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Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system has passed Windows 10 usage for Steam users for the first time since its launch in 2021. Windows 10 has been holding strong in recent years, despite Microsoft’s plans to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025. There are now signs that Windows 11 adoption is finally heading in the right direction for Microsoft.
Steam hardware survey data for August puts Windows 11 usage at 49 percent, an increase of more than 3 percent over the previous figure in July of nearly 46 percent. Windows 10 usage has dipped by around 3 percent to 47 percent, while macOS and Linux Steam usage has largely remained the same during August.
Usage of Windows 11 across the web has also been growing over the past year, too. In July 2023, Windows 11 had a market share of around 23 percent, and that has now grown to nearly 32 percent in August 2024, according to StatCounter.
Leaked data in October revealed Windows 11 was used by more than 400 million devices at the time, a slower adoption pace than Windows 10. It took Windows 10 a year to reach 400 million active devices, whereas it took Windows 11 two years to reach that same milestone. The discrepancy is partially due to upgrade eligibility for Windows 11. Microsoft first launched Windows 11 in October 2021 with strict hardware requirements, requiring a TPM security chip and CPUs released from 2018 onwards.
While Windows 11 was a free upgrade for Windows 10 users, millions of machines were left behind and unable to upgrade due to Microsoft’s hardware requirements. Windows 10 was offered as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, and it didn’t have such strict restrictions on hardware so millions were able to upgrade instead of having to buy new devices.
Microsoft is now planning to charge businesses to continue using Windows 10 after its end of support in October 2025. Consumers will also be able to pay for additional security updates for Windows 10 for the first time ever, but Microsoft has only shared business pricing so far.

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Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system has passed Windows 10 usage for Steam users for the first time since its launch in 2021. Windows 10 has been holding strong in recent years, despite Microsoft’s plans to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025. There are now signs that Windows 11 adoption is finally heading in the right direction for Microsoft.

Steam hardware survey data for August puts Windows 11 usage at 49 percent, an increase of more than 3 percent over the previous figure in July of nearly 46 percent. Windows 10 usage has dipped by around 3 percent to 47 percent, while macOS and Linux Steam usage has largely remained the same during August.

Usage of Windows 11 across the web has also been growing over the past year, too. In July 2023, Windows 11 had a market share of around 23 percent, and that has now grown to nearly 32 percent in August 2024, according to StatCounter.

Leaked data in October revealed Windows 11 was used by more than 400 million devices at the time, a slower adoption pace than Windows 10. It took Windows 10 a year to reach 400 million active devices, whereas it took Windows 11 two years to reach that same milestone. The discrepancy is partially due to upgrade eligibility for Windows 11. Microsoft first launched Windows 11 in October 2021 with strict hardware requirements, requiring a TPM security chip and CPUs released from 2018 onwards.

While Windows 11 was a free upgrade for Windows 10 users, millions of machines were left behind and unable to upgrade due to Microsoft’s hardware requirements. Windows 10 was offered as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, and it didn’t have such strict restrictions on hardware so millions were able to upgrade instead of having to buy new devices.

Microsoft is now planning to charge businesses to continue using Windows 10 after its end of support in October 2025. Consumers will also be able to pay for additional security updates for Windows 10 for the first time ever, but Microsoft has only shared business pricing so far.

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Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

I’d been promised the future of tennis was in the desert.
From the stands of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched as the eighth seed, Abdullah Shelbayh, was given the most dramatic of entrances. Inside one of the stadiums in King Abdullah Sports City, which features a sprawl of soccer fields and indoor arenas across nearly 4 million square meters, an announcer summoned a brief list of the player’s accomplishments, first in Arabic and then in English. The music swelled. Bright white lasers illuminated the lines of the court before the screen at the other end of the stadium opened up to reveal a player tunnel, from which Shelbayh emerged, looking awkward and confused as spotlights swirled around him and the volume of the music rose once again. It was the most impressive light show I’d ever seen at a tennis event, far surpassing anything I’d witnessed at the sport’s biggest tournament, the US Open — a lot of pomp for a guy ranked 185th in the world, playing in an arena that was nearly empty. In a stadium that could seat 3,700, I counted fewer than 50 spectators in total, including the players’ teams and tournament workers.
Later, a spokesperson with the Association of Tennis Professionals (or the ATP, the men’s side of the tour) would tell me they were thrilled with how the tournament was going — the light show, so cool, right? I asked if the turnout was disappointing, and while they agreed that it was, it was also expected. Traveling to Jeddah was a tough ask for many fans, and tennis does have a lot of history in Saudi Arabia. That interest would, hopefully, grow with time.
Months earlier, the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund had struck a deal with the ATP to host Next Gen in Jeddah for the following four years. Next Gen is touted as a proving ground of sorts. There is the competition itself, which features the top-ranked men under 21. In the past decade, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have both won this tournament, later going on to win Grand Slams.
It’s also a trial for the sport itself. Next Gen is where the ATP tries out new things: “innovations,” it touts, as it tests everything from dramatic rule changes to wearable tech that captures players’ biometrics. And this year, a lot of lasers, apparently.

Between matches, I wandered around the grounds. From the outside, you’d never guess there was a live sporting event happening. The parking lot was nearly empty. There appeared to be more people working the event than attending, many just idling around, looking at their phones. Out of boredom, I bought a candy bar from a concession stand, and the cashier told me I was the first customer they’d had all day.
Next Gen is a hard-court event — the most common surface — though it is unusual for several reasons. Since there are no doubles matches, the court is stripped of the lines that would frame the doubles alley, giving the area of play a narrower dimension that is destabilizing for any spectator used to looking at a normal court. The scoreboard, too, was laid out differently. Rather than the traditional scoreline, the interface prescribed more hierarchical logic to each game; the love, 15, 30, 40 order of scoring was now more legible. It was confusing to those familiar with tennis, but I could see how it might be more intuitive to someone who wasn’t.
Matches had a different rhythm, too. Games were first to four points, skipping the usual win-two-points-in-a-row drama at deuce. Sets were won in four instead of six games, with tiebreaks at 3-3. Time between serves was reduced. There were no on-court warm-ups at all.
Many of these changes were intended to speed up the match. Later that week in the finals match, Serbian Hamad Medjedovic would be allowed to take two 10-minute breaks between sets. His opponent and the tournament’s top seed, Frenchman Arthur Fils, would not be thrilled about it. “The rule is terrible,” Fils told French newspaper L’Équipe afterward. “It’s really stupid that this could happen here.”
During the event, I talked to the ATP’s chief sporting officer, Ross Hutchins, who explained that the rule changes at Next Gen were part of an initiative from the top of the organization to challenge all the sport’s assumptions, to reimagine each of tennis’s traditions to see how to break the rules “for the benefit of the fan to enjoy our sport.” Hutchins is a former player, once ranked 26th in the world in doubles, and I was surprised by how much time he spent talking about fan engagement.

He was existentially concerned about TikTok. For the better part of the last century, sports have been a monoculture because they have always been broadcast on TV — the industry term for this is “linear.” Now, people look at their phones. Surveys have shown that Zoomers don’t watch TV and, more shockingly, do not watch sports, at least not the way that their parents or older siblings do.
Hearing Hutchins’ ideas for Next Gen revealed the ATP’s anxieties. The light show had been made to look good for “short-form highlights.” (I.e., should the game be tailored to TikTok?) He even proposed going as far as completely rewriting the scoring system of tennis. “Do we simplify and go first to 21 points?” (I.e., is the sport too confusing?) And the new rules of Next Gen made matches quicker. “If you take the total amount of time in a match of two hours, how much, actually, is watching action versus watching someone look at their strings or changing their shirt or toweling themselves down? And can we try and reduce the dead time in a match?” (I.e., is tennis boring?)
Some of what Hutchins was putting forward was merely to illustrate just how far they were willing to go. He suspected some of the more radical ideas out of Next Gen wouldn’t make it to tour. But he estimated that, historically, four out of every five things they tried eventually had. The point remained: the institutions of tennis were willing to rewrite the rules of tennis.
“People have to move faster these days because of the way the entertainment world is forcing change… if you don’t grow at a certain pace, you will be left behind,” Hutchins told me.
Like any culture, there’s a tension between tradition and modernity, and during Next Gen, I tried to be a good sport and embrace the latter. Watching tennis live is as much of an aural experience as it is a visual one. During the matches, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds: the thwack of the ball, the squeaking of sneakers, and the boom of the PA announcer declaring the point’s winner. In Jeddah, though, when I would ordinarily hear applause, all I picked up was silence, like a space waiting to be filled. But with what? I wondered.

The future is technology
David Foster Wallace described tennis as a game of geometry. The construction of electronic line-calling confirms that idea. The predominant system, Hawk-Eye, measures trajectory, using a set of 12 cameras positioned around the court, each tracking the ball at 70 frames per second. The cameras themselves are not that sophisticated and, in fact, aren’t even high-definition or in color. Instead, the power comes from the processing of that footage. Using image differencing, the multiple angles allow the system to identify the ball’s position in 3D space — truth by triangulation. But Hawk-Eye doesn’t just know where the ball is and instead predicts where it’s going by calculating the ball’s speed, spin, and skid. The system assumes where a ball will bounce before it arrives, a prophecy of the future made with the confidence of the combined might of physics, surveillance technology, and an algorithm trained on billions of data points. In that way, Hawk-Eye is more precog than cop.
The system works incredibly quickly. As soon as a ball makes contact with the court, Hawk-Eye can call it out by playing a recording of a person saying “out!”
In Jeddah, I watched the semifinal match between Medjedovic and Dominic Stricker from the booth where Hawk-Eye is controlled — called the Hawk-Eye Nest, of course. There were more spectators in attendance this time, but the stadium was still pretty empty. As I was escorted to the booth, we passed all of the TV setups broadcasting the match live. Tons of screens, wires, and boxes, deployed in a way that reminded me of an arcade. Everything looked at once organized and also extremely messy, concealed half-heartedly under blankets, as we wandered through the dark, up some staircases, and finally into the booth where Hawk-Eye was operated.
I was greeted by the Hawk-Eye team deployed to this specific tournament, a polite batch of earnest twentysomething boys who all look very at home situated in front of a computer. The man behind the curtain is actually a bunch of lads, tasked with protecting the integrity of the game.
The energy in the Hawk-Eye Nest was surprisingly subdued. Everyone was playing their part, quietly and effectively, and like any desk job, it mostly involved staring at a computer monitor. I looked over the shoulder of someone whose screen was visualizing the path of the ball on the blue court below: where it had been, where it was headed. In more ways than one, this was a glimpse of the future.
Its most automated form, Hawk-Eye Live, was first tested at Next Gen in 2017 — arguably the tournament’s greatest contribution to the wider sport — and then more widely adopted during the pandemic when safety concerns around covid reduced the human footprint on the court. Now, Hawk-Eye is employed so prevalently in professional tennis that it’s more noticeable where it isn’t. As recently as this summer’s Olympic Games, American star Coco Gauff argued with the chair umpire over what she believed was an unfair call. Because the Games were in Paris, the tournament was played on clay, the only surface that has yet to incorporate Hawk-Eye. In lieu of a sophisticated computer system, what’s in and what’s out is determined the old-fashioned way: by human judgment.
For the majority of its existence, each professional tennis match had as many as nine line judges, each responsible for a single angle of the court, to call balls in or out. But on the famous red clay surface of Roland-Garros, Donna Vekić had returned Gauff’s serve with a wobbly forehand and just barely clipped the baseline on Gauff’s side of the court. The ball was in, but a line judge called it out, before yelling, “Correction!”
By then, Gauff had whacked the ball into the net, possibly assuming the point was already over. In cases like this, the chair umpire must decide if the wrong call was a “hindrance” to the player before their racket made contact with the ball — a strange ask from the rule book, considering the chair ump would literally have to be in the mind of the player to know. It was decided that neither the inaccurate call nor its correction was a hindrance to Gauff.
But in that moment, Gauff believed the call was unjust. She pleaded with the chair ump. “I feel like I’m getting cheated on constantly in this game,” she said to the tournament supervisor, through tears. “It happens to me, it happened to Serena.”
Gauff had good reason to evoke Serena Williams. Back at the 2004 US Open, broadcasters were testing Hawk-Eye as a fun visual replay for audiences at home. Two decades ago, it was not used for officiating at all. But during an infamous quarterfinal match between Williams and Jennifer Capriati, line judges called a number of Williams’ balls out, which, when shown by replay, were clearly in. This happened on three different occasions.
“This is ridiculous,” said John McEnroe, who was commentating on the broadcast. “Give me a break!”
Williams lost that match. To the spectator at home, who had a vantage unavailable to anyone on the court thanks to Hawk-Eye, it looked like injustice. That single match is often cited as the catalyst for broad adoption of electronic line-calling in tennis: “The reason Hawk-Eye became a thing is because they were calling my balls out and they weren’t even close to the line,” Williams recalled in 2022 on Meghan Markle’s podcast.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) mandated that to be used for officiating purposes, any line-calling system had to be accurate within five millimeters — about the width of a pencil. Hawk-Eye was consistent within under three. The Williams-Capriati match instigated official testing, and after about a year, in 2006, Hawk-Eye became available to players who wanted to challenge a line person’s call. Over the following decade, its implementation became standard across most of the tour’s major tournaments, as did players’ trust in the technology.

There’s a belief that Hawk-Eye is more accurate and, in turn, more objective. The insinuation is that electronic line-calling could overcome prejudice. Technology overruling bias, perceived or not.
Hawk-Eye was not the first ELC system in tennis. In the ’80s, several tournaments deployed a technology called Cyclops that used infrared beams to judge if serves were out. (It’s unclear why the system was named after a mythological creature with one eye.) As Hawk-Eye succeeded Cyclops, other ELC technologies have entered the arena — Foxtenn, Flightscope, and Bolt6 are the most prominent competitors — but Hawk-Eye has become the Kleenex of the space, the brand that transcends the proper noun. So confident is the company that when I asked one Hawk-Eye exec if they had any business challenges, he said he couldn’t think of any. As a corporate entity, Hawk-Eye apparently has no anxieties about its future.
A subsidiary of Sony, Hawk-Eye Innovations is involved in nearly every major sport. For video review or, as the company calls it, Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (which spells SMART, of course), soccer and American football are the biggest sports; when it comes to ball and player tracking, Hawk-Eye is in tennis but also involved with a newer technology that tracks at least 29 points on an athlete’s body in real time (this one’s called SkeleTRACK, and it is being used by the NBA). Other forms of electronic line-calling, such as VAR in soccer, can be quite controversial, so much so that, earlier this year, the Premier League considered ditching it. In tennis, despite the occasional hiccup, players have called for Hawk-Eye to be in more and more tournaments across the tour. There has been surprisingly little fuss about Hawk-Eye replacing jobs, probably because the line judge has typically been a part-time gig for tennis enthusiasts.
For a technology that is largely invisible to the public, Hawk-Eye has an aesthetic from its origins as a TV video review mechanism. Back in its broadcast replay days, audiences didn’t simply get the call of in or out. There was a whole build-up. Onscreen, after a player challenged a call, the image zoomed in from directly above, as if filmed by a camera suspended in the sky, pitched from the heavens, reflecting the vantage point of God. It was a form of theater, but a compelling one: as audiences waited for the animation, they clapped; when the placement of the ball was unveiled — whether its shadow-like imprint is touching a white line or not — audiences oohed and aahed. The delicious drama of a slow reveal.
There’s nothing more fundamental to tennis than the idea of keeping a ball in play. It is even more fundamental than the racquet. (The sport was originally called jeu de paume, French for “game of the palm,” and was originally played with your hands.) That’s why the men’s player with the most Grand Slam titles isn’t the sport’s most graceful player or its most relentless, but its greatest returner. You’ll never lose a point if you keep the ball in the lines, within the realm of what Hawk-Eye defines as the playable court.
Tennis is often referred to as a game of inches. Hawk-Eye turned it into a game of millimeters — three millimeters, to be exact.

An illustration of a player arguing with a chair umpire over the spot of a ball.

Line-calling is not the only use of Hawk-Eye. Once you track that much data, you can do a lot more than call a ball in or out. In fact, Hawk-Eye collects enough data that it can re-create an entire match in virtual reality. Even in more complex sports, like football, with 22 players across a 5,350-square-meter field, Hawk-Eye is able to contribute to the metaverse thing — as it did last year, when it contributed to a system that took a Jaguars-Falcons game, digitized the players to make them look like Toy Story characters, and broadcast that version live in parallel to the traditional telecast. Whether anyone wants this experience is debatable, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the technology and the herculean corporate synergy that lined the NFL up with Disney’s intellectual property. (That still sounds better than NFTs, which had been pushed on me in many conversations with the ATP.)
I’d been assured by representatives at the ATP that Hawk-Eye was ensuring the sport had a bright future, “embracing a technological future for tennis” that would be “inevitable.” But it wasn’t just automating parts of officiating or leveraging brand-name cartoon characters. A lot of it had to do with sports gambling.
During the match I observed from the Nest, Hawk-Eye would collect countless data points, much of which was being transmitted live not just to the chair umpire officiating the match but to business partners of the ATP as well — the most lucrative of which are, recently, sports betting companies. Everything that was happening on-court would be sent through an algorithm that would process that information to create more accurate betting odds that could be distributed to the world’s gamblers.
This was news to the Hawk-Eye boys. Andrew Birse, a technical project manager, gave me a puzzled look and then got a little defensive: “We mostly deal with on-site capture.” Another operator, Juan Martinez, followed up: “We don’t know what anyone does with it.”
I felt bad. They’d had no idea.
After thinking about it for a moment, Birse said, “That’s probably good for us. It means more people want it. More people want our services.”

The future is sports betting
In 2021, the ATP formed TDI. The goal of the firm was to manage an “asset” that had risen dramatically in value over the past decade: data.
The ATP was one of the first sports organizations to sell its data, which has become so lucrative that it nearly equals how much it makes on its broadcasting rights. (The Slams negotiate theirs separately.) As part of the organization’s deal with Hawk-Eye, the great wealth of that data comes from ball and player tracking would be owned by TDI — at least for the ATP’s own events — making it licensable and, therefore, profitable.
I’m told there are four levels of data captured and transmitted. Level one is the score, which is controlled entirely by the chair umpire on a small tablet. (Their chair has a pressure sensor, nicknamed a “whoopie cushion,” that knows when an ump’s ass has gotten up from the seat.) Level two is observational data, like winners, errors, aces, serve percentage — the kind of stats you’re used to seeing on TV. This is collected, usually, by a person sitting and watching the match, which means it can be quite subjective and inconsistent. “The quality of that data, honestly, was simply not something we could build a business around,” David Lampitt, CEO of TDI, told me. Ball- and player-tracking systems like Hawk-Eye produce level-three data and are so effective that it has become a more consistent way to reverse-engineer level-two data.
(Last is level four: biometric tracking, which comes from wearable tech and is only starting to come into play now, still incubating at places like Next Gen.)
As a professional sport, tennis can best be described as a sprawl: of events, of institutions, of incentives. In 2024, there will be 63 ATP-level tournaments and nearly 200 more lower-level Challengers competitions — plus this year’s Olympics, and that count doesn’t even include the ones that are women-only. Tennis also has a seven-body problem, with organizing and decisions being made across the ITF, the ATP, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the four Grand Slam tournaments, each of which are their own entity. (Imagine if every quarter of the Super Bowl was operated by separate company, with each negotiating their own broadcast deal.)

Though the ATP has an 80 percent stake in it, TDI exists as an independent entity and functions as a go-between for all seven bodies. Lampitt explained that this arrangement allows them to “pool resources, drive synergies and cost efficiencies, and drive incremental value from managing assets in a more coordinated and centralized way” — language that sounds lifted right out of a McKinsey deck.
But TDI was described to me by others as not just the sport’s data arm but also its betting arm.
Sports leagues cannot currently be directly involved in sports gambling for the obvious reasons of integrity — if the business incentives of an organization like the ATP are suddenly in line with that of a sportsbook, how are we to trust that matches wouldn’t be fixed to maximize profits? So, instead, the relationships are separated by contracts.
But the way the ATP sees it, while sports betting isn’t something it can monetize directly, the activity is in line with the organization’s mission to drive fan engagement. Gambling was just as much a way to accomplish that as making the game more suitable for TikTok.
Betting is already suited to it. Unlike most sports, tennis is not a fluid competition, nor is it a linear chase for points. Instead of a competition where points fill a time limit, points in tennis actually create time. Technically, a match can go on forever, or close to forever, as an infamous 11-hour John Isner-Nicolas Mahut match stretched over three days at Wimbledon 2010, though most men’s matches last between two and three hours.
This has to do with the scoring, which, in tennis, is like a Matryoshka doll: a point lives in a game, which lives in a set, which lives in a match. The scoring system is the sport’s weakness and strength. For the newcomer, it can be unintuitive and a little daunting; but it also constructs a competition that can turn on a dime. Each unit of the game — the point, game, and set — can offer the players a reset. And for the spectator, it maximizes the excitement, knowing that comebacks are immensely possible.

This is also what makes tennis such a ripe sport for gamblers. Several people I spoke to across the industry estimate that tennis is either the second or third biggest sport for bettors worldwide, even though it is far from being the second or third most popular sport for viewers. Everyone agrees that the construction of a match, the way it breaks down into so many discrete moments of tension, gives people the opportunity to put down money in a myriad of ways. The most obvious bets are on who will win a match. But with the huge surge of new data available has come the opportunity to create so many more gambling situations.
This is good for a company like Sportradar that is always inventing new methods for bettors to play. Sportradar is a multinational entity, with offices across 34 countries, involved in every major league, and acts as a go-between for the rights holders and betting operators around the world. They put together several products for sports books, but the most important one is calculating odds, as well as the raw and live data that calculate them. “We offer anything to do with fueling the betting industry,” Caroline Roques, a Sportradar spokesperson, told me.
Sportradar is especially excited about micro betting, which is exactly what it sounds like. It allows people to bet not just on the outcome of a whole match but moments within it. Who will win the next point? Will the next serve be an ace, let, fault, or double fault? The window to place these bets is mere seconds. The thinking: not everyone has time to watch an entire tennis match. Micro markets give the bettor more instant gratification.
These innovations in gambling come thanks to the exponential growth in data sold by firms like TDI, which comes from the strides in data capture by technology like Hawk-Eye. As has been the trend in technology for the past decade and a half, stronger algorithms have been developed thanks to the introduction of larger data sets. A big part of Sportradar’s business is dependent on coming up with accurate odds. “[Micro betting] is definitely tied to the emergence of having more data available,” says Sophie Thomas, vice president of group operations at Sportradar. More data means better models and a better understanding of the factors that can change the outcome of a bet. More data means better odds — for the oddsmaker. “If you can’t have this level of predictability, it would be impossible for you to offer micro markets because you would never be able to win as the house, basically. You would constantly be giving away money all the time to bettors.”

Sportradar is far from the first entrant into micro markets. There are startups like Huddle, YouTuber turned pro boxer Jake Paul’s Betr, and Simplebet, which launched back in 2018 and was recently acquired by DraftKings. But Sportradar will begin offering its clients micro betting data this October for tennis, and next year for the NBA.
Though Hawk-Eye’s data capture has enabled the possibility of micro markets in tennis, Thomas believes the pressure will also work backward, increasing demand on ball- and player-tracking systems to collect even more data. Between the ball and positions of both players, Hawk-Eye captures and sends exact X, Y, and Z data points not just to the ELC system but out to clients as well. Hannah Preece, tennis technical manager at Hawk-Eye, told me, “The betting market is very much around the speed of delivery — the quicker they can get it, the better.” For micro betting, the key is not just the volume of information but the velocity it can be received. Odds need to update on the fly. In fact, all betting streams are around 30 seconds ahead of what is broadcast on TV.
Sportradar itself does not collect bets but sells betting products to sports books. That could be an app, like FanDuel or DraftKings, or an online casino. Part of its offerings also entails providing more data not just to its clients, but also statistics and visualizations to the clients’ bettors. Giving people more information makes them feel more empowered in their decisions and, thus, more likely to put down money.
Habits are regional. In Europe, where the sports variety has been legal for longer, betting takes more old-school forms; but in the US, restrictions only recently loosened up after a 2018 Supreme Court decision overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had made sports betting illegal in most places. Now, the action takes a more modern outlet: as apps. The user behavior, then, is different: more of a second-screen experience, with more opportunities for those precious micro bets. What better way to compete with TikTok than on the same device, just a push notification away?
Gambling is, of course, addictive, and those addictive qualities are only exacerbated by the frictionless nature of the internet and the ubiquity of one’s phone. Recently in Defector, Corbin Smith wrote about how there are ways to come out on top of a sportsbook, through strenuous research, number crunching, and risk diversification. “Sports gambling apps do not want people to gamble like that,” he said, writing about the impulse-driven nature of same-game parlays. “The sports and internet sportsbook industries are determined to cultivate and profit not just from gambling but from gambling addictions; that’s where the money is.” It could be argued the most engaged fan is, after all, a gambling addict.
Consider the pipeline: ELC firms like Hawk-Eye collect data on the court, rightsholders like TDI license it to companies like Sportradar, Sportradar in turn packages for sports books, and sportsbooks make those odds available to bettors on their phones, often by push notification. Every time Coco Gauff swings her racket, it becomes a data point for a system that eventually turns into an opportunity for a new gambler, making a number of entities very wealthy in the process and, according to the organizing bodies of the sport, ensuring a future full of engaged tennis fans.
Stephen Marche, writing for The Atlantic, described gambling as a way of “avoiding the future.” I’d argue that making a big bet is a cynical attempt to control it, to imagine that somewhere in the future there is more money or, at least, the potential of money. I think that’s a narrow view of the world, but I also understand why many people, companies, and nations feel this way. After all, gambling takes uncertainty and makes it a game; it recasts anxiety as entertainment. Like sports, betting simplifies the world into a binary of winners and losers and asks you which one you’d rather be.

The future is Saudi Arabia
Jeddah is best known as the port city on the way to Mecca. But the Kingdom is desperate to make it a tourist destination for the non-observant as well. During the week I was there last November, I found plenty to do. Tennis at King Abdullah Sports City, of course. Meanwhile, the Formula 1 track was hosting Ferrari Night, featuring the team’s two beloved drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. Also going on: the preliminary regatta for the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest sailing yacht competition. For non-sports fans, an amusement park called Little Asia was celebrating its grand opening.
Whether the city can spend its way to becoming a destination is unclear. Each day during Next Gen, the shuttle bus passed the Jeddah Superdome, a massive structure illuminated by green lights emerging from the horizon like the world’s biggest egg. It is technically the planet’s largest geodesic dome, and as far as I can tell from its website, no events have been held there since 2022.
One morning, I visited the Red Sea Mall, after an unusually aggressive recommendation from an Uber driver, and discovered a shopping center that looked like it could be anywhere else in the Western world. Another day, I wandered the UNESCO-protected neighborhood of Old Town. It was a gorgeous assortment of homes and mosques, all slightly akilter, much of it covered in scaffolding, like corrective dentistry clamped to a neighborhood of charmingly crooked teeth. Even the old things were being made new.
Saudi Arabia is in a moment of controversial reinvention, using the great wealth of its Public Investment Fund to diversify its revenue streams from oil, wracked with the existential anxiety that the world’s energy consumption will move away from fossil fuels, from which the country makes 40 percent of its GDP. The Kingdom has poured money into not just tennis but also soccer, cricket, mixed martial arts, horse racing, and golf — going as far as launching a $2 billion rival league and poaching competitors from the PGA. Sports and the PFI make for fitting bedfellows then, as both extremely profitable monoliths that are worried what the future might hold.
By the end of that week, Medjedovic, the Serbian player, had won $500,000 — more than he’d made in total throughout his career. The finals had much better attendance numbers. Over half the tickets had been sold, and the ATP would give away the remaining seats. The organizing bodies of tennis might worry that future generations could lose interest in the sport; meanwhile, the Saudis are investing their own future in it. The four subsequent years of Next Gen in Jeddah should prove if it’s working or not.
Still, I was confused: all of tennis’s big bets for the future seemed incongruous with events in the policies of Saudi Arabia itself. Gambling is illegal. Alcohol — the revenue driver of any live sports event — is illegal. The women’s half of tennis — the part that is growing quickly — has players expressing concerns of their safety in a country where homosexuality is illegal. As recently as 2018, Saudi women were not allowed to play sports; they couldn’t watch them, either.
You could argue that women’s tennis is, by some metrics, the most progressive sport in the world, especially when it comes to leveling itself with the men’s side. Players are vocal about their values, speaking openly on issues of mental health, LGBTQ rights, and racial discrimination. The top-paid female athletes in the world are all tennis players, and Billie Jean King, one of the sport’s greatest players and ambassadors, has been a vocal and successful advocate of equal pay.
In 2019, the WTA struck a 10-year deal to host the Finals in Shenzhen, China. One tournament was held that year, while the 2020 event was canceled because of the pandemic. In 2021, Peng Shuai, a former number one ranked doubles player, accused a former government official of sexual assault. The Chinese government scrubbed mentions of the allegations from its news media and kept the WTA from speaking to Shuai directly. In response, the WTA took a stance: all tournaments in China would be suspended until further notice, including the Finals.
“If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback,” CEO and chairman Steve Simon said in a statement. “I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”
Human rights groups lauded the WTA’s position. But with the China deal having fallen through — which represented a third of the WTA’s annual revenue — the organization posted eight-figure losses in 2020 and 2021. It also meant the WTA Finals didn’t have a permanent home, then bouncing from Guadalajara to Fort Worth. Rumors surfaced that the event might move to Saudi Arabia. But how would it look to play there just years after taking a stand on China?
Last spring, rumors swirled again that the WTA Finals might come to Saudi Arabia. “This is entirely incompatible with the spirit and purpose of women’s tennis and the WTA itself,” wrote tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in a dissenting op-ed for The Washington Post.
Instead, last year’s tournament came together in the eleventh hour when the WTA struck a deal to stage the tournament in Cancun. The outdoor event was hosted in the thick of hurricane season, impeding play with rain and flooding. At one point, the wind was so strong it destroyed Gauff’s umbrella. The Independent declared it the “Fyre Festival of tennis tournaments.”
A couple months later, the WTA announced it had struck a deal to host the next three years’ finals in Riyadh. The prize money — $15 million — will be a record. The human rights concerns that had been raised? “We’re sensitive to those,” Simon said to The Athletic. “We do have assurances that everyone’s going to be welcome at the finals and I don’t anticipate anything more than positive experiences.” More prescient, in late 2023, King said heading to Saudi Arabia was already inevitable. “There’s a lot of money, which is very important to keep having money to help the players, but also help run the WTA, run the ATP and all that.”
The message was clear. The money was, apparently, too good to pass up.

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

I’d been promised the future of tennis was in the desert.

From the stands of the Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched as the eighth seed, Abdullah Shelbayh, was given the most dramatic of entrances. Inside one of the stadiums in King Abdullah Sports City, which features a sprawl of soccer fields and indoor arenas across nearly 4 million square meters, an announcer summoned a brief list of the player’s accomplishments, first in Arabic and then in English. The music swelled. Bright white lasers illuminated the lines of the court before the screen at the other end of the stadium opened up to reveal a player tunnel, from which Shelbayh emerged, looking awkward and confused as spotlights swirled around him and the volume of the music rose once again. It was the most impressive light show I’d ever seen at a tennis event, far surpassing anything I’d witnessed at the sport’s biggest tournament, the US Open — a lot of pomp for a guy ranked 185th in the world, playing in an arena that was nearly empty. In a stadium that could seat 3,700, I counted fewer than 50 spectators in total, including the players’ teams and tournament workers.

Later, a spokesperson with the Association of Tennis Professionals (or the ATP, the men’s side of the tour) would tell me they were thrilled with how the tournament was going — the light show, so cool, right? I asked if the turnout was disappointing, and while they agreed that it was, it was also expected. Traveling to Jeddah was a tough ask for many fans, and tennis does have a lot of history in Saudi Arabia. That interest would, hopefully, grow with time.

Months earlier, the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund had struck a deal with the ATP to host Next Gen in Jeddah for the following four years. Next Gen is touted as a proving ground of sorts. There is the competition itself, which features the top-ranked men under 21. In the past decade, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have both won this tournament, later going on to win Grand Slams.

It’s also a trial for the sport itself. Next Gen is where the ATP tries out new things: “innovations,” it touts, as it tests everything from dramatic rule changes to wearable tech that captures players’ biometrics. And this year, a lot of lasers, apparently.

Between matches, I wandered around the grounds. From the outside, you’d never guess there was a live sporting event happening. The parking lot was nearly empty. There appeared to be more people working the event than attending, many just idling around, looking at their phones. Out of boredom, I bought a candy bar from a concession stand, and the cashier told me I was the first customer they’d had all day.

Next Gen is a hard-court event — the most common surface — though it is unusual for several reasons. Since there are no doubles matches, the court is stripped of the lines that would frame the doubles alley, giving the area of play a narrower dimension that is destabilizing for any spectator used to looking at a normal court. The scoreboard, too, was laid out differently. Rather than the traditional scoreline, the interface prescribed more hierarchical logic to each game; the love, 15, 30, 40 order of scoring was now more legible. It was confusing to those familiar with tennis, but I could see how it might be more intuitive to someone who wasn’t.

Matches had a different rhythm, too. Games were first to four points, skipping the usual win-two-points-in-a-row drama at deuce. Sets were won in four instead of six games, with tiebreaks at 3-3. Time between serves was reduced. There were no on-court warm-ups at all.

Many of these changes were intended to speed up the match. Later that week in the finals match, Serbian Hamad Medjedovic would be allowed to take two 10-minute breaks between sets. His opponent and the tournament’s top seed, Frenchman Arthur Fils, would not be thrilled about it. “The rule is terrible,” Fils told French newspaper L’Équipe afterward. “It’s really stupid that this could happen here.”

During the event, I talked to the ATP’s chief sporting officer, Ross Hutchins, who explained that the rule changes at Next Gen were part of an initiative from the top of the organization to challenge all the sport’s assumptions, to reimagine each of tennis’s traditions to see how to break the rules “for the benefit of the fan to enjoy our sport.” Hutchins is a former player, once ranked 26th in the world in doubles, and I was surprised by how much time he spent talking about fan engagement.

He was existentially concerned about TikTok. For the better part of the last century, sports have been a monoculture because they have always been broadcast on TV — the industry term for this is “linear.” Now, people look at their phones. Surveys have shown that Zoomers don’t watch TV and, more shockingly, do not watch sports, at least not the way that their parents or older siblings do.

Hearing Hutchins’ ideas for Next Gen revealed the ATP’s anxieties. The light show had been made to look good for “short-form highlights.” (I.e., should the game be tailored to TikTok?) He even proposed going as far as completely rewriting the scoring system of tennis. “Do we simplify and go first to 21 points?” (I.e., is the sport too confusing?) And the new rules of Next Gen made matches quicker. “If you take the total amount of time in a match of two hours, how much, actually, is watching action versus watching someone look at their strings or changing their shirt or toweling themselves down? And can we try and reduce the dead time in a match?” (I.e., is tennis boring?)

Some of what Hutchins was putting forward was merely to illustrate just how far they were willing to go. He suspected some of the more radical ideas out of Next Gen wouldn’t make it to tour. But he estimated that, historically, four out of every five things they tried eventually had. The point remained: the institutions of tennis were willing to rewrite the rules of tennis.

“People have to move faster these days because of the way the entertainment world is forcing change… if you don’t grow at a certain pace, you will be left behind,” Hutchins told me.

Like any culture, there’s a tension between tradition and modernity, and during Next Gen, I tried to be a good sport and embrace the latter. Watching tennis live is as much of an aural experience as it is a visual one. During the matches, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds: the thwack of the ball, the squeaking of sneakers, and the boom of the PA announcer declaring the point’s winner. In Jeddah, though, when I would ordinarily hear applause, all I picked up was silence, like a space waiting to be filled. But with what? I wondered.

The future is technology

David Foster Wallace described tennis as a game of geometry. The construction of electronic line-calling confirms that idea. The predominant system, Hawk-Eye, measures trajectory, using a set of 12 cameras positioned around the court, each tracking the ball at 70 frames per second. The cameras themselves are not that sophisticated and, in fact, aren’t even high-definition or in color. Instead, the power comes from the processing of that footage. Using image differencing, the multiple angles allow the system to identify the ball’s position in 3D space — truth by triangulation. But Hawk-Eye doesn’t just know where the ball is and instead predicts where it’s going by calculating the ball’s speed, spin, and skid. The system assumes where a ball will bounce before it arrives, a prophecy of the future made with the confidence of the combined might of physics, surveillance technology, and an algorithm trained on billions of data points. In that way, Hawk-Eye is more precog than cop.

The system works incredibly quickly. As soon as a ball makes contact with the court, Hawk-Eye can call it out by playing a recording of a person saying “out!”

In Jeddah, I watched the semifinal match between Medjedovic and Dominic Stricker from the booth where Hawk-Eye is controlled — called the Hawk-Eye Nest, of course. There were more spectators in attendance this time, but the stadium was still pretty empty. As I was escorted to the booth, we passed all of the TV setups broadcasting the match live. Tons of screens, wires, and boxes, deployed in a way that reminded me of an arcade. Everything looked at once organized and also extremely messy, concealed half-heartedly under blankets, as we wandered through the dark, up some staircases, and finally into the booth where Hawk-Eye was operated.

I was greeted by the Hawk-Eye team deployed to this specific tournament, a polite batch of earnest twentysomething boys who all look very at home situated in front of a computer. The man behind the curtain is actually a bunch of lads, tasked with protecting the integrity of the game.

