, the chaos engulfed Redbox. Instead of the promised $500 million, Chicken Soup only generated $253 million in revenue in 2022. The number of DVD kiosks operated by the company declined from 36,000 at the time of the acquisition to 27,000 at the end of March. The pandemic-induced movie shortage, combined with a declining number of kiosks, led to continued revenue decline. Already loaded with debt, Chicken Soup quickly ran out of money. Attempts to raise more working capital failed, which only made things worse.
“Our inability to secure […] financing […] hampered our ability to pay for and secure new content, which began to strain relationships with the Company’s creditors, including content providers,” Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment wrote in its most recent quarterly report. “As a result, the Company was unable to pay for all the movies that were offered to it by its providers.”
“I love chaos”
In reality, Redbox hasn’t been able to buy any major new release for quite some time. The last high-profile movie that made it to kiosks is Barbie, which came out on DVD in October. And with no new titles at kiosks, rental revenue has declined even further. In the first three months of this year, Chicken Soup’s revenue from its Redbox retail operations was just $15.5 million — less than half what it was a year ago and just a quarter of what it had been even in early 2021 when the pandemic slowed DVD releases to a trickle.
At the same time, Chicken Soup’s financial situation spiraled. The company ended Q1 with an accumulated deficit of $937 million and less than $5 million in cash on hand. It has been falling further behind on its bills, resulting in former business partners cutting ties and filing lawsuits.
“The Company has received an increasing number of termination and/or nonrenewal notices from content suppliers and other service providers,” Chicken Soup warned in its Q1 filing.
Internally, the situation quickly devolved. Corporate credit cards that employees have been using to get gas for their cars have only been working intermittently, leaving field service employees unable to do their work for a whole week in May. “They paid us to sit at home and look at emails,” the first employee said. “We weren’t servicing anything,” the second employee added.
That in itself is a problem for the company: A little-known fact about Redbox’s business is that the company’s technicians also service kiosks for Amazon, KeyMe, Pokémon, and other kiosk vendors. Employees told me that the company would bill these companies for each individual service call. “It was a highly profitable part of the business,” said the former Redbox executive. “It’s what kept us afloat,” said the second employee.
However, when employees weren’t able to go out and service these kiosks, Redbox wasn’t making any money. What’s more, not servicing third-party kiosks in time put those business relationships at risk. This month, longtime partner ecoATM stopped working with the company, according to multiple Redbox employees.

Things got worse for Redbox and its employees in June. At the beginning of the month, a court granted ARI’s request to repossess all of the cars Redbox has been leasing from the company. In an email sent days later, Redbox told employees to remove all their personal belongings from the company cars and prepare for the worst. “In the unlikely event that your vehicle is targeted for repossession, comply with all demands and turn over keys immediately,” the email read. In late June, the court followed up with an order that directed the US Marshals Service to seize Redbox’s entire leased fleet of 437 cars.
In mid-June, the company also informed employees via email that it had been dropped by its healthcare provider, and they hadn’t been covered since May. It’s the second time Redbox employees suddenly found themselves without healthcare coverage: at the beginning of this year, Redbox employees discovered that the company-provided health insurance had lapsed in December when Redbox out of the blue switched their health plans to a new provider. The change left employees without coverage for weeks and many with massive bills. Multiple employees told me that their claims eventually got paid, but another employee said that some claims went to collection.
This time around, the company advised employees to proactively watch their healthcare expenses: “We recommend all elective, non-urgent and routine medical appointments be rescheduled,” a company representative wrote in an email to employees. For some, that warning came too late. Multiple employees told me about ongoing medical treatments that could, if not covered by their insurance, bankrupt them personally.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
A still functioning Redbox kiosk in a Walgreens.

While asking its employees to watch their expenses, the company itself ran out of cash to meet its most basic obligations. It failed to make payroll in mid-June, with Rouhana promising employees in an email that they would get paid five days late, as the company was “finalizing a financing.” That day came and went, but instead of a check, employees got another email from the CEO. The financing hadn’t closed yet, Rouhana wrote, but he “hoped to fund payroll” the following week — 10 days after paychecks were due.
Attempts to raise $175 million this spring failed, resulting in Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment defaulting on debt held by its biggest creditor. Raising more money from public market investors is also a long shot: Chicken Soup’s shares have been trading in penny-stock territory, with Nasdaq threatening to delist the company.
“We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work towards resolution,” Rouhana wrote in his first email following the missed pay date. It was his first companywide email in many months, according to multiple Redbox employees.
That lack of communication has been especially frustrating to employees. “I wish I could just know what’s going on,” said the first Redbox employee.
Absent any communication about the company’s future, Redbox employees have banded together in group chats to share the little they know with each other. One employee even paid to get access to legal filings to better understand the financial issue.
“I wish I could just know what’s going on”
At first, these group chats were small, including just a handful of people here and there. When things boiled over in mid-June, employees created a group dedicated to Redbox’s “final days” that has since grown to around 350 members.
“People are posting any articles they can find that might help bring some light to what’s going on,” said a third Redbox employee with access to the group, who spoke to The Verge under the conditions that we do not name them in this story for fear of retaliation. “Some are starting to reminisce about the good times,” that employee said, but many simply use the group to express their frustration with the situation. “A lot of bitching all day,” the employee quipped.
Then, late Friday, the company sent out an email to employees to inform them that it had filed for bankruptcy. On Monday, they once again heard from Rouhana, who revealed that he was no longer the company’s CEO. His replacement, corporate compliance specialist Bart M. Schwartz, had “an extensive background in helping companies in complex situations,” Rouhana proclaimed. Schwartz emailed employees an hour later to promise that his top priority was their health insurance and compensation.
Redbox’s rank and file don’t seem convinced that help is on the way. On Monday, they started their own GoFundMe for unpaid employees. Any money raised with the campaign will be “disbursed throughout the company minus the owner / CEO,” according to the GoFundMe page.
The company’s field service fleet, meanwhile, remains grounded. A week after first calling the company’s entire field service workforce home, Redbox management told them via email that work would remain paused until Redbox’s parent company met its payroll, reimbursement, and healthcare coverage obligations. All of that hinges on the company securing a special loan that allows bankrupt companies to keep operating.
Some employees I talked to doubt that there will be a job to return to — a sentiment that’s increasingly bubbling up in public. Redbox’s social media accounts have been happily posting through the entire crisis, publishing memes and movie trivia as if nothing had happened — until the company’s dire reality became too hard to ignore.
“Describe your life right now using one movie gif,” tweeted the official Redbox account in late June, days after the company failed to make payroll.
“Here’s mine,” the tweet continued, followed by a GIF of the sinking Titanic.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge. Getty Images

The bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company came after months of chaos, cash crunch, and corporate upheaval.

Redbox’s field service technicians thought they had seen it all.

Stores had unplugged thousands of the company’s iconic red DVD rental kiosks. Payroll and expense reimbursements had been late. Several employees say their corporate gas cards have been declined. They had read article after article about companies suing Redbox and its corporate parent over unpaid bills. Some of them had dug into financial data, puzzling together an alarming picture of a company drowning in debt. Still, the email they got on a Tuesday in mid-June came as a shock.

“Please stop what you are doing and return home immediately,” the message read, adding: “You will be paid for the rest of the day.”

The sudden work stoppage initially appeared to be due to liability issues. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which had acquired Redbox in August of 2022, had informed employees earlier that day that it had been dropped by its health insurance provider; Redbox management seemingly didn’t want to have uninsured workers in the field to service and repair the company’s kiosks.

However, a follow-up email revealed deeper concerns. “We have entered an unforeseen and unprecedented situation for our company,” a senior Redbox manager wrote. The email referenced Chicken Soup’s inability to service its massive debt, as well as its CEO’s sudden decision to push out the entire board of directors. “It is disrupting our day-to-day operation, and we are temporarily halting all field activity until we have clarity on our path forward,” the email added.

Management telling hundreds of employees to stop working out of an apparent frustration with a company’s leadership is unprecedented – but it wasn’t surprising to former employees we spoke to at Redbox. The company has been on a dizzying rollercoaster ride ever since getting acquired two years ago. After failing to pay numerous bills, Redbox and its owner have been sued over a dozen times by companies, including CVS, 7-Eleven, and NBCUniversal.

When asked about the numerous lawsuits, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s corporate communications SVP, Peter Binazeski, told me in March that the company could not comment on ongoing litigation; the company did not respond to a number of follow-up questions about its legal and financial situation.

Attempts to settle with NBCUniversal failed after Chicken Soup missed a required $4 million payment, and Redbox is on the verge of having its entire car fleet repossessed.

