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Tim Stevens

My favorite feature of the new $420,000, all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre isn’t the cosseting ride quality or the illuminated stars embedded in the headliner of the insanely ornate interior. It isn’t the 577 horsepower or the 266 miles of range. It’s neither the “yes, that’s the spot” massaging seats nor the curbside presence of that upright, chromed front grille. It isn’t even the aerodynamically refined yet classically styled Spirit of Ecstasy statuette perched atop.
My favorite feature of the Spectre is the sound it makes. As an EV, it doesn’t really make any engine sound on its own. It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Rolls-Royce Spectre sound

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.
This heavenly chorus is so subtle, you almost can’t hear it, but with this Roller being as quiet as a tomb, the result is genuinely sublime. And that’s just one aspect of a completely refined experience that’s on a level above any other EV on the road.

A hushed destiny
The Rolls-Royce brand has been applied to top-tier machines since 1904, and it feels like the previous 120 years have been leading up to this moment.
If you’re lucky enough to see an early Rolls-Royce waft by, like a Silver Ghost or a Phantom, you won’t hear much. Despite massive engines in excess of seven liters (50 percent bigger than that of a current Ford Mustang GT), these early ultra-luxury cars featured exhausts designed to minimize drivetrain noise.
With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s first battery-electric EV, the company’s engineers can finally stop overengineering ye olde internal combustion to make it smooth and silent. The Spectre relies on two electric motors that make the combined 577 horsepower mentioned above and 664 pound-feet of torque. This thing weighs a massive 6,371 pounds, more than a Cadillac Escalade, yet it can accelerate to 60mph in just 4.4 seconds.
Yes, it’s fast when it needs to be, but you’ll see better range when driven calmly, up to 266 miles on a charge from its 102kWh battery pack.
Not only is relaxed driving more efficient but it’s also much more rewarding. The Spectre has a generally calm demeanor, like a throttle pedal that requires a deep application to unleash all that power. The brake pedal is equally laid back, as is the slow steering, with just enough feedback to let you know you are turning the wheels and tires.
All four of them, in fact. Rear-wheel steering makes this nearly 18-foot-long ultra-coupe a cinch to navigate through tight parking lots. The 360-degree camera and standard automated parking also help to ensure that you don’t curb one of those 23-inch wheels, something I appreciated during my loan, as replacing any of them would surely have bankrupted me.
On borrowed tech
That 360-degree camera is just some of the tech that Rolls-Royce engineers borrowed from parent company BMW, but I wish they’d stolen a bit more, like BMW’s hands-off driver assist system.
The touchscreen infotainment is also reasonably modern, offering integrated navigation and searching for charging stations. It’ll even do both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, though, curiously, I couldn’t get the latter to work. Perhaps the car considered my last-season Samsung Galaxy S23 too passé? And though the media is played through a 16-speaker bespoke audio system that is powerful yet beautifully subtle, it sadly lacks Dolby Atmos support.
So this highest of high-tech Rolls-Royces doesn’t quite offer all the world’s features, but what you get instead is an astronomically detailed interior, floor mats of the softest lambswool, and a comprehensive set of polished metal controls, all designed with the perfect weight and feel.

Mortgage time
While you can get into a Spectre for $420,000, you’ll never get through the buying process without ticking a few boxes. Given options like the chartreuse paint you see here costs $13,100 on its own, expect to spend a lot more. This car stickered at $560,100 after a $2,750 destination charge.
A worthwhile expenditure? That’s a difficult thing for someone with the budget of a mere mortal to say. The Spectre is hardly a good value, but it is exceptional, made all the more spectacular considering it’s Rolls-Royce’s. But the presence of That Sound does make it all seem worthwhile.
There are more EVs to come, but we’ll have to be patient; an SUV has been promised for 2027, ahead of the brand becoming all-electric in 2030. How well those future EVs look and drive is anyone’s guess at this point, but if they all sound this good, they’ll be off to a very good start.

Tim Stevens

My favorite feature of the new $420,000, all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre isn’t the cosseting ride quality or the illuminated stars embedded in the headliner of the insanely ornate interior. It isn’t the 577 horsepower or the 266 miles of range. It’s neither the “yes, that’s the spot” massaging seats nor the curbside presence of that upright, chromed front grille. It isn’t even the aerodynamically refined yet classically styled Spirit of Ecstasy statuette perched atop.

My favorite feature of the Spectre is the sound it makes. As an EV, it doesn’t really make any engine sound on its own. It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.

This heavenly chorus is so subtle, you almost can’t hear it, but with this Roller being as quiet as a tomb, the result is genuinely sublime. And that’s just one aspect of a completely refined experience that’s on a level above any other EV on the road.

A hushed destiny

The Rolls-Royce brand has been applied to top-tier machines since 1904, and it feels like the previous 120 years have been leading up to this moment.

If you’re lucky enough to see an early Rolls-Royce waft by, like a Silver Ghost or a Phantom, you won’t hear much. Despite massive engines in excess of seven liters (50 percent bigger than that of a current Ford Mustang GT), these early ultra-luxury cars featured exhausts designed to minimize drivetrain noise.

With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s first battery-electric EV, the company’s engineers can finally stop overengineering ye olde internal combustion to make it smooth and silent. The Spectre relies on two electric motors that make the combined 577 horsepower mentioned above and 664 pound-feet of torque. This thing weighs a massive 6,371 pounds, more than a Cadillac Escalade, yet it can accelerate to 60mph in just 4.4 seconds.

Yes, it’s fast when it needs to be, but you’ll see better range when driven calmly, up to 266 miles on a charge from its 102kWh battery pack.

Not only is relaxed driving more efficient but it’s also much more rewarding. The Spectre has a generally calm demeanor, like a throttle pedal that requires a deep application to unleash all that power. The brake pedal is equally laid back, as is the slow steering, with just enough feedback to let you know you are turning the wheels and tires.

All four of them, in fact. Rear-wheel steering makes this nearly 18-foot-long ultra-coupe a cinch to navigate through tight parking lots. The 360-degree camera and standard automated parking also help to ensure that you don’t curb one of those 23-inch wheels, something I appreciated during my loan, as replacing any of them would surely have bankrupted me.

On borrowed tech

That 360-degree camera is just some of the tech that Rolls-Royce engineers borrowed from parent company BMW, but I wish they’d stolen a bit more, like BMW’s hands-off driver assist system.

The touchscreen infotainment is also reasonably modern, offering integrated navigation and searching for charging stations. It’ll even do both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, though, curiously, I couldn’t get the latter to work. Perhaps the car considered my last-season Samsung Galaxy S23 too passé? And though the media is played through a 16-speaker bespoke audio system that is powerful yet beautifully subtle, it sadly lacks Dolby Atmos support.

So this highest of high-tech Rolls-Royces doesn’t quite offer all the world’s features, but what you get instead is an astronomically detailed interior, floor mats of the softest lambswool, and a comprehensive set of polished metal controls, all designed with the perfect weight and feel.

Mortgage time

While you can get into a Spectre for $420,000, you’ll never get through the buying process without ticking a few boxes. Given options like the chartreuse paint you see here costs $13,100 on its own, expect to spend a lot more. This car stickered at $560,100 after a $2,750 destination charge.

A worthwhile expenditure? That’s a difficult thing for someone with the budget of a mere mortal to say. The Spectre is hardly a good value, but it is exceptional, made all the more spectacular considering it’s Rolls-Royce’s. But the presence of That Sound does make it all seem worthwhile.

There are more EVs to come, but we’ll have to be patient; an SUV has been promised for 2027, ahead of the brand becoming all-electric in 2030. How well those future EVs look and drive is anyone’s guess at this point, but if they all sound this good, they’ll be off to a very good start.