The energy in the Hawk-Eye Nest was surprisingly subdued. Everyone was playing their part, quietly and effectively, and like any desk job, it mostly involved staring at a computer monitor. I looked over the shoulder of someone whose screen was visualizing the path of the ball on the blue court below: where it had been, where it was headed. In more ways than one, this was a glimpse of the future.

Its most automated form, Hawk-Eye Live, was first tested at Next Gen in 2017 — arguably the tournament’s greatest contribution to the wider sport — and then more widely adopted during the pandemic when safety concerns around covid reduced the human footprint on the court. Now, Hawk-Eye is employed so prevalently in professional tennis that it’s more noticeable where it isn’t. As recently as this summer’s Olympic Games, American star Coco Gauff argued with the chair umpire over what she believed was an unfair call. Because the Games were in Paris, the tournament was played on clay, the only surface that has yet to incorporate Hawk-Eye. In lieu of a sophisticated computer system, what’s in and what’s out is determined the old-fashioned way: by human judgment.

For the majority of its existence, each professional tennis match had as many as nine line judges, each responsible for a single angle of the court, to call balls in or out. But on the famous red clay surface of Roland-Garros, Donna Vekić had returned Gauff’s serve with a wobbly forehand and just barely clipped the baseline on Gauff’s side of the court. The ball was in, but a line judge called it out, before yelling, “Correction!”

By then, Gauff had whacked the ball into the net, possibly assuming the point was already over. In cases like this, the chair umpire must decide if the wrong call was a “hindrance” to the player before their racket made contact with the ball — a strange ask from the rule book, considering the chair ump would literally have to be in the mind of the player to know. It was decided that neither the inaccurate call nor its correction was a hindrance to Gauff.

But in that moment, Gauff believed the call was unjust. She pleaded with the chair ump. “I feel like I’m getting cheated on constantly in this game,” she said to the tournament supervisor, through tears. “It happens to me, it happened to Serena.”

Gauff had good reason to evoke Serena Williams. Back at the 2004 US Open, broadcasters were testing Hawk-Eye as a fun visual replay for audiences at home. Two decades ago, it was not used for officiating at all. But during an infamous quarterfinal match between Williams and Jennifer Capriati, line judges called a number of Williams’ balls out, which, when shown by replay, were clearly in. This happened on three different occasions.

“This is ridiculous,” said John McEnroe, who was commentating on the broadcast. “Give me a break!”

Williams lost that match. To the spectator at home, who had a vantage unavailable to anyone on the court thanks to Hawk-Eye, it looked like injustice. That single match is often cited as the catalyst for broad adoption of electronic line-calling in tennis: “The reason Hawk-Eye became a thing is because they were calling my balls out and they weren’t even close to the line,” Williams recalled in 2022 on Meghan Markle’s podcast.

The International Tennis Federation (ITF) mandated that to be used for officiating purposes, any line-calling system had to be accurate within five millimeters — about the width of a pencil. Hawk-Eye was consistent within under three. The Williams-Capriati match instigated official testing, and after about a year, in 2006, Hawk-Eye became available to players who wanted to challenge a line person’s call. Over the following decade, its implementation became standard across most of the tour’s major tournaments, as did players’ trust in the technology.

There’s a belief that Hawk-Eye is more accurate and, in turn, more objective. The insinuation is that electronic line-calling could overcome prejudice. Technology overruling bias, perceived or not.

Hawk-Eye was not the first ELC system in tennis. In the ’80s, several tournaments deployed a technology called Cyclops that used infrared beams to judge if serves were out. (It’s unclear why the system was named after a mythological creature with one eye.) As Hawk-Eye succeeded Cyclops, other ELC technologies have entered the arena — Foxtenn, Flightscope, and Bolt6 are the most prominent competitors — but Hawk-Eye has become the Kleenex of the space, the brand that transcends the proper noun. So confident is the company that when I asked one Hawk-Eye exec if they had any business challenges, he said he couldn’t think of any. As a corporate entity, Hawk-Eye apparently has no anxieties about its future.

A subsidiary of Sony, Hawk-Eye Innovations is involved in nearly every major sport. For video review or, as the company calls it, Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (which spells SMART, of course), soccer and American football are the biggest sports; when it comes to ball and player tracking, Hawk-Eye is in tennis but also involved with a newer technology that tracks at least 29 points on an athlete’s body in real time (this one’s called SkeleTRACK, and it is being used by the NBA). Other forms of electronic line-calling, such as VAR in soccer, can be quite controversial, so much so that, earlier this year, the Premier League considered ditching it. In tennis, despite the occasional hiccup, players have called for Hawk-Eye to be in more and more tournaments across the tour. There has been surprisingly little fuss about Hawk-Eye replacing jobs, probably because the line judge has typically been a part-time gig for tennis enthusiasts.

For a technology that is largely invisible to the public, Hawk-Eye has an aesthetic from its origins as a TV video review mechanism. Back in its broadcast replay days, audiences didn’t simply get the call of in or out. There was a whole build-up. Onscreen, after a player challenged a call, the image zoomed in from directly above, as if filmed by a camera suspended in the sky, pitched from the heavens, reflecting the vantage point of God. It was a form of theater, but a compelling one: as audiences waited for the animation, they clapped; when the placement of the ball was unveiled — whether its shadow-like imprint is touching a white line or not — audiences oohed and aahed. The delicious drama of a slow reveal.

There’s nothing more fundamental to tennis than the idea of keeping a ball in play. It is even more fundamental than the racquet. (The sport was originally called jeu de paume, French for “game of the palm,” and was originally played with your hands.) That’s why the men’s player with the most Grand Slam titles isn’t the sport’s most graceful player or its most relentless, but its greatest returner. You’ll never lose a point if you keep the ball in the lines, within the realm of what Hawk-Eye defines as the playable court.

Tennis is often referred to as a game of inches. Hawk-Eye turned it into a game of millimeters — three millimeters, to be exact.

An illustration of a player arguing with a chair umpire over the spot of a ball.

Line-calling is not the only use of Hawk-Eye. Once you track that much data, you can do a lot more than call a ball in or out. In fact, Hawk-Eye collects enough data that it can re-create an entire match in virtual reality. Even in more complex sports, like football, with 22 players across a 5,350-square-meter field, Hawk-Eye is able to contribute to the metaverse thing — as it did last year, when it contributed to a system that took a Jaguars-Falcons game, digitized the players to make them look like Toy Story characters, and broadcast that version live in parallel to the traditional telecast. Whether anyone wants this experience is debatable, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the technology and the herculean corporate synergy that lined the NFL up with Disney’s intellectual property. (That still sounds better than NFTs, which had been pushed on me in many conversations with the ATP.)

I’d been assured by representatives at the ATP that Hawk-Eye was ensuring the sport had a bright future, “embracing a technological future for tennis” that would be “inevitable.” But it wasn’t just automating parts of officiating or leveraging brand-name cartoon characters. A lot of it had to do with sports gambling.

During the match I observed from the Nest, Hawk-Eye would collect countless data points, much of which was being transmitted live not just to the chair umpire officiating the match but to business partners of the ATP as well — the most lucrative of which are, recently, sports betting companies. Everything that was happening on-court would be sent through an algorithm that would process that information to create more accurate betting odds that could be distributed to the world’s gamblers.

This was news to the Hawk-Eye boys. Andrew Birse, a technical project manager, gave me a puzzled look and then got a little defensive: “We mostly deal with on-site capture.” Another operator, Juan Martinez, followed up: “We don’t know what anyone does with it.”

I felt bad. They’d had no idea.

After thinking about it for a moment, Birse said, “That’s probably good for us. It means more people want it. More people want our services.”

The future is sports betting

In 2021, the ATP formed TDI. The goal of the firm was to manage an “asset” that had risen dramatically in value over the past decade: data.

The ATP was one of the first sports organizations to sell its data, which has become so lucrative that it nearly equals how much it makes on its broadcasting rights. (The Slams negotiate theirs separately.) As part of the organization’s deal with Hawk-Eye, the great wealth of that data comes from ball and player tracking would be owned by TDI — at least for the ATP’s own events — making it licensable and, therefore, profitable.

I’m told there are four levels of data captured and transmitted. Level one is the score, which is controlled entirely by the chair umpire on a small tablet. (Their chair has a pressure sensor, nicknamed a “whoopie cushion,” that knows when an ump’s ass has gotten up from the seat.) Level two is observational data, like winners, errors, aces, serve percentage — the kind of stats you’re used to seeing on TV. This is collected, usually, by a person sitting and watching the match, which means it can be quite subjective and inconsistent. “The quality of that data, honestly, was simply not something we could build a business around,” David Lampitt, CEO of TDI, told me. Ball- and player-tracking systems like Hawk-Eye produce level-three data and are so effective that it has become a more consistent way to reverse-engineer level-two data.

(Last is level four: biometric tracking, which comes from wearable tech and is only starting to come into play now, still incubating at places like Next Gen.)

As a professional sport, tennis can best be described as a sprawl: of events, of institutions, of incentives. In 2024, there will be 63 ATP-level tournaments and nearly 200 more lower-level Challengers competitions — plus this year’s Olympics, and that count doesn’t even include the ones that are women-only. Tennis also has a seven-body problem, with organizing and decisions being made across the ITF, the ATP, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the four Grand Slam tournaments, each of which are their own entity. (Imagine if every quarter of the Super Bowl was operated by separate company, with each negotiating their own broadcast deal.)

Though the ATP has an 80 percent stake in it, TDI exists as an independent entity and functions as a go-between for all seven bodies. Lampitt explained that this arrangement allows them to “pool resources, drive synergies and cost efficiencies, and drive incremental value from managing assets in a more coordinated and centralized way” — language that sounds lifted right out of a McKinsey deck.

But TDI was described to me by others as not just the sport’s data arm but also its betting arm.

Sports leagues cannot currently be directly involved in sports gambling for the obvious reasons of integrity — if the business incentives of an organization like the ATP are suddenly in line with that of a sportsbook, how are we to trust that matches wouldn’t be fixed to maximize profits? So, instead, the relationships are separated by contracts.

But the way the ATP sees it, while sports betting isn’t something it can monetize directly, the activity is in line with the organization’s mission to drive fan engagement. Gambling was just as much a way to accomplish that as making the game more suitable for TikTok.

Betting is already suited to it. Unlike most sports, tennis is not a fluid competition, nor is it a linear chase for points. Instead of a competition where points fill a time limit, points in tennis actually create time. Technically, a match can go on forever, or close to forever, as an infamous 11-hour John Isner-Nicolas Mahut match stretched over three days at Wimbledon 2010, though most men’s matches last between two and three hours.

This has to do with the scoring, which, in tennis, is like a Matryoshka doll: a point lives in a game, which lives in a set, which lives in a match. The scoring system is the sport’s weakness and strength. For the newcomer, it can be unintuitive and a little daunting; but it also constructs a competition that can turn on a dime. Each unit of the game — the point, game, and set — can offer the players a reset. And for the spectator, it maximizes the excitement, knowing that comebacks are immensely possible.

This is also what makes tennis such a ripe sport for gamblers. Several people I spoke to across the industry estimate that tennis is either the second or third biggest sport for bettors worldwide, even though it is far from being the second or third most popular sport for viewers. Everyone agrees that the construction of a match, the way it breaks down into so many discrete moments of tension, gives people the opportunity to put down money in a myriad of ways. The most obvious bets are on who will win a match. But with the huge surge of new data available has come the opportunity to create so many more gambling situations.

This is good for a company like Sportradar that is always inventing new methods for bettors to play. Sportradar is a multinational entity, with offices across 34 countries, involved in every major league, and acts as a go-between for the rights holders and betting operators around the world. They put together several products for sports books, but the most important one is calculating odds, as well as the raw and live data that calculate them. “We offer anything to do with fueling the betting industry,” Caroline Roques, a Sportradar spokesperson, told me.

Sportradar is especially excited about micro betting, which is exactly what it sounds like. It allows people to bet not just on the outcome of a whole match but moments within it. Who will win the next point? Will the next serve be an ace, let, fault, or double fault? The window to place these bets is mere seconds. The thinking: not everyone has time to watch an entire tennis match. Micro markets give the bettor more instant gratification.

These innovations in gambling come thanks to the exponential growth in data sold by firms like TDI, which comes from the strides in data capture by technology like Hawk-Eye. As has been the trend in technology for the past decade and a half, stronger algorithms have been developed thanks to the introduction of larger data sets. A big part of Sportradar’s business is dependent on coming up with accurate odds. “[Micro betting] is definitely tied to the emergence of having more data available,” says Sophie Thomas, vice president of group operations at Sportradar. More data means better models and a better understanding of the factors that can change the outcome of a bet. More data means better odds — for the oddsmaker. “If you can’t have this level of predictability, it would be impossible for you to offer micro markets because you would never be able to win as the house, basically. You would constantly be giving away money all the time to bettors.”

