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National climate adviser Ali Zaidi | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Sure, President-elect Donald Trump is probably going to try to blow up efforts to tackle climate change as soon as he steps into office. There still isn’t enough renewable energy available to reach US climate goals or even meet skyrocketing electricity demand from AI. And time is running out to spend down climate funds from the Inflation Reduction Act before the Trump administration can attempt to claw it back. Despite it all, Joe Biden’s top adviser on climate change, Ali Zaidi, isn’t sweating it. He’s managed to keep the perhaps cloyingly upbeat optimism that’s become a trademark of the Biden and Harris camp even when that enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily reflect sentiment on the ground. The Verge spoke with White House national climate adviser Zaidi this week about what he sees ahead for clean energy technologies and where there might still be room for progress. This interview has been edited ...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images As wildfires continue to devastate parts of Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands of residents are without power as utility crews work to restore connectivity. Mobile carriers are also taking action to keep their services online and provide relief to affected residents. Here’s how major carriers are responding. Verizon In an update on Thursday , Verizon said it will waive call, text, and data usage incurred by prepaid and postpaid customers in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties from January 9th to the 18th. Verizon will automatically credit customers if they were billed for overages during this time. . @Verizon is offering community resources and is ready to deploy mission-critical communication assets to assist those affected by the disastrous Southern California wildfires and keep consumers connected. More details on our support⬇️ https://t.co/RbjlgIAJ56 pic.twitter.com/rtx0Ce...

You’ll only need to empty the Yeedi Cube’s base every once in a while. It handles the rest. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge The Yeedi Cube doesn’t have the modularity and extremities of some of the cool new robot vacuums we’ve seen at CES 2025 , but the self-emptying, self-cleaning mopping robovac is also much more reasonably priced. It’s even cheaper today at Amazon , where you can buy it for $299.99 ($260 off) when you clip an on-page coupon. That’s the lowest price we’ve seen yet on the budget robovac . The Yeedi Cube can capably map and remember several rooms, including designated no-clean zones that you can set within the mobile app. While it doesn’t have AI-powered obstacle avoidance like some of the pricier robots we test , we found its laser-based navigation system works well enough to traverse floors that don’t have laundry, clothes, or pet waste strewn about. And if it does get stuck, you can easily pick it up and reposition it thanks to an integrate...

The Super Retro Champ plays classic 16-bit titles from the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. | Image: My Arcade First announced at CES four years ago, My Arcade’s Super Retro Champ was a chunky handheld that could play classic 16-bit titles using original Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo cartridges. The console didn’t end up launching, but at CES 2025, My Arcade is reviving it with an expected release later this year. The design and functionality of the Super Retro Champ appears nearly identical to what My Arcade revealed in 2020, but as with many things now, it’s expected to be slightly more expensive. Instead of $110, the handheld is now priced at $149.99. Image: My Arcade Super Nintendo cartridges end up slightly sticking out of the top of the handheld, while Sega Genesis carts sit flush in its bottom slot. Unlike the Analogue Pocket , which can play retro titles using cartridges or ROM files, the Super Retro Champ is similar to the ModRetro Chromatic and sticks to carts. ...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta is ending its third-party fact checks and making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies. Meta is making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies , including abandoning third-party fact checks in favor of crowd-sourced “Community Notes” and loosening restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity. Under the updated Hateful Conduct policy, for example, calling gay and trans people “mentally ill” is now allowed, while an explicit ban on referring to women as “household objects” has been removed . New policy lead Joel Kaplan said that in pursuit of “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Meta will focus more on preventing over-enforcement of its content policies and less on mediating potentially harmful but technically legal discussions on its platform. It comes just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement appealed to man...

