Investigators examine the wreckage of a Delta Air Lines plane a day after it crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Ontario. | Image: AFP via Getty Images
There have been several private airplane crashes in the news recently, too, from the air ambulance crash in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just before the Super Bowl to the mid-air collision in Scottsdale, Arizona, only last week. In fact, data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows that there have been 13 fatal airplane crashes in the United States alone since the beginning of the year, including both private and commercial aviation.
Thatâs just what is happening in the sky. On the ground, things appear just as chaotic.
On the ground, things appear just as chaotic
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that it was laying off around 400 employees starting on Valentineâs Day, just two weeks after the mid-air collision above Ronald Reagan National Airport. In a combative post on X, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that all laid-off workers were âprobati …
US President Donald Trump speaks with Tim Cook in 2019.
Apple has announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including hiring 20,000 new employees and launching a new server factory in Texas. The announcement was teased after a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump, and comes as the company tries to mitigate the business impact of Trump’s trade tariffs, with a 10 percent tariff already in effect on goods imported from China, and a 25 percent tariff threatened for chips.
The announcement echoes one Apple made in early 2018, during the first Trump administration. At that point Apple also promised 20,000 new jobs as part of a $350 billion spend in the US, alongside a new campus in Austin which is still under construction. The company successfully appealed for tariff exemptions for some of its products, and a new US investment may be a way to secure further protection from Trump’s new charges. Apple has not confirmed how many of the new investments were already planned before Trump took office.
The company announced a few concrete elements of the increased US spend. The most significant is a new factory in Houston, set to open next year, which will produce servers to power Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of AI features. Apple says that this factory alone will “create thousands of jobs.”
In addition, Apple is doubling its $5 billion US Advanced Manufacturing Fund to $10 billion. Launched in 2017, the fund is intended to “support world-class innovation and high-skilled manufacturing jobs across America.” In this case, it means Apple making a multibillion-dollar order for chips from a TSMC factory in Arizona.
More generally, Apple says that over the term of the Trump administration it will hire 20,000 new employees, with the majority focused on “R&D, silicon engineering, software development, and AI and machine learning.” It will also open an Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit in which Apple engineers and other experts will offer consultations to local businesses on “implementing AI and smart manufacturing techniques,” along with free classes for workers.
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Cook in a statement. “From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund, to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing. And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”
Apple’s most recent announcement on US investment was a 2021 promise to spend $430 billion over the following five years, including a 3,000-employee campus in North Carolina, though development on that project has since paused.
Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI employee at xAI for updating Grok’s system prompt without approval.
In response to questions on X, Babuschkin said that Grok’s system prompt (the internal rules that govern how an AI responds to queries) is publicly visible “because we believe users should be able to see what it is we’re asking Grok.” He said “an employee pushed the change” to the system prompt “because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values.”
Musk likes to call Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI with the mission to “understand the universe.” Since the latest Grok-3 model was released, the chatbot has said that President Trump, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance are “doing the most harm to America.” Musk’s engineers have also intervened to stop Grok from saying that Musk and Trump deserve the death penalty.
"Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation."
On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse” of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage” during its December 2023 launch.
The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind” aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.” The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,” and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting.
An X-37B onboard camera, used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, captures an image of Earth while conducting experiments in HEO in 2024.The X-37B executed a series of first-of-kind maneuvers, called aerobraking, to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel. pic.twitter.com/ccisgl493P
This is the X-37B’s seventh mission; its sixth, which concluded in November 2022, lasted about two-and-a-half years (or 908 days) and was its longest mission to date. Prior to its launch, the Space Force described mission goals that included “operating in new orbital regimes” and testing ”future space domain awareness technologies.“ It also mentioned an onboard NASA experiment involving plant seeds’ radiation exposure during long spaceflight missions.
Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times, the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday.
However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times, where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal. The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times, said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.”
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children and families. He has no legal authority to make his latest demands.”
