It may be difficult to believe in this time of Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, but at one point, Skype was one of the primary ways to make contact with friends, family, and colleagues. First released in 2003 and, after going through several owners, finally purchased by Microsoft in 2011, the app allowed you to make phone calls and eventually video calls over the internet. For its time, it was a major convenience. 

Unfortunately, the once-popular app was fated to be neglected and ignored, and it has finally reached its end. Microsoft has announced that it is shutting Skype down on May 5th; current users will be encouraged to move to Teams or to export their data. But although Skype will be gone, the memories it evokes — not to mention the sound of its weird and wonderful ringtone — will stay with many of us for years to come.

Here are some thoughts from The Verge’s staff on Skype’s passing.

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“Skype was my lifeline back home.”

In 2006, I was 18 and did a thing only brash teenagers could do: I left the country on my own to live in Japan for seven years. This was before smartphones, when you had to have international calling cards, and my family had only gotten high-speed internet access the year before. On the one hand, I was excited about an adventure in a place where I knew no one and wasn’t fluent in the local language. On the other hand, I was petrified. 

Skype was my lifeline back home. All of my high school friends were on it, and it was cheaper than calling my family with expensive international minutes. The call quality wasn’t always great, and the time difference between Tokyo and New York City was tough. But in those early days, it was comforting to set up Skype dates with people who I knew loved me. That distinctive Skype ringtone was a reminder that I could always go home if I wanted to. Nearly a decade later, when my dad had to leave the US to receive more affordable medical treatment in Korea, Skype was the only video chat software he knew how to use. It became the main way I could see him for several months before his health declined. 

Eventually, we all moved on to other chat and video apps. My Japanese friends all use LINE, and my Korean family all uses KakaoTalk. FaceTime, Zoom, and Google Meet pretty much cover the rest of my friends. I haven’t thought of Skype in a hot second. But now that it’s going away, I am grateful it was there for me during some of the hardest moments of my life. – Victoria Song, senior reviewer

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“Those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype”

Remember the first iPhone? No, not that one. Infogear sold products under the name beginning in 1998. It was acquired by Cisco, which later sold Linksys-branded iPhones. (Yes, there was a lawsuit over it.) I remember reviewing the Linksys iPhone CIT400 — otherwise known as a “Skype phone” — in 2007.

Although there were a couple of competitors, it was relatively unique at the time since it allowed you to use Skype to place voice calls like you would on a normal household phone (remember those?). It was useful because my girlfriend (now wife) was living in Italy. And those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype! – Todd Haselton, deputy editor

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“It became a cherished lifeline”

I actually avoided Skype right up until a few years before its demise.  I don’t remember it being a popular “thing” in the UK when I was growing up. When I started jobs that required me to make overseas calls, however, it became a cherished lifeline. My mobile carrier outright blocked me from dialing non-UK numbers, and every attempt to correct the issue fizzled out. Instead, I found it was easier and cheaper to just download Skype and use credits when I needed to make those calls. It was good while it lasted :’-(  – Jess Weatherbed, news writer

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“We were using Skype for a lot of our productions”

When I first started producing podcasts at The Verge in 2015, we were using Skype for a lot of our productions. Before each taping of our show Ctrl-Walt-Delete, I’d sit in our VO booth on Skype with veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg in DC to make sure his Blue Yeti microphone was still operating with the software. 

For our show Verge ESP, I remember having to buy Skype credits to call the phone numbers of guests who didn’t have / want to use a Skype account. 

When The Vergecast was live on YouTube every Thursday, we used Skype’s NDI (Network Device Interface) to bring remote guests onto the show, which was the best software for our needs in the live control room at the time. 

However, once Zoom took over, that was the end of using the buggy Skype software. – Andru Marino, senior producer 

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“If a writer couldn’t get to the studio … Skype worked”

For decades now, my partner Jim Freund has been the host of a radio show called Hour of the Wolf on listener-sponsored NYC station WBAI-FM. He talks about science fiction and fantasy, and over the years, he has interviewed a lot of authors.

For many of those years, if a writer couldn’t get to the studio to talk and read from their work, Skype worked. It was easy to use — the most tech-nervous author could be talked through the downloading and registering process — and the quality of the resulting recording was better than you’d get over a phone. And if the writer was overseas, the cost wasn’t as prohibitive as if you’d used the landline.

But as time went on, Skype didn’t keep up. When Microsoft bought it in 2011, Jim was hopeful that this would mean better quality calls and more features — in other words, increased product support and development. However, Skype was, for the most part, ignored. As a result, especially with the increased popularity of Zoom and other apps,  it became pretty much forgotten. 

These days, if a guest is having trouble installing or understanding the video / podcasting software that Jim uses, and he suggests, “Well, we could use Skype instead,” the current answer is often, “Skype? What’s that?” When he told me that, I knew Skype was a thing of the past. – Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor

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“I listened to that ringtone so many times…”

In 2015, I did a deep dive on Skype’s entire soundscape as it was being redesigned under Microsoft:

“All the actual components [were] recorded organic sounds like wind, water, pops, people’s voices,” says [Steve] Pearce. Wind, he says, provided the white noise in a notification. A bubble pop could be recorded from a ketchup bottle, a glass, or a human gasp or gulp. “We don’t like technical things, even though we are a technical company,” he adds.