Seriously: would you wear something like this on your face if it could really read your mind? | Image: Omi Nik Shevchenko closes his eyes and starts to focus intently. He’s spent the last half hour or so telling me about his new product, an $89 wearable called Omi that can listen to, summarize, and get information out of your conversations. Now he wants to show me the future. So his eyes are closed, and he’s focusing all his attention on the round white puck stuck to his left temple with medical tape. (Did I mention he’s had this thing on his face the whole time? It’s very distracting.) “Hey, what do you think about The Verge , like as a news media website?” Shevchenko asks, to no one in particular. Then he waits. Fifteen or so seconds later, a notification pops up on his phone, with some AI-generated information about how reputable and terrific a news source The Verge is. Shevchenko is thrilled, and maybe a little relieved. The device read his brain waves to understand he was t...

Samsung announced its first Galaxy Unpacked event of 2025 , which it’s historically used to introduce the latest flagship Galaxy smartphones. That would be the Galaxy S25 family if our count is right, including the base model, the expected Galaxy S25 Ultra , and whatever else falls between. We’ll know for sure before too long with an unveiling scheduled for January 22nd. But before the company even confirms what we’re getting, you can already place a reservation to preorder the device. If you sign up at Samsung’s website or the Shop Samsung app by January 22nd at 1 PM ET (which only entails submitting your name and email address) and later place your pre-order, you’ll get a $50 credit that’s good toward any additional devices or accessories you’re purchasing alongside it. That sadly means you can’t use the $50 toward the device itself. The fine print also mentions that you can get a $100 credit toward your pre-order of a qualifying 2025 TV (perhaps some of the models it announ...

No nub here. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto Lenovo has unveiled two new ThinkPads: the X9 14 and X9 15, both Aura Editions equipped with Intel Core Ultra processors and slim designs. But what they don’t offer might be the most interesting thing about them: namely, Lenovo’s signature red TrackPoint. Instead, they use a haptic trackpad without the ThinkPad’s usual discrete button for a distinctly MacBook vibe. No doubt, it’s a ThinkPad, through and through. It’s tested to MIL-SPEC 810H durability standards. It offers a Thunderbolt 4 port on each side of the machine, making it easier to arrange docks and displays to your liking. And the design allows access to the SSD and battery to facilitate repairs and replacements. Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto Thunderbolt and HDMI on one side... Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto ...another Thunderbolt and a 3.5mm jack on the other. Both the 14-inch and 15-inch versions come with OLED panels in touch and non-touch variatio...

Photo Illustration by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images Discovery Plus is going up in price , with its ad-supported plan going from $4.99 to $5.99 per month, and its ad-free plan increasing from $8.99 to $9.99 per month. The price hike will go into effect immediately for new subscribers, while existing subscribers will see the change during their next billing cycle or after February 7th. Discovery Plus raised the price of its ad-free plan for the first time in October 2023. Following the launch of Max , Discovery Plus remained a standalone subscription despite most of its content appearing in Warner Bros. Discovery’s flagship streaming service. Discovery Plus has a mix of shows — ranging from ultra binge-worthy to ultra cringe-worthy — from channels like HGTV, TLC, the Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery, Magnolia Network, and others. Streaming service price hikes have become frustratingly common over the past few years, with Max , Paramount Plus , and Peacock all ra...

Image: Qualcomm Qualcomm is introducing another Arm laptop chip to its Snapdragon X series today, lowering the cost of Copilot Plus PCs to around $600. The new Snapdragon X joins the existing Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite and will be available in a variety of devices from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo in the coming months. The Snapdragon X is designed for mainstream and budget laptops, so it won’t offer as good of performance as the X Plus or X Elite variants. Qualcomm is still promising better performance per watt compared to Intel’s Core 5 120U processor and better battery life across a variety of tests. Much like the rest of the Snapdragon X series, the base Snapdragon X chip will include a 45 TOPS NPU that supports Microsoft’s Copilot Plus features. The Qualcomm Oryon CPU has eight cores that boost at up to 3GHz and is built on the same 4nm process node as the rest of the Snapdragon X series. Image: Qualcomm The Snapdragon X platform. It looks like the Snapdragon X wil...

