The Verge - Tech Posts

Google Maps in the US will change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley

2025-01-27T21:16:54-05:00

Illustration: The Verge

Google said today that it plans to update Google Maps to reflect President Trump’s January 20th executive order to change the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali to the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley, respectively.

The company noted on X the updated nomenclature will appear once the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated.

“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the company posted on X. It added that when “name changes vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name. Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.”

Denali was named Mount McKinley until 2015.

The US Department of the Interior said last week it plans to follow the executive order to implement the name changes.

“The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, under the purview of the Department of the Interior, is working expeditiously to update the official federal nomenclature in the Geographic Names Information System to reflect these changes, effective immediately for federal use,” the Department of the Interior said on Friday.

An Apple spokesperson wasn’t immediately available to comment on its plans for Apple Maps.

Trump says he’ll put tariffs on imported chips ‘in the near future’

2025-01-27T20:38:53-05:00

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Without going into detail about what might happen to the $52 billion in subsidies from the CHIPS Act under his administration, Donald Trump said tariffs on foreign computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals are coming “in the near future.” He also namechecked DeepSeek’s AI releases, saying, “...coming up with a faster method of AI and less expensive, that’s good. I view that as a positive if it is fact and it is true, and nobody knows, but I view that as a positive.”

In the speech at the House GOP Issues Conference held at the Trump National Doral Resort in Miami Monday afternoon, he said that to return the production of these goods to the US, “we don’t want to give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has.” Instead the incentive for manufacturers will be “they will not want to pay a tax.”

Bloomberg reports that later, in comments to reports, Trump said he wanted a tariff rate “much bigger” than 2.5 percent.

This is despite the outcome of the trade war with China during his first administration that expanded China’s trade surplus with the US between 2018, when the tariffs began, and 2021. A CTA report from last year cited by TechCrunch said Trump’s proposed tariffs could increase prices on laptops and tablets by 46 percent, game consoles by 40 percent, and smartphones by 26 percent.

He also said that “we will have more plants built in the next short period of time than ever before because the incentive will be there,” however it’s unclear how many of those will be like The Stargate Project’s first datacenter in Texas, which was in the works well before the start of his administration. Last fall, the Commerce Department said that by then, it had “announced over $30 billion in proposed CHIPS private sector investments spanning 23 projects in 15 states” with 16 new manufacturing facilities in the works.

He also said of DeepSeek that “instead of spending billions you will spend less and hopefully come up with the same solution,” even as OpenAI, Softbank & co. say they’re preparing to spend $500 billion on AI datacenters.

Update, January 27th: Added details from Bloomberg.

FBI’s warrantless ‘backdoor’ searches ruled unconstitutional

2025-01-27T18:34:12-05:00

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Following years of litigation, a federal court has finally ruled it unconstitutional for the FBI to search communications of US citizens collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In a ruling unsealed last week, US District Court Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall decided that these “backdoor” searches violate the Fourth Amendment.

As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, FISA allows federal intelligence agencies to collect swaths of foreign communications “in the name of ‘national security.’” Even though some of those communications might involve US residents, the government has argued that requiring warrants “would hinder the FBI’s ability to obtain and act upon threat intelligence.” In 2023, the FBI conducted more than 57,000 “US person” data searches, marking a 52 percent decrease from 2022.

This particular decision stems from a case involving Agron Hasbajrami, a permanent US resident who was arrested in 2011 over accusations that he planned to join a terrorist organization in Pakistan. However, the government failed to disclose that part of its case rested on emails it obtained without a warrant through Section 702 of FISA.

An appeals court in 2020 ruled that these types of searches might be unconstitutional, but now it’s official. Judge DeArcy Hall found the FBI’s warrantless search of US data “unreasonable” under the Fourth Amendment:

While communications of U.S. persons may nonetheless be intercepted, incidentally or inadvertently, it would be paradoxical to permit warrantless searches of the same information that Section 702 is specifically designed to avoid collecting. To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run “backdoor searches” that circumvent the Fourth Amendment.