“If you actually ask people to hum or sing the Skype ringtone, they can’t.”

Ironically, I listened to that ringtone so many times that, almost 10 years later, “doo dee doo, dee doo dee” popped into my head immediately. – Adi Robertson, senior editor, tech and policy

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DOO DEE DOO — DEE DOO DEE.  – Jay Peters, news editor

The United Kingdom dealt a significant blow in its war on encryption last week that, aside from blemishing Apple’s meticulously curated privacy commitments, could have worldwide ramifications for personal data protections. And while several days have passed since Apple pulled its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from UK customers, other end-to-end encryption providers like Meta, Signal, and Telegram have yet to meaningfully take an official stand beyond some of their execs posting about it on social media.

The UK may have set a precedent for other global governments to follow when it reportedly ordered Apple to give it backdoor access to iCloud data. Under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), the British government can legally demand user data be handed over for the purpose of national security and crime prevention. That seemingly includes worldwide data access, even if it’s tightly encrypted.

Some of these demands would be facilitated by controversial changes that were made to the IPA in April 2024 to expand its surveillance capabilities, like allowing intelligence services to access bulk personal datasets held by third parties and the UK government to interfere w …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A Paris-based creative studio has announced a minimalist turntable with controls streamlined to just a play button and a volume knob. Waiting For Ideas’ PP-1 — short for Plug and Play — doesn’t even have a visible tonearm, and it’s made from a solid block of anodized aluminum requiring about 12 weeks of production time to manufacture. That makes it easier to understand why the PP-1 has a €5,800 (around $6,012) price tag.

Although companies like ELP of Japan sell turntables that swap needles and tonearms for laser pickups, the PP-1 does feature more traditional record player hardware. The studio worked with a company called Miniot that created a similarly minimal turntable lacking a visible tonearm. Waiting for Ideas adapted Miniot’s technology so that the PP-1’s inverted cartridge and stylus are hidden behind a closing door system and kept out of sight when there’s no record sitting on its platter.

There’s also no speed control dial on the PP-1. Miniot’s technology can automatically detect if a record needs to be played at 33 or 45 RPM, and constantly recalculates the speed of the motor to ensure optimal playback at all times.

It’s not only a striking piece of design, it’s also a high-quality turntable. But if you’re a vinyl enthusiast, you’ll need to remember to place your records upside down on the PP-1 to hear the tracks you want.

Power is supplied by a single 5V USB-C port, and the PP-1 features just a single 3.5-millimeter audio jack for connecting it to either active or passive speakers that require an additional amplifier.

If you’re looking for a complete sound system, Waiting For Ideas has also created a set of passive 85-decibel 80W speakers matching the dimensions of the PP-1. They’re now available for preorder for €3,200 (around $3,320) and will take 12 weeks to make. You’ll just need to budget for a separate amplifier because the studio unfortunately doesn’t make a matching one of those.

Tesla is planning to install dozens of Supercharger sites at Steak ‘n Shake locations across the country, according to an exchange between the companies on X. The companies have signed an agreement for over six sites, with over 20 more to come. And if Steak ‘n Shake gets its way, possibly 100 restaurants will see future Supercharger installations.

The way the news trickled out was a little weird, yet typical of how Elon Musk likes to use his social media platform, X, to publicize new information about his various companies.

It started with seed oils

It started with a post about how Steak ’n Shake was switching from seed oils to beef tallow to cook its french fries, referencing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly made controversial claims about seed oils. (We don’t have to get into all that now.)

Musk, a major Trump supporter who is fronting the DOGE-led effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, replied to the post that “the fries taste way better!” Steak ’n Shake responded by thanking him and asking whether Tesla planned on installing charging stations at its restaurants. To which Tesla’s Supercharger account replied:

6 sites signed already, 20+ sites in design review

Let’s lock in those layouts @Steaknshake 👀

— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) February 27, 2025

Steak ‘n Shake responded again, suggesting 100 locations could serve as Supercharger sites.

Tesla has formed partnerships with restaurant and convenience store chains in the past, including Ruby Tuesday and Sheetz. The company is also currently building its own 1950s-style diner and drive-in movie theater, with over 30 charging stalls.

Tesla likely won’t be able to rely on federal funding for any new charging locations, after the Trump administration halted a $5 billion federal program to install new EV chargers. Tesla has received $31 million in funds from the program to install 539 DC fast-charging ports, which represents 6 percent of all funds distributed so far, according to a dashboard that tracks the spending.

Tina Nguyen is joining The Verge as a senior reporter, covering the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government, and the tech industry’s embrace of the MAGA movement. Nguyen joins The Verge from Puck, where she was a founding partner and national correspondent covering the evolution of the MAGA political ecosystem. Before that, Nguyen was a White House reporter for Politico and covered politics and media at Vanity Fair. She is the author of The MAGA Diaries: Life Among the Fanatics, Extremists, and True Believers that Created the Modern Right. She starts at The Verge this week.