So, how did things go so wrong for Redbox? I’ve spent months pouring over lawsuits, regulatory filings, and internal emails, as well as talking to a number of current and former Redbox employees, to find an answer to that question. Many of those conversations took on increasing urgency in June, when, in a matter of weeks, people’s worries shifted from wondering whether they’d have a job by the end of the year to whether there would be a paycheck by the end of the week. And when the paychecks finally stopped coming, employees realized that this may be the end for the last major company to still rent out DVDs.

And it could be: Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for bankruptcy at the end of June.

Things actually appeared to be looking up when Redbox was acquired two years ago. Sure, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment seemed like an odd company to make this move, but there was a plausible backstory here: after the self-help book publisher was sold by its founders in 2008, the company’s new owners began to diversify its revenue streams, adding digital media properties and lifestyle products like pet food. Chicken Soup acquired a bunch of companies over the following years, including the film distribution outlet Screen Media and the pioneering free streaming service Crackle. Chicken Soup’s leadership painted the addition of Redbox as the next step in its quest to build an entertainment media empire.

Building that empire on the back of DVD rentals is not as crazy as it sounds. Netflix shipped DVD rentals to customers for 25 years and used the proceeds from that perpetually shrinking but highly profitable business to become the global streaming juggernaut that it is today. Redbox, founded in 2002, had long been a similar powerhouse in the DVD space, with consumers renting more than 6 billion discs to date. Chicken Soup planned to follow Netflix’s playbook, with CEO Bill Rouhana telling The Verge’s David Pierce last year that Redbox’s kiosks “could be the cash flow machine that allowed us to build out our digital business over the next decade.”

“The first few months were decent,” acknowledged a Redbox employee who spoke to The Verge on the condition that we do not publish their name for fear of retaliation. But soon, warning signs started to pop up. Chicken Soup’s stock price tanked in early 2023 and never recovered. There were some irregularities with paychecks being late. Then, stores started to pull the plugs on kiosks.

“When 7-Eleven pulled our machines, that was huge,” recalled a second Redbox employee, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. “That was our first big [warning] sign.”

The convenience store chain had Redbox kiosks in front of its stores nationwide, and Redbox was contractually obligated to pay 7-Eleven a percentage of the fees it got from every single rental. A lawsuit filed by 7-Eleven in June alleges Redbox stopped paying those fees last spring. 7-Eleven terminated its contract with Redbox in August of 2023 and demanded that the company pick up its kiosks but says Redbox never did. As a result, 7-Eleven franchisees began to unplug the machines and tape credit card readers shut. Countless inoperable kiosks remain in front of 7-Eleven stores to this day.

7-Eleven wasn’t the only retailer that had a falling-out with Redbox. CVS alleged in a February lawsuit that Redbox stopped paying commissions in Q3 of 2022. Illinois-based chain Sheetz stopped getting payments at the end of 2022, according to its own lawsuit filed in February. Publix pulled all kiosks sometime last year. Kroger began telling customers last month that its Redbox kiosks would stop working soon, and Portland-based Hannaford said it wouldn’t offer access to Redbox anymore by mid-June.

Redbox has not commented publicly on the lawsuits.

Company employees were left in the dark about these rifts. “[We would] find out by working in the field, and there’s a big sign on there that says: ‘As of May 20th, this Redbox is gone,’” said the first employee. “And we’re like: ‘All right, somebody else is suing us.’”

Among the companies suing Redbox and its corporate parent is Automotive Rentals, Inc., or ARI, from which Redbox leases over 400 SUVs and other cars for its service technicians. ARI alleges in its lawsuit that Redbox stopped paying its monthly leasing fees last September; the company terminated its lease agreement with Redbox in March and finally sued in May, alleging that it was owed $7.8 million in unpaid bills.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
A Redbox kiosk outside a CVS store. CVS has filed a lawsuit against the company for failing to pay commissions.

In a legal filing, Chicken Soup’s lawyers acknowledged the failed payments, writing that “defendants do not dispute that they owe Plaintiffs money — though there is significant question about how much.” The filing goes on to state that the company had “every intention of making Plaintiffs whole” as soon as it raised the necessary financing to do so.

Redbox employees didn’t initially know about this dispute, either, but they realized something was wrong when they suddenly weren’t able to receive routine maintenance services from ARI anymore. “We couldn’t get anything done,” said the first employee. This included oil changes. “I drive a lot, almost a thousand miles a week,” the employee said. “I’m almost 20,000 miles overdue.”

“There’s people who are 18,000 miles over getting [their] oil change done because [the company] can’t pay for it,” said the second employee. The problem apparently became so acute this spring that some employees were told they should just go out, buy some motor oil, and top off their cars themselves.

“I’m not popping that hood,” said the first employee. “I am not putting new oil in old oil. That is a no.”

It’s easy to dismiss Redbox as a relic of a bygone era. A company that’s survived long past its prime. The kiosk version of Blockbuster, destined to fail sooner rather than later.

Well before the Chicken Soup acquisition, Redbox leadership realized that times were changing, with people transitioning from physical media to streaming. “Everyone knew that this was eventually going to go away,” said a former Redbox executive, who spoke on the condition that we don’t publish their name as they are still employed in the industry. But they also saw that DVDs had a surprising staying power, especially with less wealthy and less connected consumers. Forty million people still rented physical discs from Redbox kiosks before the pandemic, according to the company’s leadership at the time.

Especially in smaller towns, Redbox kiosks represented a valuable lifeline. “A lot of rural areas don’t have the luxury of high-speed internet,” said the first Redbox employee. “Our kiosk is the only theater in town.” Multiple employees told me that they were often greeted on the street, with people asking about new releases or cheering them on when they fixed a kiosk that had been broken. “People [in these areas] really can’t afford four or five different streaming services,” said the second Redbox employee.

Even so, Redbox executives were working on a digital future. Redbox tried to establish a Netflix competitor in partnership with Verizon in 2012 but shuttered the service two years later. In early 2020, Redbox tried again with a free, ad-supported streaming service that seemed a better fit for its lower-income customers and their slow transition to digital media. Redbox customers were late adopters, so executives believed that they had some time to grow the new digital service while renting out DVDs for years to come.

Then, the pandemic happened — and instantly blew up those plans.

With theaters shut down, productions put on hold, and consumers cooped up at home, Hollywood scrambled. Major studios threw out their release schedule and prioritized their own streaming ventures. Disney postponed the theatrical release of Mulan for months, only to eventually take it directly to Disney Plus. Warner Bros. released all of its 2021 movies on HBO Max.

The number of new releases at kiosks nosedived as a result. “Throughout the first three quarters of 2021, Redbox released 33 theatrical titles at the kiosk, which is typically what would have been released in one quarter pre-COVID,” the company told investors in late 2021. With few new discs in kiosks and some of the biggest titles going directly to streaming, even Redbox’s late-adopter customer base began to give Netflix and Disney Plus a look.

“There was deep concern” about this trend internally, according to the former Redbox executive, with some fearing that the company may lose its customers for good to the digital competition. “There was almost no way of bringing them back,” the former executive said.

The results on Redbox’s bottom line were disastrous: the company’s revenue declined from $829 million in 2019 to $546 million in 2020, and then to $289 million in 2021. “It happened really fast,” said the former Redbox executive.

“The pandemic screwed everything up,” said the first Redbox employee.

In the midst of that pandemic-fueled freefall, Redbox was facing corporate upheaval. Redbox’s owner at the time, private equity giant Apollo, began to look at ways to unload the asset. Discussions with Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment began in early 2020, and the two companies signed a term sheet in November of that year. However, the deal ultimately fell apart, with Apollo opting for another route: it decided to take Redbox public via a SPAC merger.

SPACs were still all the rage back then, and Redbox seemed like the perfect candidate for meme stock traders looking to hype another company steeped in nostalgia. Chicken Soup’s management, however, thought the public offering was doomed to fail. “Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s plan was merely waiting for Redbox to implode,” alleged Keith Knee, a former consultant for Chicken Soup, in a lawsuit filed earlier this year.

“They are going to be back, and we are going to be able to get this company for two-thirds of what they are asking for right now,” Chicken Soup CEO Bill Rouhana allegedly told his chief strategy officer, according to the lawsuit.

Rouhana was right: the public offering quickly devolved into a disaster. Redbox’s stock price tumbled below $2 per share just four months after it went public, and the company went on to lay off 10 percent of its staff. That’s when Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment swooped back in, offering “a substantially lower price for essentially the same assets,” according to the Knee lawsuit. Redbox couldn’t afford to say no anymore, and the two companies announced that Chicken Soup would acquire the DVD kiosk company in May of 2022.

Chicken Soup took on $325 million in debt as part of the acquisition, but CEO Bill Rouhana promised everyone a quick turnaround. Revenues of the new combined company were supposed to total $500 million in 2022, and Rouhana painted himself as a buccaneer of sorts, capable of righting the ship amid rough seas.

