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Apple might make servers again to cash in on the AI rush

16 September 2026 at 18:20
An illustration of the Apple logo on an orange and purple background

According to The Information, Apple is planning to get back into the server game and might just pair up with Nvidia to make it happen. Apple retired its Xserve line in 2011 and has largely left enterprise machines to other manufacturers since. But the growing demand for compute power as the AI industry continues to expand has apparently led the company to believe there is an opening for its powerful but efficient ARM-based M processors. Its Mac Mini and Mac Studio have proven popular with AI developers, which has led to shortages.

The server product, whether it's called Xserve or something else, likely won't debut until 2029. Word is that i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

49ers coach says his Tesla was on Autopilot when he crashed

9 August 2026 at 16:56
Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images

Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged.

"I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

X replaces its revenue-sharing program with ‘Original Content Rewards’

8 August 2026 at 22:15
X logo on black and purple background.
X wants to make money on previously used handles. | Image: The Verge

X is ending its controversial revenue-sharing program for content creators, which has seen numerous revisions under Elon Musk's reign. In its place, it's launching a new Original Content Rewards program on September 8th. To be eligible, creators must have at least 500 verified followers and at least 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the last 90 days, among other requirements.

Creators will then earn revenue based on "qualified impressions" on "original content."Qualified impressions are unique impressions from Premium subscribers "on the Home Timeline feed, where at least 50% of the post is visible." What qualifies a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

An Amazon data center could have the worst polluting power plant in the country

8 August 2026 at 18:53
Graphic image of a data center.

To power its new West Texas data center, Amazon is investing in the construction of a new power plant that could be one of the largest single producers of greenhouse gases in the US, according to the New York Times. The new gas-burning plant in Pecos County, Texas has received significant investment from Amazon and, at least initially, would not be connected to the state's power grid. Instead, its 35 natural-gas turbines would primarily deliver its 7.65 gigawatts of electricity to the new data center.

According to Cleanview, which tracks data centers and their associated power projects, GW Ranch received a permit from Texas allowing for the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Buc-ee’s dodges John Oliver to sue another small business

8 August 2026 at 16:47
Buc-ee’s mega-convenience store and 120-pump gas station in Mount Crawford, Virginia. | Image: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Buc-ee's became something of a viral sensation during the World Cup, but it has a troubling history of suing small gas stations and convenience stores. On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver literally begged the company to sue him for selling merch featuring his squirrel mascot, Mr. Nutterbutter, with branding that reads "Buc-Off." But Buc-ee's has so far declined to take the bait, instead targeting yet another small business that lacks the deep pockets and legal team of HBO.

According to WDTN, an NBC affiliate in Miami Valley, Ohio, Buc-ee's opened its first locations in the state earlier this year. And now it's targeting es …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Musician and entrepreneur Tom Vek is building a digital music player, but don’t call it retro

8 August 2026 at 16:00
Musician Tom Vek taking a selfie with his Sleevenote music player.
Tom, we can’t see your face. | Image: Tom Vek

Tom Vek burst onto the scene in 2005 with his album We Have Sound, which garnered a solid 7.6 from the tastemakers of the day over at Pitchfork. His undeniably catchy brand of dancy indietronica landed him an appearance on The OC and placement on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack. His follow-up, Leisure Seizure, had a lengthy gestation period, but arrived in 2011 to similar success, reaching No. 79 on the UK charts.

Vek has continued to release music at regular intervals over the last 15 years, dropping Newer Symbols in 2022. But in 2020 he started toying with this idea he had for a music player called Sleevenote. Inspired by viny …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Xbox prices are increasing by up to €200 or £170

2 August 2026 at 17:14
The black 1TB Xbox Series S console

When Microsoft announced its latest round of Xbox price bumps in June, it only gave US pricing. Now we know the pricing increases for the EU and UK, and they're dramatic. Depending on the model, Xbox prices are increasing by up to €200 or £170. The 1TB Xbox Series X with a disc drive is going up by over 30 percent from £499.99 / €599.99 to £669.99 / €799.99. The 512GB Xbox Series S is getting a price increase of over 43 percent, jumping from £299.99 / €349.99 to £429.99 / €499.99.

