Apple responds to tariff threat with a $500 billion US investment plan Apple has announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including hiring 20,000 new employees and launching a new server factory in Texas. The announcement was teased after a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump, and comes as the company tries to

Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup is looking a little Pixelated Apple is several months away from launching the iPhone 17 series but a significant camera redesign may be on the horizon. Leaker Majin Bu has shared CAD renders of what are purported to be the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and the rumored iPhone 17 Air — with the latter three all featuring

What’s the deal with all these airplane crashes? First, let’s lay out the facts. Four commercial jet crashes have occurred in the last 10 weeks: Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 on Christmas Day; Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 on December 29th; American Airlines Flight 5342 on January 29th; and Delta Connection Flight 4819 on February 17th. There have been several private airplane crashes in the

How to set up crash detection on your Android phone Your phone comes with a number of useful features that we hope you’ll never have to use — and crash detection falls into that category. Movement sensors detect when you’re driving — and when you come to a sudden and abrupt stop. Your phone or watch can then alert emergency services, along with family and

Nvidia admits some early RTX 5080 cards are missing ROPs, too When Nvidia originally confirmed that some of its new RTX 50-series graphics cards had a “rare” manufacturing issue that left them missing some promised render units and a slight amount of performance as a result, it only named three affected cards: the RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti. But now, Nvidia has confirmed

SpaceX thinks it knows why Starship exploded on its last test flight SpaceX believes it knows what caused the explosion during the seventh test flight of its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster on January 16th, 2025. Fires in the aft section of Starship, located between the bottom of its liquid oxygen tank and rear heat shield, caused “all but one of Starship’s engines to execute controlled

Freedom of speech is ‘on the line’ in a pivotal Dakota Access Pipeline trial A pivotal trial over the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline opens today that could have grave consequences for protests in the US and the future of the environmental group Greenpeace. Members of the Standing Rock Sioux and more than 500 other tribes protested the development of the pipeline alongside demonstrators who joined from across the US ne…

The government is still threatening to ‘semi-fire’ workers who don’t answer an email from Elon Musk We’re nearing the deadline that Elon Musk imposed for government workers to reply to a mass email about productivity, and the results have been predictably confusing — with even a direct statement from President Donald Trump failing to clear things up. Government agencies have taken significantly different tacks toward the Musk-promoted email, w…

Nintendo’s quirky Alarmo clock is no longer exclusive to its online store Ongoing scarcity has made it challenging to purchase Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo since its soft launch last year, but it appears those days are behind us. The $99.99 alarm clock is now readily available from third-party retailers in the US, starting with Best Buy. You can also buy it directly from Nintendo without a subscription, with

Epic Games v. Apple: the fight for the future of the App Store After months of preparation, Epic Games will finally take on Apple in court in a trial that could fundamentally change the makeup of the App Store. The fight dates back to August, when Epic added a direct payment mechanism to its hit battle royale game Fortnite in violation of Apple’s rules. The iPhone maker quickly

Elon Musk claims federal employees have 48 hours to explain recent work or resign Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times, the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for

The Space Force shares a photo of Earth taken by the X-37B space plane On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse” of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage” during its December 2023 launch. The Space

Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump “spread misinformation” Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI em…

Apple’s M4 MacBook Air bump may be just around the corner Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete. Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before

Hades II just keeps getting better Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great  excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, I’ve logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more – I don’t want to get tired of the game

Our favorite apps for listening to music Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)  This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and

Reddit is experiencing outages again Following some apparent outages yesterday, Reddit is dealing with more issues Friday evening. When logged in on my desktop browser, Reddit won’t load at all — I just run into error pages. In an incognito window, the site loads, though it seems to load slower than usual. I was also able to load the site

The iOS 18.4 beta brings Matter robot vacuum support Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.4 yesterday, which users have since discovered contains support for robot vacuums in the Apple Home app through Matter. As spotted by 9to5Mac, Smart Home Centre confirmed the functionality using a Switchbot S10, which offers its own beta support for Matter. (Switchbot first added Matter robot vac…

The long wait for a glimpse of Luigi There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if there’s a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm — unclear if it’s from the bodies or the heat

Lenovo Legion Go S review: feels good, plays bad The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isn’t the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC — you just need the right design and the right OS.  I was intrigued when Valve’s own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld