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.
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:
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.
The Vision Pro app for iOS will let you find new content and queue up downloads for the headset.
One of the big problems with a VR headset is that anything you want to do, you have to do inside it. Apple is looking to tackle that and other Vision Pro pain points with visionOS 2.4, which will offer improvements to the guest user experience and two new apps for finding new things to do and watch, whether you’re wearing the headset or not.
Right now, it’s hard to find software for the Vision Pro without putting on the headset and doing the search there, but with this update and iOS 18.4 that’s getting easier with a new Apple Vision Pro for iOS app. It lets you browse the visionOS App Store, install apps remotely, and even cue up videos on the headset from your iPhone. Without it, your other choices are to search for other users’ recommendations online or scroll around this Apple page that shows Vision Pro apps.
Letting another person use your Vision Pro is a hassle and something you can’t really do without first putting it on and going through some setup. This update is addressing much of that friction by making Guest Mode easier to use. For starters, you no longer have to put on the headset before anyone else can use it. When a guest puts it on, the owner will get a prompt on their iPhone or iPad to approve placing it in guest mode. They can then choose the apps guests can access and decide whether or not to AirPlay what they’re seeing, just like Apple employees can for in-store demos.
In theory, if someone in your house uses your Vision Pro regularly, that means they can get to doing that much faster. However, Apple still isn’t removing the 30-day limit that resets saved guest profiles, so less frequent users will still have to go through the rigamarole of hand-and-eye setup. Even so, it’s a big improvement from the initial experience of sharing a Vision Pro.
You’ll also be able to view your headset’s information, like the serial number, from the app instead of hunting around for it inside the headset or finding your Vision Pro in the device list of your iPhone’s Apple Account settings. People who need prescription lenses will also be able to view and store their App Clip code for ZEISS Optical Inserts in the app too. Vision Pro owners don’t have to do anything to get the app either. It’ll download to their iPhones automatically with iOS 18.4, though it is also separately downloadable for non-owners from the App Store.
Along that vein, Apple is rolling out a new Vision Pro app, too, called Spatial Gallery. The company describes it as an Apple-curated collection of spatial photos, videos, and panoramas,which includes things like behind-the-scenes clips from Apple TV shows like Severance and Shrinking. The idea is to showcase content that highlights the Vision Pro’s strengths. That app will become available for Vision Pro owners when visionOS 2.4 is released in April.
Appleâs goal with the new iPhone 16E seems to be the same as with the iPhone SE: offer a very good, cheap smartphone to entice price-sensitive shoppers to either leave Android or upgrade from a much older iPhone. From what weâve seen so far, the company seems to have succeeded â but maybe a little too well: thereâs not a whole lot of space differentiating the 16E from the pricier iPhone 16. Thatâs something Apple will have to remedy the next time its flagship phone updates come around if it wants that model to stand out.
There used to be a large gap between the iPhone SE and the standard model iPhone. The SE had an old design with thick bezels and a home button. It had a small screen, a slower processor, and less storage. If you bought the SE, you knew you werenât getting the latest and greatest.
The iPhone 16E looks a lot more like a flagship phone at a budget price. It has an OLED display, FaceID, Appleâs latest processor, and even the customizable Action Button â a perfect feature for nerding things up that was once exclusive to iPhone 15 Pro phones. It only has a single camera, but itâs been upgraded to a 48-megapixel affair that Apple bills as a â2-in-1 …
The Humane AI Pin has collapsed, but Rabbit is still kicking.The company published a blog post and video today showing off a “generalist Android agent,” slowly controlling apps on a tablet in much the same way that Rabbit claimed its R1 device would over a year ago. (It couldn’t, and can’t.) The work builds on LAM Playground, a “generalist web agent” Rabbit launched last year.
The engineers don’t use the Rabbit R1 at all for the demonstration. Instead, they type their requests into a prompt box on a laptop, which translates them to actions on an Android tablet. They task it with things like finding a YouTube video or locating a whiskey cocktail recipe in a cocktail app, gathering the ingredients, and then adding them to a Google Keep grocery list. At one point, they ask it to download the puzzle game 2048 and figure out how to play it, which it does, albeit slowly.