“Tina is deeply sourced in the world of MAGA politics and has extensively explored how Trump and his movement use the power of modern tech and social media,” says Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief at The Verge. “That’s always been a Verge story, and it will only get more important as the tech giants work to curry favor and protection from an administration that is always and forever posting through it.”

“What I’ve observed over the past decade, and what the second Trump administration understands innately, is that technology and data is the river through which cultural …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Cold Wallet, Well Go USA’s new darkly comedic home invasion thriller from director Cutter Hodierne, becomes increasingly more absurd as it unfolds. At every turn, the movie’s heroes — a group of excitable retail investors — make unhinged choices that make them feel more like cartoons than people who have complex lives outside of Reddit. But in the film’s story about how quickly big bets on crypto can go left, you can feel Cold Wallet tapping into something very real about what makes people believe that rugs can never be pulled from beneath their feet.

Cold Wallet tells the tale of Billy (Raúl Castillo), a down-on-his-luck father, who, after a nasty separation from his ex, decides to bet everything he has on a hot, new crypto coin called Tulip. Like his twitchy hacker friend Eva (Melonie Diaz) and MMA-obsessed buddy Dom (Tony Cavalero), Billy sees Tulip as an opportunity to radically change his lot in life. It’s easy for the trio to pour their money into Tulip because they genuinely believe that the coin’s creator, Charles Hegel (Josh Brener), wants to make the world a better place for people like them. But when Tulip’s value suddenly tanks one day and Hegel — a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to fire the “vast majority” of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), agency employees — some using pseudonyms for fear of retaliation — told a federal court in sworn declarations.

Seven current and five former CFPB employees submitted the declarations as part of the National Treasury Employees Union case against Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, who’s currently serving as the acting director of the CFPB. The union is seeking to halt the already in-progress dismantling of the financial services watchdog, which fields thousands of consumer complaints each week about financial products, and as of 2023, had returned $17.5 billion to consumers over 12 years through things like monetary compensation and canceled debts. Earlier this month, The Verge reported that roughly 20 technologists at the agency were suddenly fired on a weeknight, amid a broader swath of layoffs. The court has temporarily barred the CFPB from making further cuts. 

Four of the seven current employees declined to provide their names publicly but offered to identify themselves to the court under seal. In the declarations, provided under penalty of perjury, the employees described a hasty firing process orchestrated by DOGE, with cursory thought as to who would handle consumer protection issues and CFPB data once the agency was gutted. The stop-work order at the agency has prevented staffers from even conducting necessary work “to maintain the security and stability of the CFPB’s computer systems,” according to one of the declarations.

One current employee, using the pseudonym Alex Doe, says that, around February 13th, their team “was directed to assist with terminating the vast majority of CFPB employees as quickly as possible.” Alex Doe described a three-phase approach: first, firing probationary employees who are newer to the agency; second, firing “approximately 1,200 additional employees, by eliminating whole offices, divisions, and units”; and third, terminating most of the remaining employees within 60-90 days, “leaving a Bureau that could not actually perform any functions, or no Bureau at all.”

The speed of the recent layoffs necessitated “bypassing several ordinary procedures, safeguards, and rules”

The CFPB is responsible for ensuring that companies offering financial services are not misleading consumers or skirting the law. Consumers could submit complaints to the agency about credit cards and loans, and the agency could also initiate enforcement actions and rulemakings, like the one it previously finalized to monitor large digital payment providers as it does banks.

The speed of the recent layoffs necessitated “bypassing several ordinary procedures, safeguards, and rules,” according to Alex Doe, who says that the timeline of the terminations was specifically dictated by DOGE employee Jordan Wick. Only a court order that temporarily prevented further firings stopped the remaining terminations from going through on Valentine’s Day, they add. The CFPB and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a meeting after the court order, CFPB chief operating officer Adam Martinez told staff that “he did not yet know what agency would perform a similar role for the CFPB or whether the Bureau itself would technically continue to exist with a small staff to perform those functions,” according to Alex Doe.

A second current employee, using the pseudonym Blake Doe, disputes Martinez’s declaration to the court that consumers who would have been served by the CFPB’s now-eliminated Student Loan Ombudsman could just turn to the agency’s general Ombudsman office. “That is not possible, however, because the employees of the general Ombudsman Office have been ordered not to perform any work,” writes Blake Doe. Contrary to Martinez’s declaration, Blake Doe says they’ve seen evidence that the CFPB was in communication with the Federal Reserve about how to return money there or to the Treasury. 

“The hasty termination of almost all of the Bureau’s contracts resulted in systems and services being turned off before CFPB or contract personnel returned CFPB data.”

Other declarations raise issues about DOGE staffers’ privacy and security training to handle CFPB systems and concerns about where agency data — which could include HR and reasonable accommodation records — might end up.

