AT&T has announced a new “AT&T Guarantee” program promising better communication around outages and compensation that includes bill credits for a day’s service when the outage meets certain thresholds, reports Reuters. The new automatic-credit program covers both AT&T fiber and wireless services.

AT&T promises to email or text customers when there’s an outage and credit them for a full day’s worth of service if the outage meets its criteria. Those include fiber outages lasting at least 20 minutes and “wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.”

AT&T also says it will issue reward cards worth at least $5 for certain tech support issues like long wait times or failed callbacks.

The company excludes any of these events if they resulted from bad weather, natural disasters, and other events out of its control, according to small print.

Last year, AT&T had multiple outages, including a massive 12-hour one in February last year that the FCC found had cut off 5G and voice for 125 million devices in all 50 states.

Google has announced that it is shipping an unexpected update to Pixel 4A phones this week. According to Ars Technica, the company emailed Pixel 4A owners to tell them the update will address battery performance stability but that their batteries may not last as long after it’s applied.

Google repeats that in a new help page titled “Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program,” where it writes that it had noticed issues with “some” Pixel 4A phones.

From January 8, 2025, Pixel 4a devices will receive an automatic software update to Android 13. After the software update is downloaded, your device will restart automatically to apply the update. For some devices (“Impacted Devices”), the update includes new battery management features to improve the stability of your battery’s performance, so the battery may last for shorter periods between charges. Users of Impacted Devices may also notice other changes, like reduced charging performance or changes to how the battery-level indicator on your phone shows your battery capacity.

We want our customers to have the best possible experience with their products, so users of these Impacted Devices are eligible for an appeasement from Google.

Not all Pixel 4a devices are impacted by the reduction in battery capacity and charging performance, therefore if your device is not impacted the battery will perform the same as before, and you will not be eligible for an appeasement.

Besides having less runtime, the update could mean “reduced charging performance” or change how the phone shows battery capacity. Google hasn’t been specific about what’s behind the issue, but the circumstances are similar to Apple’s iPhone “batterygate” mess in 2017. Apple said its software slowed down iPhones with aging batteries to prevent accidental shutdowns, but it didn’t inform customers about why their devices had reduced performance and ended up with hundreds of millions in court settlement payments.

In this case, Google is also offering owners with affected 4A devices their choice of compensation: They can opt for a free battery swap, a $50 payday, or a $100 credit toward a new Pixel phone from its online store. 4A owners can enter their IMEI number on this page to find out if theirs is affected.

Google didn’t immediately respond to our questions about why the 4A, which hasn’t been updated since late 2023, needs this attention now.

At CES this week, Savant Systems announced Savant Smart Budget, a feature of its Smart Power system of modular relays and equipment that integrates with your existing circuit breaker box.

If you’re already at the limits of your breaker box’s capacity, Smart Budget lets you get around that with automated control of individual circuits. That way, you can add more high-draw connections, like appliances or EV chargers, than your electrical box can supply at once. For instance, you could set it so that power only goes to your EV overnight after you’re done using your oven. That sort of control can also be useful if you’re using a house battery or running on solar power.

Image: Savant

Savant says its system, which starts at $1,500 and requires installation by a licensed electrician, is more affordable than the alternative of working with your electric utility provider to upgrade to higher amperage service, which “could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

Those parts fit into “most major electrical panels” that “standardize on 1” breaker spacing,” company CMO J.C. Murphy tells The Verge, including panels from Schneider, Eaton, GE, ABB, Siemens, and others.

The Smart Budget kit will include two 30-amp single-pole circuit breakers, which Savant calls “Power Modules,” along with a double-pole 60-amp one and a current tracker for circuits you only want to monitor, according to Murphy. It also includes a Savant “Director” hub and sensors. The company sells additional Power Modules that cost $120 for dual 20-amp or single-pole 30-amp versions and $240 for a 60-amp double-pole module.

GE unveiled several new smart home products at CES on Monday, including new Matter-compatible Cync smart switches, non-Matter Cync lighting, and upscale smart shades. All of this will be rolling out over the next few months, starting with the new smart switches in March.

