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Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

The new iPads are out, and they’re terrific. They’re also expensive, and they’re a lot of iPad. Do you really need an OLED screen, an M4 processor, all that engineering to make it so thin and light, and the increasingly great but also increasingly expensive new controllers?
On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore that very question with The Verge’s Chris Welch, who uses the iPad in as varied and powerful a way as you’ll find. We talk about the upsides of OLED, the pros and cons of huge screens, and what really makes an iPad an iPad.

After that, we chat with Chris about what’s going on at Sonos. It appears we’re only a few weeks away from the launch of the company’s first headphones, which will be called Ace and look very nice. We’re also about a week into the lifespan of the new Sonos app, which is… less nice. So we discuss how Sonos is changing, what kind of company it wants to be, and whether it can make a dent in the headphone market.
After that, Vergecast producer Will Poor joins the show to tell us about his latest adventures in the right-to-repair world. New bills are passing, corporate policies are changing, and we’re still trying to figure out what it all means to regular people who just want their stuff to work. Will bought some broken phones and tells us about what happens next.
Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11 or vergecast@theverge.com, we love hearing from you!) about why so many people want the iPad to be more than just an iPad. The answer is complicated — it’s a little about the iPhone and a lot about the fact that making a device that does everything is just really hard to do.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on the new iPads:

Apple iPad Pro (2024) review: the best kind of overkill
The new Apple iPad Air is great — but it’s not the one to get
Apple iPad event: all the news from Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ reveal

And on Sonos:

Sonos announces redesigned app that puts everything on your homescreen
The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy
Sonos says its controversial app redesign took ‘courage’
This is the Sonos Roam 2 portable speaker
These are the upcoming Sonos Ace wireless headphones
Sonos Ace headphones will have magnetic ear cushions and 30-hour battery life

And on right to repair:

Right to repair: all the latest news and updates
Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans ‘parts pairing’
Apple will open the iPhone to repair with used parts
The EU’s new right-to-repair rules make companies fix your device after a warranty expires

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

The new iPads are out, and they’re terrific. They’re also expensive, and they’re a lot of iPad. Do you really need an OLED screen, an M4 processor, all that engineering to make it so thin and light, and the increasingly great but also increasingly expensive new controllers?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore that very question with The Verge’s Chris Welch, who uses the iPad in as varied and powerful a way as you’ll find. We talk about the upsides of OLED, the pros and cons of huge screens, and what really makes an iPad an iPad.

After that, we chat with Chris about what’s going on at Sonos. It appears we’re only a few weeks away from the launch of the company’s first headphones, which will be called Ace and look very nice. We’re also about a week into the lifespan of the new Sonos app, which is… less nice. So we discuss how Sonos is changing, what kind of company it wants to be, and whether it can make a dent in the headphone market.

After that, Vergecast producer Will Poor joins the show to tell us about his latest adventures in the right-to-repair world. New bills are passing, corporate policies are changing, and we’re still trying to figure out what it all means to regular people who just want their stuff to work. Will bought some broken phones and tells us about what happens next.

Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11 or vergecast@theverge.com, we love hearing from you!) about why so many people want the iPad to be more than just an iPad. The answer is complicated — it’s a little about the iPhone and a lot about the fact that making a device that does everything is just really hard to do.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on the new iPads:

Apple iPad Pro (2024) review: the best kind of overkill
The new Apple iPad Air is great — but it’s not the one to get
Apple iPad event: all the news from Apple’s ‘Let Loose’ reveal

And on Sonos:

Sonos announces redesigned app that puts everything on your homescreen
The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy
Sonos says its controversial app redesign took ‘courage’
This is the Sonos Roam 2 portable speaker
These are the upcoming Sonos Ace wireless headphones
Sonos Ace headphones will have magnetic ear cushions and 30-hour battery life

And on right to repair:

Right to repair: all the latest news and updates
Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans ‘parts pairing’
Apple will open the iPhone to repair with used parts
The EU’s new right-to-repair rules make companies fix your device after a warranty expires

Read More 

After gestating in the mind of writer / director Francis Ford Coppola for the better part of the last century, Megalopolis is finally making its way to the big screen at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And from the looks of the sci-fi epic’s first teaser trailer, it might be just about everything Coppola always dreamt it would be.
Set in a sprawling metropolis that’s been devastated by a cataclysmic natural disaster, Megalopolis tells the story of how architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) tries to rebuild the city using his unusual ability to control time. There seems to be no stopping or reversing the shower of flaming meteors that descend upon the city in the new trailer as Cesar and other citizens watch in horror. But as imperiled as the city may be, Cesar appears to be dead set on trying to convince people how it could be remade as a utopia if only they would understand his visions for a better future.
With the present being so filled with chaos, glamorous excess, and destruction, the future Cesar wants to make real probably feels something like a dream that others can’t fully wrap their minds around. The trailer makes that feel somewhat true of Megalopolis as a whole as well, but that may wind up being part of the film’s appeal when it eventually makes its theatrical debut after premiering at Cannes.

After gestating in the mind of writer / director Francis Ford Coppola for the better part of the last century, Megalopolis is finally making its way to the big screen at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And from the looks of the sci-fi epic’s first teaser trailer, it might be just about everything Coppola always dreamt it would be.

Set in a sprawling metropolis that’s been devastated by a cataclysmic natural disaster, Megalopolis tells the story of how architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) tries to rebuild the city using his unusual ability to control time. There seems to be no stopping or reversing the shower of flaming meteors that descend upon the city in the new trailer as Cesar and other citizens watch in horror. But as imperiled as the city may be, Cesar appears to be dead set on trying to convince people how it could be remade as a utopia if only they would understand his visions for a better future.

With the present being so filled with chaos, glamorous excess, and destruction, the future Cesar wants to make real probably feels something like a dream that others can’t fully wrap their minds around. The trailer makes that feel somewhat true of Megalopolis as a whole as well, but that may wind up being part of the film’s appeal when it eventually makes its theatrical debut after premiering at Cannes.

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile is bringing more of the perks of postpaid phone plans to its prepaid lineup. The company announced new plans for its prepaid business, Metro by T-Mobile, that come with a free phone for signups and ongoing access to the same trade-in deals that it offers new customers for some devices.
There are three plans in the new Metro Flex lineup: Flex Start ($50 per month); Flex Up ($60 per month); and Flex Plus ($70 per month). The company tacks on an extra $5 monthly for folks not using autopay. It’s also an extra $5 for the first month.
All three plans get unlimited 5G, talk, and text as well as T-Mobile’s Scam Shield robocall blocker and a bundled 100GB subscription to Google One, Google’s all-in-one subscription that includes storage for Gmail, Drive, and Photos. The Start plan comes with 8GB of mobile hotspot data, while the Flex and Plus plans each offer 25GB of hotspot data. At the top end, Flex Plus comes with bundled Amazon Prime membership.

