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Image: Andrew Marino / The Verge

Say this for Sonos: the company is remarkably consistent. It has spent decades building audio products that look and sound great… and are almost always initially hampered by some kind of weird software and usability issue. When Sonos stuff works, there’s nothing like it, but it doesn’t always seem to work.
The Sonos Ace headphones fit perfectly in that lineage. In The Verge’s review, Chris Welch found them to be comfortable, attractive, well-made, great-sounding, and hampered by just a few too many bugs. Even still, the Ace is a strong first effort from Sonos.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Chris joins to tell us all about his experiences with the Ace. He explains how he tests headphones, how these stack up to Bose, Sony, Apple, and others, and what Sonos needs to do to make its headphones something truly special. He also gives us a hint about how his Roam 2 review is going. (Spoiler alert: buttons!)
After that, we chat with Stacy Spikes and Muta’Ali about the new documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash. (Spikes is the co-founder and current CEO of MoviePass, and Muta’Ali directed the documentary.) They tell us about what it’s like to be cut out of your own company and story, how and why MoviePass imploded, the future of the movie theater, and why Spikes thinks MoviePass still has a future.
Finally, we grab Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) all about the smart home. You’ve got lights, you’ve got speakers, what’s next?

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

Sonos Ace review: was it worth it?
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s divisive app redesign
Sonos’ Roam 2 speaker is easier to use and available today for $179
The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy
Sonos says its controversial app redesign took ‘courage’

And on MoviePass:

MoviePass, MovieCrash review: a damning account of corporate greed
MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer
Why MoviePass really failed
Former MoviePass execs are now facing criminal fraud charges
MoviePass is officially coming back
The struggles of MoviePass, the film subscription service

And on the smart home:

Aqara kick-starts its first Matter-over-Thread smart lock with a promise of Home Key support
The new Yale Keypad Touch brings fingerprint unlocking to the August smart lock
Yale launches its first retrofit smart lock — the Yale Approach with Wi-Fi
From Derek Seaman’s Tech Blog: Home Assistant: Setting up the Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor

Image: Andrew Marino / The Verge

Say this for Sonos: the company is remarkably consistent. It has spent decades building audio products that look and sound great… and are almost always initially hampered by some kind of weird software and usability issue. When Sonos stuff works, there’s nothing like it, but it doesn’t always seem to work.

The Sonos Ace headphones fit perfectly in that lineage. In The Verge’s review, Chris Welch found them to be comfortable, attractive, well-made, great-sounding, and hampered by just a few too many bugs. Even still, the Ace is a strong first effort from Sonos.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Chris joins to tell us all about his experiences with the Ace. He explains how he tests headphones, how these stack up to Bose, Sony, Apple, and others, and what Sonos needs to do to make its headphones something truly special. He also gives us a hint about how his Roam 2 review is going. (Spoiler alert: buttons!)

After that, we chat with Stacy Spikes and Muta’Ali about the new documentary MoviePass, MovieCrash. (Spikes is the co-founder and current CEO of MoviePass, and Muta’Ali directed the documentary.) They tell us about what it’s like to be cut out of your own company and story, how and why MoviePass imploded, the future of the movie theater, and why Spikes thinks MoviePass still has a future.

Finally, we grab Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) all about the smart home. You’ve got lights, you’ve got speakers, what’s next?

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

Sonos Ace review: was it worth it?
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s divisive app redesign
Sonos’ Roam 2 speaker is easier to use and available today for $179
The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy
Sonos says its controversial app redesign took ‘courage’

And on MoviePass:

MoviePass, MovieCrash review: a damning account of corporate greed
MoviePass, MovieCrash | Official Trailer
Why MoviePass really failed
Former MoviePass execs are now facing criminal fraud charges
MoviePass is officially coming back
The struggles of MoviePass, the film subscription service

And on the smart home:

Aqara kick-starts its first Matter-over-Thread smart lock with a promise of Home Key support
The new Yale Keypad Touch brings fingerprint unlocking to the August smart lock
Yale launches its first retrofit smart lock — the Yale Approach with Wi-Fi
From Derek Seaman’s Tech Blog: Home Assistant: Setting up the Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor

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Image: Samsung

Samsung has added some additional features to the new OLED G8 gaming monitor it announced back in January, including safeguards against OLED burn-in and AI-powered resolution upscaling for content and games.
Preorders for the display are already available in regions like Australia and Singapore, suggesting that a US launch isn’t far behind. Best Buy lists the 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 (model G80SD) for $1,299.99 — making it a smidge cheaper than the first $1,499.99 OLED gaming monitor Samsung released last year — and Samsung currently has a countdown timer teasing its “new 2024 monitors,” which expires today at 9:59AM ET. We’ve asked Samsung to clarify the release dates for the Odyssey OLED G8 but haven’t yet heard back.
Samsung says the G80SD model is its first AI-powered gaming monitor, featuring the same NQ8 AI Gen3 processor as its recently released 2024 Neo QLED 8K TV. That chip is behind the monitor’s AI-upscaling capabilities, according to Samsung, which enables content and games to be upscaled to almost 4K when run through the monitor’s built-in smart TV apps and Gaming Hub, respectively.

Image: Samsung
The slim metal design is, to my eye, unchanged since it was first announced in January.

Image: Samsung
Here’s the view from the back, showing the monitor’s ports and RGB lighting.

The company has also updated the G80SD’s cooling system to mitigate OLED burn-in, adding a proprietary “pulsating heat pipe” to the monitor, which Samsung says is five times more effective at diffusing heat than the graphite sheet method it was previously using. The monitor also detects and automatically reduces the brightness of static images like taskbars or heads-up displays in games.
The G8’s remaining specifications — such as its flat display, 3840 x 2160 resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, and 16:9 aspect ratio — are otherwise identical to what was already announced ahead of CES 2024. Samsung says the monitor can deliver 250 nits of peak brightness and supports FreeSync Premium Pro to help reduce screen lag and screen tearing.
Resolution upscaling has been available in TVs and streaming devices for some time now, but I’m still curious to see how well it performs built into a gaming-focused monitor. As OLED gaming displays especially keep growing in popularity, the feature could help Samsung’s latest offering stand out against the competition — provided people actually want to use it.

