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On mobile, you get a one-tap unsubscribe under annoying website notifications from Chrome. | Image: Google

Google is expanding a Chrome safety feature to help you cancel pesky website notifications with a single tap. It’s already available on Pixels and is coming to more Android devices; adding a simple unsubscribe button in the notification so that you can get rid of websites you didn’t mean to subscribe to, like horoscopes or weird facts about ducks (there’s also an undo button in case you actually do still want those weird duck facts).
There’s also an updated Safety Check running in the background to automatically revoke permissions from websites that you haven’t visited in a long time or are otherwise dangerous. You can see the actions taken in the summary panel, which lists other potential security concerns like compromised passwords and suggestions to update software and turn on safe browsing.

Image: Google
Chrome can automatically revoke permissions from known malicious or spammy sites.

Additionally, Chrome now allows you to give one-time access to websites for your mic, camera, and other permissions. So, after you’re done with something like a virtual doctor visit, it automatically revokes the website’s access to your camera.

On mobile, you get a one-tap unsubscribe under annoying website notifications from Chrome. | Image: Google

Google is expanding a Chrome safety feature to help you cancel pesky website notifications with a single tap. It’s already available on Pixels and is coming to more Android devices; adding a simple unsubscribe button in the notification so that you can get rid of websites you didn’t mean to subscribe to, like horoscopes or weird facts about ducks (there’s also an undo button in case you actually do still want those weird duck facts).

There’s also an updated Safety Check running in the background to automatically revoke permissions from websites that you haven’t visited in a long time or are otherwise dangerous. You can see the actions taken in the summary panel, which lists other potential security concerns like compromised passwords and suggestions to update software and turn on safe browsing.

Image: Google
Chrome can automatically revoke permissions from known malicious or spammy sites.

Additionally, Chrome now allows you to give one-time access to websites for your mic, camera, and other permissions. So, after you’re done with something like a virtual doctor visit, it automatically revokes the website’s access to your camera.

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Disney’s current promo runs through September 27th and extends to both new and returning subscribers. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Like most streaming services, the price of a Disney Plus is about to go up in the not-so-distant future. Fortunately for those dreading the $2 price hike — which is due to take effect on October 17th — both new and returning subscribers can sign up for three months of Disney’s ad-supported Basic plan for $1.99 a month through September 27th, saving you $6 a month or $18 over the entire promo period.

If you can do without the ability to download content for offline viewing, Disney’s ad-supported plan is virtually identical to the ad-free plan. Both provide access to the same Disney Plus shows and films — including the full Star Wars and Marvel slate — along with National Geographic and Pixar content. That means you’ll be able to stream the new Star Wars: Skeleton Crew series when it lands on December 3rd as well as recent arrivals like X-Men ‘97, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, Ron Howard’s recent Jim Henson documentary, and The Acolyte (RIP). Overall, the Disney Plus catalog is less robust than that of Hulu, Netflix, and some other rival services, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a finer selection of classic kid-friendly content and superhero stories.

To make the most of the deal, we’d advise you to mark your calendar. Once the three-month promotional period ends, Disney Plus will automatically begin charging you the regular monthly rate, which, by then, will run you $9.99.
Other notable deals and discounts

Logitech’s MX Master 3S for Mac, one of the quietest productivity mice you can buy right now, is on sale at Amazon starting at $82.58 (about $17 off), an all-time low. The “Mac” version is the same as the standard model we reviewed in 2022. It packs the same satisfying scroll wheels, multidevice Bluetooth pairing, and a high-res 8,000 DPI sensor, only it lacks a USB-A “Bolt” dongle and comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable instead of a USB-C to USB-A cable.

Samsung’s latest Discover event runs through Sunday, September 15th, allowing you to save on a variety of earbuds, phones, and tablets. Right now, for instance, you can pick up a Galaxy Tab S9 from Amazon and Samsung starting at around $650 ($150 off), which is nearly the lowest price we’ve seen. We’re not huge fans of the 16:10 aspect ratio, but it’s still a great 11-inch Android tablet with a brilliant OLED display, water resistance, and enough processing power for all your typical tablet needs. Read our review.
If the imminent release of Echoes of Wisdom has you clamoring for some new Nintendo gear, Hori’s Zelda-themed Split Pad Pro has fallen to $49.22 (about $11 off) at Amazon. The handheld gamepad offers big, easy-to-reach buttons and generously sized triggers and analog sticks, all of which make it a more comfortable alternative to Nintendo’s cramped Joy-Con controllers. Just don’t expect support for HD rumble, NFC, or some of the features found on Nintendo’s first-party controllers. That would be too convenient, after all.

Disney’s current promo runs through September 27th and extends to both new and returning subscribers. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Like most streaming services, the price of a Disney Plus is about to go up in the not-so-distant future. Fortunately for those dreading the $2 price hike — which is due to take effect on October 17th — both new and returning subscribers can sign up for three months of Disney’s ad-supported Basic plan for $1.99 a month through September 27th, saving you $6 a month or $18 over the entire promo period.

If you can do without the ability to download content for offline viewing, Disney’s ad-supported plan is virtually identical to the ad-free plan. Both provide access to the same Disney Plus shows and films — including the full Star Wars and Marvel slate — along with National Geographic and Pixar content. That means you’ll be able to stream the new Star Wars: Skeleton Crew series when it lands on December 3rd as well as recent arrivals like X-Men ‘97, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, Ron Howard’s recent Jim Henson documentary, and The Acolyte (RIP). Overall, the Disney Plus catalog is less robust than that of Hulu, Netflix, and some other rival services, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a finer selection of classic kid-friendly content and superhero stories.

To make the most of the deal, we’d advise you to mark your calendar. Once the three-month promotional period ends, Disney Plus will automatically begin charging you the regular monthly rate, which, by then, will run you $9.99.

Other notable deals and discounts

Logitech’s MX Master 3S for Mac, one of the quietest productivity mice you can buy right now, is on sale at Amazon starting at $82.58 (about $17 off), an all-time low. The “Mac” version is the same as the standard model we reviewed in 2022. It packs the same satisfying scroll wheels, multidevice Bluetooth pairing, and a high-res 8,000 DPI sensor, only it lacks a USB-A “Bolt” dongle and comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable instead of a USB-C to USB-A cable.

