CES saw wild innovations from Roborock and Dreame and helpful upgrades from the rest of the pack, all of which are set to make 2025 a banner year for those who’d rather leave the cleaning to the robots.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple may have settled on iPhone 17 Air as the name for the rumored skinny iPhone that’s expected this fall, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. He writes that the phone will be “a testing ground for future technologies,” including the tech that leads to the company’s first foldables.

The name wouldn’t be surprising — both the MacBook Air and iPad Air were the thinnest versions of their lines when they were released. The iPhone 17 Air is expected to carry that forward by being “about 2 millimeters thinner” than current iPhones, Gurman has written. Other recent rumors have put it between 5.5mm and 6.25mm thick, which is close to the M4 iPad Pro’s depth and less than the thinnest iPhone so far, the iPhone 6.

The thinness isn’t just a flex — realizing it will help Apple along toward future foldable iPads and iPhones, Gurman writes. And he says the phone could be one of Apple’s first proving grounds for its in-house cell modem, codenamed Sinope, after it debuts in the iPhone SE this spring. This year’s iPhone lineup is also expected to debut Apple-designed Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chips, though Gurman doesn’t go as far as saying that includes the 17 Air.

Past rumors have said the new 17 Air will get a 6.6-inch ProMotion OLED display — Apple’s 120Hz variable refresh rate screen used only on iPhone Pro models so far — and that it will have just a single 48-megapixel camera lens on the back, with a 24-megapixel selfie camera. It may have Apple’s A19 chip and, like the iPhone SE 4, is expected to pack 8GB of RAM to run Apple Intelligence AI features.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid AI when you open up your phone or laptop — as soon as I started this article in Google Docs, I was immediately offered some AI assistance to write it (which I didn’t take). And with the rollout of Apple Intelligence, that now applies to iPhones, iPads, and Macs, too.

But if you aren’t seeing much value in the Apple Intelligence features that have launched so far, you’re not alone: around three-quarters of iPhone owners can’t see what all the fuss is about, according to a recent survey. It’s also worth bearing in mind that these AI add-ons take up 7GB of local storage (and counting) on every device you want to use them on.

The good news is that Apple Intelligence is both opt-in and reasonably easy to disable, which isn’t something every company does with their AI tools (looking at you, Google and Microsoft). So if you find features like Writing Tools and mangled notification summaries superfluous to your needs, you can turn them off.

Assuming you’ve already turned it on, here’s how to turn off specific features of Apple Intelligence. And if you really don’t like it, here’s how to turn it off completely.

(The steps listed below were...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Las Vegas is punishingly dry. The arid winter air means I woke up on Day 3 of CES 2025 with a nosebleed, chapped lips, and ashy legs. This in spite of the fact I slathered myself with two pumps of a fermented bean essence, eye cream, moisturizer, and a lip mask. Staring at my face in the hotel mirror, I wonder if any of those products were doing what they’re supposed to — and if maybe, I should try something different.

This is why I was so eager to try L’Oréal’s Cell BioPrint.

For anyone who’s struggled with their complexion, the Cell BioPrint feels like a holy grail gadget. The device is a mini-lab setup that analyzes a skin sample to generate a report about your skin’s current condition. It’ll also “grade” your skin with regard to oiliness, wrinkles, skin barrier function, pore size, and uneven skin tone. Based on the proteins in your skin, you’ll also see whether you’re more likely to be susceptible to those issues down the line — even if they aren’t issues now. The test also determines whether you’re responsive to retinol, a popular and well-studied skincare ingredient that nevertheless causes a ton of confusion online.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 66, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy 2025, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about loneliness and Web3 scams and the future of procedural TV, watching Deadpool & Wolverine on an airplane like the director intended, rewatching Severance and Squid Game to get ready for the second seasons, eagerly awaiting the return of Kids Baking Championship, wondering if that’s real Sara Dietschy or AI Sara Dietschy, and giving an Apple News Plus subscription a whirl as my go-to news source.

I also have for you a big report from CES in Las Vegas. This edition of Installer is a little different than most, just because we saw so many new things, and so many new things launched, and in many cases, it’s hard to know whether any of it will ever hit shelves. So think of this as part Installer, part CES recap, part “David hopes desperately these things actually ship” list. But I tried hard to pick out the stuff I’m confident will actually end up on sale at some point soon and might be worth your money. I’m sure I’ll be wrong about a few...

Read the full story at The Verge.

‘We view what we are doing as a public service,’ says the cofounder of the nonprofit that millions of people are relying on to stay safe.

If you live in Los Angeles, you are probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indexes, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone, from firefighters to regular people, have come to rely on during this week’s historic and devastating wildfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.

The elegance of the app lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t scrape user data, show ads, require any kind of login, or track your information. Its simple tech stack and UI — most of which is maintained by volunteer engineers and reporters — has likely helped save countless lives. While Watch Duty is free to use, the app accepts tax-deductible donations and offers two tiers of membership that unlock additional features, like a firefighting flight tracker and the ability to set alerts for more than four counties.

