Though Max has always said that it planned to charge more for access to its CNN and Bleacher Report Sports add-ons, the price hikes are coming in a roundabout way, targeted at subscribers of the streamer’s cheapest tier.

Max announced today that it no longer intends to charge subscribers of its Standard ($16.99 / month or $169.99 / year) and Premium ($20.99 / month or $209.99 / year) tiers an extra $9.99 a month for CNN Max and Bleacher Reports Sports. The add-ons will be removed from Max’s ad-supported tier ($9.99 / month or $99.99 / year) beginning on March 30th, however, meaning that subscribers will have to move up to more expensive tiers should they want to keep watching live sports and news.

As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Max’s decision reads very much like a sign of the streamer prioritizing live sports as part of its bundling strategy and responding to competitors like Peacock and Netflix getting more serious about live sports programming of their own. In a statement about the pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of global streaming and games, JB Perrette, said that Max’s new plan of action came after a year of assessing how users were engaging with sports content on the platform.

“We believe that the best place for that content for now is within the Standard and Premium tiers,” Perrette said. “This update ensures that subscribers can continue to enjoy that coveted access within Max, while also enabling ongoing investment in our premium sports and news portfolio.”

In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin and Semafor reporter Max Tani published details about the move on Wednesday, noting that changes also include the departure of current opinion editor David Shipley. The memo from Bezos and another from Washington Post CEO Will Lewis were leaked during an Amazon event announcing new features for its Alexa assistant.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in an email, according to a screenshot from Mullin. “A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.” Opinion articles that oppose these two pillars, Bezos says, “will be left to be published by others.” He concludes that “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” saying he is excited to fill a “void” of coverage supporting them.

Lewis’ email praises Bezos for his email’s “clarity and transparency,” saying a replacement for Shipley will be “announced in due course.”

Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, but he began shaping it more visibly shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when he reportedly nixed a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. (The Post issued a denial that did not actually deny the reports.) While this was commercially detrimental to the paper, it avoided a move that could have incensed victorious Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump, who holds significant power over the fate of Bezos’ e-commerce and aerospace endeavors, as well as its potential acquisition of TikTok. Lewis’ email tells employees that the new shift is “not about siding with any political party.”

Neither Lewis nor Bezos indicated there would be changes to the Post’s news coverage, which is distinct from its opinion section. Bezos also says the opinion section will continue to cover topics unrelated to his two pillars.

The Post’s changes under Bezos mirror billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s similar hands-on approach as owner of the Los Angeles Times, where Soon-Shiong blocked a Harris endorsement and declared a rightward editorial shift.

All news outlets, of course, have implicit or explicit boundaries for their opinion coverage — and free speech is a central value for many journalists. It’s not even uncommon for opinion writers to publish stories that significantly conflict with their news reporting. But newspaper owners have traditionally allowed their editorial staff to make those decisions, in part to clearly establish their independence. Bezos’ direct involvement raises questions about how independent the Post is from an owner with many other financial interests. In current cultural parlance, terms like “free speech” can also be defined in ways that include direct government regulation of speech.

Fortunately, America is facing numerous urgent and timely questions that fit Bezos’ new, personally issued directive. Are major tech companies like Amazon monopolies that distort fair market competition, and should the US government pursue sweeping antitrust cases that could break them up? Will the administration led by Trump, whose inauguration received a $1 million Amazon donation and was attended prominently by Bezos, continue attempts to censor media outlets by leveraging its regulatory power and access to information? The possibilities are nearly endless.

Amazon announced a new version of its smart assistant today. Alexa Plus comes with expanded capabilities, the company appeared to demonstrate, like finding concert tickets on your behalf or ordering an Uber to pick up someone at the airport. The upgraded smart assistant will also make it easier to have more natural conversations with it, but Amazon will be charging users for those new abilities for the first time.

Free early access to Alexa Plus will begin in late March 2025 in the United States for customers with eligible Echo Show devices. They’ll be notified through email and device notifications once access to Alexa Plus has been granted, but they will have to opt in to using it.

