Technology

There’s been a sweeping change across the United States’ biggest wireless carriers. Over the past decade, the leaders of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T oversaw a shift from simplistic feature phones into the era of smartphones and streaming. After early iPhones and Android devices strained their cellular networks, the major carriers gradually evolved their infrastructure to provide the robust, nationwide LTE coverage on offer today. Unlimited data plans came, went, and came again, and the carriers eventually sought to carve out their own stake in content and media, to varying degrees of success. But two of the telecom CEOs who oversaw that shift — Lowell McAdam at Verizon and John Legere at T-Mobile — have now left (McAdam in July 2018 and Legere in April 2020), and AT&T’s Randall Ste...

Chris Parnell is a normcore comedy assassin. After a career in improv, two stints on Saturday Night Live, and countless roles on sitcoms like 30 Rock and animated shows like Rick and Morty, Parnell has perfected the art of using his extremely average appearance — and voice — to deliver disarmingly strange, ridiculous and deadpan comedy. Few are better at making the act of looking like a relatively normal dude and keeping a straight face so funny (“the Chronic — what — cles of Narnia!”). This is why, as Jerry Smith, Parnell is an essential part of what makes Rick and Morty work. His ability to adopt an aw-shucks affectation even as he bears witness to some of the most bizarre things committed to animation makes him one of the most endearing aspects of the show. Recently, Parnell spoke with ...

Spotify is giving premium users a new feature that’ll allow them to share DJ duties with anyone in their immediate vicinity. Group Sessions, as Spotify is calling the feature, is rolling out in beta today and only works between premium users. A host can share a scannable Spotify code from their app with whomever they want to share playback control, meaning that the host and guests can pause, play, skip, and select tracks in the queue, and add their own picks to the list. The queue will update on everyone’s devices, and sessions will end after an hour of inactivity. Spotify doesn’t seem to have put a cap on the number of users who can join a session but it tells The Verge it will “continue to evolve the experience over time based on user feedback.” This is a small, but incremental perk for ...

Welcome to our guide to the best laptops of 2020. We live in a world where smartphones are ubiquitous, tablets are commonplace, and even smartwatches are a thing that people talk about on the regular. But throughout all of these advances, the humble laptop has persevered — and for good reason. When it comes time to work, whether that’s editing photos, writing a lot of emails, composing documents, or staying in touch with colleagues and family, we’re here to help you find the best laptop for the job. It’s getting harder to buy a bad laptop, but what separates the best laptops from good laptops is how they balance power, efficiency, portability, and comfort. The best laptop should have a fantastic keyboard and trackpad — after all, those are the two biggest reasons you’d ch...

Microsoft is working on a new text prediction feature for Outlook that’s similar to Gmail’s Smart Compose. The text predictions will allow Outlook.com and Outlook on the web to write emails for people using predictive tech that offers up suggestions while you type. A support document reveals that Outlook users will be able to accept suggestions with tab or right arrow on a keyboard, or just keep typing to ignore them. Microsoft is currently planning to roll this out later this month, and it’s marked as “in development” on the company’s Microsoft 365 feature roadmap. Microsoft is also working on a “send later” feature for Outlook on the web that will allow users to schedule when to send an email message. That’s particularly useful if you wake up from a deep sleep at 5AM and remember you nee...

Mickey Mouse has returned to Disneyland: capitalism is healing. After shutting its parks and resorts worldwide in March, Disney is starting to restart what is a core part of its business. The company is beginning with the Shanghai Disney Resort, which began admitting visitors this week for the first time since January. The park is operating under a slew of new healthy and safety measures, though, the most significant of which is a cap on visitor numbers. A maximum of 24,000 people will be allowed to enter each day, representing around 30 percent of the park’s regular capacity. On the ground reports suggest much fewer guests than this showed up on on the first day, and that the mood was somewhat muted, as masked visitors were greeted by costumed cast members (Disney’s term for staff) shouti...

Newton Mail is returning to life once again under new ownership, marking the unexpected third life for the premium email app. Newton Mail was originally set to shut down on April 30th after Essential — which previously owned the service — shut down earlier this year. But in the latest plot twist in the long-running history of the application, instead of shutting down again, Newton Mail has been bought from Essential by a pair of new owners: Maitrik Kataria and Justin Mitchell. Neither of the two are new to the software space; Kataria — who’ll be taking over as Newton Mail’s new CEO — is a product designer at a software development called Simform, while Mitchell is the founder of the SoFriendly design agency, in addition to running a messaging app called Yac. The two fully acknowledge in a ...

Vulnerabilities discovered in the Thunderbolt connection standard could allow hackers to access the contents of a locked laptop’s hard drive within minutes, a security researcher from the Eindhoven University of Technology has announced. Wired reports that the vulnerabilities affect all Thunderbolt-enabled PCs manufactured before 2019. Although hackers need physical access to a device to exploit the flaws, they could theoretically gain access to all data in about five minutes even if the laptop is locked, password protected, and has an encrypted hard drive. The entire process can reportedly be completed with a series of off-the-shelf components costing just a few hundred dollars. Perhaps most worryingly, the researcher says the flaws cannot be patched in software, and that a hardware redes...

The first phones with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765 processor are just starting to trickle out, but that isn’t stopping the company from announcing an upgraded version today called the Snapdragon 768G, which offers better CPU and GPU performance than its predecessor. The original 765G was announced back in December alongside the standard Snapdragon 765 and the flagship Snapdragon 865. The two 765 processors were notable in being Qualcomm’s first chipsets to feature integrated 5G modems. (The Snapdragon 865, while including 5G by default, requires a separate cellular modem.) 15 percent faster CPU and GPU performance The main difference between the regular 765 and the 765G was the addition of a Qualcomm Adreno 620 GPU, which the company promised would offer up to 20 percent improved performance ...

The Trump administration is reportedly in talks with major processor manufacturers to build factories in the US, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. While the Journal’s sources reference various “talks” between the administration and manufacturers, Intel reportedly has a more specific plan to run a plant that manufactures chips “securely” — playing on US fears of reliance on processor plants based overseas. Trump’s record on US manufacturing is abysmal, so expecting a crop of new US processor foundries to pop up is a risky bet. Though he has boasted of achievements in the tech sector, many of these have been total whoppers, including a repeated lie about a “new” Apple factory in Texas. But the Journal’s report suggests things might be more serious than a photo-op with the p...

A relatively small group of superstars dominate attention and money on Twitch, but it’s still a place dominated by a vast underclass of lonely hearts looking for viewers. Twitch Roulette, first spotted by The Next Web, is my new favorite way to watch people on Twitch. It makes it easy to find the streamers out there searching for the 50 followers it takes to become a Twitch affiliate. After flipping through a couple of offline channels and garden-variety Fortnite streams, I found “Big Lee:” a new streamer who says he has been going hard non-stop for the past few days. When I joined the stream, Lee was playing American Truck Simulator with no audience. (As my colleague Patricia Hernandez reported, some Twitch streamers spend years broadcasting to no one.) “I wanna hit 10 followers, then 50,...