Sportradar is far from the first entrant into micro markets. There are startups like Huddle, YouTuber turned pro boxer Jake Paul’s Betr, and Simplebet, which launched back in 2018 and was recently acquired by DraftKings. But Sportradar will begin offering its clients micro betting data this October for tennis, and next year for the NBA.

Though Hawk-Eye’s data capture has enabled the possibility of micro markets in tennis, Thomas believes the pressure will also work backward, increasing demand on ball- and player-tracking systems to collect even more data. Between the ball and positions of both players, Hawk-Eye captures and sends exact X, Y, and Z data points not just to the ELC system but out to clients as well. Hannah Preece, tennis technical manager at Hawk-Eye, told me, “The betting market is very much around the speed of delivery — the quicker they can get it, the better.” For micro betting, the key is not just the volume of information but the velocity it can be received. Odds need to update on the fly. In fact, all betting streams are around 30 seconds ahead of what is broadcast on TV.

Sportradar itself does not collect bets but sells betting products to sports books. That could be an app, like FanDuel or DraftKings, or an online casino. Part of its offerings also entails providing more data not just to its clients, but also statistics and visualizations to the clients’ bettors. Giving people more information makes them feel more empowered in their decisions and, thus, more likely to put down money.

Habits are regional. In Europe, where the sports variety has been legal for longer, betting takes more old-school forms; but in the US, restrictions only recently loosened up after a 2018 Supreme Court decision overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had made sports betting illegal in most places. Now, the action takes a more modern outlet: as apps. The user behavior, then, is different: more of a second-screen experience, with more opportunities for those precious micro bets. What better way to compete with TikTok than on the same device, just a push notification away?

Gambling is, of course, addictive, and those addictive qualities are only exacerbated by the frictionless nature of the internet and the ubiquity of one’s phone. Recently in Defector, Corbin Smith wrote about how there are ways to come out on top of a sportsbook, through strenuous research, number crunching, and risk diversification. “Sports gambling apps do not want people to gamble like that,” he said, writing about the impulse-driven nature of same-game parlays. “The sports and internet sportsbook industries are determined to cultivate and profit not just from gambling but from gambling addictions; that’s where the money is.” It could be argued the most engaged fan is, after all, a gambling addict.

Consider the pipeline: ELC firms like Hawk-Eye collect data on the court, rightsholders like TDI license it to companies like Sportradar, Sportradar in turn packages for sports books, and sportsbooks make those odds available to bettors on their phones, often by push notification. Every time Coco Gauff swings her racket, it becomes a data point for a system that eventually turns into an opportunity for a new gambler, making a number of entities very wealthy in the process and, according to the organizing bodies of the sport, ensuring a future full of engaged tennis fans.

Stephen Marche, writing for The Atlantic, described gambling as a way of “avoiding the future.” I’d argue that making a big bet is a cynical attempt to control it, to imagine that somewhere in the future there is more money or, at least, the potential of money. I think that’s a narrow view of the world, but I also understand why many people, companies, and nations feel this way. After all, gambling takes uncertainty and makes it a game; it recasts anxiety as entertainment. Like sports, betting simplifies the world into a binary of winners and losers and asks you which one you’d rather be.

The future is Saudi Arabia

Jeddah is best known as the port city on the way to Mecca. But the Kingdom is desperate to make it a tourist destination for the non-observant as well. During the week I was there last November, I found plenty to do. Tennis at King Abdullah Sports City, of course. Meanwhile, the Formula 1 track was hosting Ferrari Night, featuring the team’s two beloved drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz. Also going on: the preliminary regatta for the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest sailing yacht competition. For non-sports fans, an amusement park called Little Asia was celebrating its grand opening.

Whether the city can spend its way to becoming a destination is unclear. Each day during Next Gen, the shuttle bus passed the Jeddah Superdome, a massive structure illuminated by green lights emerging from the horizon like the world’s biggest egg. It is technically the planet’s largest geodesic dome, and as far as I can tell from its website, no events have been held there since 2022.

One morning, I visited the Red Sea Mall, after an unusually aggressive recommendation from an Uber driver, and discovered a shopping center that looked like it could be anywhere else in the Western world. Another day, I wandered the UNESCO-protected neighborhood of Old Town. It was a gorgeous assortment of homes and mosques, all slightly akilter, much of it covered in scaffolding, like corrective dentistry clamped to a neighborhood of charmingly crooked teeth. Even the old things were being made new.

Saudi Arabia is in a moment of controversial reinvention, using the great wealth of its Public Investment Fund to diversify its revenue streams from oil, wracked with the existential anxiety that the world’s energy consumption will move away from fossil fuels, from which the country makes 40 percent of its GDP. The Kingdom has poured money into not just tennis but also soccer, cricket, mixed martial arts, horse racing, and golf — going as far as launching a $2 billion rival league and poaching competitors from the PGA. Sports and the PFI make for fitting bedfellows then, as both extremely profitable monoliths that are worried what the future might hold.

By the end of that week, Medjedovic, the Serbian player, had won $500,000 — more than he’d made in total throughout his career. The finals had much better attendance numbers. Over half the tickets had been sold, and the ATP would give away the remaining seats. The organizing bodies of tennis might worry that future generations could lose interest in the sport; meanwhile, the Saudis are investing their own future in it. The four subsequent years of Next Gen in Jeddah should prove if it’s working or not.

Still, I was confused: all of tennis’s big bets for the future seemed incongruous with events in the policies of Saudi Arabia itself. Gambling is illegal. Alcohol — the revenue driver of any live sports event — is illegal. The women’s half of tennis — the part that is growing quickly — has players expressing concerns of their safety in a country where homosexuality is illegal. As recently as 2018, Saudi women were not allowed to play sports; they couldn’t watch them, either.

You could argue that women’s tennis is, by some metrics, the most progressive sport in the world, especially when it comes to leveling itself with the men’s side. Players are vocal about their values, speaking openly on issues of mental health, LGBTQ rights, and racial discrimination. The top-paid female athletes in the world are all tennis players, and Billie Jean King, one of the sport’s greatest players and ambassadors, has been a vocal and successful advocate of equal pay.

In 2019, the WTA struck a 10-year deal to host the Finals in Shenzhen, China. One tournament was held that year, while the 2020 event was canceled because of the pandemic. In 2021, Peng Shuai, a former number one ranked doubles player, accused a former government official of sexual assault. The Chinese government scrubbed mentions of the allegations from its news media and kept the WTA from speaking to Shuai directly. In response, the WTA took a stance: all tournaments in China would be suspended until further notice, including the Finals.

“If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback,” CEO and chairman Steve Simon said in a statement. “I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”

Human rights groups lauded the WTA’s position. But with the China deal having fallen through — which represented a third of the WTA’s annual revenue — the organization posted eight-figure losses in 2020 and 2021. It also meant the WTA Finals didn’t have a permanent home, then bouncing from Guadalajara to Fort Worth. Rumors surfaced that the event might move to Saudi Arabia. But how would it look to play there just years after taking a stand on China?

Last spring, rumors swirled again that the WTA Finals might come to Saudi Arabia. “This is entirely incompatible with the spirit and purpose of women’s tennis and the WTA itself,” wrote tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova in a dissenting op-ed for The Washington Post.

Instead, last year’s tournament came together in the eleventh hour when the WTA struck a deal to stage the tournament in Cancun. The outdoor event was hosted in the thick of hurricane season, impeding play with rain and flooding. At one point, the wind was so strong it destroyed Gauff’s umbrella. The Independent declared it the “Fyre Festival of tennis tournaments.”

A couple months later, the WTA announced it had struck a deal to host the next three years’ finals in Riyadh. The prize money — $15 million — will be a record. The human rights concerns that had been raised? “We’re sensitive to those,” Simon said to The Athletic. “We do have assurances that everyone’s going to be welcome at the finals and I don’t anticipate anything more than positive experiences.” More prescient, in late 2023, King said heading to Saudi Arabia was already inevitable. “There’s a lot of money, which is very important to keep having money to help the players, but also help run the WTA, run the ATP and all that.”

The message was clear. The money was, apparently, too good to pass up.

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The Pixel 9 is the Android flagship for anyone who just wants a dang phone. The Pixel 9 is the kind of device you get after a few generations of incremental progress.
One minor update after another doesn’t look like much year-over-year. A faster fingerprint sensor? Uniform bezels? Not the stuff of headlines. But eventually, the little stuff adds up to something significant. That’s the feeling I get holding the Pixel 9, and I like it a lot.
The Pixel 9 is the only non-Pro phone in the 9 series at this point, which, as best I can tell, means it has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB and doesn’t have a telephoto lens. It’s smaller than the aptly named Pixel 9 Pro XL, the same size and shape as the regular Pixel 9 Pro, and it doesn’t fold in half like the other 9 Pro does.
But mainly, the Pixel 9 just works. The screen is bright and the battery goes all day. The fingerprint sensor is quick and accurate, finally. Although it’s pricier than last year’s model at $799 versus $699, that’s basically the going rate for a non-Pro flagship phone. And for the first time, the Pixel line feels like it has earned a place right alongside Samsung and Apple. Google just needed a few years to get here.

Let’s get it out of the way: from the front, the Pixel 9 looks like an iPhone. The rounded screen corners, the flat sides — it’s all iPhone and that’s fine. Compared to recent Pixel generations, it feels about 80 percent less likely to fly out of my hand when I pick it up from a table, which I appreciate way more than the distinct look the curved edges provided. The 6.3-inch screen is a little bigger than the Pixel 8’s. Its 1080p screen is on the low side, resolution-wise, but looks sharp enough that it never bothered me.
The Pixel 9 comes with the same main and ultrawide cameras as the Pro phones, but it doesn’t have a telephoto lens. Not all flagship phones come with a telephoto, and the Pixel 9’s lossless 2x crop zoom is fine. But you don’t get the more dramatic reach of the 9 Pro’s 5x zoom or the nice portrait framing of a 3x lens like the one on the Samsung Galaxy S24. It’s the thing I missed most when I switched from using the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 9 — way more than a few extra pixels on the screen or a handful of AI-enhanced video or photo features.

Aside from that, you don’t miss out on much. The screen doesn’t get quite as bright as the Pros, but it’s still good enough to use in direct sunlight. Battery performance is on par with the rest of the Pixel 9 series. It had plenty left in the tank by the end of the day, and I never felt like I needed to give it a late-in-the-day recharge, even with heavy use.
Tensor G4, Google’s newest chipset, is on all four Pixel 9 models. It’s a solid performer for daily tasks and doesn’t seem to heat up quite as dramatically as the previous generation, though if you spend 20 minutes running a media-heavy webpage, it will still double as a hand warmer. But it doesn’t feel like it’s going to burst into flames, you know?
It all adds up to an experience that feels polished in a way that previous Pixels didn’t quite achieve. The chipsets ran hot, the shapes felt wonky, and the screens weren’t quite as nice. The non-Pro Pixel, in particular, has been on a journey from the upper midrange to proper flagship, mainly by improving the screen refresh rate and adding minor camera features along the way. Both models gained some quality-of-life improvements over time, too, including the ability to use face unlock for payments and — new in the 9 series — a much-improved fingerprint scanner. The kind of stuff that makes me feel much more comfortable recommending it to my parents or my hair stylist.

Google is really leaning into the weird camera bar, but I don’t hate it.

Google sorted the hardware out, and the software is as clean as ever. But this is a phone launched in 2024, so we have to talk about AI. There are a few features reserved for the Pro line, like Video Boost, which uses AI in the cloud to bump up the brightness in low light video. That’s not a huge loss, and the Pixel 9 has plenty of other AI features, including Reimagine, Screenshots, and Pixel Studio, all of which you can read about in my Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review. Some of it is so good that it’s problematic! But the TL;DR is that it feels like a real mixed bag right now, and AI features are starting to pile up in a way that’s sort of hurting my head.
What do I do with a JPEG of a kid’s birthday party invitation? Add it to screenshots? Ask Gemini to put it on my calendar? Or just find it in my messages every time I need to look up the party time or address? AI is supposed to save us from the latter scenario, and Google’s various AI tools kinda work like that sometimes. For now, it remains unproven as the next platform shift.
The Pixel 9 also comes with something more important but much less flashy: seven years of OS updates. Sure, it ships with Android 14, which is weird since Pixels usually ship with the year’s newest OS version. But the Pixel 9 will be first in line for Android 15 when it arrives this fall, so that doesn’t feel like much more than an interesting footnote. You’ll outgrow the Pixel 9 before it stops receiving software updates, which is how things should be.

An Android phone for people who aren’t phone people.