Read More 

Screenshot: YouTube

With all the noise from the lead-up to the 2024 US Presidential election next week, you’d be forgiven for having missed some of the trailers that came out over the last few days. Not to worry; I’ve got you covered for some of the best ones.
This week’s trailers included a teaser for Netflix’s second season of Squid Game, a new haunted house horror film from Steven Soderbergh, and a look at Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Daniel Craig showed up in a trailer for a new A24 movie called Queer.
Squid Game season 2

Squid Game is finally returning for its second season soon, and in a new teaser, Lee Jung-jae’s Gi-hun looks like he’s preparing to stage an uprising. Whatever happens, it looks like the season will be a bloody, violent return for the dystopian competition on December 26th.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

I’m very excited that Jude Law’s Star Wars debut, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, is essentially a swashbuckling pirate adventure. The vibes it’s throwing off feel like a nice blend of The Goonies and Star Trek: Prodigy, and I’m certainly ready. The series debuts December 3rd on Disney Plus.
Presence

The moody trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house horror film Presence doesn’t show the supernatural figure that’s terrorizing Lucy Liu and her suburban family. That’s because it all takes place from the perspective of the ghost itself, which I didn’t realize until I read Variety’s write-up of this trailer. It’s already an eerie preview, but knowing that made it much more so on my second viewing. The movie hits theaters on January 24th.
Queer

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on William Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, an American expat who lives in 1950s Mexico City and falls for a younger man named Eugene (Drew Starkey). Having already gotten showings at the Venice Film Festival, some reviews have praised it for Daniel Craig’s performance and Guadagnino’s “trippy” direction. Queer releases on November 27th.
Xenoblade Chronicles X

Nintendo continued to not reveal the successor to the Switch in a batch of announcements this week that included the surprise launch of a new music streaming app that only plays Nintendo songs, the release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as a paid app, and a remaster of Xenoblade Chronicles X, a 2015 Monolith Soft action RPG. The game will be available on March 20th, 2025, for the Nintendo Switch.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership

Mario & Luigi: Brothership got a new trailer this week, backed by a banger of a sea shanty that’s been stuck in my head all day today. The latest game in the Mario & Luigi RPG series puts the brothers on a seafaring adventure that continues to make the Switch an excellent Nintendo console for Mario RPG games. It’s available November 7th.

Screenshot: YouTube

With all the noise from the lead-up to the 2024 US Presidential election next week, you’d be forgiven for having missed some of the trailers that came out over the last few days. Not to worry; I’ve got you covered for some of the best ones.

This week’s trailers included a teaser for Netflix’s second season of Squid Game, a new haunted house horror film from Steven Soderbergh, and a look at Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Daniel Craig showed up in a trailer for a new A24 movie called Queer.

Squid Game season 2

Squid Game is finally returning for its second season soon, and in a new teaser, Lee Jung-jae’s Gi-hun looks like he’s preparing to stage an uprising. Whatever happens, it looks like the season will be a bloody, violent return for the dystopian competition on December 26th.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

I’m very excited that Jude Law’s Star Wars debut, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, is essentially a swashbuckling pirate adventure. The vibes it’s throwing off feel like a nice blend of The Goonies and Star Trek: Prodigy, and I’m certainly ready. The series debuts December 3rd on Disney Plus.

Presence

The moody trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house horror film Presence doesn’t show the supernatural figure that’s terrorizing Lucy Liu and her suburban family. That’s because it all takes place from the perspective of the ghost itself, which I didn’t realize until I read Variety’s write-up of this trailer. It’s already an eerie preview, but knowing that made it much more so on my second viewing. The movie hits theaters on January 24th.

Queer

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on William Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, an American expat who lives in 1950s Mexico City and falls for a younger man named Eugene (Drew Starkey). Having already gotten showings at the Venice Film Festival, some reviews have praised it for Daniel Craig’s performance and Guadagnino’s “trippy” direction. Queer releases on November 27th.

Xenoblade Chronicles X

Nintendo continued to not reveal the successor to the Switch in a batch of announcements this week that included the surprise launch of a new music streaming app that only plays Nintendo songs, the release of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as a paid app, and a remaster of Xenoblade Chronicles X, a 2015 Monolith Soft action RPG. The game will be available on March 20th, 2025, for the Nintendo Switch.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership

Mario & Luigi: Brothership got a new trailer this week, backed by a banger of a sea shanty that’s been stuck in my head all day today. The latest game in the Mario & Luigi RPG series puts the brothers on a seafaring adventure that continues to make the Switch an excellent Nintendo console for Mario RPG games. It’s available November 7th.

Read More 

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

People have started receiving their orders of Amazon’s first color e-reader, the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, and many say they’re disappointed to find a yellow, discolored strip at the bottom of the display. Complaints about the $279.99 e-reader’s display have spread online and dragged down its Amazon star rating, and some report customer service reps say a fix is on the way.
A Reddit user posted a thread with images (see below), saying it’s most obvious when the Kindle “is supposed to be evenly lit and colored like a piece of paper.” Many others with the same issue say they’ve exchanged their Colorsoft for a new one or simply returned it. Another said they only noticed it while using the device’s edge lighting.

It’s possible the discoloration will be corrected with a software update, as one person who replied posted a screenshot in which a customer service agent appeared to confirm that Amazon is working on issuing a fix for it. Multiple people said in another thread that the issue didn’t appear until after an initial software update, so there may be something to that. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment.
It’s not immediately clear how widespread the issue is. On Amazon’s website, where the Kindle Colorsoft is sitting at a 2.6-star average rating as of this writing, a large portion of both good and bad reviews point out the discoloration. Some say the yellow bar is hardly noticeable, while others say it’s too distracting to keep.
Our own review unit of the new e-reader falls in the former category — The Verge’s Andrew Liszewski, who is testing the device now, said the discoloration is more obvious in pictures than in real life, and he wouldn’t have noticed if not for others’ complaints. You can see for yourself in the images below.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

People have started receiving their orders of Amazon’s first color e-reader, the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, and many say they’re disappointed to find a yellow, discolored strip at the bottom of the display. Complaints about the $279.99 e-reader’s display have spread online and dragged down its Amazon star rating, and some report customer service reps say a fix is on the way.

A Reddit user posted a thread with images (see below), saying it’s most obvious when the Kindle “is supposed to be evenly lit and colored like a piece of paper.” Many others with the same issue say they’ve exchanged their Colorsoft for a new one or simply returned it. Another said they only noticed it while using the device’s edge lighting.

It’s possible the discoloration will be corrected with a software update, as one person who replied posted a screenshot in which a customer service agent appeared to confirm that Amazon is working on issuing a fix for it. Multiple people said in another thread that the issue didn’t appear until after an initial software update, so there may be something to that. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment.

It’s not immediately clear how widespread the issue is. On Amazon’s website, where the Kindle Colorsoft is sitting at a 2.6-star average rating as of this writing, a large portion of both good and bad reviews point out the discoloration. Some say the yellow bar is hardly noticeable, while others say it’s too distracting to keep.

Our own review unit of the new e-reader falls in the former category — The Verge’s Andrew Liszewski, who is testing the device now, said the discoloration is more obvious in pictures than in real life, and he wouldn’t have noticed if not for others’ complaints. You can see for yourself in the images below.

Read More 

Let’s face it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better location tracker if you’re tapped into the Apple ecosystem. | Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, meaning airports everywhere are about to get slammed. Thankfully, if you plan on flying out of town this holiday season, Apple’s AirTags can help you speed through the baggage claim with some extra piece of mind. A four-pack normally goes for $99, but right now, you can buy them for just under $74 at Walmart and Best Buy — a mere $1 shy of their best price to date.