“The industry is completely chaotic right now,” Rouhana told me when I interviewed him days after the acquisition closed in August of 2022. “It’s a total nightmare. It’s completely in a state of flux. I’m pretty comfortable with that because I believe in the value of the stuff we bought.” Rouhana told me that Redbox kiosks would be around another 10 to 20 years and that Chicken Soup would recoup its money “many times over” before they ultimately disappeared. He kept insisting that he was unmoved by any short-term challenges.

“I love chaos,” Rouhana said.

Soon, the chaos engulfed Redbox. Instead of the promised $500 million, Chicken Soup only generated $253 million in revenue in 2022. The number of DVD kiosks operated by the company declined from 36,000 at the time of the acquisition to 27,000 at the end of March. The pandemic-induced movie shortage, combined with a declining number of kiosks, led to continued revenue decline. Already loaded with debt, Chicken Soup quickly ran out of money. Attempts to raise more working capital failed, which only made things worse.

“Our inability to secure […] financing […] hampered our ability to pay for and secure new content, which began to strain relationships with the Company’s creditors, including content providers,” Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment wrote in its most recent quarterly report. “As a result, the Company was unable to pay for all the movies that were offered to it by its providers.”

In reality, Redbox hasn’t been able to buy any major new release for quite some time. The last high-profile movie that made it to kiosks is Barbie, which came out on DVD in October. And with no new titles at kiosks, rental revenue has declined even further. In the first three months of this year, Chicken Soup’s revenue from its Redbox retail operations was just $15.5 million — less than half what it was a year ago and just a quarter of what it had been even in early 2021 when the pandemic slowed DVD releases to a trickle.

At the same time, Chicken Soup’s financial situation spiraled. The company ended Q1 with an accumulated deficit of $937 million and less than $5 million in cash on hand. It has been falling further behind on its bills, resulting in former business partners cutting ties and filing lawsuits.

“The Company has received an increasing number of termination and/or nonrenewal notices from content suppliers and other service providers,” Chicken Soup warned in its Q1 filing.

Internally, the situation quickly devolved. Corporate credit cards that employees have been using to get gas for their cars have only been working intermittently, leaving field service employees unable to do their work for a whole week in May. “They paid us to sit at home and look at emails,” the first employee said. “We weren’t servicing anything,” the second employee added.

That in itself is a problem for the company: A little-known fact about Redbox’s business is that the company’s technicians also service kiosks for Amazon, KeyMe, Pokémon, and other kiosk vendors. Employees told me that the company would bill these companies for each individual service call. “It was a highly profitable part of the business,” said the former Redbox executive. “It’s what kept us afloat,” said the second employee.

However, when employees weren’t able to go out and service these kiosks, Redbox wasn’t making any money. What’s more, not servicing third-party kiosks in time put those business relationships at risk. This month, longtime partner ecoATM stopped working with the company, according to multiple Redbox employees.

Things got worse for Redbox and its employees in June. At the beginning of the month, a court granted ARI’s request to repossess all of the cars Redbox has been leasing from the company. In an email sent days later, Redbox told employees to remove all their personal belongings from the company cars and prepare for the worst. “In the unlikely event that your vehicle is targeted for repossession, comply with all demands and turn over keys immediately,” the email read. In late June, the court followed up with an order that directed the US Marshals Service to seize Redbox’s entire leased fleet of 437 cars.

In mid-June, the company also informed employees via email that it had been dropped by its healthcare provider, and they hadn’t been covered since May. It’s the second time Redbox employees suddenly found themselves without healthcare coverage: at the beginning of this year, Redbox employees discovered that the company-provided health insurance had lapsed in December when Redbox out of the blue switched their health plans to a new provider. The change left employees without coverage for weeks and many with massive bills. Multiple employees told me that their claims eventually got paid, but another employee said that some claims went to collection.

This time around, the company advised employees to proactively watch their healthcare expenses: “We recommend all elective, non-urgent and routine medical appointments be rescheduled,” a company representative wrote in an email to employees. For some, that warning came too late. Multiple employees told me about ongoing medical treatments that could, if not covered by their insurance, bankrupt them personally.

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
A still functioning Redbox kiosk in a Walgreens.

While asking its employees to watch their expenses, the company itself ran out of cash to meet its most basic obligations. It failed to make payroll in mid-June, with Rouhana promising employees in an email that they would get paid five days late, as the company was “finalizing a financing.” That day came and went, but instead of a check, employees got another email from the CEO. The financing hadn’t closed yet, Rouhana wrote, but he “hoped to fund payroll” the following week — 10 days after paychecks were due.

Attempts to raise $175 million this spring failed, resulting in Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment defaulting on debt held by its biggest creditor. Raising more money from public market investors is also a long shot: Chicken Soup’s shares have been trading in penny-stock territory, with Nasdaq threatening to delist the company.

“We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work towards resolution,” Rouhana wrote in his first email following the missed pay date. It was his first companywide email in many months, according to multiple Redbox employees.

That lack of communication has been especially frustrating to employees. “I wish I could just know what’s going on,” said the first Redbox employee.

Absent any communication about the company’s future, Redbox employees have banded together in group chats to share the little they know with each other. One employee even paid to get access to legal filings to better understand the financial issue.

At first, these group chats were small, including just a handful of people here and there. When things boiled over in mid-June, employees created a group dedicated to Redbox’s “final days” that has since grown to around 350 members.

“People are posting any articles they can find that might help bring some light to what’s going on,” said a third Redbox employee with access to the group, who spoke to The Verge under the conditions that we do not name them in this story for fear of retaliation. “Some are starting to reminisce about the good times,” that employee said, but many simply use the group to express their frustration with the situation. “A lot of bitching all day,” the employee quipped.

Then, late Friday, the company sent out an email to employees to inform them that it had filed for bankruptcy. On Monday, they once again heard from Rouhana, who revealed that he was no longer the company’s CEO. His replacement, corporate compliance specialist Bart M. Schwartz, had “an extensive background in helping companies in complex situations,” Rouhana proclaimed. Schwartz emailed employees an hour later to promise that his top priority was their health insurance and compensation.

Redbox’s rank and file don’t seem convinced that help is on the way. On Monday, they started their own GoFundMe for unpaid employees. Any money raised with the campaign will be “disbursed throughout the company minus the owner / CEO,” according to the GoFundMe page.

The company’s field service fleet, meanwhile, remains grounded. A week after first calling the company’s entire field service workforce home, Redbox management told them via email that work would remain paused until Redbox’s parent company met its payroll, reimbursement, and healthcare coverage obligations. All of that hinges on the company securing a special loan that allows bankrupt companies to keep operating.

Some employees I talked to doubt that there will be a job to return to — a sentiment that’s increasingly bubbling up in public. Redbox’s social media accounts have been happily posting through the entire crisis, publishing memes and movie trivia as if nothing had happened — until the company’s dire reality became too hard to ignore.

“Describe your life right now using one movie gif,” tweeted the official Redbox account in late June, days after the company failed to make payroll.

“Here’s mine,” the tweet continued, followed by a GIF of the sinking Titanic.

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I can hear the eerie, garbled radio chatter of the Combine soldiers just by looking at this. | Image: Valve

The Steam Summer Sale is raging on, offering significant discounts on the Steam Deck and hundreds of PC games. While we rounded up a bunch of our top Summer Sale picks last week, one title that should definitely not fly under your radar is Valve’s own Half-Life: Alyx — which is selling for its all-time low price of $20.39 (nearly $40 off) until the sale ends on July 11th at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.

Now, Alyx is quite a unique game and experience. For starters, when it came out in 2020, it was the first time Valve returned to the world of Half-Life (the 26-year-old series that put it on the map) since 2007. It’s a prequel to Half-Life 2, starring supporting-character-turned-protagonist Alyx Vance. And, notably, you take control of her through her own eyes since Half-Life: Alyx is solely designed around VR and requires you to own a compatible headset. Much like previous Half-Life installments, it’s received near-universal praise for its excellent gameplay and exquisite setting.

It really is an absolute must-buy and must-play if you own a VR headset and have the means, as Valve really put thought and care into how you explore this world in virtual reality (no, it’s not a glorified tech demo only for Valve to boost Index headset sales). Also, for any of you PlayStation VR2 headset owners looking forward to Sony’s PC adapter that’s due out August 7th, you might want to pocket Half-Life: Alyx at this excellent price for safekeeping until then. The game is used as the poster child for the PSVR 2 adapter for a reason, and it only gets this cheap a few times a year.