And that’s the Pixel 9’s whole deal: it’s a phone that the Android ecosystem has needed for a while now. It’s straightforward, well-made, and designed to keep up for many years to come. It doesn’t have every fancy feature or the best camera hardware, but it has enough to make it a worthy alternative to Samsung’s base-model S-series, which is more or less the default Android phone.
There’s a reason why so many people choose a Samsung phone: they’re really good. But they also come with a whole lot of stuff that most people don’t need, bordering on bloated. They’re powerful tools if you know how to tweak them to your liking, but I suspect a lot of people buy them for the nice hardware and just put up with the software quirks. I’ve generally preferred the simpler out-of-box experience of using a Pixel phone, but the hardware never really felt like it was on Samsung’s level.
It’s a phone that the Android ecosystem has needed for a while now
That changes with the Pixel 9. It’s finally a phone for someone who just wants a really good phone. Someone who doesn’t care about the difference between optical and digital zoom, doesn’t want to fiddle with a lot of customization options, and who wants to avoid thinking about buying a new phone for as long as they can. The Android ecosystem has that option now, and it’s a damn good one.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The Pixel 9 is the Android flagship for anyone who just wants a dang phone.

The Pixel 9 is the kind of device you get after a few generations of incremental progress.

One minor update after another doesn’t look like much year-over-year. A faster fingerprint sensor? Uniform bezels? Not the stuff of headlines. But eventually, the little stuff adds up to something significant. That’s the feeling I get holding the Pixel 9, and I like it a lot.

The Pixel 9 is the only non-Pro phone in the 9 series at this point, which, as best I can tell, means it has 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB and doesn’t have a telephoto lens. It’s smaller than the aptly named Pixel 9 Pro XL, the same size and shape as the regular Pixel 9 Pro, and it doesn’t fold in half like the other 9 Pro does.

But mainly, the Pixel 9 just works. The screen is bright and the battery goes all day. The fingerprint sensor is quick and accurate, finally. Although it’s pricier than last year’s model at $799 versus $699, that’s basically the going rate for a non-Pro flagship phone. And for the first time, the Pixel line feels like it has earned a place right alongside Samsung and Apple. Google just needed a few years to get here.

Let’s get it out of the way: from the front, the Pixel 9 looks like an iPhone. The rounded screen corners, the flat sides — it’s all iPhone and that’s fine. Compared to recent Pixel generations, it feels about 80 percent less likely to fly out of my hand when I pick it up from a table, which I appreciate way more than the distinct look the curved edges provided. The 6.3-inch screen is a little bigger than the Pixel 8’s. Its 1080p screen is on the low side, resolution-wise, but looks sharp enough that it never bothered me.

The Pixel 9 comes with the same main and ultrawide cameras as the Pro phones, but it doesn’t have a telephoto lens. Not all flagship phones come with a telephoto, and the Pixel 9’s lossless 2x crop zoom is fine. But you don’t get the more dramatic reach of the 9 Pro’s 5x zoom or the nice portrait framing of a 3x lens like the one on the Samsung Galaxy S24. It’s the thing I missed most when I switched from using the Pixel 9 Pro to the Pixel 9 — way more than a few extra pixels on the screen or a handful of AI-enhanced video or photo features.

Aside from that, you don’t miss out on much. The screen doesn’t get quite as bright as the Pros, but it’s still good enough to use in direct sunlight. Battery performance is on par with the rest of the Pixel 9 series. It had plenty left in the tank by the end of the day, and I never felt like I needed to give it a late-in-the-day recharge, even with heavy use.

Tensor G4, Google’s newest chipset, is on all four Pixel 9 models. It’s a solid performer for daily tasks and doesn’t seem to heat up quite as dramatically as the previous generation, though if you spend 20 minutes running a media-heavy webpage, it will still double as a hand warmer. But it doesn’t feel like it’s going to burst into flames, you know?

It all adds up to an experience that feels polished in a way that previous Pixels didn’t quite achieve. The chipsets ran hot, the shapes felt wonky, and the screens weren’t quite as nice. The non-Pro Pixel, in particular, has been on a journey from the upper midrange to proper flagship, mainly by improving the screen refresh rate and adding minor camera features along the way. Both models gained some quality-of-life improvements over time, too, including the ability to use face unlock for payments and — new in the 9 series — a much-improved fingerprint scanner. The kind of stuff that makes me feel much more comfortable recommending it to my parents or my hair stylist.

Google sorted the hardware out, and the software is as clean as ever. But this is a phone launched in 2024, so we have to talk about AI. There are a few features reserved for the Pro line, like Video Boost, which uses AI in the cloud to bump up the brightness in low light video. That’s not a huge loss, and the Pixel 9 has plenty of other AI features, including Reimagine, Screenshots, and Pixel Studio, all of which you can read about in my Pixel 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL review. Some of it is so good that it’s problematic! But the TL;DR is that it feels like a real mixed bag right now, and AI features are starting to pile up in a way that’s sort of hurting my head.

What do I do with a JPEG of a kid’s birthday party invitation? Add it to screenshots? Ask Gemini to put it on my calendar? Or just find it in my messages every time I need to look up the party time or address? AI is supposed to save us from the latter scenario, and Google’s various AI tools kinda work like that sometimes. For now, it remains unproven as the next platform shift.

The Pixel 9 also comes with something more important but much less flashy: seven years of OS updates. Sure, it ships with Android 14, which is weird since Pixels usually ship with the year’s newest OS version. But the Pixel 9 will be first in line for Android 15 when it arrives this fall, so that doesn’t feel like much more than an interesting footnote. You’ll outgrow the Pixel 9 before it stops receiving software updates, which is how things should be.

And that’s the Pixel 9’s whole deal: it’s a phone that the Android ecosystem has needed for a while now. It’s straightforward, well-made, and designed to keep up for many years to come. It doesn’t have every fancy feature or the best camera hardware, but it has enough to make it a worthy alternative to Samsung’s base-model S-series, which is more or less the default Android phone.

There’s a reason why so many people choose a Samsung phone: they’re really good. But they also come with a whole lot of stuff that most people don’t need, bordering on bloated. They’re powerful tools if you know how to tweak them to your liking, but I suspect a lot of people buy them for the nice hardware and just put up with the software quirks. I’ve generally preferred the simpler out-of-box experience of using a Pixel phone, but the hardware never really felt like it was on Samsung’s level.

That changes with the Pixel 9. It’s finally a phone for someone who just wants a really good phone. Someone who doesn’t care about the difference between optical and digital zoom, doesn’t want to fiddle with a lot of customization options, and who wants to avoid thinking about buying a new phone for as long as they can. The Android ecosystem has that option now, and it’s a damn good one.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

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Image: The Verge

A federal judge issued a last-minute partial block on a Texas law that would require some large web services to identify minors and filter what they see online. Called HB 18 or the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, it was signed into law last year and was set to take effect over the weekend on September 1st. But a late Friday court ruling determined that the “monitoring and filtering” requirements posed a significant threat to online speech.
The SCOPE Act requires a range of web services, particularly large social networks, to apply special rules to users whose registered age is under 18. That includes limiting data collection, banning targeted advertising, and not allowing financial transactions without parental consent. More unusually for a US-based law, it says services must implement a plan to “prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material,” including content that promotes or “glorifies” things like suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and “grooming.” And any service whose content is deemed more than one-third harmful or obscene (as defined by an existing Texas statute) must implement a “commercially reasonable age verification method.”
Tech industry groups NetChoice and the CCIA sued to prevent the law from taking effect, arguing that it unconstitutionally restricted freedom of expression. A separate suit was filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. On August 30th, Judge Robert Pitman agreed partially to NetChoice’s demands in court, granting an injunction on the monitoring and filtering rules while the case proceeds.
The ruling didn’t find that the entirety of HB 18 posed a threat to First Amendment-protected speech, and some provisions — like the data collection rules and the age verification for sites with large amounts of adult content — remain in force. (Texas already required age verification on adult sites.) Meta and TikTok didn’t reply to a request for comment on whether they were planning changes to comply with the new law.
But Pitman was highly critical of the monitoring and filtering rules. “Terms like ‘promoting,’ ‘glorifying,’ ‘substance abuse,’ ‘harassment,’ and ‘grooming’ are undefined, despite their potential wide breadth and politically charged nature,” he writes, echoing criticism from FIRE, which noted that terms like “grooming” have been applied to all forms of LGBTQ content. “At what point, for example, does alcohol use become ‘substance abuse?’ When does an extreme diet cross the line into an ‘eating disorder?’” An attorney general enforcing the law could end up doing so selectively — by, say, deciding that posts or videos about marijuana were glorifying substance abuse “even if cigarette and alcohol use is not.”
And the judge points out that while social networks would have to filter out controversial material, the same rules wouldn’t apply to other media:
A teenager can read Peter Singer advocate for physician-assisted suicide in Practical Ethics on Google Books but cannot watch his lectures on YouTube or potentially even review the same book on Goodreads. In its attempt to block children from accessing harmful content, Texas also prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online. Even accepting that Texas only wishes to prohibit the most harmful pieces of content, a state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online.
While the injunction only covers a portion of the law, it makes HB 18 the latest state-level internet regulation to be at least partially blocked by courts, alongside California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act and other statutes in Arkansas, Ohio and Mississippi. (At the federal level, Congress is still working on the the Kids Online Safety Act, which has raised its own censorship concerns despite lawmakers’ efforts to allay them.) The legal battle over the SCOPE Act isn’t finished — but for now, Texas teens can keep watching videos about weed.

Image: The Verge

A federal judge issued a last-minute partial block on a Texas law that would require some large web services to identify minors and filter what they see online. Called HB 18 or the Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, it was signed into law last year and was set to take effect over the weekend on September 1st. But a late Friday court ruling determined that the “monitoring and filtering” requirements posed a significant threat to online speech.

The SCOPE Act requires a range of web services, particularly large social networks, to apply special rules to users whose registered age is under 18. That includes limiting data collection, banning targeted advertising, and not allowing financial transactions without parental consent. More unusually for a US-based law, it says services must implement a plan to “prevent the known minor’s exposure to harmful material,” including content that promotes or “glorifies” things like suicide, self-harm, substance abuse, and “grooming.” And any service whose content is deemed more than one-third harmful or obscene (as defined by an existing Texas statute) must implement a “commercially reasonable age verification method.”

Tech industry groups NetChoice and the CCIA sued to prevent the law from taking effect, arguing that it unconstitutionally restricted freedom of expression. A separate suit was filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. On August 30th, Judge Robert Pitman agreed partially to NetChoice’s demands in court, granting an injunction on the monitoring and filtering rules while the case proceeds.

The ruling didn’t find that the entirety of HB 18 posed a threat to First Amendment-protected speech, and some provisions — like the data collection rules and the age verification for sites with large amounts of adult content — remain in force. (Texas already required age verification on adult sites.) Meta and TikTok didn’t reply to a request for comment on whether they were planning changes to comply with the new law.

But Pitman was highly critical of the monitoring and filtering rules. “Terms like ‘promoting,’ ‘glorifying,’ ‘substance abuse,’ ‘harassment,’ and ‘grooming’ are undefined, despite their potential wide breadth and politically charged nature,” he writes, echoing criticism from FIRE, which noted that terms like “grooming” have been applied to all forms of LGBTQ content. “At what point, for example, does alcohol use become ‘substance abuse?’ When does an extreme diet cross the line into an ‘eating disorder?’” An attorney general enforcing the law could end up doing so selectively — by, say, deciding that posts or videos about marijuana were glorifying substance abuse “even if cigarette and alcohol use is not.”

And the judge points out that while social networks would have to filter out controversial material, the same rules wouldn’t apply to other media:

A teenager can read Peter Singer advocate for physician-assisted suicide in Practical Ethics on Google Books but cannot watch his lectures on YouTube or potentially even review the same book on Goodreads. In its attempt to block children from accessing harmful content, Texas also prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online. Even accepting that Texas only wishes to prohibit the most harmful pieces of content, a state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online.

While the injunction only covers a portion of the law, it makes HB 18 the latest state-level internet regulation to be at least partially blocked by courts, alongside California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act and other statutes in Arkansas, Ohio and Mississippi. (At the federal level, Congress is still working on the the Kids Online Safety Act, which has raised its own censorship concerns despite lawmakers’ efforts to allay them.) The legal battle over the SCOPE Act isn’t finished — but for now, Texas teens can keep watching videos about weed.

Read More 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After a brutal 2023, the vibes around self-driving cars are improving. Cruise, the industry leader whose vehicle was involved in a horrific San Francisco crash last fall, has rebooted under new management, while rival Waymo is expanding to serve broader swaths of the Bay Area and Los Angeles and Tesla is promising a new robotaxi service.
Although Americans say they remain wary of autonomous driving, boosters insist there is nothing to fear. In fact, they foresee roads full of self-driving cars that are both safer and cleaner than the status quo, a tantalizing prospect in a country where transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and residents are several times more likely to die in a crash than those living in other rich nations.
Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.