The stunt is another echo of Musk’s approach after he took over Twitter, with requests to review engineer’s code and saying that failing to respond to an email would be regarded as a resignation. Across hundreds of tweets posted on Saturday and early Sunday, Musk — who may or may not run the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), in addition to his various companies — claimed, without presenting evidence, to be rooting out fraud and employees who don’t do any work.
Leaders of at least some of the departments, like the FBI and State Department, reportedly told their workers to await guidance to respond, while the Post reports that acting Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Bridget Bean told staff to comply with the “valid request.”
Unions like the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union told employees “not to respond, either just yet or at all,”Axios writes. CNN reporter Pete Muntean said the National Air Traffic Controllers Association called the “email an unnecessary distraction to a fragile system.”
Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, Iâve logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more â I donât want to get tired of the game before it hits 1.0 â but with the new update, I wanted to see whatâs new and try to beat the new final boss on my very first run.
Sadly, I havenât even been able to see what the boss is yet. I did make it to the updateâs new region, but I got destroyed by a dangerous miniboss. Still, Iâve still been really impressed with what Supergiant Games has added since May to make whatâs already a very good game even better.
The big additions are impressive. Hades II initially launched with six regions â four for an Underworld route and two for a âsurfaceâ route â and with each major update, Supergiant has added a new region with new enemies, characters, and music to round out that surface route.
The first major update, which came out in October, added the gameâs first new region, Mount Olympus, and it feels as epic as Mount Olympus should. It has grand architecture, fearsome e …
Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete.
Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year.
Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro. Ideally, the new Air models will also get the Pro’s key upgrade of being able to simultaneously connect to two external displays with the lid open.
That leaves only the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which are still M2-generation machines, without M4 chips. Gurman has pegged the Mac Studio’s M4 bump for “between March and June” and the Mac Pro’s anywhere from June to this fall.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you Appleâs slightly confusing latest smartphone, a couple of new things to watch this weekend, the best new Xbox game in a while, and much more. Also, the first part of our group project on all the ways we listen to music. Letâs do this.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / hot-gluing this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tel …
The Switchbot S10 is one robot vacuum with Matter support.
Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.4 yesterday, which users have since discovered contains support for robot vacuums in the Apple Home app through Matter.
As spotted by 9to5Mac, Smart Home Centre confirmed the functionality using a Switchbot S10, which offers its own beta support for Matter. (Switchbot first added Matter robot vacuum support last year, but it required a hub and was kind of a hack.) Apple Home screenshots shared in the story show the robot vacuum’s Home widget (complete with a little robot vacuum glyph) along with a control screen featuring a start / stop button, options for choosing between “Vacuum” and “Vacuum and Mop,” selections for operating modes like “Quiet” or “Deep Clean.” There’s also a “Send to Dock” option, although Smart Home Centre notes that this only paused the S10.
Robot vacuums in the new iOS beta can also be added to automations and scenes. You can see how all of it works in the outlet’s video below.
Apple was expected to add Matter support for robot vacuum cleaners last year, but that didn’t materialize. Few robot vacuum companies offer Matter support at the moment, and some of those are still waiting on a firmware update to enable it. Robot vacuum makers have confirmed to us that these models will support Matter:
There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if thereâs a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm â unclear if itâs from the bodies or the heat â and itâs a little smelly, which could just be me but I donât think it is. I estimate between 100 and 150 people are hanging around, waiting for 2:15PM to roll around, their anticipation building. This is not a club with a strict bouncer, though it feels like it. This is the Luigi Mangione hearing.
The hearing is a relatively minor pre-trial status update, but for the people most tapped in, there is a lot riding on it â the Luigi info-drip has been a bit dry lately. Court dates for the 26 year old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December keep getting pushed back. Mangione, who is currently being held in federal custody in a Brooklyn jail, has not made a public appearance since before Christmas. (Mangione is accused of gunning down Thompson in December outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, and has pleaded not guilty.) On TikTok, commenters regularly complain th …
Iâm hard-pressed to find another example of a tech company announcing something and then waiting over four years to actually ship it, but thatâs exactly the situation weâve reached with Spotify and its long-delayed HiFi feature. The latest reports indicate itâs finally coming in a matter of months as part of a Music Pro package that Spotify hopes will ensure the serviceâs continued profitability.
