verge-rss

Image: Alex Parkin / Getty Images

Smartmatic and Dominion are trying to debunk false stories and rebuild trust — but that’s a tall order in 2024. Ed Smith still remembers the weeks after Election Day 2020. The elections compliance expert worked for voting technology provider Smartmatic at the time: a mostly low-profile company that had supplied ballot-marking devices to Los Angeles County. As the polls reported their vote counts, though, then-President Donald Trump lost to challenger Joe Biden — and Trump launched an all-out war on the results. Companies like Smartmatic found themselves under siege.
Trump and his allies accused Smartmatic and its competitor Dominion Voting Systems of a conspiracy to rig the vote for Biden. And as Trump’s attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, piled up false claims in court, armies of online supporters descended on employees like Smith. Twitter users found his work history at several voting tech companies and concluded, “This must be the guy,” he recalls. People were “threatening me, wanting to come to my house and show me some love.” Smith had been proud of his years of experience — work he considered a public benefit. But as Trump undercut trust in the system, Smith’s own mother believed the election had been stolen. The misinformation and online attacks “just created a climate that led me to be very sad.”
Four years later, Trump is again on the ballot. He’s preemptively claimed his rivals want to steal the election and refused to guarantee he’ll accept the results. Dominion, Smartmatic, and other election tech providers are going on the offensive, trying to convince the public of their trustworthiness. But they’re contending with a problem that seems sometimes insurmountable: fighting conspiracy theories amid a crisis of trust.
Communications was once an “afterthought” in election tech
Communication was an “afterthought for election commissions” when Smartmatic began working in the industry two decades ago, says Samira Saba, communications director for the company. The job of election commissions was pretty much just about making sure votes were counted and voter rolls were up to date. “Today, election administrators around the world recognize that disinformation is among the largest challenges they face—if not the largest,” Saba told The Verge in an email.
While there had long been some activists sowing doubt in the voting system, Smith says that in 2020, the industry was “caught off-guard by the volume and the ferociousness of the misinformation.” False claims weren’t coming just from fringe figures but the then-sitting president and leader of the Republican Party. Major networks like Fox News were repeating their claims.
The companies’ first move was a blitz of defamation lawsuits against news outlets and conspiracy theorists — one that’s been fairly successful in court. Newsmax settled with Smartmatic in September, and judges have allowed Smartmatic suits to proceed against Fox, One America News (OAN), and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion reached a $787 million defamation settlement with Fox last year, and cases are proceeding against OAN, Newsmax, Lindell, Powell, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy put a Dominion lawsuit on pause late last year, but a judge ended his bankruptcy this summer, letting the case advance.
Election lies aren’t gone from conservative news outlets, according to the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, but the tactics have changed. “The difference that we’ve seen so far in 2024 is that MAGA personalities appear to have been able to steer conversations away from specific potential defamatory claims, particularly about voting companies — even as those sorts of claims continue to circulate on social media,” Media Matters senior adviser John Whitehouse says in a statement. “The lesson for MAGA media seems to be that the core audience wants more election denial — and they’re gonna give it to them.”
But the court of public opinion is just as important. For this election, Smartmatic and Dominion both maintain pages on their websites fact-checking false claims about their technologies and explaining how their companies work. Smartmatic began publishing a handbook for fighting mis- and disinformation in 2016. Its latest edition walks election officials through steps like auditing media channels where citizens get information, building relationships with journalists and influencers, and creating a crisis communications plan. It advises that election officials “show empathy and concern” and “make sure your explanation isn’t more complicated than the falsehood.”
Voting technology companies aren’t the only ones trying to explain how these systems work and defend their reliability. State governments operate fact-check pages that “pre-bunk” election misconceptions. Election authorities have emphasized ways that voters can observe the system — like livestreams of ballot processing facilities. Local election offices also run extensive public testing of voting machines in the weeks and months leading up to the election.
Still, convincing voters that they can trust the system can be tricky — especially when it means proving something isn’t happening.
“Make sure your explanation isn’t more complicated than the falsehood”
Letting voters observe the process themselves can help, says Sara Cutter, executive director of the nonpartisan trade group American Council for Election Technology (ACET). Chester County resident Jay Schneider was one of those skeptics about the election process in 2020. “To be honest, when the 2020 election came around I was thinking, ‘This seems a little sketchy, what’s been going on. There’s some shenanigans going around and around the country,’” he told Spotlight PA in a 2023 story. But after working the polls himself, he became so persuaded by the strength of the checks and balances in the system that he decided to take on a bigger role in the process as a judge of elections.
Smith agrees that personal experience with the system is valuable. “When you are aware of those sorts of checks and balances, you know that throwing the election in the manner that people are saying it’s thrown would just be an impossible dream,” he says.
Successful persuasion depends on the person and situation, though, in Smith’s experience. Many people are content with learning more about the checks on the election system that prevent fraud, he says, but for “some percentage of people … you can tell them whatever you want to tell them, you can show them whatever you want to show them, it just doesn’t seem to sink in.”
Part of the problem is that conspiracy theorists — including Trump and allies like Giuliani — have undercut trust in the very institutions trying to restore it. Smith says people are not “as willing to go to the Secretary of State’s website and say, ‘Oh, well, Secretary X said that vote by mail is safe, and here’s why.’ Now, people just simply don’t believe that individual.”
Election technology companies don’t “shy away” from scrutiny, says Cutter. “But when scrutiny becomes suspicion and then public trust erodes, that’s when mis- and disinformation begins to fill the void.”
Some false claims may stem from misunderstandings. The industry was “surprised” by calls for paper ballots, says Cutter, since “98 percent of jurisdictions” do use paper — some just have those ballots marked with electronic devices designed for greater accessibility.
Likewise, while ensuring voting machines are secure is important, these machines are just one part of a larger system. “American elections have built-in checks and balances,” says Cutter, much like the government itself. “Basically no two jurisdictions are going to have the exact same mix of technology and election administration procedures that allow them to be compromised at a systemic level.”
To do significant nationwide damage, an attacker would need to familiarize themselves with countless combinations of hardware and software. And by the same token, a single company like Dominion couldn’t simply flip a switch to change election results because there are processes to catch machinery that’s not working as expected.
The backlash against voting tech companies “is steeling their resolve,” Cutter says — “once elections get into your blood, a lot of folks don’t ever leave this space.” But it’s still taken a toll. Some ACET members have installed extra security cameras, she says, and a few have even made emergency plans for moving offices.
They aren’t the only ones preparing for the possibility of violence. Across the country, election officials have stepped up security, anticipating threats. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that election workers in Arizona have undergone active shooter drills, and an election office in Maricopa County now has armed guards and metal detectors. And even before Election Day, Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, have seen fires at ballot boxes damage hundreds of ballots.
Cutter has a question for people who believe false narratives about rigged elections: “why is it that you want that to be true? Because I still believe in America. I believe in our innovation, in the hope that we give the world. And I believe in American resiliency and in the accountability that we have built into our systems.”
“Every American deserves fair, free, and safe and secure elections,” she says. “They’ve got them. We’ve got the receipts.”

Image: Alex Parkin / Getty Images

Smartmatic and Dominion are trying to debunk false stories and rebuild trust — but that’s a tall order in 2024.

Ed Smith still remembers the weeks after Election Day 2020. The elections compliance expert worked for voting technology provider Smartmatic at the time: a mostly low-profile company that had supplied ballot-marking devices to Los Angeles County. As the polls reported their vote counts, though, then-President Donald Trump lost to challenger Joe Biden — and Trump launched an all-out war on the results. Companies like Smartmatic found themselves under siege.

Trump and his allies accused Smartmatic and its competitor Dominion Voting Systems of a conspiracy to rig the vote for Biden. And as Trump’s attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, piled up false claims in court, armies of online supporters descended on employees like Smith. Twitter users found his work history at several voting tech companies and concluded, “This must be the guy,” he recalls. People were “threatening me, wanting to come to my house and show me some love.” Smith had been proud of his years of experience — work he considered a public benefit. But as Trump undercut trust in the system, Smith’s own mother believed the election had been stolen. The misinformation and online attacks “just created a climate that led me to be very sad.”

Four years later, Trump is again on the ballot. He’s preemptively claimed his rivals want to steal the election and refused to guarantee he’ll accept the results. Dominion, Smartmatic, and other election tech providers are going on the offensive, trying to convince the public of their trustworthiness. But they’re contending with a problem that seems sometimes insurmountable: fighting conspiracy theories amid a crisis of trust.

Communication was an “afterthought for election commissions” when Smartmatic began working in the industry two decades ago, says Samira Saba, communications director for the company. The job of election commissions was pretty much just about making sure votes were counted and voter rolls were up to date. “Today, election administrators around the world recognize that disinformation is among the largest challenges they face—if not the largest,” Saba told The Verge in an email.

While there had long been some activists sowing doubt in the voting system, Smith says that in 2020, the industry was “caught off-guard by the volume and the ferociousness of the misinformation.” False claims weren’t coming just from fringe figures but the then-sitting president and leader of the Republican Party. Major networks like Fox News were repeating their claims.

The companies’ first move was a blitz of defamation lawsuits against news outlets and conspiracy theorists — one that’s been fairly successful in court. Newsmax settled with Smartmatic in September, and judges have allowed Smartmatic suits to proceed against Fox, One America News (OAN), and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion reached a $787 million defamation settlement with Fox last year, and cases are proceeding against OAN, Newsmax, Lindell, Powell, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy put a Dominion lawsuit on pause late last year, but a judge ended his bankruptcy this summer, letting the case advance.

Election lies aren’t gone from conservative news outlets, according to the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, but the tactics have changed. “The difference that we’ve seen so far in 2024 is that MAGA personalities appear to have been able to steer conversations away from specific potential defamatory claims, particularly about voting companies — even as those sorts of claims continue to circulate on social media,” Media Matters senior adviser John Whitehouse says in a statement. “The lesson for MAGA media seems to be that the core audience wants more election denial — and they’re gonna give it to them.”

