Oli Freke is a musician and journalist whose works have appeared in Sound on Sound, The Quietus, and Mixmag. This has included using math to explore the melodic potential of the Western 12-tone scale and deep dives on effects plug-ins. He's even written a book tracing the evolution of the synthesizer from 1963 through 1995, charting the change from analog to digital and back.
His new project is Beat Gems, a coffee-table visual history of drum machines from publisher Bjooks. Like other Bjooks titles, Beat Gems is loaded with gorgeous photos, fascinating historical tidbits, and practical advice for making the most of your gear, whether it's …
Teenage Engineering’s OP-XY has a huge number of functions. | Photo by Terrence O’Brien / The Verge
With elements from synthesizers, loopers, and effects pedals, Teenage Engineering’s devices lie somewhere between musical instrument and modern art. These grooveboxes, as they’re often called, are capable of helping you producesongs in real time from a single unit, with an eye-catching design language. A wide swath of the brand’s offerings are 30 percent off at Guitar Center when you use code TE30, atAmazon when you click the on-page coupon for whichever product you’re interested in, and B&H Photo (discount applied automatically at checkout). The terms for the Amazon coupon claim it will run through August 8th, 2026, while Guitar Center deal is listed as “limited time.”
The OP-XY is one of the flagship units, which my colleague Terrence O’Brien described as a “greatest hits tour for Teenage Engineering.” Normally $2,299, the discount code brings the price down to a more palatable $1,609.30, which is a lot cheaper, but still pretty pricey for an aspiring musician. That said, it’s loaded with features for both production and live performance, and has a premium, durable build quality that reflects its price point. It’s currently sold out at Amazon, but in stock and discounted at Guitar Center and B&H Photo. Read our Teenage Engineering OP-XY review.
The model I’m most tempted by is the EP-40 Riddim, a compact sampler with a library of over 400 built-in synth settings and effects particularly well-suited for producing dub and reggae music, plus 128MB of storage for your own loops and recorded sounds. It’s a bit less intimidating for a beginner than the OP-XY, both in terms of price point and features, and itstighter genre focus may help concentrate your efforts and onboarding. Normally $329, the EP-40 is $230.30 at Amazon, Guitar Center, and B&H Photo during the promotion.
Warner Bros. Discovery has filed suit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally poaching employees, including Pia Barlow, former senior VP for originals marketing. In the complaint, Warner says that "Amazon has chosen to ride on the coattails of other well-established Hollywood mainstays," and that it engaged in a "lawless employee shopping spree." Deadline reports that Francesca Orsi, HBO's head of drama series and films, is believed to be one of the other Amazon targets.
Barlow is set to begin a new position as Amazon's head of original series marketing on August 3rd. According to Warner's suit, Barlow was under contract until October 31st …
Last month, Louisville, Kentucky-based creator Luke The Maker showed off a bizarre, 3D-printed, pistol-shaped case design for the popular minimalist Xteink X4 e-reader. The X4 lies vertically atop the plastic gun's slide, with a cutout on the side to access its buttons. Though the frame was digitally modeled after a real gun, this "case" can't shoot bullets. Squeezing the trigger does nothing at all. He calls his contraption the "Gundle."
In a post showing off the wacky accessory, Luke (whose last name is Blackford) can be seen flipping through Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and J.D. Sali …
What Surrounds Us takes its title literally. You play as a circle surrounding a hole in its middle - it looks like a donut with frosting. You work together with other sentient moving circles, sometimes helping them joyfully meet with others. And you traverse a large map that's composed entirely of, you guessed it, a series of circles. But the circles everywhere aren't just an artistic choice; they underscore the game's themes about working in connection with the environment and the things around us.
Despite the trippy design, What Surrounds Us has a familiar format. I kept feeling echoes of The Legend of Zelda as I trekked across three dist …
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 137, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy phone season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This “piercing pillow” also works great with earbuds you probably already own.
Tech companies love to sell us expensive gadgets to solve all of life's little problems. Sleepbuds sold by the likes of Anker and Ozlo are a good example. These miniature marvels of engineering sit flush in the ear, and allow side-sleepers to doze off listening to podcasts, audiobooks, music, or white noise without annoying their partner. But why pay over $200 for a second pair of highly specialized buds when you can spend a fraction of that for a product that never needs charging, never loses its Bluetooth connection, and won't need replacing in a few years after the battery wears out?
Piercing pillows, as the name suggests, promise pain …
Remember when Meta was planning to charge a $20 monthly subscription fee for the smart glasses feature that lets people hear each other more clearly - even though that feature runs locally on your glasses and doesn't require the cloud? Meta has paused those plans, spokesperson Tyler Yee confirms to The Verge.
The company is not giving up on the idea of a subscription fee for certain features - that's still moving forward. Yee confirms that "some premium features will be subscription-based over time."
But Conversation Focus, the accessibility feature, "will remain available for free through our Early Access Program for early testers while w …
Meta's smart glasses have been a PR headache for the company. Public backlash has been swift, and fierce; people are concerned about the erosion of privacy and expansion of surveillance. Some especially bad actors are using the glasses to film themselves "pranking" random strangers. Women have become unsuspecting social media content for men filming themselves hitting on them without their knowledge. When your product is being referred to as "pervert glasses," you have a problem on your hands.
On Thursday, Business Insider reported that Meta was taking the fairly extraordinary step of banning some content filmed with Meta glasses from the c …
Qualcomm sent a letter to customers on Friday warning of plans to increase its prices by "a percentage in the double digits," Bloomberg reports. The price hikes will go into effect starting with products shipped after September 1st.
Qualcomm claims it has "exhausted its ability to absorb higher costs from suppliers," as ongoing component shortages continue to drive up prices. The company also said it attempted to source components from alternate suppliers prior to announcing the price hikes.
