Technology

A few weeks ago, I highlighted a $100 deal on a refurbished set of Jabra Elite 75t headphones. That price remains unbeatable, though if you aren’t wanting to go down the refurbished route, a brand-new set is more affordable than ever at Amazon and Best Buy. These normally cost $180, but you can get them now for $150. While the Elite 75t lack noise cancellation or a wireless charging case, they make up that with excellent sound quality, a comfortable fit, and USB-C charging. Compared to AirPods, they have better noise isolation and better compatibility with Android devices. These earned one of the top spots in our buying guide to the best truly wireless headphones. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon’s Echo Spot smart display hasn’t been easy to come by recently, but today, A...

DC Comics is preparing to host a 24-hour event this August that will include teasers and announcements for upcoming comics, games, TV shows, and films, including The Batman, Shazam!, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman 1984. The event, called FanDome, will kick off on August 22nd at 1PM ET. Alongside announcements and general news, DC Comics and WarnerMedia are wrangling an assortment of talent for interviews and discussions across some of the company’s most anticipated titles, including Aquaman, The Batman, Batwoman, Black Adam, Black Lightning, DC Super Hero Girls , Legends of Tomorrow, Stargirl, Doom Patrol, The Flash, Harley Quinn, the Snyder Cut of Justice League, Lucifer, Pennyworth, Shazam!, The Suicide Squad, Supergirl, Superman & Lois, Teen Titans Go!, Titans, Watchmen, Young Justice: O...

Seth Meyers has taken on some new jobs over the past few months. Since he started hosting Late Night at home during the coronavirus pandemic, he’s also been in charge of recording his own video and audio, running a teleprompter, and uploading the files to his production staff to make the show look, feel, and sound enough like the one he’s been making in 30 Rockefeller Plaza for the past six years. A late-night talk show is a pretty well-oiled machine at NBC — the format has been around since at least the 1950s — but according to Eric Leiderman, one of the producers for Late Night with Seth Meyers, a lot of the production workflows from Studio 8G couldn’t carry over to a show that’s done completely remotely. “We felt very vulnerable from a production standpoint for sure,” Leiderman says. “W...

The Tesla Model S Long Range Plus now has an EPA-rated range of 402 miles, making it the first electric vehicle to receive a rating of over 400 miles from the agency. The new rating applies to all North American Model S vehicles with the “Long Range Plus” name, which Tesla introduced back in February to replace the “Long Range” version of the car. “All Model S cars made since late Jan have 402 mile range,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. “This is just making it official.” The Model S Long Range Plus has a starting price of $74,990 following a price reduction last month. Until recently, the EPA-rated range of the Model S Long Range Plus was 391 miles, but this had been a source of contention between Tesla and the EPA. Last month, Tesla’s CEO claimed that the rating was a result of a mi...

Microsoft is launching a new Money in Excel feature that’s designed to help the millions of people who use Excel to track budgets and personal finances. Money in Excel is a template and add-in for Excel that allows Microsoft 365 subscribers to securely connect to bank, credit card, investment, or loan accounts and import transactions and account information directly into a spreadsheet. You’ll need to be a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber in the US to get access to Money in Excel, and you can simply download the template to begin connecting bank accounts through the Plaid connector. Most major US financial institutions are supported, and the template will automatically import transactions from accounts into a single workbook. Money in Excel.Microsoft Transactions are categorized ...

Last week I wrote about a set of predictions that I got spectacularly wrong. Today, to soothe my fragile ego, let’s talk about a case where I was a closer to the mark. In April, after talking with public health experts, I wrote about why Bluetooth-based approaches to finding new cases of COVID-19 seemed likely to fall short. A combination of human behaviors and technical challenges seemed likely to limit the effectiveness of a pandemic response scheme that relied on our phones passively pinging each other wherever we went. At the same time, I wrote, a more old-fashioned approach — using human beings to make phone calls and identify people who may have been exposed to the disease — seemed much more promising. Somewhat hilariously, at least to me, the very next day Apple and Google announced...

The European Commission is opening two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices today. The first investigation will probe whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following complaints by Spotify and Rakuten over Apple’s 30-percent cut on subscriptions and sales of ebooks through its App Store. “We need to ensure that Apple’s rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers, for example with its music streaming service Apple Music or with Apple Books,” says Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU’s antitrust division. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s App Store rules and their compliance with EU competition rules.” Spotify led the complaints into Apple’s App ...

T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers were mystified on Monday when their calls stopped going through, in what turned out to be a nationwide outage for T-Mobile’s network, specifically, that lasted most of the day. Around 1AM Tuesday, the company tweeted that voice calls and text messaging services had been fully restored. According to reports on Downdetector and on social media, reports spiking around 2:20 PM ET Monday. While AT&T told The Verge that its network was “operating normally” and Verizon said its network was “performing well,” T-Mobile confirmed that it’ was working to fix “a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country.” Verizon also said it was not to blame: “We’re aware that another carrier is having network issues. Calls to and from that ...

Google is opening up its Google Maps Platform to everyone so developers can incorporate Maps data into their games, the company announced on Monday. Its tools let developers use Maps data to build games that let you explore a modified version of the real world, similar to Niantic’s Pokémon Go. (Niantic, once a startup within Google, has its own developer toolset for making AR games that use live camera and 3D mapping data, called the Niantic Real World Platform.) Google first announced the tools in March 2018, but they were only available to a “limited group” of studios and only 10 games have been built with them so far, according to a Google blog post. The company says indie studios and other developers expressed interest in using the platform, so the company has been working to scale up ...

The US Department of Transportation launched a new voluntary program to collect and share data from autonomous vehicle operators. Companies testing AVs on public roads are invited to submit information to the government, which will then publicize it online. But given the voluntary nature of the program, safety advocates say the effort is likely to fall short of providing useful data to the public. There is currently no federal rule requiring AV companies to submit information about their testing activities to the government. Instead, a patchwork of state-by-state regulations govern what is and isn’t disclosed. California has the most stringent rules, requiring companies to obtain a license for different types of testing, disclose vehicle crashes, list the number of miles driven, and the fr...

Apple on Monday touted the findings of a new study from economic consulting firm Analysis Group that says the App Store was responsible for $517 billion in estimated total billings and sales of both physical products and services and digital goods in 2019. Of that amount, Apple says it takes a 30 percent cut of just $61 billion of those sales, as that’s the portion of total billings that constitutes digital-only goods. That includes the biggest category, mobile games, as well as in-app purchases, subscriptions, and unit sales of paid apps. In-app advertising, also largely dedicated to mobile gaming, makes up another $45 billion. Of everything else — from ride-hailing software to food delivery apps to mobile retail shops from Best Buy and Target — making up the remaining $413 billion, Apple...

It might not look like much of a video game, but Akili Interactive’s EndeavorRX, formerly Project EVO, may go down in history: it’s the first video game that can legally be marketed and prescribed as medicine in the US. That’s the landmark decision from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is authorizing doctors to prescribe the iPhone and iPad game for kids between ages eight and 12 years old with ADHD, after it underwent seven years of clinical trials that studied over 600 children to figure out whether a game could actually make a difference. [embedded content] According to the company’s favorite of the five studies, the answer is yes: one-third of kids treated “no longer had a measurable attention deficit on at least one measure of objective attention” after playing the obstac...