Subscriptions for Alexa Plus start at $19.99 per month once early access ends, but it’s free for Prime users. Given that Prime costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, it’s hard to imagine anyone opting to pay for Alexa Plus on its own. Many of the smart assistant’s new capabilities, such as jumping to the part of a movie where a specific song is playing, will also be dependent on services like Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video. So to fully take advantage of Alexa Plus, a Prime membership almost seems mandatory.

There were no hardware announcements made at today’s Amazon event, but the company has confirmed that Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, including the Alexa mobile app, as well as Fire TVs and tablets. However, the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, which all feature touchscreen interfaces, will be prioritized during early access. The company has also confirmed that certain older generation Echo devices, including the Echo Tap and first-generation versions of the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, and Echo Show, won’t support Alexa Plus. Amazon’s Astro robot will also only be compatible with the original Alexa.

Update, February 26th: Added additional details on device compatibility and availability.

It’s shaping up to be a good week to be a Sonos fan. First, Sonos launched a sale for existing customers that includes steep discounts on soundbars, speakers, and headphones, and now the Sonos-ready Victrola Stream Onyx is more than 50 percent off. Now through February 28th, you can buy the two-speed, belt-driven turntable at Woot for just $249.99 ($350 off), which is a new low price.

The Onyx is the entry-level model in Victrola’s Works with Sonos turntable lineup. Like its pricier siblings — specifically the $799.99 Stream Carbon, $799.99 Stream Pearl, and $1,299.99 Stream Sapphire — it lets you play your vinyl records over your Sonos speaker without requiring you to install any extra equipment. It looks nearly as sleek as the more premium models, too, thanks to a relatively compact design, a metal platter, and a charming illuminated knob found on the front that allows you to control the volume while playing vinyl.

To keep costs down, Victrola made the Onyx from cheaper, thick molded plastic as opposed to higher-quality materials such as metal or wood. The Onyx also comes with a less expensive Audio-Technica VM95E cartridge and, unlike the Sapphire, won’t let you stream records to non-Sonos devices via Wi-Fi. But if you just want a simple, cheap(ish) way to listen to your favorite vinyl records via your Sonos speakers, you probably won’t miss the extra perks.

More ways to save today

• Anker’s Soundcore Sport X20 earbuds are on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for $63.99 ($16 off), which is their second-best price to date. The fitness-friendly buds are a lot like the Sport X10 — which were once our favorite budget earbuds for the gym — only they offer longer battery life, a more robust IP68 water resistance rating, and multipoint support. They also supposedly offer better noise cancellation and continue to sport an adjustable ear hook, which is a boon if you’re someone who struggles with keeping traditional earbuds in during intense gym sessions.
• The OnePlus 12R is available at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $399.99 ($100 off) as a result of a recent price cut. The 12R remains one of the better midrange phones on the market, with an impressive 6.78-inch OLED display, great build quality, and superfast 80W wired charging. It uses an older chipset than the $599.99 OnePlus 13R and lacks the updated 50-megapixel main shooter, but it’s still snappy enough and comes with a decent camera array. Read our review.
• As we noted yesterday, Apple’s AirTags are down to their lowest price to date. If you’re embedded in Samsung’s ecosystem, however, the Galaxy SmartTag2 is a better bet. Luckily, Samsung’s handy item tracker is on sale at Amazon and Chewy starting at $15.96 ($14 off), an all-time low. The UWB-equipped tracker works with Samsung’s Galaxy Find network, allowing Galaxy device owners to locate their misplaced valuables. Each tracker also includes a battery that can last up to 700 days and a robust IP67 rating for water and dust resistance.

Google just announced it’s received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s Loss of Pulse Detection feature. It will start rolling out to US devices sometime at the end of March.

The Loss of Pulse Detection feature is exactly what it sounds like: if the Pixel Watch 3 senses that you’ve lost your pulse through an event like a heart attack or an overdose, it’ll send you a prompt. If you don’t respond, it’ll automatically call emergency services on your behalf. Back in August, Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of product manager for Pixel wearables, told The Verge that the Pixel Watch 3 is capable of differentiating between a genuine loss-of-pulse event and a person simply taking the watch off.

This feature has been available in the European Union since September 2024. However, high-stakes health features like Loss of Pulse Detection require regulatory clearance, and each country has its own governing bodies and procedures. Whether it rolls out to other regions will depend on the relevant local regulatory agency.

Amazon is refreshing the alexa.com website and the Alexa mobile app so that Alexa Plus subscribers will be able to use the revamped, AI-powered voice assistant. We don’t have many details beyond that, but the website and the app could be handy new ways to interact with the revamped Alexa, which was announced at an event this morning.

At the event, Amazon showed how you’ll be able to have conversations with Alexa Plus for things like ordering groceries, controlling smart home devices, and even telling you if someone in your house has recently walked the dog by looking at your home camera footage. Amazon also demoed how Alexa Plus could analyze and summarize documents, and perhaps the new website and app will be used to upload that information.

You’ll access Alexa Plus from the current Alexa app — there won’t be a new app to download, spokesperson Devon Corvasce confirms to The Verge. And when we first published this story, alexa.com just took you to a page to learn more about Alexa and to access the Alexa mobile apps, but now it redirects to a page about Alexa Plus.

It seems like we’ll have to wait a little bit for the new website and app to be available widely, though. Amazon says that Alexa Plus will initially roll out in the US “in the next few weeks,” and then “subsequently in waves in the coming months.” Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 per month or will also be available as part of a Prime membership.

Update, February 26th: Amazon confirmed that Alexa Plus won’t require a separate app and has changed the current page you see when you visit alexa.com.

While showing up at a protest can demonstrate your opinion to the world, you may not want your face — or the faces of other protesters — to be included, especially when there is the possibility that authorities will collect and use that information (as they did for tracking movements during COVID-19 social distancing). As a result, many consider it vital to obscure the faces of people in any photos you may post on social media and other online sources.

What follows are some strategies for removing facial features from your photos. Of course, you can open up your images on a desktop or laptop using Photoshop or Preview to blur or scrub, but we’re going to assume you aren’t carrying around a laptop with you. So with mobile in mind, you still have some solid options.

What needs to be done

When removing faces, you want to use a method that can’t be reversed. It is possible to de-blur a photo, especially using neural networks. It’s not possible to completely reverse the blurring, since it is lossy (in other words, some data will be permanently lost), but a lot can be “restored.” So why take the risk? Painting over faces, or using mosaic blur techniques, will prevent …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa — Alexa Plus — that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.

Some of the new abilities coming to Alexa Plus include the ability to do things for you — you’ll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. Amazon says it will also be able to memorize personal details like your diet and movie preferences.

Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year. That comes with access to the Alexa website, where the company said you can do “longform work.” Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, starting with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. Early access will start rolling out next month.

Alexa Plus will also be able to carry on conversations from uttering its wake word, which is still just “Alexa.” It also has vision capabilities and can take pictures and analyze images. Amazon demoed other abilities, such as Alexa prompting you to tell you about concert ticket availability and being able to tell you about local businesses (referencing Yelp to do so) and book dinner reservations. The company says it can read a study guide and test you on the answers, as well as research trips and create itineraries.

Like before, you can still control smart home devices, with Amazon calling out things like smart home cameras and lights, but the company says it can create routines on your behalf as well. You’ll also be able to use Alexa Plus for music, with the ability to find songs based on relatively vague descriptions. The company also said you can ask Alexa to jump to a specific scene in a movie, though that took a couple of tries.

A lot of what Amazon showed off was clearly well beyond what you can do with the older version of Alexa. In one part of the demo, Amazon SVP of devices and services Panos Panay asked Alexa if anyone had walked the dog recently, and it referenced smart home cameras to respond that, yes, someone had. 

Amazon’s director of Alexa, Mara Segal, demonstrated that you’ll be able to share documents with Alexa — such as handwritten notes and recipes, emails, instruction manuals, and pictures — that it can reference later. For instance, Segal asked Alexa to read a housing association document and analyze its rules regarding solar panels. She also asked it for a readout of a SXSW schedule. 

Segal also demonstrated how Alexa Plus can take action when prompted, like telling her about a kids’ soccer schedule and adding calendar details and reminders based on it, all using fairly casual, natural language in an ongoing conversation.

A lot of the demonstrated Alexa Plus features were visual, meaning that the dashboard and UI on touchscreen Echo devices have had a facelift. There are new customizable widgets on the homescreen that can be moved to a second page and a whole new widget specifically for controlling connected smart home devices.