Image: Samsung

Samsung has added some additional features to the new OLED G8 gaming monitor it announced back in January, including safeguards against OLED burn-in and AI-powered resolution upscaling for content and games.

Preorders for the display are already available in regions like Australia and Singapore, suggesting that a US launch isn’t far behind. Best Buy lists the 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 (model G80SD) for $1,299.99 — making it a smidge cheaper than the first $1,499.99 OLED gaming monitor Samsung released last year — and Samsung currently has a countdown timer teasing its “new 2024 monitors,” which expires today at 9:59AM ET. We’ve asked Samsung to clarify the release dates for the Odyssey OLED G8 but haven’t yet heard back.

Samsung says the G80SD model is its first AI-powered gaming monitor, featuring the same NQ8 AI Gen3 processor as its recently released 2024 Neo QLED 8K TV. That chip is behind the monitor’s AI-upscaling capabilities, according to Samsung, which enables content and games to be upscaled to almost 4K when run through the monitor’s built-in smart TV apps and Gaming Hub, respectively.

The company has also updated the G80SD’s cooling system to mitigate OLED burn-in, adding a proprietary “pulsating heat pipe” to the monitor, which Samsung says is five times more effective at diffusing heat than the graphite sheet method it was previously using. The monitor also detects and automatically reduces the brightness of static images like taskbars or heads-up displays in games.

The G8’s remaining specifications — such as its flat display, 3840 x 2160 resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, and 16:9 aspect ratio — are otherwise identical to what was already announced ahead of CES 2024. Samsung says the monitor can deliver 250 nits of peak brightness and supports FreeSync Premium Pro to help reduce screen lag and screen tearing.

Resolution upscaling has been available in TVs and streaming devices for some time now, but I’m still curious to see how well it performs built into a gaming-focused monitor. As OLED gaming displays especially keep growing in popularity, the feature could help Samsung’s latest offering stand out against the competition — provided people actually want to use it.

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The third-gen Apple TV 4K is one of the best streaming devices you can get, even if you’re not an Apple user. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge

From The Acolyte and House of the Dragon to the 2024 Paris Olympics, there’s going to be plenty to stream this summer. Luckily, if you want to upgrade your setup in preparation for the busy entertainment slate, Verizon is currently selling the latest Apple TV 4K for $89.99 ($40 off), which is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen on the 64GB model.

Despite having launched in 2022, the third-gen Apple TV 4K remains an exceptionally snappy streaming device that, unlike most of the competition, doesn’t fully inundate you with ads. It offers a straightforward interface and an impressive feature set, too, with support for HDR10 Plus, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and Wi-Fi 6. It also comes with a Siri Remote that charges via USB-C as well as deeper integration with the Apple ecosystem than anything you’d get from Amazon, Roku, or Google. The latter means you can take advantage of add-on subscriptions like Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness Plus or pair it with a set of AirPods for private listening. You can even use it with your iPhone and Apple’s Continuity Camera feature, which allows you to take FaceTime calls on the big screen.
Overall, Apple’s entry-level 4K streamer is a well-designed, easy-to-use option most people should be happy with. Keep in mind, however, that the 64GB model isn’t as futureproof as the 128GB configuration, which features an ethernet port and support for the newer Thread protocol. That said, you can also rest assured it’s not likely to get supplanted by a new model anytime soon, especially considering we’re not expecting any hardware announcements out of WWDC 2024.

Read our Apple TV 4K (third-gen) review.

Four more ways to save

The Amazfit GTR 4, our favorite fitness tracker, is currently available from Amazon, Best Buy, and Amazfit for $169.99 ($30 off), which is just $10 shy of its all-time low. The platform-agnostic smartwatch offers a lot for the money, including support for Amazon Alexa, 14 days of battery life, multiband GPS, and other features that are rare to find at this price point. Read our review.

8BitDo’s Retro Mechanical Keyboard — which is designed to resemble Nintendo’s original NES controller — has dropped to a new low at Woot. Normally $99.99, you can pick up the “N Edition” with a 90-day warranty for $69.99 ($30 off) through June 29th. The retro-inspired Bluetooth board features a tenkeyless layout and clicky, hot-swappable switches, but the real kicker is the included Super Buttons, which you can program to carry out various macros.

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag2 is on sale at Amazon in black for $20.99 ($9 off), one of its better prices to date. The ultra wideband location tracker is ideal for Samsung Galaxy phone owners, as it works with the Galaxy Find network, letting you keep tabs on your belongings in a similar fashion to Apple’s Find My network. The latest model also offers a beefier IP67 rating, a user-replaceable battery that lasts up to 700 days, and more precise tracking.

Amazon’s ad-supported 32GB Fire HD 10 from 2021 is on sale through June 10th at Woot for $69.99 ($80 off); it’s also available at Amazon for $5 more. It isn’t as snappy or long-lasting as the latest model, but the budget-friendly tablet remains a good entertainment device. Its large 10.1-inch display is relatively sharp compared to many other Amazon Fire tablets, making it a good option for streaming shows and reading books. Read our review.

The third-gen Apple TV 4K is one of the best streaming devices you can get, even if you’re not an Apple user. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge

From The Acolyte and House of the Dragon to the 2024 Paris Olympics, there’s going to be plenty to stream this summer. Luckily, if you want to upgrade your setup in preparation for the busy entertainment slate, Verizon is currently selling the latest Apple TV 4K for $89.99 ($40 off), which is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen on the 64GB model.

Despite having launched in 2022, the third-gen Apple TV 4K remains an exceptionally snappy streaming device that, unlike most of the competition, doesn’t fully inundate you with ads. It offers a straightforward interface and an impressive feature set, too, with support for HDR10 Plus, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and Wi-Fi 6. It also comes with a Siri Remote that charges via USB-C as well as deeper integration with the Apple ecosystem than anything you’d get from Amazon, Roku, or Google. The latter means you can take advantage of add-on subscriptions like Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness Plus or pair it with a set of AirPods for private listening. You can even use it with your iPhone and Apple’s Continuity Camera feature, which allows you to take FaceTime calls on the big screen.