But the court of public opinion is just as important. For this election, Smartmatic and Dominion both maintain pages on their websites fact-checking false claims about their technologies and explaining how their companies work. Smartmatic began publishing a handbook for fighting mis- and disinformation in 2016. Its latest edition walks election officials through steps like auditing media channels where citizens get information, building relationships with journalists and influencers, and creating a crisis communications plan. It advises that election officials “show empathy and concern” and “make sure your explanation isn’t more complicated than the falsehood.”

Voting technology companies aren’t the only ones trying to explain how these systems work and defend their reliability. State governments operate fact-check pages that “pre-bunk” election misconceptions. Election authorities have emphasized ways that voters can observe the system — like livestreams of ballot processing facilities. Local election offices also run extensive public testing of voting machines in the weeks and months leading up to the election.

Still, convincing voters that they can trust the system can be tricky — especially when it means proving something isn’t happening.

Letting voters observe the process themselves can help, says Sara Cutter, executive director of the nonpartisan trade group American Council for Election Technology (ACET). Chester County resident Jay Schneider was one of those skeptics about the election process in 2020. “To be honest, when the 2020 election came around I was thinking, ‘This seems a little sketchy, what’s been going on. There’s some shenanigans going around and around the country,’” he told Spotlight PA in a 2023 story. But after working the polls himself, he became so persuaded by the strength of the checks and balances in the system that he decided to take on a bigger role in the process as a judge of elections.

Smith agrees that personal experience with the system is valuable. “When you are aware of those sorts of checks and balances, you know that throwing the election in the manner that people are saying it’s thrown would just be an impossible dream,” he says.

Successful persuasion depends on the person and situation, though, in Smith’s experience. Many people are content with learning more about the checks on the election system that prevent fraud, he says, but for “some percentage of people … you can tell them whatever you want to tell them, you can show them whatever you want to show them, it just doesn’t seem to sink in.”

Part of the problem is that conspiracy theorists — including Trump and allies like Giuliani — have undercut trust in the very institutions trying to restore it. Smith says people are not “as willing to go to the Secretary of State’s website and say, ‘Oh, well, Secretary X said that vote by mail is safe, and here’s why.’ Now, people just simply don’t believe that individual.”

Election technology companies don’t “shy away” from scrutiny, says Cutter. “But when scrutiny becomes suspicion and then public trust erodes, that’s when mis- and disinformation begins to fill the void.”

Some false claims may stem from misunderstandings. The industry was “surprised” by calls for paper ballots, says Cutter, since “98 percent of jurisdictions” do use paper — some just have those ballots marked with electronic devices designed for greater accessibility.

Likewise, while ensuring voting machines are secure is important, these machines are just one part of a larger system. “American elections have built-in checks and balances,” says Cutter, much like the government itself. “Basically no two jurisdictions are going to have the exact same mix of technology and election administration procedures that allow them to be compromised at a systemic level.”

To do significant nationwide damage, an attacker would need to familiarize themselves with countless combinations of hardware and software. And by the same token, a single company like Dominion couldn’t simply flip a switch to change election results because there are processes to catch machinery that’s not working as expected.

The backlash against voting tech companies “is steeling their resolve,” Cutter says — “once elections get into your blood, a lot of folks don’t ever leave this space.” But it’s still taken a toll. Some ACET members have installed extra security cameras, she says, and a few have even made emergency plans for moving offices.

They aren’t the only ones preparing for the possibility of violence. Across the country, election officials have stepped up security, anticipating threats. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that election workers in Arizona have undergone active shooter drills, and an election office in Maricopa County now has armed guards and metal detectors. And even before Election Day, Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, have seen fires at ballot boxes damage hundreds of ballots.

Cutter has a question for people who believe false narratives about rigged elections: “why is it that you want that to be true? Because I still believe in America. I believe in our innovation, in the hope that we give the world. And I believe in American resiliency and in the accountability that we have built into our systems.”

“Every American deserves fair, free, and safe and secure elections,” she says. “They’ve got them. We’ve got the receipts.”

Read More 

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Social networking has become more disconnected, to say the least. Two years ago, Elon Musk began transforming Twitter into what is now X, and the ensuing chaos drove a lot of former users elsewhere — elsewhere being several places, including Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and even Facebook or Instagram.
We were curious as to where our staff members were going for their social networking fix these days — or whether they had given up on it altogether. Here are some of their answers.

I just don’t think any single platform is going to be the one-stop shop that Twitter once was
Jay Peters, news editor
I primarily use microblogging social networks, and I bounce between many of them because 1) I need to for my job and 2) because none has really risen to become the One Central Place that Twitter used to be.
X is awful now, but I need to use it to keep tabs on Elon Musk and the various companies that still post news on the platform first. (Nintendo, please consider moving to another platform!) Threads has a lot of people that migrated from X, but I don’t like how much the service pushes the “For You” feed. Bluesky is my favorite microblogging app to actually use, but not enough of the people I care about post there regularly.
If I had to pick just one, it would be Bluesky. But I just don’t think any single platform is going to be the one-stop shop that Twitter once was, so for the foreseeable future, I’ll keep dabbling with them all.

Screenshot: Bluesky
Bluesky.

The WTA app and website are amazing for helping you find hikes throughout the state
Allison Johnson, reviewer
The best social network, hands-down, is the trip reports section of the Washington Trails Association app. I am not kidding. The WTA app and website are amazing for helping you find hikes throughout the state, and there’s almost always a recent trip report for the hike you’re considering. This is how you find out critical information like if the bathrooms are gross and if the mosquitos are really bad on the trail. News I can use! Plus, people post images with their reports so you get to look at pictures of gorgeous mountains and sometimes dogs. Nobody is mean to anyone else, and you literally have to go outside and touch grass before you post. Is there a better framework for a social network? No.

I really need to avoid the black hole that is TikTok
Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor
I’m on way too many social networks right now because I haven’t found a favorite yet. I am still on Facebook. (I’m sorry, but many of my friends and family are there, and so that’s what I use to keep in touch.) I tend to use Threads more often than Bluesky or Mastodon because I’ve gotten into that habit, although I have a lot of writer friends and colleagues on Bluesky and should go there more often. And I really need to avoid the black hole that is TikTok — I’ve got too many things on my task list to spend that much time watching short videos of cute cats and angry activists.

I also really like not getting death threats for talking about nerd media
Kate Cox, senior producer
I really miss what Twitter used to be; I was an extremely avid tweeter. But I also really missed what LiveJournal used to be and, before it, what AOL used to be. So here we are.
I’ve never been on Instagram so Threads was a nonstarter, but I’ve landed pretty happily on Bluesky, and all the social interaction I’m willing to do in public is over there. But honestly, it’s still too much trouble to have strong opinions (especially about something like a video game, haha) where everyone can read them — so the majority of my social media time is spent on a small handful of tightly personal Discord spaces. They’re friends and family-style servers; none has more than a hundred members, and the smallest has just five.
Do I miss the open social media era of the internet? So much. But I also really like not getting death threats for talking about nerd media, so Discord it is.

Image: Discord
Discord.

I’ve joined local groups so I can stay up-to-date on what’s going on around town
Emma Roth, news writer
I’m with Barbara — I often use Facebook. After a very long period of trying to stay off social networks, it’s become an invaluable resource for me since moving to a new state. I’ve joined local groups so I can stay up-to-date on what’s going on around town and even meet new people (both of which would otherwise be a challenge while working from home). There are also a few Facebook pages that have become my go-to sources for updates on local weather, helping me navigate this year’s tumultuous hurricane season.
Other than that, I still use X to get real-time updates on breaking news, but I’m trying to fold Threads and Bluesky into my routine, too.

I’d also like to put in a good word for Tumblr, which, yes, is still around
Adi Robertson, senior editor, tech and policy
Twitter (RIP) was my only professional social network for a long time, and after a stint at Mastodon, I’ve settled pretty squarely on Bluesky for now. I love the fact that we’ve got multiple microblogging platforms, and I’m happy for everyone who’s having a good time on Mastodon, but a lot of my old Twitter faves settled on Bluesky and it feels low-stakes and low-pressure in a way Mastodon didn’t for me.
I’d also like to put in a good word for Tumblr, which, yes, is still around — and has a user base that’s uniquely weird, cohesive, and largely indifferent to clout and monetization. Its feature set has somehow coalesced into the perfect system for collaborative culture-making and lightly absurdist microfiction. You’re not gonna get stuff like Goncharov, Second Century Warlord, or the Destiel News Delivery System anywhere else.

If I’m honest, I think I’m done with social media
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, smart home reviewer
As has been said more eloquently by my colleagues, I miss Twitter. I still use X, despite my better judgment, but it’s increasingly becoming unusable, and I’ve yet to find a viable alternative. Threads has too little news and is far too worthy (those earnest “story Threads” are unbearable), Mastodon is too boring, and I just haven’t found my community on Bluesky. I do enjoy a good Discord, which is where many of my smart home tribes have migrated to and is probably where I’ll spend more of my work-related social media time.
But if I’m honest, I think I’m done with social media from a personal vantage. I’ve been an avid user for nearly two decades, since the early Facebook days, largely to stay in touch with friends and family after moving halfway across the world. But as its value in my work diminishes and fewer social networks retain that social feel, it’s time to move on. My digital social networks are now mostly iMessage and WhatsApp chat groups, and that’s fine with me.

Screenshot: Meta
Threads.

Threads is the only platform that lets me build an endless stream of those sweet Verge videos
Sean Hollister, senior editor
I stepped away from social media almost entirely after the death of Twitter — but I’m back on Threads for one reason and one reason alone. I want to share videos of the coolest and most gadgety toys with you, and Meta / Facebook / Instagram’s Threads is the only platform that lets me build an endless stream of those sweet Verge videos just by embedding them. Plus, they natively play in a browser window without requiring you to log in. If Meta ever changes those things (or blows up Threads with ads), I’ll probably have to find a new home.
I’ve also dabbled with Mastodon (both solo and by federating my Threads account), and I technically haven’t deleted my X account yet since I kept it around for DMs… but it’s been a while since I got a message there. Perhaps it’s time.