If you own an iPhone, Apple’s AirTags are the best Bluetooth trackers you can buy. They offer impressively precise tracking thanks to Apple’s ultra wideband chip and their ability to tap into Apple’s vast Find My system, which lets them cover a broader range than Bluetooth alone. You can also share them with up to five people — assuming your phone is running iOS 17 or 18 — allowing everybody to keep tabs on valuables if you’re traveling with a family or group. The water-resistant trackers even have user-replaceable batteries, so you don’t need to get a new one whenever a battery dies. Now, if only Apple outfitted them with a lanyard hole or some way to attach them to your bag…
Read our original AirTag review.

A few more ways to save today

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds FE are down to an all-time low of $59.99 ($40 off) at Amazon for a limited time. The entry-level earbuds offer a number of welcome features for the price, including active noise cancellation, great sound quality, and reliable performance. Granted, you don’t get perks like wireless charging and multipoint Bluetooth connectivity — which isn’t surprising given even the newer Galaxy Buds 3 Pro can’t pair with multiple devices at the same time — but the omissions are somewhat to be expected for a pair of earbuds that cost under $60. Read our review.

OnePlus is throwing in an extra leather or rubber strap when you buy the OnePlus Watch 2 on sale for $219.99 ($80 off) and apply promo code PUMPKIN at checkout. That’s one of the better prices to date on the terrific Android watch, which remains one of the few third-party options running Wear OS 4 and our default pick if you don’t want a watch from Samsung and Google. It supports Google Assistant and offers up to 12 days of battery life in power saving mode, rendering it an impressive option even if it only comes in a single 47mm size and lacks LTE connectivity. Read our review.

Belkin’s BoostCharge Power Bank 20K is on sale at Amazon in pink starting at $27.56 (about $12 off), which marks a new all-time low. (It’s also available at Amazon and direct from Belkin for about $4 more in other shades). The newer power bank is on the slower side and only truly suitable for charging phones — its lone USB-C port tops out at 15 watts and its two USB-A ports 12 watts — but it’s a high-capacity option that won’t hurt your wallet.

Let’s face it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better location tracker if you’re tapped into the Apple ecosystem. | Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, meaning airports everywhere are about to get slammed. Thankfully, if you plan on flying out of town this holiday season, Apple’s AirTags can help you speed through the baggage claim with some extra piece of mind. A four-pack normally goes for $99, but right now, you can buy them for just under $74 at Walmart and Best Buy — a mere $1 shy of their best price to date.

If you own an iPhone, Apple’s AirTags are the best Bluetooth trackers you can buy. They offer impressively precise tracking thanks to Apple’s ultra wideband chip and their ability to tap into Apple’s vast Find My system, which lets them cover a broader range than Bluetooth alone. You can also share them with up to five people — assuming your phone is running iOS 17 or 18 — allowing everybody to keep tabs on valuables if you’re traveling with a family or group. The water-resistant trackers even have user-replaceable batteries, so you don’t need to get a new one whenever a battery dies. Now, if only Apple outfitted them with a lanyard hole or some way to attach them to your bag…

Read our original AirTag review.

A few more ways to save today

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds FE are down to an all-time low of $59.99 ($40 off) at Amazon for a limited time. The entry-level earbuds offer a number of welcome features for the price, including active noise cancellation, great sound quality, and reliable performance. Granted, you don’t get perks like wireless charging and multipoint Bluetooth connectivity — which isn’t surprising given even the newer Galaxy Buds 3 Pro can’t pair with multiple devices at the same time — but the omissions are somewhat to be expected for a pair of earbuds that cost under $60. Read our review.

OnePlus is throwing in an extra leather or rubber strap when you buy the OnePlus Watch 2 on sale for $219.99 ($80 off) and apply promo code PUMPKIN at checkout. That’s one of the better prices to date on the terrific Android watch, which remains one of the few third-party options running Wear OS 4 and our default pick if you don’t want a watch from Samsung and Google. It supports Google Assistant and offers up to 12 days of battery life in power saving mode, rendering it an impressive option even if it only comes in a single 47mm size and lacks LTE connectivity. Read our review.

Belkin’s BoostCharge Power Bank 20K is on sale at Amazon in pink starting at $27.56 (about $12 off), which marks a new all-time low. (It’s also available at Amazon and direct from Belkin for about $4 more in other shades). The newer power bank is on the slower side and only truly suitable for charging phones — its lone USB-C port tops out at 15 watts and its two USB-A ports 12 watts — but it’s a high-capacity option that won’t hurt your wallet.

Read More 

Adult Swim

Juston Gordon-Montgomery sees his new shonen-inspired Adult Swim series as a gateway to the world of wrestling. Juston Gordon-Montgomery grew up during the Attitude Era of pro wrestling — a time when the personalities were humongous, the storylines were wild, and the theater of it all bordered on high camp. Though it has gotten way easier to watch wrestling in the streaming era, the sport’s cultural dominance has waned in the years since it first captured Gordon-Montgomery’s imagination. Especially to non-fans, the idea of getting into wrestling can still feel a bit daunting. But that feeling is part of what inspired Gordon-Montgomery to create Invincible Fight Girl, a new series coming to Adult Swim.
Invincible Fight Girl’s story about a young accountant named Andy (Sydney Mikayla) who dreams of becoming a legendary wrestler is the stuff of shonen classics like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. But the show’s setting — a world where everyone is some sort of masked brawler with unique costumes and signature combat moves — feels like a loving send-up of the pro-wrestling culture that defined the sport throughout the late ’90s. On paper, Invincible Fight Girl’s blend of influences makes its premise sound a little busy, but you can immediately see the vision come together as soon as its characters step into the ring.

When I recently sat down with Gordon-Montgomery to talk about Invincible Fight Girl, he told me that he wanted his love for the Attitude Era of wrestling to shine through “not just in Andy as a character, but the show as a whole.”
“Wrestling felt magical to me as a kid, but the characters and their backstories also felt real,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “I fully believed that the Undertaker really was a dead guy. The Attitude Era felt like it lent itself to the question ‘What would a world be like if it was filled with pro wrestlers,’ because they would all be these very distinct, very clear characters with ideologies that would come through in how they speak and fight.”
From the jump, Gordon-Montgomery knew he wanted to tell a story that both focused on someone chasing their passion and captured the feeling of getting swept up in the thrill of a wrestling match. Naturally, Invincible Fight Girl’s creative team took some cues from real-world wrestling. Because the show is all about a scrappy fighter training to be the best in a world full of magical people, though, anime series like Pokémon and Naruto were an obvious go-to source of inspiration.
If those shows could spin entire worlds out of concepts like catching monsters and being a shinobi, Gordon-Montgomery felt he might be able to do something similar with pro wrestling. To really capture the spirit of wrestling, though, Gordon-Montgomery and his team found themselves looking to “one of the most fantastic pieces of media there is”: director Satoshi Nishimura’s 2000 adaptation of Hajime no Ippo.
“I don’t know if a lot of people know about Hajime no Ippo, but it was the north star for us because, in that show, the fighting isn’t just fighting,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “It’s a way to visualize philosophies clashing and illustrate how characters grow and change. So much of wrestling matches is just storytelling and pageantry, and it felt important to make sure that our fights weren’t just people hitting each other and pulling off moves that you recognize.”

Image: Adult Swim
Quesa Poblana giving Andy a hard time.

Early in the series, as Andy’s first striking out on her own, many of her go-to maneuvers are wrestling basics you might recognize from live-action matches because she’s a novice who learned everything she knows from instructional videos. Her skills level up as she meets new allies like elderly wrestling legend Quesa Poblana (Rolonda Watts) and aspiring journalist Mikey (T.K. Weaver). But Andy’s transformation into Invincible Fight Girl takes time, something many networks seem increasingly skittish about giving newer projects.