Overall, Apple’s entry-level 4K streamer is a well-designed, easy-to-use option most people should be happy with. Keep in mind, however, that the 64GB model isn’t as futureproof as the 128GB configuration, which features an ethernet port and support for the newer Thread protocol. That said, you can also rest assured it’s not likely to get supplanted by a new model anytime soon, especially considering we’re not expecting any hardware announcements out of WWDC 2024.

Read our Apple TV 4K (third-gen) review.

Four more ways to save

The Amazfit GTR 4, our favorite fitness tracker, is currently available from Amazon, Best Buy, and Amazfit for $169.99 ($30 off), which is just $10 shy of its all-time low. The platform-agnostic smartwatch offers a lot for the money, including support for Amazon Alexa, 14 days of battery life, multiband GPS, and other features that are rare to find at this price point. Read our review.

8BitDo’s Retro Mechanical Keyboard — which is designed to resemble Nintendo’s original NES controller — has dropped to a new low at Woot. Normally $99.99, you can pick up the “N Edition” with a 90-day warranty for $69.99 ($30 off) through June 29th. The retro-inspired Bluetooth board features a tenkeyless layout and clicky, hot-swappable switches, but the real kicker is the included Super Buttons, which you can program to carry out various macros.

Samsung’s Galaxy SmartTag2 is on sale at Amazon in black for $20.99 ($9 off), one of its better prices to date. The ultra wideband location tracker is ideal for Samsung Galaxy phone owners, as it works with the Galaxy Find network, letting you keep tabs on your belongings in a similar fashion to Apple’s Find My network. The latest model also offers a beefier IP67 rating, a user-replaceable battery that lasts up to 700 days, and more precise tracking.

Amazon’s ad-supported 32GB Fire HD 10 from 2021 is on sale through June 10th at Woot for $69.99 ($80 off); it’s also available at Amazon for $5 more. It isn’t as snappy or long-lasting as the latest model, but the budget-friendly tablet remains a good entertainment device. Its large 10.1-inch display is relatively sharp compared to many other Amazon Fire tablets, making it a good option for streaming shows and reading books. Read our review.

Read More 

Image: Aptoide / The Verge

Aptoide, the popular Google Play alternative for Android devices, is launching a third-party iOS app store in the European Union — the first focused entirely on gaming since the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules came into effect.
Aptoide’s iOS game store is being released via a closed launch on Thursday, with access initially restricted to users with invitation-only access codes. Aptoide says it has a waiting list of 20,000 signups and plans to issue between 500 to 1,000 codes per day, with the limited launch enabling the platform to monitor feedback from early adopters.
The Aptoide iOS store will launch with seven games — a fairly standard ensemble of popular activities like Solitaire, Charades, and Mahjong — but the company says the store will eventually “feature content from a variety of developers.” Aptoide claims that “over 100” iOS developers have expressed interest in the platform, and that 30 offerings are currently in the process of being integrated.
Unlike Aptoide’s other app marketplaces, the iOS store will only focus on games for now, with the company planning to add new games to the store every week following its launch. Aptoide CEO Paulo Trezentos told The Verge that the service may be expanded in the future to provide additional content and services.

Images: Aptoide
Here’s what the Aptoide iOS app currently looks like — titles are limited but the company says more are on the way.

Notably, Aptoide is also the first third-party iOS marketplace in Europe to launch with an Apple-approved in-app purchases (IAP) solution, which it will provide to developers via an IAP software development kit.
The company is taking a new approach to offsetting Apple’s 50 euro cents Core Technology Fee (CTF) for every annual installation of the store. Instead of passing that on directly to users in the form of a subscription, the cost will be supported by a fee charged to developers for in-app purchases. “This means that IAP-driven apps will be preferred in Aptoide iOS,” says Trezentos. “Hopefully, one day that CTF is not charged, we’ll be able to serve more developers, as the unit economics changes.”
Other alternative iOS app stores that have launched in the EU have established their own ways around the CTF. Setapp currently absorbs the fee but says it will be included in the Setapp Mobile subscription price in the future. AltStore PAL, meanwhile, covers the fee via a €1.50 (plus tax) annual subscription for installing the app marketplace itself.

Image: Aptoide / The Verge

Aptoide, the popular Google Play alternative for Android devices, is launching a third-party iOS app store in the European Union — the first focused entirely on gaming since the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules came into effect.

Aptoide’s iOS game store is being released via a closed launch on Thursday, with access initially restricted to users with invitation-only access codes. Aptoide says it has a waiting list of 20,000 signups and plans to issue between 500 to 1,000 codes per day, with the limited launch enabling the platform to monitor feedback from early adopters.

The Aptoide iOS store will launch with seven games — a fairly standard ensemble of popular activities like Solitaire, Charades, and Mahjong — but the company says the store will eventually “feature content from a variety of developers.” Aptoide claims that “over 100” iOS developers have expressed interest in the platform, and that 30 offerings are currently in the process of being integrated.

Unlike Aptoide’s other app marketplaces, the iOS store will only focus on games for now, with the company planning to add new games to the store every week following its launch. Aptoide CEO Paulo Trezentos told The Verge that the service may be expanded in the future to provide additional content and services.

Images: Aptoide
Here’s what the Aptoide iOS app currently looks like — titles are limited but the company says more are on the way.

Notably, Aptoide is also the first third-party iOS marketplace in Europe to launch with an Apple-approved in-app purchases (IAP) solution, which it will provide to developers via an IAP software development kit.

The company is taking a new approach to offsetting Apple’s 50 euro cents Core Technology Fee (CTF) for every annual installation of the store. Instead of passing that on directly to users in the form of a subscription, the cost will be supported by a fee charged to developers for in-app purchases. “This means that IAP-driven apps will be preferred in Aptoide iOS,” says Trezentos. “Hopefully, one day that CTF is not charged, we’ll be able to serve more developers, as the unit economics changes.”