I can hear the eerie, garbled radio chatter of the Combine soldiers just by looking at this. | Image: Valve

The Steam Summer Sale is raging on, offering significant discounts on the Steam Deck and hundreds of PC games. While we rounded up a bunch of our top Summer Sale picks last week, one title that should definitely not fly under your radar is Valve’s own Half-Life: Alyx — which is selling for its all-time low price of $20.39 (nearly $40 off) until the sale ends on July 11th at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.

Now, Alyx is quite a unique game and experience. For starters, when it came out in 2020, it was the first time Valve returned to the world of Half-Life (the 26-year-old series that put it on the map) since 2007. It’s a prequel to Half-Life 2, starring supporting-character-turned-protagonist Alyx Vance. And, notably, you take control of her through her own eyes since Half-Life: Alyx is solely designed around VR and requires you to own a compatible headset. Much like previous Half-Life installments, it’s received near-universal praise for its excellent gameplay and exquisite setting.

It really is an absolute must-buy and must-play if you own a VR headset and have the means, as Valve really put thought and care into how you explore this world in virtual reality (no, it’s not a glorified tech demo only for Valve to boost Index headset sales). Also, for any of you PlayStation VR2 headset owners looking forward to Sony’s PC adapter that’s due out August 7th, you might want to pocket Half-Life: Alyx at this excellent price for safekeeping until then. The game is used as the poster child for the PSVR 2 adapter for a reason, and it only gets this cheap a few times a year.

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Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

YouTube has launched an improved eraser tool that lets creators remove copyrighted music from their videos while keeping other audio intact. The revamped tool, which was released this week, was first reported by TechCrunch.
The Erase Song feature lets creators silence copyrighted music in their content, the company announced in a video. The tool had previously been in place as a beta feature, but it wasn’t always accurate.
The updated Erase Song feature uses an “AI-powered algorithm” to help it more precisely identify and remove copyrighted songs without affecting other audio in a particular clip. That’s the goal, at least.

But even the new and improved version might not always produce perfect results. So in cases where the tool fails to get rid of the copyrighted content, creators can mute all sound in sections of the video that have been flagged for containing copyrighted material.
YouTube’s support page says the Erase Song tool “might not work if the song is hard to remove,” so muting the audio instead can help to remove a content ID claim against a video.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

YouTube has launched an improved eraser tool that lets creators remove copyrighted music from their videos while keeping other audio intact. The revamped tool, which was released this week, was first reported by TechCrunch.

The Erase Song feature lets creators silence copyrighted music in their content, the company announced in a video. The tool had previously been in place as a beta feature, but it wasn’t always accurate.

The updated Erase Song feature uses an “AI-powered algorithm” to help it more precisely identify and remove copyrighted songs without affecting other audio in a particular clip. That’s the goal, at least.

But even the new and improved version might not always produce perfect results. So in cases where the tool fails to get rid of the copyrighted content, creators can mute all sound in sections of the video that have been flagged for containing copyrighted material.

YouTube’s support page says the Erase Song tool “might not work if the song is hard to remove,” so muting the audio instead can help to remove a content ID claim against a video.

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems that everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, if only they had the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many fine gadgets, I also don’t really want another device in my life, so I was pretty excited to stumble upon a partial solution with a gadget I already have: the Playdate.
Yes, I’m talking about that little yellow Game Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank jutting out of its side. Since the launch of its on-device store, Catalog, the handheld has become home to quite a range of experiences. I’ve been playing tiny city builders and dungeon crawlers and egg touchers. Even still, I was surprised to discover Playbook, a full-fledged e-reading app. Perhaps even more surprising is that it actually works pretty well.
The app comes with a handful of classic books preinstalled, and I tested it initially by reading through most of Frankenstein. The Playdate’s black-and-white LCD screen is pretty great for displaying text, which shows up crisp and clear. The drawback is that it has no backlight for reading at night, and the screen is tiny. At one point, a single one of Mary Shelley’s sentences took up the entire display.

Photo by Andrew Webster / The Verge
Long sentences can take up the entire screen.

But, like the device itself, the app is also very charming. You can scroll through books using the crank, which is weird but fun in a tactile way (you can also use the D-pad instead). And instead of telling you what percentage of the book you’ve read or how much time you have left, Playbook has a candle that serves as a progress bar, slowly burning down as you read. It’s less scientific, but much more cozy, with the flame flickering every now and then.
There are missing features — there’s no way to jump around in a book without scrolling, for instance, and you can’t highlight passages — but the biggest hurdle might just be getting books onto your Playdate. It’s not as simple as syncing your Kindle library. Instead, you have to connect your handheld to a computer, put it in USB mode, and then drag and drop files into the right folder. Before that, you have to convert .epub files to .txt, which is relatively painless.
To test this, I grabbed a bunch of ebooks from Project Gutenberg, including Dracula, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Turning of the Screw. (In retrospect, my choices may have been influenced by the idea of reading by virtual candlelight.) Everything I added to the app worked just fine, with the exception of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which caused my Playdate to crash every time I tried to open it, presumably because it’s so large.
Now let’s be real: a $5 Playdate app is not going to be your one-stop solution for reading more. It hasn’t been for me. I still keep a Kindle on my bedside table and carry paperbacks wherever I go. But just as the Playdate serves a complementary role, offering unique games that aren’t meant to replace a Switch or PlayStation, so, too, does Playbook.
The app isn’t my main tool for reading. But it works well enough and — crucially — is convenient enough that it’s great to have around in a pinch. Having a library of classic novels on a device the size of a credit card comes in handy — and, if nothing else, it’s helping keep me from buying another gadget.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems that everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, if only they had the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many fine gadgets, I also don’t really want another device in my life, so I was pretty excited to stumble upon a partial solution with a gadget I already have: the Playdate.

Yes, I’m talking about that little yellow Game Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank jutting out of its side. Since the launch of its on-device store, Catalog, the handheld has become home to quite a range of experiences. I’ve been playing tiny city builders and dungeon crawlers and egg touchers. Even still, I was surprised to discover Playbook, a full-fledged e-reading app. Perhaps even more surprising is that it actually works pretty well.

The app comes with a handful of classic books preinstalled, and I tested it initially by reading through most of Frankenstein. The Playdate’s black-and-white LCD screen is pretty great for displaying text, which shows up crisp and clear. The drawback is that it has no backlight for reading at night, and the screen is tiny. At one point, a single one of Mary Shelley’s sentences took up the entire display.

Photo by Andrew Webster / The Verge
Long sentences can take up the entire screen.

But, like the device itself, the app is also very charming. You can scroll through books using the crank, which is weird but fun in a tactile way (you can also use the D-pad instead). And instead of telling you what percentage of the book you’ve read or how much time you have left, Playbook has a candle that serves as a progress bar, slowly burning down as you read. It’s less scientific, but much more cozy, with the flame flickering every now and then.

There are missing features — there’s no way to jump around in a book without scrolling, for instance, and you can’t highlight passages — but the biggest hurdle might just be getting books onto your Playdate. It’s not as simple as syncing your Kindle library. Instead, you have to connect your handheld to a computer, put it in USB mode, and then drag and drop files into the right folder. Before that, you have to convert .epub files to .txt, which is relatively painless.

To test this, I grabbed a bunch of ebooks from Project Gutenberg, including Dracula, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Turning of the Screw. (In retrospect, my choices may have been influenced by the idea of reading by virtual candlelight.) Everything I added to the app worked just fine, with the exception of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which caused my Playdate to crash every time I tried to open it, presumably because it’s so large.

Now let’s be real: a $5 Playdate app is not going to be your one-stop solution for reading more. It hasn’t been for me. I still keep a Kindle on my bedside table and carry paperbacks wherever I go. But just as the Playdate serves a complementary role, offering unique games that aren’t meant to replace a Switch or PlayStation, so, too, does Playbook.

The app isn’t my main tool for reading. But it works well enough and — crucially — is convenient enough that it’s great to have around in a pinch. Having a library of classic novels on a device the size of a credit card comes in handy — and, if nothing else, it’s helping keep me from buying another gadget.

Read More 

If all the benchmarks we did had a physical form, it’d look something like this.

We tested every Snapdragon X chip against the Intel Core Ultra, AMD Ryzen 8000, and Apple M3. After 12 years of trying to make Windows on Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm happen. That’s a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and capable enough performance for even light workloads. But it seems like Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to pay off now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform.
We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the final word on Snapdragon performance — app compatibility is changing on a near-daily basis, and we’ll have full reviews for many of these laptops in the next few weeks — but we now have a good idea of how the first wave of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the competition and how they still fall short.
This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) in every single one of our benchmarks, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf.
A new focus on power efficiency
For the last few years, laptop makers have focused on increasing power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its own Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the power efficiency of its own fast enough.
Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power, which is one reason smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to make Windows work on Arm and reap those power savings has been slow going because the chips haven’t been fast enough to run Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm instruction set — until now.

Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the “X Elite” brand and one under “X Plus.” They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support for LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their core counts and max clock speeds change as you go down the lineup, from a 12-core chip with a 3.8GHz top speed and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core at 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost.
With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its previous laptop chips. Instead of using a mix of performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive work, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture — every chip can run both types of tasks.

Competing against its new CPUs are Apple’s hybrid core Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous core x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid core x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid core architecture by ditching just the LP cores in its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which arrive this fall.)
The best CPU performance Windows on Arm has ever seen
We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 because they work across Windows and macOS as well as on Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they provide a broad overview of a processor’s capabilities when handling various workloads. While we tested laptops of different sizes from different brands, these benchmarks are still a great baseline of how these chips fare compared to their competitors and how they stack up.
Single-core performance
Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips still lead the pack in single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s higher-end X Elite chips are a touch faster in single-core workloads than the M2 Max chip in the early 2023 MacBook Pro — between 2 and 3 percent in our tests. They are also up to 24 percent faster than the performance cores in Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor and up to 17 percent faster than the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS cores. The bottom-tier X Elite and X Plus are the slowest, but they still push out impressive scores and pull ahead — albeit barely — of most of the Intel-based laptops in the table below.
Multicore performance
The Snapdragon chips really shine in multicore benchmarks, overtaking all the other CPUs aside from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max. The M3 chip in the MacBook Air only has eight cores compared to the 12 or 10 cores of the Snapdragon chips, so it makes sense why it fell behind. The 16-core M3 Max far outpaces the rest of the field, and the 12-core M2 Max is slightly faster in Cinebench 2024 multicore than the fastest X Elite chips.

Our results are mostly in line with what Qualcomm claimed during my hands-on in April, though, as you can see in the graph above, there are some outliers — notably the multicore scores for the 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 and Galaxy Book4 Edge. But I suspect those outliers are either due to core count and clock speed or how much power the CPU draws.
Power profiling
There’s no meaningful performance difference between AC and battery power on any of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve tested, provided they’re using the same power profile each time. The numbers above are from the “best performance” power profile or equivalent, on wall power; manufacturers have the ability to tweak the power profiles on their devices.
We repeated our CPU benchmarks on the Dell XPS 13, Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Microsoft Surface Pro 11 with balanced or recommended power settings enabled to compare to the results above. With the recommended power setting enabled, the Surface Pro 11’s performance decreased between 7.5 and 16 percent across all CPU tests.
But the XPS 13 and Galaxy Book4 Edge’s performance actually increased slightly on most tests in balanced mode: between 0.9 and 2.7 percent on the XPS 13 and between 1.3 and 8.3 percent on the Book4 Edge.

Snapdragon falls behind in GPU performance
Qualcomm has been careful to position this wave of Snapdragon X laptops as productivity machines, rather than gaming or workstation PCs, and the integrated GPUs are fine for that. They can run laptop displays at up to 4K at 120Hz and up to three 4K external displays at 60Hz.
But integrated GPUs aren’t great for gaming, 3D rendering, or any other heavy graphical workloads, and that includes all of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. (Apple’s integrated GPUs are an exception, especially as they scale up; the massive 40-core GPU on the MacBook Pro M3 Max blows past AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.)

Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs lag behind higher-end Intel and AMD integrated GPUs in our initial benchmarks. In Geekbench 6 GPU, Intel Arc is 29 percent faster than the more powerful Adreno chip in the highest-end Snapdragon chip and about 39 percent faster than the other Snapdragon chips. The AMD Radeon 780M is 17 to 29 percent faster, respectively, but the MacBook Air 15 is about 39 percent slower.
Only two of the Snapdragon laptops fared a little better in the PugetBench Adobe Photoshop benchmark. Photoshop has a native Arm64 version; the Surface Pro and 15-inch Surface Laptop surpassed the Dell XPS 14 and Acer Swift Go 14 AMD by 10 percent. The MacBook Air 15 wins here, though, by 42 percent.
This is just an early snapshot of iGPU performance, though. It’s hard to get a real feel for it when most of the benchmarking programs we use, including games, don’t have native Arm64 versions yet — and when emulated versions often don’t hit the GPU properly or at all.
Gaming on Arm
These Snapdragon laptops are not gaming laptops, but they can run games — sometimes. Very few games have native Arm64 versions, so Microsoft leans heavily on emulation here. Microsoft automatically enables Auto SR (its own version of Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, which increase frame rates by dropping the in-game resolution and then upscaling with AI) on a short list of games, which includes The Witcher 3 and Control. But those games have already been optimized to run well on processors with integrated graphics, so they don’t actually need Auto SR — and in most cases run better without it.
The same goes for some games that haven’t been optimized, like Palia and What Remains of Edith Finch. In those games, there was no discernible difference in frame rate, responsiveness, or visual fidelity between having ASR on or off. In other games that are supposed to be optimized for Windows on Arm, like Control and Borderlands 3, turning on ASR degraded the visual quality with distracting flickering lines on or around fine details like mesh screens and hair.
Control was the only game I was able to try on a reference laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite chip during a hands-on demo back in April, but it runs just as well on the XPS 13, Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Yoga Slim 7x I tested. To get a stable 30fps, the graphics preset must be set to low and the resolution can’t be higher than 1200p, but it runs smooth and is responsive.
If a game doesn’t work, you will learn quickly: it will crash as soon as you launch it, or after you load one of your saves, or if you have the resolution or graphics settings too high. In the best-case scenario, it will run under 20fps even on low settings. There are a lot of variables, and they differ from game to game in the dozen I tested.
There is a third-party website that tracks what games are compatible on Snapdragon Windows Arm PCs, but it won’t always tell you what resolution or graphics setting to select or if it will work on a system with less than 32GB of memory. You game at your own risk with Windows on Arm.
Emulation is fine for the little stuff
One of Microsoft’s big claims was that Snapdragon-configured Windows laptops would have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2,” Apple’s emulation software that lets x86 Mac apps run on Apple Silicon. Microsoft hasn’t had the greatest reputation when it comes to x86 emulation on Arm, and while its new Prism emulator is much faster, it’s still not fast enough for heavyweight apps.
We tested all the Snapdragon laptops using the emulated x86 version of Blender, a popular free 3D modeling and rendering program that’s a core part of our benchmarking suite. We also tested a few with an alpha build with native Arm64 support. Neither the emulated x86 version nor the alpha native version detected the Adreno GPU, so the CPUs had to do all the work, but the native version still performed about 40 percent faster.
But faster doesn’t mean fast — while the CPU rendering times with the Arm64 version were within a minute of integrated GPU rendering times on the Intel Arc, and near identical to the AMD Radeon 780M, it still took over four times longer than the base MacBook Air M3.