The model generally does the things they ask, sometimes well and sometimes with quirks like sending a poem over WhatsApp one message at a time instead of in a single block. One of the engineers wonders if they should have asked it to use line breaks in their prompt, but they don’t go back to try again.
Rabbit’s AI agent is clearly still a work in progress, as it has been since the R1 launched with almost none of the capabilities that founder and CEO Jesse Lyu presented in January 2024. Rabbit has steadily rolled out updates, like the ability to train its AI agents to complete specific tasks or prompt it to remake its own interface. The examples it presented today are “only the core action loop an Android agent completes,” according to Rabbit’s blog post. The company promises to share more about its “upcoming cross-platform multi-agent system” in coming weeks.
Amazon-owned Eero is updating its mainline mesh routers with Wi-Fi 7 options in the new Eero 7 and Eero Pro 7 that are available for preorder now ahead of their launch on February 26th. Pricing for the Eero 7 and Eero Pro 7 ranges from $169.99 and $299.99 for single routers to $349.99 and $699.99 for three-packs, respectively.
Eero says these routers can push wireless throughput of up to 1.8Gbps (Eero 7) and 3.9Gbps (Eero Pro 7) — if true, that’s more than enough for most peoples’ hardwired internet service. Like their Wi-Fi 6 and 6E predecessors, the two mesh systems are mainly distinguished from each other by the number of bands they have and the throughput of their ethernet ports. The cheaper Eero 7 is a dual-band router (2.4GHz and 5GHz) with two 2.5Gbps, self-configuring ethernet ports, while the Pro 7 adds a 6GHz band and dual 5Gbps ethernet ports.
Those figures aren’t as impressive as the numbers Eero claims for its first Wi-Fi 7 router, the Eero Max 7, but the new routers bring Wi-Fi 7-exclusive features that can still benefit you even if you don’t have Wi-Fi 7 devices, and at a much lower price than the Max 7’s almost $1,360 three-pack price. Those features promise to improve the connection between wireless routers by combining multiple bands into one for higher throughput and more stability (if one is congested or goes down, it’s still using the other one), and offering 320MHz channel bandwidth on the 6GHz band, or double the 160MHz that was the maximum going back to Wi-Fi 5.
Eero VP of software engineering Rowan Chakoumakos told The Verge in a briefing that both the Pro model and standard Eero 7 can push up to a 240MHz signal on the 5GHz band, something else that’s only supported in Wi-Fi 7. Basically, the wireless signal going to an Eero 7 or Pro 7 mesh router should have more throughputthan with older Eero systems, to the benefit of even your older, non-Wi-Fi 7 smartphone, game console, or laptop. It’ll also be a cheaper option if you’ve considered the Eero Outdoor 7 but couldn’t bring yourself to get the pricey Eero Max 7 to integrate it with.
Like their predecessors, the new Wi-Fi 7 routers work as smart home hubs for Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem, with Matter support, a Zigbee radio, and the ability to act as Thread Border Routers. They’re also backward compatible with all of Eero’s 10 years’ worth of routers and work with Amazon smart speaker devices like Echo Dots with Eero mesh extender capability and all older Wi-Fi standards.
The release of these new routers brings Eero’s Wi-Fi 7 options up to four, including the outdoor Wi-Fi 7 router it announced in October. The company says it will keep selling the Eero 6, 6 Plus, and Pro 6E, each of which got a recent price drop that knocked around $20 off of prices that now range between $89.99 for a single Eero 6 all the way up to $549.99 for a three-pack of the Eero Pro 6E.
The Apple C1 chip: Apple’s first in-house 5G modem.
Apple has just introduced the iPhone 16E, a spiritual successor to the iPhone SE line that has a significant first: it introduces Apple’s long-awaited in-house 5G modem called the C1. The chip, which Apple says is the most power-efficient modem in a phone, is Apple’s bid to end its reliance on Qualcomm’s 5G chips.