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Social networking has become more disconnected, to say the least. Two years ago, Elon Musk began transforming Twitter into what is now X, and the ensuing chaos drove a lot of former users elsewhere — elsewhere being several places, including Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and even Facebook or Instagram.

We were curious as to where our staff members were going for their social networking fix these days — or whether they had given up on it altogether. Here are some of their answers.

I just don’t think any single platform is going to be the one-stop shop that Twitter once was

Jay Peters, news editor

I primarily use microblogging social networks, and I bounce between many of them because 1) I need to for my job and 2) because none has really risen to become the One Central Place that Twitter used to be.

X is awful now, but I need to use it to keep tabs on Elon Musk and the various companies that still post news on the platform first. (Nintendo, please consider moving to another platform!) Threads has a lot of people that migrated from X, but I don’t like how much the service pushes the “For You” feed. Bluesky is my favorite microblogging app to actually use, but not enough of the people I care about post there regularly.

If I had to pick just one, it would be Bluesky. But I just don’t think any single platform is going to be the one-stop shop that Twitter once was, so for the foreseeable future, I’ll keep dabbling with them all.

Screenshot: Bluesky
Bluesky.

The WTA app and website are amazing for helping you find hikes throughout the state

Allison Johnson, reviewer

The best social network, hands-down, is the trip reports section of the Washington Trails Association app. I am not kidding. The WTA app and website are amazing for helping you find hikes throughout the state, and there’s almost always a recent trip report for the hike you’re considering. This is how you find out critical information like if the bathrooms are gross and if the mosquitos are really bad on the trail. News I can use! Plus, people post images with their reports so you get to look at pictures of gorgeous mountains and sometimes dogs. Nobody is mean to anyone else, and you literally have to go outside and touch grass before you post. Is there a better framework for a social network? No.

I really need to avoid the black hole that is TikTok

Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

I’m on way too many social networks right now because I haven’t found a favorite yet. I am still on Facebook. (I’m sorry, but many of my friends and family are there, and so that’s what I use to keep in touch.) I tend to use Threads more often than Bluesky or Mastodon because I’ve gotten into that habit, although I have a lot of writer friends and colleagues on Bluesky and should go there more often. And I really need to avoid the black hole that is TikTok — I’ve got too many things on my task list to spend that much time watching short videos of cute cats and angry activists.

I also really like not getting death threats for talking about nerd media

Kate Cox, senior producer

I really miss what Twitter used to be; I was an extremely avid tweeter. But I also really missed what LiveJournal used to be and, before it, what AOL used to be. So here we are.

I’ve never been on Instagram so Threads was a nonstarter, but I’ve landed pretty happily on Bluesky, and all the social interaction I’m willing to do in public is over there. But honestly, it’s still too much trouble to have strong opinions (especially about something like a video game, haha) where everyone can read them — so the majority of my social media time is spent on a small handful of tightly personal Discord spaces. They’re friends and family-style servers; none has more than a hundred members, and the smallest has just five.

Do I miss the open social media era of the internet? So much. But I also really like not getting death threats for talking about nerd media, so Discord it is.

Image: Discord
Discord.

I’ve joined local groups so I can stay up-to-date on what’s going on around town

Emma Roth, news writer

I’m with Barbara — I often use Facebook. After a very long period of trying to stay off social networks, it’s become an invaluable resource for me since moving to a new state. I’ve joined local groups so I can stay up-to-date on what’s going on around town and even meet new people (both of which would otherwise be a challenge while working from home). There are also a few Facebook pages that have become my go-to sources for updates on local weather, helping me navigate this year’s tumultuous hurricane season.

Other than that, I still use X to get real-time updates on breaking news, but I’m trying to fold Threads and Bluesky into my routine, too.

I’d also like to put in a good word for Tumblr, which, yes, is still around

Adi Robertson, senior editor, tech and policy

Twitter (RIP) was my only professional social network for a long time, and after a stint at Mastodon, I’ve settled pretty squarely on Bluesky for now. I love the fact that we’ve got multiple microblogging platforms, and I’m happy for everyone who’s having a good time on Mastodon, but a lot of my old Twitter faves settled on Bluesky and it feels low-stakes and low-pressure in a way Mastodon didn’t for me.

I’d also like to put in a good word for Tumblr, which, yes, is still around — and has a user base that’s uniquely weird, cohesive, and largely indifferent to clout and monetization. Its feature set has somehow coalesced into the perfect system for collaborative culture-making and lightly absurdist microfiction. You’re not gonna get stuff like Goncharov, Second Century Warlord, or the Destiel News Delivery System anywhere else.

If I’m honest, I think I’m done with social media

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, smart home reviewer

As has been said more eloquently by my colleagues, I miss Twitter. I still use X, despite my better judgment, but it’s increasingly becoming unusable, and I’ve yet to find a viable alternative. Threads has too little news and is far too worthy (those earnest “story Threads” are unbearable), Mastodon is too boring, and I just haven’t found my community on Bluesky. I do enjoy a good Discord, which is where many of my smart home tribes have migrated to and is probably where I’ll spend more of my work-related social media time.

But if I’m honest, I think I’m done with social media from a personal vantage. I’ve been an avid user for nearly two decades, since the early Facebook days, largely to stay in touch with friends and family after moving halfway across the world. But as its value in my work diminishes and fewer social networks retain that social feel, it’s time to move on. My digital social networks are now mostly iMessage and WhatsApp chat groups, and that’s fine with me.

Screenshot: Meta
Threads.

Threads is the only platform that lets me build an endless stream of those sweet Verge videos

Sean Hollister, senior editor

I stepped away from social media almost entirely after the death of Twitter — but I’m back on Threads for one reason and one reason alone. I want to share videos of the coolest and most gadgety toys with you, and Meta / Facebook / Instagram’s Threads is the only platform that lets me build an endless stream of those sweet Verge videos just by embedding them. Plus, they natively play in a browser window without requiring you to log in. If Meta ever changes those things (or blows up Threads with ads), I’ll probably have to find a new home.

I’ve also dabbled with Mastodon (both solo and by federating my Threads account), and I technically haven’t deleted my X account yet since I kept it around for DMs… but it’s been a while since I got a message there. Perhaps it’s time.

Read More 

The $1,300 ‘Aura Edition’ laptop doesn’t quite live up to its fancy new Lunar Lake processor. Intel is back, baby. At least for now.
The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a fine-looking 15-inch thin-and-light productivity laptop with an AI coprocessor — another entry in an increasingly crowded field. It has most of what you’d expect from a laptop like this: all-day battery life, a nice screen, a great keyboard, full-sounding speakers, and just a couple of irritating shortcomings.
But the most interesting thing about the Yoga Slim 7i is what’s inside. It’s the first laptop we’ve tested with Intel’s new Lunar Lake processor architecture. Intel has a lot to prove: in the last six months, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips proved Arm processors could match Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs for performance while trouncing them on battery life. And laptops with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips arrived with similar performance, more powerful graphics, and decent-enough battery life to keep them in the game, too. Lunar Lake is essentially Intel’s last chance to stay competitive in thin-and-light laptops.
The good news is that Lunar Lake basically pulls it off. The bad news is that, for a $1,300 laptop, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i falls short in a few too many areas to make it an easy recommendation.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has a sharp 15.3-inch screen, an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, excellent speakers, a great keyboard, a mediocre trackpad, and a whole lot of branding.
The Aura Edition tag is Lenovo’s way of saying it has a Lunar Lake chip and mostly amounts to some AI bloatware. It’s also a Copilot Plus PC. That means that among other things, it has a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) that can perform at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) — the NPU in the Core Ultra 7 256V can do up to 47 TOPS. This puts Lunar Lake laptops like the Yoga Slim 7i in direct competition with the slew of Snapdragon-equipped Copilot Plus PCs released this year, as well as those like the Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips.
Whether you’re working with AI and actually need that NPU or (like most people) you’re just looking for a fast laptop with good battery life, Lunar Lake shows solid gains over Intel’s last-gen Meteor Lake chips in single-core performance and power efficiency. And it means you don’t have to jump ship to Windows on Arm to get improved battery life and standby time.
In daily use, the Yoga Slim 7i feels fast, rarely showing any signs of lag or slowdown. The only times I noticed the tiniest stutters were as I swiped between many Chrome tabs I had open across four virtual desktops. There’s life in that x86 architecture yet.

In single-core benchmarks, the Lunar Lake Core 7 Ultra 256V in the Yoga Slim 7i is imperceptibly faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H (Meteor Lake) chip and about 5 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite 78-100 in Lenovo’s similar Yoga Slim 7x. But it’s nearly 10 percent slower than the higher-clocked Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 or the AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX in the Asus Zenbook S 16.
In multicore, the Lunar Lake chip fell further behind — between 18 and 27 percent slower in Geekbench and 25 to 38 percent in Cinebench. Lunar Lake has four fewer cores than the Snapdragon chips and half of what the Core Ultra 9 18H is working with, so it makes sense that multicore performance is going to take a hit, but it’s a smaller hit than you’d expect given the lower core count.
The bigger offender is the Arc 140V iGPU, which isn’t any better than Meteor Lake in our tests and is about 20 percent slower than the GPU in the AMD-powered Zenbook. Ars Technica and Tom’s Hardware both ran more graphics benchmarks, with mixed results — Lunar Lake’s GPU beat Meteor Lake in some tests, including several actual games, but fell behind in others. It may call for a revisit after Intel delivers more driver updates. Regardless, none of these are gaming machines.
Intel comes out of this looking pretty good, all things considered. The Core 7 Ultra 256V isn’t as fast in our benchmarks as the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 or Ryzen AI 9370HX, but it’s close enough, especially in single-core work. It lasted three hours longer than the Zenbook in our battery rundown test, and it doesn’t have the lingering compatibility issues of the Arm-powered Snapdragon X Elite chip.