GE’s new Cync switches — the Smart Keypad Dimmer ($44.99) and Smart Paddle Dimmer ($25.99) — won’t use the usual quirky Cync design. The keypad dimmer, pictured at the top of this story, is more utilitarian, with programmable buttons for scenes or group control and up-and-down buttons for dimming at the bottom. The paddle dimmer looks, well, like a paddle switch with a dimming slider on the side. Here’s a picture of that one:

Image: GE

As both of the new dimmers have Matter support, you can expect them to work with any major smart home platform.

GE says “the entire family has been enhanced” so that when you install a Cync switch on a three-way circuit, you don’t have to replace the dumb switch on the other end to keep smart control. That means you can turn the circuit off with the dumb switch, but still use voice commands or scheduled automation with Cync smart bulbs that the switch controls.

The company also announced café lights and outdoor strip lights for its “Cync Dynamic Effects” category of lights that offer 16 million colors, tunable white light, music syncing, and addressable LEDs. The company says the café lights will have reinforced eye holes for hanging and come in 24-foot ($39.99) and 48-foot ($69.99) versions starting in March. The strip lights are coming in April and measure 16 feet ($79.99) or 32 feet ($129.99). They’ll lack Matter support and will only work with Google Home or Amazon Alexa.

Finally, GE is releasing smart shades as part of its Proseo line. They require professional installation and are controllable through the Savant app. The company says they’ll feature “modern architectural aesthetics, performance fabrics and unmatched control interface options to complement any luxury space.” They’re designed to hide wires and screws and to cover large areas like full-wall windows and floor-to-ceiling corner windows. These are custom jobs, “and priced as such,” according to Savant.

Netgear just announced the Orbi 870, a new Wi-Fi 7 mesh system that joins its now-three-tier lineup of Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers. It’s pricey like the others, but at $1,299.99 for a three-pack, it’s a full thousand dollars cheaper than the next kit up, the quad-band Orbi 970.

Netgear says a three-pack of Orbi 870s can cover up to 9,000 square feet with Wi-Fi, though, as with all routers, that number depends heavily on both physical and wireless interference in your home as well as where you put the routers. The Orbi 870 supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands. You can connect to two of those bands simultaneously using Multi-Link Operation (MLO) with a Wi-Fi 7 device, which could mean faster downloads, less latency, and a more stable connection.

The Orbi 870 also supports 320MHz channel bandwidth, which will have the most obvious benefits if you like watching download progress bars as much as I do (probably an unhealthy amount). But again, you’ll need Wi-Fi 7 on your phone or laptop to take advantage of it.

Finally, Netgear outfitted the primary gateway with a 10Gbps ethernet WAN port, while both it and its satellites have four 2.5Gbps ethernet LAN ports. That’s a bump from the two 2.5Gbps on the cheaper Orbi 770’s satellites or two 2.5Gbps and one 10Gbps port on those of the Orbi 970. All of the Wi-Fi 7 Orbis support wired backhaul and “enhanced” wireless backhaul, meaning they talk to each other using MLO, ideally offering more stability and throughput.

Wi-Fi 7 is still pretty new, so unless you’ve upgraded a lot of your devices recently, it’s hard to justify picking up spendy kits like the Orbi 870 — you need Wi-Fi 7 devices to use Wi-Fi 7 features. Still, they’re backward-compatible with older Wi-Fi standards and futureproof for years to come. And owners could benefit indirectly since the routers will communicate among themselves with all the stability, responsiveness, and throughput gains of Wi-Fi 7.

The Orbi 870 is available now in both black and white. If you don’t want to shell out $1,299.99 for a three-pack, two are available for $999.99. Netgear doesn’t sell the gateway router by itself but will happily sell you an add-on satellite for $549.99.

Razer announced it’s overhauling the Razer Blade 16 inside and out. In addition to a new CPU and GPU, the Blade 16 is now thinner overall than the outgoing 2024 model and comes with a few tweaks to its audio system and keyboard.