A CFPB contracting officer going by the name of Charlie Doe says that contract termination notices they saw did not include the usual data preservation notices to ensure CFPB data is not lost. Between February 11th and 14th, the agency issued termination notices for over a hundred contracts, Charlie Doe says, including ones that maintain the consumer complaint database and ensure it’s scrubbed of personally identifiable information, ignoring feedback from employees about which contracts were necessary to keep to follow the law. 

“The hasty termination of almost all of the Bureau’s contracts resulted in systems and services being turned off before CFPB or contract personnel returned CFPB data,” a fourth employee, Drew Doe, writes. “Because not all systems have off-line backups, some of the CFPB’s data may have been deleted. Among other things, this data may include CFPB Human Resource records, Reasonable Accommodation records, Ombudsman records, and Equal Employment Opportunity records. The data may not be recoverable and as of February 25th, CFPB is trying to now figure out which systems and services have records.” 

Some of the seemingly hasty work is apparently deliberate. CFPB director of digital services Adam Scott submitted an email exchange he was copied on to the court, in which the agency’s chief information officer, Christopher Chilbert, told an employee that it was his understanding that the CFPB’s deleted homepage was a decision made by Vought,  “and it was not an error made by the members of the DOGE team.”

Drew Doe claims that DOGE staffers “were given full privileged access to CFPB systems and data, without following the process that the CFPB ordinarily requires to do so,” including signing documents about the governance of CFPB systems and data. In meetings over the past couple of weeks, they add, senior executives told agency staff “that the CFPB would exist in name only.”

Steam Next Fest is going on until March 3rd, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wading through a seemingly endless carousel of games, filling up my Steam Deck’s internal and external memory looking for the Good Shit™. I’ve landed on four standout game demos that are worth your time now and whenever their full games release.

The Talos Principle Reawakened

The best way to describe The Talos Principle: Reawakened is if Portal was harder, less funny, and written by C.S. Lewis if he knew what a robot was. Reawakened is a remaster of 2014’s The Talos Principle. But according to the developers at Croteam, Reawakened doesn’t just take the original and slap on a next-gen coat of paint; it also adds new story content and a new puzzle editor so players can create their own challenges. 

Reawakened strikes the perfect difficulty balance – not too simple, not too frustrating – that makes its puzzles delightful to figure out. In the demo, you play as a robot tasked with solving puzzles using lasers, signal jammers, and your own burgeoning sentience. The game gives you no tutorial on how exactly to use the tools you’re given. And while that can be annoying if t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mozilla introduced its first Terms of Use for Firefox this week, but the company has already had to post an update to address criticisms of language that appeared to give Mozilla overly broad ownership over user data.

Specifically, some users took issue with this line in the terms, as reported by TechCrunch: “When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”

In response, Mozilla added this update to its blog post. “We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible,” Mozilla says. “Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.

The company adds that “it does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.” (In the Privacy Notice, Mozilla spells out how it uses your data for things like the core functionality of Firefox and its features, as well as how to adjust what data you provide.)

To TechCrunch, Mozilla shared its reasoning over some of the language in the terms:

Mozilla also further clarified why it used certain terms, saying that the term “nonexclusive” was used to indicate that Mozilla doesn’t want an exclusive license to user data, because users should be able to do other things with that data, too.

“Royalty-free” was used because Firefox is free and neither Mozilla nor the user should owe each other money in exchange for handling the data in order to provide the browser. And “worldwide” was used because Firefox is available worldwide and provides access to the global internet.

Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel also told TechCrunch that “these changes are not driven by a desire by Mozilla to use people’s data for AI or sell it to advertisers. As it says in the Terms of Use, we ask for permission from the user to use their data to operate Firefox ‘as you indicate with your use of Firefox.’ This means that our ability to use data is still limited by what we disclose in the Privacy Notice.”

In its original blog post, Mozilla said that “some optional Firefox features or services may require us to collect additional data to make them work, and when they do, your privacy remains our priority.” The company added that “we intend to be clear about what data we collect and how we use it.”

Electric vehicle charging network EVgo changed its terms of service Thursday to include new language explicitly prohibiting the use of high-speed DC extension cables and breakaway adapters at the company’s stations. The terms, which go into effect March 8th, are another bump in the road for enterprising companies looking to cash in on EV charging accessories.

EVgo added the following terms in bold to the Authorized Charging Adapters section of its Terms of Service: “EVgo prohibits the use of all other adapters, including break-away adapters and DC extension cords (“Unauthorized Equipment”) on EVgo’s network and Charging Stations.” The company continues to authorize “automaker-manufactured charging adapters” (such as J3400 “NACS” to CCS1) and have UL2252 certification.

Another bump in the road for enterprising companies looking to cash in on EV charging accessories

Tesla’s Terms of Use for its Superchargers similarly prohibit any adapter not “sold or provided by Tesla or by other automakers,” without specifically calling out specific types.

EV accessory maker A2Z EV recently put up for preorder its $248 6ft-plus DC extension cord that lets you plug an EV into a short-corded fast-charging station. EV owners may want this to charge their non-Teslas at Tesla Superchargers using supported NACS adapters without blocking out multiple charging stalls. Superchargers are known for their short cords that can’t reach around to varying port locations on different EV makes. Some early testing by YouTube channel State of Charge shows the extension cable working without overheating.