The big perk of the plans is supposed to be the ability to upgrade your phone at a discount. T-Mobile says customers on these plans can trade in their phones every one, two, or three years — as long as they still work — to get discounts on phones “from top brands like Apple, Samsung, Motorola and REVVL.” (You know, well-known and popular phone brand Revvl?)
T-Mobile isn’t clear about exactly how these trade-ins work, though. The company just says that your trade-in options “expand” if you wait multiple years. Subscribers are supposed to get access to “the same” deals that new customers would.
In the press release shared with The Verge, T-Mobile says customers “may notice slower speeds when our network is busy” if they use more than 35GB per month. Video on these plans streams in standard definition. The company offers its Flex deals for up to four lines, and if customers who sign up want to switch plans within six months of starting one, it will cost $50 to do so.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile is bringing more of the perks of postpaid phone plans to its prepaid lineup. The company announced new plans for its prepaid business, Metro by T-Mobile, that come with a free phone for signups and ongoing access to the same trade-in deals that it offers new customers for some devices.

There are three plans in the new Metro Flex lineup: Flex Start ($50 per month); Flex Up ($60 per month); and Flex Plus ($70 per month). The company tacks on an extra $5 monthly for folks not using autopay. It’s also an extra $5 for the first month.

All three plans get unlimited 5G, talk, and text as well as T-Mobile’s Scam Shield robocall blocker and a bundled 100GB subscription to Google One, Google’s all-in-one subscription that includes storage for Gmail, Drive, and Photos. The Start plan comes with 8GB of mobile hotspot data, while the Flex and Plus plans each offer 25GB of hotspot data. At the top end, Flex Plus comes with bundled Amazon Prime membership.

The big perk of the plans is supposed to be the ability to upgrade your phone at a discount. T-Mobile says customers on these plans can trade in their phones every one, two, or three years — as long as they still work — to get discounts on phones “from top brands like Apple, Samsung, Motorola and REVVL.” (You know, well-known and popular phone brand Revvl?)

T-Mobile isn’t clear about exactly how these trade-ins work, though. The company just says that your trade-in options “expand” if you wait multiple years. Subscribers are supposed to get access to “the same” deals that new customers would.

In the press release shared with The Verge, T-Mobile says customers “may notice slower speeds when our network is busy” if they use more than 35GB per month. Video on these plans streams in standard definition. The company offers its Flex deals for up to four lines, and if customers who sign up want to switch plans within six months of starting one, it will cost $50 to do so.

Read More 

The Sims 4. | Image: Electronic Arts

Midsummer Studios is a new game studio founded by two former Firaxis developers, Jake Solomon and Will Miller. Before founding Midsummer, the two worked on XCOM, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Today, the new studio has announced its first game: a next-gen life sim game with former The Sims director Grant Rodiek leading the project as executive producer.
According to the studio’s press release, this debut project “emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” The project doesn’t currently have a title or release date.
This new game will face stiff competition in the life-sim genre, which has been dominated by big-budget games like The Sims 4 and smaller, indie outfits like Stardew Valley. Midsummer’s developers wrote that they want to give players the tools to tell their own stories, reminiscent of the popular trend of players using avatars created in The Sims and similar games to act out soap opera-style stories that are recorded and uploaded to social media.
Meanwhile, EA is already working on its next iteration of The Sims, a free-to-play title dubbed “Project Rene,” and former Sims and Second Life developer Rod Humble set up a new studio to launch the life-sim Life by You, which is due out on June 4th.

The Sims 4. | Image: Electronic Arts

Midsummer Studios is a new game studio founded by two former Firaxis developers, Jake Solomon and Will Miller. Before founding Midsummer, the two worked on XCOM, Civilization: Beyond Earth, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Today, the new studio has announced its first game: a next-gen life sim game with former The Sims director Grant Rodiek leading the project as executive producer.

According to the studio’s press release, this debut project “emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” The project doesn’t currently have a title or release date.

This new game will face stiff competition in the life-sim genre, which has been dominated by big-budget games like The Sims 4 and smaller, indie outfits like Stardew Valley. Midsummer’s developers wrote that they want to give players the tools to tell their own stories, reminiscent of the popular trend of players using avatars created in The Sims and similar games to act out soap opera-style stories that are recorded and uploaded to social media.

Meanwhile, EA is already working on its next iteration of The Sims, a free-to-play title dubbed “Project Rene,” and former Sims and Second Life developer Rod Humble set up a new studio to launch the life-sim Life by You, which is due out on June 4th.

Read More 

Setapp Mobile makes every app available for one subscription.

A subscription-based alternative to the Apple App Store with nag-free software. There’s been little for Europeans to celebrate since the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Apple to allow third-party marketplaces for iPhone apps. While the launch of AltStore PAL has potential, Apple’s loosening of App Store restrictions to allow emulators took away the marketplace’s main selling point. But now, there’s another alternative app store launching that could really shake up the entire sector: MacPaw’s Setapp Mobile.
Setapp Mobile enters an invite-only beta today, and we’ve spent the past week giving it a good going over. The verdict? Setapp Mobile’s subscription-based approach opens up an exciting new way of using an iPhone, one where you can play with a range of apps without being stung by reduced features, ads, nags to upgrade, or spending money on something you may not even use. Well, if you live in the EU, of course.
The bigger question is whether Setapp Mobile will appeal to anyone beyond the power users and productivity nerds it’s clearly targeting.

Unlike the macOS version, Setapp Mobile is currently a no-frills marketplace with no category selection or recommendations.

What you see when clicking into a specific app. There’s no price listed since all apps are part of your monthly subscription.

Setapp began as a macOS platform, allowing users access to hundreds of curated apps. For $9.99 a month, Mac users can download and use popular productivity and utility software, including CleanShot X, Bartender, and Yoink. This model proved popular enough that MacPaw launched an iOS version in 2020.
The Setapp iOS store, though, has a huge drawback: actually getting the apps onto your phone is an awful experience. The process requires opening your Setapp account in a browser, going to your apps section, following a link that opens the iOS App Store, and installing said piece of software before returning to your account and activating it.
If that sounds tiresome, that’s because it is — and it’s a deliberate move by Apple. The Cupertino, California, giant wants a cut of every purchase, so it’s not in its financial interest to easily allow external developers to offer subscriptions to groups of apps inside the App Store.
This is what the new Setapp Mobile aims to solve in Europe. You subscribe to the marketplace and then you can download as many iPhone apps from it as you want with no in-app purchases or hidden fees. The current invite-only beta is free to anyone who signed up to the waitlist, while the full version will incur a subscription fee for a price that has yet to be announced.
In regards to Apple’s Core Technology Fee (CTF), the 50 euro cents that marketplace developers like MacPaw must pay Apple for each annual install of Setapp Mobile will be absorbed for now and then included in the Setapp Mobile subscription price in the future. Apple also charges app developers a 50 euro cents CTF for each annual app install over a million, but MacPaw believes that software on the platform is unlikely to reach this threshold.

One of the many screens you have to navigate through when installing any alternative app store.

Apple makes double sure you want to install an alternative app marketplace.