Samsung’s latest Discover event runs through Sunday, September 15th, allowing you to save on a variety of earbuds, phones, and tablets. Right now, for instance, you can pick up a Galaxy Tab S9 from Amazon and Samsung starting at around $650 ($150 off), which is nearly the lowest price we’ve seen. We’re not huge fans of the 16:10 aspect ratio, but it’s still a great 11-inch Android tablet with a brilliant OLED display, water resistance, and enough processing power for all your typical tablet needs. Read our review.
If the imminent release of Echoes of Wisdom has you clamoring for some new Nintendo gear, Hori’s Zelda-themed Split Pad Pro has fallen to $49.22 (about $11 off) at Amazon. The handheld gamepad offers big, easy-to-reach buttons and generously sized triggers and analog sticks, all of which make it a more comfortable alternative to Nintendo’s cramped Joy-Con controllers. Just don’t expect support for HD rumble, NFC, or some of the features found on Nintendo’s first-party controllers. That would be too convenient, after all.

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Image: The Flappy Bird Foundation

A self-described “team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world” says it’s acquired the rights to Flappy Bird, the iconic mobile game whose creator took it offline less than a year after it was released. Now, “The Flappy Bird Foundation Group” will relaunch the game on Android and iOS in 2025.
But it’s unclear whether the original creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, is a part of the game’s relaunch. The Verge reached out to Nguyen with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back. His account on X and the website for his game development company don’t show any recent updates. The Flappy Bird Foundation said it acquired the rights to the game from Gametech, LLC, which isn’t associated with Nguyen.
Following Flappy Bird’s sudden shutdown in 2014, clones started flooding app stores while companies attempted to snap up its trademark. Even though Ngyuen expressed interest in relaunching the game at the time, Apple’s App Store rules may have prevented him from doing so. Under the rules, developers lose ownership of an app’s name when they remove it, and they can’t relaunch it under the same name if another developer is using it.

Still, as someone who was a big Flappy Bird player back in 2013, I’d love to see the game brought back to life.
While the new game will feature the original Flappy Bird character, future updates will introduce new game modes, characters, and “massive multiplayer challenges.” The new Flappy Bird website shows what we might expect, with a new “rivals” mode where you can challenge 99 other players and another that has you shooting birds through basketball hoops. There are some new characters as well, like “Peng” the penguin, and the rainbow mohawk-sporting “Quirky.”

Image: The Flappy Bird Foundation

A self-described “team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world” says it’s acquired the rights to Flappy Bird, the iconic mobile game whose creator took it offline less than a year after it was released. Now, “The Flappy Bird Foundation Group” will relaunch the game on Android and iOS in 2025.

But it’s unclear whether the original creator of Flappy Bird, Dong Nguyen, is a part of the game’s relaunch. The Verge reached out to Nguyen with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back. His account on X and the website for his game development company don’t show any recent updates. The Flappy Bird Foundation said it acquired the rights to the game from Gametech, LLC, which isn’t associated with Nguyen.

Following Flappy Bird’s sudden shutdown in 2014, clones started flooding app stores while companies attempted to snap up its trademark. Even though Ngyuen expressed interest in relaunching the game at the time, Apple’s App Store rules may have prevented him from doing so. Under the rules, developers lose ownership of an app’s name when they remove it, and they can’t relaunch it under the same name if another developer is using it.

Still, as someone who was a big Flappy Bird player back in 2013, I’d love to see the game brought back to life.

While the new game will feature the original Flappy Bird character, future updates will introduce new game modes, characters, and “massive multiplayer challenges.” The new Flappy Bird website shows what we might expect, with a new “rivals” mode where you can challenge 99 other players and another that has you shooting birds through basketball hoops. There are some new characters as well, like “Peng” the penguin, and the rainbow mohawk-sporting “Quirky.”

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge overall for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt has the potential to completely reset our cultural relationship with photography and, in particular, how much we instinctively trust photos to reflect the truth.
But the debate over image editing and the inherent truth of photos is nothing new, of course. It’s existed for as long as photography has existed, and it’s raged since digital photo editing tools have become widely available. You know this argument; you’ve heard it a million times. It’s when people say, “It’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally.

Today, we’re exploring that argument, trying to understand exactly what it means and why our new world of AI image tools is different — and yes, in some cases, the same. Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed recently dove into this for us, and I asked her to join me in going through the debate and the arguments one by one to help figure it out.
Because, sure, in many ways, AI image editing really is just a faster, easier version of Photoshop — even Adobe now has AI tech like its Firefly image generator built right into Photoshop. But making powerful tools instantly accessible to everyone has side effects, and we’re seeing that right now.
Say you want to generate an image of Donald Trump pointing a gun at Kamala Harris. Just ask Elon Musk’s Grok, the AI chatbot built right into X. It’ll do it no problem because it has very few of the same filters that have prevented competing AI products from depicting politicians or outright violence. How about a deepfake nude of a classmate? That’s now made more trivial than ever before thanks to so-called “nudification” apps that manipulate existing photos, and it’s fast becoming a national crisis.
These might be old problems — Photoshop let you do all sorts of awful manipulations to celebrity photographs, and even in the days before computers, you could create convincing fake images to mislead people. But generative AI tools are testing whether the scale and sophistication of the tech and the speed of its adoption with little oversight has landed us firmly in uncharted territory.
I’ll just be direct here: my view is that people say “it’s just like Photoshop” to diminish these new problems that AI tools are causing and to make them seem like they’re already solved or not worth considering. But I would remind you that we hardly solved any of those problems when it really was just Photoshop — and any proposed solution that requires everyone to fundamentally understand that every image they see is edited isn’t much of a solution at all.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge overall for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt has the potential to completely reset our cultural relationship with photography and, in particular, how much we instinctively trust photos to reflect the truth.

But the debate over image editing and the inherent truth of photos is nothing new, of course. It’s existed for as long as photography has existed, and it’s raged since digital photo editing tools have become widely available. You know this argument; you’ve heard it a million times. It’s when people say, “It’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally.

Today, we’re exploring that argument, trying to understand exactly what it means and why our new world of AI image tools is different — and yes, in some cases, the same. Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed recently dove into this for us, and I asked her to join me in going through the debate and the arguments one by one to help figure it out.

Because, sure, in many ways, AI image editing really is just a faster, easier version of Photoshop — even Adobe now has AI tech like its Firefly image generator built right into Photoshop. But making powerful tools instantly accessible to everyone has side effects, and we’re seeing that right now.

Say you want to generate an image of Donald Trump pointing a gun at Kamala Harris. Just ask Elon Musk’s Grok, the AI chatbot built right into X. It’ll do it no problem because it has very few of the same filters that have prevented competing AI products from depicting politicians or outright violence. How about a deepfake nude of a classmate? That’s now made more trivial than ever before thanks to so-called “nudification” apps that manipulate existing photos, and it’s fast becoming a national crisis.

These might be old problems — Photoshop let you do all sorts of awful manipulations to celebrity photographs, and even in the days before computers, you could create convincing fake images to mislead people. But generative AI tools are testing whether the scale and sophistication of the tech and the speed of its adoption with little oversight has landed us firmly in uncharted territory.