Apple says the chip contributes to the 16E’s longer battery life. The company says the phone’s internal design is optimized to support a larger battery, giving it up to 26 hours of video playback. According to Apple’s technical specifications for the iPhone 16E, its new chip covers much of the same low-end 5G spectrum as the iPhone 16 but lacks mmWave — that’s the 5G with gigabit-territory throughput.
The C1 starting in the 16E makes sense: the $599 device is now the cheapest way to get one of Apple’s thin-bezel phones with Apple Intelligence. If this inaugural outing for the chip doesn’t end up being great, people may chalk it up to this being a more affordable phone.
This has been nearly six years in the making, with Apple having bought Intel’s cell modem business in 2019. There’s every reason to be skeptical that it will perform as well as Qualcomm. In 2023, the company extended its deal with Qualcomm. The news was followed by a report that it was struggling with its in-house modem’s design. But 2026 is coming, and the C1 may be the first step toward Apple weaning itself off of Qualcomm once and for all.
The iPhone 16E is available to preorder tomorrow and ships on February 28th.
Meta’s WhatsApp has now gathered enough users to be designated a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), opening it up to stricter regulations in the region, reports Bloomberg.
The DSA assigns VLOP status to any online service with more than 45 million users, a threshold WhatsApp crossed last year, European Commissioner Thomas Regnier told Bloomberg. In a February 14th filing, the company said it recorded an average “approximately 46.8 million” monthly active users of WhatsApp Channels, WhatsApp’s broadcasting feature, over the last six months of 2024. In a February 16th update to its privacy policy, WhatsApp also added new information about its data processing “in line with our regulatory obligations under the DSA.”
Companies designated as VLOPs are required to give users ways to report illegal goods, services, or content, and to provide ways to prevent or remove such posts. The DSA also places tight controls on what information companies can use for targeted advertising and heavier restrictions on child-targeted ads. Europeans who use VLOPs are entitled to more control over how their data is used and must be given the ability to opt out of things like recommendations systems and profiling.
Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are already considered VLOPs in the EU.
A photo of the Nothing Phone 3A’s triple-camera setup.
Nothing is comparing its coming budget Phone 3A’s camera against that of the iPhone 16 Pro Max in a new YouTube video released today. Specifically, it’s showing off the performance of the Phone 3A’s 50MP periscope camera, which appears in the bottom right of the triangular three-camera array in the photo (emailed to the The Verge) at the top of this story.
Nothing says the periscope camera offers a 3X optical zoom and up to a 60x “ultra zoom” for macro photography and 70mm focal length, compared to the 5X optical zoom, 25x digital zoom, and 120mm focal length of the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s tetraprism camera. The company says in its email the camera’s computational photography uses AI tone-mapping and scene detection to tweak the look of images.
In its email, Nothing says the 3A’s 50MP main camera gathers “64% more light at a pixel level meaning it has a 300% greater full well capacity” than the 2A. In the video, Nothing explains that full well capacity refers to how much light the sensor’s individual pixels can collect before becoming oversaturated. All four of the phone’s camera sensors — the three rear cameras and its front-facing camera — support Ultra HDR, while the main camera and front camera record at 4K video and feature night photography enhancements.
The comparisons involve outdoor pictures of graffiti, food, and buildings. The YouTube video’s description includes a link to a Google Drive containing some of the pictures it took, such as the two below comparing depth-of-field between the phones, with the Nothing Phone 3A’s shot on the left and iPhone 16 Pro Max’s on the right.
The Nothing Phone 3A (left) vs. the iPhone 16 Pro Max (right)
Nothing has been trickling bits of information and teases of the Phone 3A lately, such as a social media post hinting at a new button or a press release confirming that it will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that’s 25 percent faster than the Phone 2A’s MediaTek CPU. The company has said it will unveil the Nothing Phone 3A on March 4th at 10AM GMT / 5AM ET.
Days after YouTube published a blog post saying it could lose Paramount content soon, it updated the post to announce a deal to keep it. The company posted on X that, as a result, channels such as CBS, CBS Sports, and Nickelodeon and add-ons like Paramount Plus, Showtime, and BET Plus will stick around after all.