In the Yoga Slim 7i, Lunar Lake delivers this competitive performance while maintaining excellent battery life. The Yoga got me through my days on a charge just fine and only lost up to 3 percent charge when left unplugged overnight. I did manage to kill it in nine hours on a heavy workload day, but I kept the screen pretty bright with screen timeout and sleep disabled and Windows’ Energy Saver not kicking in until 10 percent. (I accidentally left the power settings this way from a battery test; I normally stick to a laptop’s default power settings.)
On a day where I left more typical sleep / wake settings on but treated myself to variable 60 to 120Hz refresh rates instead of the default 60Hz, it lasted nearly 11 hours before needing a charge. For a decently sized screen that gets fairly bright with support for both HDR and 120Hz refresh, that ain’t bad at all.
Speaking of the 7i’s screen, its 15.3-inch, 2880 x 1800 IPS panel doesn’t have as vibrant of colors or as deep of blacks as an OLED, but it’s still pleasing to look at unless it’s side by side with an OLED. It’s rated for 500 nits of brightness, and I measured its peak at 512. The Snapdragon-powered Yoga Slim 7x has a 14-inch OLED panel at a slightly higher 2944 x 1840 resolution, but it tops out at 90Hz.
While the screen is good, the 7i’s keyboard, speakers, and port selection are fantastic — which you should expect when you step up to a larger 15-inch laptop. The keys have surprisingly deep travel, with a nice tactile feel. The 7i’s well-built metal frame is fairly thin and has smooth edges that don’t cut into your wrists when you type. The quad-speaker setup sounds quite full for a laptop, making it more than serviceable for enjoying music, podcasts, or taking calls while you work. And it has port selection befitting a productivity machine, with Thunderbolt 4 ports on either side, plus a legacy USB-A port, HDMI-out, and combination headphone / mic jack.

I love having a USB-A and USB-C port on the right side, but I loathe this location for a power button and webcam override.

HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, and a headphone / mic jack — I’ve got no complaints on this side.

So what’s the rub? The biggest offender here is its trackpad, which is oddly short and wide compared to those found on laptops like the Microsoft Surface 7. And unlike the Surface 7’s haptic trackpad, the Yoga Slim’s is annoyingly hard to click toward the top third. (Imagine trying to press a piano key near its hinge.) It’s also excessively sensitive to accidental taps, forcing me to turn off single- and multi-finger taps entirely in Windows settings.
The Slim 7i’s 1080p webcam is passable at best. Its auto-exposure tends toward the washed-out and gets wildly confused when I am backlit by a window. On several occasions, it looked like I was being raptured on a video call for a solid 15 seconds before the camera software could figure out what to do. But the image quality I can live with — unlike its awkwardly placed kill switch. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that the Yoga has a switch to cut power to the webcam at the hardware level, but its location on the right edge of the laptop is annoying. Pulling it out of my bag is usually enough to toggle it off, which means Windows Hello doesn’t work until I figure out what happened. If you’re a frequent commuter, this may get on your nerves.

Lots of other laptops put their webcam switches and shutters right here next to the lens, and that would have been preferable here.

It’s a small-ish flaw I can maybe tolerate, unlike the badgering notifications from Lenovo’s preinstalled Vantage software, upselling services you don’t need. Yes, you can kill the notifications and uninstall Lenovo’s app, but bloat is bloat. And the Vantage app is another example of PC makers desperately trying to find things to do with AI and failing at the execution.
Shield mode, for example, is a setting in the Vantage app that uses your webcam to warn you if onlookers are behind you and could be reading your screen. It can even blur your screen so they can’t read it (and of course, neither can you). But it doesn’t kick in until the interloper is breathing down your neck, at which point you probably don’t need an app to tell you they’re in your space.

Shield mode, thank you.

The downsides of the Yoga Slim 7i aren’t deal-breakers, but they’d be more forgivable on a cheaper machine. $1,300 puts you within range of the 15-inch MacBook Air (which just got a free RAM upgrade), and if you don’t need to run Windows, that laptop offers you even better build quality, an amazing trackpad, and a battery that easily lasts a full day and a bit more.
If you need a Windows thin-and-light today, you’ll get even better battery life from a Snapdragon X laptop like the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, as well as similar specs and a much nicer trackpad, though you’ll have to spend a bit more and deal with (hopefully) minor software compatibility issues. And a Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI gives you better GPU performance, a good trackpad, and an OLED panel for about the same price, but that lovely display isn’t as bright as the Yoga 7i’s and its battery doesn’t last as long.

It’s a clean and tidy design.

But if you remove those ugly preapplied stickers, it should look even better.

So where does that leave us? The Yoga Slim 7i shows you can get good performance and battery life from a Lunar Lake laptop — especially compared to Meteor Lake laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which is nearly a full pound heavier, with a screen that tops out at 60Hz.
As a laptop, the Yoga Slim 7i is fine but not exceptional. As a demonstration of Lunar Lake’s potential, it’s intriguing. The good news is that, if you need a thin-and-light Windows laptop soon, the next few months are going to be very exciting. We’re going to be testing more Strix Point and Lunar Lake laptops from the likes of Acer, Dell, and others. And with CES right around the corner, we’re sure to see a fleet of new options for 2025.
Lunar Lake could very well be a stopgap measure for x86 on our long, inevitable march to Arm-based everything, but it’s showing signs that Intel’s old dog is learning some new tricks.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

The $1,300 ‘Aura Edition’ laptop doesn’t quite live up to its fancy new Lunar Lake processor.

Intel is back, baby. At least for now.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a fine-looking 15-inch thin-and-light productivity laptop with an AI coprocessor — another entry in an increasingly crowded field. It has most of what you’d expect from a laptop like this: all-day battery life, a nice screen, a great keyboard, full-sounding speakers, and just a couple of irritating shortcomings.

But the most interesting thing about the Yoga Slim 7i is what’s inside. It’s the first laptop we’ve tested with Intel’s new Lunar Lake processor architecture. Intel has a lot to prove: in the last six months, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips proved Arm processors could match Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs for performance while trouncing them on battery life. And laptops with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips arrived with similar performance, more powerful graphics, and decent-enough battery life to keep them in the game, too. Lunar Lake is essentially Intel’s last chance to stay competitive in thin-and-light laptops.

The good news is that Lunar Lake basically pulls it off. The bad news is that, for a $1,300 laptop, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i falls short in a few too many areas to make it an easy recommendation.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition has a sharp 15.3-inch screen, an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor, 16GB or 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, excellent speakers, a great keyboard, a mediocre trackpad, and a whole lot of branding.

The Aura Edition tag is Lenovo’s way of saying it has a Lunar Lake chip and mostly amounts to some AI bloatware. It’s also a Copilot Plus PC. That means that among other things, it has a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) that can perform at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) — the NPU in the Core Ultra 7 256V can do up to 47 TOPS. This puts Lunar Lake laptops like the Yoga Slim 7i in direct competition with the slew of Snapdragon-equipped Copilot Plus PCs released this year, as well as those like the Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI chips.

Whether you’re working with AI and actually need that NPU or (like most people) you’re just looking for a fast laptop with good battery life, Lunar Lake shows solid gains over Intel’s last-gen Meteor Lake chips in single-core performance and power efficiency. And it means you don’t have to jump ship to Windows on Arm to get improved battery life and standby time.

In daily use, the Yoga Slim 7i feels fast, rarely showing any signs of lag or slowdown. The only times I noticed the tiniest stutters were as I swiped between many Chrome tabs I had open across four virtual desktops. There’s life in that x86 architecture yet.

In single-core benchmarks, the Lunar Lake Core 7 Ultra 256V in the Yoga Slim 7i is imperceptibly faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H (Meteor Lake) chip and about 5 percent faster than the Snapdragon X Elite 78-100 in Lenovo’s similar Yoga Slim 7x. But it’s nearly 10 percent slower than the higher-clocked Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7 or the AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX in the Asus Zenbook S 16.

In multicore, the Lunar Lake chip fell further behind — between 18 and 27 percent slower in Geekbench and 25 to 38 percent in Cinebench. Lunar Lake has four fewer cores than the Snapdragon chips and half of what the Core Ultra 9 18H is working with, so it makes sense that multicore performance is going to take a hit, but it’s a smaller hit than you’d expect given the lower core count.

The bigger offender is the Arc 140V iGPU, which isn’t any better than Meteor Lake in our tests and is about 20 percent slower than the GPU in the AMD-powered Zenbook. Ars Technica and Tom’s Hardware both ran more graphics benchmarks, with mixed results — Lunar Lake’s GPU beat Meteor Lake in some tests, including several actual games, but fell behind in others. It may call for a revisit after Intel delivers more driver updates. Regardless, none of these are gaming machines.

Intel comes out of this looking pretty good, all things considered. The Core 7 Ultra 256V isn’t as fast in our benchmarks as the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite 80-100 or Ryzen AI 9370HX, but it’s close enough, especially in single-core work. It lasted three hours longer than the Zenbook in our battery rundown test, and it doesn’t have the lingering compatibility issues of the Arm-powered Snapdragon X Elite chip.

In the Yoga Slim 7i, Lunar Lake delivers this competitive performance while maintaining excellent battery life. The Yoga got me through my days on a charge just fine and only lost up to 3 percent charge when left unplugged overnight. I did manage to kill it in nine hours on a heavy workload day, but I kept the screen pretty bright with screen timeout and sleep disabled and Windows’ Energy Saver not kicking in until 10 percent. (I accidentally left the power settings this way from a battery test; I normally stick to a laptop’s default power settings.)

On a day where I left more typical sleep / wake settings on but treated myself to variable 60 to 120Hz refresh rates instead of the default 60Hz, it lasted nearly 11 hours before needing a charge. For a decently sized screen that gets fairly bright with support for both HDR and 120Hz refresh, that ain’t bad at all.