Other alternative iOS app stores that have launched in the EU have established their own ways around the CTF. Setapp currently absorbs the fee but says it will be included in the Setapp Mobile subscription price in the future. AltStore PAL, meanwhile, covers the fee via a €1.50 (plus tax) annual subscription for installing the app marketplace itself.

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

As the AI craze continues, even the microcomputer company Raspberry Pi plans to sell an AI chip. It’s integrated with Raspberry Pi’s camera software and can run AI-based applications like chatbots natively on the tiny computer.
Raspberry Pi partnered with chipmaker Hailo for its AI Kit, which is an add-on for its Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer that will run Hailo’s Hailo-8L M.2 accelerator. The kits will be available “soon from the worldwide network of Raspberry Pi-approved resellers” for $70.
Hailo CEO and co-founder Orr Danon tells The Verge that its accelerator’s “power consumption is below 2W and is passively cooled.” The accelerator offers 13 tera operations per second (TOPS), which is lower than chips planned for AI laptops like Intel’s 40 TOPS Lunar Lake processors.
Most AI applications run on the cloud because they often require massive amounts of energy and computing power to work. However, there has been a move to make smaller AI models and processors that require less power to bring AI to portable devices. That way, laptops and phones can run coding assistants or AI-powered photo editing applications without needing to do an API call.
AI on PCs and other portable devices is the big trend right now as many hardware makers seek to cash in on the AI demand. Microsoft revealed its laptop partners will release Copilot Plus PCs, which have built-in AI features like the controversial Recall. AMD announced new AI-branded Ryzen processors to point out that its flagship chips can now run generative AI workloads. Nvidia, which makes the much sought-after H100 GPUs that train large language models like GPT-4o, will also ship AI chips inside laptops.

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

As the AI craze continues, even the microcomputer company Raspberry Pi plans to sell an AI chip. It’s integrated with Raspberry Pi’s camera software and can run AI-based applications like chatbots natively on the tiny computer.

Raspberry Pi partnered with chipmaker Hailo for its AI Kit, which is an add-on for its Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer that will run Hailo’s Hailo-8L M.2 accelerator. The kits will be available “soon from the worldwide network of Raspberry Pi-approved resellers” for $70.

Hailo CEO and co-founder Orr Danon tells The Verge that its accelerator’s “power consumption is below 2W and is passively cooled.” The accelerator offers 13 tera operations per second (TOPS), which is lower than chips planned for AI laptops like Intel’s 40 TOPS Lunar Lake processors.

Most AI applications run on the cloud because they often require massive amounts of energy and computing power to work. However, there has been a move to make smaller AI models and processors that require less power to bring AI to portable devices. That way, laptops and phones can run coding assistants or AI-powered photo editing applications without needing to do an API call.

AI on PCs and other portable devices is the big trend right now as many hardware makers seek to cash in on the AI demand. Microsoft revealed its laptop partners will release Copilot Plus PCs, which have built-in AI features like the controversial Recall. AMD announced new AI-branded Ryzen processors to point out that its flagship chips can now run generative AI workloads. Nvidia, which makes the much sought-after H100 GPUs that train large language models like GPT-4o, will also ship AI chips inside laptops.

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This is not the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, but rather a Fallout edition of the original. (I used generative expand around the edge because the image was cropping poorly.) | Image: MSI

Just three months after releasing its first gaming handheld PC to damning reviews — here’s mine — MSI is already announcing a likely replacement. The “MSI Claw 8 AI Plus” swaps its lackluster Intel Meteor Lake chip for the brand-new Lunar Lake ones, while replacing its 7-inch, 1080p 120Hz variable resolution rate screen for a larger 8-inch one.
Perhaps even more importantly, it will boast up to an 80 watt-hour battery, MSI tells The Verge — tying it with the recently announced Asus ROG Ally X for biggest battery in a PC gaming handheld. Despite the larger screen, it’ll still offer a smooth 120Hz refresh rate with VRR, writes MSI marketing specialist Anne Lee.
The Claw will also offer a second USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 capabilities, just like the Asus, will come with a wall-mounted charger instead of the two-cord brick of the original, and will have enhanced “tactile feel of the LB/RB buttons.”
MSI didn’t provide any other details or a single image of the new handheld, only telling us that the company would release more info at Computex — the PC show that’s currently underway in Taipei, Taiwan. But we know as of today that Intel’s Lunar Lake has up to 50 percent more GPU performance than Meteor Lake and its Xe2 GPU needs less power for the same performance — though Intel doesn’t label its chart axes, so we have no clue how much.

Image: Intel
“Meteor Lake H” is the chip that was in the original MSI Claw.

MSI did announce another version of the Claw today: a limited-edition Fallout version that looks a tad like the game’s Pip-Boy wrist computers, but is unfortunately based on the original 7-inch MSI Claw with Meteor Lake, not Lunar Lake. So unless there’s a lot of utterly diehard Fallout + Claw fans, I expect that one will be similarly dead on arrival. Still, MSI’s press release says it will have “the largest battery in the industry,” so maybe it’ll have a surprise or two inside?
In case you’re wondering, yes, I have been retesting the original MSI Claw with the newest BIOS and sets of drivers, and I’m not yet finding enough of a performance boost to change my recommendation at all.

This is not the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus, but rather a Fallout edition of the original. (I used generative expand around the edge because the image was cropping poorly.) | Image: MSI

Just three months after releasing its first gaming handheld PC to damning reviews — here’s mine — MSI is already announcing a likely replacement. The “MSI Claw 8 AI Plus” swaps its lackluster Intel Meteor Lake chip for the brand-new Lunar Lake ones, while replacing its 7-inch, 1080p 120Hz variable resolution rate screen for a larger 8-inch one.

Perhaps even more importantly, it will boast up to an 80 watt-hour battery, MSI tells The Verge — tying it with the recently announced Asus ROG Ally X for biggest battery in a PC gaming handheld. Despite the larger screen, it’ll still offer a smooth 120Hz refresh rate with VRR, writes MSI marketing specialist Anne Lee.

