Celebrities will be able to find and request removal of AI deepfakes on YouTube
YouTube is expanding its AI deepfake monitoring feature to Hollywood - meaning some celebrity AI videos could soon disappear.
The platform's likeness detection feature searches YouTube for AI deepfake content and flags it for public figures enrolled in the program. Public figures can use it to keep track of AI content on YouTube of themselves or request removal (takedowns are evaluated against YouTube's privacy policy, and not every request will be approved). YouTube began testing the feature with content creators last fall; in March, the company expanded the program to politicians and journalists. YouTube says the tool will cover celebriti …
Twelve South’s magnetic PowerBug charger is down to just $35
If you’re tired of dealing with a cluttered desk or nightstand, the Twelve South PowerBug cuts down on cables by plugging directly into the wall and handling multiple devices at once. And right now, it’s down to a new low price, starting at $35.05 ($15 off) at Amazon.
All you need to do is plug it in, and it turns any wall outlet into a charger that can power two devices at once, without the clutter of loose cables and bulky wall chargers. The 15W Qi2 pad wirelessly charges MagSafe-compatible iPhones and other Qi2 devices, while a 35W USB-C Power Delivery port underneath simultaneously handles a second gadget. That means you can stick it next to your bed and charge your phone overnight while topping up your AirPods, or use it at your desk to keep your phone in view while your tablet charges underneath.
Aside from charging, it also doubles as a phone stand with support for Apple’s StandBy mode, letting you use your iPhone to display the time or upcoming calendar events at a glance. Because it holds your phone in place, it’s also convenient for hands-free FaceTime calls, keeping an eye on notifications, or following along with a workout or recipe without having to hold it.
Govee’s new rechargeable table lamp is less than half the price of Hue’s
Nearly four years after Philips Hue launched its Go portable table lamp, Govee has announced its own version for less than half the price. While the Hue Go is currently listed for $175.99, the new Govee Table Lamp Classic has launched at $79.99. Assuming you're okay with never using it outside, Govee's alternative may be the better buy.
Govee's cordless lamp is a bit brighter producing up to 500 lumens of light compared to just 370 lumens from Hue's. However, being dimmer allows the Hue lamp to run for up to 48 hours without external power, while the Govee's 4,800mAh battery will only last for up to 30 hours with colored lighting, or up to …
The Mac is in good hands in Apple’s post-Cook era
The Mac reached a series of low points in the Tim Cook era: the fiasco of the butterfly keyboard, the clunky transition to USB-C, the underutilized potential of the Touch Bar, and the occasionally lackluster Intel chip performance. For a while, it seemed like Apple had shifted all of its attention, innovation, and care toward the iPad. For Mac users, it was a rough stretch of time.
And then, with the transition to Apple Silicon in 2020, everything changed. The line was revitalized with hugely capable new chips, and Apple began prioritizing usability over thinness at all costs. The Mac is now in a new golden era, and yesterday's changes at A …
Wearable health tech might be Tim Cook’s greatest legacy
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Granted, 19th-century proverb writers were talking about the fruit, but Tim Cook helped give new meaning to the adage with the release of the very first Apple Watch. In fact, I'd argue that when he hands the reins to John Ternus in September, it won't be iPhones, Macs, AirPods, or the Vision Pro that defines Cook's legacy. It'll be how the Apple Watch set the course for modern health tech.
You don't have to take my word for it. In 2019, Cook himself told told Mad Money host Jim Cramer, "…If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, 'What was Apple's greatest contribution …
Oppo’s new phone has one camera too many
Oppo's Find X9 Ultra offers something that no other new phone has for three long years: a 10x telephoto lens. In an attempt to win the photography front of the war between the various Ultra flagships, Oppo has turned to a trick last employed by Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra. It's a better 10x lens than ever before, but is it good enough for the moments you might really need it?
The long-distance lens is the best of its kind, but compared to this phone's other lenses it struggles a little with the usual suspects: moving subjects, low light, and moving subjects in low light. Fortunately the Find X9 Ultra is an excellent phone otherwise. It pairs …
Ordering with the Starbucks ChatGPT app was a true coffee nightmare
Venti iced coffee, light skim milk. That's what I get at Starbucks. It is what I have gotten at Starbucks every time I've been to Starbucks for as long as I can remember, other than a brief love affair with the caffe misto a few years ago. In person, my brain barely needs to activate to say the words aloud; in the app, it's four taps and I'm ready to go.
My first time ordering Starbucks through its new ChatGPT integration, which launched last week, was comparatively a complete mess. Getting started is easy enough, if not exactly obvious: Just open ChatGPT and type "@Starbucks" plus your order. You can probably guess what happens next, right …
Dyson’s newest floor scrubber is already on sale for 20 percent off
Dyson feels like it’s been on a tear as of late. The company recently introduced a handheld version of its iconic fan and a travel-friendly hair dryer, along with a mopping version of its ultra-thin PencilVac. And while none of them are currently discounted, you can save on the new Dyson Clean+Wash Hygiene wet cleaner, which is on sale at Amazon and Walmart for a new low of $399.99 ($100 off).
Dyson Clean+Wash Hygiene wet cleaner
Where to Buy:
Unlike most Dyson models, its latest hard floor cleaner doesn’t rely on suction. Instead, it uses hydration and a four-speed motorized brush bar — along with nylon bristles — to agitate tough stains and pet hair, allowing you to remove both without clogging the machine with gunk. An anti-tangle comb helps prevent unwanted wrapping, while the self-cleaning roller is continuously fed fresh water as you maneuver around your home. The added benefit of its lack of suction is that, theoretically, it should hold up better in the long term, as most vacuums see their performance decline after five years or so due to wear and tear.