I’ll just be direct here: my view is that people say “it’s just like Photoshop” to diminish these new problems that AI tools are causing and to make them seem like they’re already solved or not worth considering. But I would remind you that we hardly solved any of those problems when it really was just Photoshop — and any proposed solution that requires everyone to fundamentally understand that every image they see is edited isn’t much of a solution at all.

Read More 

An aerial photo of a warehouse next to homes in Bloomington, California. | Photo by Wes Reel for The Verge

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just handed communities a powerful new way to hold nearby warehouses accountable for the pollution they create.
Until recently, air quality regulations largely overlooked tailpipe pollution choking neighborhoods near sprawling warehouses. Warehouses may not have smokestacks releasing pollutants that the EPA and local agencies typically regulate. But they do attract a steady stream of trucks. It’s a problem the warehouse wouldn’t necessarily have been held accountable for since old-school regulations focused on pollutants coming from the facility itself.
Warehouses are expanding to meet demand for e-commerce
That changed with a landmark policy in Southern California called the Warehouse Indirect Source Rule (ISR) that requires large warehouses to take steps to limit those tailpipe emissions. The EPA just approved the ISR as part of the state’s air plan, which gives the agency and people living near warehouses the ability to sue if companies violate the rule. Making the rule federally enforceable could also help pave the way for similar rules in other regions where warehouses are expanding to meet demand for e-commerce.
“These indirect sources, such as warehouses, ports, and rail yards, all contribute to pollution and therefore must be addressed so our communities can breathe cleaner air,” EPA Pacific Southwest regional administrator Martha Guzman said in the EPA’s announcement yesterday.
A recent nationwide study linked truck traffic from warehouses to a rise in the smog-forming pollutant nitrogen dioxide. Neighborhoods downwind of warehouses, less than 5 miles (roughly 7 kilometers) away, saw a nearly 20 percent increase in nitrogen dioxide pollution on average compared to neighborhoods upwind of warehouses.
Clusters of warehouses with more loading docks and parking spaces can bring in more truck traffic. And neighborhoods with more residents of color are often the most affected. The study found that in places with the most warehouses, the proportion of Asian and Hispanic residents was close to 290 percent and 240 percent higher, respectively, than the median nationwide.

“Poor communities carry the burden of being exposed to increased pollution, not seeing high paying jobs, and having whole blocks of homes, schools, and small businesses swallowed up to place mega warehouses in our backyards,” Taylor Thomas, codirector of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, said in a press release. “This regulation marks an acknowledgement of the years of suffering borne by hundreds of thousands of people in our region, and a shift to having the logistics industry be responsible for the vast harms they create and leave behind.”
The Indirect Source Rule in Southern California was first adopted by the local air district in 2021 and will apply to warehouses with more than 100,000 square feet of indoor floor space in a single structure by next year. It uses a points-based system to try to keep pollution near warehouses in check. Warehouses need to earn a certain amount of points by electrifying vehicle fleets, installing EV chargers, and taking other pollution-cutting measures — or pay a fee. The rule has already pushed companies to acquire at least 815 new zero-emission trucks and install 172 truck charging stations, Sierra Club points out, citing data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the warehouses covered by the rule — 1,400 of 2,000 — were not in compliance last year, the Press-Telegram reports. The EPA’s decision to make the rule federally enforceable could force noncomplying warehouses to take swifter action. Advocates for communities near warehouses outside of California celebrated the decision as they try to establish similar indirect source rules.
“At least one in four New Yorkers live within half a mile of a mega e-commerce warehouse that generates hundreds or thousands of daily truck trips … we are inspired by California’s success in reducing harmful tailpipe emissions,” a statewide coalition of advocacy groups called ElectrifyNY said in an emailed statement. The coalition is calling on local leaders to pass the Clean Deliveries Act, which would establish an indirect source rule for warehouses in New York state. The bill was sent to the State Assembly after passing in the State Senate in June.

An aerial photo of a warehouse next to homes in Bloomington, California. | Photo by Wes Reel for The Verge

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just handed communities a powerful new way to hold nearby warehouses accountable for the pollution they create.

Until recently, air quality regulations largely overlooked tailpipe pollution choking neighborhoods near sprawling warehouses. Warehouses may not have smokestacks releasing pollutants that the EPA and local agencies typically regulate. But they do attract a steady stream of trucks. It’s a problem the warehouse wouldn’t necessarily have been held accountable for since old-school regulations focused on pollutants coming from the facility itself.

That changed with a landmark policy in Southern California called the Warehouse Indirect Source Rule (ISR) that requires large warehouses to take steps to limit those tailpipe emissions. The EPA just approved the ISR as part of the state’s air plan, which gives the agency and people living near warehouses the ability to sue if companies violate the rule. Making the rule federally enforceable could also help pave the way for similar rules in other regions where warehouses are expanding to meet demand for e-commerce.

“These indirect sources, such as warehouses, ports, and rail yards, all contribute to pollution and therefore must be addressed so our communities can breathe cleaner air,” EPA Pacific Southwest regional administrator Martha Guzman said in the EPA’s announcement yesterday.

A recent nationwide study linked truck traffic from warehouses to a rise in the smog-forming pollutant nitrogen dioxide. Neighborhoods downwind of warehouses, less than 5 miles (roughly 7 kilometers) away, saw a nearly 20 percent increase in nitrogen dioxide pollution on average compared to neighborhoods upwind of warehouses.

Clusters of warehouses with more loading docks and parking spaces can bring in more truck traffic. And neighborhoods with more residents of color are often the most affected. The study found that in places with the most warehouses, the proportion of Asian and Hispanic residents was close to 290 percent and 240 percent higher, respectively, than the median nationwide.

“Poor communities carry the burden of being exposed to increased pollution, not seeing high paying jobs, and having whole blocks of homes, schools, and small businesses swallowed up to place mega warehouses in our backyards,” Taylor Thomas, codirector of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, said in a press release. “This regulation marks an acknowledgement of the years of suffering borne by hundreds of thousands of people in our region, and a shift to having the logistics industry be responsible for the vast harms they create and leave behind.”

The Indirect Source Rule in Southern California was first adopted by the local air district in 2021 and will apply to warehouses with more than 100,000 square feet of indoor floor space in a single structure by next year. It uses a points-based system to try to keep pollution near warehouses in check. Warehouses need to earn a certain amount of points by electrifying vehicle fleets, installing EV chargers, and taking other pollution-cutting measures — or pay a fee. The rule has already pushed companies to acquire at least 815 new zero-emission trucks and install 172 truck charging stations, Sierra Club points out, citing data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the warehouses covered by the rule — 1,400 of 2,000 — were not in compliance last year, the Press-Telegram reports. The EPA’s decision to make the rule federally enforceable could force noncomplying warehouses to take swifter action. Advocates for communities near warehouses outside of California celebrated the decision as they try to establish similar indirect source rules.