The Claw will also offer a second USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 capabilities, just like the Asus, will come with a wall-mounted charger instead of the two-cord brick of the original, and will have enhanced “tactile feel of the LB/RB buttons.”

MSI didn’t provide any other details or a single image of the new handheld, only telling us that the company would release more info at Computex — the PC show that’s currently underway in Taipei, Taiwan. But we know as of today that Intel’s Lunar Lake has up to 50 percent more GPU performance than Meteor Lake and its Xe2 GPU needs less power for the same performance — though Intel doesn’t label its chart axes, so we have no clue how much.

Image: Intel
“Meteor Lake H” is the chip that was in the original MSI Claw.

MSI did announce another version of the Claw today: a limited-edition Fallout version that looks a tad like the game’s Pip-Boy wrist computers, but is unfortunately based on the original 7-inch MSI Claw with Meteor Lake, not Lunar Lake. So unless there’s a lot of utterly diehard Fallout + Claw fans, I expect that one will be similarly dead on arrival. Still, MSI’s press release says it will have “the largest battery in the industry,” so maybe it’ll have a surprise or two inside?

In case you’re wondering, yes, I have been retesting the original MSI Claw with the newest BIOS and sets of drivers, and I’m not yet finding enough of a performance boost to change my recommendation at all.

Read More 

Intel’s Lunar Lake held aloft by Intel client chip boss Michelle Johnston Holthaus. | Image: Intel

Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, dubbed Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel didn’t settle down after that: today it’s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall, will overhaul the formula yet again.
Facing the existential threat of Arm and the opportunity of AI PCs, Intel has apparently ditched its famous tick-tock cadence for a whole new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clockspeed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.
“It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen it before,” claims Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock, who says Intel tweaked every part of the chip to make it happen. He says it’ll “definitely” beat Qualcomm, too.

Image: Intel
Here’s an early glimpse at a real Lunar Lake chip, where you can clearly see its two chunks of onboard memory below the main silicon.

The biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won’t have separate memory sticks or chips! Lunar Lake now bakes 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory into the package itself, with no ability to connect more RAM. It’s a change that reduces the power consumption of moving data through the system by approximately 40 percent, according to Intel. For those who need more memory, Hallock says a separate Arrow Lake architecture is coming to laptops later this year.
After hours of poring through slide decks and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here’s everything else I just learned.
8 cores, no hyperthreading
Last year’s Meteor Lake contained a wild new “3D performance hybrid architecture” with loads of Performance (P), Efficiency (E), and even a pair of brand-new Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores on a separate tile dubbed the “low power island.”
That island was built like a smartphone, a first for Intel, with its own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controllers, memory, and those low-power CPU cores. The idea: you could theoretically save battery life by never heating up other tiles and bigger cores unless you’re doing bigger tasks.

But it didn’t work. Apps like Microsoft Teams wound up warming the entire chip. So Intel is axing the LP-E cores after only one year — in favor of a new 4 by 4 system. You get up to four new “Lion Cove” P-cores and four new “Skymont” E-Cores in a Lunar Lake chip. Those E-cores now run as fast as an LP-E core at one-third the power, or scale to 2x or 4x the performance (single-threaded vs. multi-threaded).

And with a new thread director, Windows can now create “containment zones” that actually keep “most real workloads” on the Skymont E-cores, Microsoft and Intel claim.

Image: Intel
The LP-E cores “did not constrain all the workloads we had hoped or wanted the island to handle, so we were not getting the full entitlement of battery life and efficiency we had hoped for,” says Hallock.

“This is key to Lunar Lake battery life: we can run more workloads in a lower power environment on a lower power core with fewer things turned on, and still give you a great user experience,” says Intel fellow Stephen Robinson.
Microsoft Teams uses 35 percent less power on Lunar Lake thanks to those changes, Intel claims — though Intel says it can’t yet translate that to hours for me.
Similarly, Intel has finally axed Hyper-Threading because the SMT technology eats more power and real estate than it’s worth. “Adding more cores is slightly more die area” than the doubled portions of circuitry needed to make HT work, Hallock admits, but he says the E-cores are so compact and capable now that HT simply no longer makes sense.
More performance everywhere
Speaking of capable E-cores, Intel’s Skymont has another surprise: this year’s E-core is more powerful and efficient than last year’s P-core at typical laptop clockspeeds — with up to 20 percent more single-threaded performance. It just can’t scale up to nearly as many gigahertz:

Image: Intel
“Raptor Cove for peak performance, Skymont for more performance ISO power or ISO performance at lower power,” says Intel.

Image: Intel
Here we are zoomed into the blue box on the companion graph. Label your axes, Intel!

The four “Lion Cove” P-cores, meanwhile, offer a 14 percent performance increase clock for clock, though Intel wouldn’t provide clockspeed numbers so we can truly compare. But overall, says Hallock, performance is “generationally very significantly up” compared to last year.

Image: Intel
Intel’s new P-cores also have more performance at lower power.

In the GPU realm, Intel is even more sure of itself: the company says its Xe2 GPU offers 1.5x the graphics performance of Meteor Lake (in 3DMark Time Spy) which itself was 2x the performance of the previous generation. It’s still got the same number of Xe cores and other functional units, but with a variety of performance and efficiency improvements.

And while assuredly not all Lunar Lake chips will be equal, Intel says it didn’t have to split its Xe laptop GPU into two different flavors for lower and higher wattage: Xe2 can now scale across the spectrum of light and medium-weight laptops all by itself. Intel also says the GPU offers 67 TOPS of AI performance, in addition to the NPU.

Image: Intel
Xe2 replaces both Meteor Lake H and Meteor Lake U GPUs.

A tripled NPU
Meteor Lake didn’t truly kick off the AI laptop generation the way that Intel hoped. In fact, you could argue it left early adopters in the cold — with just 11.5 TOPS worth of AI acceleration, their NPU falls far shy of Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement for Copilot Plus PCs.
But Lunar Lake triples the amount of NPU hardware on the die, doubles the memory bandwidth, and boosts the clockspeed from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz —offering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2x to 4x performance overall.