Image: Getty

In the 1800s, coal was the sine qua non of economic development, essential for everything from heating to transport to manufacturing. In Britain, the country where the stuff first powered an industrial revolution, national leaders debated how concerned they should be about potentially depleting coal deposits. Some argued that supply would never be exhausted because improvements in steam engine designs would steadily reduce the amount of coal necessary to power a train, make a dress, or do anything else. Productivity gains would allow Britain’s coal resources to stretch further and further.
In his 1865 book The Coal Question, the economist William Stanley Jevons explained why he disagreed. Jevons drew from then-recent history to show that steam engines’ efficiency had led people to deploy more of them. “Burning coal became an economically viable thing to do, so demand exploded,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale. “You have steam engines everywhere, and people are using them instead of water power. You actually use a lot more coal than you did initially.” Despite the improvements in steam engine design, Jevons argued, total coal use would continue to rise.
“Burning coal became an economically viable thing to do, so demand exploded”
Today, the Jevons paradox describes a situation where greater efficiency in deploying a resource (such as water, gasoline, or electricity) causes demand for that resource to skyrocket — negating an expected decline in total usage. Electric lights are often cited as an example: people have responded to improved light bulb efficiency by installing so many more of them that there has been no decline in the total energy consumed by lighting. The Jevons paradox has become a bedrock principle of environmental economics, used to explain why efficiency improvements can backfire and cause the opposite outcome from what was intended.
Its lessons can also illuminate transportation. Consider the projects undertaken by highway agencies to alleviate roadway congestion. Public officials often justify them by noting (accurately) that gas-powered engines are less efficient and release more pollutants if they are stuck in gridlock instead of moving at a steady clip. For that reason, they argue, highway expansions or traffic technologies that mitigate traffic jams will also reduce emissions.

Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

The Jevons paradox reveals a blind spot in such claims. If an added lane or new traffic technology does relieve congestion, more people will decide to drive due to a drop in the “cost” of using a car — in this case, the time sitting in traffic. Even if each car now produces fewer emissions due to faster travel speeds, these benefits could be overshadowed by the sheer number of new trips that would not have otherwise occurred. In other words: backfire. (The benefits of expanded highways are even more questionable when one considers the likelihood that rising car volumes ultimately force traffic to move as slowly as before — only now with more cars belching fumes as they inch forward. This phenomenon is known as induced demand.)
Now consider the case of autonomous vehicles. Seeking to win over skeptical regulators and members of the public, AV supporters frequently cite the supposed safety benefits from replacing the fallible humans sitting behind the wheel with technology that will never drive drunk, high, or distracted. Some also suggest that self-driving cars will reduce energy use and emissions since they will avoid the quirks of human driving that compromise engine efficiency. “The higher the proportion of AVs on the road, the smoother the overall flow of traffic ought to be, resulting in less energy-consuming stop-and-go traffic,” predicted a 2021 blog post from Mobileye, a technology company that claims it is “driving the autonomous vehicle evolution.”
The Jevons paradox has become a bedrock principle of environmental economics
Both of these supposed benefits are dubious; AVs’ computers may make driving errors that humans would not, and even if they run entirely on electricity, their software, hardware, and sensors require an enormous amount of power that generates its own emissions as it is produced. Still, it is reasonable to expect AVs’ reliability and efficiency to improve over time. For the sake of argument, let’s take a leap of faith and assume that an average self-driving car will eventually be both safer and cleaner than one driven by a human. Will total crash deaths and emissions then fall?
The Jevons paradox suggests we shouldn’t count on it.
As AV companies’ ads show, the raison d’être of autonomous vehicles is making driving easier and more pleasant, with passengers free to hold a work meeting, sing a song, or grab some shuteye. How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it.

Image: Getty Images

Similar to highway expansion, the availability of autonomous vehicles will likely lead people to take longer motor vehicle trips or opt for a car when they would have otherwise used transit, biked, or stayed home. The result will be a lot more (now autonomous) cars on the road. As the University of Virginia historian Peter Norton wrote in a prescient 2014 article, self-driving technology could lead people to “spend more total time in vehicles [and] use them for even more tasks.”
Norton, who teaches the Jevons paradox in his classes, told me that he wrote that article because he “was seeing smart engineers argue, to my utter astonishment, that [AVs’] efficiency against would only bring savings — with no counteracting costs. How they can continually deny this elementary fact is beyond me.”
How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it
Supporting his point, a recent paper from the Transportation Research Board concluded that “the likelihood of making additional trips increases” when autonomous vehicles are available, even if they are shared instead of owned. Since each self-driven mile creates some pollution and carries some risk of a crash death, the rise in total driving will counteract the theoretical climate or safety improvements over a single, otherwise identical human-driven journey.
The societal impact of self-driving cars looks even worse when considering second-order effects related to land use. Just as the ascent of car ownership fueled suburbanization in the 20th century, AVs could lead people to relocate to larger, less energy-efficient homes on the urban fringe, where car trips — now more tolerable — are longer.
At the moment, there are more questions than answers about the collective effects of AVs, which are currently available in only a handful of US cities. As self-driving companies pour billions of dollars into advancing their technology, it is impossible to know how safe and energy-efficient their products could eventually become. But the Jevons paradox suggests those are not the only questions to consider. Another, equally crucial one: how much more driving will AVs induce — and will those added miles swamp any possible upside?

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After a brutal 2023, the vibes around self-driving cars are improving. Cruise, the industry leader whose vehicle was involved in a horrific San Francisco crash last fall, has rebooted under new management, while rival Waymo is expanding to serve broader swaths of the Bay Area and Los Angeles and Tesla is promising a new robotaxi service.

Although Americans say they remain wary of autonomous driving, boosters insist there is nothing to fear. In fact, they foresee roads full of self-driving cars that are both safer and cleaner than the status quo, a tantalizing prospect in a country where transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and residents are several times more likely to die in a crash than those living in other rich nations.

Enticing though they are, such arguments conceal a logical flaw. As a classic 19th-century theory known as a Jevons paradox explains, even if autonomous vehicles eventually work perfectly — an enormous “if” — they are likely to increase total emissions and crash deaths, simply because people will use them so much.

Image: Getty

In the 1800s, coal was the sine qua non of economic development, essential for everything from heating to transport to manufacturing. In Britain, the country where the stuff first powered an industrial revolution, national leaders debated how concerned they should be about potentially depleting coal deposits. Some argued that supply would never be exhausted because improvements in steam engine designs would steadily reduce the amount of coal necessary to power a train, make a dress, or do anything else. Productivity gains would allow Britain’s coal resources to stretch further and further.

In his 1865 book The Coal Question, the economist William Stanley Jevons explained why he disagreed. Jevons drew from then-recent history to show that steam engines’ efficiency had led people to deploy more of them. “Burning coal became an economically viable thing to do, so demand exploded,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale. “You have steam engines everywhere, and people are using them instead of water power. You actually use a lot more coal than you did initially.” Despite the improvements in steam engine design, Jevons argued, total coal use would continue to rise.

Today, the Jevons paradox describes a situation where greater efficiency in deploying a resource (such as water, gasoline, or electricity) causes demand for that resource to skyrocket — negating an expected decline in total usage. Electric lights are often cited as an example: people have responded to improved light bulb efficiency by installing so many more of them that there has been no decline in the total energy consumed by lighting. The Jevons paradox has become a bedrock principle of environmental economics, used to explain why efficiency improvements can backfire and cause the opposite outcome from what was intended.

Its lessons can also illuminate transportation. Consider the projects undertaken by highway agencies to alleviate roadway congestion. Public officials often justify them by noting (accurately) that gas-powered engines are less efficient and release more pollutants if they are stuck in gridlock instead of moving at a steady clip. For that reason, they argue, highway expansions or traffic technologies that mitigate traffic jams will also reduce emissions.

Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

The Jevons paradox reveals a blind spot in such claims. If an added lane or new traffic technology does relieve congestion, more people will decide to drive due to a drop in the “cost” of using a car — in this case, the time sitting in traffic. Even if each car now produces fewer emissions due to faster travel speeds, these benefits could be overshadowed by the sheer number of new trips that would not have otherwise occurred. In other words: backfire. (The benefits of expanded highways are even more questionable when one considers the likelihood that rising car volumes ultimately force traffic to move as slowly as before — only now with more cars belching fumes as they inch forward. This phenomenon is known as induced demand.)

Now consider the case of autonomous vehicles. Seeking to win over skeptical regulators and members of the public, AV supporters frequently cite the supposed safety benefits from replacing the fallible humans sitting behind the wheel with technology that will never drive drunk, high, or distracted. Some also suggest that self-driving cars will reduce energy use and emissions since they will avoid the quirks of human driving that compromise engine efficiency. “The higher the proportion of AVs on the road, the smoother the overall flow of traffic ought to be, resulting in less energy-consuming stop-and-go traffic,” predicted a 2021 blog post from Mobileye, a technology company that claims it is “driving the autonomous vehicle evolution.”

Both of these supposed benefits are dubious; AVs’ computers may make driving errors that humans would not, and even if they run entirely on electricity, their software, hardware, and sensors require an enormous amount of power that generates its own emissions as it is produced. Still, it is reasonable to expect AVs’ reliability and efficiency to improve over time. For the sake of argument, let’s take a leap of faith and assume that an average self-driving car will eventually be both safer and cleaner than one driven by a human. Will total crash deaths and emissions then fall?

The Jevons paradox suggests we shouldn’t count on it.

As AV companies’ ads show, the raison d’être of autonomous vehicles is making driving easier and more pleasant, with passengers free to hold a work meeting, sing a song, or grab some shuteye. How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it.

Image: Getty Images

Similar to highway expansion, the availability of autonomous vehicles will likely lead people to take longer motor vehicle trips or opt for a car when they would have otherwise used transit, biked, or stayed home. The result will be a lot more (now autonomous) cars on the road. As the University of Virginia historian Peter Norton wrote in a prescient 2014 article, self-driving technology could lead people to “spend more total time in vehicles [and] use them for even more tasks.”

Norton, who teaches the Jevons paradox in his classes, told me that he wrote that article because he “was seeing smart engineers argue, to my utter astonishment, that [AVs’] efficiency against would only bring savings — with no counteracting costs. How they can continually deny this elementary fact is beyond me.”

Supporting his point, a recent paper from the Transportation Research Board concluded that “the likelihood of making additional trips increases” when autonomous vehicles are available, even if they are shared instead of owned. Since each self-driven mile creates some pollution and carries some risk of a crash death, the rise in total driving will counteract the theoretical climate or safety improvements over a single, otherwise identical human-driven journey.

The societal impact of self-driving cars looks even worse when considering second-order effects related to land use. Just as the ascent of car ownership fueled suburbanization in the 20th century, AVs could lead people to relocate to larger, less energy-efficient homes on the urban fringe, where car trips — now more tolerable — are longer.

At the moment, there are more questions than answers about the collective effects of AVs, which are currently available in only a handful of US cities. As self-driving companies pour billions of dollars into advancing their technology, it is impossible to know how safe and energy-efficient their products could eventually become. But the Jevons paradox suggests those are not the only questions to consider. Another, equally crucial one: how much more driving will AVs induce — and will those added miles swamp any possible upside?

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Image: Microsoft

Lenovo appears ready to launch new more affordable Copilot Plus PCs. Reliable leaker Evan Blass has published a press release from Lenovo that details a variety of Copilot Plus PCs that will be announced at the IFA trade show later this week, including two that are powered by an unannounced 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip.
The new Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs from Lenovo include the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1, a convertible with a 14-inch OLED display, and the IdeaPad Slim 5x, a full-metal clamshell laptop with the option to pick a 14-inch OLED display. Both feature a new Snapdragon X Plus 8-core chip, instead of the regular 10-core version.

Image: Evan Blass (X)
The IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 comes with an OLED display.

Image: Evan Blass (X)
The IdeaPad 5x could usher in an era of cheaper Copilot Plus PCs.

Lenovo lists the starting price of the Slim 5x at €899 (about $990), and the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 at a starting price of €999, with availability for both models expected in September. This European pricing suggests we’ll see Copilot Plus PCs launch at €200 less than the €1,199 retail price of the Surface Laptop 7 — technically the cheapest Copilot Plus PC right now.
It’s not clear if the US pricing of Lenovo’s new Copilot Plus PCs will come close to the discounts we’re seeing to full retail pricing on some models, though. You can currently purchase a Dell Inspiron 14 Plus for $799.99, or a HP OmniBook X for $899.99. Both of these Copilot Plus PCs have been discounted and don’t include tax, and feature Qualcomm’s 10- or 12-core Snapdragon chips.
Lenovo is also planning to launch other Copilot Plus PCs with Intel and AMD processors. The Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a 15-inch laptop that’s powered by Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 2 chips, and Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 7 and IdeaPad Slim 5 are both powered by AMD’s latest Ryzen processors.