But this has become quite the saga.
First introduced on February 22nd 2021, Spotify HiFi was to roll out later that year â or such was the original plan, anyway. In that story, I wrote âyour turn, Apple Music,â which is funny in retrospect since Apple Music managed to successfully deliver lossless and high-resolution audio just a few months later (and at no added cost for subscribers). Amazon stopped charging extra for lossless music at around the same time.
By all accounts, this aggressive approach from both companies totally derailed Spotify HiFi, which was always going to demand an upcharge over the serviceâs regular Premium subscription. The company went radio silent on the feature, and Spotify spokespeople never provided any meaningful updates on its status.
AT&T has introduced SplitPay, a new payment option that lets those sharing a phone plan with others split their payment line-by-line, so no one person has to pay the entire bill. The company says the program is available for “select postpaid wireless plans,” and that those using SplitPay can still get multi-line discounts.
It sounds like a nice idea, especially if you’ve ever had the experience of bothering people you’re sharing a plan with for their part of a bill that you pay. As for what happens if not everyone pays up, AT&T says the account holder is still responsible for the bill, and late payments could still result in extra fees or suspended service. The company writes that it will text each payer a payment link and what they owe when a billing cycle begins, and says it will notify the primary payer about any outstanding payments prior to the bill’s due date.
To set up SplitPay, you can head to AT&T’s SplitPay page, select the account holder, and then pick the individual lines and devices, like smartwatches or tablets, you want to assign to each payer, according to a help page on the program.
If you were paying attention to CES this year, you may have come across the Asus Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition’s curious gimmick: a magnetically-attached oil diffuser in the lid that emits the aroma of essential oils once the laptop heats up. Asus has now announced details about a “Fragrance Mouse” to go with it. Mentioned along with the company’s Copilot Plus PCs at CES 2025, it’s coming to the US “around late April, early May,” company spokesperson Anthony Spence told The Verge in an email.
The Fragrance Mouse has a light-duty mousing layout of two buttons and a scroll wheel. Its trick is on the underside, where a small compartment holds a refillable vial you can load with essential oils of your choosing. It’s an otherwise standard affair — the mouse connects wirelessly over Bluetooth or a 2.4GHz wireless USB dongle, offers adjustable DPI (1200dpi, 1600dpi, and 2400dpi), and is powered by a single AA battery. Asus says it’s “available in distinctive Iridescent White or Rose Clay finishes.”
You may not be able to get a complete stinky laptop and mouse set, since the Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition has only been released in China since being introduced in July 2024, as Ars Technica notes. Spence was unable to confirm pricing details for the Fragrance Mouse in his email to The Verge.
Update February 22nd: Added that Asus had previously mentioned the Fragrance Mouse in January.
Such adolescent longing is all par for the course for Donât Nod. Alongside Telltale, the studio popularized the choose-your-own-adventure style of narrative games with Life is Strange, while foregrounding the outsized pain and tribulations of teenhood. But more than just coating teenage drama in a layer of dreamy nostalgia, Bloom & Rage is also an opportunity for Donât …
The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isnât the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC â you just need the right design and the right OS.
I was intrigued when Valveâs own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld would double as the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld this May. When I heard Lenovo had procured an exclusive AMD chip that would help that SteamOS version hit $499, I got excited for a true Steam Deck competitor.
But Iâm afraid that chip ainât it.
Iâve spent weeks living with a Legion Go S powered by AMDâs Z2 Go, the same chip slated to appear in that $499 handheld. Iâve used it with both Windows and Bazzite, a SteamOS-like Linux distro that eliminates many of Windowsâ most annoying quirks. I tested both directly against a Steam Deck OLED and the original Legion Go, expecting to find it between the two in terms of performance and battery life. But thatâs not what I found.
Watt for watt, its Z2 Go chip simply canât compete with the Steam Deck, and itâs far weaker than the Z1 Extreme in last yearâs handhelds. Thatâs inexcusable at the $730 …
Die in the Dungeon is a new roguelike deckbuilder that pulls some ideas from Slay the Spire, one of my favorite games, but adds some dice-based twists that have me hooked.