Speaking of the 7i’s screen, its 15.3-inch, 2880 x 1800 IPS panel doesn’t have as vibrant of colors or as deep of blacks as an OLED, but it’s still pleasing to look at unless it’s side by side with an OLED. It’s rated for 500 nits of brightness, and I measured its peak at 512. The Snapdragon-powered Yoga Slim 7x has a 14-inch OLED panel at a slightly higher 2944 x 1840 resolution, but it tops out at 90Hz.

While the screen is good, the 7i’s keyboard, speakers, and port selection are fantastic — which you should expect when you step up to a larger 15-inch laptop. The keys have surprisingly deep travel, with a nice tactile feel. The 7i’s well-built metal frame is fairly thin and has smooth edges that don’t cut into your wrists when you type. The quad-speaker setup sounds quite full for a laptop, making it more than serviceable for enjoying music, podcasts, or taking calls while you work. And it has port selection befitting a productivity machine, with Thunderbolt 4 ports on either side, plus a legacy USB-A port, HDMI-out, and combination headphone / mic jack.

So what’s the rub? The biggest offender here is its trackpad, which is oddly short and wide compared to those found on laptops like the Microsoft Surface 7. And unlike the Surface 7’s haptic trackpad, the Yoga Slim’s is annoyingly hard to click toward the top third. (Imagine trying to press a piano key near its hinge.) It’s also excessively sensitive to accidental taps, forcing me to turn off single- and multi-finger taps entirely in Windows settings.

The Slim 7i’s 1080p webcam is passable at best. Its auto-exposure tends toward the washed-out and gets wildly confused when I am backlit by a window. On several occasions, it looked like I was being raptured on a video call for a solid 15 seconds before the camera software could figure out what to do. But the image quality I can live with — unlike its awkwardly placed kill switch. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that the Yoga has a switch to cut power to the webcam at the hardware level, but its location on the right edge of the laptop is annoying. Pulling it out of my bag is usually enough to toggle it off, which means Windows Hello doesn’t work until I figure out what happened. If you’re a frequent commuter, this may get on your nerves.

Lots of other laptops put their webcam switches and shutters right here next to the lens, and that would have been preferable here.

It’s a small-ish flaw I can maybe tolerate, unlike the badgering notifications from Lenovo’s preinstalled Vantage software, upselling services you don’t need. Yes, you can kill the notifications and uninstall Lenovo’s app, but bloat is bloat. And the Vantage app is another example of PC makers desperately trying to find things to do with AI and failing at the execution.

Shield mode, for example, is a setting in the Vantage app that uses your webcam to warn you if onlookers are behind you and could be reading your screen. It can even blur your screen so they can’t read it (and of course, neither can you). But it doesn’t kick in until the interloper is breathing down your neck, at which point you probably don’t need an app to tell you they’re in your space.

Shield mode, thank you.

The downsides of the Yoga Slim 7i aren’t deal-breakers, but they’d be more forgivable on a cheaper machine. $1,300 puts you within range of the 15-inch MacBook Air (which just got a free RAM upgrade), and if you don’t need to run Windows, that laptop offers you even better build quality, an amazing trackpad, and a battery that easily lasts a full day and a bit more.

If you need a Windows thin-and-light today, you’ll get even better battery life from a Snapdragon X laptop like the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, as well as similar specs and a much nicer trackpad, though you’ll have to spend a bit more and deal with (hopefully) minor software compatibility issues. And a Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Ryzen AI gives you better GPU performance, a good trackpad, and an OLED panel for about the same price, but that lovely display isn’t as bright as the Yoga 7i’s and its battery doesn’t last as long.

It’s a clean and tidy design.

But if you remove those ugly preapplied stickers, it should look even better.

So where does that leave us? The Yoga Slim 7i shows you can get good performance and battery life from a Lunar Lake laptop — especially compared to Meteor Lake laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which is nearly a full pound heavier, with a screen that tops out at 60Hz.

As a laptop, the Yoga Slim 7i is fine but not exceptional. As a demonstration of Lunar Lake’s potential, it’s intriguing. The good news is that, if you need a thin-and-light Windows laptop soon, the next few months are going to be very exciting. We’re going to be testing more Strix Point and Lunar Lake laptops from the likes of Acer, Dell, and others. And with CES right around the corner, we’re sure to see a fleet of new options for 2025.

Lunar Lake could very well be a stopgap measure for x86 on our long, inevitable march to Arm-based everything, but it’s showing signs that Intel’s old dog is learning some new tricks.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid

Retro Game Corps isn’t Nintendo’s typical mark. Could he fight back? Russ Crandall knows how to reinvent himself. At 24, he relearned how to walk and write after a stroke impacted his brain. When open-heart surgery wasn’t enough to address a rare autoimmune disease, he adopted a paleo diet — and became a New York Times bestselling cookbook author and food blogger following his seemingly miraculous recovery. Last year, he retired from a 22-year career as a US Navy translator to become a full-time YouTuber instead.
Now, he’s wondering if Nintendo will force him to change yet again.
Crandall runs Retro Game Corps, a YouTube channel with half a million subscribers that shows hundreds of ways to play classic games using modern hardware and emulation. If there’s a handheld gaming device released in the past four years, odds are Crandall has made a 20-minute video about it. He started the channel as a hobby in 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic but soon realized it could become his day job.
So, last year, he shut down his food blog — “I was kind of done telling people what to eat,” he says — and left the military with the rank of master chief petty officer.

Selfie by Russ Crandall

Yes, Retro Game Corps was a master chief, just like in Halo. (I saw his DD-214.)

But four years into his YouTube career, on September 28th, Crandall saw how easily his new life as a content creator could disintegrate. Walking back from his studio after pulling an all-nighter, he checked his phone to see if a just-edited video was uploading properly. It was — but another one of his videos vanished before his eyes. Days earlier, he’d published a 14-minute video about how well Nintendo Wii U games can run on Android handhelds, and now it had been wiped from YouTube.
“This can’t be happening,” he recalls saying out loud. A few minutes later, a YouTube email confirmed it wasn’t a glitch: Nintendo had issued a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube had removed his video, and his entire 500,000-subscriber channel was now at risk of permanent deletion.
“We’ll have to terminate your channel” after one more strike, YouTube warned
It was his second YouTube copyright strike from Nintendo, and Crandall says that’s when it truly sank in. YouTube maintains a strict “three strikes, you’re out” rule, and he realized his family’s livelihood depended on preventing strike number three. “It all sort of came crashing down in that moment,” he tells The Verge.
In a panic, he rushed back to the studio, canceled his upload, and publicly declared that Nintendo was targeting him. He would begin self-censoring all his videos to hopefully escape the Japanese company’s wrath. “I will no longer show any Nintendo games on-screen,” he told his fans and related communities on Reddit, YouTube, and social networks.
Nintendo was well within its rights to ask for a takedown, of course: Crandall had shown the company’s copyrighted content onscreen. And yet that doesn’t explain the copyright strike at all since countless Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers show Nintendo content every single day. Clearly, Nintendo was using copyright as a pretext to get these videos taken down.

Crandall says he received this YouTube notice on September 28th.

Most institutions have historically taken Nintendo’s legal threats seriously. Countless fan projects, including unofficial remakes and sequels, have been voluntarily terminated by their creators after receiving cease and desist orders from Nintendo. While the technology behind video game emulators is generally considered legal, even the lead developers of the Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx folded when Nintendo came knocking on their doors.
But unlike many of those developers, Crandall isn’t some pseudonymous person who could slink back into the internet’s shadows. Nor is he someone Nintendo can readily accuse of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” like Yuzu, for distributing software tools.
Even among content creators, Crandall doesn’t seem like the kind of person Nintendo usually threatens — he’s known for advocating that people should buy Nintendo products before they use emulators and often shows off physical cartridges in his videos to drive that message home.
“If I’m playing a Switch game on my Steam Deck, the cartridge will be there or the box will be there to indicate that I have purchased the game,” he says. While he admits he hasn’t done that 100 percent of the time, he’s been careful with Nintendo Switch games in particular. In one of the videos that YouTube removed, he flips through a wallet full of 80 genuine cartridges. He also produces guides on how to create personal backups of your own genuine classic games.

Here’s his wallet of 80 genuine Switch cartridges, from one of the videos that Nintendo asked YouTube to remove.

That’s why the community was so surprised when Nintendo targeted him, of all YouTubers — and it’s why Crandall might possibly take the unusual step of challenging Nintendo’s takedowns.
Crandall says he’s been a Nintendo fan for nearly 40 years, ever since his family bought an NES for Christmas in 1985. The copyright strikes hit hard. “This is the first actual interaction I’ve had with Nintendo, and it’s crazy. I feature most of their games not because I’m trying to, like, stick it to them, but just sharing the love of those games,” he says.
But he does have a guess as to why Nintendo targeted him. The first copyright strike landed on his video about the MIG Dumper and the MIG Flash, a pair of devices that let you turn genuine Nintendo Switch cartridges into digital files and then carry around an entire library of those ROMs in a special microSD-equipped flash cartridge for your console. I’ve watched the video, and while Crandall does explicitly take an anti-piracy stance, it’s easy to imagine these gadgets being used by bad actors, too.
“I think the first strike was simply due to the fact that they wanted to minimize attention around the MIG Flash cartridge and dumper, and they had an opportunity,” Crandall says. That opportunity was a relatively tiny mistake: unlike, say, fellow YouTuber Taki Udon’s video on the MIG products, Retro Game Corps showed off four seconds of the title screen of Mario to prove the MIG hardware could legitimately dump and run games, potentially infringing Nintendo’s exclusive right to distribute and / or perform its audiovisual intellectual property.

In one of the videos YouTube removed, Crandall never shows more than the title screen of this Nintendo game.