Image: Belkin Belkin has announced the Stage PowerGrip, a magnetic battery pack that doubles as a DSLR-style ergonomic grip for iPhone photography, a phone stand, and a spare wired charger for your other devices. It’ll be available in May, with pricing info coming later on. The PowerGrip is an odd-looking accessory until you see it attached to a phone. It’s clearly designed to evoke the look and feel of a traditional camera. It features Bluetooth pairing to enable the “shutter button” on the top of the grip to let you take pictures with the iOS camera app. Besides that, the PowerGrip has a built-in retractable USB-C cable for charging other devices and a 10,000mAh battery. It offers wireless 7.5-watt charging for the attached iPhone, and a small LED screen on the front will show how much battery it has left. Belkin says it will come in powder blue, sandbox (a grayish sandy color), fresh yellow, black, and pepper (a nearly black dark gray). Belkin’s take on this is similar to o...

The Saros Z70 from Roborock is the first robot vacuum with an articulating arm that can clear clutter out of its way. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge Roborock has added an arm to its latest flagship robot vacuum. And this is no tiny appendage like the one the company debuted on its S8 MaxV Ultra at CES last year ; it’s an actual articulating robotic arm. The arm rises from the middle of Roborock’s latest flagship bot — the Saros Z70 — and can extend out to pick up items such as socks and tissues while cleaning your floors. While it’s mildly terrifying and currently extremely slow — I can certainly see the potential in a robot vacuum that can clean up ahead of itself. The Verge got a sneak peek at the Saros Z70 in action ahead of its launch at CES 2025 and can confirm the arm works as advertised, although, as mentioned, it’s laboriously slow. During our demo, it took about a minute to pick up and move each sock in its path. It’s also limited to socks, tissues, small towels, and ...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Nvidia’s RTX 5090 has leaked today in the form of a marketing image of the unannounced next-gen GPU. VideoCardz has obtained a box shot of the RTX 5090, which suggests that the rumors of 32GB of GDDR7 memory are true. While the packaging of the unannounced Inno3D RTX 5090 iChill X3 doesn’t reveal more specs about Nvidia’s flagship next-gen GPU, it does suggest that this particular model will ship with a 3.5-slot cooler. Image: VideoCardz Inno3D’s RTX 5090 packaging. The RTX 5090 is expected to have double the VRAM of the RTX 5080, which is rumored to include 16GB of GDDR7 memory. It’s also rumored to include 21,760 CUDA cores, nearly 1.8TB/s of memory bandwidth, and a TDP of 575 watts — 125 watts more than the RTX 4090. We shouldn’t have long to wait until details about the RTX 50-series of GPUs are official. Nvidia is hosting a CES keynote tomorrow night, where the GPU maker is widely expected to announce its RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 ...

Image: Cath Virginia. / The Verge Between the Apple Watch Series 10, the Ultra 2, and the second-gen SE, there are more options than ever. We’ll help you sort through them. Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/23037217/best-apple-watch-series-se-ultra

Sleep trackers, earbuds, and smart beds. | Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge Sleep tech is more than tracking. Here are the best gadgets I’ve tested that help you fall asleep, stay asleep, or wake up earlier. Read the full story at The Verge. source https://www.theverge.com/23291925/best-sleep-tech-trackers-earbuds-wearables

The AirFly SE might not be the only way to enjoy in-flight entertainment with your own headphones, but it’s one of the most reliable. | Image: Twelve South The Twelve South AirFly SE is one of those gadgets that can make long flights go by just a little faster, allowing you to eschew the shoddy pair of complimentary earbuds you get with most airlines in favor of your own set of Bluetooth cans. And right now, it’s on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for $29.99 ($5 off), which is a new all-time low. Twelve South’s entry-level Bluetooth transmitter features an integrated 3.5mm cable, meaning all you need to do is plug it into the seatback entertainment system and pair it with your favorite pair of wireless earbuds or noise-canceling headphones. It doesn’t last as long as the step-up AirFly Pro and Pro Deluxe — nor does it allow for two simultaneous connections — but it still lets a single user eke out 20 hours of continuous playback on a single charge. Plus, it works with virtual...

