Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge Today, Framework is the modular repairable laptop company. Tomorrow, it wants to be a consumer electronics company, period. That’s one of the biggest reasons it just raised another $18 million in funding — it wants to expand beyond the laptop into “additional product categories.” Framework CEO Nirav Patel tells me that has always been the plan and that the company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops, too. “We chose to take on the notebook space first,” he says, partly because Framework knew it could bootstrap its ambitions by catering to the PC builders and tinkerers and Linux enthusiasts left behind by big OEMs and partly because it wanted to go big or go home. If Framework could succeed in laptops, he thought, it would be... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla provided a sneak peek of its upcoming ridehailing mobile app in the company’s latest earnings report. The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has said that Tesla will unveil a long-gestating robotaxi in August. The company revealed five screens from the forthcoming feature. The first screen shows a big button that says “Summon” with a lower message for the possible wait time. The next screen has a 3D map with a little virtual vehicle following a route to the waiting passenger. It looks a lot like the Uber app — but more Tesla-y. Image: Tesla Tesla’s ridehailing app looks like your average ridehailing app. While they wait, the passenger can set the vehicle’s climate to a preferred temperature. Other details, like... Continue reading…

Demand for Vision Pro is falling. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple is reportedly cutting its Vision Pro headset shipment forecast for the rest of the year due to cooling demand. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo writes that Apple cut orders for the Vision Pro even before it launched outside of the US. His sources claim that Apple now expects to sell only around 400,000 to 450,000 units in 2024, compared to what Kuo says was a “market consensus” of 700,000 to 800,000. Demand for the $3,500 Vision Pro dropped much lower than the company was expecting. Facing the unanticipated drop in steam, Apple is now adjusting its headset roadmap, possibly pushing the future of a lower-cost entry mixed reality headset beyond 2025 (if at all). Apple’s Vision Pro has largely wowed early adopters due to its technical... Continue reading…

Photo by VCG / VCG via Getty Images Tesla reported its first quarter earnings during an incredibly shaky moment for the company in which sales numbers and the stock price have both fallen. Against this backdrop, Tesla reported $1.1 billion in net income on $21 billion in revenue, down 9 percent from $23.3 billion the same time last year. The company’s profits, once the envy of the auto industry, are at their lowest in six years thanks to rampant price cutting and slowing demand. Earlier this week, the company approved its latest price cuts for the US, China, and Germany — all major markets for the EV maker. Tesla’s Q1 operating margins are 5.5 percent, down from 11.4 percent in Q1 2023. In a note to shareholders, the company blames an industrywide shift from... Continue reading…

Wattpad says DMs will be shut down on May 6th, alongside the deletion of all existing messages. | Image: Wattpad Community publishing platform Wattpad is removing the ability for users to send each other direct messages, claiming that the feature has “only been relevant to a small percentage” of its global user base. Users will retain access to their DMs until May 6th, after which all existing messages will be deleted and the feature will no longer be available, according to Wattpad’s help center. Wattpad is instead encouraging its users to communicate via the public commenting feature on stories or the conversation section of profile pages. There is currently no means for users to download their existing DMs, and Wattpad says that it’s unable to retrieve such data. The feature will still exist in a limited capacity solely for Wattpad to... Continue reading…

Home internet for when you’re not at home. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has announced two new home internet plans: Home Internet Plus and Away. Well, technically that’s one home internet plan and one anywhere-but-home plan. These new flavors of T-Mobile’s 5G-powered internet service aim to address different customers, but both serve the same goal: leveraging that sweet 5G spectrum to do more than just keep our phones connected. The new Away plan, importantly, does not allow for “extended use in the same location,” according to a footnote in T-Mobile’s press release. It’s basically a Starlink competitor designed for campers and RV owners, but instead of using satellite connectivity, it’s more like a supercharged cellular hotspot. It can connect up to 64 devices at a time, which seems like way more... Continue reading…

Apple’s next event will be all about iPads. | Image: Apple Apple has gone and announced a spring event for May 7th at 7AM PT / 10AM ET. While the company didn’t say what the event is about, the Apple Pencil in its graphic suggests we’re finally about to hear about new iPads — but which ones? Well, almost certainly OLED iPad Pros, which we’ve been hearing about for months, but the company might also announce a new iPad Air in two sizes for the first time. Rumors have also circulated in the last few months about a new Apple Pencil and updated Magic Keyboard accessories that would give iPad Pro owners a more laptop-like feel. Because more accessories are all the iPad needs, right? It doesn’t seem likely that there will be an update of the 10th-generation vanilla iPad or the iPad Mini quite yet, so... Continue reading…

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Tech companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon committed today to reviewing their AI training data for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and removing it from use in any future models. The companies signed on to a new set of principles meant to limit the proliferation of CSAM. They promise to ensure training datasets do not contain CSAM, to avoid datasets with a high risk of including CSAM, and to remove CSAM imagery or links to CSAM from data sources. The companies also commit to “stress-testing” AI models to ensure they don’t generate any CSAM imagery and to only release models if these have been evaluated for child safety. Other signatories include Anthropic, Civitai, Metaphysic, Mistral AI, and Stability AI. G... Continue reading…

Image: Atlus Metaphor: ReFantazio is the inscrutable name for Atlus’ next RPG project. The company launched a new trailer and a 30-minute video introducing players to the story, gameplay, and social elements of the game, and at first blush, it looks pretty damn intriguing. Check out the gameplay video below. Metaphor: ReFantazio is an action RPG from Studio Zero, a new internal studio spun up in 2016 and headed by Katsura Hashino. Atlus really wants you to know the bona fides of the developers working on Metaphor. Hashino himself worked on Shin Megami Tensei III, Persona 3, 4, and 5. The game’s mechanical designer is Ikuto Yamashita, who helped design the mechs in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Shoji Meguro, who did the music for the Persona series,... Continue reading…

Image: Spotify Spotify has launched a colorful personality quiz designed to help K-pop fans determine their persona. For those unfamiliar with the K-pop term or its Jungian roots, a “persona” refers to the distinct, public-facing role of each member of a band. The feature leans into K-pop’s status as a major area of growth in the global music industry, which Spotify has been eager to tap into. The five-question quiz, which fans can take inside the Spotify app, will identify whether you’re a Main Visual, a Main Vocal, a Main Rapper, a Main Dancer, or a Trainee. In a callout to K-pop fan culture, the quiz will also generate a photocard (similar to the band-specific trading cards) with your results that you can share on social media. The feature will be... Continue reading…