Installing Setapp Mobile follows the same pattern as AltStore PAL: navigating through a dozen screen interactions that often feel repetitive. These pop-ups and warnings are designed to make the process daunting, but thankfully for inexperienced users, Setapp includes illustrated step-by-step instructions to make it a bit smoother.
Once you’ve passed this trial and have the marketplace installed, it’s plain sailing. The Setapp Mobile store displays the apps as a basic list with none of the category or recommendation tabs you can find on the macOS version of the store. Installing software is easy, but there are no bells and whistles to the experience.
In the version we tested, there were 13 apps available — Focused Work, CleanMyPhone, SideNotes, Itemlist, Taskheat, MonAI, Mindr, NeatNook, Subjects, BasicBeauty, Optika, Downie, and ClearVPN — all of them high-quality and feature-rich. MacPaw confirms there will be over 30 apps available when the open beta launches later in the summer.
Where Setapp Mobile differs from AltStore PAL is that these apps aren’t trying to push Apple’s boundaries. Of the 13 we tried, 12 are already available on the App Store. It’s only Downie — an app that lets you download videos from YouTube, Instagram, and the like — that isn’t.

The Downie video downloader app in action. Although Apple doesn’t allow this type of software on the App Store, it fits into MacPaw’s strategy to focus on work and productivity tools.

Speaking with MacPaw, the company says that it wants to act as a curated marketplace with a focus on productivity, work, and optimization tools, not to function as a marketplace for apps you can’t necessarily find on Apple’s App Store. Hosting apps that operate outside of this remit — such as porn, gambling, game emulation, and torrenting software — is not in its immediate plans. MacPaw hasn’t ruled this path out entirely but makes it clear this isn’t its mission or primary focus.
As a macOS user of the Setapp platform, what I value most is its discovery mechanisms and money-saving potential. Once the platform hosts several apps you regularly use, it’s cheaper to pay for Setapp than to subscribe to them individually. After you’ve hit this inflection point, it’s a joy to try out and experiment with new apps. In many ways, it replicates the old-school App Store experience, whereby scanning for new releases feels like an adventure.
In its current state, Setapp Mobile doesn’t have this benefit — but that will change. The 13 apps in the closed beta we tested has already grown to 17 at launch. And they barely scratch the surface of the marketplace’s potential, with 30 said to be included in the upcoming open beta and around 50 available on the regular iOS version, there’s lots of potential here.
Pricing will be important to Setapp Mobile’s success, but MacPaw hasn’t settled on a subscription fee yet. Currently, the macOS version costs $9.99 a month, and its macOS and iOS bundle is $12.49. The platform could thrive if users find the new EU app marketplace to be a good value. And as more apps appear, the appeal of Setapp Mobile rises, and so does its attractiveness to developers.

Ready to go.

While Setapp Mobile will probably remain comparatively niche in its current state, its model won’t. Customers are increasingly comfortable with subscriptions, and if high-profile developers can group together to provide both a valuable and reliable service outside of Apple’s ecosystem, then the public will follow. There’s no reason, for example, that a Steam-esque service backed by a big player couldn’t thrive on iOS, or that Setapp Mobile couldn’t grow to be that business for the 450 million people living within the EU.
However MacPaw chooses to proceed with its alternative app marketplace, its model could spark the dormant kindling of third-party app stores. From here, it’s in the hands of other developers to see if they adopt this approach or maybe try another one as more app marketplaces like Aptoide and the Epic Games Store prepare to launch in Europe.

Setapp Mobile makes every app available for one subscription.

A subscription-based alternative to the Apple App Store with nag-free software.

There’s been little for Europeans to celebrate since the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Apple to allow third-party marketplaces for iPhone apps. While the launch of AltStore PAL has potential, Apple’s loosening of App Store restrictions to allow emulators took away the marketplace’s main selling point. But now, there’s another alternative app store launching that could really shake up the entire sector: MacPaw’s Setapp Mobile.

Setapp Mobile enters an invite-only beta today, and we’ve spent the past week giving it a good going over. The verdict? Setapp Mobile’s subscription-based approach opens up an exciting new way of using an iPhone, one where you can play with a range of apps without being stung by reduced features, ads, nags to upgrade, or spending money on something you may not even use. Well, if you live in the EU, of course.

The bigger question is whether Setapp Mobile will appeal to anyone beyond the power users and productivity nerds it’s clearly targeting.

Setapp began as a macOS platform, allowing users access to hundreds of curated apps. For $9.99 a month, Mac users can download and use popular productivity and utility software, including CleanShot X, Bartender, and Yoink. This model proved popular enough that MacPaw launched an iOS version in 2020.

The Setapp iOS store, though, has a huge drawback: actually getting the apps onto your phone is an awful experience. The process requires opening your Setapp account in a browser, going to your apps section, following a link that opens the iOS App Store, and installing said piece of software before returning to your account and activating it.

If that sounds tiresome, that’s because it is — and it’s a deliberate move by Apple. The Cupertino, California, giant wants a cut of every purchase, so it’s not in its financial interest to easily allow external developers to offer subscriptions to groups of apps inside the App Store.

This is what the new Setapp Mobile aims to solve in Europe. You subscribe to the marketplace and then you can download as many iPhone apps from it as you want with no in-app purchases or hidden fees. The current invite-only beta is free to anyone who signed up to the waitlist, while the full version will incur a subscription fee for a price that has yet to be announced.

In regards to Apple’s Core Technology Fee (CTF), the 50 euro cents that marketplace developers like MacPaw must pay Apple for each annual install of Setapp Mobile will be absorbed for now and then included in the Setapp Mobile subscription price in the future. Apple also charges app developers a 50 euro cents CTF for each annual app install over a million, but MacPaw believes that software on the platform is unlikely to reach this threshold.

Installing Setapp Mobile follows the same pattern as AltStore PAL: navigating through a dozen screen interactions that often feel repetitive. These pop-ups and warnings are designed to make the process daunting, but thankfully for inexperienced users, Setapp includes illustrated step-by-step instructions to make it a bit smoother.

Once you’ve passed this trial and have the marketplace installed, it’s plain sailing. The Setapp Mobile store displays the apps as a basic list with none of the category or recommendation tabs you can find on the macOS version of the store. Installing software is easy, but there are no bells and whistles to the experience.

In the version we tested, there were 13 apps available — Focused Work, CleanMyPhone, SideNotes, Itemlist, Taskheat, MonAI, Mindr, NeatNook, Subjects, BasicBeauty, Optika, Downie, and ClearVPN — all of them high-quality and feature-rich. MacPaw confirms there will be over 30 apps available when the open beta launches later in the summer.

Where Setapp Mobile differs from AltStore PAL is that these apps aren’t trying to push Apple’s boundaries. Of the 13 we tried, 12 are already available on the App Store. It’s only Downie — an app that lets you download videos from YouTube, Instagram, and the like — that isn’t.

Speaking with MacPaw, the company says that it wants to act as a curated marketplace with a focus on productivity, work, and optimization tools, not to function as a marketplace for apps you can’t necessarily find on Apple’s App Store. Hosting apps that operate outside of this remit — such as porn, gambling, game emulation, and torrenting software — is not in its immediate plans. MacPaw hasn’t ruled this path out entirely but makes it clear this isn’t its mission or primary focus.