With plans to expand the service across the United States, as well as overseas and into other emergency services, Watch Duty may eventually replace some of the slower and less reliable local government alert systems for millions of people.

Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images

An app born from fire

The idea for Watch Duty came to cofounder John Mills while he was trying to protect his off-grid Sonoma County home from the Walbridge fire in 2020. He realized there wasn’t a single source for all the information people needed to protect themselves from the blaze, which ultimately killed 33 people and destroyed 156 homes. John and his friend David Merritt, who is Watch Duty’s cofounder and CTO, decided to build an app to help.

“This came out of an idea that John had, and he talked to me about it four years ago,” Merritt tells The Verge. “We built the app in 60 days, and it was run completely by volunteers, no full-time staff. It was a side project for a lot of engineers, so the aim was to keep it as simple as possible.”

Fire reporting is piecemeal at best in fire-prone areas and frequently scattered across platforms like Facebook and X, where fire departments and counties have verified pages sharing relevant updates. But increasingly, social media platforms are putting automated access for alert services behind paywalls. Governments also use a wide variety of alert systems, causing delays that can cost lives, especially in fast-moving fires like the Palisades and Eaton fires that have forced evacuations for more than 180,000 people. And sometimes, these government-run alerts are sent out mistakenly, causing mass confusion.

Watch Duty simplifies all that for millions of people.

“We view what we are doing as a public service,” says Merritt. “It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very scattered. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, their hands are tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We partner with government sources with a focus on firefighting.”

One of the biggest issues around fires, in particular, is that they can move quickly and consume large swaths of land and structures in minutes. For example, the winds that drove the Palisades fire to spread to more than 10,000 acres reached 90 miles per hour on Tuesday. When minutes matter, the piecemeal alert system that Watch Duty replaces can cause delays that cost lives.

“Some of the delivery systems for push notifications and text messages that government agencies use had a 15-minute delay, which is not good for fire,” says Merritt. “We shoot to have push notifications out in under a minute. Right now, 1.5 million people in LA are getting push notifications through the app. That’s a lot of messages to send out in 60 seconds. In general, people are getting it pretty much all at the same time.”

A simple tech stack

For Watch Duty, this kind of mass communication requires reliable technology as well as a group of dedicated staff and skilled volunteers. Merritt says that Watch Duty relies on a number of corporate partners with whom it has relationships and contracts to provide its service.

The app is built on a mix of technology, including Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, Firebase, Fastly, and Heroku. Merritt says the app uses some AI, but only for internal routing of alerts and emails. Reporters at Watch Duty — those who listen to scanners and update the app with push notifications about everything from air drops to evacuation updates — are mostly volunteers who coordinate coverage via Slack.

“All information is vetted for quality over quantity,” he says. “We have a code of conduct for reporters. For example, we never report on injuries or give specific addresses. It’s all tailored with a specific set of criteria. We don’t editorialize. We report on what we have heard on the scanners.”

According to Merritt, the app has 100 percent uptime. Even though it started with volunteer engineers, the nonprofit has slowly added more full-time people. “We still have volunteers helping us, but it’s becoming more on the internal paid staff as we grow, as things get more complex, and as we have more rigorous processes,” he says.

He says there are no plans to ever charge for the app or scrape user data. The approach is kind of the Field of Dreams method to building a free app that saves people’s lives: if you build it well, the funding will come.

“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of tech does,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get information and get out. We have the option of adding more photos, but we limit those to the ones that provide different views of a fire we have been tracking. We don’t want people doom scrolling.”

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images

Collecting information in the era of Trump

Watch Duty relies heavily on publicly available information from places like the National Weather Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. Should the incoming Trump administration decide to execute on threats to dismantle and disband the EPA (which monitors air quality) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency to the National Weather Service, such moves would impact Watch Duty’s ability to operate.

Even still, Merritt is optimistic. “We will be pretty well insulated from any change to policy,” he says. “We are either buying that information ourselves already or we are happy to buy it, and we will take that cost on. The fact that we’re soon going to be covering the entire US will defray the cost of anything that shifts from a policy perspective. Our operation costs are mostly salaries. We are trying to hire really good engineers and have a really solid platform. If we need to raise a grant to buy data from the National Weather Service, then we will.”

Regardless of what the next administration does, it’s clear that Watch Duty has become a critical and necessary app for those in Southern California right now. The app currently covers 22 states and plans to roll out nationwide soon.

“We got 1.4 million app downloads in the last few days,” according to Merritt. “I think we have only received 60 support tickets, so that shows that something is working there. We are really just focused on the delivery of this information.”

Amazon will be winding down its Prime Try Before You Buy program, which let Prime members try on clothes before paying for them, reports The Information. It will shutter on January 31st, according to a banner at the top of the service’s landing page.

Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is discontinuing the service because it only worked for a “limited number of items” and customers have been “increasingly using our new AI-powered features” to decide what to buy.

