The Verge

Bose thinks it can be a media company for some reason

2026-06-21T14:55:44-04:00

The history books are littered with the corpses of corporate record labels started by companies that had no business being in the music industry. Bose thinks it can be the exception to the rule. It thinks it can be Red Bull. And, while Bose has more of a right to dip its toes into the media world than Build-a-Bear, there's little reason to believe it can succeed where so many others have failed.

In an interview with Business Insider, Bose CMO Jim Mollica said the company had created Bose Studios as part of a move away from traditional "campaign-driven marketing." A big element of that is going to be Bose Records, a new label the company has …

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Cold Court’s debut EP is an infectious, glitchy genre mashup

2026-06-21T13:49:54-04:00

Cold Court is a brother-sister duo from Philly that seems to love nothing more than shoving all of their influences together in a messy soup that at least superficially resembles the hyperpop you've come to expect from acts like 100 Gecs. But, where songs like "Dumbest Girl Alive" goofily wink at pop punk and emo, Cold Court are a bit more self-serious, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The opening track on the band's debut EP \ (^_^) / (aka Hands Up), "Nina", starts off sounding not unlike the dance punk bands that stormed the scene in the mid aughts like Franz Ferdinand or Test Icicles. But that all starts to change about a minute …

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Polymarket reportedly paid people to post fake videos of themselves placing bets

2026-06-21T13:20:38-04:00

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Polymarket has been paying people to film themselves placing fake bets and celebrating fake wins on social media. WSJ identified over 1,100 deceptive clips and talked to creators who, despite not stating as such in their videos, confirmed the company paid them to create the clips.

The videos posted on social media look legit at first, but there are subtle clues that betray them as fraudulent. For instance, when examined closely, one clip shows someone visiting "poiymarket.com" rather than polymarket.com. According to the Journal's investigation, none of the bets placed in the over 1,100 vide …

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How Roomba started a robot revolution

2026-06-21T08:29:01-04:00

If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would just bump around your house, looking for something to suck up, until its battery died or its (way too small) tank filled up. Not that it mattered, though. You probably loved your Roomba. You probably gave it a name.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Roomba, and how it made vacuums lovable. The Verge's David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined by iRobot's co-founder and former CEO Colin Angle to trace the robovac revolution back to its origins, with a group of engineers try …

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Electric air taxis are stuck in the courtroom

2026-06-16T17:21:59-04:00

Joby flight at JFK airport. | Image: The Verge

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

Last year, two of the leading air taxi companies in the US, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, sued each other, with Joby accusing Archer of corporate espionage and Archer claiming that Joby was concealing its ties to China. Then, in February of this year, Archer filed a patent infringement suit against a different air taxi rival, Vertical A …

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Sony’s Xperia 1 VIII is still a phone for the fans

2026-06-21T06:29:00-04:00

The 1 VIII doesn’t look much like any Xperia that’s come before.

The Xperia 1 VIII marks an attempt at a step change for Sony's flagship phone line. Not only has it had an aesthetic overhaul, but Sony has also revamped the camera system, dropping the continuous optical zoom telephoto that's defined the last four generations of Xperia phone.

It's not all different. Sony staples like a 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD card slot remain, and a few specific design touches, like a thick front bezel that fits stereo speakers, have stayed intact. Sony's ambitious pricing hasn't changed either: The Xperia 1 VIII isn't launching in the US, but in the UK and Europe, it starts from £1,399 / €1,499 (about $1,850), r …

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The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI

2026-06-20T14:46:48-04:00

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.

According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re …

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Musician and YouTuber Hainbach on ‘Breath of the Wild’ and Swiss Army Knives

2026-06-20T12:32:37-04:00

Indulging in the “Dark Souls of synthesis.” | Image: Aleksander Stojanov / Hainbach

Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum, is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co …

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Moves of the Diamond Hand is an unfinished, irresistibly weird dice-based RPG

2026-06-18T15:57:13-04:00

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.

Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …

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Toy Story has the right take on tech

2026-06-19T09:42:16-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we should totally all do together one of these days), listening to Paul McCartney on Song Exploder, trudging through the bugs of the iOS 27 beta in order to use the good new Siri, once again trying and failing to switch to YouTube Music, free trial-hopping my way through the World Cup, finally upgrading my camera setup with the E …

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