Congress reauthorized Section 702 of FISA last year, and it’s set to expire again in 2026. The EFF is asking lawmakers to create a “legislative warrant requirement so that the intelligence community does not continue to trample on the constitutionally protected rights to private communications.”

Sony reduces OLED burn-in fears with a three-year warranty on InZone monitors

2025-01-27T16:58:47-05:00

Image: Sony

Sony is upping the limited warranty on some InZone gaming monitors to three years and is tossing in OLED burn-in coverage for the 27-inch M10S. The company announced the additional coverage today after launching both the InZone M10S OLED and M9 II LED in September with only one-year limited warranties out of the box. Sony says other than that, the limited warranties remain as they were.

Manufacturers have long been averse to talking about burn-in or have outright categorized the phenomenon as “normal use,” denying warranty claims to fix it on various panel types. However, OLEDs have historically been more susceptible to burn-in, especially when used with many static images like those from a PC. In recent years, OLED has improved to be less sensitive to burn-ins.

Sony is the latest in a trend of manufacturers adding burn-in coverage. Alienware was one of the first to specifically include OLED burn-in within its three-year coverage on the QD-OLED monitor launched in 2022, and for its latest 27-inch 4K model coming this year. And in 2023, The Verge’s Sean Hollister asked LG to explicitly warrant the company’s OLED monitors against burn-in and they agreed and changed their verbiage.

Screenshot: The Verge

A Samsung representative on this Best Buy product listing says the three-year warranty on the 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 covers burn-in.

Since then, companies like MSI and Asus have also pledged to cover OLED burn-in on some models, including their latest ones (in some countries). It’s important to research the warranty included in the model you’re buying to determine whether burn-in coverage is included. For instance, Samsung’s website shows a general policy for its warranty that excludes burn-ins, however, an online rep confirmed it does cover it on a 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8. However, the company still hasn’t clarified if burn-ins are covered for its latest 27-inch Odyssey OLED G8 gaming monitor.

Now Apple tells us how to update AirPods

2025-01-27T16:46:00-05:00

To update the firmware on your AirPods, first put them in the case. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Apple updated its AirPods firmware support page today with a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to upgrade the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max with their latest firmware, according to MacRumors. While most Apple devices, like the iPhone or Apple Watch, can start updates in the settings, with the AirPods, you have to wait for the update process to happen on its own.

The AirPods firmware support page still includes Apple’s original summary of the conditions needed for the update process but has now added an expanded step-by-step guide to help ensure the process happens automatically.

Although most of the steps have been previously known, there are some specific suggestions added, including charging with a USB cable and waiting at least 30 minutes for the update to happen. Those clarifications may help you if you’ve been struggling to get firmware updates to work.

The following steps are specifically for the AirPods and AirPods Pro. The instructions for the AirPods Max are nearly identical, but with the charging case steps omitted.

Make sure that your AirPods are in Bluetooth range of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac that’s connected to Wi-Fi.
Put your AirPods in their charging case and close the lid.
Plug the charging cable into your charging case, then plug the other end of the cable into a USB charger or port.
Keep the lid of the charging case closed, and wait at least 30 minutes for the firmware to update.
Open the lid of the charging case to reconnect your AirPods to your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Check the firmware version again.

There are still no sounds or pop-ups on a connected device letting you know when your AirPods’ firmware has been successfully updated. After following these steps and waiting for at least half an hour, you can check your AirPods firmware version manually by opening the Bluetooth settings of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, clicking the Info button next to the name of your AirPods, and then navigating to the About section.

If it’s still showing a firmware version that’s older than the latest versions Apple lists on its support page, the company recommends resetting the AirPods and then going through the firmware update steps again.

DeepSeek: all the news about the startup that’s shaking up AI stocks

2025-01-27T15:20:05-05:00

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Chinese startup DeepSeek claims its AI models can match the performance of those made by OpenAI and Meta — but at a fraction of the cost.

DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent, while the newly-released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.

DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store, and the company is disrupting financial markets, with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent to cut nearly $600 billion from its market cap on January 27th, which CNBC said is the biggest single-day drop in US history.

. The AI assistant is powered by the startup’s “state-of-the-art” DeepSeek-V3 model, allowing users to ask questions, plan trips, generate text, and more. As downloads of DeepSeek’s app spiked, the startup began restricting signups due to “malicious attacks.”

Launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek has garnered attention for building open-source AI models using less cash and fewer GPUs when compared to the billions spent by OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others. If DeepSeek’s performance claims are true, it could prove that the startup managed to build powerful AI models despite strict US export controls preventing chipmakers like Nvidia from selling high-performance graphics cards in China.

Here’s all the latest on DeepSeek.

The Pebble smartwatch is making a comeback

2025-01-27T15:08:56-05:00

The Pebble Time Round just got a new lease on life. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge

Eric Migicovsky still wears his Pebble. Thirteen years after he founded the wearables company and found huge success on Kickstarter, and more than eight years after he sold the company to Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google, Migicovsky’s watch still works. (In case you’re wondering: when I saw him at CES a few weeks ago, he appeared to be wearing a white Pebble Time Round model. But he has a box full of them at home.) It hasn’t gotten a software update since December 2016, though, and he’s been worried for a while that it will eventually stop getting notifications, or connecting to his phone, or run into some other show-stopping problem.

Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.

To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.

The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old.

Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge

Pebbles were always gadget-y gadgets, which is still part of their appeal.

The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. “I’ve tried literally everything else,” he says, “and nothing else comes close.” Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements — lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it’s true that there’s been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. “For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there’s just nothing.”

The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn’t try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches.

If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that’s precisely the point. Migicovsky tells me over and over that the plan is not to reinvent Pebble, or AI the bejesus out of the concept, or do whatever else you’d do starting a hardware company in 2025. The fact that the Pebble on his wrist still works, and still works for him, is evidence that maybe Pebble had already finished its job. “We’re building a spiritual, not successor, but clone of Pebble,” he says, “because there’s not that much I actually want to change.”

A lot of other things have changed in eight years, though. Google, Apple, and Samsung all now have good smartwatches that are tied tightly to their other devices — Pebble always had trouble getting access to features on iOS, in particular, and that’s not getting easier. Smartwatches are currently health and fitness devices above all else, and they’re getting vastly more complex and powerful in pursuit of those features. Google obviously doesn’t see any form of Pebble as a threat; its best chance is to chart another path entirely.

The biggest difference this time will be how the company itself operates. Migicovsky wrote a long blog post in 2022 explaining what went wrong at Pebble the first time and ascribed its failure in part to taking a bunch of investment money and letting it change the company. Since then, Migicovsky has made plenty of money from Beeper and during a stint as an investor at Y Combinator; his new company is his alone. Right now, it’s just Migicovsky and a few part-time employees — it’ll grow, he says, but not too much. “The core thing here is: sustainable.”

Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform’s apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too. “There’s going to be the ability for anyone who wants to, to take Pebble source code, compile it, run it on their Pebbles, build new Pebbles, build new watches,” he says. “They could even use it in random other hardware. Who knows what people can do with it now?”

This whole project will take time, Migicovsky cautions. He only found out for sure that Google would open-source the software a few days ago, and he hasn’t been able to use it at all yet. But he’s already working on hardware prototypes, and he’s crystal clear on what he wants the new Pebbles to be. He knows he can do it because he already did it once. The evidence is right there on his wrist. All he’s trying to do is make sure it can stay there.

iOS 18.3 is out with tweaks to AI notification summaries

2025-01-27T13:44:25-05:00

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

iOS 18.3 is here, and it’s bringing changes to AI notification summaries on your iPhone. In iOS 18.3’s release notes, Apple says it has temporarily disabled notification summaries for news and entertainment apps.

