Spotify Wrapped 2025 turns listening into a competition

It’s time for year-end lists, annual roundups, and, of course, Spotify Wrapped. The usual suspects are here, like your most listened to song, your total time listened, and your favorite artist. You also get your 2025 Wrapped playlist, which now shows how many times you listened to each of your top 100 tracks this year. […]

Mirumi the furry companion robot is now available on Kickstarter

Among a sea of new TVs, robovacs, and smart glasses, Yukai Engineering’s Mirumi was a unique standout at CES 2025 earlier this year. The tiny robot has no practical purpose other than looking adorable and bringing a smile to people’s faces by simulating an inquisitive personality. The company planned to release the companion bot sometime […]

The Polaroid Flip, my favorite retro instant camera, is cheaper than ever

I love instant cameras because of how they help me slow down and be creative without the distractions of a phone. Holding a real print also feels grounding in a screen-dominated age, which is why I think a lot of people these days are drawn to them — and why models with old-school vibes like […]

Indiegogo is launching ‘Express Crowdfunding’ so creators can ship things sooner

Indiegogo is planning to launch a new “Express Crowdfunding” campaign format that lets creators ship things while the campaign is on-going instead of forcing creators to wait until the campaign is over. Indiegogo spokesperson Maciej Kuc tells The Verge that the change was spurred by Indiegogo’s recent move to the infrastructure from its new owner, […]

Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one - but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that. I read a lot of my […]

Amazon’s bet that AI benchmarks don’t matter

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Amazon's AI chief has a message for the model benchmark obsessives: Stop looking at the leaderboards. "I want real-world utility. None of these benchmarks are real," Rohit Prasad, Amazon's […]

Silicon Valley is rallying behind a guy who sucks

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers that covers the political intrigue and power struggles between Big Tech and Big Government. Subscribe here for a weekly dispatch of tech oligarchs fighting regular oligarchs. Prior to last week, only highly specialized political insiders knew the extent of David Sacks' influence in the Trump […]

Helldivers 2’s new ‘slim’ version saves 131GB of space on your drive

If you’ve been short on storage on your PC, the latest Helldivers 2 beta update might help. The developers said Tuesday they’ve managed to cut down the PC file size for Helldivers 2 by about 85 percent, freeing up enough space for at least one or two more large games.  In a post on the […]

HBO Max’s Mad Men 4K release is the opposite of a remaster

Though HBO Max was very proud to announce that it would be the first platform to stream Mad Men in 4K, the show's new rollout has been an absolute mess. When HBO Max subscribers fired up the app yesterday hoping to see Don Draper and company in glorious 4K, many were dismayed to see that […]

Roborock’s powerful Saros 10 robovac is still at its lowest price ever

Black Friday and Cyber Monday brought some of the best deals of the year on robot vacuums. One of the handful of great discounts remaining is on the Roborock Saros 10, which we recently crowned the runner-up in our buying guide to the best robovac you can buy. This robovac and mop hybrid is still […]