The new Blade 16 comes with up to a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU and a “next-gen Nvidia GPU.” The company also bumped its speaker array from four to six speakers, while the display carries over the 240Hz OLED introduced to the line last year. This is the first time Razer has put an AMD processor in the Blade 16.

Razer says it’s packing all of that into a chassis that’s over 30 percent thinner than last year’s model at just 0.59 inches — or 14.9 millimeters — thick in the front and 0.69 inches (17.4mm) in the back, not including the feet. For reference, the 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 is 0.61 inches (15.5mm) thick, including feet. The new Razer Blade is also deeper than last year’s model, measuring 250.5mm front to back, versus 244mm for the 2024 Blade 16. Despite all of that, Razer says it increased the travel of its keyboard keys from 1mm to 1.5mm. And there’s now a Copilot key, of course.

That thinness may come at a cost: the new Blade 16 has a 90Wh battery that it says can charge to 80 percent in about 45 minutes. The fast charging may come in handy; the larger 95.2Wh battery in the Blade 16 we reviewed in 2023 already felt like it wasn’t up to the task. That review unit was also a hot laptop. Razer says it’s using a new thermal gel that covers more interior surface area than the 2023 model.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

The AMD chip it’s using might help things, though. When we tested an Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 with that Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU against the same laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, the AMD version ran for three hours longer in non-gaming tasks and put out slightly less heat, though Asus puts a much lower power draw cap on its gaming laptops than Razer does. Naturally, we won’t know how any of that affects the new Blade 16 until we have one in hand to test.

The 2025 Razer Blade 16 is due out in the first quarter of this year. Razer didn’t announce pricing, but you can bet it won’t be cheap.

Samsung has announced that it will hold its next Galaxy Unpacked event at 10AM PT / 1PM ET on January 22nd in San Jose, California. Samsung will stream the event on YouTube, its website, and its newsroom page. According to its invitation, the company is preparing to introduce its next Galaxy S devices, along with new Galaxy AI features.

Rumors have suggested Samsung’s next phones will include a redesigned Galaxy S25 Ultra with more rounded corners, bringing it visually more in line with its lower-tier phones while still keeping marquee features like the Galaxy S Pen. There are also rumors that a Galaxy “Slim” phone is in the works, though that’s not expected until later in the year.

Finally, the rumor mill suggests that Samsung is adding Qi2 wireless charging to the Galaxy S25 line but wouldn’t put magnets in the phones, relying on magnetic cases instead. Earlier Monday, the Wireless Power Consortium quoted Samsung saying it’s supporting Qi 2 with new Galaxy devices this year while introducing “Qi2 Ready,” a special certification for phones needing a magnetic case to fully support the standard.

If you know you’re going to upgrade to some flavor of Galaxy S25 phone, the company is offering $50 credits if you reserve a spot in line to preorder it.

The Wireless Power Consortium announced at CES on Monday that more Android devices will use the MagSafe-based Qi2 charging standard in 2025. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll all have magnets, though; the WPC says it now has a “Qi2 Ready” certification for phones that need a case to add the magnetic alignment ring but otherwise meet the charging standard’s spec.

The announcement of Qi2 Ready could explain recent rumors that you’ll need a case to add magnetic charging to Galaxy S25 phones from Samsung, which says it’s releasing Qi2 Galaxy devices later this year. Meanwhile, Google says it’s “committed to the Qi2 wireless charging standard” and is contributing “its own high-power wireless charging technology to WPC.”

At the moment, you need a case with an embedded magnet for most Android phones to have MagSafe-style wireless charging. Apart from phones like the HMD Skyline, Apple has been alone in equipping its phones with the magnetic ring that normal Qi2 certification now requires.

The WPC also announced that a coming part of the Qi2 standard will be in-car wireless charging with a moving coil that shifts to keep aligned with the coil in your phone, using tech contributed by Panasonic Automotive Systems. Both the moving coil and Qi2 Ready certification are part of the Qi v2.1 update.