Tagay gave examples like Virtual Try-On AR feature that puts 3D renders of shoes from certain brands on your feet using your smartphone’s camera. She also mentioned the company’s LLM-powered “personalized size recommendations” that tweak size recommendations based on customer reviews.

Prime Try Before You Buy launched in 2018 for all Prime subscribers as Amazon Wardrobe before the company later changed its name. Through it, Prime members can order up to six items, try them for seven days, then pay for what works and send back the rest — like a very basic version of Stitch Fix’s curated clothing service. But a big part of that is returns, which is something the company has been trying to cut back on.

The discontinuation of Prime Try Before You Buy comes after years of cost-cutting at the company, as CNBC points out. That’s included massive layoffs and shuttering physical stores, as well as scaling back some of its efforts in the grocery industry.

Here is the full statement Tagay provided to The Verge:

Given the combination of Try Before You Buy only scaling to a limited number of items and customers increasingly using our new AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts to make sure they find the right fit, we’re phasing out the Try Before You Buy option, effective January 31, 2025. Of course, customers will continue to enjoy fast, free shipping, with easy, free returns on our full apparel selection.

The inventive gadgets and gizmos at CES can often define the year, but most everything that appears on the showroom floor isn’t going to be available until later in the year, if at all. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Anker’s 140W GaN charger, which is already available in black or silver for $79.99 ($10 off) when you clip the on-page coupon at Amazon or use promo code WSCPV2LBR7KR at Anker’s online storefront.

Out of all the chargers to come out of CES this year, the Anker Charger (140W) easily offers one of the more refreshing designs. The wall charger is unique in that it positions all four USB ports on the underside of the device, thus reorienting its center of gravity and helping prevent it from falling out when loaded with weighty cables. Two of those ports are USB-C ports that supply up to 140W of power — letting you top off everything from a Nintendo Switch to the latest MacBook Pro — while a third USB-C port maxes out at 40W. It also features a single USB-A port limited to 33W, as well as a built-in info display for viewing temperature data and the power output for each port.

More ways to save this weekend

• Amazon is selling its Smart Air Quality Monitor for $49.99 ($20 off), which is only $5 more than its best price to date. The compact device uses phone and voice alerts (via Echo speakers) to let you know when it detects abnormal changes in particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, humidity, and temperature. It can even automatically trigger Alexa-enabled air purifiers, along with humidifiers and other connected devices.
• Samsung’s budget-friendly Galaxy Buds FE are down to $59.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, nearly matching their lowest price to date. They’re a good bet if you could care less about multipoint support and wireless charging, as they offer reliable performance, enjoyable sound, and surprisingly good noise cancellation for the price. They also sport a wing tip design, which can provide a more secure fit if you struggle with traditional in-ears. Read our review.

Note: Quentyn Kennemer also contributed to this post.

Leaks and rumors supported by multiple third-party manufactures make up the bulk of info out there about the new Switch.

Nintendo’s announcement of the Switch successor is imminent. Just how imminent is anyone’s guess with the company stating that it would reveal info on the console before the end of its fiscal year in March. Rumors regarding the new Switch have been circulating for more than a year, but with less than two months to go until the promised deadline, and in the absence of any real information from Nintendo itself, speculation about the console, its specs, physical profile, and more have reached a fever pitch. So before the official reveal, here’s everything we think we know about Nintendo’s next console.

The only concrete, Nintendo-confirmed piece of information we know about the new console is that it’ll be backwards compatible with the Switch. Everything else has come by way of leaks and info supplied by third-party manufacturers. Late last year, one such manufacturer, Dbrand, debuted its Killswitch carrying case meant for the Switch 2. According to Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz, the Killswitch is based on the “actual dimensions” of the new console obtained from a “3D scan of the real hardware.” But in an interview with The Verge, he declined to say exactly how or where Dbrand obtained such information.

Image: Dbrand

If the Killswitch’s design is indeed derived from the real thing, the new console will be larger than the Switch OLED with an 8-inch screen, and feature a kickstand that will span the length of the console similar to the OLED model. That the new Switch will be larger than previous iterations is supported by leaks and info from other accessory manufacturers as well as the idea that the Joy-Con controllers will attach via magnet instead of sliding and snapping into place. The new controller design will also incorporate magnets in the joysticks to combat against the dreaded “Joy-Con drift” that plagues the Switch even now.

CES 2025 provided even more fodder for the rumor mill, with accessory manufacturer Genki showing off a 3D printed mock-up of the console on the show floor. In an interview with The Verge, Genki CEO Eddie Tsai went into detail about what he knows about the new Switch reaffirming rumors regarding its larger size, magnetic Joy-Con, and more.

While there’s a lot of speculation and potential evidence about what the new console will look like, there’s less circulating about what it can actually do. Beyond an alleged photo of the console’s motherboard, there hasn’t been much out there about the console’s hardware specifications. Because Nintendo has never made consoles at the bleeding edge (or, honestly, even the cutting one) of graphics or processing power, it’s hard to guess how well the console will perform or what additional features, like a microphone, it’ll have.