The company had said in its post on February 12th that it would offer an $8 credit if Paramount content was “unavailable for an extended period of time,” but updated the next day to say talks had been extended. YouTube TV didn’t elaborate further on its new deal or how it could affect pricing. Responding to questions on X about whether it will raise prices as a result of the deal, the TeamYouTube account replied, “We take these decisions very seriously & will be sure to communicate any potential changes in the future before they happen.”
Members, we’re happy to share that we’ve reached a deal to continue carrying Paramount content on YouTube TV. That means you still have access to channels like CBS, CBS Sports, and Nickelodeon. Add-ons like Paramount+ with SHOWTIME and BET+ also remain uninterrupted.
YouTube TV increased its subscription by $10 a month to $82.99 in December. The new price is in keeping with recent increases from similar services like Fubo, Hulu Plus Live TV, and Sling TV as customers continue to shift from cable to streaming and content makers look for ways to keep revenue going. YouTube did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for more information.
Protestors gathered outside a Tesla showroom in New York on Saturday. | Photo: Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg via Getty Images<br>
Today marked a second weekend of scattered protests at Tesla showrooms, following a “TeslaTakeover” hashtag that has been trending on Twitter alternative Bluesky this week. Protestors’ messages largely focused on the divisive efforts of Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency since the start of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
The protests don’t appear to be especially large, but they are numerous, ranging from places like New York to lesser-known locales like Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb Golden Valley. A section of Action Network’s site for organizing protests shows rallies planned for cities in Ohio, Florida, Washington, New Mexico, and Alberta, Canada.
Rise and Resist went back to Tesla today, to defend democracy and the Constitution against Musk’s criminal enterprise. #StopTheCoup #TeslaTakedown #EndOligarchy
Tesla investors have expressed concern that Musk’s activities are negatively impacting the company, which saw its stock price plummet by 21 percent since Trump’s inauguration according to an ABC story this week. Inside the company, employees and senior staff said in a recent meeting that “the company would be better off if Musk resigned,” The Washington Post reported.
One of the larger rallies today was outside of Tesla’s Manhattan showroom, where a previous protest took place on February 9th. In the videos below, people can be heard chanting, “Don’t buy swasticars” and “Elon Musk can go to Mars; we don’t need your Nazi cars,” perhaps referencing Musk’s support for far-right groups like Germany’s AfD party or his suspicious salute on Inauguration Day.
Protest today at Tesla in NYC #TeslaTakeover #video #StopElon #ImpeachMusk
Happening now: Protesters at the Tesla service center just outside of Minneapolis. Signs reading “Unplug Mad King Musk”, “This car runs on facsism”, “Who buys cars from a nazi?”, “Say no to doge”, “Don’t buy swasticars, BAD DOGE!”.
HAPPENING NOW A handful of protestors rally against Elon Musk outside of Pittsburgh-area Tesla dealership. They are criticizing CEO Musk’s new role in the White House.@KDKApic.twitter.com/uBAxwTlxbl
Actor, director, and progressive activist Alex Winter, who heavily promoted this weekend’s protests over the last few days, posted an image of himself holding a sign urging people to sell their Teslas at a protest in Pasadena, California:
Amazing day out here and across the country! We have over 70 people at this store in Pasadena. Won't post shots of the crowd, up to others if they want to. This is just the beginning!#TeslaTakedownTeslatakedown.com
There are many posts on Bluesky with the #TeslaTakeover hashtag, but far fewer show up when searching X, Instagram, or Threads. Outside of picketing, others protested Musk in different ways. Musician Sheryl Crow posted a video of a Tesla being driven away on a flatbed truck, along with a message saying “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla,” and noting that she had donated the money to NPR, which is currently threatened by an FCC investigation into public media.
More protests are expected, including during the President’s Day holiday on Monday, with one set for Lowell, Maine and at least one other in Richmond, Virginia. Those are in addition to numerous demonstrations planned this weekend that don’t target Tesla showrooms but still relate to the actions of Musk, DOGE, and President Trump more broadly.