When Gordon-Montgomery started in animation, he didn’t see Western studios producing a lot of serialized shows in the way he wanted Invincible Fight Girl to be. Protracted narratives that play out over the course of dozens of episodes are a hallmark of the anime Gordon-Montgomery was taking notes from, but he knew that pushing for that kind of story structure would be a challenge.
“Especially because we’re in this era of shorter season orders, there was definitely some concern about, ‘How long are you trying to draw these plot beats and revelations out?’” Gordon-Montgomery told me. “But to the credit of our partners at the network, I think they understood our vision. We were able to really convey that this is how Andy’s story needed to be told in order for audiences to really experience it the way we intended.”
Though Gordon-Montgomery doesn’t want to put a number to how many episodes he envisions Invincible Fight Girl running for just yet, he’s confident that the show’s core concept has legs akin to Pokémon’s.
“Pokémon is kind of at a point where it’s just going to keep going forever, which isn’t quite what we want to do,” Gordon-Montgomery said. “But I think there’s a very, very long runway of different ideas that we’re exploring philosophically with Andy and this world we’ve created. There are a lot of things that haven’t been done in animation here that I see us doing if we get the shot.”
Invincible Fight Girl premieres on Adult Swim on November 2nd.

Adult Swim

Juston Gordon-Montgomery sees his new shonen-inspired Adult Swim series as a gateway to the world of wrestling.

Juston Gordon-Montgomery grew up during the Attitude Era of pro wrestling — a time when the personalities were humongous, the storylines were wild, and the theater of it all bordered on high camp. Though it has gotten way easier to watch wrestling in the streaming era, the sport’s cultural dominance has waned in the years since it first captured Gordon-Montgomery’s imagination. Especially to non-fans, the idea of getting into wrestling can still feel a bit daunting. But that feeling is part of what inspired Gordon-Montgomery to create Invincible Fight Girl, a new series coming to Adult Swim.

Invincible Fight Girl’s story about a young accountant named Andy (Sydney Mikayla) who dreams of becoming a legendary wrestler is the stuff of shonen classics like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. But the show’s setting — a world where everyone is some sort of masked brawler with unique costumes and signature combat moves — feels like a loving send-up of the pro-wrestling culture that defined the sport throughout the late ’90s. On paper, Invincible Fight Girl’s blend of influences makes its premise sound a little busy, but you can immediately see the vision come together as soon as its characters step into the ring.

When I recently sat down with Gordon-Montgomery to talk about Invincible Fight Girl, he told me that he wanted his love for the Attitude Era of wrestling to shine through “not just in Andy as a character, but the show as a whole.”

“Wrestling felt magical to me as a kid, but the characters and their backstories also felt real,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “I fully believed that the Undertaker really was a dead guy. The Attitude Era felt like it lent itself to the question ‘What would a world be like if it was filled with pro wrestlers,’ because they would all be these very distinct, very clear characters with ideologies that would come through in how they speak and fight.”

From the jump, Gordon-Montgomery knew he wanted to tell a story that both focused on someone chasing their passion and captured the feeling of getting swept up in the thrill of a wrestling match. Naturally, Invincible Fight Girl’s creative team took some cues from real-world wrestling. Because the show is all about a scrappy fighter training to be the best in a world full of magical people, though, anime series like Pokémon and Naruto were an obvious go-to source of inspiration.

If those shows could spin entire worlds out of concepts like catching monsters and being a shinobi, Gordon-Montgomery felt he might be able to do something similar with pro wrestling. To really capture the spirit of wrestling, though, Gordon-Montgomery and his team found themselves looking to “one of the most fantastic pieces of media there is”: director Satoshi Nishimura’s 2000 adaptation of Hajime no Ippo.

“I don’t know if a lot of people know about Hajime no Ippo, but it was the north star for us because, in that show, the fighting isn’t just fighting,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “It’s a way to visualize philosophies clashing and illustrate how characters grow and change. So much of wrestling matches is just storytelling and pageantry, and it felt important to make sure that our fights weren’t just people hitting each other and pulling off moves that you recognize.”

Early in the series, as Andy’s first striking out on her own, many of her go-to maneuvers are wrestling basics you might recognize from live-action matches because she’s a novice who learned everything she knows from instructional videos. Her skills level up as she meets new allies like elderly wrestling legend Quesa Poblana (Rolonda Watts) and aspiring journalist Mikey (T.K. Weaver). But Andy’s transformation into Invincible Fight Girl takes time, something many networks seem increasingly skittish about giving newer projects.

When Gordon-Montgomery started in animation, he didn’t see Western studios producing a lot of serialized shows in the way he wanted Invincible Fight Girl to be. Protracted narratives that play out over the course of dozens of episodes are a hallmark of the anime Gordon-Montgomery was taking notes from, but he knew that pushing for that kind of story structure would be a challenge.

“Especially because we’re in this era of shorter season orders, there was definitely some concern about, ‘How long are you trying to draw these plot beats and revelations out?’” Gordon-Montgomery told me. “But to the credit of our partners at the network, I think they understood our vision. We were able to really convey that this is how Andy’s story needed to be told in order for audiences to really experience it the way we intended.”

Though Gordon-Montgomery doesn’t want to put a number to how many episodes he envisions Invincible Fight Girl running for just yet, he’s confident that the show’s core concept has legs akin to Pokémon’s.

“Pokémon is kind of at a point where it’s just going to keep going forever, which isn’t quite what we want to do,” Gordon-Montgomery said. “But I think there’s a very, very long runway of different ideas that we’re exploring philosophically with Andy and this world we’ve created. There are a lot of things that haven’t been done in animation here that I see us doing if we get the shot.”

Invincible Fight Girl premieres on Adult Swim on November 2nd.

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Image: Motion Twin

Some of the most beloved roguelikes are single-player — the likes of Hades, Balatro, and Dead Cells are all solo titles. But Windblown, the new roguelike from Motion Twin, the studio that created Dead Cells, showed me just how cool it can be to play a roguelike with other people.
In Windblown, your character, one of a few adorable animal adventurers like an axolotl or a bat, is shot out of a cannon into a mysterious giant tornado to fight your way through various zones. Like Dead Cells, you can equip up to two main weapons. I typically have one for close-range bouts and another for long-distance attacks. But with every weapon, you’re also able to pull off a combo that uses a special move from the other weapon called an “Alterattack.”
Here’s an example. I love using a crossbow to attack enemies from a distance, and I pair it with a giant heavy blade. I rarely use the blade on its own; instead, I use its Alterattack that cracks open the earth in a straight line to continue to wallop on enemies at range. That turns a run into a steady rhythm of slinging arrows and using the Alterattack at exactly the right time, and with my five hours so far with the game, I haven’t gotten tired of the pattern.
Windblown just launched in early access, and you can already unlock more than a dozen weapons, meaning there are a lot of combinations that I haven’t messed around with. And with four different biomes to get through on a run, there’s a lot to see, too.

Image: Motion Twin
The bosses are no joke.

All of that would be enough to make Windblown part of my regular rotation of roguelikes I use to wind down at the end of a long day. But the game’s multiplayer is making Windblown the game I turn to every time I turn on my Steam Deck.
Windblown’s multiplayer lobbies, which you unlock fairly early on, let you play a full run with a team of three people. You can use voice and text chat to communicate, but it’s not required; I haven’t used those at all, instead relying on four in-game emoji. I also like that you can name your lobbies. I created one titled “help me get 1st win” and immediately had two helpful people join up to help me tackle the tornado. (Sadly, we did not get the win.)