Additionally, the Clean+Wash Hygiene comes with a hot-air drying dock that charges the cleaner and flushes the microfiber roller after each cycle, helping reduce bacterial growth and odors. It should last up to 45 minutes on a single charge — though we have yet to confirm the exact runtime — and the water tank is large enough to clean 3,767 square feet of floor before needing to be emptied. Thankfully, the latter isn’t all that difficult, given that it can be done in a single action in 20 seconds or so. Just don’t expect disposal to be as odorless as the dock itself, even if the water and debris are automatically separated.
More ways to save today
- If you’re a Pixel phone owner hellbent on using Google gear, the company’s 45W USB-C Power Charger is on sale at Amazon for $17.99 ($12 off), nearly matching its best price to date. I wouldn’t normally recommend it given that companies like Anker often sell competing wall adapters for far less (ahem), though, at this price, Google’s first-party offering is a lot easier to sign off on.
- Now through April 29th, Nintendo is running a Spotlight Sale in the My Nintendo Shop, allowing you to save on a host of Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 games. There’s quite a bit on offer — from cel-shaded puzzlers to Bethesda classics that refuse to die — but Hades II ($23.99
$29.99) is probably the standout. I only recently started pouring time into the Greek-y roguelike, which, so far, is just as enthralling as the original. I probably should have taken our own Jay Peter’s word for it when he said as much in September. - TCL’s midrange Tab A1 Plus is on sale at Amazon for $229.99 ($70 off) through April 27th, which remains the best price we’ve seen on the Android tablet to date. The newer, 12.2-inch slate features a 2.4K display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a four-speaker sound array, and all-day battery life. It also features a host of Google Gemini-powered features (including Circle to Search) and a Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 processor, which, while certainly not the fastest chipset available, should be enough to power most everyday tasks.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gets a price cut but loses new Call of Duty games
After Xbox CEO Asha Sharma admitted last week that "Game Pass has become too expensive for players," Microsoft is dropping the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Starting today, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 to $22.99 a month, and PC Game Pass moves to $13.99, down from $16.49 a month.
The price drops are being fueled in part by future Call of Duty titles no longer joining Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. "New Call of Duty games will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass during the following holiday season (about a year later), while existing Call of Duty titles already in the library will …
The next evolution of The Verge’s homepage is here
When we updated our homepage in 2022, our primary goal was simple: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you visit. With that update, we introduced the homepage StoryStream and Quick Posts, and it was built to redesign the relationship we have with you, our audience.
It’s been almost four years since then, and a lot has changed. The fall of Twitter, the rise of AI, and major shifts in how people discover and follow news have reshaped how readers find us and engage with our journalism. In all of that, one thing has become especially clear: You, our readers, are not a monolith.
Some of you visit multiple times a day, every day. Others check in a few times a week. Some start with the homepage. Others come via RSS or newsletters. We’re lucky to have an audience that is both broad and deeply loyal. But it also means a single, fixed homepage has a hard time serving everyone well.
One issue stood out in particular: Some of our best work simply didn’t stay visible long enough. Stories would move quickly through the reverse chronological feed and risk being pinned, breaking the flow of that feed, or compete for limited space in top stories. This meant some of our great reporting and ambitious packages could be easy to miss.
This update is our first attempt at better balancing our work, which is part magazine, part firehose of news.
On desktop, that means separating those two modes more clearly. The left side of the homepage is now where we highlight our top stories of the day, followed by story sets, which are collections of stories around a topic. These might center on a live event, a major news moment, or a larger package. The goal is simply to give important work more room to breathe and more time to be seen.
The reverse chronological feed isn’t going away. It now lives on the right side of the homepage as an uninterrupted stream of everything we publish. No pinned stories, no non-chronological interruptions. Just the latest articles and Quick Posts, in order. Behind a toggle, you’ll still find the Following feed, with updates from the topics and authors you care about most.
Elsewhere on the page, we’re continuing to surface collections of articles like Most Popular and Most Discussed, along with the latest from key areas we cover, including tech and reviews.
On mobile, these same ideas translate into feeds you can toggle between at the top of your screen.
All of this is meant to make it easier to move between two very real ways of reading The Verge: seeing our biggest reporting and what we think is most important, or diving into the firehose to pick what is most important to you.
We’ve created a new Verge product updates page where we’ll share what we’re working on and what we ship. We’ve also started a user research group because we want to hear directly from you as we make decisions about what to build or iterate on next. In some cases, we’ll even share and test ideas before they roll out more broadly. We did that with this version of the homepage.
To be clear, we don’t expect this homepage will solve everything for everyone. It’s shorter than the previous version by design because we plan to add to it and evolve it over time.
There’s a lot more we want to explore! Maybe logged-in users can choose whether they land on Top Stories or Latest by default. Maybe articles you’ve already read are grayed out, making it easier to find something new to read. Maybe we try entirely new ways of organizing our work altogether! Some of these ideas will land. Some won’t. That’s part of the process we will be working with going forward.
And this goes beyond the homepage: We’re working on getting dark mode out this year (finally), launching an app, and experimenting with federation. There are so many possibilities, and we’re excited to hear what you care about the most.
This approach will take time to fully ramp up, and not every change will feel immediately valuable to every reader. But our goal remains the same: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you visit. We’re confident working this way, in the open and in collaboration with you, our readers, is how we all get there.
It takes a lot of people to rethink a homepage.
This experience was brought to life by the Verge product team, with contributions and support from teams across The Verge, including editorial, audience, art and design, and customer support. We also partnered closely with teams across Vox Media, including ads, analytics, and QA.
Big thanks to Nilay, Helen, and David for their guidance and support throughout.
We’ll keep sharing what we’re building next on our product updates feed. Follow along — tell us what’s working, what’s not, and what you want to see more of. We want to hear it all!