The Global Update

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is getting a bunch of small but handy new features, like the ability to more finely tune your playback speed, new tools to collaborate on playlists, a sleep timer, and more. For me, a person who has written multiple times about video playback speeds, YouTube’s new speed…

Image: Apple Apple just announced, in a somewhat understated fashion via a press release, a new iPad Mini. It’s the first upgrade for Apple’s smallest tablet since 2021. The new Mini starts at $499. It’s up for pre-order now and goes on sale next Wednesday. The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs…

Sonos apparently believes its mobile app has reached a good enough place to resume product launches: today the company has announced the Arc Ultra and Sub 4. The $999 Arc Ultra is a more powerful take on the original Arc, and it’s the first Sonos product to feature unique transducer technology from Mayht, a startup…

Illustration: The Verge Google plans to buy electricity from next-generation nuclear reactors. It announced the deal yesterday, which it says is the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase electricity from advanced small modular reactors (SMRs) that are still under development. Google inked the deal with engineering company Kairos Power, which plans to get its first…

The Wired Floodlight Camera provides many of the same features as Arlo’s wireless alternative for a lower price. | Image: Arlo Arlo is releasing a new floodlight security camera that connects directly to your home’s Wi-Fi and power source. That allows the Arlo Wired Floodlight Camera to monitor and illuminate outdoor spaces 24/7 without interruption,…

This new camera from Simplisafe lets trained agents watch over your property. | Image: Simplisafe Home security company SimpliSafe has launched its new live monitoring feature — Active Guard Outdoor Protection. Announced earlier this year, the service is powered by a new outdoor camera that uses on-device and cloud-based AI to alert call center agents…

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge In fashion, it’s said that trends return every 20 years. But it seems technology has started to repeat itself at the same cadence, too. Can you identify what things happened in 2004, 2024, or in some cases, both? Microsoft loses its antitrust case in Europe Year: 2004 Two decades…

Before a podcast was a “podcast,” it was… well, it wasn’t really much of anything. A few of the early believers called them “audio blogs,” and the journalist often credited with coining the term “podcast” also offered “GuerillaMedia” as an alternative in the very same article. (And actually, there’s plenty of debate over exactly who…

Oura furthers its lead among smart rings with hardware and software refinements, but its subscription is still its biggest downside. For the greater part of this past summer, I wore six smart rings at once. I wanted to see which was best, and the Oura Ring Gen 3 was the clear winner. Well, it’s been…

The DJI Air 3S. | Image: DJI The Air 3S is DJI’s new mid-range drone that builds upon the Air 3 in a few notable ways. These include better image quality, especially in low light, with nighttime obstacle avoidance to help ensure the drone returns home safely. That’s promising since the versatile (if boring) Air…