Isn’t that fair use? Crandall thinks so. It seems like his uses could be brief, limited, and educational enough to satisfy the four-factor fair use test, and arguing that could genuinely get him out of YouTube purgatory. I could easily find dozens of similar examples in our journalism here at The Verge. But in order to submit what’s called a “copyright counter notification” with YouTube, which argues that he’s been inaccurately targeted and isn’t infringing on someone’s copyright, Crandall would have to open himself up to a potential Nintendo lawsuit.
“It’s a dangerous game,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast. “You really don’t want to get into federal court over something that even if you win, will be an expensive and time-consuming burden.”
But Crandall knows this — he seems quite read up on both the DMCA and YouTube processes — and yet he’s considered at least trying his luck. Crandall says he’s conflicted; he doesn’t want to “poke the bear.” He has his family to think about. But it’s possible Nintendo could continue to come after him, he admits, even if he lies low.
While he’s already eliminated Nintendo games from his testing suite for all future videos, he says he simply doesn’t have time to go back through the hundreds of videos he’s created that already contain Mario footage and blur or delete every last scrap. And yet, the way things stand, Nintendo could pick any of those videos to immediately designate his channel for deletion.
Companies can freely pick and choose who they target with copyright infringement complaints and lawsuits, several legal experts tell me. Unlike with trademarks, they don’t need to actively or consistently defend their works in order to maintain their rights.
Crandall says that even YouTube initially thought that perhaps Nintendo made a mistake when targeting him. He’s part of the YouTube Partner Program, and his designated partner manager told him to sit tight while YouTube asked Nintendo if it might retract its own takedown requests. But Nintendo wouldn’t, and YouTube has now told him he’s on his own.

Image via Russ Crandall
On November 23rd, one of the copyright strikes should simply expire — unless Nintendo makes a move before then.

As of late October, he’s waffling. He could simply wait two more months until YouTube’s 90-day copyright strikes expire because, as soon as they do, his channel will no longer be in danger of immediate termination. Nintendo’s takedown requests already succeeded in removing those videos, and he can hope Nintendo feels it’s made enough of an example out of him to do anything more.
Or he can submit a document that shows he’s not willing to be that example, not willing to be pushed around by Nintendo — and hope it doesn’t land him in a world of legal hurt.
It’s painful for Crandall, who has been a lifelong fan of Nintendo’s work. Even after a long day of making videos about games, he likes to relax by playing through a couple of classic Mario or Donkey Kong levels, purely to admire the artistry and design. “Since the second strike I haven’t been doing that much at all, because even just seeing the box art leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth,” he says.
Nintendo didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid

Retro Game Corps isn’t Nintendo’s typical mark. Could he fight back?

Russ Crandall knows how to reinvent himself. At 24, he relearned how to walk and write after a stroke impacted his brain. When open-heart surgery wasn’t enough to address a rare autoimmune disease, he adopted a paleo diet — and became a New York Times bestselling cookbook author and food blogger following his seemingly miraculous recovery. Last year, he retired from a 22-year career as a US Navy translator to become a full-time YouTuber instead.

Now, he’s wondering if Nintendo will force him to change yet again.

Crandall runs Retro Game Corps, a YouTube channel with half a million subscribers that shows hundreds of ways to play classic games using modern hardware and emulation. If there’s a handheld gaming device released in the past four years, odds are Crandall has made a 20-minute video about it. He started the channel as a hobby in 2020 during the covid-19 pandemic but soon realized it could become his day job.

So, last year, he shut down his food blog — “I was kind of done telling people what to eat,” he says — and left the military with the rank of master chief petty officer.

Selfie by Russ Crandall

Yes, Retro Game Corps was a master chief, just like in Halo. (I saw his DD-214.)

But four years into his YouTube career, on September 28th, Crandall saw how easily his new life as a content creator could disintegrate. Walking back from his studio after pulling an all-nighter, he checked his phone to see if a just-edited video was uploading properly. It was — but another one of his videos vanished before his eyes. Days earlier, he’d published a 14-minute video about how well Nintendo Wii U games can run on Android handhelds, and now it had been wiped from YouTube.

“This can’t be happening,” he recalls saying out loud. A few minutes later, a YouTube email confirmed it wasn’t a glitch: Nintendo had issued a DMCA takedown notice, YouTube had removed his video, and his entire 500,000-subscriber channel was now at risk of permanent deletion.

It was his second YouTube copyright strike from Nintendo, and Crandall says that’s when it truly sank in. YouTube maintains a strict “three strikes, you’re out” rule, and he realized his family’s livelihood depended on preventing strike number three. “It all sort of came crashing down in that moment,” he tells The Verge.

In a panic, he rushed back to the studio, canceled his upload, and publicly declared that Nintendo was targeting him. He would begin self-censoring all his videos to hopefully escape the Japanese company’s wrath. “I will no longer show any Nintendo games on-screen,” he told his fans and related communities on Reddit, YouTube, and social networks.

Nintendo was well within its rights to ask for a takedown, of course: Crandall had shown the company’s copyrighted content onscreen. And yet that doesn’t explain the copyright strike at all since countless Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers show Nintendo content every single day. Clearly, Nintendo was using copyright as a pretext to get these videos taken down.

Most institutions have historically taken Nintendo’s legal threats seriously. Countless fan projects, including unofficial remakes and sequels, have been voluntarily terminated by their creators after receiving cease and desist orders from Nintendo. While the technology behind video game emulators is generally considered legal, even the lead developers of the Nintendo Switch emulators Yuzu and Ryujinx folded when Nintendo came knocking on their doors.

But unlike many of those developers, Crandall isn’t some pseudonymous person who could slink back into the internet’s shadows. Nor is he someone Nintendo can readily accuse of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” like Yuzu, for distributing software tools.

Even among content creators, Crandall doesn’t seem like the kind of person Nintendo usually threatens — he’s known for advocating that people should buy Nintendo products before they use emulators and often shows off physical cartridges in his videos to drive that message home.

“If I’m playing a Switch game on my Steam Deck, the cartridge will be there or the box will be there to indicate that I have purchased the game,” he says. While he admits he hasn’t done that 100 percent of the time, he’s been careful with Nintendo Switch games in particular. In one of the videos that YouTube removed, he flips through a wallet full of 80 genuine cartridges. He also produces guides on how to create personal backups of your own genuine classic games.

That’s why the community was so surprised when Nintendo targeted him, of all YouTubers — and it’s why Crandall might possibly take the unusual step of challenging Nintendo’s takedowns.

Crandall says he’s been a Nintendo fan for nearly 40 years, ever since his family bought an NES for Christmas in 1985. The copyright strikes hit hard. “This is the first actual interaction I’ve had with Nintendo, and it’s crazy. I feature most of their games not because I’m trying to, like, stick it to them, but just sharing the love of those games,” he says.

But he does have a guess as to why Nintendo targeted him. The first copyright strike landed on his video about the MIG Dumper and the MIG Flash, a pair of devices that let you turn genuine Nintendo Switch cartridges into digital files and then carry around an entire library of those ROMs in a special microSD-equipped flash cartridge for your console. I’ve watched the video, and while Crandall does explicitly take an anti-piracy stance, it’s easy to imagine these gadgets being used by bad actors, too.

“I think the first strike was simply due to the fact that they wanted to minimize attention around the MIG Flash cartridge and dumper, and they had an opportunity,” Crandall says. That opportunity was a relatively tiny mistake: unlike, say, fellow YouTuber Taki Udon’s video on the MIG products, Retro Game Corps showed off four seconds of the title screen of Mario to prove the MIG hardware could legitimately dump and run games, potentially infringing Nintendo’s exclusive right to distribute and / or perform its audiovisual intellectual property.

Isn’t that fair use? Crandall thinks so. It seems like his uses could be brief, limited, and educational enough to satisfy the four-factor fair use test, and arguing that could genuinely get him out of YouTube purgatory. I could easily find dozens of similar examples in our journalism here at The Verge. But in order to submit what’s called a “copyright counter notification” with YouTube, which argues that he’s been inaccurately targeted and isn’t infringing on someone’s copyright, Crandall would have to open himself up to a potential Nintendo lawsuit.

“It’s a dangerous game,” says Richard Hoeg, a business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast. “You really don’t want to get into federal court over something that even if you win, will be an expensive and time-consuming burden.”

But Crandall knows this — he seems quite read up on both the DMCA and YouTube processes — and yet he’s considered at least trying his luck. Crandall says he’s conflicted; he doesn’t want to “poke the bear.” He has his family to think about. But it’s possible Nintendo could continue to come after him, he admits, even if he lies low.

While he’s already eliminated Nintendo games from his testing suite for all future videos, he says he simply doesn’t have time to go back through the hundreds of videos he’s created that already contain Mario footage and blur or delete every last scrap. And yet, the way things stand, Nintendo could pick any of those videos to immediately designate his channel for deletion.

Companies can freely pick and choose who they target with copyright infringement complaints and lawsuits, several legal experts tell me. Unlike with trademarks, they don’t need to actively or consistently defend their works in order to maintain their rights.

Crandall says that even YouTube initially thought that perhaps Nintendo made a mistake when targeting him. He’s part of the YouTube Partner Program, and his designated partner manager told him to sit tight while YouTube asked Nintendo if it might retract its own takedown requests. But Nintendo wouldn’t, and YouTube has now told him he’s on his own.

As of late October, he’s waffling. He could simply wait two more months until YouTube’s 90-day copyright strikes expire because, as soon as they do, his channel will no longer be in danger of immediate termination. Nintendo’s takedown requests already succeeded in removing those videos, and he can hope Nintendo feels it’s made enough of an example out of him to do anything more.

Or he can submit a document that shows he’s not willing to be that example, not willing to be pushed around by Nintendo — and hope it doesn’t land him in a world of legal hurt.

It’s painful for Crandall, who has been a lifelong fan of Nintendo’s work. Even after a long day of making videos about games, he likes to relax by playing through a couple of classic Mario or Donkey Kong levels, purely to admire the artistry and design. “Since the second strike I haven’t been doing that much at all, because even just seeing the box art leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth,” he says.

