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It’s perfectly fine to ignore your smartwatch this January

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If you saw my training load data for January, it would resemble a stock crashing. Hard. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Every January, fitness tech and wearable companies love to remind us about New Year’s Resolutions. For a small number of people, New Year’s features, challenges, and marketing campaigns will be exactly the push they need. For everyone else, they’re another reason to feel bad about yourself. The start of the new year is when Peloton Bikes go on sale, Apple trots out its annual Ring in the New Year Challenge badge and new Fitness Plus content , and anecdotally, it’s when I see a lot of friends suddenly start logging miles in Strava. But this year, I saw a new marketing tactic: Quitter’s day. Quitter’s day is the second Friday in January — the day when most people throw in the towel on New Year’s Resolutions, fitness related or otherwise. Apple rolled out an Apple Watch commercial around it, encouraging people to “quit quitting” with a little extra ...
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Prime members can save $50 on the Amazon Kindle Colorsoft in its first sale

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Comic book and graphic novel Kindle readers get a little reprieve with today’s deal. | Photo: Andrew Liszewski / The Verge Much of Amazon’s experimentation in the Kindle line has generally led to bigger devices that are easier to read, but the Kindle Colorsoft is the first that ventures beyond a fully monochromatic viewing experience. Of course, that comes with a higher price tag than comparably sized Kindles, but if you’re a Prime member, you can finally save a bit. The Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition has dropped to $229.99 ($50 off) at Amazon in its first sale. We feel the Kindle Colorsoft’s 7-inch display offers the best color available in an ebook reader yet, thanks to better-than-average vividity and contrast. It makes browsing and reading books more pleasant, if nothing else. But there are other improvements we like, such as faster page-turning performance and smoother zooming. Those benefits aren’t necessarily exclusive to the Colorsoft, however, as all of Amazon’s...
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A giant battery power plant is on fire in California

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MOSS LANDING, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 17: A fire erupted at Moss Landing Power Plant on Thursday.  | Photo: Getty Images A fire broke out at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Central California Thursday. The battery power plant is the largest in the world according to the company, Vistra, that owns it. The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders for nearby residents and closed parts of Highway 1 in response. County Health officials have asked other residents to shelter indoors with windows and doors closed and to switch off ventilation systems. “There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glen Church told KSBW-TV . The company will investigate the cause of the fire once it’s out, Vistra spokesperson Jenny Lyon told The Mercury News . Vistra did not immediately respond to an email from The Verge . It completed an expansion of the facility in 2023, adding more than 110,000 battery modules needed to ...
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Lawmakers press Meta, Apple, Google, and others on massive Trump donations

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) are putting pressure on big tech firms to explain their motives for donating to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. In letters to Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Uber, the lawmakers express concerns about the companies making contributions to “avoid scrutiny, limit regulation, and buy favor.” Over the past several weeks, Google, Microsoft , Apple CEO Tim Cook , Meta , Amazon , and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman all donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration, while Uber and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi , each contributed $1 million. Many of these tech execs have already met with Trump, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is even hosting an inauguration party for the incoming president, according to The New York Times . These sizable donations surpass the amount most of these companies contributed to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund in 2021. A filing ...
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Meet the brothers who built NYC’s favorite congestion pricing tracking tool

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Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images Now that New York City has finally flipped the switch on congestion pricing, the big question is: Will it work? And if so, how well? To find out, all eyes turned to an unassuming new web tool called the Congestion Pricing Tracker . The brainchild of two college-age brothers, the tracker uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate traffic times for chosen routes and days. The data is presented as a line graph of traffic times before and after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th. Compare one line to the other to see whether traffic times have increased or decreased. Unsurprisingly, depending on the route and time of day, the new tolling scheme seems to be working — perhaps even better than expected. Since January 5th, most drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street during peak hours will pay $9 — or $2.25 for late nights and weekends. And that fee appears to be doing what it set out to do, which i...
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The Switch 2 is boring — and that’s exactly what Nintendo needs

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Image: The Verge, Nintendo You can always count on Nintendo for a surprise. This is the company that followed the Game Boy with a strange dual-screened handheld and broke out of its GameCube slump with a console focused on motion controls. It’s the company that lost its lead with the Wii U and then gambled on another innovation — the portable hybrid known as the Switch — to ultimately get back on top . All of those were big, risky swings that seemingly exemplified the company’s playful, experimental ethos. The Switch 2, on the other hand, is… a bigger, better Switch . It’s kind of boring. But it’s also exactly the right move from Nintendo. At a time when people expect their games and experiences to carry over between devices, the old console paradigm of starting over with a new generation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And since Nintendo hit a home run with the original Switch, it has the runway to be a little bit boring this time. Today’s reveal video didn’t detail a whole ...
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Adam Scott on using Severance’s weird, retrofuturistic computers

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Image: Apple Much of Severance — the sci-fi workplace thriller on Apple TV Plus — takes place in a brightly lit office, with characters huddled over strange computers where they do work they’re told is both mysterious and important. In the show, that work looks a bit like an alternate reality take on Minesweeper , except the characters are attempting to find numbers that “feel scary,” even though they don’t know what that really means — and the cast is largely going through the same experience. The computers on the show are functional, so when Mark and Helly are moving pixelated numbers around on a screen, that’s something the performers are doing on set. “When you see us, we really are refining numbers,” Adam Scott, who plays Mark and serves as a producer on the show, tells The Verge . “There is actually a way to do it.” The computers are the brainchild of prop master Cath Miller and production designer Jeremy Hindle. The office-dwelling characters in Severance have under...
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