Image: Intel
Tripled AI hardware.

The tripled hardware does draw a little more power, but Intel says it’s substantially faster: just 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Stable Diffusion for Lunar Lake vs. 20.9 seconds for Meteor Lake, while pulling 11.2 watts instead of 9 watts previously.
Intel says its software partners are currently building 350 AI features for PCs due through 2025.
Everything else that caught my eye or ear

Lunar Lake now natively supports H.266 VVC video for an additional 10 percent filesize reduction over AV1 “at the same quality”.
You get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 baked into the chip — though it still requires a companion PCIe module for the physical radios and antenna connectors.
Intel claims it takes 55 percent less time to wake up wireless when waking up the machine.

eDP 1.5 with “panel replay” and other techniques can save up to (emphasis on “up to”) 351mW of power by not repeatedly drawing the same images on screen.
There’s a new dedicated Partner Security Engine on the chip that’s “effectively Microsoft Pluton,” Intel says, with its own processor, fuse, and crypto portion.
Lunar Lake’s onboard memory means motherboards can and will shrink — “there are some interesting design win decisions coming,” says Hallock.
Lunar Lake’s Compute Tile is indeed built on TSMC’s N3B processor, with the platform controller on TSMC’s N6, though Intel says it does all the design, assembly, and packaging.
Intel says it can dynamically adjust the speed of the RAM to reduce Wi-Fi interference.
Intel says it can dynamically adjust clockspeed in 16.67MHz intervals (down from 100MHz) to optimize performance.
Every Lunar Lake system gets two Thunderbolt 4 ports — “You are guaranteed a minimum of two Thunderbolt 4 ports on every Lunar Lake system that you touch,” says Hallock.
Intel, like Qualcomm, will sell a Mac Mini-like AI PC development kit later this year — one that Intel says will be upgradable to Panther Lake chips when they’re available.

Image: Intel
The Intel AI PC Development Kit, with 32GB of RAM, two USB-C, two USB-A, and HDMI.

Intel says a big wave of Lunar Lake laptops will arrive later this year, with 80 different designs across 20 hardware partners at launch, including all the biggest PC vendors — though not Microsoft, which chose to go with Qualcomm’s chips for its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro instead. Intel’s client chip boss Michelle Johnston Holthaus says all 80 designs should be available ahead of the holidays this year.

Intel’s Lunar Lake held aloft by Intel client chip boss Michelle Johnston Holthaus. | Image: Intel

Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, dubbed Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel didn’t settle down after that: today it’s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall, will overhaul the formula yet again.

Facing the existential threat of Arm and the opportunity of AI PCs, Intel has apparently ditched its famous tick-tock cadence for a whole new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clockspeed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.

“It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen it before,” claims Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock, who says Intel tweaked every part of the chip to make it happen. He says it’ll “definitely” beat Qualcomm, too.

Image: Intel
Here’s an early glimpse at a real Lunar Lake chip, where you can clearly see its two chunks of onboard memory below the main silicon.

The biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won’t have separate memory sticks or chips! Lunar Lake now bakes 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory into the package itself, with no ability to connect more RAM. It’s a change that reduces the power consumption of moving data through the system by approximately 40 percent, according to Intel. For those who need more memory, Hallock says a separate Arrow Lake architecture is coming to laptops later this year.

After hours of poring through slide decks and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here’s everything else I just learned.

8 cores, no hyperthreading

Last year’s Meteor Lake contained a wild new “3D performance hybrid architecture” with loads of Performance (P), Efficiency (E), and even a pair of brand-new Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores on a separate tile dubbed the “low power island.”

That island was built like a smartphone, a first for Intel, with its own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controllers, memory, and those low-power CPU cores. The idea: you could theoretically save battery life by never heating up other tiles and bigger cores unless you’re doing bigger tasks.

But it didn’t work. Apps like Microsoft Teams wound up warming the entire chip. So Intel is axing the LP-E cores after only one year — in favor of a new 4 by 4 system. You get up to four new “Lion Cove” P-cores and four new “Skymont” E-Cores in a Lunar Lake chip. Those E-cores now run as fast as an LP-E core at one-third the power, or scale to 2x or 4x the performance (single-threaded vs. multi-threaded).

And with a new thread director, Windows can now create “containment zones” that actually keep “most real workloads” on the Skymont E-cores, Microsoft and Intel claim.

Image: Intel
The LP-E cores “did not constrain all the workloads we had hoped or wanted the island to handle, so we were not getting the full entitlement of battery life and efficiency we had hoped for,” says Hallock.

“This is key to Lunar Lake battery life: we can run more workloads in a lower power environment on a lower power core with fewer things turned on, and still give you a great user experience,” says Intel fellow Stephen Robinson.

Microsoft Teams uses 35 percent less power on Lunar Lake thanks to those changes, Intel claims — though Intel says it can’t yet translate that to hours for me.

Similarly, Intel has finally axed Hyper-Threading because the SMT technology eats more power and real estate than it’s worth. “Adding more cores is slightly more die area” than the doubled portions of circuitry needed to make HT work, Hallock admits, but he says the E-cores are so compact and capable now that HT simply no longer makes sense.

More performance everywhere

Speaking of capable E-cores, Intel’s Skymont has another surprise: this year’s E-core is more powerful and efficient than last year’s P-core at typical laptop clockspeeds — with up to 20 percent more single-threaded performance. It just can’t scale up to nearly as many gigahertz:

The four “Lion Cove” P-cores, meanwhile, offer a 14 percent performance increase clock for clock, though Intel wouldn’t provide clockspeed numbers so we can truly compare. But overall, says Hallock, performance is “generationally very significantly up” compared to last year.

Image: Intel
Intel’s new P-cores also have more performance at lower power.