“At least one in four New Yorkers live within half a mile of a mega e-commerce warehouse that generates hundreds or thousands of daily truck trips … we are inspired by California’s success in reducing harmful tailpipe emissions,” a statewide coalition of advocacy groups called ElectrifyNY said in an emailed statement. The coalition is calling on local leaders to pass the Clean Deliveries Act, which would establish an indirect source rule for warehouses in New York state. The bill was sent to the State Assembly after passing in the State Senate in June.

Read More 

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

These days, there are so many digital subscriptions out there — music, movies, fitness, cloud storage, software, podcasts, audiobooks, Patreons, security cameras, AI bots, and more — that it’s perfectly understandable if you start losing track of what exactly you’re signed up for.
To make things even more complicated, you may be paying some subscriptions monthly and others annually. Then, there are those insidious free trials: you sign up to test something out, forget all about it after a few days, and then get billed unexpectedly (this is an occupational hazard for tech journalists). And of course, both Apple and Google make it immensely easy to sign up for various services almost instantly using their account.
Luckily, Apple and Google also offer ways to quickly check up on the apps and services you’ve signed up for. You can easily review your active subscriptions and cancel them if you want to — and you can do it on your desktop or mobile device. It’s worth doing on a regular basis to make sure you’re not signed up (and paying) for anything you don’t want. Here’s how.
(A note: it’s worth bearing in mind the Apple tax — if you sign up through the iOS App Store for something like Netflix or Spotify, Apple takes a 30 percent cut each time, which is often passed on to users. You can sometimes get these subscriptions for cheaper if you sign up on the web or a non-Apple device.)
Subscriptions using Apple’s App Store

Screenshot: Apple
You can get at your subscriptions through your App Store account page.

Screenshot: Apple
You’re able to cancel subscriptions and resubscribe to canceled ones.

If you’ve signed up for any digital subscriptions through the App Store, using or registered payment method, Apple keeps track of them for you. If you’re using your iPhone:

Open the App Store and tap your profile picture (top right).
Choose Subscriptions to see active and recently canceled subscriptions.
Tap Sort to order the list by name, price, or renewal date.
Select any subscription to see more details and to cancel it.

For each subscription, you’ll be shown the app it’s attached to, how much you’re paying, and how regularly you’re paying. In most cases, you just get the option to cancel, but if multiple plans are available — as with Apple One, for example — you can switch to a different plan as well as cancel.
On the same screen, you’ll also see subscriptions you’ve canceled, up to a year after the subscription has expired, and you can’t manually clear this history. If you select any of these subscriptions, you get the option to renew them again.
There’s also a Renewal Receipts toggle switch on the subscriptions page: enable this to get emailed receipts every time there’s a renewal and another payment gets taken (it can be another useful reminder of what you’re signed up to).
You can get to these subscriptions from macOS, too — everything you’ve signed up for through an Apple App Store, whether on mobile or desktop, is shown together.

Open the Mac App Store and click your profile picture (bottom left).
Choose Account Settings.
Select Manage next to Subscriptions.
Click any subscription to see details.

You get the same options as you do on iOS: you’re able to cancel subscriptions that are active or renew subscriptions that have been canceled in the last year.
Subscriptions using Google’s Pay Store

Screenshot: Google
Active and expired subscriptions are shown in the Play Store.

Screenshot: Google
Find out when you’ll be charged next and how much you’ll have to pay.

To use an Android device to find subscriptions to apps and services that you’ve signed up for through your Google account, start by opening the Play Store.

Tap your account picture (top right).
Choose Payments and subscriptions > Subscriptions.
Select any of the subscriptions shown to see more details about it: how much you’re paying, when the next billing date is, and the payment method being used. You can also update your payment method (for example, if you want to use a different credit card).
To cancel a subscription, select it, then choose Cancel subscription.
Tap Resubscribe to sign up again for a subscription you’ve previously canceled.
Choose Remove to remove a canceled subscription from the list.

You can get to the same options on a desktop system by loading up the Play Store on the web in your browser.

Click your account picture (top right).
Choose Payments & subscriptions.
Open the Subscriptions tab to see everything you’re signed up for.
Click Resubscribe to renew a canceled subscription or Manage for anything else.

The options are the same as on mobile: you can see the billing amount, the next billing date, and the payment method being used. Click Cancel subscription to cancel.
Other subscription checks
If you didn’t sign up for any of your digital subscriptions directly through your Apple or Google account, they won’t necessarily all show up on your account. To get a fuller picture of your subscriptions, a bit more detective work may be required.
Checking bank account and credit card balances regularly is a good start — if this isn’t something you already do. Any subscriptions will be billed regularly on the same dates, and it should be clear what they are. Remember that some might be annual rather than monthly, so you really need to look at 12 months’ worth of records to be sure.
Digging into your email inbox can help, too: run a search for “subscription” and see what comes up (you might find a few newsletters you can unsubscribe from, too). If you use secondary email accounts to sign up for subscriptions, in order to avoid getting too many promotional messages, remember to check these, too.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

These days, there are so many digital subscriptions out there — music, movies, fitness, cloud storage, software, podcasts, audiobooks, Patreons, security cameras, AI bots, and more — that it’s perfectly understandable if you start losing track of what exactly you’re signed up for.

To make things even more complicated, you may be paying some subscriptions monthly and others annually. Then, there are those insidious free trials: you sign up to test something out, forget all about it after a few days, and then get billed unexpectedly (this is an occupational hazard for tech journalists). And of course, both Apple and Google make it immensely easy to sign up for various services almost instantly using their account.

Luckily, Apple and Google also offer ways to quickly check up on the apps and services you’ve signed up for. You can easily review your active subscriptions and cancel them if you want to — and you can do it on your desktop or mobile device. It’s worth doing on a regular basis to make sure you’re not signed up (and paying) for anything you don’t want. Here’s how.

(A note: it’s worth bearing in mind the Apple tax — if you sign up through the iOS App Store for something like Netflix or Spotify, Apple takes a 30 percent cut each time, which is often passed on to users. You can sometimes get these subscriptions for cheaper if you sign up on the web or a non-Apple device.)

Subscriptions using Apple’s App Store

If you’ve signed up for any digital subscriptions through the App Store, using or registered payment method, Apple keeps track of them for you. If you’re using your iPhone:

Open the App Store and tap your profile picture (top right).
Choose Subscriptions to see active and recently canceled subscriptions.
Tap Sort to order the list by name, price, or renewal date.
Select any subscription to see more details and to cancel it.