As Bloomberg notes, Qualcomm's price increases will likely have a ripple effect, particularly for smartphones. Qualcomm's chips power everything fro …
Dave Eggers attends the "The Turning Point: To Be Destroyed" premiere. | Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer tips on being relentlessly prolific, or how to excel in multiple fields. Instead, he apparently laced into the company. According to the Financial Times, Eggers told the staff:
"The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teache …
The Pixel 10a shipped with a last gen processor. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
Mystic Leaks suggests that the Pixel 11a will return to featuring a flagship-grade processor with the Tensor G6. Rather than the Tensor G5 found in the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro, the Pixel 10a shipped with the previous generation Tensor G4. That was a huge disappointment since, typically, the Pixel a lineup kept the modern processor, but cut corners in other places to keep costs down.
The Tensor G6 is rumored to feature the same PowerVR DXT-48-1536 GPU as the G5, but it should still be an improvement over the Mali-G715 in the Tensor G4. The big upgrade is that the G6 moves on from Samsung's Exynos modems and instead uses a MediaTek M90 modem. Tha …
Now, if you want to, you can use Google's 3D emoji in your own creations. The company shared some details about how it went about designing the little pictograms and why, as part of World Emoji Day on Friday. Things you might not necessarily worry about in a 2D illustration suddenly become very important when you're talking about a 3D model. Is a smiley face a sphere? A mask? A flat disc?
In addition to offering a behind-the-scenes look at Google's design process, it also announced that it would be completely open-sourcing the emoji set:
We're handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, …
The GoPro Max2 can use your earbuds as a microphone over Bluetooth.
A 360-degree camera is a great way to ensure you capture every bit of the action, but prices tend to be on the high end for models worth your attention. That’s why it’s notable that the GoPro Max 2 accessory bundle is discounted to $369 at Amazon (a dollar more at Best Buy and GoPro). The bundle is stuffed for being just $70 more than the base camera, containing everything you need to shoot the best angles during all-day adventures. The capable camera can shoot 360-degree 8K video at 30 frames per second, or 180-degree 4K video at 60FPS, and it can attach to the wide ecosystem of GoPro-compatible mounts.
In addition to the Max 2 camera, the bundle includes a four-foot extension pole, two protective lens caps, two high-capacity batteries, a 64GB microSD card, a curved adhesive mount, a mounting buckle for GoPro mounts, a mounting finger adapter for cameras, two thumb screws, a wrist lanyard, a microfiber cloth, and a USB-C cable. The standalone camera includes most of those accessories, but has fewer mounts, a single battery, no SD card, and no extension pole. The pole and extra battery are $75 on their own, so you’re getting a solid deal before you even take the free microSD card into account.
The Max 2’s six-mic array records in every direction and automatically reduces wind noise. Alternatively, you can connect Bluetooth microphones, too. The 1.82-inch LCD touchscreen lets you quickly check your footage and manage settings, and it’s waterproof up to 16 feet in case you want to take it swimming or surfing. A single battery should last 66 minutes at full 8K, or 90 minutes at 5.6K resolution. The lenses are replaceable, too, in case a bad fall damages them.
Carter Sherman has been covering sex, gender, and the complex personal and national politics that accompany them for years. She was a senior reporter for Vice and has written for Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine as well. Along the way, she's garnered a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and four Emmy nominations.
She's also the author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. That book looks at how the internet and our polarized political landscape have changed sex and relationships, from school board battles over sex ed to abortion access. These days she finds herself …
Facial recognition smart locks are here; now you can unlock your door the same way you unlock your phone. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
Hands-free unlocking is the future of smart locks. The best smart home tech removes friction, and having your door unlock for you as you walk up is as frictionless as it gets - no passcodes to remember, no need to have a free hand to wave, press, or poke at the lock. One way to achieve this nirvana is through facial recognition. You already unlock your phone with your face; why not your home?
Hands-free unlocking using geofencing has been around for a while, but it can be slow and unreliable, and requires an app running in the background on your phone. Newer innovations - facial recognition and unlocking using an ultrawideband (UWB) radio - …
Sony’s flagship Bravia 9 II is the best RGB LED TV I’ve seen this year.
The Sony Bravia 9 II is the most anticipated new TV in years. It's an amazing RGB LED TV. I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on the new Bravia with my son, who has been getting into the roleplaying game but had never seen the movie. The landscapes of Faerûn looked natural and real, while the magic cast by the Red Wizards of Thay was vibrant and colorful. Specular highlights in HDR really pop. I saw it with Xenk's glowing sword as he fought in the Underdark in Honor Among Thieves, but also in the explosions as Furiosa flees across the desert in Mad Max: Fury Road and the sun reflecting off the waves in The Meg.
It's been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo's Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they're still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great effect. Except instead of flying through space as an unnervingly realistic anthropomorphic fox, you're flying - and flipping, and spinning, and grinding - through Japan while driving a blindingly fast train.
Calling Denshattack! a train game radically undersells what you actually do. Across a bright …
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope your neighborhood isn't as smoky as mine, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
You don’t need a $10,000 Amflow PX Carbon Pro, but it doesn’t hurt. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
Cheater, I'd grumble between huffs as yet another e-bike rider casually skittered past me on a steep ascent. It's this purist attitude that, for years, has left me blind to one simple fact: electric mountain bikes are fun!
My attitude adjustment came a few weeks ago, the very first time I rode an Amflow PX Carbon Pro fitted with the incredibly compact, lightweight, and powerful M2S motor from Avinox, a new DJI offshoot that has incumbents like Bosch and Specialized on edge. The motor doesn't make me a speed demon, but it does let me suck better by compensating whenever my poor technique kills the momentum.
Login