When playing solo, I’ve found that I’m somewhat cautious and strategic as I think about how to use weapons and positioning to take on the game’s aggressive enemies and dodge their attacks. With the help of a team, battles are speedier and become delightful explosions of light, color, sound, and damage. It’s so fun to absolutely annihilate baddies with other people, and it’s comforting to know that they’ve got your back in a pinch.
There are a lot of great roguelikes to play right now; Hades II just got a huge update, Balatro is nearly impossible to put down (especially now that it’s on mobile), and I’ve wanted to get back into Shogun Showdown, which I think everyone is sleeping on. Windblown needed more than just its Motion Twin pedigree to stand out, but so far, the multiplayer is the hook that keeps me coming back.

Image: Motion Twin

Some of the most beloved roguelikes are single-player — the likes of Hades, Balatro, and Dead Cells are all solo titles. But Windblown, the new roguelike from Motion Twin, the studio that created Dead Cells, showed me just how cool it can be to play a roguelike with other people.

In Windblown, your character, one of a few adorable animal adventurers like an axolotl or a bat, is shot out of a cannon into a mysterious giant tornado to fight your way through various zones. Like Dead Cells, you can equip up to two main weapons. I typically have one for close-range bouts and another for long-distance attacks. But with every weapon, you’re also able to pull off a combo that uses a special move from the other weapon called an “Alterattack.”

Here’s an example. I love using a crossbow to attack enemies from a distance, and I pair it with a giant heavy blade. I rarely use the blade on its own; instead, I use its Alterattack that cracks open the earth in a straight line to continue to wallop on enemies at range. That turns a run into a steady rhythm of slinging arrows and using the Alterattack at exactly the right time, and with my five hours so far with the game, I haven’t gotten tired of the pattern.

Windblown just launched in early access, and you can already unlock more than a dozen weapons, meaning there are a lot of combinations that I haven’t messed around with. And with four different biomes to get through on a run, there’s a lot to see, too.

Image: Motion Twin
The bosses are no joke.

All of that would be enough to make Windblown part of my regular rotation of roguelikes I use to wind down at the end of a long day. But the game’s multiplayer is making Windblown the game I turn to every time I turn on my Steam Deck.

Windblown’s multiplayer lobbies, which you unlock fairly early on, let you play a full run with a team of three people. You can use voice and text chat to communicate, but it’s not required; I haven’t used those at all, instead relying on four in-game emoji. I also like that you can name your lobbies. I created one titled “help me get 1st win” and immediately had two helpful people join up to help me tackle the tornado. (Sadly, we did not get the win.)

When playing solo, I’ve found that I’m somewhat cautious and strategic as I think about how to use weapons and positioning to take on the game’s aggressive enemies and dodge their attacks. With the help of a team, battles are speedier and become delightful explosions of light, color, sound, and damage. It’s so fun to absolutely annihilate baddies with other people, and it’s comforting to know that they’ve got your back in a pinch.

There are a lot of great roguelikes to play right now; Hades II just got a huge update, Balatro is nearly impossible to put down (especially now that it’s on mobile), and I’ve wanted to get back into Shogun Showdown, which I think everyone is sleeping on. Windblown needed more than just its Motion Twin pedigree to stand out, but so far, the multiplayer is the hook that keeps me coming back.

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Image: Zoox

This week, Zoox cofounder and CTO Jesse Levinson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 that it would start rolling out its purpose-built autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Las Vegas in the coming weeks.
But little was said about the ongoing investigation into the Amazon-owned company’s claims that its vehicles — which are shaped like giant toasters and lack traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals — comply with federal safety rules.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an open investigation into Zoox’s claim that its vehicles are self-certified, a spokesperson confirmed this week. And NHTSA has not granted the company an exemption from these rules. The spokesperson declined to comment on the investigation itself.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an open investigation into Zoox’s claim that its vehicles are self-certified
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) require vehicles to have certain traditional controls, like steering wheels (which include airbags), pedals, and rear and sideview mirrors. The rules are very specific, often detailing the exact position of certain controls down the centimeter. Automakers who build vehicles without these controls are supposed to file petitions with the government for temporary exemptions to these rules so they can deploy their steering wheel-less vehicles.
Zoox, however, contends that it won’t need exemptions because it self-certifies that its vehicles meet current safety standards. “From the beginning, we challenged ourselves to create a vehicle that would be compliant with FMVSS requirements within the current regulatory structure,” the company wrote in a July 2022 blog post. And then later, in November 2023, Zoox said it had achieved this goal.
“Today, Zoox has reached a critical milestone in our journey to launch our robotaxi on public roads: becoming the first company to self-certify a purpose-built, fully autonomous, all-electric passenger vehicle to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS),” the company wrote on November 3rd.
Other companies have sought exemptions, with varying degrees of success. Nuro received the first exemption in 2020 to produce its R2 delivery vehicles, which lack traditional controls and aren’t even large enough for a human operator. Meanwhile, GM sought a similar exemption for its Origin vehicles, submitting a request to NHTSA in 2022. But while Cruise seemed confident it would eventually receive the exemption, the company became bogged down in controversy after a pedestrian was injured by one of its robotaxis in San Francisco. (GM eventually put the Origin vehicle on indefinite hold.)
“The first company to self-certify a purpose-built, fully autonomous, all-electric passenger vehicle”
Zoox’s shuttles are similar to the Origin, designed to travel in either direction, with a cabin featuring passenger seats facing each other. The vehicles are currently permitted by the California DMV to operate in a “limited area” in Foster City, California, where the company is headquartered.
At Disrupt, Levinson said Zoox would start out with employees as passengers in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco as well as the Las Vegas Strip. But safety advocates say that the company is skipping a key step in its rush to launch a commercial service.
“Our belief is that a deployment of these vehicles on public roads is a violation of the Safety Act,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “Zoox isn’t so much exploiting a gray area as they are putting a foot over the red line and challenging NHTSA to call their bluff.”
Of course, the burden is on NHTSA to enforce its own rules — and the agency has only recently started to show more backbone in how it approaches autonomous vehicle operators. NHTSA is currently investigating Waymo and Zoox for alleged safety lapses, as well as Ford and Tesla for fatal crashes involving their driver-assist features. If it determines there’s a problem, it could force a recall.
During Disrupt, TechCrunch transportation editor Kirsten Korosec asked Levinson whether he was worried the federal government could derail Zoox’s planned rollout. He maintained that the company’s vehicle is “fully FMVSS compliant” and that Zoox would continue to address NHTSA’s concerns as they emerge. But ultimately he was confident in his company’s approach to the rules.
“We’ve spent an incredible amount of money and time and people complying with the FMVSS regulations as they are,” Levinson said, “and because there aren’t traditional manual controls, in some cases, that requires, you know, interpreting them in a way that is relevant to a robotaxi.”

Image: Zoox

This week, Zoox cofounder and CTO Jesse Levinson announced at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 that it would start rolling out its purpose-built autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and Las Vegas in the coming weeks.

But little was said about the ongoing investigation into the Amazon-owned company’s claims that its vehicles — which are shaped like giant toasters and lack traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals — comply with federal safety rules.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an open investigation into Zoox’s claim that its vehicles are self-certified, a spokesperson confirmed this week. And NHTSA has not granted the company an exemption from these rules. The spokesperson declined to comment on the investigation itself.

Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) require vehicles to have certain traditional controls, like steering wheels (which include airbags), pedals, and rear and sideview mirrors. The rules are very specific, often detailing the exact position of certain controls down the centimeter. Automakers who build vehicles without these controls are supposed to file petitions with the government for temporary exemptions to these rules so they can deploy their steering wheel-less vehicles.