For each subscription, you’ll be shown the app it’s attached to, how much you’re paying, and how regularly you’re paying. In most cases, you just get the option to cancel, but if multiple plans are available — as with Apple One, for example — you can switch to a different plan as well as cancel.

On the same screen, you’ll also see subscriptions you’ve canceled, up to a year after the subscription has expired, and you can’t manually clear this history. If you select any of these subscriptions, you get the option to renew them again.

There’s also a Renewal Receipts toggle switch on the subscriptions page: enable this to get emailed receipts every time there’s a renewal and another payment gets taken (it can be another useful reminder of what you’re signed up to).

You can get to these subscriptions from macOS, too — everything you’ve signed up for through an Apple App Store, whether on mobile or desktop, is shown together.

Open the Mac App Store and click your profile picture (bottom left).
Choose Account Settings.
Select Manage next to Subscriptions.
Click any subscription to see details.

You get the same options as you do on iOS: you’re able to cancel subscriptions that are active or renew subscriptions that have been canceled in the last year.

Subscriptions using Google’s Pay Store

To use an Android device to find subscriptions to apps and services that you’ve signed up for through your Google account, start by opening the Play Store.

Tap your account picture (top right).
Choose Payments and subscriptions > Subscriptions.
Select any of the subscriptions shown to see more details about it: how much you’re paying, when the next billing date is, and the payment method being used. You can also update your payment method (for example, if you want to use a different credit card).
To cancel a subscription, select it, then choose Cancel subscription.
Tap Resubscribe to sign up again for a subscription you’ve previously canceled.
Choose Remove to remove a canceled subscription from the list.

You can get to the same options on a desktop system by loading up the Play Store on the web in your browser.

Click your account picture (top right).
Choose Payments & subscriptions.
Open the Subscriptions tab to see everything you’re signed up for.
Click Resubscribe to renew a canceled subscription or Manage for anything else.

The options are the same as on mobile: you can see the billing amount, the next billing date, and the payment method being used. Click Cancel subscription to cancel.

Other subscription checks

If you didn’t sign up for any of your digital subscriptions directly through your Apple or Google account, they won’t necessarily all show up on your account. To get a fuller picture of your subscriptions, a bit more detective work may be required.

Checking bank account and credit card balances regularly is a good start — if this isn’t something you already do. Any subscriptions will be billed regularly on the same dates, and it should be clear what they are. Remember that some might be annual rather than monthly, so you really need to look at 12 months’ worth of records to be sure.

Digging into your email inbox can help, too: run a search for “subscription” and see what comes up (you might find a few newsletters you can unsubscribe from, too). If you use secondary email accounts to sign up for subscriptions, in order to avoid getting too many promotional messages, remember to check these, too.

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GM and Hyundai executives announced a new partnership to codevelop vehicles. | Image: Hyundai

Auto tie-ups are nothing new, but they have become more frequent and wide-ranging in the age of clean energy and alternate fuel sources, as companies seek to spread out the cost and risk of adopting expensive new technologies.
The latest alignment is between General Motors and Hyundai, which are joining forces to codevelop new passenger and commercial vehicles, including EVs and hydrogen fuel cells. They will also explore ways to save money on the acquisition of raw battery materials and steel, among other crucial supplies.
The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to “look for ways to leverage their complementary scale and strengths to reduce costs and bring a wider range of vehicles and technologies to customers faster.”
“Look for ways to leverage their complementary scale and strengths”
The key word there is “faster,” as EV sales growth appears to be petering out, leading to a lot of skittishness in the industry. A lack of available affordable models and historically high interest rates are sapping some of the enthusiasm from car buyers. And GM and Hyundai are hoping that their combined mettle can help pick things up again.
The two companies are among the most aggressive on electrification in the North American market. GM has a range of available EVs under its many brands, including the Chevy Silverado, Equinox, Blazer, Cadillac Lyriq, Hummer, and GMC Sierra. Meanwhile, Hyundai and its sister company Kia have quietly emerged as EV powerhouses with their popular Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 6 and Kia EV6 and EV9.
Both are also actively engaged in building out their respective hydrogen businesses. GM jointly owns a fuel cell production factory with Honda, while Hyundai has said that hydrogen will play a “prominent role” in its effort to go carbon neutral.
Where all of this will lead is a little unclear right now. But a relevant example could be the recent collaboration between GM and Honda, in which Honda introduced the electric Prologue SUV built on GM’s Ultium platform — and then that was basically it. The two companies were supposed to release a lineup of affordable EVs but abandoned the plan after determining it would be too difficult.
There’s no mention of “affordable EVs” in GM and Hyundai’s respective announcements — or EVs in particular, aside from a vague reference to “electric [and] hydrogen technologies.” But it’s still early days of this partnership. We’ll have to see where it goes.

GM and Hyundai executives announced a new partnership to codevelop vehicles. | Image: Hyundai

Auto tie-ups are nothing new, but they have become more frequent and wide-ranging in the age of clean energy and alternate fuel sources, as companies seek to spread out the cost and risk of adopting expensive new technologies.

The latest alignment is between General Motors and Hyundai, which are joining forces to codevelop new passenger and commercial vehicles, including EVs and hydrogen fuel cells. They will also explore ways to save money on the acquisition of raw battery materials and steel, among other crucial supplies.

The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to “look for ways to leverage their complementary scale and strengths to reduce costs and bring a wider range of vehicles and technologies to customers faster.”

The key word there is “faster,” as EV sales growth appears to be petering out, leading to a lot of skittishness in the industry. A lack of available affordable models and historically high interest rates are sapping some of the enthusiasm from car buyers. And GM and Hyundai are hoping that their combined mettle can help pick things up again.

The two companies are among the most aggressive on electrification in the North American market. GM has a range of available EVs under its many brands, including the Chevy Silverado, Equinox, Blazer, Cadillac Lyriq, Hummer, and GMC Sierra. Meanwhile, Hyundai and its sister company Kia have quietly emerged as EV powerhouses with their popular Hyundai Ioniq 5 and 6 and Kia EV6 and EV9.

Both are also actively engaged in building out their respective hydrogen businesses. GM jointly owns a fuel cell production factory with Honda, while Hyundai has said that hydrogen will play a “prominent role” in its effort to go carbon neutral.

Where all of this will lead is a little unclear right now. But a relevant example could be the recent collaboration between GM and Honda, in which Honda introduced the electric Prologue SUV built on GM’s Ultium platform — and then that was basically it. The two companies were supposed to release a lineup of affordable EVs but abandoned the plan after determining it would be too difficult.

