Tech

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The fediverse has the potential to help create enduring and interoperable social networks. But many creators and businesses rely on bigger, closed platforms because they offer direct ways to make money from their audiences, which is hard to do in the fediverse right now. Sub.club is trying to solve that.  The idea is that this will let users on ActivityPub-based …

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, …

Sure, it’s not straight-up horror as the early teasers suggested, but even still, Emio — The Smiling Man is among the darkest games Nintendo has ever made. It’s a murder mystery that doesn’t skimp on the murder and throws in an unsettling urban legend for good measure. More than that, though, it’s just a really great mystery on a platform …

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 50, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I promise it’s not always this many expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)  This week, I’ve been reading about crime rings and paleontology beefs and the strange language …

Let’s get one thing out of the way: contrary to what you may have heard, electric vehicle sales are up. I know, recent headlines suggest otherwise. Tesla sales are down. Ford is scaling back its EV rollout. General Motors is delaying an electric truck and holding back on investments in EV battery mining. And Hertz is off-loading EVs as its …