Zoox, however, contends that it won’t need exemptions because it self-certifies that its vehicles meet current safety standards. “From the beginning, we challenged ourselves to create a vehicle that would be compliant with FMVSS requirements within the current regulatory structure,” the company wrote in a July 2022 blog post. And then later, in November 2023, Zoox said it had achieved this goal.

“Today, Zoox has reached a critical milestone in our journey to launch our robotaxi on public roads: becoming the first company to self-certify a purpose-built, fully autonomous, all-electric passenger vehicle to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS),” the company wrote on November 3rd.

Other companies have sought exemptions, with varying degrees of success. Nuro received the first exemption in 2020 to produce its R2 delivery vehicles, which lack traditional controls and aren’t even large enough for a human operator. Meanwhile, GM sought a similar exemption for its Origin vehicles, submitting a request to NHTSA in 2022. But while Cruise seemed confident it would eventually receive the exemption, the company became bogged down in controversy after a pedestrian was injured by one of its robotaxis in San Francisco. (GM eventually put the Origin vehicle on indefinite hold.)

Zoox’s shuttles are similar to the Origin, designed to travel in either direction, with a cabin featuring passenger seats facing each other. The vehicles are currently permitted by the California DMV to operate in a “limited area” in Foster City, California, where the company is headquartered.

At Disrupt, Levinson said Zoox would start out with employees as passengers in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco as well as the Las Vegas Strip. But safety advocates say that the company is skipping a key step in its rush to launch a commercial service.

“Our belief is that a deployment of these vehicles on public roads is a violation of the Safety Act,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety. “Zoox isn’t so much exploiting a gray area as they are putting a foot over the red line and challenging NHTSA to call their bluff.”

Of course, the burden is on NHTSA to enforce its own rules — and the agency has only recently started to show more backbone in how it approaches autonomous vehicle operators. NHTSA is currently investigating Waymo and Zoox for alleged safety lapses, as well as Ford and Tesla for fatal crashes involving their driver-assist features. If it determines there’s a problem, it could force a recall.

During Disrupt, TechCrunch transportation editor Kirsten Korosec asked Levinson whether he was worried the federal government could derail Zoox’s planned rollout. He maintained that the company’s vehicle is “fully FMVSS compliant” and that Zoox would continue to address NHTSA’s concerns as they emerge. But ultimately he was confident in his company’s approach to the rules.

“We’ve spent an incredible amount of money and time and people complying with the FMVSS regulations as they are,” Levinson said, “and because there aren’t traditional manual controls, in some cases, that requires, you know, interpreting them in a way that is relevant to a robotaxi.”

Read More 

Cat not included.

Using the Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra has given me the best sleep of my life. I just can’t get over the price and subscription. I’m only half joking when I say that Eight Sleep’s temperature-controlling mattress cover improved my marriage. A good night’s sleep is elusive in my house. I’m always cold, my spouse runs hot. We battle nightly over the thermostat. So when I first reviewed an Eight Sleep cover, it was a revelation. I could curl up and drift off into a toasty slumber. My spouse could make like a penguin and sleep on a slab of ice.
The only thing I didn’t like was the nearly $1,900 price and the $19 monthly subscription. Fast-forward two years, and alas, I’m in the same pickle with Eight Sleep’s latest ludicrously expensive mattress cover: the Pod 4 Ultra, which starts at just under $4,700 for a Queen. Not including the mandatory annual membership, which starts at $199.

The new $4,700 Pod 4 Ultra also does not come with colorful socks, but it is thinner.

I can hear my mom’s ghost screeching. $4,700!? Are you insane?! Sleep is free! It’s a fair criticism, but good sleep is hard to come by. Eight Sleep’s whole pitch is that it helps create the perfect sleep conditions. The cover contains tubing that runs water from a control hub to separately warm or cool each side of the bed. It’s embedded with sleep-tracking sensors, plus haptic motors for a silent alarm, letting the bed vibrate at a gradually increasing intensity to gently wake you up. Lastly, there’s an AI-powered Autopilot feature that adjusts the temperature as you sleep so you theoretically get a better night’s rest. Since it’s a cover, you can zip it onto your existing mattress instead of having to shell out for an entire smart bed. (Those can cost up to a whopping $10,000.)
The latest Pod 4 Ultra does all of that, too — and it’s quite good at it. So why is it so much more expensive? Some of that is good ole price inflation, but the Ultra bundle also adds a base. It slots into your existing bed frame and lets you adjust the bed’s elevation and position. The cover itself has also been refined so it’s quieter, 20 percent thinner, and has twice the cooling power. Sleep tracking now includes snoring detection — and if you shell out for the base, the bed automatically lifts the head area to reduce said snoring. Eight Sleep also added touch controls via two “tap zones” on either side of the bed that let you adjust temperature, dismiss alarms, and adjust bed position without needing your phone.
It pains my penny-pinching soul that I love these updates.

The base fits within your existing bed frame and there are three elevation presets that you can customize.

Hear me out. I know no one needs a fancy $2,000 base to tweak their bed’s elevation. In my 36 years on Earth, stacking a bunch of pillows against the headboard has generally been good enough. But the bed elevating for you is regretfully delightful. On lazy Sundays, I hit the reading elevation preset and morph into a happy little shrimp while watching the latest brain-rotting season of Love is Blind. Cozying up with a book, feet and upper back elevated with my bed already warmed up for me is now my nightly routine. (It’s also the comfiest way to doomscroll.) There are two other presets for relaxing and sleeping, and you can set your own custom elevation, too.

Having the base also gets you a nifty snoring mitigation feature. When enabled, the bed will automatically lift when it detects snoring. It’s not perfect. I’ve woken up a few times to a moving bed. Even so, I’d rather be slightly disoriented by a moving bed than have to grumpily wake up my snoring spouse to get them to quiet down. Especially since I haven’t woken up every time. Sometimes I only know an adjustment happens because it pops up in Eight Sleep’s morning sleep report. Either way, I now have definitive proof that I snore much, much less than my spouse.
The main downside — besides the cost — is the base isn’t ideal if you have small wily pets. My cat Petey never viewed the bed as a foe before, but now that it moves, it’s become public enemy number one. It moves, he pounces, claws unsheathed. I’m afraid one of these days, he’s going to poke a hole in the Pod 4 Ultra — a device full of water at any given moment. Cats also love exploring under the bed, which led to an incident where he almost got pancaked by the bed lowering. It’s now a family rule that all cats must be accounted for before changing bed elevation.
I asked Eight Sleep about the seeming lack of safety features. “We have no reported cases of people or small pets being harmed by the Pod 4 Ultra Base,” says Sam Kang, Eight Sleep’s VP of hardware. “We also move the base very slowly to allow time for anything that may be underneath the lowering portion to get out of the way.” I still say you ought to be overly cautious, especially as there are no warnings within the app.

The new touch controls are my favorite update. They’re textured and easily felt through sheets.