Meta has stopped selling the Quest Pro, UploadVR spotted. The news comes just over two months since the company discontinued the high-end VR headset. Meta wrote then that it would keep selling the headset until year’s end or until it ran out of stock, whichever came first. I guess it didn’t sell out.

The $999 headset’s product page now says the “Meta Quest Pro is no longer available” and encourages users to consider the Meta Quest 3 instead, which we liked more than its upscale sibling. UploadVR notes that the company is still selling the Quest Pro’s Touch Pro controllers, which work with the Quest 2 and up.

VR headsets have struggled to go mainstream, especially at the high end. The $3,500 Vision Pro has improved since we gave it a relatively lackluster review but still hasn’t caught on in a big way. Apple reportedly cut back on manufacturing it in October. The Quest Pro started at a cheap-by-comparison $1,499, but it made a far worse impression at launch — packed better internals than the Quest 2 and some fancy new features the older headset lacked, but it was also heavy, expensive, and didn’t have much better displays.

Birdfy has announced the Birdfy Bath Pro, a camera-equipped smart bird bath that lets you watch your local birds as they plop into the water to wash up. The device features two lenses — a wide-angle one and an auto-tracking one — and an optional AI analysis feature that keeps track of and summarizes the bath’s visitors. It’s in preorder now.

The onboard camera consists of a 2MP wide-angle lens that shoots at 1080p and a 3MP “Portrait Lens” with 2K resolution. It carries an IP66 waterproof rating, so it should be able to withstand bird splashes, rain, and a direct blast from a water hose. But if you live somewhere cold, you should know the camera may be slow or not start at all if the outdoor temperature drops below 14 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 10 degrees Celsius).

Image: Birdfy

The fountain portion comes with five interchangeable nozzles that Birdfy says make “captivating water patterns.” The Bath Pro will run you $249.99, or $299.99 with the stand included. For another $50, you can also get a lifetime subscription to its AI analysis service that Birdfy says will recognize birds and offer daily visitor counts and bird picture highlights. It also offers monthly recaps that rank your bath with that of other Birdfy owners.

Rounding out its features are an integrated solar panel to keep its 9,000mAh battery topped up, cloud storage for videos and images, and Wi-Fi connectivity so you can watch birds from your phone, “catching every flutter and dip in real-time.”

The Bath Pro feels like a logical next step after the Bird Buddy smart bird feeder got its moment in the sun in 2023. Bird Buddy seemed to agree when it announced its own prototype for one that year, but it hasn’t started shipping that yet according to an update on its Kickstarter page. Birdfy has its own bird feeders, including the also newly announced Birdfy Feeder Metal, a metal-housed smart bird feeder with similar features to the Bath Pro.

OWC has released two new super-long active optical USB4 cables, available in lengths of nearly 10 feet (3 meters) and 15 feet (4.5 meters) and offering up to 40Gbps of data throughput. According to OWC’s press materials, they’ll set you back $98.99 and $129.99, respectively, though its website currently lists them for slightly less. That’s a bargain, compared to what Apple is charging.

Data throughput aside, OWC says you can also expect the 3m option to provide up to 240W of power, while the 4.5m cable manages 60W. The cables are covered with braided nylon, too, which hopefully means they’re nice and flexible. And although they aren’t Thunderbolt 4 cables, they’ll work the way you’d expect with other Thunderbolt 3- or- 4-capable devices, including docks and hubs.

Image: OWC

Intel generally guarantees Thunderbolt 4 performance at up to 2 meters over traditional copper cables. Those cables need special tech inside to keep throughput up over longer runs, which is likely part of why Apple’s 3-meter 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 cable costs $159.

You can find some USB4 cables as long as OWC’s for much less than that, but the longer ones don’t tend to offer the same high throughput, which OWC credits to the electromagnetic interference immunity of fiber-optics.