Arlo’s cloud storage subscriptions get another price hike. | Image: Arlo Arlo has once again increased the monthly subscription pricing for its smart home cameras’ Arlo Secure cloud storage plan . The company now charges $9.99 per month (up from $7.99) to store a single camera’s recordings and $19.99 a month (up from $17.99) for unlimited cameras. And instead of calling the cheaper plan Arlo Secure, both are now named Secure Plus. At $9.99 per month, the cheapest Secure plan is now more than three times the monthly $2.99 Arlo once charged to store video for a single camera in the cloud. The company bumped that to $4.99 in early 2023, then to $7.99 last year . With annual billing, the single-camera plan still works out to $7.99 per month, while the unlimited-camera one is effectively $17.99 per month when you pay for a year upfront. Screenshot: Arlo website Arlo’s annual pricing is a little cheaper per-month. This latest round of price increases comes after Arlo announced a ne...

JMGO’s N3 Ultra Max has a motorized gimbal, letting you remotely adjust where it projects. | Image: JMGO JMGO’s N3 Ultra Max projector simplifies setup with a motorized gimbal that handles alignment automatically. Once positioned in a room, you can change where it’s projecting using its motion-sensing wireless remote. The all-in-one projector will handle the rest of the fine-tuning, including focus, optical zoom, and keystone adjustments to ensure the image is level and perfectly aligned. Although the 4K N3 Ultra Max debuted in China late last year, JMGO is announcing a new version for the global market at CES that includes improved software, Google TV, and native Netflix support. The company expects it to be available globally, including in the US, sometime in the fourth quarter of 2025, but pricing details haven’t been finalized yet. Image: JMGO The N3 Ultra Max can match the movements of its wireless remote. The N3 Ultra Max joins a growing line of gimbal-mounted projector...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Getty Images In September 2023, Meta made a big deal of its new AI chatbots that used celebrities’ likeness: everyone from Kendall Jenner to MrBeast leased themselves out to embody AI characters on Instagram and Facebook. The celebrity-based bots were killed off last summer after less than a year, but users have recently been finding a handful of other, entirely fake bot profiles still floating around — and the reaction is not good. There’s “ Jane Austen ,” a “cynical novelist and storyteller”; “ Liv ,” whose bio claims she is a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller”; and “ Carter ,” who promises to give users relationship advice. All are labeled as “AI managed by Meta” and the profiles date back to when the initial announcement was made. But the more than a dozen AI characters have apparently not been very popular: each has just a few thousand followers, with their posts getting just a few likes and comments. That...

Image: Samsung Samsung is bringing the Galaxy Fit 3 to the US . The budget-friendly fitness tracker will cost $59.99 when it launches on January 9th, 2025. Samsung first released the Galaxy Fit 3 in several countries outside the US last February. The device comes equipped with a 1.6-inch display surrounded by an aluminum body and lasts up to 13 days on a single charge. The Galaxy Fit 3 has some of the same fitness-tracking features as the pricier Galaxy Watch 7 , including the ability to monitor your sleep patterns, detect snoring, check blood oxygen levels, and measure your heart rate. It can also track over 100 types of workouts, with a case coming in gray, silver, or pink gold. Image: Samsung The Galaxy A16 5G has a 6.7-inch OLED display with an up to 90Hz refresh rate. Alongside the Galaxy Fit 3, Samsung is releasing the more affordable Galaxy A16 5G phone in the US on January 9th for $199.99. The device comes with a 6.7-inch FHD Plus OLED display with an up to 90Hz ref...

Dutch startup Legato is leading an effort to bring support for streaming speakers to Matter. | Image: Legato Matter , the smart home standard designed to connect and control all your smart home devices, could soon support speakers. Chris LaPré, CTO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which runs Matter, confirmed to The Verge that “a new streaming speaker device type and related controls” is under development. As part of Matter, speakers could leverage the device-to-device communication enabled by the standard to send you an alert when someone rings your doorbell, notify you when your washing is done, or sound alarms when a smoke detector is triggered. Additionally, Matter support could allow you to play music on any Matter-enabled speaker from any Matter-enabled app regardless of the ecosystem or brand, according to Fiede Schillmoeller, CEO of Legato , the company leading the group developing the spec. However, it may be a while until we see any of these benefits, as ...