While these Snapdragon laptops are not what you’d want to buy for 3D rendering — you’ll want a discrete GPU for that, regardless of platform — the massive difference between emulated and native CPU rendering shows how important it is for developers to have Arm64 versions of their software, especially if it’s designed to handle heavy workloads.
We couldn’t run our Premiere Pro benchmark since Adobe hasn’t released a native Arm version, and Adobe blocks the x86 version from emulation on Arm. (For a couple of days, it didn’t block all the Snapdragon X CPUs, but the emulated results were not great.) My colleague Tom Warren has a wonderful deep dive into the current state of Windows on Arm if you’re looking for more information on x86 emulation, and we’ll continue to test the Prism emulator as we find opportunities to do so.
Battery life
Microsoft claims that its Copilot Plus PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20 percent more battery life than the latest MacBook Air 15-inch.” When I tested the latest 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs, they lasted about 18 hours on a charge when I used them as I normally would during a regular week, with the display brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible.
None of the Snapdragon laptops’ batteries lasted 18 hours like the M3 Air, but most weren’t far behind, averaging 14 to 16 hours. That’s still a lot longer than most of the Intel- and AMD-based laptops I tested, with the exception of the Intel-based Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which got near identical battery life to the Snapdragon-based Galaxy Book4 Edge, at over 14 hours each.
In Tom’s testing, the Microsoft Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU lasted about seven hours with the brightness set to 100 percent while being pushed with all sorts of tasks like downloading games from Steam and taking video calls. In lighter workloads on 50 percent brightness, the battery drained just 25 percent after four hours. My own experience with the Snapdragon Dell XPS 13 was similar.
At 75 percent brightness (or as close to 200 nits as possible), the XPS 13 kept a charge for around 15 hours — two to three hours longer than the Dell XPS 14 I recently reviewed with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, despite the smaller battery on the XPS 13. It also lasted longer than the Acer Swift Go 14 AMD I tested with a Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU. That one got me between 12 to 14 hours, depending on how often I used it, how I used it, and how high I had the display brightness cranked.
We have more testing to do on all of these laptops — the Surface Pro in particular hasn’t gotten the battery life we expected, and we’re working with Microsoft to try to figure out why — but so far, the Copilot Plus PCs seem to beat comparable AMD and Intel machines on battery by several hours.
Here’s why I’m not mentioning the NPU
Yes, these are Copilot Plus PCs. Yes, they run a bunch of AI stuff. But my colleagues and I have yet to figure out a reliable method to test relative NPU performance in a meaningful way. The Copilot Plus AI features, with the possible exceptions of Studio Effects and Live Captions translations, currently feel more like gimmicks than useful apps most people can incorporate into their day-to-day life, and Microsoft doesn’t plan to release Recall, its most-hyped AI app, until it addresses security concerns.
But the NPUs are there — and not just on Arm PCs — so we expect apps to take more advantage of that processing power soon. We’ll revisit NPU benchmarks as it makes sense.
More for less… more or less
This wave of Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs starts at $999 and can cost in excess of $2,500. They feature nearly everything most other laptops in that price range do: beautiful OLED displays; high storage capacity; long battery life; fast processors; metal chassis; and in some cases, the latest Wi-Fi 7 adapter. It’s all the same stuff you get with Intel- and AMD-based laptops, and even MacBooks, often for less money.
As MacBook Air competitors, they have a few nifty features that have been baked into Windows for a while that Apple is only just adding to macOS, like phone mirroring and automatic window tiling — and you can use up to three external monitors, with or without the lid closed. They can also be priced more reasonably. At $1,099, the base 13-inch MacBook Air M3 has an eight-core processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. But at $999, the base 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 has a 10-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage — and you can easily upgrade that storage yourself.
The Snapdragon laptops are generally cheaper than their Intel or AMD counterparts, too. The Qualcomm Dell XPS 13 is $200 cheaper and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is $150 cheaper, while the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is $100 more. Better performance and longer battery life for less money are going to be the major selling points for most people — and these Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs hit all three.
Where does Qualcomm go from here?
Unlike previous Windows on Arm laptops — even up to 2022’s Surface Pro 9 (SQ3), these Copilot Plus PCs finally have processors fast enough to run the operating system and emulate most x86 programs. And now that every major Windows laptop manufacturer has at least one Snapdragon X-based machine, there should finally be enough of an install base to entice developers at large to create native Arm64 versions of their apps, which will make these an easier sell.
But with Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI coming soon, it’s unclear how long Qualcomm will hold onto its lead. Lunar Lake will be closer in design to Apple Silicon, with RAM incorporated into the chip itself, and Intel claims that getting rid of hyperthreading will decrease power consumption, so laptops with these chips will supposedly get better battery life than its current-gen processors. Ryzen AI will have a 12-core and 10-core variant, just like Qualcomm Snapdragon, on its Zen 5 architecture, clock speeds up to 5.1GHz, and a more powerful iGPU, so that could increase the graphics performance lead it currently has over some of the Snapdragon X Elite chips.
We’ll have plenty more to test in the coming weeks as app compatibility improves and full reviews of many of these Snapdragon X laptops soon. Qualcomm has shown us that Windows on Arm is finally feasible. Now, it’s up to Intel and AMD to convince people not to make the jump.
Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

If all the benchmarks we did had a physical form, it’d look something like this.

We tested every Snapdragon X chip against the Intel Core Ultra, AMD Ryzen 8000, and Apple M3.

After 12 years of trying to make Windows on Arm happen, Microsoft has made Windows on Arm happen. That’s a long time to keep throwing money at a version of Windows that, historically, has lacked compatible software, reliable emulation, and capable enough performance for even light workloads. But it seems like Microsoft’s 12-year odyssey is starting to pay off now that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips are turning Windows on Arm into a viable platform.

We’ve spent the past week and a half testing seven Copilot Plus PCs, representing all four Snapdragon X chips, against a slate of similar laptops running Apple Silicon, Intel Core Ultra, and AMD Ryzen processors. This isn’t the final word on Snapdragon performance — app compatibility is changing on a near-daily basis, and we’ll have full reviews for many of these laptops in the next few weeks — but we now have a good idea of how the first wave of Snapdragon X laptops stack up against the competition and how they still fall short.

This is the fiercest Microsoft has been able to compete with MacBooks in price, performance, and battery life, and while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips don’t outright beat Apple’s M3 chip (with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU) in every single one of our benchmarks, they could make Intel and AMD scramble to catch up to another competitor — this time, on their home turf.

A new focus on power efficiency

For the last few years, laptop makers have focused on increasing power efficiency (and therefore battery life) without sacrificing performance. For Apple, that meant ditching Intel and using its own Arm-based chips; Intel wasn’t improving the power efficiency of its own fast enough.

Arm is a processor architecture with a more efficient instruction set than the x86 set found in Intel and AMD CPUs. It uses smaller, more optimized instructions, so the CPU can process tasks faster using less power, which is one reason smartphone chips are Arm-based. Microsoft’s 12-year journey to make Windows work on Arm and reap those power savings has been slow going because the chips haven’t been fast enough to run Windows and emulate apps that aren’t compatible with the Arm instruction set — until now.

Qualcomm currently has four Snapdragon X chips: three under the “X Elite” brand and one under “X Plus.” They all share an Adreno GPU, an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, and support for LPDDR5X memory up to 8448MHz, but their core counts and max clock speeds change as you go down the lineup, from a 12-core chip with a 3.8GHz top speed and 4.2GHz dual-core boost to a 10-core at 3.4GHz with no dual-core boost.

With the Snapdragon X Elite lineup, Qualcomm ditched the hybrid architecture of its previous laptop chips. Instead of using a mix of performance cores for heavy workloads and efficiency cores for less intensive work, Qualcomm now uses a homogeneous architecture — every chip can run both types of tasks.

Competing against its new CPUs are Apple’s hybrid core Arm chips, AMD’s homogeneous core x86 chips, and Intel’s hybrid core x86 chips. (Though Intel is adjusting its hybrid core architecture by ditching just the LP cores in its next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which arrive this fall.)

The best CPU performance Windows on Arm has ever seen

We ran Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024 because they work across Windows and macOS as well as on Intel and AMD’s x86 chips and Apple and Qualcomm’s Arm chips. Together, they provide a broad overview of a processor’s capabilities when handling various workloads. While we tested laptops of different sizes from different brands, these benchmarks are still a great baseline of how these chips fare compared to their competitors and how they stack up.

Single-core performance

Among the laptops we tested, Apple’s M3 chips still lead the pack in single-core performance, but Qualcomm’s higher-end X Elite chips are a touch faster in single-core workloads than the M2 Max chip in the early 2023 MacBook Pro — between 2 and 3 percent in our tests. They are also up to 24 percent faster than the performance cores in Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor and up to 17 percent faster than the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS cores. The bottom-tier X Elite and X Plus are the slowest, but they still push out impressive scores and pull ahead — albeit barely — of most of the Intel-based laptops in the table below.

Multicore performance

The Snapdragon chips really shine in multicore benchmarks, overtaking all the other CPUs aside from Apple’s M2 Max and M3 Max. The M3 chip in the MacBook Air only has eight cores compared to the 12 or 10 cores of the Snapdragon chips, so it makes sense why it fell behind. The 16-core M3 Max far outpaces the rest of the field, and the 12-core M2 Max is slightly faster in Cinebench 2024 multicore than the fastest X Elite chips.

Our results are mostly in line with what Qualcomm claimed during my hands-on in April, though, as you can see in the graph above, there are some outliers — notably the multicore scores for the 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 and Galaxy Book4 Edge. But I suspect those outliers are either due to core count and clock speed or how much power the CPU draws.

Power profiling

There’s no meaningful performance difference between AC and battery power on any of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve tested, provided they’re using the same power profile each time. The numbers above are from the “best performance” power profile or equivalent, on wall power; manufacturers have the ability to tweak the power profiles on their devices.

We repeated our CPU benchmarks on the Dell XPS 13, Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Microsoft Surface Pro 11 with balanced or recommended power settings enabled to compare to the results above. With the recommended power setting enabled, the Surface Pro 11’s performance decreased between 7.5 and 16 percent across all CPU tests.

But the XPS 13 and Galaxy Book4 Edge’s performance actually increased slightly on most tests in balanced mode: between 0.9 and 2.7 percent on the XPS 13 and between 1.3 and 8.3 percent on the Book4 Edge.

Snapdragon falls behind in GPU performance

Qualcomm has been careful to position this wave of Snapdragon X laptops as productivity machines, rather than gaming or workstation PCs, and the integrated GPUs are fine for that. They can run laptop displays at up to 4K at 120Hz and up to three 4K external displays at 60Hz.