In the GPU realm, Intel is even more sure of itself: the company says its Xe2 GPU offers 1.5x the graphics performance of Meteor Lake (in 3DMark Time Spy) which itself was 2x the performance of the previous generation. It’s still got the same number of Xe cores and other functional units, but with a variety of performance and efficiency improvements.

And while assuredly not all Lunar Lake chips will be equal, Intel says it didn’t have to split its Xe laptop GPU into two different flavors for lower and higher wattage: Xe2 can now scale across the spectrum of light and medium-weight laptops all by itself. Intel also says the GPU offers 67 TOPS of AI performance, in addition to the NPU.

Image: Intel
Xe2 replaces both Meteor Lake H and Meteor Lake U GPUs.

A tripled NPU

Meteor Lake didn’t truly kick off the AI laptop generation the way that Intel hoped. In fact, you could argue it left early adopters in the cold — with just 11.5 TOPS worth of AI acceleration, their NPU falls far shy of Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement for Copilot Plus PCs.

But Lunar Lake triples the amount of NPU hardware on the die, doubles the memory bandwidth, and boosts the clockspeed from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz —offering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2x to 4x performance overall.

Image: Intel
Tripled AI hardware.

The tripled hardware does draw a little more power, but Intel says it’s substantially faster: just 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Stable Diffusion for Lunar Lake vs. 20.9 seconds for Meteor Lake, while pulling 11.2 watts instead of 9 watts previously.

Intel says its software partners are currently building 350 AI features for PCs due through 2025.

Everything else that caught my eye or ear

Lunar Lake now natively supports H.266 VVC video for an additional 10 percent filesize reduction over AV1 “at the same quality”.
You get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 baked into the chip — though it still requires a companion PCIe module for the physical radios and antenna connectors.
Intel claims it takes 55 percent less time to wake up wireless when waking up the machine.

eDP 1.5 with “panel replay” and other techniques can save up to (emphasis on “up to”) 351mW of power by not repeatedly drawing the same images on screen.
There’s a new dedicated Partner Security Engine on the chip that’s “effectively Microsoft Pluton,” Intel says, with its own processor, fuse, and crypto portion.
Lunar Lake’s onboard memory means motherboards can and will shrink — “there are some interesting design win decisions coming,” says Hallock.
Lunar Lake’s Compute Tile is indeed built on TSMC’s N3B processor, with the platform controller on TSMC’s N6, though Intel says it does all the design, assembly, and packaging.
Intel says it can dynamically adjust the speed of the RAM to reduce Wi-Fi interference.
Intel says it can dynamically adjust clockspeed in 16.67MHz intervals (down from 100MHz) to optimize performance.
Every Lunar Lake system gets two Thunderbolt 4 ports — “You are guaranteed a minimum of two Thunderbolt 4 ports on every Lunar Lake system that you touch,” says Hallock.
Intel, like Qualcomm, will sell a Mac Mini-like AI PC development kit later this year — one that Intel says will be upgradable to Panther Lake chips when they’re available.

Image: Intel
The Intel AI PC Development Kit, with 32GB of RAM, two USB-C, two USB-A, and HDMI.

Intel says a big wave of Lunar Lake laptops will arrive later this year, with 80 different designs across 20 hardware partners at launch, including all the biggest PC vendors — though not Microsoft, which chose to go with Qualcomm’s chips for its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro instead. Intel’s client chip boss Michelle Johnston Holthaus says all 80 designs should be available ahead of the holidays this year.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

On Monday, Microsoft announced layoffs reportedly affecting around 1,000 employees. As reported previously by CNBC, the mixed reality department working on HoloLens 2 is one of the areas affected. Separately, Business Insider reported that Azure for Operators and Mission Engineering has also seen cuts of “hundreds” of employees.
This round of layoffs comes more than a year after Microsoft laid off more than 10,000 people, and CEO Satya Nadella said the company was changing its hardware portfolio. Since then, Microsoft has closed its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, invested heavily in AI, and recently begun a push for “AI PCs” with a new round of Surface devices powered by Qualcomm chips.

In a statement to CNBC, Microsoft said, “We remain fully committed to the Department of Defense’s IVAS program and will continue to deliver cutting edge technology to support our soldiers,” and that it will continue to sell HoloLens 2.
Microsoft formed the Azure for Operators and Mission Engineering department in 2021 to encompass “moonshots,” like the Azure Space unit seeking to work with companies like SpaceX and roll out a portable data center in a box. Other teams in the group work on projects like support for telecoms and work on quantum computing.

Image: The Verge

On Monday, Microsoft announced layoffs reportedly affecting around 1,000 employees. As reported previously by CNBC, the mixed reality department working on HoloLens 2 is one of the areas affected. Separately, Business Insider reported that Azure for Operators and Mission Engineering has also seen cuts of “hundreds” of employees.

This round of layoffs comes more than a year after Microsoft laid off more than 10,000 people, and CEO Satya Nadella said the company was changing its hardware portfolio. Since then, Microsoft has closed its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, invested heavily in AI, and recently begun a push for “AI PCs” with a new round of Surface devices powered by Qualcomm chips.

In a statement to CNBC, Microsoft said, “We remain fully committed to the Department of Defense’s IVAS program and will continue to deliver cutting edge technology to support our soldiers,” and that it will continue to sell HoloLens 2.

Microsoft formed the Azure for Operators and Mission Engineering department in 2021 to encompass “moonshots,” like the Azure Space unit seeking to work with companies like SpaceX and roll out a portable data center in a box. Other teams in the group work on projects like support for telecoms and work on quantum computing.