Last year, a startup called EVject built a breakaway adapter designed to let you drive away from a Tesla Supercharger (or other station) without getting out of your car in case of a dangerous situation. However, Tesla sued the company after the automaker’s testing found that the adapter could overheat. Tesla eventually dropped the case later in the year, and EVject maintains that its product is safe.

However, should other competing EV accessory makers decide to make cheaper versions of extension cables and breakaway adapters for people to buy, it may not work as safely. And if both EVgo and Tesla networks are saying no to these accessories, then others might join — which means companies like A2Z EV and EVject might have a tough time selling their solutions.

Intel is delaying the opening of its $28 billion Ohio chip plants yet again. In an update on Friday, Intel executive vice president Naga Chandrasekaran said the company now expects its first factory to begin operations between 2030 and 2031 – years later than its initial plan to kick off production in 2025.

Meanwhile, the second fabrication plant on Intel’s Ohio campus isn’t expected to open until 2032. “We are taking a prudent approach to ensure we complete the project in a financially responsible manner,” Chandrasekaran said in the post. “We will continue construction at a slower pace, while maintaining the flexibility to accelerate work and the start of operations if customer demand warrants.”

Intel’s Ohio fabrication units have been beset by delays since the very beginning. In 2022, the chipmaker postponed the groundbreaking ceremony over a lack of government funding. It later bumped the opening of its plants to 2027 or 2028.

The past year has been tumultuous for Intel. The company grappled with mass layoffs, major financial losses, and the removal of Pat Gelsigner as CEO. In January, Intel revealed that it’s canceling its AI chip as the company attempts to “simplify” its roadmap and “concentrate” resources.

As noted by The Columbus Dispatch, Intel has invested $3.7 billion into its Ohio chip plants since 2022. The company says it has completed the basement level of its fab and has since started to work on the above-ground structure. Chandrasekaran added that the delay “allows us to manage our capital responsibly and adapt to the needs of our customers.”

The Verge is heading to Barcelona, Spain, for Mobile World Congress 2025. We’re fresh off CES, where we saw plenty of new gadgets, from TVs to gaming handhelds and smart glasses. But, as it says right in the name, MWC 2025 is more focused on… mobile stuff. And it’s for a global audience, which means not everything will make its way to the US.

Expect announcements from companies like Xiaomi and Nothing, the latter of which will unveil the Nothing Phone 3A, and other global phone makers. Larger firms like Samsung and Google will be there, though it’s still unclear if they’ll have news. But we’re still waiting for more details on Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, so maybe that’ll pop up at the show.

We’ll also look for more obscure and fun stuff that’s only available here on the floor. In 2024, we saw Humane’s ill-fated AI Pin (RIP), a laptop with a transparent screen, and more.

Keep this page bookmarked for all the news, commentary, and first looks from the show floor.

• What to expect at MWC 2025

Mobile World Congress 2025 is nearly upon us, and we’re heading to Barcelona to see what the world’s smartphone manufacturers have to offer as they launch new devices, tease new features, and talk incessantly about AI. The show officially kicks off on March 3rd and runs to March 6th, but the first announcements should arrive on March 2nd, when Xiaomi, HMD, and Honor all have press conferences scheduled.

MWC may be a long way from its glory days when the likes of Samsung and Sony used it as the launchpad for that year’s flagship phones, but there are still some major players expected to unveil new hardware next week — most notably, Xiaomi bringing its flagship 15 series to Europe. Nothing, HMD, and Realme are among the other companies we already know are planning to launch new phones.

Here’s what to expect from the companies we know will have news.

Xiaomi

It’s already been confirmed that Xiaomi is launching the 15 series on March 2nd, with the regular 15 and 15 Ultra expected to appear. The base model has been available in China since October, while the 15 Ultra was only officially revealed on February 27th.

The 15 Ultra is another photography-focused flagship, wit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple customers filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging it misled consumers with claims that certain Apple Watches are carbon neutral. For a product to be considered carbon neutral, its manufacturer has to offset or cancel out any pollution the item generates.  

Apple said in 2023 that “select case and band combinations” of its Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Apple Watch SE would be the company’s first carbon neutral devices. The suit was filed on behalf of anyone who bought those watches. It alleges that the products were not really carbon neutral because they relied on faulty offset projects that didn’t actually reduce the company’s greenhouse gas pollution. 

The lawsuit shows how difficult it is to make promises about a product’s sustainability by attempting to offset or capture the carbon dioxide emissions it generates. Many environmental advocates have instead pushed for tech companies to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, and to make products that last longer and are easier to repair.

Make products that last longer and are easier to repair

The company’s carbon neutral claims were false, and the seven plaintiffs would not have purchased the Apple Watches or paid as much for them had they known that, the lawsuit alleges. “Apple’s false advertising may lead [consumers] to choose its products over genuinely sustainable alternatives,” the complaint filed in a California federal court on Wednesday says.