But integrated GPUs aren’t great for gaming, 3D rendering, or any other heavy graphical workloads, and that includes all of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. (Apple’s integrated GPUs are an exception, especially as they scale up; the massive 40-core GPU on the MacBook Pro M3 Max blows past AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.)

Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs lag behind higher-end Intel and AMD integrated GPUs in our initial benchmarks. In Geekbench 6 GPU, Intel Arc is 29 percent faster than the more powerful Adreno chip in the highest-end Snapdragon chip and about 39 percent faster than the other Snapdragon chips. The AMD Radeon 780M is 17 to 29 percent faster, respectively, but the MacBook Air 15 is about 39 percent slower.

Only two of the Snapdragon laptops fared a little better in the PugetBench Adobe Photoshop benchmark. Photoshop has a native Arm64 version; the Surface Pro and 15-inch Surface Laptop surpassed the Dell XPS 14 and Acer Swift Go 14 AMD by 10 percent. The MacBook Air 15 wins here, though, by 42 percent.

This is just an early snapshot of iGPU performance, though. It’s hard to get a real feel for it when most of the benchmarking programs we use, including games, don’t have native Arm64 versions yet — and when emulated versions often don’t hit the GPU properly or at all.

Gaming on Arm

These Snapdragon laptops are not gaming laptops, but they can run games — sometimes. Very few games have native Arm64 versions, so Microsoft leans heavily on emulation here. Microsoft automatically enables Auto SR (its own version of Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, which increase frame rates by dropping the in-game resolution and then upscaling with AI) on a short list of games, which includes The Witcher 3 and Control. But those games have already been optimized to run well on processors with integrated graphics, so they don’t actually need Auto SR — and in most cases run better without it.

The same goes for some games that haven’t been optimized, like Palia and What Remains of Edith Finch. In those games, there was no discernible difference in frame rate, responsiveness, or visual fidelity between having ASR on or off. In other games that are supposed to be optimized for Windows on Arm, like Control and Borderlands 3, turning on ASR degraded the visual quality with distracting flickering lines on or around fine details like mesh screens and hair.

Control was the only game I was able to try on a reference laptop with a Snapdragon X Elite chip during a hands-on demo back in April, but it runs just as well on the XPS 13, Galaxy Book4 Edge, and Yoga Slim 7x I tested. To get a stable 30fps, the graphics preset must be set to low and the resolution can’t be higher than 1200p, but it runs smooth and is responsive.

If a game doesn’t work, you will learn quickly: it will crash as soon as you launch it, or after you load one of your saves, or if you have the resolution or graphics settings too high. In the best-case scenario, it will run under 20fps even on low settings. There are a lot of variables, and they differ from game to game in the dozen I tested.

There is a third-party website that tracks what games are compatible on Snapdragon Windows Arm PCs, but it won’t always tell you what resolution or graphics setting to select or if it will work on a system with less than 32GB of memory. You game at your own risk with Windows on Arm.

Emulation is fine for the little stuff

One of Microsoft’s big claims was that Snapdragon-configured Windows laptops would have “faster app emulation than Rosetta 2,” Apple’s emulation software that lets x86 Mac apps run on Apple Silicon. Microsoft hasn’t had the greatest reputation when it comes to x86 emulation on Arm, and while its new Prism emulator is much faster, it’s still not fast enough for heavyweight apps.

We tested all the Snapdragon laptops using the emulated x86 version of Blender, a popular free 3D modeling and rendering program that’s a core part of our benchmarking suite. We also tested a few with an alpha build with native Arm64 support. Neither the emulated x86 version nor the alpha native version detected the Adreno GPU, so the CPUs had to do all the work, but the native version still performed about 40 percent faster.

But faster doesn’t mean fast — while the CPU rendering times with the Arm64 version were within a minute of integrated GPU rendering times on the Intel Arc, and near identical to the AMD Radeon 780M, it still took over four times longer than the base MacBook Air M3.

While these Snapdragon laptops are not what you’d want to buy for 3D rendering — you’ll want a discrete GPU for that, regardless of platform — the massive difference between emulated and native CPU rendering shows how important it is for developers to have Arm64 versions of their software, especially if it’s designed to handle heavy workloads.

We couldn’t run our Premiere Pro benchmark since Adobe hasn’t released a native Arm version, and Adobe blocks the x86 version from emulation on Arm. (For a couple of days, it didn’t block all the Snapdragon X CPUs, but the emulated results were not great.) My colleague Tom Warren has a wonderful deep dive into the current state of Windows on Arm if you’re looking for more information on x86 emulation, and we’ll continue to test the Prism emulator as we find opportunities to do so.

Battery life

Microsoft claims that its Copilot Plus PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20 percent more battery life than the latest MacBook Air 15-inch.” When I tested the latest 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs, they lasted about 18 hours on a charge when I used them as I normally would during a regular week, with the display brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible.

None of the Snapdragon laptops’ batteries lasted 18 hours like the M3 Air, but most weren’t far behind, averaging 14 to 16 hours. That’s still a lot longer than most of the Intel- and AMD-based laptops I tested, with the exception of the Intel-based Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which got near identical battery life to the Snapdragon-based Galaxy Book4 Edge, at over 14 hours each.

In Tom’s testing, the Microsoft Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus CPU lasted about seven hours with the brightness set to 100 percent while being pushed with all sorts of tasks like downloading games from Steam and taking video calls. In lighter workloads on 50 percent brightness, the battery drained just 25 percent after four hours. My own experience with the Snapdragon Dell XPS 13 was similar.

At 75 percent brightness (or as close to 200 nits as possible), the XPS 13 kept a charge for around 15 hours — two to three hours longer than the Dell XPS 14 I recently reviewed with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, despite the smaller battery on the XPS 13. It also lasted longer than the Acer Swift Go 14 AMD I tested with a Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU. That one got me between 12 to 14 hours, depending on how often I used it, how I used it, and how high I had the display brightness cranked.

We have more testing to do on all of these laptops — the Surface Pro in particular hasn’t gotten the battery life we expected, and we’re working with Microsoft to try to figure out why — but so far, the Copilot Plus PCs seem to beat comparable AMD and Intel machines on battery by several hours.

Here’s why I’m not mentioning the NPU

Yes, these are Copilot Plus PCs. Yes, they run a bunch of AI stuff. But my colleagues and I have yet to figure out a reliable method to test relative NPU performance in a meaningful way. The Copilot Plus AI features, with the possible exceptions of Studio Effects and Live Captions translations, currently feel more like gimmicks than useful apps most people can incorporate into their day-to-day life, and Microsoft doesn’t plan to release Recall, its most-hyped AI app, until it addresses security concerns.

But the NPUs are there — and not just on Arm PCs — so we expect apps to take more advantage of that processing power soon. We’ll revisit NPU benchmarks as it makes sense.

More for less… more or less

This wave of Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs starts at $999 and can cost in excess of $2,500. They feature nearly everything most other laptops in that price range do: beautiful OLED displays; high storage capacity; long battery life; fast processors; metal chassis; and in some cases, the latest Wi-Fi 7 adapter. It’s all the same stuff you get with Intel- and AMD-based laptops, and even MacBooks, often for less money.

As MacBook Air competitors, they have a few nifty features that have been baked into Windows for a while that Apple is only just adding to macOS, like phone mirroring and automatic window tiling — and you can use up to three external monitors, with or without the lid closed. They can also be priced more reasonably. At $1,099, the base 13-inch MacBook Air M3 has an eight-core processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. But at $999, the base 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 has a 10-core processor, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of storage — and you can easily upgrade that storage yourself.

The Snapdragon laptops are generally cheaper than their Intel or AMD counterparts, too. The Qualcomm Dell XPS 13 is $200 cheaper and the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is $150 cheaper, while the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x is $100 more. Better performance and longer battery life for less money are going to be the major selling points for most people — and these Snapdragon Copilot Plus PCs hit all three.

Where does Qualcomm go from here?

Unlike previous Windows on Arm laptops — even up to 2022’s Surface Pro 9 (SQ3), these Copilot Plus PCs finally have processors fast enough to run the operating system and emulate most x86 programs. And now that every major Windows laptop manufacturer has at least one Snapdragon X-based machine, there should finally be enough of an install base to entice developers at large to create native Arm64 versions of their apps, which will make these an easier sell.

But with Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Ryzen AI coming soon, it’s unclear how long Qualcomm will hold onto its lead. Lunar Lake will be closer in design to Apple Silicon, with RAM incorporated into the chip itself, and Intel claims that getting rid of hyperthreading will decrease power consumption, so laptops with these chips will supposedly get better battery life than its current-gen processors. Ryzen AI will have a 12-core and 10-core variant, just like Qualcomm Snapdragon, on its Zen 5 architecture, clock speeds up to 5.1GHz, and a more powerful iGPU, so that could increase the graphics performance lead it currently has over some of the Snapdragon X Elite chips.