Though the console’s internals remain a mystery, we do know that it’ll be backwards compatible with Switch games. We can also reasonably guess at least one game that’ll be a launch title: Metroid Prime 4. Announced in 2017, and undergoing a change of studio and a development reboot two years later, Nintendo debuted gameplay footage for the first time last year and shared a soft launch window of 2025. When Twilight Princess launched in 2006, it debuted on both the GameCube and served as a launch title for the Wii. Breath of the Wild was also cross-gen, debuting on the Wii U while launching with the Switch in 2017.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Knowing that the new Switch and Metroid Prime 4 both launch in 2025 and with Twilight Princess and BotW as examples, it’s speculated that the reason for Metroid 4’s long stint in development hell was, at least in part, because the game was being tooled for both the Switch and its successor. Also, you just can’t have a new Nintendo console without a Mario game. Super Mario Odyssey was a Switch launch title, and though there’s been other new releases like Super Mario Wonder, there hasn’t been a new, standalone (put down your pitchforks Bowser’s Fury fans) 3D Mario game since then. It’s all but assured one will be announced with the new Switch. The recently announced Pokémon Legends: Z-A is also a good launch title candidate as Nintendo curiously worded the game’s debut trailer with “releasing simultaneously worldwide on Nintendo Switch in 2025.”

For all the rumors and reasonable guesses supported by increasingly convincing evidence, it’s helpful to remember that at the end of the day, we’re still talking about Nintendo. The company has always tread a separate and unpredictable path from the other two major console manufacturers and that oddball strategy has mostly worked very well. Though the company is not immune to the same layoffs and delays (the Switch 2 was originally pegged for a 2024 release) plaguing its peers and indeed has its own manifold issues with how it treats and pays its employees and contractors, of the major publishers, it seems to be the one that is best navigating the current crisis ravaging the industry.

It is folly trying to predict what Nintendo will do, and that applies to its new console. All we can count on is that it’s coming soon, and when it arrives, it’ll be big.

New renders of the Samsung Galaxy S25 series have appeared in a leak from Android Headlines ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event later this month. The most obvious change here is that Samsung has tweaked the design of the S25 Ultra, rounding off the phone’s corners a bit.

From the renders, it looks like you’ll be able to get the non-Ultra S25s in light blue, dark blue, light green, and silver. The Ultra will come in black, gray, and two silvery colors with either a white or blue tint.

Here are a couple of the images — you can see the rest at Android Headlines:

Image: Android Headlines

Image: Android Headlines

Apart from the new colors, the non-Ultra phones are almost indistinguishable from the S24 line. But one finer detail that’s changed is the way the camera bumps seem to nod at the look of a traditional camera lens barrel that flares out at the end. Internally, look for a CPU bump from Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chips to new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile processors, but not much else. You can read more about the internals in a separate specs leak that Android Headlines also published yesterday.

Stay tuned for our coverage of the next Galaxy Unpacked event on January 22nd, at which we expect the company will reveal plenty of details about these phones. Naturally, you can bet it will talk about new AI features, too. Maybe by then, I’ll have stopped thinking about connecting “to compatible ships” through Matter with SmartThings.

Update January 11th: Removed the image gallery and replaced with two images.

Blue Origin is preparing for one of its biggest launches yet. On Monday, the Jeff Bezos-owned commercial space company will attempt to send its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket into space for the first time.

The launch comes after almost a decade of development, and its outcome could threaten the dominance of Elon Musk’s SpaceX — not only in the commercial space industry but also in the satellite internet business. Here’s an overview of what you need to know about the New Glenn flight and how to watch it live.

What is New Glenn, and why is it important?

First announced in 2016, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is meant to shuttle cargo, satellites, and, in the future, people into space. The New Glenn is named after John Glenn, the first NASA astronaut to enter the Earth’s orbit.

Its first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s powerful BE-4 engines, which run on liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen. Blue Origin aims to reuse New Glenn’s first stage for at least 25 missions, as it’s designed to touch down vertically on a sea-based platform following launch, allowing the company to retrieve it.

The rocket’s upper stage is disposable and carries Blue Origin’s payload. It’s capable of sending 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit and 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit. Blue Origin says New Glenn is also “engineered with the safety and redundance required to fly humans.” Though Blue Origin initially aimed to launch New Glenn in 2020, its inaugural flight kept getting pushed back due to issues with the development of its BE-4 engine and other technical mishaps.

As pointed out by NPR, New Glenn has a similar carrying capacity to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, but it stands out with a larger, 23-foot-wide cargo bay. If New Glenn’s launch is successful, it could heat up its rivalry with SpaceX as both companies vie to secure lucrative government contracts.

New Glenn is also key to Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite internet initiative. Though the company’s first set of satellites is scheduled to launch aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket this year, Blue Origin will eventually launch Project Kuiper satellites aboard New Glenn, rivaling SpaceX’s Starlink. Amazon plans to send 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites into space, which is still far fewer than Starlink’s growing constellation of more than 6,000 satellites.