As a macOS user of the Setapp platform, what I value most is its discovery mechanisms and money-saving potential. Once the platform hosts several apps you regularly use, it’s cheaper to pay for Setapp than to subscribe to them individually. After you’ve hit this inflection point, it’s a joy to try out and experiment with new apps. In many ways, it replicates the old-school App Store experience, whereby scanning for new releases feels like an adventure.

In its current state, Setapp Mobile doesn’t have this benefit — but that will change. The 13 apps in the closed beta we tested has already grown to 17 at launch. And they barely scratch the surface of the marketplace’s potential, with 30 said to be included in the upcoming open beta and around 50 available on the regular iOS version, there’s lots of potential here.

Pricing will be important to Setapp Mobile’s success, but MacPaw hasn’t settled on a subscription fee yet. Currently, the macOS version costs $9.99 a month, and its macOS and iOS bundle is $12.49. The platform could thrive if users find the new EU app marketplace to be a good value. And as more apps appear, the appeal of Setapp Mobile rises, and so does its attractiveness to developers.

While Setapp Mobile will probably remain comparatively niche in its current state, its model won’t. Customers are increasingly comfortable with subscriptions, and if high-profile developers can group together to provide both a valuable and reliable service outside of Apple’s ecosystem, then the public will follow. There’s no reason, for example, that a Steam-esque service backed by a big player couldn’t thrive on iOS, or that Setapp Mobile couldn’t grow to be that business for the 450 million people living within the EU.

However MacPaw chooses to proceed with its alternative app marketplace, its model could spark the dormant kindling of third-party app stores. From here, it’s in the hands of other developers to see if they adopt this approach or maybe try another one as more app marketplaces like Aptoide and the Epic Games Store prepare to launch in Europe.

Read More 

Image: Lego

5,471 pieces and nearly three feet tall. Fifteen months after Lego revealed its majestic $500 Lord of the Rings: Rivendell playset, we’re getting the fortress of evil itself. Barad-dûr, home of The One Ring’s creator Sauron and the location of his fireball-like Eye of Sauron in the films, is now officially a 5,471-piece Lego set worthy of an epic showdown.

Not that Barad-dûr ever waged battle in the books or films, mind! Neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Peter Jackson gave us so much as a glimpse inside its walls, so Lego had free rein to imagine the interior… and fill it with Easter eggs.

Image: Lego

It’s fairly tall. Tap for larger image.

For $459.99, €459.99, or £399.99, the new playset set not only comes with a glowing Eye of Sauron (thanks to a Lego light brick) and a pair of ominous mechanically operated front doors, but you also get a dark throne that opens up to reveal a secret room for the Palantir…

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

…not to mention a smithy where the orcs can forge and sharpen their cruel weapons, a lava pit with a suspended skeleton cage, and a feasting room for the orcs…

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

…plus a number of secreted-away references like Frodo’s stolen mithril coat, a hidden map, and a tiny spider to represent Shelob.

Image: Lego

The back of the box reveals a lot of play features — here’s a 4.5K image I uploaded for you so you don’t miss a thing.

It comes with 10 minifigures, including a world-weary Frodo, Sam, Gollum, a quartet of orcs, the Mouth of Sauron, and of course Sauron himself…

Image: Lego

The minifigure collection. Tap here for larger photo.

…and if you decide 32.5 inches (83cm) isn’t tall enough, Lego says you can buy additional copies and stack its modular pieces as high as you want. Here are the layers that come in the box:

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

The set’s coming out June 1st for Lego Insiders (it’s a free sign-up) or June 4th for everyone else.
Oh, and because I’m sure you’re curious: here’s a size comparison with Lego Rivendell.

Image: Lego
Tap for larger image.

I believe this is Lego’s first-ever attempt at Barad-dûr. Lego did Tower of Orthanc and Black Gate sets in 2013, but those locales were quite far from Sauron’s wicked home.

Image: Lego

5,471 pieces and nearly three feet tall.

Fifteen months after Lego revealed its majestic $500 Lord of the Rings: Rivendell playset, we’re getting the fortress of evil itself. Barad-dûr, home of The One Ring’s creator Sauron and the location of his fireball-like Eye of Sauron in the films, is now officially a 5,471-piece Lego set worthy of an epic showdown.

Not that Barad-dûr ever waged battle in the books or films, mind! Neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Peter Jackson gave us so much as a glimpse inside its walls, so Lego had free rein to imagine the interior… and fill it with Easter eggs.

For $459.99, €459.99, or £399.99, the new playset set not only comes with a glowing Eye of Sauron (thanks to a Lego light brick) and a pair of ominous mechanically operated front doors, but you also get a dark throne that opens up to reveal a secret room for the Palantir…

…not to mention a smithy where the orcs can forge and sharpen their cruel weapons, a lava pit with a suspended skeleton cage, and a feasting room for the orcs…

…plus a number of secreted-away references like Frodo’s stolen mithril coat, a hidden map, and a tiny spider to represent Shelob.

It comes with 10 minifigures, including a world-weary Frodo, Sam, Gollum, a quartet of orcs, the Mouth of Sauron, and of course Sauron himself…

…and if you decide 32.5 inches (83cm) isn’t tall enough, Lego says you can buy additional copies and stack its modular pieces as high as you want. Here are the layers that come in the box:

The set’s coming out June 1st for Lego Insiders (it’s a free sign-up) or June 4th for everyone else.

Oh, and because I’m sure you’re curious: here’s a size comparison with Lego Rivendell.

I believe this is Lego’s first-ever attempt at Barad-dûr. Lego did Tower of Orthanc and Black Gate sets in 2013, but those locales were quite far from Sauron’s wicked home.

Read More 

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Federal safety investigators have opened a preliminary investigation into dozens of incidents involving Waymo’s driverless vehicles, including several “single-party” crashes and possible traffic law violations.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation is looking into 22 incidents in which Waymo’s robotaxis were “the sole vehicle operated during a collision” or “exhibited driving behavior that potentially violated traffic safety laws.”

INOA-PE24016-12382 by ahawkins8223

These include “collisions with stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains, collisions with parked vehicles, and instances in which the ADS appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices.” NHTSA is also looking into reports of Waymo vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road or illegally entering construction sites.
Some of the incidents were reported by Waymo under NHTSA’s standing general order requiring companies to report collisions involving autonomous vehicles, while others were collected from public sources.

The investigation comes after several videos of Waymo vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road went viral in recent weeks. One video, shot in Tempe, Arizona, shows a driverless Waymo vehicle attempting a left turn, which was blocked by cars waiting at the light. The robotaxi seems to pause for a moment before turning into oncoming traffic. In another video, a Waymo car is filmed driving on the wrong side of the street while being swarmed by a pack of electric unicycle riders.