MSI’s new 27-inch 4K OLED monitor. | Image: MSI 27-inch 4K OLED 240Hz monitors seem to be like buses: you wait ages for one and then three turn up at once. Asus, Samsung, and MSI are all announcing the industry’s next-generation QD-OLED gaming monitors that offer the benefits of 4K OLED 240Hz panels at the smaller 27-inch size instead of 32 inches. All three appear to be using the same fourth generation QD-OLED panel from Samsung Display, which Asus says offers “a longer lifespan over previous-gen OLEDs.” Both the Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM and the MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED (who names these things?) include DisplayPort 2.1a (UHBR20), which offers 80Gbps of bandwidth to support 4K at 240Hz without the need for Display Stream Compression (DSC). Samsung’s press release about its Odyssey OLED G8 (G81SF) doesn’t mention DisplayPort 2.1a compatibility, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s part of the spec list. Image: Asus Asus’ latest OLED monitor has a 26.5-inch viewable display. ...

Illustration: Beatrice Sala The United States has arrested a US Army soldier and charged him with being part of a hacking scheme to sell and distribute stolen phone records. An indictment alleges that 20-year-old Cameron John Wagenius knowingly sold “confidential phone records” over online forums and other communications platforms last November. The indictment doesn’t detail the hacked material, but KrebsOnSecurity reports that Wagenius appears to be connected to a series of high-profile data breaches linked to the online alias “Kiberphant0m.” Kiberphant0m claimed to have hacked 15 telecom firms and was working with the person allegedly behind the Snowflake data breach to sell the stolen information. In November, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed were AT&T call logs for President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s not clear if the data was genuine, but AT&T did suffer a major theft of customer data as part of the Snowflake breach last year. I...

A Tesla Cybertruck appeared to explode outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday morning. A video shared on X shows the truck engulfed in flames just outside the hotel’s lobby, with the person who captured it saying the Cybertruck “blew up.” It’s still not clear what caused the fire, or if there were any injuries. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police said they are “investigating” and that the fire had been put out. Local news station KSNV News 3 Las Vegas said a vehicle fire was first reported at 8:41AM local time and that police and firefighters were responding. The news of the fire comes amid numerous reports about Tesla CEO Elon Musk getting closer to President-elect Donald Trump. Musk spent New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago and reportedly sat in during Trump’s dinner with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos . Musk has also been staying at a cottage on Trump’s Florida property since around Election Day, according to a report from The New York Times . Cybertruck blew...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The US has issued sanctions on organizations in Russia and Iran for attempting to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. The Treasury Department said on Tuesday that the groups tried to “stoke socio-political tensions” and influence voters. One group, the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise, has ties to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and built a server to host its own AI tools “to avoid foreign web-hosting services that would block their activity.” The organization then used these tools to “quickly create disinformation” that it spread across dozens of fake online news outlets, while also providing US-based companies with money to maintain its AI server and operate a network of “at least 100 websites” used in its campaign. Additionally, the Russian organization manipulated a video to “produce baseless accusations concerning a 2024 vice presidential candidate”. In October, the US...

Popeye’s first appearance in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip. | Image: King Features It’s a new year, and that means more works are headed to the public domain. This year, thousands of copyrighted works created in 1929, including the earliest versions of Popeye and the Belgian comic book character Tintin, are now free to reuse and repurpose in the US. Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of Public Domain has once again rounded up all the most iconic works that have been freed from the bounds of copyright, which also includes sound recordings from 1924. As pointed out by Duke Law School, 1929 was a particularly pivotal year for film, as it was the first with sound. These are just some of the works entering the public domain this year (you can view the full catalog here ): The Skeleton Dance from Disney’s Silly Symphonies short film series Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film Blackmail Nacio Herb Brown’s Singin’ in the Rain and the film it appeared in, The Hollywoo...