While other consoles have received price bumps as RAM and storage prices skyrocket due to demand from the AI industry, none have been quite as dramatic as Microso …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Pixel 11 specs and price leak with no surprises

1 August 2026 at 22:31
A teaser image of Google’s Pixel 11 Pro.

Android Headlines claims to have the specs and price for the entire Pixel 11 lineup. What the site shared basically lines up with everything else that we've heard in the lead-up to the August 12th event. The Pixel 11 is expected to get a $100 price hike, starting at $899, but will come with 256GB of storage instead of 128GB in the base model. While the entire lineup will sport the new Tensor G6 and Titan M3 chips, the base model Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL are both getting that rumored RAM cut to just 12GB, along with price increases to $1,099 and $1,299, respectively.

The Pixel 11 will supposedly ditch the telephoto lens and settle fo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Angela Nissel faces down grief with a laugh

1 August 2026 at 21:15
Angela Nissel
Angela Nissel smiles through the pain. | Image: Angela Nissel

Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times.

Of course, that sort of dark humor should come as no surprise from Nissel. She first made a splash with The Broke Diaries, which grew out of a blog she kept in college detailing her daily struggles and, at times, embarrassment at being a broke student. Eventually she went on to produce and write for hit shows including Scrubs and The Boondocks.

One of her most lasting cont …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Is this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop?

1 August 2026 at 19:20
The seemingly AI generated cover art for Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz.
That cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix Flexin

Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he's recently found solo success with the track "Rubberz," which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song's origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.

Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influenced West Coast rap. "Rubberz," on the other hand, is heavily influenced by '80s UK s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day leak racks up millions of views

1 August 2026 at 18:00
Spider-Man swinging through downtown Manhattan.

A bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day was up on X for over seven hours before eventually being pulled. During that time, it reached over 5.9 million accounts and accumulated over 143,000 likes. Other accounts have reposted the leaked film, but none have lasted particularly long, as Disney now seems to be on top of issuing takedown requests.

The leak is unlikely to slow down the box office juggernaut, which is already shattering records. It raked in $72 million in previews this week. The previous record holder was Avengers: Endgame, which grossed $60 million during its previews way back in 2019. Endgame went on to set staggering records for …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Trump blames Tim Walz for water hacks even though it’s probably Iran

1 August 2026 at 16:23
Donald Trump speaks during the House Republican Party member retreat. | Image: Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images

The FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have stopped short of officially blaming Iran for a spate of cyberattacks on Minnesota's water systems, but consensus is that Iran is likely behind them. That, of course, hasn't stopped Donald Trump from sharing his own theory - that Governor Tim Walz is to blame and telling reporters that "I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack."

Trump's comments come shortly after the FBI issued a warning that the cyberattacks on American infrastructure were spreading to other states. In Minnesota alone, at least 30 community water systems had been targeted in what a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Synth historian Oli Freke will spend big on a good bicycle

25 July 2026 at 16:15

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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Warner Bros. is suing Amazon for poaching employees

25 July 2026 at 15:05
Warner Bros. logo on a graphic blue and yellow background.

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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

18 July 2026 at 21:54
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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google might not kneecap the Pixel 11a with an old processor

18 July 2026 at 19:25
Photo of Google Pixel 10A in front of white tiles, showing the camera from an angle
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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is open-sourcing its 3D emoji

18 July 2026 at 17:40
Google’s 2D blob thumbs up emoji next to a wire frame model and the new 3D model.

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, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Guardian’s Carter Sherman fondly remembers being terrified by Ocarina of Time

18 July 2026 at 15:30
Carter Sherman sitting on a the floor in front of a couch, instead of just on it for some reason.
Carter, there’s a couch RIGHT THERE. | Image:

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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI

20 June 2026 at 19:46
A smiling computer surrounded by music notes.

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.

According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Musician and YouTuber Hainbach on ‘Breath of the Wild’ and Swiss Army Knives

20 June 2026 at 16:20
A black and white photo of Hainbach at a table with two pieces of scientific equipment that he uses to make music.
Indulging in the “Dark Souls of synthesis.” | Image: Aleksander Stojanov / Hainbach

Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum, is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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