OWC’s cables are a bit of a throwback to Thunderbolt’s roots as Light Peak, which was initially codeveloped by Intel and Apple as a fiber optic cable standard that made its way to a Sony laptop just as the companies decided to go with copper, instead. Optical, data-only Thunderbolt lives on at companies like Corning, which has you covered if you need a $480 164-foot (50 meters) 5K optical display cable in your life.

Cables aside, OWC also recently announced a $189.99 Thunderbolt 5 hub, which went up for preorder in November and is available now. It’s got four Thunderbolt 5 ports and a single USB-A port and supports three simultaneous 8K displays at 60Hz.

Amazon Prime Video has licensed a documentary about Melania Trump that will be directed by Rush Hour director Brett Ratner, reports Variety. A Prime Video spokesperson told the outlet that the movie will be an “unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at the first lady.

The news comes after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had dinner with Donald Trump, who was heavily critical of the company during his first term. It also follows the decision by Bezos and Amazon to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, just as other tech CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have done. Prime Video is also set to livestream Trump’s inauguration.

The film is the first significant Hollywood project that Ratner has taken on since 2017, when several women accused him of sexual misconduct and another of rape, Variety notes. He denied the allegations but parted ways with Warner Bros.

Ratner has some notable ties to the Trumps, including a former partnership with Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. He also filmed 2011’s Tower Heist largely on-location at Trump International Hotel & Tower and has reportedly run in Mar-a-Lago social circles since his departure from Hollywood life.

Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary has already begun filming and the company plans to give it theatrical and streaming releases starting in the second half of this year, Variety writes.

Belkin has announced the Stage PowerGrip, a magnetic battery pack that doubles as a DSLR-style ergonomic grip for iPhone photography, a phone stand, and a spare wired charger for your other devices. It’ll be available in May, with pricing info coming later on.

The PowerGrip is an odd-looking accessory until you see it attached to a phone. It’s clearly designed to evoke the look and feel of a traditional camera. It features Bluetooth pairing to enable the “shutter button” on the top of the grip to let you take pictures with the iOS camera app.

Besides that, the PowerGrip has a built-in retractable USB-C cable for charging other devices and a 10,000mAh battery. It offers wireless 7.5-watt charging for the attached iPhone, and a small LED screen on the front will show how much battery it has left. Belkin says it will come in powder blue, sandbox (a grayish sandy color), fresh yellow, black, and pepper (a nearly black dark gray).

Belkin’s take on this is similar to others you can find on Amazon, though mostly those are from brands with alphabet soup-style names. Apple sells one version of this concept called the ShiftCam ProGrip. Like Belkin’s devce, it adds a physical shutter button to your phone and doubles as a charger, but it costs $149.95. Belkin hasn’t announced pricing for the PowerGrip, but assuming it’s cheaper, it could be well worth a look if you’re into iPhone photography.

Devin Stone of the YouTube Channel Legal Eagle is suing PayPal over the affiliate link practices of its Honey extension that were detailed by fellow YouTuber MegaLag last month, he announced in a video published Friday.

The proposed class action lawsuit was filed December 29th in California’s Northern District Court by Stone’s Eagle Team LLP and several other YouTubers’ businesses. It accuses Honey of intentionally replacing creators’ affiliate links with its own, even if it’s not offering shoppers a benefit, depriving creators of money in the process.

The complaint alleges that PayPal’s practice violates California’s Unfair Competition Law and constitutes interference between creators and their business partners. The plaintiffs are seeking to represent anyone who was part of an affiliate program and had their link “redirected to Paypal as a result of the Honey browser extension.” Class action status has not yet been certified by a court.

Honey operates by offering to find coupon codes through its browser extension. The MegaLag video last month describes how when shoppers interact with its pop-up offers at checkout, it replaces existing affiliate cookies with its own in the background and gets credit for the sale, whether it actually found a coupon or not.

The complaint lists other ways PayPal is allegedly claiming affiliate commissions. That includes offering users rewards through its Honey Gold Program and encouraging them to “Get Rewarded with PayPal,” which prompts them to check out using PayPal.

“We dispute the allegations in the lawsuits, and will defend against them vigorously,” PayPal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe said in a statement emailed to The Verge. He added that “Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution.”