There’s no mention of “affordable EVs” in GM and Hyundai’s respective announcements — or EVs in particular, aside from a vague reference to “electric [and] hydrogen technologies.” But it’s still early days of this partnership. We’ll have to see where it goes.

Read More 

Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos: Getty Images

Apple revealed its iPhone 16 lineup on Monday, and the big selling point was Apple Intelligence. Apple’s on-device AI system offers splashy features like the ability to rewrite emails, generate custom emoji, and a significantly upgraded Siri. But underneath it all, AI is delivering one other big change to the iPhone: more RAM.
Although Apple never talks about RAM in its smartphones, MacRumors discovered that every iPhone 16 model now has 8GB of RAM, up from 6GB in the base models from last year. And it’s not just Apple making changes like that. Last month, Google made similar changes to its AI-heavy Pixel 9; both the standard and pro models saw an increase in RAM, making 12GB the least you can get this year.

The impetus behind these RAM bumps appears to be artificial intelligence. AI is the year’s new must-have feature, and it’s also incredibly RAM-hungry. Smartphone makers are now bumping memory because they need to — whether they’re saying that out loud or not.
AI models need to be quick to respond when users call on them, and the best way to make that happen is to keep them perpetually loaded in memory. RAM responds far more quickly than a device’s long-term storage; it would be annoying if you had to wait for an AI model to load before you could grab a quick email summary. But AI models are also fairly large. Even a “small” one, like Microsoft’s Phi-3 Mini, takes up 1.8GB of space, and that means taking memory away from other smartphone functions that were previously making use of it.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
The Google Pixel 9 lineup gets 12GB or 16GB of RAM, depending on the model, to handle its AI features.

You can see how this played out very directly on Pixel phones. Last year, Google didn’t enable local AI features on the standard model Pixel 8 due to “hardware limitations.” Spoiler: it was the RAM. Android VP and general manager Seang Chau said in March that the Pixel 8 Pro could better handle Gemini Nano, the company’s small AI model, because that phone had 4GB more RAM, at 12GB, than the Pixel 8. The model needed to stay loaded in memory at all times, and the implication was that the Pixel 8 would have lost too much memory in supporting the feature by default.
“It wasn’t as easy a call to just say, alright, we’re just gonna enable it on the Pixel 8 as well,” Chau said. Google eventually allowed Gemini Nano onto the Pixel 8, but only for people willing to run their phones in Developer Mode — people who Chau said “understand the potential impact to the user experience.”
Those tradeoffs are why Google decided to boost RAM across the board with the Pixel 9. “We don’t want the rest of the phone experiences to slow to accommodate the large model, hence growing the total RAM instead of squeezing into the existing budget,” Google group product manager Stephanie Scott said in an email exchange with The Verge.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Microsoft bumped the Surface Pro 11’s base RAM to 16GB, the minimum for a Copilot Plus PC.

So, is all of that extra RAM going just to AI, or will users see improved performance across the board? It’s going to depend a lot on the implementation and just how large those models are. Google, which added 4GB to support local AI features, says you’ll see improvements to both. “Speaking only to our latest Pixel phones,” Scott wrote, “you can expect both better performance and improved AI experiences from their additional RAM.” She added that Pixel 9 phones “will be able to keep up with future AI advances.” But if those advances mean larger models, that could easily mean they’ll be eating up more RAM.
The same RAM-boosting trend is playing out in the laptop world, too. Microsoft dictated earlier this year that only machines with at least 16GB of memory can be considered a Copilot Plus PC — that is, a laptop capable of running local Windows AI features. It’s rumored that Apple is planning to add more RAM to its next generation of laptops, too, after years of offering 8GB of RAM by default.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
The iPhone 16, now with 8GB of RAM, is Apple Intelligence-ready.

That extra memory will be needed, especially if laptop makers want to keep even larger models loaded locally. “I think most OSes will keep a LLM always-loaded,” Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond told me in an email, “so 6-8GB RAM is the sweet spot that will unlock that in parallel to the other things the OS is already doing.” Chaumond added that models can then load or unload “a small model on top of it to change some properties,” such as a style for image generation or domain-specific knowledge for an LLM. (Apple describes its approach similarly.)
Apple hasn’t explicitly said how much RAM is necessary to run Apple Intelligence. But every Apple device that runs it, going back to the 2020 M1 MacBook Air, has at least 8GB of RAM. Notably, last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, with 8GB of memory, can run Apple Intelligence, while the standard iPhone 15 with 6GB of RAM cannot.

Apple AI boss John Giannandrea said in a June interview with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber that limitations like “bandwidth in the device” and the neural engine’s size would make AI features too slow to be useful on the iPhone 15. Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said during the same appearance that “RAM is one of the pieces of the total.”
The 2GB iPhone 16 RAM bump isn’t ultimately a lot, but Apple has long been slow to expand baseline RAM across its devices. Any increase here feels like a win for usability, even if the company is starting small.
We still don’t know how useful Apple Intelligence will be or whether a slight jump in memory will be enough for today’s iPhones to run tomorrow’s AI features. One thing seems certain, though: we’ll be seeing more of these sorts of hardware bumps as AI proliferates across the industry.

Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos: Getty Images

Apple revealed its iPhone 16 lineup on Monday, and the big selling point was Apple Intelligence. Apple’s on-device AI system offers splashy features like the ability to rewrite emails, generate custom emoji, and a significantly upgraded Siri. But underneath it all, AI is delivering one other big change to the iPhone: more RAM.

Although Apple never talks about RAM in its smartphones, MacRumors discovered that every iPhone 16 model now has 8GB of RAM, up from 6GB in the base models from last year. And it’s not just Apple making changes like that. Last month, Google made similar changes to its AI-heavy Pixel 9; both the standard and pro models saw an increase in RAM, making 12GB the least you can get this year.

The impetus behind these RAM bumps appears to be artificial intelligence. AI is the year’s new must-have feature, and it’s also incredibly RAM-hungry. Smartphone makers are now bumping memory because they need to — whether they’re saying that out loud or not.

AI models need to be quick to respond when users call on them, and the best way to make that happen is to keep them perpetually loaded in memory. RAM responds far more quickly than a device’s long-term storage; it would be annoying if you had to wait for an AI model to load before you could grab a quick email summary. But AI models are also fairly large. Even a “small” one, like Microsoft’s Phi-3 Mini, takes up 1.8GB of space, and that means taking memory away from other smartphone functions that were previously making use of it.