@kilowattsapp Hello officer, sry i got a little confused #waymo #autonomous ♬ original sound – kilowattsapp

Waymo acknowledges that while its vehicles do occasionally get involved in minor traffic collisions, its technology is much better at preventing more serious incidents than human drivers. The company recently analyzed 7.13 million fully driverless miles in three cities — Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — and compared the data to human driving benchmarks to determine whether its cars were involved in fewer injuring-causing and police-reported crashes.
“At Waymo we currently serve over 50 thousand weekly trips for our riders in some of the most challenging and complex environments,” Christopher Bonelli, a spokesperson for Waymo, said in a statement. “We are proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency. NHTSA plays a very important role in road safety and we will continue to work with them as part of our mission to become the world’s most trusted driver.”
The investigation comes at a crucial time for Waymo, after receiving approval from California regulators to expand its robotaxi operations to the lucrative Los Angeles market. The company has also recently begun testing its driverless vehicles on highways in preparation for passenger trips.
The investigation comes amid heightened scrutiny of driver-assist and autonomous vehicle technology by federal safety regulators, as companies struggle to prove to government watchdogs and the public that their vehicles are as safe as they claim. Concerns about the safety of driverless robotaxis have grown after several high-profile crashes, such as when a Waymo car crashed into a bicyclist earlier this year and a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in October of last year.
NHTSA has launched preliminary investigations into most major players in the AV space, including Tesla, GM’s Cruise, Ford, Zoox, and others.

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Federal safety investigators have opened a preliminary investigation into dozens of incidents involving Waymo’s driverless vehicles, including several “single-party” crashes and possible traffic law violations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation is looking into 22 incidents in which Waymo’s robotaxis were “the sole vehicle operated during a collision” or “exhibited driving behavior that potentially violated traffic safety laws.”

These include “collisions with stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains, collisions with parked vehicles, and instances in which the ADS appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices.” NHTSA is also looking into reports of Waymo vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road or illegally entering construction sites.

Some of the incidents were reported by Waymo under NHTSA’s standing general order requiring companies to report collisions involving autonomous vehicles, while others were collected from public sources.

The investigation comes after several videos of Waymo vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road went viral in recent weeks. One video, shot in Tempe, Arizona, shows a driverless Waymo vehicle attempting a left turn, which was blocked by cars waiting at the light. The robotaxi seems to pause for a moment before turning into oncoming traffic. In another video, a Waymo car is filmed driving on the wrong side of the street while being swarmed by a pack of electric unicycle riders.

Waymo acknowledges that while its vehicles do occasionally get involved in minor traffic collisions, its technology is much better at preventing more serious incidents than human drivers. The company recently analyzed 7.13 million fully driverless miles in three cities — Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — and compared the data to human driving benchmarks to determine whether its cars were involved in fewer injuring-causing and police-reported crashes.

“At Waymo we currently serve over 50 thousand weekly trips for our riders in some of the most challenging and complex environments,” Christopher Bonelli, a spokesperson for Waymo, said in a statement. “We are proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency. NHTSA plays a very important role in road safety and we will continue to work with them as part of our mission to become the world’s most trusted driver.”

The investigation comes at a crucial time for Waymo, after receiving approval from California regulators to expand its robotaxi operations to the lucrative Los Angeles market. The company has also recently begun testing its driverless vehicles on highways in preparation for passenger trips.

The investigation comes amid heightened scrutiny of driver-assist and autonomous vehicle technology by federal safety regulators, as companies struggle to prove to government watchdogs and the public that their vehicles are as safe as they claim. Concerns about the safety of driverless robotaxis have grown after several high-profile crashes, such as when a Waymo car crashed into a bicyclist earlier this year and a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in October of last year.

NHTSA has launched preliminary investigations into most major players in the AV space, including Tesla, GM’s Cruise, Ford, Zoox, and others.

Read More 

Image: Google

Google’s most AI-focused developer conference yet is kicking off on May 14th. Get ready for a whole lot of AI news coming out of Google’s developer-focused I/O conference. The company is showing off key products like its flagship Gemini AI model at the event, which must prove itself as a worthy contender against OpenAI’s GPT-4 and its new and faster iteration, GPT-4o. Google is also presenting updates to its smaller and open-sourced “Gemma” AI products.
All this AI news at Google I/O doesn’t mean we won’t see more Android phone advancements, as the two go hand in hand. While Google already spilled the beans on new hardware releases like the midrange Pixel 8A and the dock-not-included Pixel Tablet, there are plenty of new features to see in Android 15 — and perhaps other surprises.
Read on below for all the details.

Image: Google

Google’s most AI-focused developer conference yet is kicking off on May 14th.

Get ready for a whole lot of AI news coming out of Google’s developer-focused I/O conference. The company is showing off key products like its flagship Gemini AI model at the event, which must prove itself as a worthy contender against OpenAI’s GPT-4 and its new and faster iteration, GPT-4o. Google is also presenting updates to its smaller and open-sourced “Gemma” AI products.

All this AI news at Google I/O doesn’t mean we won’t see more Android phone advancements, as the two go hand in hand. While Google already spilled the beans on new hardware releases like the midrange Pixel 8A and the dock-not-included Pixel Tablet, there are plenty of new features to see in Android 15 — and perhaps other surprises.

Read on below for all the details.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is already running over budget and behind schedule. But it may also be our best chance of finding extraterrestrial life. Hundreds of millions of miles away, on the frigid surface of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is hard at work, diligently gathering fresh samples of Martian rock, sealing them in pristine tubes, and leaving them on the surface ready for collection.
If they can be brought back to Earth, these would be an invaluable scientific resource: the first sample ever collected from another planet, which could answer fundamental questions about the history and habitability of Mars.
But like a child forgotten at school pickup, Perseverance may face a long, lonely wait for collection. The mission to retrieve the samples, called Mars Sample Return (MSR), has already caused NASA huge headaches with costs projected to hit $11 billion and a timetable that an independent review declared wholly unrealistic.
“The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson recently, announcing that the agency would be looking to make major changes, including soliciting help from the aerospace industry.
Proponents of the mission argue that it is the best chance we’ll ever have to find evidence of life beyond Earth and that samples from Mars can reveal crucial information, like how long the planet had water on its surface and when it lost its atmosphere. But critics point to the ever-ballooning budget and question whether the scientific payoff is worth the expense.
“The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away.”
There are hopes that private industry could help, with options being floated like using the SpaceX Starship to carry the sample back from Mars. But even if that works, there are still significant challenges to address. Perhaps the biggest is launching a rocket from the Martian surface, something that has never been done before, not to mention getting a launch vehicle to rendezvous with a Starship in orbit and transfer the samples for transport back to Earth.
NASA has not shied away from acknowledging the scope of the task or the doubts raised by the public about whether that money could be better spent elsewhere. However, experts agree that sample return offers an opportunity to learn about Mars and other planets that robotic exploration can’t hope to match.

Image: NASA
This animation shows NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover collecting a sample using a coring bit on the end of its robotic arm.