What to expect from New Glenn’s first launch

New Glenn is set to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a three-hour launch window opening on January 13th at 1AM ET (10PM PT). The launch was originally scheduled for January 10th, but it was pushed back due to “a high sea state in the Atlantic,” first to January 12th and then to January 13th as the “still unfavorable” conditions continued.

During this uncrewed launch, New Glenn will have the Blue Ring Pathfinder on board, a payload consisting of a communications array, a power system, and a flight computer. It will test the company’s Blue Ring spacecraft, which will help support missions with refueling, hosting, data relay, and cloud computing capabilities. The goal is for New Glenn to reach orbit, while “anything beyond that,” like landing its reusable booster, is a “bonus,” according to Blue Origin CEO David Limp.

“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president of New Glenn, said in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”

How to watch New Glenn’s launch live

Blue Origin will likely stream the launch live from its website and YouTube channel. We’ll embed the stream below once it becomes available.

Update January 11th: Updated to reflect the most recent delay to January 13th at 1AM ET.

Honda’s potential merger with Nissan would represent one of the largest shake-ups to the industry since the creation of Stellantis in 2021. But there are huge risks involved, too.

On Tuesday in Las Vegas, during a roundtable discussion with select media, Honda executives offered some more insight into the merger, including how combining resources and factories could help the companies stay competitive in the increasingly costly fight with China.

Honda is concerned about China’s meteoric rise as a dominant and highly competitive player in the EV and autonomous driving space. In late December, when Honda and Nissan announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to create an automotive company worth around $50 billion, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said that the “rise of Chinese automakers and new players has changed the car industry quite a lot... We have to build up capabilities to fight with them by 2030, otherwise we’ll be beaten.”

The stakes are high, too. According to a recent report by S&P Global Mobility, the global EV market will grow nearly 30 percent year over year, with 89.6 million new EVs expected to be sold this year. According to Allied Market Research, the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to reach around $60.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $448.6 billion by 2035. If the Japanese automakers want to continue to dominate the market as they have since the 1960s, they have to iterate quickly and get products into consumers’ hands.

“Since the beginning of last year, we’ve been in conversation with Nissan,” Noriya Kaihara, director and executive vice president at Honda, said through a translator following the company’s debut of two “production prototypes,” the Honda 0 Saloon and the Honda 0 SUV at CES. “Nothing has been decided but we’ve been discussing how to proceed.”

Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Honda wants Nissan’s large SUVs and underutilized factories

During the roundtable, Kaihara said that Honda is looking at Nissan as a way to reduce costs around future software-defined vehicles (SDV).

“We have significant labor and development costs, and if there are operations we could share, that would be good for us,” he said. Developing brand-new software, he continued, including advanced driving systems that move closer to autonomous vehicles and battery-electric vehicles, is both increasingly important for the longevity of established automakers and increasingly expensive.

Honda also said that Nissan’s large SUVs like the Armada and Pathfinder make it an attractive partner. Toshihiro Akiwa, VP and head of Honda’s BEV development center, said through a translator that Honda’s hybrid technology is solid but only currently exists in its midsize vehicles like the CR-V and the Accord. The company is interested in Nissan’s larger vehicles because Honda’s “motor and battery capacity can be adapted to the larger vehicle.”

While Honda does have the Prologue, that vehicle was part of a $5 billion joint venture with GM that only lasted through the development of two vehicles. The Prologue has been a surprise EV hit, selling over 33,000 in 2024 and outselling the larger gas-powered Honda Passport.

Since the partnership with GM went south, it’s not likely that the Prologue will be in production long, though Honda has made no announcements about its plans for the vehicle. Honda does not currently offer an all-electric crossover outside of the Prologue, though fans of the brand have been asking for an all-electric CR-V for years.

Nissan, on the other hand, saw its earnings decline by as much as 90 percent last year, forcing it to lay off thousands of employees. The company has been struggling since the arrest of former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn in 2018 for financial misconduct. Unsurprisingly, Ghosn isn’t pleased about the news, telling Bloomberg that Nissan was in “panic mode,” calling the deal a “desperate move” and noting that the “synergies between the two companies are difficult to find.”

But as Honda executives at the roundtable noted, Nissan’s struggle could pose an opportunity for Honda, too. That’s because Honda plants that serve the US are currently running at maximum capacity, and they could use the excess capacity at Nissan’s factories to meet customer demand. “I’m not in a position to make comment [on Nissan], but they have capacity,” Kaihara said.

Photo by PETER POWER / AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s tariff threats and loss of EV incentives

President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on foreign imports and eliminate federal subsidies that have helped save Americans billions in EV costs also came up in the conversation. “If Trump impacts future government strategy we have to be very flexible when the subsidies are cut or stopped,” Kaihara said.

That includes where Honda builds and produces its most popular vehicles like the CR-V and Civic. “Each factory in Canada and Mexico is almost to full production level,” Kaihara said. “It’s not so easy to change that direction, but depending on the tariff situation, we might have to change the production location to Japan or somewhere else.”