Apple is standing by its assertions. “We are proud of our carbon neutral products, which are the result of industry-leading innovation in clean energy and low-carbon design,” Apple spokesperson Sean Redding said in an email. 

Redding says the company reduced Apple Watch emissions by more than 75 percent. The company focused on cutting pollution from materials, electricity, and transportation used to make the watches, in part by getting more of its suppliers to switch to clean energy. 

To deal with the remaining pollution, Redding says Apple invests in “nature-based projects to remove hundreds of thousands of metric tons of carbon from the air.” That’s where the new lawsuit finds problems. 

To offset their emissions, many companies buy carbon credits from forestry projects that represent tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide that trees and soil naturally trap. Apple primarily purchased credits from the Chyulu Hills project in Kenya and the Guinan Project in China, the suit says. It alleges that neither of the projects met a basic standard for carbon offsets, which is that they capture additional CO2 that would not otherwise have been sequestered had Apple not paid to support the project. 

According to the complaint:

The Chyulu Hills Project purports to generate carbon credits by preventing deforestation on land which has been legally protected from deforestation since 1983, while the Guinan Project claims to have planted trees on “barren land” that was already heavily forested before the project began. In both cases, the carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence. And because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading. 

Apple is far from the only company to have faced accusations about carbon offset projects. Dozens of big-name brands — including airlines, retailers, banks, and more — have relied on “junk” carbon offsets to make carbon neutral claims, a 2022 Bloomberg investigation found.

This also isn’t the first time Apple’s first carbon neutral products have faced scrutiny. The company needs to be more transparent about its supply chain in order to back its carbon neutral claims, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs said in a separate report in 2023. That report found that some Apple suppliers’ emissions were growing. 

A better measure of a company’s environmental impact is whether its entire carbon footprint — encompassing its operations, supply chain, and the use of its products — is shrinking. A company can purport to make a more sustainable product, but it could potentially wind up selling so many of those products that the company as a whole has a bigger carbon footprint. 

So, for consumers who want to limit their own carbon footprint, they’re probably better off hanging on to their current devices for as long as they can. For its part, Apple’s carbon footprint as a company got smaller between 2021 and 2023, even without taking carbon offsets into account, according to its latest sustainability report. But Apple still churned out 16.1 million metric tons of CgO2 emissions in 2023, roughly equivalent to the emissions from 42 gas-fired power plants in a year. And while Apple has made some strides, there’s still a long way to go to make devices easier to repair.

Severance has always been a horror story, albeit one set in a mostly generic office. That blandness is a large part of what makes it so scary: underneath the corporate speak, drab decor, and unflattering fluorescent lighting is something very sinister. And in the show’s latest episode, it uses that energy to tap into a new, even more terrifying kind of fear.

Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 7.

The episode, called “Chikhai Bardo,” picks up with Mark (Adam Scott) recovering from a process called reintegration that’s designed to reunite the two halves of his mind: the outie who lives a normal life, and the innie who is confined to the unyielding hell of the basement of tech giant Lumon Industries. Because of this, it has an almost Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vibe to it. As Mark is passed out on his couch post-surgery, and his brain is seemingly stitching itself back together, we get flashbacks of how he met his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and how their relationship became strained after they struggled to conceive.

Gemma is better known to Severance viewers as Miss Casey, the disturbingly calm wellness director at Lumon. In the outside world, …

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Amazon has been trying to make virtual assistants happen for more than a decade. Alexa is, by many definitions, wildly successful, but it has so far failed to become the kind of omnipresent, omnipotent helper the company imagines. (It has also, by all accounts, failed to become a compelling business for Amazon.) This week, though, Amazon launched the most ambitious version of Alexa yet, with new technology underneath and some big new ideas about how you might interact with AI.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what’s next for Alexa. David Imel — who you might know as the co-host of the Waveform podcast — joins the show to help us figure out what to make of Alexa Plus, and the whole idea that large language models can make virtual assistants both more useful and more accessible. Amazon’s description of Alexa Plus makes a lot of sense, and sounds pretty compelling, but we have reservations both about the user experience and about Amazon’s ability to actually pull this off.

After that, we dive into a busy week of gadget news, beginning with one of the more unusual camera launches we’ve seen in a while. We also talk about the iPhone 16E, and the ne …

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The Apple Watch is now the smartwatch of choice for National Hockey League officials. Apple and the NHL just announced a collaboration where on-ice officials will wear Apple Watches that are running special software to receive important in-game information.

Using the custom-built NHL Watch Comms app, on-ice referees can view the game clock directly from their wrist. They’ll also be able to receive haptic alerts for when NHL players leave the penalty box or when time is running out in the period. The haptic patterns for each timer are different, so as not to confuse the officials. The Apple Watches will also be synced to the NHL’s Oasis feed, a cloud system that enables player tracking, game telemetry, and other data, which will ensure that all officials receive the same information.

“We wanted to make sure that the officials had really good awareness and were able to keep their eyes on play,” says Andres de Corral, vice president of digital services at Presidio, a tech firm that helped develop the app. “So by enabling haptic responses, we were able to provide non-visual cues to the officials.”