Instruments the size of a city block
With the tremendous success of the Mars rover program, it’s reasonable to ask why carrying samples all the way back to Earth is necessary when rovers are already so capable and will only become more so in the future. The answer is simple: there’s no substitute for a well-equipped Earth lab.
The Perseverance rover has an impressive set of instruments on board, but it’s not feasible to engineer some tools to fit onto a mobile platform. Scientists want to use instruments that are room-sized, like mass spectrometers used for dating planetary materials, and ones that are the size of a city block, like particle accelerators called synchrotrons that can analyze the composition of samples down to their tiniest parts, explained Mini Wadhwa, the MSR principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The instruments need to be so big in part because the indicators that scientists are looking for in the samples will be so small. To detect organic molecules (not necessarily signs of life but the building blocks for living things) in a sample, for example, requires looking for extremely small amounts of material in samples that are already only a few grams in mass. And looking for indications of life in the structures of rock, called morphologic biomarkers, requires extremely sensitive measurements using powerful microscopes.
There’s no substitute for a well-equipped Earth lab
“This is work that you cannot do with a rover,” said Katie Stack Morgan, a Mars research scientist at JPL. “We don’t have the instrumentation and we don’t have a way to make those measurements. Yet those are so key in the search for life and understanding how Mars as a planet — atmosphere, surface, subsurface — interacted with each other.”
Even those who have raised questions about the costs or challenges of the MSR mission have no doubts about the enormous potential value of having Mars samples on Earth.
“For the cost of Mars Sample Return, we could do a lot of wonderful robotic science,” said Michael Hecht, principal investigator of MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, on the Perseverance rover. “But I don’t think anyone would contest the idea that given samples here in an Earth laboratory, we could accomplish things that are leaps and bounds beyond what we can accomplish on Mars.”

Image: NASA
An annotated representation of the 13 sample tubes containing rock core samples that are being carried aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover.

A project of epic scale
For those unconvinced by the payoff, NASA may need to put in more work to persuade critics of the importance of samples to planetary science beyond Mars.
“Is the planetary science community as a whole chomping at the bit to say, yes, bring those samples home? No,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist who has worked on other NASA missions but is not involved in the Mars program, adding that the problem was one of messaging and communication as much as anything else: “NASA has not done a particularly great job advocating for the scientific value of these samples.”
It’s not that planetary scientists as a group are against Mars research or that they don’t see the value of Mars samples. It’s more of a worry that MSR could take up more budget in the future.
“This is work that you cannot do with a rover.”
NASA has been very explicit that MSR won’t eat up the entire budget for planetary science and that it exists on top of existing planetary research. However, the planetary science division has struggled with other budget issues, including overruns or delays for major missions like Psyche, Dragonfly, Europa Clipper, and Veritas and long-term delays and problems caused by the covid-19 pandemic.
To make MSR happen, the entire planetary science community will need to come together in support, as the astrophysics community did with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope — another mammoth project that was hugely expensive and ran years behind schedule. “This is the first project of this scale the planetary science community has ever had to contend with,” said Byrne. “It is our Webb moment.”

A risky justification
Much of the justification for the huge expense of MSR comes from a single issue. There’s a very real chance that getting samples back to Earth could answer the biggest question in all of space research: did life ever exist on another planet?
While there is almost certainly nothing alive on the surface of Mars now, the planet was potentially habitable billions of years ago, when water flowed plentifully and microbial life could have flourished. The area where the Perseverance rover is exploring, called the Jezero Crater, was once an ancient lake, and the rover has scooped up samples of the rocks there for future study.
“It could absolutely be possible that evidence for life on Mars is sitting in those tubes,” Stack Morgan said. “So if you want to answer that question, you have to bring them back.”
“NASA has not done a particularly great job advocating for the scientific value of these samples.”
Hinging the justification for sample return on the possibility of finding life carries a huge risk of disappointment from the public if that isn’t found. “It is sexy to say we’re going to look for life,” Byrne said. “But it is risky unless you know you’re going to find it.”
If you look at the history of missions like the Viking probes in the 1970s or the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which caused a media uproar when it was initially thought to contain evidence of Martian life in the 1990s, you can see otherwise successful research that has carried the stigma of disappointment because it didn’t find smoking gun evidence of life.
And there are plenty of reasons to advocate for Mars samples that aren’t related to searching for life. A recent meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) focused on science goals other than the search for life that could be accomplished using samples. Samples could inform our understanding of when and how the Mars climate changed from being somewhat Earth-like to the dry, cold conditions we see today; the properties of the dust that coats much of the planet; and how the inner planets were bombarded by asteroids in the early period of the Solar System.
The value of potential samples isn’t only limited to understanding Mars, either. “Many, if not all, of the things we learn from samples at Mars inform our understanding of the evolution of our Solar System and, by extension, give us better ideas of how exoplanets may form and evolve around other stars,” said Vicky Hamilton, the steering committee chair for the MEPAG group.

Image: NASA
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the location where it will be parked for several weeks during a Mars solar conjunction.

A stepping stone to human exploration?
While the scientific community is interested in studying samples from Mars, much of the public has a stronger desire to see people stand on the surface of another planet. Human exploration of Mars has been a dream for decades, and it could be feasible within the next 50 to 100 years. (Elon Musk’s inflated claims aside, putting humans on Mars within a timescale of decades is possible, although it would require massive amounts of money.)
NASA seems aware of the public hunger for human exploration, and the agency has positioned both its Artemis Moon program and the MSR mission as paving the way for astronauts to visit Mars. Dewayne Washington, NASA’s MSR senior communications manager, said that bringing Mars samples back to Earth would prepare the agency for human exploration by providing information on the safety of the Mars environment, developing technologies like launch and landing of large masses, and developing sterilization techniques.
“It could absolutely be possible that evidence for life on Mars is sitting in those tubes.”
Certainly, one of the biggest challenges for human exploration is safely landing on and launching from Mars, and learning how to do this with samples can only help with that goal. However, not everyone is convinced that using robots to convey samples or sending astronauts to the Moon is really helpful in furthering human exploration of Mars.
“I do wonder why people feel the need to justify these very important and valuable things in terms of being a step to something else,” Hecht said. “You wouldn’t open a bicycle factory so you could learn how to build cars.”
One suggestion for making the MSR mission more affordable is to combine it with the Artemis Moon program, such as perhaps sending samples from Mars to the planned lunar Gateway space station rather than directly back to Earth. But Hecht isn’t convinced that would solve the problem. “I don’t really see it,” he said, as including an additional rendezvous “just adds complexity.”
Onto the next mission
Questions about the details aside, there is strong motivation to make it happen. “Even though Mars has been the focus of research for several decades now, we have truly only scratched the surface,” Stack Morgan said. “You’re not going to answer some of the most fundamental, basic questions about Mars until we get those samples back in our labs here on Earth.”
The motivation is not only because of the potential scientific value. There’s also the fact that the time, effort, and money (over $2.7 billion) has already been spent to send Perseverance to Mars to collect and seal samples and to leave them on the surface ready to be returned to Earth.
“We have truly only scratched the surface”
That money “has already been spent,” Hecht pointed out, so it would be wasteful to not see the mission through: “You might find plenty of folks in the planetary science community who would grumble about the path we’ve taken, but I don’t think you would find many who would argue that, having come so far, we should pull the plug now.”
Scientists also have their eyes on the future, considering what the next big target might be after Mars. “This should be the first of these projects for the planetary community, not the last,” Byrne said. Currently, there are around 40 planetary science-related NASA missions, but scientists envision a fleet of hundreds of missions exploring not only the inner Solar System planets but also beyond to the outer planets and other targets like moons or asteroids — not only orbiting these objects but also landing on them.
Our understanding of how planets form and develop and the range of conditions that exist on them has exploded in recent decades, looking not only at bodies within our Solar System but also exoplanets beyond. And technology is rapidly developing to allow more of these wildly ambitious plans to move within the realm of possibility.
“What if we want to return a sample from Enceladus to Earth? Or what if we want to rove on Venus? And drill through the ice shell of Europa? Or put a fleet of spacecraft out to Neptune and bring a bit of Triton home?” Byrne said. These places may or may not be habitable, but the potential for discovery exists beyond only searching for life: “Let’s explore these worlds for the sake of understanding the universe.”