A significant move like that would be costly and could translate to increased prices for consumers when they go to buy their next Honda.

In spite of all this, Honda is not wavering on its commitment to electrification. “For the time being, we will have new EVs in the next year for the Zero series,” Kaihara said. “For the long term, I think, considering the environmental issues, EVs will be the solution for the future, and that will not be changed.”

Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when.

What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.

I broke an 11-year streak of not going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and see something...

Read the full story at The Verge.

At CES 2025, Intel let journalists into its private “Innovation Showcase,” where we saw things like prototype next-gen laptops and giant stereo 3D handheld gaming PCs.

While I was there, I also spotted a heavy metal handheld on a table that didn’t seem... fully attached... to its screen. When I lifted the screen, it came away easily.

It felt suspiciously light to be a real tablet, so I flipped it over and saw three connectors underneath:

Above it, on a shelf, was a laptop with a suspiciously sized chunk of plastic on the bottom that looked like a perfect match. A minute later, Intel gaming evangelist Colin Helms confirmed: I was looking at a concept modular PC.

That module contains a complete Intel Lunar Lake computer, the entire guts you'd need to make one work outside of peripherals and screen. It’s basically a reboot of Intel’s abandoned Compute Card idea, except it's not all Intel’s doing and you probably shouldn't ever expect it to ship.

It’s a concept from Quanta, a company whose name you don’t typically see on the laptops and tablets they create, because Quanta is an ODM (like Compal, Pegatron, Wistron, and Apple’s better known iPhone supplier Foxconn) that designs and manufactures hardware on behalf of brand names.

Quanta’s calling the whole modular system the “AI8A,” and the aforementioned module at its heart is the “Detachable AI Core.” Helms told me it plugs into other concept computers as well, including an all-in-one desktop that Intel didn’t have to show off. And presumably, like the Compute Card idea, you could upgrade your computer just by putting a new new module into it.

The modular laptop has lots of concept-y bells and whistles too, so many that Intel’s CES staff hadn’t even worked them all out yet.

For starts, the laptop has a motorized hinge, so you can tell it to open and close its own lid; it also claims to offer eye-tracking that lets you sling around multitasking windows just by looking at where you’d like them to be. It apparently comes with a mouse integrated into a ring that you could wear.

The most mundane: a built-in Qi wireless charging pad in the palmrest, with indicator lights to show your battery’s remaining capacity.

I couldn’t try any of it working, unfortunately, nor did I manage to ask what “AI8A” means, because I mistakenly thought it said Aiba until I checked my photos closely just now. Nor could we hotswap the module between the handheld and laptop, since the module apparently doesn't have a battery inside.

Again, this is a cool computing concept car: it’s not likely that this computer will ever ship, even in a more practical / less gadgety form. Thankfully, we have begun to see some real, practical modularity in the laptop space since the death of Intel's Compute Card. Framework just celebrated its fifth anniversary this week, and Dell took a smaller step forward at CES with its first modular repairable USB-C port.

Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge

I’ll spare you the experience of listening to one of the richest men in the world whine and just tell you straight out: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.

Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the tone at the very beginning: “I think at some level you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”

Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is one way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.”

Early on in the interview, Zuckerberg tests out the water to see how much pushback he’ll get; Rogan is a notoriously soft interviewer — it’s like listening to your dumbest stoned friend hold a conversation — but he does occasionally challenge his guests. So Zuckerberg says that there are limits on the First Amendment by saying, “It’s like, all right, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”

“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyer I know foam at the mouth because it’s flat out wrong. It is not the law, and it never has been. And, obviously, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater — especially if, you know, the theater is on fire. Rogan says nothing in response to this, and Zuckerberg knows he’s got a willing mark. If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?

For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own tone by referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The idea that the government was forcing Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and covid vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the election is something of a running theme throughout the interview. When Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about any of this, he’s quite vague — but in case you were wondering, a man who was formally rebuked by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a hospital while his platforms spread health misinformation thinks that “on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative.” Whew!

Misinformation on Facebook started well before the 2016 election — as early as 2014, scammers were spreading Ebola lies on Facebook. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri — then Facebook’s VP of product management — said in a statement that Facebook was combating fake news but “there’s so much more we need to do.” Facebook did receive criticism for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefitted President Donald Trump, but even then, Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said.

Still, in the 2020 election, Facebook — along with other social media networks — took a harsher stance on fake news, making it harder for Macedonian teenagers to make a profit off Trump supporters. During his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterizes this intervention as giving “too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.”

Facebook implemented a fact-checking program, one that involved partners such as the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump’s second presidency, implemented before Trump even took the oath of office, Zuckerberg has said Facebook will end the program. “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcing the move.

On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went further in describing the fact-checking program he’d implemented: “It’s something out of like 1984.” He says the fact-checkers were “too biased,” though he doesn’t say exactly how.