Bed elevation is cool, but the upgrade I love most is the touch controls. The tap zones, located on either side of the bed, are textured so you can easily feel them through the sheets. Double tapping raises the bed temperature, while triple tapping lowers it. A quadruple tap will let you cycle through bed elevation presets (e.g., reading, relaxation, sleeping, etc.). But it’s most helpful in snoozing or dismissing the silent alarm. Mine vibrates my side of the bed at 5:45AM so I can get ready for my cursed morning workout. All I have to do is roll over, pat the bed twice, and I don’t disturb my spouse. Previously, I’d have to blindly search for my phone, launch the Eight Sleep app, and dismiss the alarm that way. I was never quick enough, and the “silent” alarm is actually quite loud the longer you let it go. (The vibrations are quite powerful.) Adding the touch controls lets me use the silent alarm more confidently — and lets my spouse get some extra Zzzs.
The other updates are less flashy but improve the overall experience. The hub, for instance, is definitely quieter. With the Pod 2 Pro, it would occasionally whirr while filling the bed with water. It wasn’t too noisy, but it was loud enough that my spouse would comment. We don’t really notice the Pod 4’s hub, except when it’s time to refill the tank. It’s still kind of big — about the size of a slim gaming PC, but after a while you forget it’s there. The cover itself looks the same, but it’s now thinner and has redesigned tubing for better comfort and efficient cooling. I think I noticed when we first used the Pod 4 Ultra, but it’s not something that made a huge overall impact. It’s hard to say whether the cooling is also two times more powerful, though I do feel like it’s ever so slightly faster at reaching the desired temperature.

The hub is still big, but it’s quieter than before.

But for the most part, the hub blends in next to your nightstand.

Expensive bed tech is inherently ridiculous. A mattress has one job: to be a comfy place for you to sleep. Adding tech to it overcomplicates one of the most natural things a human can do. But this is the age of optimization, and wellness influencers would have you believe that none of us sleep as well as we should. (Though, you could easily fix this by buying a supplement or product using a code in their bio. How else could mouth taping take over TikTok?) That sleepmaxxing has become a viral trend speaks to how much the average person wants to sleep better. In this environment, a $5,000 smart mattress cover — not even a mattress — that promises you the best night of fully optimized, AI-automated sleep is the most 2024 piece of wellness tech imaginable. It drives me bonkers that I can’t even argue with the results! Yes, it can be finicky at first, and it took months to really notice how much my sleep had improved. But the fact is my spouse and I, both lifelong insomniacs, have been sleeping like babies.
The last time I thought this hard about a bed was in my early 20s. After seven years of sleeping on paper-thin, rock-hard futons, I’d accumulated enough bodily pains that my doctor demanded I buy a proper mattress. Almost overnight, the pain that had been plaguing me for years disappeared. No one is more upset than I that switching from a regular mattress to an Eight Sleep product had similar, albeit less dramatic, results. Not once, but twice.

Pablo enjoys making biscuits on a toasty Eight Sleep. The other cat, not pictured, enjoys attacking it.

Even so, I still struggle with this price tag. Particularly since features like Autopilot, silent alarms, and sleep insights, are locked behind a mandatory $199 annual subscription that you pay for upfront. You can cancel after a year, so long as you’re okay with losing every single feature except manual temperature control. Eight Sleep says it does this to develop, maintain, and improve its smart features, but subscribing to your bed fundamentally feels wrong. Adjusting the temperature is the most important feature, but it’s not worth the entry price if that’s all you’re getting.
And yet, I remain tempted. It’s why I hate that I love this bed. On the one hand, it’s continually solved a major problem my spouse and I have with our sleep preferences. On the other, we still managed to sleep on a regular, not-so-smart bed in the past and could do so again. Even if we’d have to go back to battling over the thermostat. It’d be so much easier to make this decision if the Pod 4 Ultra sucked. But it doesn’t! Now my problem is figuring out how much a good night’s sleep is really worth.

Cat not included.

Using the Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra has given me the best sleep of my life. I just can’t get over the price and subscription.

I’m only half joking when I say that Eight Sleep’s temperature-controlling mattress cover improved my marriage. A good night’s sleep is elusive in my house. I’m always cold, my spouse runs hot. We battle nightly over the thermostat. So when I first reviewed an Eight Sleep cover, it was a revelation. I could curl up and drift off into a toasty slumber. My spouse could make like a penguin and sleep on a slab of ice.

The only thing I didn’t like was the nearly $1,900 price and the $19 monthly subscription. Fast-forward two years, and alas, I’m in the same pickle with Eight Sleep’s latest ludicrously expensive mattress cover: the Pod 4 Ultra, which starts at just under $4,700 for a Queen. Not including the mandatory annual membership, which starts at $199.

The new $4,700 Pod 4 Ultra also does not come with colorful socks, but it is thinner.

I can hear my mom’s ghost screeching. $4,700!? Are you insane?! Sleep is free! It’s a fair criticism, but good sleep is hard to come by. Eight Sleep’s whole pitch is that it helps create the perfect sleep conditions. The cover contains tubing that runs water from a control hub to separately warm or cool each side of the bed. It’s embedded with sleep-tracking sensors, plus haptic motors for a silent alarm, letting the bed vibrate at a gradually increasing intensity to gently wake you up. Lastly, there’s an AI-powered Autopilot feature that adjusts the temperature as you sleep so you theoretically get a better night’s rest. Since it’s a cover, you can zip it onto your existing mattress instead of having to shell out for an entire smart bed. (Those can cost up to a whopping $10,000.)

The latest Pod 4 Ultra does all of that, too — and it’s quite good at it. So why is it so much more expensive? Some of that is good ole price inflation, but the Ultra bundle also adds a base. It slots into your existing bed frame and lets you adjust the bed’s elevation and position. The cover itself has also been refined so it’s quieter, 20 percent thinner, and has twice the cooling power. Sleep tracking now includes snoring detection — and if you shell out for the base, the bed automatically lifts the head area to reduce said snoring. Eight Sleep also added touch controls via two “tap zones” on either side of the bed that let you adjust temperature, dismiss alarms, and adjust bed position without needing your phone.

It pains my penny-pinching soul that I love these updates.

The base fits within your existing bed frame and there are three elevation presets that you can customize.

Hear me out. I know no one needs a fancy $2,000 base to tweak their bed’s elevation. In my 36 years on Earth, stacking a bunch of pillows against the headboard has generally been good enough. But the bed elevating for you is regretfully delightful. On lazy Sundays, I hit the reading elevation preset and morph into a happy little shrimp while watching the latest brain-rotting season of Love is Blind. Cozying up with a book, feet and upper back elevated with my bed already warmed up for me is now my nightly routine. (It’s also the comfiest way to doomscroll.) There are two other presets for relaxing and sleeping, and you can set your own custom elevation, too.

Having the base also gets you a nifty snoring mitigation feature. When enabled, the bed will automatically lift when it detects snoring. It’s not perfect. I’ve woken up a few times to a moving bed. Even so, I’d rather be slightly disoriented by a moving bed than have to grumpily wake up my snoring spouse to get them to quiet down. Especially since I haven’t woken up every time. Sometimes I only know an adjustment happens because it pops up in Eight Sleep’s morning sleep report. Either way, I now have definitive proof that I snore much, much less than my spouse.

The main downside — besides the cost — is the base isn’t ideal if you have small wily pets. My cat Petey never viewed the bed as a foe before, but now that it moves, it’s become public enemy number one. It moves, he pounces, claws unsheathed. I’m afraid one of these days, he’s going to poke a hole in the Pod 4 Ultra — a device full of water at any given moment. Cats also love exploring under the bed, which led to an incident where he almost got pancaked by the bed lowering. It’s now a family rule that all cats must be accounted for before changing bed elevation.

I asked Eight Sleep about the seeming lack of safety features. “We have no reported cases of people or small pets being harmed by the Pod 4 Ultra Base,” says Sam Kang, Eight Sleep’s VP of hardware. “We also move the base very slowly to allow time for anything that may be underneath the lowering portion to get out of the way.” I still say you ought to be overly cautious, especially as there are no warnings within the app.