When you speak with the new Alexa Plus on Echo devices with a display, you’ll also see a fluctuating blue bar at the bottom of the interface. Panay said this “is Alexa” and that the little animations and icons it displays are called “Alexicons,” which are used to visually express a sense of personality.

The company also showed off some familiar LLM greatest hits — you can get Alexa Plus to make up stories for you, and it seems to be able to generate AI art as well. 

Amazon said Alexa Plus is a model-agnostic system, using its own Amazon Nova model, as well as those from companies like Anthropic. It will choose the best model for the task at hand, according to the company. 

Amazon also listed a number of partners from which Alexa Plus draws data to understand and analyze financial markets, sports, and more. Some of the partners include The Associated Press, Politico, The Washington Post, and Reuters.

The company demonstrated that by having Alexa answer questions about the Boston Red Sox and asking Alexa to track ticket availability over time. Alexa Plus will apparently also be able to buy those tickets for you. The company says these are day-one capabilities powered by hundreds of models it calls “experts.”

Amazon said its LLM experts can also do things for services from firms like Uber Eats, Sonos, Wyze, Zoom, Xbox, Plex, Dyson, Bose, Grubhub, Levoit, and Ticketmaster. It also noted some of the Alexa Plus features will be available on the web through Alexa.com.

The company is also partnering with AI song generator Suno to allow Alexa Plus to create songs on the fly from a prompt, with the company demonstrating an AI-made country song about a bodega cat. 

Amazon first announced it was going to “supercharge” Alexa with AI in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims, saying that Alexa would understand context or build automated routines for you — you needed only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was struggling to realize its efforts and that some employees were leaving because they didn’t think this version of Alexa would ever work.

The devices team at Amazon also saw a major executive shakeup in the interim, with longtime leader Dave Limp being replaced by Panay, who’d come over from running Microsoft’s Surface lineup.

Now that its AI Alexa is here, Amazon is entering a world very different from the one Alexa was born into back in 2014. It will compete with a crowded field of AI-powered digital assistants like the way-ahead Google Gemini, the category-defining ChatGPT, and Apple’s reportedly also-struggling upgraded Siri. But with some very limited exceptions, those chatbots aren’t on smart speakers yet, and that may be Amazon’s opportunity. Its speakers could bring an AI chatbot to a lot of people a lot faster than competitors. Amazon just needs to finish getting it out the door.

Lucid Motors founder and CEO Peter Rawlinson will step down, as the luxury EV company sets its sights on doubling production over the next year.

Rawlinson won’t be leaving the company. Instead, he’ll be assuming the role of “Strategic Technical Advisor to the Chairman of the Board,” the company said. Chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff will serve as interim CEO while the board initiates a search for a new chief executive.

“Now that we have successfully launched the Lucid Gravity, I have decided it is finally the right time for me to step aside from my roles at Lucid,” Rawlinson said in a statement. “I am incredibly proud of the accomplishments the Lucid team have achieved together through my tenure of these past twelve years. We grew from a tiny company with a big ambition, to a widely recognized technological world leader in sustainable mobility. It has been my honor to have led and grown this remarkable, truly world-class organization, because Lucid has always been first and foremost about a team effort.”

The leadership shuffle comes as Lucid eyes major growth for the next year. The company says it expects to sell 20,000 vehicles in 2025, nearly double the 10,241 EVs it delivered in 2024. The updated guidance was announced as part of the company’s fourth quarter earnings. Lucid reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $636.9 million for the three month period ending December 31st.

Lucid said it earned $234.4 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, on top of $807.8 million for the entire year. The company lost $3.06 billion attributable to common stockholders in 2024, and ended the year with $6.13 billion in total liquidity.

Doubling production will be a tough feat for Lucid, with most analysts predicting that EV share of the retail market to remain flat this year. Its especially tough for a luxury EV company like Lucid, with most of the growth taking place in the mass-market segment. But Lucid has high hopes for its Gravity SUV, which just started its first customer deliveries late last year. The company says it plans on gradually ramping up production during the year.

Lucid said the SUV would get up to 440 miles of range, offer 800 horsepower, and accelerate 0–60 mph in under 3.5 seconds. The Gravity will also be the first vehicle from Lucid to come with a native NACS charging port that’s compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network.