The popular Nintendo DS emulator Drastic has disappeared from the Google Play store, reports Android Authority. It’s not clear at the moment why the app is now gone, but it seems likely that it was the developer, not Nintendo, that prompted its removal.
Developer Exophase made Drastic free-to-download last year and indicated that it planned to remove the app from Google Play and open-source its code, though that doesn’t seem to have ever happened. The announcement came after a Nintendo settlement took down Switch emulator Yuzu and Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, something the developer said wasn’t reponsible for its decision, but did accelerate the timeline.
Exophase did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
The loss of Drastic is a hit to the broader emulator scene, which was rocked by Nintendo’s legal moves against Yuzu last year. But despite that, there is now a flourishing iOS emulator marketplace, thanks to a surprise change to Apple’s App Store guidelines last year.
Amazon won’t launch the AI-powered upgrade for Alexa for at least a month after its showcase at an event set for February 26th, according to The Washington Post. The delay is reportedly at least partly because the updated assistant has issues with giving inaccurate answers to test questions.
An anonymous Amazon employee told the outlet that the upgrade won’t come “until March 31 or later” due to the issues. The new Alexa could be tied to a subscription, with features like “the ability to adopt a personality, recall conversations, order takeout or call a taxi,” and was originally set to launch later this month as a free trial, the Post writes, citing internal documents and messages.
News of the delay comes after months of rumors suggesting Amazon is struggling to realize its plans to “supercharge” Alexa generative AI, which it said in 2023 would take place over a period of months, but still hasn’t. It was reportedly delayed from a late 2024 launch amid beta tester reports of slow, stiff, and less-than-useful responses. Amazon declined to comment on this story.
Apple is also rumored to be having issues with its own Siri AI upgrade, which has been expected to come soon in iOS 18.4, but may see its capabilities limited or delayed entirely to iOS 18.5, coming as early as May, Bloomberg reported yesterday. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini-fueled digital assistant continues to enjoy a substantial lead in the race to beef up older smartphone assistants with generative AI.
Update February 16th: Added that Amazon declined to comment on this story.
It really makes you want to reach out and pick up one of the players.
The NBA has introduced a new AR feature for its Vision Pro app this week called Tabletop, which places a floating render of a basketball court in your space during “select” live games, according to an NBA help page describing the feature. On the court, digital avatars mirror the game’s actual players as they move, pass, and shoot — but only for live games that you can watch or listen to with NBA League Pass.
The feature even works for local market games that are otherwise unavailable to stream video of in the app. It was about 45 seconds behind the announcer audio during a local game I tested it with, but Vision Pro owner Justin Ryan reported about a half-second delay after using a toolbar option to sync with the live feed. The feature wasn’t available for any out-of-market games when I tested, so I only had an audio feed to compare with.
Each player has the same avatar (shown as either a robot or with a cell-shaded cartoon style), but you can still differentiate by the color of their jerseys and the names and numbers emblazoned on them. Their name is also placed above their head when they have the ball. The NBA didn’t immediately respond when I asked whether the feature will be available for this weekend’s NBA All-Star events. Here’s a screen recording of the feature from my own Vision Pro, followed by a timestamped link to the same moment from a highlights reel the NBA posted after the game:
The feature is reminiscent of what the Lapz Vision Pro app did for Formula 1 races before it was shut down by F1 itself. If you subscribe to NBA League Pass and have a Vision Pro, look for a new Tabletop button next to the usual “Watch Live” and “Multiview” buttons in the NBA app.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unveils streaming experience of the future via the NBA App – and you can be in it! pic.twitter.com/FKYJvskf0H
Tabletop was surprisingly polished for an alpha feature when I tried it out. The NBA has shown off mixed reality tech it’s experimenting with in the past, such as the above presentation from NBA commissioner Adam Silver in which he demonstrates using a 3D scan of sports commentator Ahmad Rashad to replace a player in an in-game clip.
Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay President Donald Trump “about $10 million” to settle his lawsuit against Twitter, reports The Wall Street Journal. The settlement would come on top of an estimated $250 million that Musk, who now seemingly has broad authority over government agencies as the head of DOGE, put toward helping Trump get elected last year.