The lawsuit acknowledges that last-click attribution is a standard practice that credits the most recent affiliate with a sale at checkout. The plaintiffs argue Honey is using that standard practice in a way that’s “deceitful and clandestine,” luring users into clicking useless pop-ups that insert its code. We’ve reached out to PayPal for a statement on the lawsuit.

Lawyers are asking the court to make PayPal pay damages to creators and to permanently forbid it from swapping its own affiliate attribution at checkout. They’ve set up a website inviting other creators to join the lawsuit.

Here is Criscoe’s full statement:

We dispute the allegations in the lawsuits, and will defend against them vigorously. Honey is free to use and provides millions of shoppers with additional savings on their purchases whenever possible. Honey helps merchants reduce cart abandonment and comparison shopping while increasing sales conversion. Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution, which is widely used across major brands.

Update January 5th: Added statement from PayPal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe.

Arlo has once again increased the monthly subscription pricing for its smart home cameras’ Arlo Secure cloud storage plan. The company now charges $9.99 per month (up from $7.99) to store a single camera’s recordings and $19.99 a month (up from $17.99) for unlimited cameras. And instead of calling the cheaper plan Arlo Secure, both are now named Secure Plus.

At $9.99 per month, the cheapest Secure plan is now more than three times the monthly $2.99 Arlo once charged to store video for a single camera in the cloud. The company bumped that to $4.99 in early 2023, then to $7.99 last year. With annual billing, the single-camera plan still works out to $7.99 per month, while the unlimited-camera one is effectively $17.99 per month when you pay for a year upfront.

Screenshot: Arlo website

This latest round of price increases comes after Arlo announced a new set of AI-powered features in September. The features include letting users name specific people or vehicles the camera sees and get notifications about them, or to train its cameras to detect and notify them of events like a sprinkler turning on or garage door opening. The company has also doubled how many days of recordings it will store, from 30 to 60 days.

Arlo has offered at least some users the ability to keep their old rate by switching to an annual plan, according to a screenshot posted to the Arlo subreddit.

Users can still get free storage by using Arlo Base Stations and SmartHub devices that are compatible with their cameras. However, going that route also means missing out on certain subscription-only features that make smart cameras appealing, such as package detection.

We still haven’t seen the “next generation of CarPlay” that Apple first announced in 2022 and continues to say on its CarPlay webpage is arriving in 2024, as MacRumors points out. And barring some spectacular surprise, it’s not coming today or tomorrow. What gives?

So far, we’ve only seen changes like CarPlay mapping directions appearing in the instrument cluster in cars from manufacturers like Polestar, Porsche, and Lincoln. That’s even the case for vehicles like the 2024 Lincoln Nautilus, which has the screen real estate to support Apple’s vision for its dashboard-spanning infotainment software. Porsche and Aston Martin had announced their cars would be the first to get the new CarPlay, but both recently declined to give Wired a timeline for its rollout.

Screenshot: Apple

Other companies that Apple said would support its new CarPlay have been noncommittal about the software since it was announced. Some have closed the door on full support more forcefully since then, like when Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in April that Apple won’t be taking over all the screens in its cars.

Outside of Apple’s initial pronouncement that so many cars would use its big CarPlay update, automakers like General Motors and Rivian have taken a stand against both it and Google’s Android Auto. That’s not a popular position, particularly for GM, but both have indicated it’s about having more control over their vehicles.

Despite the lukewarm reception of Apple’s ideas, the company has continued to talk about its plans for the software. It’s just not clear what cars, if any, it will ever show up in.

One of the big benefits of buying a “Pro” iPhone is currently that you get a fancy high-refresh rate OLED display, but that may become standard across the iPhone 17 lineup, according to a Weibo leak from Digital Chat Station spotted by MacRumors. The outlet notes that Digital Chat Station leaked accurate details about the iPhone 15 line’s camera sensors and the display panel of the iPhone 12.