Lucid is backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invested $2.5 billion in the company in 2024. The money has helped the cash-losing EV maker from heading down a similar path as some of its less financially stable peers.

Amazon is set to announce new Alexa features beginning at 10AM ET this morning — and we hope a few devices accompany them. There isn’t a way to watch the event remotely, but our team is here in person to bring you all of the updates as they happen.

We’re expecting Amazon to announce its new AI-powered Alexa, which, according to earlier reports, could cost as much as $5 to $10 per month on top of a Prime membership. Reuters said in June that Amazon has considered the subscription pricing for a complete Alexa overhaul that could allow people to order dinner from services like Uber Eats or help write an email.

The Washington Post said earlier this month that Amazon won’t release the new version of Alexa for at least a month after this event because the company has reportedly encountered issues with inaccurate answers to test questions.

It seems like it would be a good time for Amazon to announce new products that use the latest version of Alexa, too, so we’re hoping to see new Echos or updates to Amazon’s glasses, Fire TV platform, and other devices and services. But who knows? Follow along below for the updates.

Ncuti Gatwa’s version of the Doctor will be back pretty soon. Disney Plus and the BBC announced that the next season of Doctor Who will start streaming on April 12th, with new episodes dropping weekly. The season will span eight episodes total. Perhaps more interesting than the date, though, is a pair of new characters that will be joining the cast.

First up is Belinda Chandra (played by Andor’s Varada Sethu), who will be a new companion for the Doctor. (That said, the official announcement does that that Millie Gibson will be returning as Ruby Sunday.) According to the plot synopsis, the new season follows the Doctor on “an epic quest to get her back to Earth. But a mysterious force is stopping their return and the time-traveling TARDIS team must face great dangers, bigger enemies, and wider terrors than ever before.”

Those wider terrors, it seems, include a cartoon character ripped out of an evil version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Alan Cumming will play Mr Ring-a-Ding, who is described as:

a happy, funny, singalong cartoon, who lives in Sunny Town with his friend Sunshine Sally. However, in 1952, after years of repeats in cinemas across the land, Mr Ring-a-Ding suddenly looks beyond the screen and sees the real world outside — and the consequences are terrifying.

Here are the two new additions:

This will be Gatwa’s second season in the role, after taking over for Jodie Whittaker. A spinoff series for the show, called The War Between The Land And The Sea, is also in the works.

The new season of Doctor Who will be coming at a particularly busy time for streaming TV, with the next season of Andor hitting Disney Plus on April 22nd, and The Last of Us returning for season 2 on HBO on April 13th.

Amazon has finally taken the wraps off its AI-enhanced version of Alexa, called Alexa Plus.

The new version of Alexa is powered by a mixture of LLMs and integrations that reach across news partners and all kinds of apps and ordering services. You’ll be able to use Alexa to add events to your calendar, buy concert tickets, and ask questions about the news.

Amazon is making some big promises here, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. The service won’t start rolling out until March, and it sounds like availability will be limited even then.

You can find all of our coverage in the stream below.

• Amazon is launching Alexa.com and new app for Alexa Plus
• Alexa Plus’ AI upgrades cost $19.99, but it’s all free with Prime
• We can’t try Alexa Plus ourselves in the demo area.
• Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus
• Amazon Alexa event live blog: all the news from the keynote
• We’re now inside Amazon’s event and waiting.
• We’re on the ground at Amazon’s event.
• What to expect from Amazon’s big Alexa event this week
• Amazon’s revamped Alexa might launch over a month after its announcement event
• There’s a hidden message in Amazon’s event invites
• Amazon announces February product event

Framework’s mission is to “fix consumer electronics, one category at a time” by making them modular, repairable, and upgradable. It’s the only laptop maker to ever truly succeed at that “upgradable” part. But desktop PCs are already modular, so why is Framework making one?

At first, I thought it saw a unique opportunity to make a cute yet badass tiny gaming PC with AMD’s unusual Strix Halo processor and decided to shoot its shot. As you’ll read below, I’m excited by the result. But I also have another idea I’ll share with you afterward.