You can see how this played out very directly on Pixel phones. Last year, Google didn’t enable local AI features on the standard model Pixel 8 due to “hardware limitations.” Spoiler: it was the RAM. Android VP and general manager Seang Chau said in March that the Pixel 8 Pro could better handle Gemini Nano, the company’s small AI model, because that phone had 4GB more RAM, at 12GB, than the Pixel 8. The model needed to stay loaded in memory at all times, and the implication was that the Pixel 8 would have lost too much memory in supporting the feature by default.

“It wasn’t as easy a call to just say, alright, we’re just gonna enable it on the Pixel 8 as well,” Chau said. Google eventually allowed Gemini Nano onto the Pixel 8, but only for people willing to run their phones in Developer Mode — people who Chau said “understand the potential impact to the user experience.”

Those tradeoffs are why Google decided to boost RAM across the board with the Pixel 9. “We don’t want the rest of the phone experiences to slow to accommodate the large model, hence growing the total RAM instead of squeezing into the existing budget,” Google group product manager Stephanie Scott said in an email exchange with The Verge.

So, is all of that extra RAM going just to AI, or will users see improved performance across the board? It’s going to depend a lot on the implementation and just how large those models are. Google, which added 4GB to support local AI features, says you’ll see improvements to both. “Speaking only to our latest Pixel phones,” Scott wrote, “you can expect both better performance and improved AI experiences from their additional RAM.” She added that Pixel 9 phones “will be able to keep up with future AI advances.” But if those advances mean larger models, that could easily mean they’ll be eating up more RAM.

The same RAM-boosting trend is playing out in the laptop world, too. Microsoft dictated earlier this year that only machines with at least 16GB of memory can be considered a Copilot Plus PC — that is, a laptop capable of running local Windows AI features. It’s rumored that Apple is planning to add more RAM to its next generation of laptops, too, after years of offering 8GB of RAM by default.

That extra memory will be needed, especially if laptop makers want to keep even larger models loaded locally. “I think most OSes will keep a LLM always-loaded,” Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond told me in an email, “so 6-8GB RAM is the sweet spot that will unlock that in parallel to the other things the OS is already doing.” Chaumond added that models can then load or unload “a small model on top of it to change some properties,” such as a style for image generation or domain-specific knowledge for an LLM. (Apple describes its approach similarly.)

Apple hasn’t explicitly said how much RAM is necessary to run Apple Intelligence. But every Apple device that runs it, going back to the 2020 M1 MacBook Air, has at least 8GB of RAM. Notably, last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, with 8GB of memory, can run Apple Intelligence, while the standard iPhone 15 with 6GB of RAM cannot.

Apple AI boss John Giannandrea said in a June interview with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber that limitations like “bandwidth in the device” and the neural engine’s size would make AI features too slow to be useful on the iPhone 15. Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said during the same appearance that “RAM is one of the pieces of the total.”

The 2GB iPhone 16 RAM bump isn’t ultimately a lot, but Apple has long been slow to expand baseline RAM across its devices. Any increase here feels like a win for usability, even if the company is starting small.

We still don’t know how useful Apple Intelligence will be or whether a slight jump in memory will be enough for today’s iPhones to run tomorrow’s AI features. One thing seems certain, though: we’ll be seeing more of these sorts of hardware bumps as AI proliferates across the industry.

Read More 

Privatey-trained astronaut Jared Isaacman emerges from the capsule. | Screenshot: SpaceX

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts successfully performed a spacewalk, marking the first done by a private company. After depressurizing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the billionaire funding the mission, Jared Isaacman, emerged from the spacecraft early Thursday morning.
With his torso and head fully sticking outside the capsule, Isaacman performed tests on SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which are designed for increased mobility. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said during the spacewalk. “But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”

Watch Dragon’s first spacewalk with the @PolarisProgram’s Polaris Dawn crew https://t.co/svdJRkGN7K— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 12, 2024

After Isaacman returned to the capsule, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis exited the spacecraft to conduct other tests. Neither of them floated freely, and both relied on 12-foot-long umbilical cords to provide them with oxygen.
The two other privately trained Polaris Dawn astronauts, SpaceX engineer Anna Menon and retired US Air Force fighter pilot Scott Poteet, stayed inside the capsule. They remained exposed to the vacuum of space, as the Dragon Capsule doesn’t have an airlock.
In addition to making history with the first commercial spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn crew also reached a higher orbit than any other astronauts since the Apollo missions.

Privatey-trained astronaut Jared Isaacman emerges from the capsule. | Screenshot: SpaceX

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts successfully performed a spacewalk, marking the first done by a private company. After depressurizing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the billionaire funding the mission, Jared Isaacman, emerged from the spacecraft early Thursday morning.

With his torso and head fully sticking outside the capsule, Isaacman performed tests on SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which are designed for increased mobility. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said during the spacewalk. “But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”

After Isaacman returned to the capsule, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis exited the spacecraft to conduct other tests. Neither of them floated freely, and both relied on 12-foot-long umbilical cords to provide them with oxygen.

The two other privately trained Polaris Dawn astronauts, SpaceX engineer Anna Menon and retired US Air Force fighter pilot Scott Poteet, stayed inside the capsule. They remained exposed to the vacuum of space, as the Dragon Capsule doesn’t have an airlock.

In addition to making history with the first commercial spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn crew also reached a higher orbit than any other astronauts since the Apollo missions.

Read More 

The iFixit portable soldering station. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

My first USB-C soldering iron was a revelation. “You mean I can make liquid metal connections anywhere, in seconds, just by plugging this tiny stick into a USB cable?” Now, repair company iFixit is introducing its own take on the idea. It claims the iFixit FixHub Smart Soldering Iron is powerful enough for pros and easier for beginners than any others that have come before.
So far, it’s not a new revelation, but after my first couple of hours, I’m loving iFixit’s improvements on an already great idea.

For starters: the $80 iron comes with a heat-resistant magnetic storage cap so you can safely put it away at a moment’s notice, an LED warning light that tells you if it’s blistering hot, motion sensors to automatically shut it off if you set it down for a while or if it falls from your hand, and a triangular grip to keep it from rolling across a surface. I am not a soldering pro, but so far, these features worked beautifully in my early testing.
You can also turn it off with a dedicated power switch on the handle, instead of having to yank the plug like my old Miniware TS80, and it’s far harder to accidentally yank that plug since it has a locking USB-C cable.

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The power switch and locking USB-C cable.

If you spend money for iFixit’s $250 kit, it’ll come with an iFixit-designed 55 watt-hour battery that helps turn the iron into a portable soldering station. Its two USB-C outputs provide 100W of power, more than enough to hit the melting point of lead-free solder in four seconds, and its beefy metal temperature dial feels great. Attachment points turn the soldering iron’s cap into an infinitely adjustable holster that lets you put the iron away fast.