Bed elevation is cool, but the upgrade I love most is the touch controls. The tap zones, located on either side of the bed, are textured so you can easily feel them through the sheets. Double tapping raises the bed temperature, while triple tapping lowers it. A quadruple tap will let you cycle through bed elevation presets (e.g., reading, relaxation, sleeping, etc.). But it’s most helpful in snoozing or dismissing the silent alarm. Mine vibrates my side of the bed at 5:45AM so I can get ready for my cursed morning workout. All I have to do is roll over, pat the bed twice, and I don’t disturb my spouse. Previously, I’d have to blindly search for my phone, launch the Eight Sleep app, and dismiss the alarm that way. I was never quick enough, and the “silent” alarm is actually quite loud the longer you let it go. (The vibrations are quite powerful.) Adding the touch controls lets me use the silent alarm more confidently — and lets my spouse get some extra Zzzs.

The other updates are less flashy but improve the overall experience. The hub, for instance, is definitely quieter. With the Pod 2 Pro, it would occasionally whirr while filling the bed with water. It wasn’t too noisy, but it was loud enough that my spouse would comment. We don’t really notice the Pod 4’s hub, except when it’s time to refill the tank. It’s still kind of big — about the size of a slim gaming PC, but after a while you forget it’s there. The cover itself looks the same, but it’s now thinner and has redesigned tubing for better comfort and efficient cooling. I think I noticed when we first used the Pod 4 Ultra, but it’s not something that made a huge overall impact. It’s hard to say whether the cooling is also two times more powerful, though I do feel like it’s ever so slightly faster at reaching the desired temperature.

Expensive bed tech is inherently ridiculous. A mattress has one job: to be a comfy place for you to sleep. Adding tech to it overcomplicates one of the most natural things a human can do. But this is the age of optimization, and wellness influencers would have you believe that none of us sleep as well as we should. (Though, you could easily fix this by buying a supplement or product using a code in their bio. How else could mouth taping take over TikTok?) That sleepmaxxing has become a viral trend speaks to how much the average person wants to sleep better. In this environment, a $5,000 smart mattress cover — not even a mattress — that promises you the best night of fully optimized, AI-automated sleep is the most 2024 piece of wellness tech imaginable. It drives me bonkers that I can’t even argue with the results! Yes, it can be finicky at first, and it took months to really notice how much my sleep had improved. But the fact is my spouse and I, both lifelong insomniacs, have been sleeping like babies.

The last time I thought this hard about a bed was in my early 20s. After seven years of sleeping on paper-thin, rock-hard futons, I’d accumulated enough bodily pains that my doctor demanded I buy a proper mattress. Almost overnight, the pain that had been plaguing me for years disappeared. No one is more upset than I that switching from a regular mattress to an Eight Sleep product had similar, albeit less dramatic, results. Not once, but twice.

Pablo enjoys making biscuits on a toasty Eight Sleep. The other cat, not pictured, enjoys attacking it.

Even so, I still struggle with this price tag. Particularly since features like Autopilot, silent alarms, and sleep insights, are locked behind a mandatory $199 annual subscription that you pay for upfront. You can cancel after a year, so long as you’re okay with losing every single feature except manual temperature control. Eight Sleep says it does this to develop, maintain, and improve its smart features, but subscribing to your bed fundamentally feels wrong. Adjusting the temperature is the most important feature, but it’s not worth the entry price if that’s all you’re getting.

And yet, I remain tempted. It’s why I hate that I love this bed. On the one hand, it’s continually solved a major problem my spouse and I have with our sleep preferences. On the other, we still managed to sleep on a regular, not-so-smart bed in the past and could do so again. Even if we’d have to go back to battling over the thermostat. It’d be so much easier to make this decision if the Pod 4 Ultra sucked. But it doesn’t! Now my problem is figuring out how much a good night’s sleep is really worth.

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Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

On Friday evening, Okta posted an odd update to its list of security advisories. The latest entry reveals that under specific circumstances, someone could’ve logged in by entering anything for a password, but only if the account’s username had over 52 characters.
According to the note people reported receiving, other requirements to exploit the vulnerability included Okta checking the cache from a previous successful login, and that an organization’s authentication policy didn’t add extra conditions like requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Here are the details that are currently available:

On October 30, 2024, a vulnerability was internally identified in generating the cache key for AD/LDAP DelAuth. The Bcrypt algorithm was used to generate the cache key where we hash a combined string of userId + username + password. During specific conditions, this could allow users to authenticate by only providing the username with the stored cache key of a previous successful authentication.
The vulnerability can be exploited if the agent is down and cannot be reached OR there is high traffic. This will result in the DelAuth hitting the cache first.

Okta allowing login bypass for any usernames with 52+ characters is insaneOfficial Security Advisory: https://t.co/3b4v30q53z pic.twitter.com/yD8FkgwSgs— Kinnaird McQuade ☁️ (@kmcquade3) November 1, 2024

According to the note, the flaw has been present since an update on July 23rd until it was resolved by switching the cryptographic algorithm from Bcrypt to PBKDF2 after the vulnerability was internally identified. Okta didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional details but says customers whose setups meet the necessary conditions should check those three months of system logs.

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

On Friday evening, Okta posted an odd update to its list of security advisories. The latest entry reveals that under specific circumstances, someone could’ve logged in by entering anything for a password, but only if the account’s username had over 52 characters.

According to the note people reported receiving, other requirements to exploit the vulnerability included Okta checking the cache from a previous successful login, and that an organization’s authentication policy didn’t add extra conditions like requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Here are the details that are currently available:

On October 30, 2024, a vulnerability was internally identified in generating the cache key for AD/LDAP DelAuth. The Bcrypt algorithm was used to generate the cache key where we hash a combined string of userId + username + password. During specific conditions, this could allow users to authenticate by only providing the username with the stored cache key of a previous successful authentication.

The vulnerability can be exploited if the agent is down and cannot be reached OR there is high traffic. This will result in the DelAuth hitting the cache first.

According to the note, the flaw has been present since an update on July 23rd until it was resolved by switching the cryptographic algorithm from Bcrypt to PBKDF2 after the vulnerability was internally identified. Okta didn’t immediately respond to a request for additional details but says customers whose setups meet the necessary conditions should check those three months of system logs.

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Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple announced a new service program to fix iPhone 14 Plus phones that have rear cameras that won’t show a preview.
Here’s Apple’s specific definition of the affected phones, according to the service program page:
Apple has determined that the rear camera on a very small percentage of iPhone 14 Plus devices may exhibit no preview. Affected devices were manufactured between April 10, 2023 to April 28, 2024.
If your iPhone 14 Plus is affected — and you can enter your serial number on the program page to see if yours is — Apple says it or an Authorized Service Provider will service your phone for free. If you’ve already paid to have the camera repaired, Apple says to reach out to ask if you can get a refund.
Eligible phones will be covered by this program for three years after they were originally sold.
Apple occasionally launches these types of service programs to offer repairs for its products, like one to fix receivers on iPhone 12 or 12 Pro phones and one to fix AirPods Pro that made crackling or static sounds.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple announced a new service program to fix iPhone 14 Plus phones that have rear cameras that won’t show a preview.

Here’s Apple’s specific definition of the affected phones, according to the service program page:

Apple has determined that the rear camera on a very small percentage of iPhone 14 Plus devices may exhibit no preview. Affected devices were manufactured between April 10, 2023 to April 28, 2024.

If your iPhone 14 Plus is affected — and you can enter your serial number on the program page to see if yours is — Apple says it or an Authorized Service Provider will service your phone for free. If you’ve already paid to have the camera repaired, Apple says to reach out to ask if you can get a refund.

Eligible phones will be covered by this program for three years after they were originally sold.

Apple occasionally launches these types of service programs to offer repairs for its products, like one to fix receivers on iPhone 12 or 12 Pro phones and one to fix AirPods Pro that made crackling or static sounds.

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