Let’s start with the gadget part: yes, the tiny 4.5-liter gaming desktop that Framework announced yesterday is just as cool in person as it was in Framework’s photos, and yes, it can game.

At first, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to meaningfully try that last part. Almost all the Framework Desktops at the company’s live event in San Francisco yesterday were either running games that don’t offer a great sense of performance (Counter-Strike and Street Fighter) or were unplugged so we could take photos from every angle. But partway through the event, someone had fired up Cyberpunk 2077, and I saw my chance.

The first b …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is making it easier to remove and update Search results that contain your personal information. The company’s “Results about you” tool for detecting personal information like addresses and phone numbers that appear in Search has been updated to make it “easier than ever” for users to sign up and for removals to be requested directly on the Search page.

The Results about you tool can help people proactively monitor what sensitive information is appearing in Search results for anyone to find. You register by giving Google the name, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses that you want it to scan for. (Google says your contact data “is not shared or used to personalize your experience across other Google products.”) You’ll then be notified when your data is detected so you can request removal.

The tool was previously hidden away unless you were using the Google app — on mobile web and desktop it was buried deep within the History settings under Google user accounts. It’s also only currently available to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, Sweden, Thailand, India, and Indonesia, but will be expanded to more countries in the future.

Clicking on the three-dot menu next to results in Google Search will now display a “remove this result” option that users can click on to more quickly request removal, and understand what kind of information is eligible for deletion. Three request options will appear once opened: personal information, which includes the doxxing content outlined on Google’s help page; legal removals to flag illegal content like copyright infringement and child abuse; and requests to refresh outdated Search results.

The latter is a new feature for situations where users have had their information updated, corrected, or removed from a website but Search results haven’t reflected those changes. Upon selection, Google will be prompted to recrawl the website linking to the Search result and update its information.

YouTube isn’t a podcast app, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the number one place people who want to consume online radio shows now turn to. According to the company, a staggering 1 billion people are tuning into podcasts every month on YouTube. That’s not just more than either Apple or Spotify can claim — it utterly lays them to waste. 

In 2023, Spotify reported it had 100 million regular podcast listeners, and touted that half a billion people had listened to a podcast on its platform since 2019 when it started its push into the world of online radio shows. Apple tends to come out behind Spotify in third-party measurements. If a full eighth of the world’s population uses YouTube for podcasts, it seems like that’s probably where the action is. 

Reaching that big chunk of audience takes extra work for podcasters, though. Listeners can’t turn just off their phone’s screen to listen unless they’re paying for YouTube Premium, and people may not want to stare at a static image for an hour straight. That means doing video to really make it count.

Making video for YouTube is far more expensive than it used to be. In a newsletter earlier this month, cooking creator Carla Lalli Music, formerly of Bon Apetit, said it cost her $3,500 to shoot a single video for the platform. Those were more complicated than a podcast video, but it still speaks to the platform’s demand for quality in order to get off the ground. YouTube says that more than 400 million hours of podcasts were watched on TVs alone last year. Video clearly matters; creators can’t just turn on their webcams and get results.

Reaching YouTube’s audience also means playing by YouTube’s rules. The platform doesn’t work with RSS feeds in the same way that most other podcast platforms do — every podcast has to become a native YouTube video. That requires them to play by YouTube’s ad rules, too, and use YouTube’s ad systems. Podcasters can’t serve ads the same way they do everywhere else, and they can’t get the same metrics they’d normally use to sell advertisers on their reach and success.

Still, that tradeoff has clearly been worth it to a great many creators, and YouTube’s stats today show why. It may not be a traditional podcast platform, but it’s a big one that podcasters can’t ignore.

More Android phones could soon provide longer lifetime support updates thanks to a new agreement between Qualcomm and Google. Qualcomm announced on Monday that “up to eight consecutive years of software and security updates” will be available to Android phones running on future Snapdragon 8 and Snapdragon 7-series chips.

As Android specialist Mishall Rahman points out, the “eight consecutive years” is a little misleading here because Qualcomm includes the year on which a device is released. That means the device can be supported for eight years, but receive seven years of Android version upgrades — bringing more Android phones in line with the seven years of support provided on Google’s Pixel 8 and Pixel 9 lineup.

