Last week, the Trump administration announced an extreme tariff plan on essentially every other nation in the world. This would make imports far more costly, and as a result, Apple’s stock fell nearly 10% on the news. Given the fact that everything about Apple’s supply chain relies on strategic overseas manufacturing, this is awful news for the company.
However, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman lays out some ideas on how Apple could mitigate these tariffs.
The Nintendo Switch may be remembered as much for repopularizing portable gaming as it will for a hardware issue that affected millions of gamers: joystick drift.
Drifting is the most common term for an issue where joysticks detect false inputs â even when no one is touching a controller â causing unwanted movements to happen in a game. The issue also affects controllers from Sony, Microsoft, and third-party accessory makers.
Hall effect sensors emerged a few years ago as a potential solution to the problem, but there’s an even better option out there thatâs easier to retrofit into existing controller designs. That solution is tunneling magnetoresistance, or TMR, a technology that revolutionized hard drives two decades ago using quantum mechanics and magnets.
Like Hall effect sensors, TMR sensors avoid the fundamental problem with more traditional joysticks: their sensors wear down as a matter of their design. The controllers that ship with the last few Xbox consoles, the PS4 and PS5, and the Switch are all built around sensors like this â potentiometers, a component that can be used to change or measure electrical resistance.
Solid objects rubbing against each other i …
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing a ‘major shake-up’ for the 20th anniversary of the iPhone next year. One of the changes includes introducing a foldable iPhone for the first time, but the company is reportedly planning a ‘bold new Pro model.’
Your House is a visual novel that is the closest game Iâve played to reading an actual book.
In Your House, you play as Debbie, a girl who receives a mysterious postcard on her birthday with an address and a key. The address leads to a mansion thatâs filled with secrets and puzzles for you to solve, and the gameâs presentation does a lot to sell the feeling of curling up on the couch with a good mystery novel.
Much of how you interact with the game is by reading through pages of text to know what room youâre in, whatâs going on, what you can interact with, and where you can go next. As you scroll down the âpageâ youâre reading, certain words, rooms, or locations will show up in bold. Click on those, and something will happen, whether it’s more text appearing on the page or a little animation that shows Debbie moving from one room to another. When you reach a dead end, youâll usually be offered a link back to a hub area like a living room.
Many pages also have gorgeous pictures in a âânoir comic style that you can click on to investigate in more detail or interact with to solve puzzles. One had me note the number of consonants and vowels in a name under a p …
Surrounding the Washington Monument Saturday were thousands of signs with messages spanning innumerable topics. âSupport Ukraine,â âBeware of DOGE,â âProtect Trans Lives,â were just a few of them. Others struck a note of exasperation: âWhere do I startâ¦â
The nationwide Hands Off protests this weekend turned out millions of protesters across 1,300 different events, organizers estimate, motivated by a wide array of causes but two people: President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. In the signs they brought to the DC rally, some protesters focused on a single issue. Others tried to fit as many as they could. The throughline was a message to the US government: protect democracy, and stop messing with programs and agencies that matter.
The crowd in Washington, DC â more than 100,000, per organizersâ estimates â was peaceful and orderly. On a stage behind the Washington Monument, lawmakers like Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL) and organizers including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler spoke. Attendees around them quietly listened, save for the occasional call-and-response chant, cheers, or boos for the Trump administration. Farther away, a gr …
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple will no longer be launching its rumored smart home hub this year. This is due to all of the delays with Apple Intelligence Siri, and Apple reportedly is considering delaying the launch until sometime in 2026 until some of the engineering challenges are figured out.
According to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, the iPhone 17 Pro design might not necessarily be a gigantic year over year leap. Early iPhone 17 Pro rumors suggested the possibility of a more drastic design change, whereas now it’ll be far more similar to last years design, apparently.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 78, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, sorry everythingâs about to get so expensive, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a couple of great new apps for streaming and gaming, a look back into Microsoftâs history, the latest on the Switch 2, a screed against screen time, and much more.
Oh, and a programming note: Installeris off next week. Taking a little break before we ramp up for Developer Conference season. But we have lots to do today! Letâs get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / listening to / watching / downloading / sipping on this week? Tell me everyth …
Math and computer science researchers have long known that some questions are fundamentally unanswerable. Now physicists are exploring how physical systems put hard limits on what we can predict.
When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. “Nobody ever says Connecticut,” says Long, a geologist at Yale University in New Haven in that state.
And yet Connecticut—along with much of the rest of eastern North America—holds important clues about Earth’s history. This region, which geologists call the eastern North American margin, essentially spans the US eastern seaboard and a little farther north into Atlantic Canada. It was created over hundreds of millions of years as slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic Ocean was born.
Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.
Breaking down the confusing world of color spaces.
The best method that we have for defining color is by using math. Specifically, mind-boggling mathematical models called color spaces that use geometry to assign colors as a fixed point that we can reference, ensuring the bluethat I see is the same blue you see. As a creative-leaning person who can barely split a bill without a calculator app, all that math is extremely daunting.
The good news is that computing software will do all these complicated calculations for us, allowing us to rely on our eyeballs to pick whatever colors look best. The bad news is that thereâs an equally daunting number of color spaces to choose from, and theyâre all optimized for different tasks across web design, photography, video editing, physical printing, and more. And if you select the wrong one at any point between creating, editing, and viewing something, it can really mess with what colors are supposed to look like.
Itâs a lot to absorb. Thankfully, most of us will only ever need to understand the basics, and that knowledge can be useful to everyone â not just creative professionals. Learning about it can help you buy your next phone, TV, laptop, or computer monitor, and get the most o …
After years of managerial turmoil and a failed merger with Honda, Nissan is attempting to right the ship. President Donald Trump's tariffs couldn't have come at a worse time.
Meta has announced Llama 4, its newest collection of AI models that now power the Meta AI assistant on the web and in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The two new models, also available to download from Meta or Hugging Face, are Llama 4 Scout — a small model capable of “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU” — and Llama 4 Maverick, which is more akin to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Meta says it’s still in the process of training Llama 4 Behemoth, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is “the highest performing base model in the world.”
According to Meta, Llama 4 Scout has a 10-million-token context window — the working memory of an AI model — and beats Google’s Gemma 3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models, as well as the open-source Mistral 3.1, “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks,” while still “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU.” Meta makes similar claims about its larger Maverick model’s performance versus OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and says its results are comparable to DeepSeek-V3 in coding and reasoning tasks using “less than half the active parameters.”
Meanwhile, Llama 4 Behemoth has 288 billion active parameters with 2 trillion parameters in total. While it hasn’t been released yet, Meta says Behemoth can outperform its competitors (in this case GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7) “on several STEM benchmarks.”
For Llama 4, Meta says it switched to a “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, an approach that conserves resources by using only the parts of a model that are needed for a given task. The company plans to discuss future plans for AI models and products at its LlamaCon conference, which is taking place on April 29th.
As with its past models, Meta calls the Llama 4 collection “open-source,” although Llama has been criticized for its license restrictions. For instance, the Llama 4 license requires commercial entities with more than 700 million monthly active users to request permission from Meta before using its models, which the Open Source Initiative wrote in 2023 takes it “out of the category of ‘Open Source.’”