We’ll have plenty more to test in the coming weeks as app compatibility improves and full reviews of many of these Snapdragon X laptops soon. Qualcomm has shown us that Windows on Arm is finally feasible. Now, it’s up to Intel and AMD to convince people not to make the jump.

Photography by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

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Image: The Verge

Threads, Meta’s X competitor, is officially one year old. While the site was rushed into existence with a bare-bones set of features, Meta has steadily improved upon the app to make it a decent place for people looking to post on a platform that isn’t X.
The site arrived at the right moment. By last summer, Elon Musk’s takeover of X — which back then was still called Twitter — hadn’t only seen him wantonly firing vast swaths of the company and shutting off servers but also making changes with real consequences for the site’s user experience. That site had been very unstable and major advertisers fled, leaving in their wake cheap, garbage product and crypto ads. Chaotic changes to verification led first to high-profile impersonations and celebrity suspensions and then to the spread of false information.
Threads had the promise of a social platform without all of that baggage — even if the app was pretty bare-bones when it launched on July 5th, 2023. Users could publish 500-word text posts. They could embed images or videos in their posts and comment on, like, repost, or share those of others. That’s about it. Crucially, because Threads accounts are tied to Instagram accounts, it was relatively easy to start using the platform.

That was enough to get 100 million users to test the waters in the first five days, beating OpenAI’s two-month run to the same record with ChatGPT. But big features like hashtags and trending topics weren’t yet part of the experience. The only feed available was an algorithmic one — with no option to see only posts from people you follow — and it was also chock-full of cringe-inducing posts from celebrities and brands.
Meta has worked quickly to address the biggest needs. A follows-only feed rolled out before the app was a month old. The real web app launched in August. There are now hashtags (sort of) and trending topics. The company even added features that it arguably didn’t have to, like a TweetDeck-like web experience, complete with automatically refreshing feeds and the option for always-present columns populated with follows-only feeds, likes, and saved posts.
Some things are still missing, like a dedicated Threads inbox for DMs — Meta has been resistant to that idea, though it is experimenting. But overall, things have changed for the better in the last year.
Another potential differentiator for Threads was a promised integration with the fediverse — and, to the surprise of many, Meta actually seems to be delivering on it. Threads’ protocol of choice is ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol used by Mastodon. Fediverse integration is in an optional beta right now, and if you turn it on, non-Threads fediverse users can follow you, see and like your posts, and their replies will even show up in Threads. Yet Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has talked about how the feature will mean creators on the platform aren’t necessarily locked into Threads, which could be comforting for people who want to have a little more control over their social media identity.
Some combination of these things makes Threads look most like the heir apparent to the former Twitter crown. But Threads isn’t guaranteed to supplant X.
Not everybody finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing
Mosseri and Co. have tried to encourage a generally measured vibe on the platform and thread the needle of getting engagement without leaning on outrage. Not everybody finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing, including Meta’s choice to keep news and political content at arm’s length and give users options to limit political posts on their feeds. But there may not be much it can do to keep people from flooding the platform with more political content as the US presidential election approaches in November. That will be a big test for its approach.
Whether the approach helps or hinders the platform, it’s still growing, despite a dip in activity after launching. Threads expanded to Europe in July, and four months later, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that it had about 150 million monthly active users. This month, analytics firm Similarweb found that while Twitter still has a higher daily monthly active user count, it’s on a downward trajectory, and Threads is on its way up. And as of Wednesday, Threads has more than 175 million users.
Even so, the ecosystems are fragmented, and Threads isn’t guaranteed to supplant X. There are also other competitors. As of this writing, about 5.9 million people either use or have accounts on Bluesky, which is decentralized but not on the ActivityPub platform Threads is betting on. That number of users might be a drop in the bucket compared to Threads’ user count, but Bluesky is growing, and Threads doesn’t feel like it caters as well to the kind of chaotic content Bluesky users produce. Bluesky also has features that Threads hasn’t rolled out, like proper DMs and more customizable tools for moderation.
And Meta has a long row to hoe to bring over many entrenched X users, too. Anyone who has spent years building their follow list or their own following on the platform might not have much of a reason to leave, especially if the people they care about aren’t migrating away from X. Many communities on X, like the so-called “sports Twitter,” haven’t fully made the move over to Threads, despite overtures like live scores.
Still, Threads is doing pretty well after just a year. It’s missing a lot of what made Twitter so compelling, but Musk has dropped a heavy bag of wrenches into X’s machinery since he bought it. Maybe all Threads has to do is be good enough — and be around if that machinery finally seizes up.

Image: The Verge

Threads, Meta’s X competitor, is officially one year old. While the site was rushed into existence with a bare-bones set of features, Meta has steadily improved upon the app to make it a decent place for people looking to post on a platform that isn’t X.

The site arrived at the right moment. By last summer, Elon Musk’s takeover of X — which back then was still called Twitter — hadn’t only seen him wantonly firing vast swaths of the company and shutting off servers but also making changes with real consequences for the site’s user experience. That site had been very unstable and major advertisers fled, leaving in their wake cheap, garbage product and crypto ads. Chaotic changes to verification led first to high-profile impersonations and celebrity suspensions and then to the spread of false information.

Threads had the promise of a social platform without all of that baggage — even if the app was pretty bare-bones when it launched on July 5th, 2023. Users could publish 500-word text posts. They could embed images or videos in their posts and comment on, like, repost, or share those of others. That’s about it. Crucially, because Threads accounts are tied to Instagram accounts, it was relatively easy to start using the platform.

That was enough to get 100 million users to test the waters in the first five days, beating OpenAI’s two-month run to the same record with ChatGPT. But big features like hashtags and trending topics weren’t yet part of the experience. The only feed available was an algorithmic one — with no option to see only posts from people you follow — and it was also chock-full of cringe-inducing posts from celebrities and brands.

Meta has worked quickly to address the biggest needs. A follows-only feed rolled out before the app was a month old. The real web app launched in August. There are now hashtags (sort of) and trending topics. The company even added features that it arguably didn’t have to, like a TweetDeck-like web experience, complete with automatically refreshing feeds and the option for always-present columns populated with follows-only feeds, likes, and saved posts.

Some things are still missing, like a dedicated Threads inbox for DMs — Meta has been resistant to that idea, though it is experimenting. But overall, things have changed for the better in the last year.

Another potential differentiator for Threads was a promised integration with the fediverse — and, to the surprise of many, Meta actually seems to be delivering on it. Threads’ protocol of choice is ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol used by Mastodon. Fediverse integration is in an optional beta right now, and if you turn it on, non-Threads fediverse users can follow you, see and like your posts, and their replies will even show up in Threads. Yet Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has talked about how the feature will mean creators on the platform aren’t necessarily locked into Threads, which could be comforting for people who want to have a little more control over their social media identity.

Some combination of these things makes Threads look most like the heir apparent to the former Twitter crown. But Threads isn’t guaranteed to supplant X.

Mosseri and Co. have tried to encourage a generally measured vibe on the platform and thread the needle of getting engagement without leaning on outrage. Not everybody finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing, including Meta’s choice to keep news and political content at arm’s length and give users options to limit political posts on their feeds. But there may not be much it can do to keep people from flooding the platform with more political content as the US presidential election approaches in November. That will be a big test for its approach.

Whether the approach helps or hinders the platform, it’s still growing, despite a dip in activity after launching. Threads expanded to Europe in July, and four months later, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that it had about 150 million monthly active users. This month, analytics firm Similarweb found that while Twitter still has a higher daily monthly active user count, it’s on a downward trajectory, and Threads is on its way up. And as of Wednesday, Threads has more than 175 million users.

Even so, the ecosystems are fragmented, and Threads isn’t guaranteed to supplant X. There are also other competitors. As of this writing, about 5.9 million people either use or have accounts on Bluesky, which is decentralized but not on the ActivityPub platform Threads is betting on. That number of users might be a drop in the bucket compared to Threads’ user count, but Bluesky is growing, and Threads doesn’t feel like it caters as well to the kind of chaotic content Bluesky users produce. Bluesky also has features that Threads hasn’t rolled out, like proper DMs and more customizable tools for moderation.

And Meta has a long row to hoe to bring over many entrenched X users, too. Anyone who has spent years building their follow list or their own following on the platform might not have much of a reason to leave, especially if the people they care about aren’t migrating away from X. Many communities on X, like the so-called “sports Twitter,” haven’t fully made the move over to Threads, despite overtures like live scores.

Still, Threads is doing pretty well after just a year. It’s missing a lot of what made Twitter so compelling, but Musk has dropped a heavy bag of wrenches into X’s machinery since he bought it. Maybe all Threads has to do is be good enough — and be around if that machinery finally seizes up.

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