Image: The Verge

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is already running over budget and behind schedule. But it may also be our best chance of finding extraterrestrial life.

Hundreds of millions of miles away, on the frigid surface of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is hard at work, diligently gathering fresh samples of Martian rock, sealing them in pristine tubes, and leaving them on the surface ready for collection.

If they can be brought back to Earth, these would be an invaluable scientific resource: the first sample ever collected from another planet, which could answer fundamental questions about the history and habitability of Mars.

But like a child forgotten at school pickup, Perseverance may face a long, lonely wait for collection. The mission to retrieve the samples, called Mars Sample Return (MSR), has already caused NASA huge headaches with costs projected to hit $11 billion and a timetable that an independent review declared wholly unrealistic.

“The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson recently, announcing that the agency would be looking to make major changes, including soliciting help from the aerospace industry.

Proponents of the mission argue that it is the best chance we’ll ever have to find evidence of life beyond Earth and that samples from Mars can reveal crucial information, like how long the planet had water on its surface and when it lost its atmosphere. But critics point to the ever-ballooning budget and question whether the scientific payoff is worth the expense.

There are hopes that private industry could help, with options being floated like using the SpaceX Starship to carry the sample back from Mars. But even if that works, there are still significant challenges to address. Perhaps the biggest is launching a rocket from the Martian surface, something that has never been done before, not to mention getting a launch vehicle to rendezvous with a Starship in orbit and transfer the samples for transport back to Earth.

NASA has not shied away from acknowledging the scope of the task or the doubts raised by the public about whether that money could be better spent elsewhere. However, experts agree that sample return offers an opportunity to learn about Mars and other planets that robotic exploration can’t hope to match.

Image: NASA
This animation shows NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover collecting a sample using a coring bit on the end of its robotic arm.

Instruments the size of a city block

With the tremendous success of the Mars rover program, it’s reasonable to ask why carrying samples all the way back to Earth is necessary when rovers are already so capable and will only become more so in the future. The answer is simple: there’s no substitute for a well-equipped Earth lab.

The Perseverance rover has an impressive set of instruments on board, but it’s not feasible to engineer some tools to fit onto a mobile platform. Scientists want to use instruments that are room-sized, like mass spectrometers used for dating planetary materials, and ones that are the size of a city block, like particle accelerators called synchrotrons that can analyze the composition of samples down to their tiniest parts, explained Mini Wadhwa, the MSR principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The instruments need to be so big in part because the indicators that scientists are looking for in the samples will be so small. To detect organic molecules (not necessarily signs of life but the building blocks for living things) in a sample, for example, requires looking for extremely small amounts of material in samples that are already only a few grams in mass. And looking for indications of life in the structures of rock, called morphologic biomarkers, requires extremely sensitive measurements using powerful microscopes.

“This is work that you cannot do with a rover,” said Katie Stack Morgan, a Mars research scientist at JPL. “We don’t have the instrumentation and we don’t have a way to make those measurements. Yet those are so key in the search for life and understanding how Mars as a planet — atmosphere, surface, subsurface — interacted with each other.”

Even those who have raised questions about the costs or challenges of the MSR mission have no doubts about the enormous potential value of having Mars samples on Earth.

“For the cost of Mars Sample Return, we could do a lot of wonderful robotic science,” said Michael Hecht, principal investigator of MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, on the Perseverance rover. “But I don’t think anyone would contest the idea that given samples here in an Earth laboratory, we could accomplish things that are leaps and bounds beyond what we can accomplish on Mars.”

Image: NASA
An annotated representation of the 13 sample tubes containing rock core samples that are being carried aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover.

A project of epic scale

For those unconvinced by the payoff, NASA may need to put in more work to persuade critics of the importance of samples to planetary science beyond Mars.

“Is the planetary science community as a whole chomping at the bit to say, yes, bring those samples home? No,” said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist who has worked on other NASA missions but is not involved in the Mars program, adding that the problem was one of messaging and communication as much as anything else: “NASA has not done a particularly great job advocating for the scientific value of these samples.”

It’s not that planetary scientists as a group are against Mars research or that they don’t see the value of Mars samples. It’s more of a worry that MSR could take up more budget in the future.

NASA has been very explicit that MSR won’t eat up the entire budget for planetary science and that it exists on top of existing planetary research. However, the planetary science division has struggled with other budget issues, including overruns or delays for major missions like Psyche, Dragonfly, Europa Clipper, and Veritas and long-term delays and problems caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

To make MSR happen, the entire planetary science community will need to come together in support, as the astrophysics community did with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope — another mammoth project that was hugely expensive and ran years behind schedule. “This is the first project of this scale the planetary science community has ever had to contend with,” said Byrne. “It is our Webb moment.”

A risky justification

Much of the justification for the huge expense of MSR comes from a single issue. There’s a very real chance that getting samples back to Earth could answer the biggest question in all of space research: did life ever exist on another planet?

While there is almost certainly nothing alive on the surface of Mars now, the planet was potentially habitable billions of years ago, when water flowed plentifully and microbial life could have flourished. The area where the Perseverance rover is exploring, called the Jezero Crater, was once an ancient lake, and the rover has scooped up samples of the rocks there for future study.

“It could absolutely be possible that evidence for life on Mars is sitting in those tubes,” Stack Morgan said. “So if you want to answer that question, you have to bring them back.”

Hinging the justification for sample return on the possibility of finding life carries a huge risk of disappointment from the public if that isn’t found. “It is sexy to say we’re going to look for life,” Byrne said. “But it is risky unless you know you’re going to find it.”

If you look at the history of missions like the Viking probes in the 1970s or the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite, which caused a media uproar when it was initially thought to contain evidence of Martian life in the 1990s, you can see otherwise successful research that has carried the stigma of disappointment because it didn’t find smoking gun evidence of life.

And there are plenty of reasons to advocate for Mars samples that aren’t related to searching for life. A recent meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) focused on science goals other than the search for life that could be accomplished using samples. Samples could inform our understanding of when and how the Mars climate changed from being somewhat Earth-like to the dry, cold conditions we see today; the properties of the dust that coats much of the planet; and how the inner planets were bombarded by asteroids in the early period of the Solar System.