The change, which was first spotted in the iOS 18.3 beta, comes after the BBC called out the feature for incorrectly summarizing one of its headlines. If you opt-in to the feature, Apple will notify you once it becomes available again.

For Apple devices that support Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later, iPads and Macs with the Apple Silicon M1 chip or later, and the most recent version of the iPad mini), today’s updates will also switch Apple Intelligence on by default.

Other features coming with the new iPhone update include the ability to use Visual Intelligence to add an event to the Calendar app from a poster or flyer, as well as a way to “easily identify plants and animals.” On Macs, the macOS 15.3 update that is also rolling out now is adding support for Genmoji, along with similar changes for notification summaries.

Additionally, iOS 18.3 will show notification summaries in italicized text to help you distinguish them from standard notifications. There will be new settings that let you manage notification summaries from your lock screen as well.

You can download the iOS 18.3 update by heading to Settings > General > Software Update.

Meta AI will use its ‘memory’ to provide better recommendations

2025-01-27T12:46:13-05:00

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta is widely launching the ability for its AI chatbot to “remember” certain details about you, such as your dietary preferences or your interests, the company said in a blog post on Monday. It will then use your past conversations, in addition to details from Facebook and Instagram accounts, to provide more relevant recommendations.

Meta first started rolling out a memory feature for its AI chatbot last year, but now it will be available across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp on iOS and Android in the US and Canada. Though you can tell Meta AI to remember certain things, like that you love traveling, it will also “pick up important details based on context.”

For example, if Meta AI provides you with a recipe that contains meat, and you respond that you’re vegan, the chatbot will adjust its future responses to account for your preference.

Image: Meta

Along with these “memories,” Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram will deliver “a greater level of personalization” using information from your accounts on each platform, including your age, gender, and “interests based on your activity,” according to Meta’s support page.

As noted by Meta, if you ask its chatbot for something fun to do with family, Meta AI could use your home location listed in your Facebook profile, as well as recently-viewed reels showing live country performances, to recommend a local country music show. When asked whether you can disable personalization, Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez said the company doesn’t “offer an opt-out for these features at this time,” adding that “we believe that the best experiences are personalized.”

Meta says its AI will only remember things in one-on-one conversations, not in group chats, and that you can delete its memories “at any time.” Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini already have a similar feature.

Update, January 27th: Added more information from Meta.

Apple’s Sports app now tells you where you can watch nationally broadcast games

2025-01-27T12:32:12-05:00

The Apple Sports app has been updated with broadcast information for users in the US. | Screenshot: David Pierce / The Verge

Apple updated its iOS Sports app today with several new features, including a faster way to navigate the app, support for a handful of additional soccer tournaments, and information about where you can watch games that are being nationally broadcast in the US.

According to the release notes for the update, you can now quickly “swipe left or right to browse all of the leagues and teams you follow.” When on a page for a specific game, below each team’s name and record for the season you’ll now find an additional line listing broadcast information such as “Live on NHL Network,” or “Live on TNT, Max, truTV,” if there are several ways to watch it.

Screenshot: Richard Lawler / The Verge

The Apple Sports app now provides brief details on where to watch nationally-televised games in the US.

The update also expands the Sports app’s soccer coverage with the addition of the UK’s FA Cup, EFL Championship, and League Cup tournaments.

Apple Sports launched in February, giving fans of several different major sports leagues – including the NBA, NHL, and MLS – a one-stop solution for keeping tabs on scores, stats, upcoming games, and even betting odds. In August, the app added live scores and play-by-play info for NFL and college football games and expanded its Live Activities support “for all teams and leagues available in the app,” making it easier to track games on an iPhone’s lock screen and the Apple Watch.

In December, it also introduced summaries of scoring plays and big moments in a game called Key Plays, plus league standings that made it easier to track which teams qualified for the postseason.