The problem wasn’t that the fact-checking was bad; it was that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get fact-checked, as some research has shown. That means conservatives are also more likely to be moderated. In this sense, perhaps it wasn’t Facebook’s fact-checking systems that had a liberal bias, but reality.

Well, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to moderate during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was difficult to keep up with and conspiracy theories ran amok. I’m just not convinced it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about being pushed by the Biden administration to fact-check claims: “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” Zuckerberg says.

“Did you record any of these phone calls?” Rogan asks.

“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”

Rogan then asks who, specifically, was pressuring Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer: “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I think it was, you know, I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was.”

But the biggest lie of all is a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is particularly full of shit here because Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications which document this!

In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” Emphasis mine. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Those emails also reveal Zuckerberg wanted to blame the Biden White House for how Facebook chose to moderate the “lab leak” conspiracy theory of covid origins. “Can we include that the WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” he asked in a WhatsApp chat. His former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, responded, “I don’t think they put specific pressure on that theory.”

Joel Kaplan, the former George W. Bush advisor who has now replaced Clegg, said that blaming the White House for Facebook’s behavior would “supercharge” conservatives who believed the social media giant was “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more interested in criticizing us than actually solving the problems, then I’m not sure how it’s helping the cause to engage with them further,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration successfully censored anything.

In fact, many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration. Take, for instance, the “Plandemic” video hoax: Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration pressuring him about this, it was the Trump administration. The Biden White House may well have engaged in similar outreach, but it was joining what was already an active discussion about Facebook moderation.

Facebook was widely and obviously targeted by Republican lawmakers, including Jordan, Senator Ted Cruz, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and incoming Vice President JD Vance. It was mostly conservatives who threatened him during the interminable and pointless Congressional hearings Zuckerberg sat through for years – often asking him to comment directly on conspiracy theories or demand that individual trolls be reinstated to his platforms.

But Zuckerberg didn’t mention any of that to Rogan. Instead, he was upset that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started investigating him for improperly using financial information to target ads. What does Zuckerberg say about this? Well, let me give it to you straight:

They kind of found some theory they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right? To like, to like, find, find some theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or it’s just like a quiet consensus that like, we don’t like these guys. They’re not doing what we want. We’re going to punish them. But, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to be at the other end of that.

This is a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to help you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade. Blaming the CFPB for a witch-hunt when we’ve all watched Republicans target Facebook really is something! That’s what this whole performance is about: getting Trump, Vance, Jordan and the rest of the Republican party to lay off. After all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook just $5 billion — chump change, really. If Zuckerberg plays ball, his next privacy whoopsie could be even cheaper.

In fact, Zuckerberg even offers Republicans another target: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “by basically, like, squeezing people.” Among his complaints:

• Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store sales
• Airpods work better with Apple phones than all other headphones
• Apple wouldn’t let Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans connect to iOS using the same quick-setup protocol Airpods use
• iMessage is a walled garden, and groupchats go wonky if there’s a person with an Android phone in there
• “I mean at some point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If you know, if they didn’t apply, like I think you know, it’s like — and this is just Meta, I think we’d like, make twice as much profit or something.”

At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.

But Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. Getting Rogan’s listeners riled up about Zuckerberg’s enemies and finding Republicans a new tech company target is just a coincidence, as are the changes to allow more hate speech on his platforms happening now, changes that just happen to pacify Republicans. All of this has nothing to do with the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan. “I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, because they kind of look at the timing and they’re like, hey, well, you’re doing this right after the election.” he says. “We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”

And did this work? Did Zuckerberg’s gambit to talk about how social media needed more “masculine energy” win over the bros? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.

I don’t know. I did think it was pretty funny that after all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg didn’t say a word about Trump and the Republicans’ efforts at it. After all, Trump, the incoming president who has on occasion threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, was recently asked if the Facebook changes were in response to his threats.

“Probably,” Trump said.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while” and that it has been coasting off of its past success. “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he said this week.

Zuckerberg made the statements during a nearly three-hour long podcast with Joe Rogan where, along with discussing Meta’s moderation policy changes and turn against diversity and inclusion policies, they got into Meta’s beef with Apple and its policies.

The conversation actually started with Rogan’s issues with Apple. Rogan said he’s moving “from Apple to Android” in part because he doesn’t “like being attached to one company.” He also isn’t a fan of Apple’s App Store policies. “The way they do that Apple store, where they charge people 30 percent,” he said. “That seems so insane that they can get away with doing that.”

“I have some opinions about this,” Zuckerberg said. While he gives credit to the iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time,” he argued that Apple has put rules in place that “feel arbitrary.”

Zuckerberg said that Apple has “thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way” as Apple’s own products, like the AirPods. If Apple let other people use its protocol, “there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there,” Zuckerberg said.

Naturally, there’s business behind Zuckerberg’s gripes. Meta has had longstanding issues with Apple and the 30 percent cut it takes on some App Store transactions. Apple’s iOS restrictions have made it harder for Meta to compete on hardware and wiped out billions of dollars in advertising. Zuckerberg said that if Apple’s “random rules” didn’t apply, Meta would make “twice as much profit or something” based on his “back of the envelope calculation.”