The value of potential samples isn’t only limited to understanding Mars, either. “Many, if not all, of the things we learn from samples at Mars inform our understanding of the evolution of our Solar System and, by extension, give us better ideas of how exoplanets may form and evolve around other stars,” said Vicky Hamilton, the steering committee chair for the MEPAG group.

Image: NASA
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the location where it will be parked for several weeks during a Mars solar conjunction.

A stepping stone to human exploration?

While the scientific community is interested in studying samples from Mars, much of the public has a stronger desire to see people stand on the surface of another planet. Human exploration of Mars has been a dream for decades, and it could be feasible within the next 50 to 100 years. (Elon Musk’s inflated claims aside, putting humans on Mars within a timescale of decades is possible, although it would require massive amounts of money.)

NASA seems aware of the public hunger for human exploration, and the agency has positioned both its Artemis Moon program and the MSR mission as paving the way for astronauts to visit Mars. Dewayne Washington, NASA’s MSR senior communications manager, said that bringing Mars samples back to Earth would prepare the agency for human exploration by providing information on the safety of the Mars environment, developing technologies like launch and landing of large masses, and developing sterilization techniques.

Certainly, one of the biggest challenges for human exploration is safely landing on and launching from Mars, and learning how to do this with samples can only help with that goal. However, not everyone is convinced that using robots to convey samples or sending astronauts to the Moon is really helpful in furthering human exploration of Mars.

“I do wonder why people feel the need to justify these very important and valuable things in terms of being a step to something else,” Hecht said. “You wouldn’t open a bicycle factory so you could learn how to build cars.”

One suggestion for making the MSR mission more affordable is to combine it with the Artemis Moon program, such as perhaps sending samples from Mars to the planned lunar Gateway space station rather than directly back to Earth. But Hecht isn’t convinced that would solve the problem. “I don’t really see it,” he said, as including an additional rendezvous “just adds complexity.”

Onto the next mission

Questions about the details aside, there is strong motivation to make it happen. “Even though Mars has been the focus of research for several decades now, we have truly only scratched the surface,” Stack Morgan said. “You’re not going to answer some of the most fundamental, basic questions about Mars until we get those samples back in our labs here on Earth.”

The motivation is not only because of the potential scientific value. There’s also the fact that the time, effort, and money (over $2.7 billion) has already been spent to send Perseverance to Mars to collect and seal samples and to leave them on the surface ready to be returned to Earth.

That money “has already been spent,” Hecht pointed out, so it would be wasteful to not see the mission through: “You might find plenty of folks in the planetary science community who would grumble about the path we’ve taken, but I don’t think you would find many who would argue that, having come so far, we should pull the plug now.”

Scientists also have their eyes on the future, considering what the next big target might be after Mars. “This should be the first of these projects for the planetary community, not the last,” Byrne said. Currently, there are around 40 planetary science-related NASA missions, but scientists envision a fleet of hundreds of missions exploring not only the inner Solar System planets but also beyond to the outer planets and other targets like moons or asteroids — not only orbiting these objects but also landing on them.

Our understanding of how planets form and develop and the range of conditions that exist on them has exploded in recent decades, looking not only at bodies within our Solar System but also exoplanets beyond. And technology is rapidly developing to allow more of these wildly ambitious plans to move within the realm of possibility.

“What if we want to return a sample from Enceladus to Earth? Or what if we want to rove on Venus? And drill through the ice shell of Europa? Or put a fleet of spacecraft out to Neptune and bring a bit of Triton home?” Byrne said. These places may or may not be habitable, but the potential for discovery exists beyond only searching for life: “Let’s explore these worlds for the sake of understanding the universe.”

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Sony is appointing co-CEOs Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino to lead its PlayStation business from June 1st. Hermen Hulst, who currently serves as PlayStation studios chief, will be appointed as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s (SIE) studio business group. Hideaki Nishino will be appointed CEO of SIE’s platform business group, and both will report up to Sony CFO and SIE chairman Hiroki Totoki.
The unusual appointment of co-CEOs comes just months after former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan retired. Totoki had been serving as interim CEO of SIE and was working to find the successor for the SIE CEO role, but Sony has now decided it wants to split up responsibilities for leading its PlayStation business across platform and games. Both Nishino and Hulst are Sony veterans, with Nishino having served multiple roles for more than 20 years at Sony.
This is the first time Sony has appointed co-CEOs to run its PlayStation business, and it comes amid a game industry that’s reeling from layoffs over the past 18 months. Sony laid off 900 PlayStation employees earlier this year and closed its London Studio in the UK that developed PlayStation VR games. Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision and Xbox employees earlier this year, and then shut down the Bethesda studios behind Redfall and Hi-Fi Rush last week in another round of layoffs.
Sony’s announcement of new PlayStation leaders also comes just hours before it’s due to report its latest earnings. Sony lowered its PS5 console sales forecasts last quarter, so all eyes are now on the number of PS5 units that the company managed to sell in its 2023 fiscal year ended March 31st. We might also get further hints at Sony’s ambitious PlayStation PC plans.
During an earnings call earlier this year, SIE chairman Hiroki Totoki also discussed the opportunity to grow PlayStation games on PC / multiplatform. “In the past, we wanted to popularize console… but there is a synergy to it,” said Totoki. “So if you have strong first-party content, not only with our console but also other platforms like computers, first-party can be grown with multi platforms and that can help operating profit to improve.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Sony is appointing co-CEOs Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino to lead its PlayStation business from June 1st. Hermen Hulst, who currently serves as PlayStation studios chief, will be appointed as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s (SIE) studio business group. Hideaki Nishino will be appointed CEO of SIE’s platform business group, and both will report up to Sony CFO and SIE chairman Hiroki Totoki.

The unusual appointment of co-CEOs comes just months after former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan retired. Totoki had been serving as interim CEO of SIE and was working to find the successor for the SIE CEO role, but Sony has now decided it wants to split up responsibilities for leading its PlayStation business across platform and games. Both Nishino and Hulst are Sony veterans, with Nishino having served multiple roles for more than 20 years at Sony.

This is the first time Sony has appointed co-CEOs to run its PlayStation business, and it comes amid a game industry that’s reeling from layoffs over the past 18 months. Sony laid off 900 PlayStation employees earlier this year and closed its London Studio in the UK that developed PlayStation VR games. Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision and Xbox employees earlier this year, and then shut down the Bethesda studios behind Redfall and Hi-Fi Rush last week in another round of layoffs.

Sony’s announcement of new PlayStation leaders also comes just hours before it’s due to report its latest earnings. Sony lowered its PS5 console sales forecasts last quarter, so all eyes are now on the number of PS5 units that the company managed to sell in its 2023 fiscal year ended March 31st. We might also get further hints at Sony’s ambitious PlayStation PC plans.

During an earnings call earlier this year, SIE chairman Hiroki Totoki also discussed the opportunity to grow PlayStation games on PC / multiplatform. “In the past, we wanted to popularize console… but there is a synergy to it,” said Totoki. “So if you have strong first-party content, not only with our console but also other platforms like computers, first-party can be grown with multi platforms and that can help operating profit to improve.”

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