Qualcomm mentioned its support expansion plans in October, which started with devices running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform. That includes the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, Xiaomi 15 Series, OnePlus 13, and Asus ROG Phone 9. 

Today’s announcement extends that service to additional chipsets, but it’s important to note that eligible phones aren’t guaranteed to receive expanded support updates. This update makes it easier and more affordable for phone manufacturers to provide users with longer support, but Qualcomm says that it’s ultimately up to device makers to decide whether they offer it on specific phone models.

“Support for platform software included in this program will be made available to OEMs for eight consecutive years, including both Android OS and kernel upgrades, without requiring significant changes or upgrades to the platform and OEM code on the device,” Qualcomm said.

Phones running older Snapdragon chips won’t be eligible for future support upgrades according to Qualcomm. The biggest caveat to all this beyond hoping device makers actually implement the expanded support update is that very few phones are likely to keep running for the full eight years. But if you’re committed to reducing e-waste and continually repairing your Android phone, at least the option will be there.

Every day for the last few weeks, I’ve received a notification on my phone at 7:30 in the morning. The notification comes from ChatGPT, and it always contains the same thing: instructions for a 20-minute full-body workout and a 10-minute meditation. The instructions are simple, and I’ve actually come to appreciate the daily prodding. I do wish it would stop recommending the exact same thing every damn day, though. The mountain climbers and positive intentions are getting a little old.

OpenAI has added a number of new features to ChatGPT in the last few weeks, a couple of which attempt to turn the chatbot into a straightforward productivity app. There’s Tasks, which all paid users can access and allows you to set reminders and make to-do lists in ChatGPT; and there’s Operator, a so-called “agentic” model for Pro subscribers that attempts to actually accomplish tasks on your behalf. As an incorrigible tester of to-do list apps, I decided to throw my life into ChatGPT and see if it could help me get more done.

After using it for a while, I’m sold on the idea of AI-capable task apps. The best way to use AI is simply as a way to get you started — it’s a brainstorming partne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Volvo is continuing to drop hints about its upcoming high-tech electric sedan, the ES90, ahead of the EV’s official reveal next month. Today, the Swedish automaker provided new details about the ES90’s range and battery efficiency, calling it “a car that goes further and charges faster than any electric Volvo before.”

That’s mostly thanks to the ES90’s new-for-Volvo 800-volt architecture, putting it on par with other fast-charging EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6. The new architecture is an upgrade from previous Volvo EVs, like the $80,000 EX90 SUV, which features a 400-volt system.

Volvo claims that the ES90 will be able to add 300km (186 miles) of range in just 10 minutes when plugged into a 350kW fast-charging station (depending on the outdoor temperature). Moreover, it will offer a driving range of up to 700km (435 miles) under the more generous WLTP testing cycle.

Automakers are increasingly trending toward higher voltage systems in the hopes of luring in more customers who are turned off by slow charging speeds and the prospect of being stuck at a public charging station for 40 minutes or more. Stellantis, parent company of Jeep and Ram, recently announced a new 800-volt flexible architecture for some of its upcoming EVs.

Volvo said it needed to upgrade a number of its components in order to support the higher voltage system, including battery cells, motors, inverters, and thermal parts. The new motors were lighter and more efficient, and the overall system now creates less heat, meaning the battery can be charged at a faster rate without overloading the electrical system.

Volvo also plans to introduce a new, in-house-developed battery management software for the ES90, provided by Breathe Battery Technologies, which also received investments from Volvo’s corporate venture capital arm. The new software will slash the amount of time it takes to charge from 10 to 80 percent by as much as 30 percent, down to 20 minutes.

The ES90 will also feature a slew of recycled materials, including 29 percent of the aluminum, 16 percent of polymers, and 18 percent of steel. Wood panels inside the ES90 are made from FSC-certified wood, Volvo says. The automaker is also introducing a new blockchain-based battery “passport” to track raw materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite used in the battery. 

Two years ago, the last time Framework had an event in San Francisco, California, the highlight was the Framework Laptop 16 — a laptop promising the “holy grail” of upgradable graphics cards, and easily one of the most ambitious laptops ever made.

But today, the Framework Laptop 16 got little mention at its new event, which focused on the new, similarly gamer-oriented Framework Desktop instead. While the Desktop and Framework’s original 13-inch laptop both got the latest AMD processors today, we don’t yet know if or when the Framework Laptop 16 might leap forward too.