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

If you’re not using two irons simultaneously, the battery’s ports can also charge your phone, thin laptop, or other USB-C gadgets — I saw around 75 watts of output — and iFixit tells me it has other USB-powered tools of its own currently in development.

Plus, as expected from iFixit, the entire power station is easily repairable.
Just remove the backplate with the included Torx screwdriver (iFixit also includes Phillips screws in the box), pop off the shielded battery connector with a spudger, slide out the innards, and it’s just four more screws to disassemble the rest. iFixit will sell you the battery that goes inside for $80, should you ever need to replace it.
I have minor nitpicks. The purple LED that means “iron is cooling down” was initially a bit hard to distinguish from the blue LED that means “safe to touch.” The magnets on the cap are maybe too strong: my soldering tip sometimes gets pulled toward them instead of going straight into the sheath, and sometimes they make me accidentally drag the entire battery pack an inch across the table when I unsheathe it again.
It’s also a slight shame iFixit didn’t adopt the same interchangeable tips as the popular Pinecil and / or Miniware USB-C soldering irons. Even though they plug in roughly the same way, and my old Miniware TS80 tips are a perfect fit, they’re not cross-compatible.
iFixit will sell its own additional tips for $20 each, which is actually less than I paid for a good TS80 tip. (Unlike normal soldering iron tips, USB-C ones have heater cores and temperature sensors inside.)

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The swappable soldering iron tip.

As much as I’m already enjoying it, I have to wonder how many people would be perfectly happy with a Pinecil. Last year, we introduced you to the $26 open-source soldering iron that’s so inexpensive and easy to use, nearly every nerd might want one in a drawer. It’s harder to say that about an $80–$250 product, particularly when the $80 iFixit version needs to be plugged into a computer to set its temperature, which is cool but not as convenient as its competitors’ built-in screen.
But iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens thinks he can attract a new audience to soldering that would’ve been scared to try it before by eliminating lots of typical pain points. He tells me he wants iFixit to do “everything we can to make sure people want to be able to solder, instead of just being afraid of waving around a hot stick.”
He says he’s “on a new mission to teach the world to solder,” calling solder “the glue of the modern age,” and he says iFixit plans to stock more products to help that happen.

Image: iFixit
iFixit’s $300 Portable Soldering Toolkit.

iFixit is opening preorders today and says it’ll start shipping to the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe on October 15th. While additional soldering tips won’t be available for preorder, they should go on sale that day, including cone, bevel, wedge, point, and knife edge varieties.
Today, iFixit will also sell a $300 Portable Soldering Toolkit that fits the iron and battery station into a custom tool roll filled with a laundry list of other common soldering needs or “nice-to-haves,” including a flush cutter, wire stripper, tip cleaner, and soldering splint.

The iFixit portable soldering station. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

My first USB-C soldering iron was a revelation. “You mean I can make liquid metal connections anywhere, in seconds, just by plugging this tiny stick into a USB cable?” Now, repair company iFixit is introducing its own take on the idea. It claims the iFixit FixHub Smart Soldering Iron is powerful enough for pros and easier for beginners than any others that have come before.

So far, it’s not a new revelation, but after my first couple of hours, I’m loving iFixit’s improvements on an already great idea.

For starters: the $80 iron comes with a heat-resistant magnetic storage cap so you can safely put it away at a moment’s notice, an LED warning light that tells you if it’s blistering hot, motion sensors to automatically shut it off if you set it down for a while or if it falls from your hand, and a triangular grip to keep it from rolling across a surface. I am not a soldering pro, but so far, these features worked beautifully in my early testing.

You can also turn it off with a dedicated power switch on the handle, instead of having to yank the plug like my old Miniware TS80, and it’s far harder to accidentally yank that plug since it has a locking USB-C cable.

If you spend money for iFixit’s $250 kit, it’ll come with an iFixit-designed 55 watt-hour battery that helps turn the iron into a portable soldering station. Its two USB-C outputs provide 100W of power, more than enough to hit the melting point of lead-free solder in four seconds, and its beefy metal temperature dial feels great. Attachment points turn the soldering iron’s cap into an infinitely adjustable holster that lets you put the iron away fast.

If you’re not using two irons simultaneously, the battery’s ports can also charge your phone, thin laptop, or other USB-C gadgets — I saw around 75 watts of output — and iFixit tells me it has other USB-powered tools of its own currently in development.

Plus, as expected from iFixit, the entire power station is easily repairable.

Just remove the backplate with the included Torx screwdriver (iFixit also includes Phillips screws in the box), pop off the shielded battery connector with a spudger, slide out the innards, and it’s just four more screws to disassemble the rest. iFixit will sell you the battery that goes inside for $80, should you ever need to replace it.

I have minor nitpicks. The purple LED that means “iron is cooling down” was initially a bit hard to distinguish from the blue LED that means “safe to touch.” The magnets on the cap are maybe too strong: my soldering tip sometimes gets pulled toward them instead of going straight into the sheath, and sometimes they make me accidentally drag the entire battery pack an inch across the table when I unsheathe it again.

It’s also a slight shame iFixit didn’t adopt the same interchangeable tips as the popular Pinecil and / or Miniware USB-C soldering irons. Even though they plug in roughly the same way, and my old Miniware TS80 tips are a perfect fit, they’re not cross-compatible.

iFixit will sell its own additional tips for $20 each, which is actually less than I paid for a good TS80 tip. (Unlike normal soldering iron tips, USB-C ones have heater cores and temperature sensors inside.)

As much as I’m already enjoying it, I have to wonder how many people would be perfectly happy with a Pinecil. Last year, we introduced you to the $26 open-source soldering iron that’s so inexpensive and easy to use, nearly every nerd might want one in a drawer. It’s harder to say that about an $80–$250 product, particularly when the $80 iFixit version needs to be plugged into a computer to set its temperature, which is cool but not as convenient as its competitors’ built-in screen.

But iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens thinks he can attract a new audience to soldering that would’ve been scared to try it before by eliminating lots of typical pain points. He tells me he wants iFixit to do “everything we can to make sure people want to be able to solder, instead of just being afraid of waving around a hot stick.”

He says he’s “on a new mission to teach the world to solder,” calling solder “the glue of the modern age,” and he says iFixit plans to stock more products to help that happen.

iFixit is opening preorders today and says it’ll start shipping to the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe on October 15th. While additional soldering tips won’t be available for preorder, they should go on sale that day, including cone, bevel, wedge, point, and knife edge varieties.

Today, iFixit will also sell a $300 Portable Soldering Toolkit that fits the iron and battery station into a custom tool roll filled with a laundry list of other common soldering needs or “nice-to-haves,” including a flush cutter, wire stripper, tip cleaner, and soldering splint.

Read More