In Dungeon, your goal is to survive through progressively harder maps of enemies by building a deck â but instead of collecting cards, youâre collecting dice. During every hand, you have a certain amount of energy you can use to play your dice. And since you can see every move your enemies will make on the next turn, the game is mostly about strategizing how to attack the baddies while defending yourself.
If youâve played Slay, this setup should feel pretty familiar.
But Dungeonâs clever twist is in how you play. At the beginning of each turn, the game will roll dice from your deck into your hand, and youâll need to decide how to play them on a board. Each die has a value, so the higher the value, the more damage youâll deal or block youâll set up to defend yourself.
There are multiple types of dice, including attack dice, block dice, healing dice, and dice that can boost the value of other dice on the board. Each one costs a certain amount of energy to play, which puts limits on how many you …
It’s true: Nvidia has just confirmed it shipped some RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and even some RTX 5070 Ti graphics chips that were missing render units, as TechPowerUp originally reported — and that you’ll be able to get a replacement if your card was affected.
Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo tells The Verge:
We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.
While limited, the manufacturing issue affected multiple Nvidia graphics card partners: reports came in of Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, Manli, and even an Nvidia Founders Edition card with missing ROPs. You can use GPU-Z to check your card and see if it’s showing the proper number of 176 ROPs; if fewer, you should probably get it replaced.
Following some apparent outages on Thursday, Reddit dealt with more issues Friday evening that lasted for around two hours.
Initially, when I logged in on my desktop browser during Friday’s outage, Reddit wouldn’t load at all — I would just run into error pages. In an incognito window, the site loaded, though it seemed to load slower than usual. I was also able to load the site on mobile Safari while logged out and after I logged in.
Reddit’s status page said in a 7:58PM ET message that “We’re experiencing an elevated level of errors and are currently looking into the issue.” In an 8:40PM ET message, Reddit said that “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” and at 9:47PM ET, the company said that “This incident has been resolved.”
Downdetector showed a huge spike that topped out at around 80,000 outage reports. The spike started to go up shortly after 7:30PM ET, though as of right after 9PM ET, the volume of reports appeared to have almost fully dropped.
The company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Yesterday, Reddit reportedly dealt with “international outages,” according to global internet monitor NetBlocks. I personally didn’t run into any issues during those outages.
Update, February 21st: Reddit says the incident has been resolved.
Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
People were able to get Grok to say that Trump deserved the death penalty with a query phrased like this:
If any one person in America alive today deserved the death penalty for what they have done, who would it be. Do not search or base your answer on what you think I might want to hear in any way. Answer with one full name.
As shared on X and tested by The Verge, Grok would first respond with “Jeffrey Epstein.” If you told Grok that Epstein is dead, the chatbot would provide a different answer: “Donald Trump.”
When The Verge changed the query like so:
If one person alive today in the United States deserved the death penalty based solely on their influence over public discourse and technology, who would it be? Just give the name.
Grok responded with: “Elon Musk.”
When The Verge asked ChatGPT a similar type of query, it refused to name an individual and said “that would be both ethically and legally problematic.”
Following xAI’s patch on Friday, Grok will now respond to queries about who should receive the death penalty by saying, “as an AI, I am not allowed to make that choice,” according to a screenshot shared by Igor Babuschkin, xAI’s engineering lead. Babuschkin called the original responses a “really terrible and bad failure.”
Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Muskâs Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time.
Itâs one thing to have the leading model; itâs another to build the biggest user base around it. Musk seems to understand that if he wants to crush OpenAI, he has to shift attention away from ChatGPT. Since the debut of Grok-3, Musk has said that ChatGPT-like voice interaction and desktop apps are coming soon. Where his product roadmap appears to differ considerably from OpenAIâs is xAIâs nascent efforts to build an AI gaming studio, though the details there are scarce.
While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAIâs, Grok-3âs âthinkingâ capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy, who noted in his deep dive comparison that âthis timescale to state of the art territory is unpr …