Read More 

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A Ticketmaster data breach that allegedly includes details for 560 million accounts and another one affecting Santander have been linked to their accounts at Snowflake, a cloud storage provider. However, Snowflake says there’s no evidence its platform is at fault.
A joint statement to that effect made last night with CrowdStrike and Mandiant, two third-party security companies investigating the incident, lends additional credibility to the claim. Also, an earlier third-party report saying bad actors generated session tokens and may have compromised “hundreds” of Snowflake accounts has now been removed. Hudson Rock, the security firm behind that report, posted a statement of its own today on LinkedIn: “In accordance to a letter we received from Snowflake’s legal counsel, we have decided to take down all content related to our report.”
A post from Snowflake says, “To date, we do not believe this activity is caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or malicious activity within the Snowflake product. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation, we have promptly informed the limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted.”
The joint statement says the attacks appear to be a “targeted campaign” focused on accounts without multifactor authentication. Snowflake has also released instructions for customers to review their accounts for unusual activity and ways to set up account and network policies to prevent similar attacks.
Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and Mandiant:

We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by a vulnerability, misconfiguration, or breach of Snowflake’s platform;
We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by compromised credentials of current or former Snowflake personnel;
This appears to be a targeted campaign directed at users with single-factor authentication;
As part of this campaign, threat actors have leveraged credentials previously purchased or obtained through infostealing malware; and
We did find evidence that a threat actor obtained personal credentials to and accessed demo accounts belonging to a former Snowflake employee. It did not contain sensitive data. Demo accounts are not connected to Snowflake’s production or corporate systems. The access was possible because the demo account was not behind Okta or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), unlike Snowflake’s corporate and production systems.

Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, which waited 11 days to confirm the data breach in a note to investors late Friday evening, has not provided any additional details about what information has been compromised or responded to inquiries.

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A Ticketmaster data breach that allegedly includes details for 560 million accounts and another one affecting Santander have been linked to their accounts at Snowflake, a cloud storage provider. However, Snowflake says there’s no evidence its platform is at fault.

A joint statement to that effect made last night with CrowdStrike and Mandiant, two third-party security companies investigating the incident, lends additional credibility to the claim. Also, an earlier third-party report saying bad actors generated session tokens and may have compromised “hundreds” of Snowflake accounts has now been removed. Hudson Rock, the security firm behind that report, posted a statement of its own today on LinkedIn: “In accordance to a letter we received from Snowflake’s legal counsel, we have decided to take down all content related to our report.”

A post from Snowflake says, “To date, we do not believe this activity is caused by any vulnerability, misconfiguration, or malicious activity within the Snowflake product. Throughout the course of our ongoing investigation, we have promptly informed the limited number of customers who we believe may have been impacted.”

The joint statement says the attacks appear to be a “targeted campaign” focused on accounts without multifactor authentication. Snowflake has also released instructions for customers to review their accounts for unusual activity and ways to set up account and network policies to prevent similar attacks.

Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and Mandiant:

We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by a vulnerability, misconfiguration, or breach of Snowflake’s platform;

We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by compromised credentials of current or former Snowflake personnel;

This appears to be a targeted campaign directed at users with single-factor authentication;

As part of this campaign, threat actors have leveraged credentials previously purchased or obtained through infostealing malware; and

We did find evidence that a threat actor obtained personal credentials to and accessed demo accounts belonging to a former Snowflake employee. It did not contain sensitive data. Demo accounts are not connected to Snowflake’s production or corporate systems. The access was possible because the demo account was not behind Okta or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), unlike Snowflake’s corporate and production systems.

Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, which waited 11 days to confirm the data breach in a note to investors late Friday evening, has not provided any additional details about what information has been compromised or responded to inquiries.

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The leaked lineup for last week’s PlayStation State of Play surfaced shortly after the event was scheduled on YouTube. This has added to concerns over the kind of access Google employees have to videos before they go live, an issue highlighted in recent reports from Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson and 404 Media.
One incident, as noted by Henderson, occurred in 2022 when KSI attempted to give away over $10,000 in Amazon gift cards. However, KSI later realized that all of the gift card codes had been redeemed before the video was posted, sparking an internal investigation at YouTube. The company reportedly started a similar investigation after the trailer for GTA VI leaked, but it’s not clear whether it’s related.
All of this ties into what seems like an ongoing problem at Google. On Monday, 404 Media published reports based on Google’s internal database records, and it found that a Google contractor was behind the 2017 Nintendo leak that offered an early look at Yoshi’s Crafted World.

At the time, a user on Reddit shared an image of the trailer just before its reveal at E3. The image contained an “admin.youtube.com” URL in the address bar, suggesting that an employee accessed the private version of the video.
Google confirmed that an employee accessed the information in a database entry viewed by 404 Media. “Google employee deliberately leaked private Nintendo information,” the entry said. “Former TVC [temporary vendor contractor] download video with admin account, and shared unreleased Nintendo feature with friend.” The entry also reportedly said the incident was “non-intentional.”
In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Matt Bryant says every flag reported by 404 Media “was reviewed and resolved at that time.” However, the company didn’t elaborate on what it does to prevent employees from accessing and leaking content early.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The leaked lineup for last week’s PlayStation State of Play surfaced shortly after the event was scheduled on YouTube. This has added to concerns over the kind of access Google employees have to videos before they go live, an issue highlighted in recent reports from Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson and 404 Media.

One incident, as noted by Henderson, occurred in 2022 when KSI attempted to give away over $10,000 in Amazon gift cards. However, KSI later realized that all of the gift card codes had been redeemed before the video was posted, sparking an internal investigation at YouTube. The company reportedly started a similar investigation after the trailer for GTA VI leaked, but it’s not clear whether it’s related.

All of this ties into what seems like an ongoing problem at Google. On Monday, 404 Media published reports based on Google’s internal database records, and it found that a Google contractor was behind the 2017 Nintendo leak that offered an early look at Yoshi’s Crafted World.

At the time, a user on Reddit shared an image of the trailer just before its reveal at E3. The image contained an “admin.youtube.com” URL in the address bar, suggesting that an employee accessed the private version of the video.

Google confirmed that an employee accessed the information in a database entry viewed by 404 Media. “Google employee deliberately leaked private Nintendo information,” the entry said. “Former TVC [temporary vendor contractor] download video with admin account, and shared unreleased Nintendo feature with friend.” The entry also reportedly said the incident was “non-intentional.”

In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Matt Bryant says every flag reported by 404 Media “was reviewed and resolved at that time.” However, the company didn’t elaborate on what it does to prevent employees from accessing and leaking content early.

Read More