Situational awareness is a major challenge for officials on the ice. On t …

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It’s the end of an era. Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.

“Skype users will be in control, they’ll have the choice,” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, in an interview with The Verge. “They can migrate their conversation history and their contacts out and move on if they want, or they can migrate to Teams.”

If you choose to move on and bring your Skype data with you, the exported data will include photos and conversation history. Microsoft also made a tool to easily view existing Skype chat history if you don’t want to move to Teams.

Skype will remain online until May 5th, so existing users will have around 60 days to decide whether they want to switch to Microsoft Teams or export their data. “If they do want to come to Teams then the first-run is pretty instantaneous because we’ve already done the work on the backend to restore their contacts, message history, and call logs,” says Amit Fulay, vice president of product at Microsoft.

The transition to Microsoft Teams will keep Skype group chats intact, and during the 60-day window, Microsoft will also maintain interoperability so you can message contacts on Teams and those messages will be delivered to friends still using Skype.

If you do move to Microsoft Teams, there’s one big part of Skype that’s disappearing, though. Microsoft is removing the telephony parts that allow you to call domestic or international numbers or people’s cellphones. “Part of the reason is we look at the usage and the trends, and this functionality was great at the time when voice over IP (VoIP) wasn’t available and mobile data plans were very expensive,” explains Fulay. “If we look at the future, that’s not a thing we want to be in.”

Microsoft will honor existing Skype credits, but it will no longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that allow you to make or receive international and domestic calls. Existing Skype subscription users will be able to use their Skype credits and subscriptions inside Microsoft Teams until the end of their next renewal period. Existing Skype Number users will also need to port their number over to another provider, as Microsoft is no longer supporting this, either.

The Skype Dial Pad will be part of Teams temporarily for existing credits and subscriptions, but Microsoft isn’t going to offer calling plans to Teams consumers like it does for businesses. “The world has really moved on,” says Teper. “Probably the biggest thing is higher bandwidth and lower data plan cost, from us and others, has really driven almost all of the traffic to VoIP.”

The admission of consumers moving on from calling phone numbers from Skype is also a large part of why the service is shutting down nearly 14 years after Microsoft first acquired it for $8.5 billion. Over the last decade, services like FaceTime, Messenger, and WhatsApp have made it simple to connect with friends through messaging, calls, and video chats in a way that Microsoft struggled to compete with through Skype and its many design iterations.

This was particularly evident in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, when consumers flocked to Zoom instead of Skype. “The Skype userbase actually grew at the beginning of the pandemic, and has been pretty flat since,” admits Teper. “It’s not shrunk in some dramatic way. It has been relatively flat over the last few years. We hope we’ll migrate most Skype users… but we want to make sure the users know they’re in control.”

Microsoft will now be fully focused on Teams for consumers, after launching the personal version in 2020. At the time, Microsoft said it was still fully committed to Skype, but it’s been clear in recent years that the company was preparing for the eventual retirement of Skype. In December, Microsoft killed off Skype credits and phone numbers in favor of subscriptions, another sign that the end of Skype was nearing.

“Initially the vision was to have one experience across work and life… but Teams was new and that was not realistically where we were in 2020,” reveals Teper. “So we continued to invest in Skype, and about two to three years ago we started bringing in the free Teams consumer experience with the new client. We wanted to wait until the adoption was at the scale where we could be very convinced it was the right time.”

The Skype retirement won’t result in job cuts, either, at least not immediately. “There’s one team, which is Microsoft Teams and Skype. On the backend it has actually evolved to a common team,” says Teper. “There won’t be layoffs, those folks are going to be working on making things better — whether it’s fun end user features or AI innovation, it’s really about doubling down on Teams.”

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, meme coins don’t meet the requirements to be protected by federal securities law. In new guidance issued on Thursday, the SEC announced that it doesn’t view most meme coins — cryptocurrencies that originate from internet memes or cultural phenomena — as securities, and that transactions around them do not need to be registered with the commission.

The SEC said it reached this decision because the coins do not “generate a yield or convey rights to future income, profits, or assets of a business,” and therefore cannot be considered a security. Instead, the SEC describes meme coins as “more akin to collectibles” and “typically have limited or no use or functionality.”

This comes amid a rise in new meme coin cryptocurrencies following Trump’s election. The DOGE acronym for Trump’s waste elimination agency was likely inspired by dogecoin, a popular meme coin that was enthusiastically supported by DOGE leader Elon Musk prior to his appointment. Trump and his wife Melania also launched their own respective meme coins in January, which have plummeted in value since being released.

The clarified guidance could impact crypto regulations and shield companies and individuals that create meme coins from potential litigation. The digital currencies tend to experience volatile price swings and are popularly used in “pump and dump” schemes, in which a token is artificially inflated via insider promotion to cash in on the buying frenzy.

“Meme coins typically are purchased for entertainment, social interaction, and cultural purposes, and their value is driven primarily by market demand and speculation,” said the SEC. “Given the speculative nature of meme coins, they tend to experience significant market price volatility, and often are accompanied by statements regarding their risks and lack of utility, other than for entertainment or other non-functional purposes.”

AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs is arriving next week — and its new graphics cards are aggressively priced against Nvidia’s $749 GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and $549 RTX 5070. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT ship on March 6th for $549 and $599, respectively, one day after the RTX 5070 arrives.

AMD says they both offer “4K gaming at a 1440p price,” though it’s making some unusual comparisons to do so — according to AMD, the 9070 XT is 51 percent faster on average than a four-year-old RX 6900 XT at 4K and max settings and 26 percent faster than a four-year-old RTX 3090 at the same settings, cards that filled a pricey niche two generations ago.

While leaks had suggested the pricing of AMD’s 9070 could start at $649, AMD surprised everyone today with suggested retail prices at $549 for this card — putting it head-to-head with Nvidia’s $549 RTX 5070. The $599 9700 XT could even challenge Nvidia’s $749 pricing for its RTX 5070 Ti, as long as AMD has managed to deliver performance that can challenge both of these RTX 50-series cards.

We won’t know the full answer to that until reviews for AMD’s cards appear next week as well as reviews for Nvidia’s RTX 5070. AMD is dropping some performance hints about where its 9070 series cards might fit in, though. AMD says the 9070 XT is 42 percent more potent at 4K Ultra (and 38 percent at 1440p Ultra) than AMD’s RX 7900 GRE, a card that challenged the RTX 4070 at $549 but vanished after less than a year. And it’s “just barely slightly slower” than a 7900 XTX, AMD’s 2022 flagship, we heard on a call.

The vanilla RX 9070, meanwhile, is 21 percent faster than the same 7900 GRE at 4K, suggesting it’s not far off the XT in performance: 38 percent faster than the AMD 6800 XT and 26 percent faster than the Nvidia RTX 3080, according to AMD. At 220 watts of board power, AMD’s director of graphics product management, Scott Olschewsky, says the 4nm monolithic chip is “the most efficient GPU we’ve ever built.”

Each card also offers 16GB of GDDR6 memory, DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b ports, and are PCIe 5.0 cards — not that your motherboard needs a 5.0 new slot or would necessarily benefit from one. They will use standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

While both the 9070 and 9070 XT have far fewer graphics compute units than the 7900 GRE (55, 64, and 80, respectively), they don’t need as many because they’re the first cards to ship with RDNA 4, which AMD says offers twice the rasterization (read: non-ray traced) graphics performance per compute unit as RDNA 2. (RDNA 3 was closer to 1.4x that of RDNA 2.)

AMD says it’s taken larger steps than that in ray tracing, too, and almost fully doubled its FP16 machine learning performance since RDNA 3, and up to 779 TOPS, though performance will differ from app to app: AMD’s only seeing 12 percent more performance in Adobe Lightroom super resolution over the 7900 GRE, as one example.

But even if you’re not playing with AI very intentionally, AMD will put that hardware to use in gaming with FSR 4, which comes with a new AI upscaling algorithm for its super resolution tech that’ll exclusively run on these RDNA 4 and newer cards.

Olschewsky says FSR 4 can increase frame rates “while looking just as good as native rendering” at 4K resolution. AMD used some images from Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 — a title that averages just 53fps at 4K Ultra settings — to show more fine detail in the distant background of an image while averaging at 182fps with FSR 4 and frame generation turned on.

And while AMD didn’t share expected performance for that game without the fake frames added, it did break out the differences for a handful of other games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Ratchet & Clank:

AMD says it’ll have 30 FSR4 games at launch and over 75 by the end of the year — one obvious theme is a lot of PS5 games, making us wonder how closely the PS5 Pro’s “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution,” an AI upscaler powered by AMD hardware, might be related to it. But AMD also says FSR 3.1 games can be updated to FSR 4 “with a simple toggle.”

The new cards also have an enhanced media engine with higher image quality for gameplay recording, as the last one “did not meet quality expectations from the gamers trying to record and stream.” AMD says its Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), its generic fake frame generation you can apply to any game yourself, is being upgraded to AFMF 2.1, with less ghosting and smearing of details.

As with any graphics card these days, the actual amount you pay will be determined by whether AMD can actually make enough of the things, and if AMD’s board partners don’t jack up the price. Olschewsky had some fighting words for Nvidia there, though: “We believe that our 9070 XT will be going toe-to-toe with what you’ve seen from the 5070 Ti that users may or may not be able to buy,” adding that the 9070 “is going to look very strong against their upcoming 5070.”

Unlike Nvidia, which warned of shortages with its new cards, he says AMD expects “strong availability at launch.”

“We are working with all of our partners to go and deliver the most competitive prices on GPUs around the world; our focus is ensuring cards hit target price points around the world. It’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen, but we’ll be working with partners as we see pricing show up.”

At the end of AMD’s event today the company also teased that its RX 9060 series cards will arrive in the second quarter to “broaden the family even further.” AMD plans to disclose more information about these cards “later,” but it certainly looks like it’s getting ready to challenge Nvidia’s unannounced RTX 5060 cards.