Nintendo didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Read More 

Hardware is hard. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Apple’s journey to making its own wireless chips has been a long one, but the end might be in sight. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo posted on X that Apple’s switch to its own in-house Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chips will start with the iPhone 17 in the second half of next year.
Kuo also agrees with 9to5Mac’s report that the iPhone SE 4, expected in spring of 2025, will be the first device to use Apple’s own homemade 5G modem. He says that the SE will continue using a third-party Wi-Fi chip made by Broadcom, and that the iPhone 17 will be the first device to use both an Apple-made modem and Wi-Fi chip.
Modems are hard, apparently. Apple has been trying to get away from using Qualcomm’s RF modems since at least 2019, when it bought Intel’s modem division. That’s because Apple famously likes to control its own destiny, and also, Qualcomm and Apple hate each other’s guts. According to reports, the iPhone 15 was supposed to be the first Apple phone with the new modem, but that proved to be an unrealistic target. The modem wasn’t ready for this year’s iPhones either.
The budget-friendly iPhone SE series is due for a serious upgrade, and it looks like Apple intends to add a lot more than just a new custom modem. Rumors suggest it will come with an OLED screen for the first time, Face ID, and will support Apple Intelligence. But those aren’t the only upgrades it might see: a higher price tag could be in the cards, too.

Hardware is hard. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Apple’s journey to making its own wireless chips has been a long one, but the end might be in sight. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo posted on X that Apple’s switch to its own in-house Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chips will start with the iPhone 17 in the second half of next year.

Kuo also agrees with 9to5Mac’s report that the iPhone SE 4, expected in spring of 2025, will be the first device to use Apple’s own homemade 5G modem. He says that the SE will continue using a third-party Wi-Fi chip made by Broadcom, and that the iPhone 17 will be the first device to use both an Apple-made modem and Wi-Fi chip.

Modems are hard, apparently. Apple has been trying to get away from using Qualcomm’s RF modems since at least 2019, when it bought Intel’s modem division. That’s because Apple famously likes to control its own destiny, and also, Qualcomm and Apple hate each other’s guts. According to reports, the iPhone 15 was supposed to be the first Apple phone with the new modem, but that proved to be an unrealistic target. The modem wasn’t ready for this year’s iPhones either.

The budget-friendly iPhone SE series is due for a serious upgrade, and it looks like Apple intends to add a lot more than just a new custom modem. Rumors suggest it will come with an OLED screen for the first time, Face ID, and will support Apple Intelligence. But those aren’t the only upgrades it might see: a higher price tag could be in the cards, too.

Read More 

The Quick Insert button is on the Galaxy Chromebook Plus and is coming to future 2025 Chromebooks. | Image: Google

Starting today, Google’s ChromeOS 130 update with Quick Insert, Focus Mode, Welcome Recap, and other features is rolling out. Chromebook Plus models with NPU also get exclusive special features in 130, such as the new recorder app with AI, enhanced mic, camera effects, and Gemini AI tools like “help me read” summaries.
There’s a long list of changes in 130, but here are some highlights. Quick Insert is a way to add emoji, GIFs, or links to recently visited sites and access AI features from a menu. On most devices, that means using the launcher or Google button plus f on your keyboard. The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is the first Chromebook to replace the launcher key with a new button that activates Quick Insert with a single press, but more devices launching next year will have it, too.
Focus Mode lets you activate do not disturb and schedule time to reduce distractions while you work, while Welcome Recap is an opt-in feature that summarizes whatever you were doing last so you can reopen apps and tabs to get back to work quickly.

Image: Google
Welcome Recap.

The Quick Insert button is on the Galaxy Chromebook Plus and is coming to future 2025 Chromebooks. | Image: Google

Starting today, Google’s ChromeOS 130 update with Quick Insert, Focus Mode, Welcome Recap, and other features is rolling out. Chromebook Plus models with NPU also get exclusive special features in 130, such as the new recorder app with AI, enhanced mic, camera effects, and Gemini AI tools like “help me read” summaries.

There’s a long list of changes in 130, but here are some highlights. Quick Insert is a way to add emoji, GIFs, or links to recently visited sites and access AI features from a menu. On most devices, that means using the launcher or Google button plus f on your keyboard. The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is the first Chromebook to replace the launcher key with a new button that activates Quick Insert with a single press, but more devices launching next year will have it, too.

Focus Mode lets you activate do not disturb and schedule time to reduce distractions while you work, while Welcome Recap is an opt-in feature that summarizes whatever you were doing last so you can reopen apps and tabs to get back to work quickly.

Image: Google
Welcome Recap.

Read More 

Nvidia made a fortune on the AI boom. AMD’s rival AI chip became the fastest ramping product in its history, already pulling in $1 billion per quarter and inspiring AMD to remake itself as an AI company too. But Intel, which suggested it would pull in $1 billion, even $2 billion on the back of AI in 2024, now says it won’t even meet its more modest $500 million goal for its Gaudi AI accelerator this year.

“We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today.
Though Intel just launched its recent Gaudi 3 accelerator this past quarter, said Gelsinger, “the overall uptake of Gaudi has been slower than we anticipated as adoption rates were impacted by the product transition from Gaudi 2 to Gaudi 3 and software ease of use.”
Despite the missed goal, Gelsinger says “we remain encouraged by the market available to us. There is clear need for solutions with superior [total cost of ownership] based on open standards, and we are continuing to enhance the Gaudi value proposition.”
Later on the call, Gelsinger seemingly had some sour grapes to share, pointing out how so far, the industry’s huge spend on AI chips has been focused on training AI models in the cloud. “Training is creating the weather model, not using it,” he says, suggesting once again that putting AI into all the chips, not just ones in the cloud, might be more important in the long run.
Intel reported $13.3 billion in revenue in quarterly earnings today, down 6 percent year over year but up compared to last quarter — and losses of a whopping $16.6 billion. But those losses were based on $18.5 billion of impairments and restructuring charges, the cost of Intel’s decision to rework itself for more profitability in the future.
Last quarter it announced a $10 billion cost reduction plan and over 15,000 layoffs, and it’s now detailing some of the structural shifts inside the company too — including moving its edge computing business into the Client Computing Group that generally handles its desktop and laptop chips, and integrating its software teams into the company’s core business units.
Gelsinger says Intel will “focus on fewer projects, with the top priority to be to maximize the value of our x86 franchise across the client, edge, and data center markets.”

Nvidia made a fortune on the AI boom. AMD’s rival AI chip became the fastest ramping product in its history, already pulling in $1 billion per quarter and inspiring AMD to remake itself as an AI company too. But Intel, which suggested it would pull in $1 billion, even $2 billion on the back of AI in 2024, now says it won’t even meet its more modest $500 million goal for its Gaudi AI accelerator this year.

“We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today.

Though Intel just launched its recent Gaudi 3 accelerator this past quarter, said Gelsinger, “the overall uptake of Gaudi has been slower than we anticipated as adoption rates were impacted by the product transition from Gaudi 2 to Gaudi 3 and software ease of use.”

Despite the missed goal, Gelsinger says “we remain encouraged by the market available to us. There is clear need for solutions with superior [total cost of ownership] based on open standards, and we are continuing to enhance the Gaudi value proposition.”

Later on the call, Gelsinger seemingly had some sour grapes to share, pointing out how so far, the industry’s huge spend on AI chips has been focused on training AI models in the cloud. “Training is creating the weather model, not using it,” he says, suggesting once again that putting AI into all the chips, not just ones in the cloud, might be more important in the long run.

Intel reported $13.3 billion in revenue in quarterly earnings today, down 6 percent year over year but up compared to last quarter — and losses of a whopping $16.6 billion. But those losses were based on $18.5 billion of impairments and restructuring charges, the cost of Intel’s decision to rework itself for more profitability in the future.

Last quarter it announced a $10 billion cost reduction plan and over 15,000 layoffs, and it’s now detailing some of the structural shifts inside the company too — including moving its edge computing business into the Client Computing Group that generally handles its desktop and laptop chips, and integrating its software teams into the company’s core business units.

Gelsinger says Intel will “focus on fewer projects, with the top priority to be to maximize the value of our x86 franchise across the client, edge, and data center markets.”

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In the week’s least surprising news, Amazon’s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa — billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant — has been pushed back. Again. “A person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were recently told that their target deadline had been moved into 2025,” writes Bloomberg.
The revamped voice assistant, first announced last September, was expected to arrive this year, toting ChatGPT-style intelligence and more natural, conversational interactions. But earlier this summer, Fortune reported that the new Alexa might never be ready. Then, for the first time in half a decade, fall came and went without a big splashy Amazon event, and the rumors appeared to be true.
It seems we can’t have a smarter Alexa and a more capable Alexa.
As further evidence that the company is retrenching, Amazon has cut off access to the beta of the new Alexa. You used to be able to request access by saying, “Alexa, let’s chat” to an Echo device. Now, the assistant responds with, “Let’s Chat is no longer available. For now, you can ask me questions or do things like set a timer, play music, turn on a connected light, and more.”
Bloomberg’s sources say those beta users who did get to chat have been unimpressed (I requested access several times but with no luck). Responses were slow, sounded stiff, and weren’t “all that useful,” they said. Plus, the new Alexa messes up smart home integrations, hallucinates, and apparently tries to show off. Bloomberg reports:
One tester says the ongoing hallucinations aren’t always wrong, just uncalled for, as if Alexa is trying to show off its newfound prowess. For instance, before, if you asked Alexa what halftime show Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at, it might say the 2004 Super Bowl. Now, it’s just as likely to give a long-winded addendum about the infamous wardrobe malfunction.
The challenge appears to lie in integrating large language models with the command and control method of today’s voice assistants. It seems we can’t have a smarter Alexa and a more capable Alexa. According to Bloomberg’s sources, using pre-trained AI models allows Alexa to answer more complicated questions but makes it more likely to fail at setting a kitchen timer or controlling smart lights.