The only mention of Framework’s flagship laptop was a new “One Key Module” that will experimentally be available for the Framework community to build their own electromechanical keyboards, should they choose to, that would be thin enough to fit in the Laptop 16’s extremely thin Input Module bay. (You can see how the Input Modules work in my video here.)

While Framework did finally ship its promised M.2 adapter bay in December, which will let you stick extra SSDs or other peripherals into a Framework Laptop 16 instead of a discrete graphics card, my big question is: is the promising but somewhat problematic laptop a dead end, or will it get new mainboards and new chips in the future?

I tracked down Framework CEO Nirav Patel at the event today, and he wouldn’t say much, but he was clear on one thing: “We’re nowhere near done with Framework Laptop 16.”

I pushed my luck, asking: Is today the day he can assure us that the Laptop 16 will eventually see at least one GPU upgrade or snap-on secondary battery?

“Today is not that day,” he told me.

I want to see Framework succeed, and perhaps it’s too early to begin to wonder otherwise — it was still shipping preordered batches of the Laptop 16 to buyers through the middle of last year.

But we’ve pushed the company pretty hard on the GPU in the past specifically because it’s a thing rivals have tried and failed at before — Dell/Alienware even got sued over the failed promise of the Alienware Area-51m, which never bothered to ship a second generation of its supposedly upgradable GPUs.

Framework has resisted our pushes so far, stopping short of confirming it in our 2023 story: here’s his exact language at the time. It’d be nice if Framework could assure buyers that the upgrades are absolutely coming. But personally, there’s more than a few things about that laptop I’d like to change, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Framework was doing a bit of a rethink even if it does deliver.

Razer is adding a fresh gaming laptop to the pile of new models up for preorder today: the Blade 18. Like its smaller (but far from small) Blade 16 cousin, the new Razer Blade 18 will come with Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs and Intel Arrow Lake CPUs. But one major way it differs is its large 18-inch display, which has dual modes allowing it to run at either 3840 x 2400 at 240Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440Hz.

The Blade 18 will start at $3,199.99 with an RTX 5070 Ti and climb to $4,499.99 with an RTX 5090. But if either the Blade 18 or the already announced $2,799.99 Blade 16 are the right pricey option for you, you’ll have to wait until late-April for them to actually ship.

Razer isn’t the only PC manufacturer offering new gaming laptops for preorder today. As Nvidia already teased, a variety of new notebooks sporting RTX 50-series GPUs now have finalized pricing, and there are fresh offerings from the likes of Asus ROG, MSI, and HP. Back when many of these laptops were first announced at CES in January, they mostly had estimated prices or no pricing at all.

The first wave of these new gaming laptops sits at the high end with high prices, and some are more expensive than their last-gen versions with 40-series GPUs. Like previous generations, we may have to wait until cheaper mobile GPUs are announced and brought to market to get something not priced into the stratosphere.

Hopefully, the mobile versions of Nvidia’s new cards won’t be saddled by some of the problems that have hit its latest desktop class, with mediocre improvements over their last-gen counterparts, power issues, or manufacturing missteps.

As for some examples of these soon-to-land laptops and the kinds of prices we’re talking: Asus’s flagship ROG Strix Scar 16, with its new wraparound RGB lighting, starts at $3,299.99 with an RTX 5080 GPU and $4,299.99 with a top-of-the-line RTX 5090. The sleeker Zephyrus G14, which is a Verge favorite for balancing gaming performance with everyday usability, starts at $2,499.99 with an RTX 5070 Ti. And the larger Zephyrus G16 starts with the same GPU at $2,699.99. The G14 can go up to the RTX 5080, but the G16 will go all the way to an RTX 5090 once those higher-end configurations come a little later.

MSI has its RTX 5090-equipped Titan 18 HX AI is up for preorder for an astounding $5,999.99. (That’s not even MSI’s ridiculous Dragon Edition Norse Myth, which is still listed as “coming soon.”) The company has some of its slightly more down-to-Earth gaming laptops up for preorder as well, like the Stealth 18 HX AI with an RTX 5070 Ti starting at $2,999.99.