Apple is increasingly under pressure to open up. It’s made changes in the European Union in response to new laws targeting its policies, and it’s facing a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice for holding a monopoly over smartphones. But the company seems intent on maintaining its closed ecosystem until it’s forced to change.

Zuckerberg believes that Apple’s reliance on “just advantaging their stuff” will ultimately hurt the company. Apple has “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things,” he said. He said that the tech industry is “super dynamic,” and “if you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually, you’re just going to get beat by someone.” (It’s easy to guess who Zuckerberg thinks that might be!)

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s remarks.

Zuckerberg touched on a lot of other tech topics as part of his conversation with Rogan, including AI and how he thinks about screen time with his daughter playing Minecraft. One area he spent some time on was neural interfaces and how physical and digital worlds will blend together.

He thinks that “it’s going to be a while before we’re really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain,” for example, and (naturally) he talked about the benefits of a wrist-based neural interface, which Meta is working on as part of its Orion augmented reality glasses.

Down the line, Zuckerberg envisions a world where you’ll be able to use the neural interface wristband and the glasses to text a friend or an AI and have the glasses give you the answer. He also believes that as smart glasses or even contact lenses as a computing platform become more developed, the internet will be “overlaid” on the physical world.

“I think we’ll basically be in this wild world where most of the world will be physical, but there will be this increasing amount of virtual objects or people who are beaming in or hologramming into different things to interact in different ways,” he said.

“There isn’t a physical world and a digital world anymore,” he added. “We’re in 2025. It’s one world.”

Like Meta, Amazon is ending some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In a memo sent last month, Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company has been “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to its efforts around representation and inclusion, as reported earlier by CNBC and Bloomberg.

In the memo, a copy of which Amazon provided to The Verge, Castleberry wrote that over the past few years, Amazon has been evaluating its programs across the company, each of which “addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated.” At the same time, Castleberry noted that the company worked to “build programs that are open to all” instead of having “individual groups build programs.” Castleberry said Amazon aimed to complete the discontinuation of some of these “outdated” programs by the end of 2024.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser declined to identify which programs had been ended.

“This approach — where we move away from programs that were separate from our existing processes, and instead integrating our work into existing processes so they become durable — is the evolution to...

Read the full story at The Verge.

After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a law that could ban TikTok, it looks like one of its last possible lifelines is unlikely to save it from the impending ouster.

TikTok will be banned from the US unless either the Supreme Court blocks the law from taking effect before the January 19th deadline or its China-based parent company, ByteDance, finally agrees to sell it. A sale — and return — of TikTok could happen after the deadline, and President-elect Donald Trump may get creative in trying not to enforce the law once he’s sworn in the next day. But the longer it takes, the shakier things look for TikTok.

Bloomberg Intelligence senior litigation analyst Matthew Schettenhelm gave TikTok a 30 percent chance of winning at the Supreme Court before oral arguments, but he lowered that prediction to just 20 percent after hearing the justices’ questioning. TikTok made a last-ditch plea for the court to issue an administrative stay without signaling a ruling on the law’s merits, something Trump has suggested so he can attempt to broker a TikTok sale. Schettenhelm says that’s unlikely — the court does not tend to issue that kind of pause just because of a change in...

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’re looking for indoor activities to keep you entertained this winter, you might want to check out Amazon’s ongoing Blu-ray sale. Now through January 20th, you can pick up three 4K Blu-ray titles for $33 when you add them to your cart, regardless of their sale price. That amounts to $11 per film, which is the kind of discount typically reserved for major shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What’s more, you can take advantage of the deal as many times as you’d like.

The limited time promo extends to hundreds of movies, including some of the most popular films from the past few years. Never got a chance to watch Denis Villeneuve’s Dune? That’s okay, because the sale includes both Dune and Dune: Part Two, each of which would normally cost north of $30. Thanks to Amazon’s sale, though, you can pick up both for $33 alongside a third box office hit — whether it be Twisters, Oppenheimer, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Batman, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, or even Barbie.

It’s not all recent hits from the past year or two, either. The sale includes older classics, too, including Jurassic Park, The Shining, Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade Runner 2049, and much more.

Meta is eliminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs because of the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts” in the US, according to a memo to employees seen by Axios. Meta will also roll back representation goals and end its “diverse slate approach” to hiring.

The memo, which was written by Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, said the company would replace DEI programs with ones “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” as reported by Axios. The company will also “end efforts to source business suppliers from diverse-owned businesses.”

“The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” Gale wrote. “The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Axios’ reporting is accurate.

The news follows Meta’s appointment of the Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta also recently announced its plans to replace third-party fact-checking with a Community Notes system similar to Elon Musk’s X.

Meta also overhauled its Hateful Conduct Policy, making changes that now “allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” among other horrible things, and announced plans to move its moderation teams from California to Texas due to concerns about “bias.”

Update, January 10th: Added confirmation from Meta.