Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well," said Sharma. As Chiang is departing today, her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders …
Let’s be honest. Nobody spends $2,000 on a phone and expects it to break a few hours later. Especially if all you’re doing is opening and closing the device.
Well, Apple’s first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, launched today. Of course, it didn’t take long before reports of cracked screens hit the internet, giving many people who can’t wait to dunk on Apple all the ammunition they need to make jokes online.
Photos of damaged inner displays, with cracks around the hinge, are already showing up on Reddit and the MacRumors forums. Some photos also show phones with bright lines stretching across one side of the screen. One iPhone Duo owner claims their phone lasted only 6 hours and fewer than 20 openings before it began showing signs of damage. Not ideal, assuming all of these photos/claims are real.
Everything We Know About the iPhone Duo’s Screens Already Cracking
So, are people really having issues with these new iPhones already? According to PhoneArena, Reddit moderators verified the Australian owner’s damaged phone and replacement after reviewing additional photos and Apple repair paperwork. They couldn’t confirm the cause. The cause of the failure remains unsolved.
Apple hadn’t responded to The Verge’s request for comment at the time of publication, though PhoneArena reported that the owner said an Apple Store technician called it a “day one manufacturing error.” Of course, that isn’t an official statement from Apple.
As for how many iPhone Duos are out in the wild and already damaged, that number also remains a mystery. Odds are this won’t end up resembling the Red Ring of Death fiasco Microsoft dealt with all those years ago, though.
Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called "Time4Popcorn" still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the world, phoning home to now-abandoned web domains over unencrypted HTTP and running an outdated, insecure version of Chrome.
Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure and leading to a reported two deaths and at least 17 injuries.
The Ukrainian military reported receiving no advance warning about the Starshield speed restriction. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was a direct message from the US amid rising tensions b …
We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it be a better product if it started as an iPad rather than an iPhone? Would we feel differently about this thing if it were simply called the iPad Du …
Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."
That means anyone who has connected their Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos to AI Mode and other Search tools …
The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.
SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners.
The move would give SpaceX access to half of the 158,500 cell towers currently operational in the US, according to Reuters. When asked about a potential partnership with SpaceX, Amazon, or other satellite services during an earnings call on Wednesday, Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant said, "I don't think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can …
Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."
The business terms, which were originally supposed to go into effect on October 30th, appeared to give Meta permission to freely scrape the new sites that use its platforms, while using the material for AI training. Though Meta u …
Seven years after Sigma claimed its original fp was the world's smallest and lightest full-frame mirrorless camera, the company has announced a similarly compact follow-up with several welcome upgrades, including an improved sensor, an articulating LCD display, and longer battery life. But this time around, Sigma is only claiming its new FP2 is the "world's smallest" full-frame shooter since those upgrades have increased its body-only weight by about 6 grams.
The Sigma FP2 will be available on November 11th and starts at $2,199 for the camera body alone. For $2,749, you can bundle it with Sigma's upgraded EVF-21 viewfinder featuring a 5.76 …
It’s been a long time since we had to rethink how to use an iPhone. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Duo is an entirely new kind of iPhone, so it comes with a bit of a learning curve. That's a wild thing to imagine, since the iPhone has had very few fundamental changes since its inception. But the Duo is built different. If you won the preorder lottery and managed to get your hands on one today, you'll see what that means. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll lose track of the volume buttons as you turn the thing around.
We've learned a few tricks over the past week of flipping and folding the Duo as much as we could. Here are our favorite tips and hacks for newly minted Duo owners.
You can set orientation lock on each screen independent …
If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" or Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." The iPod seems to pop up on any non-existent Apple Music page, so you can find it by just adding a string of random letters after the main Apple Music URL.
Just imagine… a nice, clean homescreen with no ads, thanks to Claude. | Image: cleanyourtv
Vibe coding has reached TVs. Social media is awash with posts from people using LLMs and open-source tools to remove ads and tracking, trim bloat so the OS runs faster, and even completely change the look and organization of their homescreens. While a lot of it is fun - one user turned their TV homescreen into a Pokémon town - I think there's a level of frustration behind it, too. And TV companies should take notice.
Vibe coded my parents' TV this afternoon!
It was showing a sponsored ad before you could even get to Netflix.
Gave Claude Code the model number, it found the TV on wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher.
The Brick Night is considerably bigger then the OG Brick, and more than double the price. | Image: Brick
Brick, the company behind the $59 gadget that blocks you from using apps on your phone, has launched a new device that's designed to help you cut back on doomscrolling in bed. The $129 Brick Night introduces a location-based element: instead of requiring you to tap your phone against the device, like the OG Brick, this version uses Bluetooth to automatically kick in when you enter your bedroom (or any other room you put it in).
The Brick Night uses two CR2477 batteries, and you can set a location zone of up to 25 feet x 25 feet. Both this and the Brick allow you to select specific apps to block instead of rendering your entire phone inacces …
The Warhound website calls this “a new breed of dominance.” | Image: Warhound
A new Texas-based defense startup has a plan to improve military and police dogs in the US: it's going to genetically modify them and equip them with Anduril's military technology. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences (the company that says it's trying to resurrect extinct animals), and it's already secured $200 million in funding from investors.
Warhound plans to use Colossal's work in genetics, cloning, and animal biology to "produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions," with Anduril then equipping them with its "advanced cybernetic Augments." T …
Don’t be fooled; only one of these is a truly small phone (it’s the iPhone 13 Mini on the left).
When we published our review of the iPhone Duo, I got a lot of hopeful questions from my fellow Mini fans who took note of the cover screen's Mini-ish 5.4-inch size. "Is this… a small phone that turns into a tablet?" they asked. And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no. The Duo is not the small phone we've been looking for.
But the Duo is thick and heavy. You will feel its weight every time you read an email, scroll Instagram, or put it in your pocket. It is a dense phone, and after a week with the Duo, …
Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use AI in misleading ways," spurring the new policies and restrictions.
Under the new policies, every listing must include "at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background," and all photos must "accurately represent the item a buyer will receive." The photos that aren't the first one can be edited with softw …
My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA.
My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that much. It couldn't possibly charge that much money if it wants next gen to be a success. "I wouldn't release it at all," former Microsoft exec Mike Ybarra recently said.
My third thought: Didn't Microsoft alreadysay out loud that it knows people won't pay that much?
Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday.
Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and marketing content, it's also supposed to create realistic scenes, digital art, environmental imagery, and more. The model's two-stage sy …
Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That's in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It's not just PCs, either - that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low.
Counterpoint linked the decline in PC shipments to higher component prices. Up until Q2 2026, PC shipments had been growing for over two years straight. But over the last several months, RAM, SSDs, and chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have all gotten more expensive, leading to price hikes on everything from MacBooks to Raspberry Pis. C …
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