Old Alexa may have its issues, but it can (mostly) reliably control my smart lights. No one is asking for a digital assistant they can chat with at home, but who won’t get off the couch to turn out the lights. I have my husband for that.
Bloomberg reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has yet to convey a compelling vision for an AI-powered Alexa to the company. While he’s said publicly, “We continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa … ”, there’s been scant information about what an LLM-powered Alexa will bring to its millions of users — beyond being able to converse more naturally. More importantly, it seems Amazon has yet to prove it can do this without diminishing the features customers use the assistant for every day.
No one is asking for a digital assistant they can chat with, but who won’t get off the couch to turn out the lights.
While the company searches for its vision, Jassy has installed a new head of the devices and services division under which Alexa falls. Panos Panay has been at the company for a year now, and Bloomberg reports the former head of Microsoft’s Surface division has “brought a focus on higher-quality design to a group adept at utilitarian gadgets.”
As I wrote this week, Amazon’s prior tact of making copious amounts of cheap hardware at the expense of better software is partly why Alexa hasn’t gotten measurably smarter over the last decade. However, with better hardware and a focus on building on Alexa’s strength, rather than simply turning it into a chatbot, the company could recapture Jeff Bezos’s original vision of creating Star Trek’s “Computer.” But whatever the plan is for a new Alexa, it looks like it won’t be here anytime soon.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In the week’s least surprising news, Amazon’s reinvention of its Alexa voice assistant has reportedly fallen even further behind. According to Bloomberg, the launch of a new Alexa — billed as a smarter, more capable AI-powered voice assistant — has been pushed back. Again. “A person familiar with the matter said Alexa AI teams were recently told that their target deadline had been moved into 2025,” writes Bloomberg.

The revamped voice assistant, first announced last September, was expected to arrive this year, toting ChatGPT-style intelligence and more natural, conversational interactions. But earlier this summer, Fortune reported that the new Alexa might never be ready. Then, for the first time in half a decade, fall came and went without a big splashy Amazon event, and the rumors appeared to be true.

As further evidence that the company is retrenching, Amazon has cut off access to the beta of the new Alexa. You used to be able to request access by saying, “Alexa, let’s chat” to an Echo device. Now, the assistant responds with, “Let’s Chat is no longer available. For now, you can ask me questions or do things like set a timer, play music, turn on a connected light, and more.”

Bloomberg’s sources say those beta users who did get to chat have been unimpressed (I requested access several times but with no luck). Responses were slow, sounded stiff, and weren’t “all that useful,” they said. Plus, the new Alexa messes up smart home integrations, hallucinates, and apparently tries to show off. Bloomberg reports:

One tester says the ongoing hallucinations aren’t always wrong, just uncalled for, as if Alexa is trying to show off its newfound prowess. For instance, before, if you asked Alexa what halftime show Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at, it might say the 2004 Super Bowl. Now, it’s just as likely to give a long-winded addendum about the infamous wardrobe malfunction.

The challenge appears to lie in integrating large language models with the command and control method of today’s voice assistants. It seems we can’t have a smarter Alexa and a more capable Alexa. According to Bloomberg’s sources, using pre-trained AI models allows Alexa to answer more complicated questions but makes it more likely to fail at setting a kitchen timer or controlling smart lights.

Old Alexa may have its issues, but it can (mostly) reliably control my smart lights. No one is asking for a digital assistant they can chat with at home, but who won’t get off the couch to turn out the lights. I have my husband for that.

Bloomberg reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has yet to convey a compelling vision for an AI-powered Alexa to the company. While he’s said publicly, “We continue to re-architect the brain of Alexa … ”, there’s been scant information about what an LLM-powered Alexa will bring to its millions of users — beyond being able to converse more naturally. More importantly, it seems Amazon has yet to prove it can do this without diminishing the features customers use the assistant for every day.

While the company searches for its vision, Jassy has installed a new head of the devices and services division under which Alexa falls. Panos Panay has been at the company for a year now, and Bloomberg reports the former head of Microsoft’s Surface division has “brought a focus on higher-quality design to a group adept at utilitarian gadgets.”

As I wrote this week, Amazon’s prior tact of making copious amounts of cheap hardware at the expense of better software is partly why Alexa hasn’t gotten measurably smarter over the last decade. However, with better hardware and a focus on building on Alexa’s strength, rather than simply turning it into a chatbot, the company could recapture Jeff Bezos’s original vision of creating Star Trek’s “Computer.” But whatever the plan is for a new Alexa, it looks like it won’t be here anytime soon.

Read More 

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

To cap off a busy week that saw the rollout of the first Apple Intelligence features and several new Macs, Apple reported its fiscal Q4 earnings this afternoon. The period included very early sales of the iPhone 16 lineup, offering a chance to gauge the momentum of the company’s latest phones. The Apple Watch Series 10 and AirPods 4 were also released during the quarter. CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that sales of the iPhone 15 were “stronger than 14 in the year-ago quarter, and 16 was stronger than 15.”
The company reported revenue of $94.9 billion, which is a new record for the September quarter and up 6 percent year over year. The strong performance was dampened somewhat by a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion that Apple paid to Ireland after a long-running tax dispute. Nearly every segment of Apple’s business was also up with the exception of the “wearables, home, and accessories” category. iPad revenues were up 8 percent after Apple finally introduced new iPad Pro and iPad Air models in the spring.
Apple’s first set of AI-powered Apple Intelligence capabilities are mostly focused on summarization, writing tools, and image cleanup. ChatGPT integration and the ability to generate images will come with iOS 18.2 in December. “We’re getting great feedback from customers and developers already and a really early stat, which is only three days worth of data: users are adopting iOS 18.1 at twice the rate that they adopted 17.1 in the year ago quarter,” Cook told CNBC.

The iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro were all refreshed this week with Apple’s latest M4 silicon. The Mini underwent a substantial redesign and is now smaller than ever. It’s rumored that M4 editions of the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and Mac Studio will follow sometime next year. Apple refreshed the iPad Mini earlier this month. This batch of new hardware, along with the iPhone 16 lineup and wearables, could boost Apple’s performance in the all-important holiday quarter.
Lurking in the background of all this is an antitrust suit against Apple from the US Department of Justice, plus European Union guidelines that have forced Apple to make the iPhone more open to new default apps and services.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

To cap off a busy week that saw the rollout of the first Apple Intelligence features and several new Macs, Apple reported its fiscal Q4 earnings this afternoon. The period included very early sales of the iPhone 16 lineup, offering a chance to gauge the momentum of the company’s latest phones. The Apple Watch Series 10 and AirPods 4 were also released during the quarter. CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that sales of the iPhone 15 were “stronger than 14 in the year-ago quarter, and 16 was stronger than 15.”

The company reported revenue of $94.9 billion, which is a new record for the September quarter and up 6 percent year over year. The strong performance was dampened somewhat by a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion that Apple paid to Ireland after a long-running tax dispute. Nearly every segment of Apple’s business was also up with the exception of the “wearables, home, and accessories” category. iPad revenues were up 8 percent after Apple finally introduced new iPad Pro and iPad Air models in the spring.

Apple’s first set of AI-powered Apple Intelligence capabilities are mostly focused on summarization, writing tools, and image cleanup. ChatGPT integration and the ability to generate images will come with iOS 18.2 in December. “We’re getting great feedback from customers and developers already and a really early stat, which is only three days worth of data: users are adopting iOS 18.1 at twice the rate that they adopted 17.1 in the year ago quarter,” Cook told CNBC.

The iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro were all refreshed this week with Apple’s latest M4 silicon. The Mini underwent a substantial redesign and is now smaller than ever. It’s rumored that M4 editions of the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and Mac Studio will follow sometime next year. Apple refreshed the iPad Mini earlier this month. This batch of new hardware, along with the iPhone 16 lineup and wearables, could boost Apple’s performance in the all-important holiday quarter.

Lurking in the background of all this is an antitrust suit against Apple from the US Department of Justice, plus European Union guidelines that have forced Apple to make the iPhone more open to new default apps and services.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

The music streaming app Tidal is laying off more workers. In a statement to Fortune, an unnamed Tidal spokesperson confirmed “the elimination of some roles across our business and design teams.”
On Wednesday, Fortune published a leaked memo from Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Tidal parent company Block Block Head, who said that the company is going to “part ways with a number of folks” on the team. “We’re reducing the size of our design team and foundational roles supporting TIDAL, and we will consider reducing engineering over the next few weeks as we have more clarity around leadership going forward,” Dorsey wrote, according to Fortune.

Though Dorsey’s message didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees — or about a quarter of Tidal’s remaining staff. Tidal cut 10 percent of its workers last December, and Dorsey reportedly considered a major reorganization at Block in July.
Earlier this year, Tidal merged its two high-fidelity music plans into one $10.99 / month subscription, lowering the price of its most expensive plan as a result. It also made FLAC the default audio format for stereo, while adding Dolby Atmos for immersive sound.

Image: The Verge

The music streaming app Tidal is laying off more workers. In a statement to Fortune, an unnamed Tidal spokesperson confirmed “the elimination of some roles across our business and design teams.”

On Wednesday, Fortune published a leaked memo from Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Tidal parent company Block Block Head, who said that the company is going to “part ways with a number of folks” on the team. “We’re reducing the size of our design team and foundational roles supporting TIDAL, and we will consider reducing engineering over the next few weeks as we have more clarity around leadership going forward,” Dorsey wrote, according to Fortune.

Though Dorsey’s message didn’t specify how many employees would be laid off, sources told Fortune that it could be around 100 employees — or about a quarter of Tidal’s remaining staff. Tidal cut 10 percent of its workers last December, and Dorsey reportedly considered a major reorganization at Block in July.

Earlier this year, Tidal merged its two high-fidelity music plans into one $10.99 / month subscription, lowering the price of its most expensive plan as a result. It also made FLAC the default audio format for stereo, while adding Dolby Atmos for immersive sound.

Read More