The rumor is a bit vague, saying only that the base iPhone 17 will have a high refresh rate. But it follows some more specific supply chain whispers we’ve heard in recent months. MacRumors pointed to one in February that suggested Apple will use the same LTPO panel tech, which drives Apple’s variable refresh rate “ProMotion” iPhone 16 Pro displays, for all of next year’s phones. That was later echoed by others, including display supply chain analyst Ross Young in September.

The next set of iPhones is also expected to replace the base model “Plus” iPhone with an iPhone 17 “Slim” in 2025, which Young suggested will have ProMotion, too. Instead of differentiating by display tech, Apple could stratify the lineup in different ways, like by giving the iPhone 17 Pro Max a smaller Face ID sensor and Dynamic Island cutout, as well as 12GB of RAM for both sizes of iPhone 17 Pro and 8GB for the standard and Slim models.

The whole line is rumored to have 24MP front-facing cameras instead of the 12MP found in current iPhones, and they may all use an Apple-designed Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip for the first time.

New images of the rumored DJI Flip folding drone hit late last week, showing the compact, light-colored drone both folded and unfolded, and even in a carrying case. The images appeared in posts by Igor Bogdanov, who has shared other credible DJI leaks in the past.

Bogdanov added in a post yesterday that DJI is preparing a new Cellular Dongle 2 module for the compact drone. The new leaks join earlier images of ND filters for the Flip, its propeller set, and charging hub, which Bogdanov wrote can charge two batteries in a minimum of 45 minutes, and can use “a 65W parallel charger.”

Below are some of the other pictures Bogdanov posted, including of its front screen, which drone leaker Jasper Ellens notes shows “all the handsfree Quickshots we know from the Neo.”

Ellens posted a short video of the drone yesterday, writing that the Flip’s registration numbers put it in DJI’s FPV drone category, meaning that it could allow for first-person streaming during flight. In early December, he also leaked details like the drone’s compact folding approach and that it should get about 30 minutes of flight thanks to a battery that’s bigger than the one in DJI’s Neo selfie drone.

YouTube is testing a new floating “Play something” button that will pick a video for you, 9to5Google spotted in the YouTube app for Android. The button floats just above the bottom bar of the app, and when tapped, it picks a YouTube video to play for you.

Just as in earlier versions of this feature YouTube’s been testing, the new button reportedly uses the portrait-oriented YouTube Shorts player to show videos, regardless of whether they’re vertically formatted Shorts or standard YouTube videos. Hopefully that changes by the time the feature gets a wide release.

Other incarnations the company has been testing for over a year include a “Play Something” banner and a simple button that looks like a black-and-white YouTube logo. If the feature’s name sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Netflix retired a similar random video picker last year called “Surprise Me,” which originally launched in 2021 as “Play Something.”

A Reddit user posted a screenshot overnight of a Spotify search that brought a surprise: a pornographic video tucked into suggested results for the rapper M.I.A. Here’s a NSFW link to the thread. The video shown in their screenshot didn’t appear for us, but we found others after scrolling through dozens of results in the “Video” tab.

One of the accounts that posted videos we saw has published erotic audio for years but has sprinkled in sexually graphic videos more recently. Another account, which was named with a long string of alphanumeric characters, has been publishing equally nonsensically-titled explicit videos as a podcast account since mid-November.

Spotify representative Laura Batey told The Verge in an email that the examples we provided “have been removed due to violation of our policies.” Those policies include forbidding sexually explicit material. We asked Spotify for more information on how the videos made it past its moderation and will update here if it responds.

The videos we found appear to be unmoderated podcast uploads, and reporting them isn’t very convenient. The Spotify app lacks a button for doing so — instead, users have to copy the content’s URL and head to a webpage for reporting possible violations.

Porn on Spotify isn’t a new thing. Other recent Reddit posts contain examples of unexpected explicit video in search results and even erotic audio tracks being suggested in one user’s Discovery Weekly algorithmic playlist. A 2022 Vice story also detailed sexually explicit audio on the platform, as well as other content like graphic nudity in user-made playlist cover art.