Trump sued Twitter, Facebook, and Google over his account suspensions following the January 6th, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, and a judge dismissed this lawsuit in 2022, rejecting arguments that the company was a state actor or that Section 230 is unconstitutional.
Before that, ABC News agreed to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit for $15 million. And last month, the Journal reported Paramount Global was considering caving on Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the editing of a Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview.
Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr has asked his agency to investigate Comcast’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, reports Newsmax. “We have received an inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission and will be cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions,” Comcast spokesperson Joelle Terry confirms to The Verge.
According to Newsmax, Carr said that FCC is looking for signs that the company’s initiatives have violated federal employment law, writing: “I expect that this investigation into Comcast and its NBCUniversal operations will aid the commission’s broader efforts to root out invidious forms of DEI discrimination across all of the sectors the FCC regulates.”
Since taking control of the FCC last month, Carr has threatened to pull broadcast licenses of companies like Disney and CBS for airing content that’s not friendly to Trump and conservatives. He has also ordered investigations into NPR and PBS for “airing commercials,” which fellow Commissioner Anna Gomez told The Verge was a Trump administration “effort to weaponize the power of the FCC.” Carr was a Trump appointee, and he wrote the Project 2025 chapter on how the FCC should rein in big companies.
In addition to its cable, wireless, and internet services, Comcast owns a swath of broadcasters, including NBC Universal, streaming service Peacock, and many others. (Disclosure:Comcast is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)
Apparent official renders of the Pixel 9A. | Image: <em><a href="https://www.androidheadlines.com/google-pixel-9a-renders-colors">Android Headlines</a></em>
A new set of leaked Pixel 9A renders appears to confirm months of rumors that Google is virtually ditching the camera bump this year. The images, published by Android Headlines, also show the phone in four colors — black (Obsidian), white (Porcelain), pink (Peony), and purple (Iris) — will look like.
Smartphones that lay flat on a table have mostly become a distant memory now that phone makers have embraced the camera bump. That makes these Pixel 9A renders especially exciting, even if there’s still the barest hint of a bump when viewed from the side.
The back cameras will include a 48-megapixel main shooter (down from 64 megapixels in the 8A), and a 13-megapixel ultrawide, and the phone will have a 13-megapixel selfie camera on the front, according to Android Headlines. The Pixel 9A will also apparently sport a 5,100mAh battery, up from the previous model’s 4,492 mAh.
Android Headlines says the phone will cost $499 for the base 128GB model, $599 for the 256GB one, and that Google will officially announce it on March 19th ahead of a March 26th release date.
Past rumors have also suggested the Pixel 9A will get a 6.3-inch screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, a Tensor G4 chip, 8GB of RAM, and that 256GB will be its maximum storage tier. The budget phone will likely have competition from Apple’s fourth iPhone SE, which is rumored to be announced any day now.
Updating a newer iPhone, iPad, or Mac to the latest software could have an unintended side effect of re-enabling Apple Intelligence. Users who turned off Apple’s AI features in iOS / iPadOS 18.3 or macOS 15.3 — the first set of updates to enable the features by default — have reported that the software suite turned itself on again after they updated to iOS 18.3.1 or macOS 15.3.1, which were released yesterday with notes about fixing a security flaw on iPhones and iPads.
Reports from MacRumors and on Reddit note that those who see the Apple “Welcome” screen after updating find they have to turn Apple Intelligence off again afterward, even if they had disabled it previously. Developer Jeff Johnson also noted inconsistent results, with it turning on for one laptop but not another while installing the same update.
The features didn’t turn on for any of our devices updating from iOS 18.3 or macOS 15.3, but it’s still something worth checking if you don’t want it on your device. We’ve asked Apple about the switch and will update this post if we receive any additional details.
You can turn Apple Intelligence off by heading to Settings (or System Settings on a Mac), then scrolling to Apple Intelligence & Siri — the toggle should be at the top of that page.
The next scheduled update with iOS 18.4 is expected to bring with it some of the more significant features, including what Apple says will be a better Siri and much deeper AI integration.