Image: Microsoft

Lenovo appears ready to launch new more affordable Copilot Plus PCs. Reliable leaker Evan Blass has published a press release from Lenovo that details a variety of Copilot Plus PCs that will be announced at the IFA trade show later this week, including two that are powered by an unannounced 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip.

The new Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs from Lenovo include the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1, a convertible with a 14-inch OLED display, and the IdeaPad Slim 5x, a full-metal clamshell laptop with the option to pick a 14-inch OLED display. Both feature a new Snapdragon X Plus 8-core chip, instead of the regular 10-core version.

Image: Evan Blass (X)
The IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 comes with an OLED display.

Image: Evan Blass (X)
The IdeaPad 5x could usher in an era of cheaper Copilot Plus PCs.

Lenovo lists the starting price of the Slim 5x at €899 (about $990), and the IdeaPad 5x 2-in-1 at a starting price of €999, with availability for both models expected in September. This European pricing suggests we’ll see Copilot Plus PCs launch at €200 less than the €1,199 retail price of the Surface Laptop 7 — technically the cheapest Copilot Plus PC right now.

It’s not clear if the US pricing of Lenovo’s new Copilot Plus PCs will come close to the discounts we’re seeing to full retail pricing on some models, though. You can currently purchase a Dell Inspiron 14 Plus for $799.99, or a HP OmniBook X for $899.99. Both of these Copilot Plus PCs have been discounted and don’t include tax, and feature Qualcomm’s 10- or 12-core Snapdragon chips.

Lenovo is also planning to launch other Copilot Plus PCs with Intel and AMD processors. The Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a 15-inch laptop that’s powered by Intel’s latest Core Ultra Series 2 chips, and Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 7 and IdeaPad Slim 5 are both powered by AMD’s latest Ryzen processors.

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Disney and DirecTV both blame each other for causing the blackout. | Image: The Verge

Disney-owned channels including ABC and ESPN were pulled from DirecTV’s lineup on Sunday after talks to reach a new distribution deal between the companies collapsed. The blackout started midway through ESPN’s broadcast of the US Open tennis tournament, and just ahead of the NFL season opener this coming weekend.
DirecTV and Disney are both blaming each other for causing the blackout. The only thing for certain is that DirecTV’s roughly 11 million subscribers are the ones suffering.
DirecTV says it’s being prevented from offering more flexible packages that can more closely cater to consumer interest, and that Disney is “herding consumers away” from network TV by shifting content to Disney-owned streaming services like Hulu and Disney Plus. Disney is also accused of including a last-minute demand to waive all claims that its behavior is anti-competitive, according to DirecTV.
“The Walt Disney Co. is once again refusing any accountability to consumers, distribution partners, and now the American judicial system,” Rob Thun, chief content officer at DirecTV, said in a statement. “Disney is in the business of creating alternate realities, but this is the real world where we believe you earn your way and must answer for your own actions. They want to continue to chase maximum profits and dominant control at the expense of consumers – making it harder for them to select the shows and sports they want at a reasonable price.”
Disney says it won’t enter into an agreement that undervalues its portfolio
Disney, meanwhile, says its channels are worth a premium that DirecTV is refusing to pay.
“While we’re open to offering DirecTV flexibility and terms which we’ve extended to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs. We invest significantly to deliver the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news and sports because that’s what our viewers expect and deserve,” the company said in a statement on its website. “We urge DirecTV to do what’s in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”
The deal that expired on Sunday was negotiated in 2019, according to Reuters. These contracts are typically made to intentionally expire during periods of peak viewership as an incentive for both parties to renegotiate. Nevertheless, carriage disputes are fairly common — Disney pulled a similar move on the same day last year when it blocked its channels for Charter’s Spectrum subscribers in the middle of the US Open. That blackout lasted for twelve days before a new deal was reached.

Disney and DirecTV both blame each other for causing the blackout. | Image: The Verge

Disney-owned channels including ABC and ESPN were pulled from DirecTV’s lineup on Sunday after talks to reach a new distribution deal between the companies collapsed. The blackout started midway through ESPN’s broadcast of the US Open tennis tournament, and just ahead of the NFL season opener this coming weekend.

DirecTV and Disney are both blaming each other for causing the blackout. The only thing for certain is that DirecTV’s roughly 11 million subscribers are the ones suffering.

DirecTV says it’s being prevented from offering more flexible packages that can more closely cater to consumer interest, and that Disney is “herding consumers away” from network TV by shifting content to Disney-owned streaming services like Hulu and Disney Plus. Disney is also accused of including a last-minute demand to waive all claims that its behavior is anti-competitive, according to DirecTV.

“The Walt Disney Co. is once again refusing any accountability to consumers, distribution partners, and now the American judicial system,” Rob Thun, chief content officer at DirecTV, said in a statement. “Disney is in the business of creating alternate realities, but this is the real world where we believe you earn your way and must answer for your own actions. They want to continue to chase maximum profits and dominant control at the expense of consumers – making it harder for them to select the shows and sports they want at a reasonable price.”

Disney, meanwhile, says its channels are worth a premium that DirecTV is refusing to pay.

“While we’re open to offering DirecTV flexibility and terms which we’ve extended to other distributors, we will not enter into an agreement that undervalues our portfolio of television channels and programs. We invest significantly to deliver the No. 1 brands in entertainment, news and sports because that’s what our viewers expect and deserve,” the company said in a statement on its website. “We urge DirecTV to do what’s in the best interest of their customers and finalize a deal that would immediately restore our programming.”

The deal that expired on Sunday was negotiated in 2019, according to Reuters. These contracts are typically made to intentionally expire during periods of peak viewership as an incentive for both parties to renegotiate. Nevertheless, carriage disputes are fairly common — Disney pulled a similar move on the same day last year when it blocked its channels for Charter’s Spectrum subscribers in the middle of the US Open. That blackout lasted for twelve days before a new deal was reached.

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Image: Microsoft

While the latest update to Windows 11 makes it look like the upcoming Recall feature can be easily removed by users, Microsoft tells us it’s just a bug and a fix is coming. Deskmodder spotted the change last week in the latest 24H2 version of Windows 11, with KB5041865 seemingly delivering the ability to uninstall Recall from the Windows Features section.
“We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.”
The controversial Recall AI feature, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a computer, was originally supposed to debut with Copilot Plus PCs in June. Microsoft was forced to delay the feature after security researchers raised concerns. Microsoft says it remains on track to preview Recall with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs in October, after the company has had more time to make major changes to Recall.
Security researchers initially found that the Recall database that stores the snapshots of your computer every few seconds wasn’t encrypted, and malware could have potentially accessed the Recall feature. Microsoft is now making the AI-powered feature an opt-in experience instead of on by default, encrypting the database, and authenticating through Windows Hello.
We did ask Microsoft whether it will allow Windows users to fully uninstall Recall, as this appearance in the Windows features list suggests, but the company only confirmed this was just “incorrectly listed” for now. It’s possible that Microsoft may need to add a Recall uninstall option to EU copies of Windows 11 to comply with the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act. Microsoft has already had to add an uninstall option for Edge in European Economic Area (EEA) countries, alongside the ability to remove the Bing-powered web search in the Start menu.

Image: Microsoft

While the latest update to Windows 11 makes it look like the upcoming Recall feature can be easily removed by users, Microsoft tells us it’s just a bug and a fix is coming. Deskmodder spotted the change last week in the latest 24H2 version of Windows 11, with KB5041865 seemingly delivering the ability to uninstall Recall from the Windows Features section.

“We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.”

The controversial Recall AI feature, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a computer, was originally supposed to debut with Copilot Plus PCs in June. Microsoft was forced to delay the feature after security researchers raised concerns. Microsoft says it remains on track to preview Recall with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs in October, after the company has had more time to make major changes to Recall.

Security researchers initially found that the Recall database that stores the snapshots of your computer every few seconds wasn’t encrypted, and malware could have potentially accessed the Recall feature. Microsoft is now making the AI-powered feature an opt-in experience instead of on by default, encrypting the database, and authenticating through Windows Hello.

We did ask Microsoft whether it will allow Windows users to fully uninstall Recall, as this appearance in the Windows features list suggests, but the company only confirmed this was just “incorrectly listed” for now. It’s possible that Microsoft may need to add a Recall uninstall option to EU copies of Windows 11 to comply with the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act. Microsoft has already had to add an uninstall option for Edge in European Economic Area (EEA) countries, alongside the ability to remove the Bing-powered web search in the Start menu.

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Image: NASA

US astronaut Barry Wilmore called NASA ground crew on Saturday, asking for help with a repetitive knocking sound that was coming from the Boeing Starliner craft. The interaction was captured by a NASA Space Flight forum member, who included a recording of it in a post that was spotted by Ars Technica.
In the recording, Wilmore asks NASA crew in Houston to configure their call so that he could show them the noise, which he says is coming from the speaker inside Starliner. Then, a repetitive clanging sound with slight there’s-something-on-the-wing vibes can be heard. The Earthside crew member describes it as sounding “almost like a sonar ping.”

Starliner crew reports hearing strange “sonar like noises” emanating from their craft. This is the real audio of it: pic.twitter.com/xzHTMvB7uq— SpaceBasedFox . (@SpaceBasedFox) September 1, 2024

The mysterious sound could very well have a very mundane explanation, like the very specific type of feedback loop one person on Reddit compared it to. At the very least, neither Wilmore nor the NASA ground team member he spoke with seemed particularly concerned (even if it does sort of resemble the unnerving Ganado theme from Resident Evil 4).
Boeing’s Starliner is currently scheduled to undock on September 6th for an automated, uncrewed return to Earth, leaving its original intended passengers, Wilmore and fellow astronaut Sunita Williams, behind on the ISS until early next year.

Image: NASA

US astronaut Barry Wilmore called NASA ground crew on Saturday, asking for help with a repetitive knocking sound that was coming from the Boeing Starliner craft. The interaction was captured by a NASA Space Flight forum member, who included a recording of it in a post that was spotted by Ars Technica.

In the recording, Wilmore asks NASA crew in Houston to configure their call so that he could show them the noise, which he says is coming from the speaker inside Starliner. Then, a repetitive clanging sound with slight there’s-something-on-the-wing vibes can be heard. The Earthside crew member describes it as sounding “almost like a sonar ping.”

The mysterious sound could very well have a very mundane explanation, like the very specific type of feedback loop one person on Reddit compared it to. At the very least, neither Wilmore nor the NASA ground team member he spoke with seemed particularly concerned (even if it does sort of resemble the unnerving Ganado theme from Resident Evil 4).

Boeing’s Starliner is currently scheduled to undock on September 6th for an automated, uncrewed return to Earth, leaving its original intended passengers, Wilmore and fellow astronaut Sunita Williams, behind on the ISS until early next year.

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The next version of the Mac Mini may be so much smaller than this. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple’s next Mac Mini won’t have USB-A ports, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in today’s Power On newsletter that the new desktops will start to hit Apple’s warehouses in September. The higher-end variant with an Apple M4 Pro chip will ship in October, he writes.
The version with an M4 Pro will still cram a lot of ports, including five USB-C ports (two in the front and three in the back), an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack, according to Gurman’s sources. And the new Mac Mini will apparently have an internal power supply. That’s not too shabby for a computer that’s expected to be about the size of an Apple TV.

Is it time to say goodbye to USB-A? Maybe. Probably. But no matter how you feel about that, it’s absolutely time something new happened with the Mac Mini, the longest-in-the-tooth Apple computer design. As Chris Welch illustrated earlier this month, it looks the same in our 2012 and 2023 reviews. (He didn’t point out our review of the first version of the Mac Mini’s current design because there isn’t one — The Verge didn’t exist yet in 2010.)

The next version of the Mac Mini may be so much smaller than this. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple’s next Mac Mini won’t have USB-A ports, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in today’s Power On newsletter that the new desktops will start to hit Apple’s warehouses in September. The higher-end variant with an Apple M4 Pro chip will ship in October, he writes.

The version with an M4 Pro will still cram a lot of ports, including five USB-C ports (two in the front and three in the back), an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack, according to Gurman’s sources. And the new Mac Mini will apparently have an internal power supply. That’s not too shabby for a computer that’s expected to be about the size of an Apple TV.

Is it time to say goodbye to USB-A? Maybe. Probably. But no matter how you feel about that, it’s absolutely time something new happened with the Mac Mini, the longest-in-the-tooth Apple computer design. As Chris Welch illustrated earlier this month, it looks the same in our 2012 and 2023 reviews. (He didn’t point out our review of the first version of the Mac Mini’s current design because there isn’t one — The Verge didn’t exist yet in 2010.)

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