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AT&T is updating its next-gen 911 network to give users more efficient ways to share important information with emergency services. Starting in October, AT&T’s ESInet emergency communications platform will make it easier for AT&T customers to share pictures and video messages with supported dispatch centers, helping to quickly explain the situation and better prepare first responders who will arrive on the scene.

The ESInet platform helps 911 dispatch centers process callouts faster and more reliably by replacing traditional analog connections with fiber-based IP networks. Since its launch in 2018, AT&T says 1,700 emergency call centers have now been upgraded to the new communications technology.

Sending multimedia content to emergency dispatchers is currently a complicated process, but AT&T says the incoming update will make it as effortless as texting family and friends. While AT&T will be the first US carrier to support these capabilities, picture and video messaging will be interoperable with other network providers who choose to integrate it.

Emergency multimedia messaging support will roll out alongside security features that provide dispatchers with a dedicated private internet connection to access public safety data from the cloud, helping to protect sensitive emergency information from cyber threats. Select 2026 Toyota vehicles equipped with a built-in AT&T Connected Car SIM will also be able to automatically send crash data to emergency dispatchers, including airbag status and precise vehicle location.


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The Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition.

Microsoft and Meta announced an Xbox-branded Quest VR headset last year, and it's going on sale today for $399.99. The Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition is a custom colorway VR headset that comes bundled with an Xbox wireless controller, matching Touch Plus controllers, and three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

I've been using the Quest 3S Xbox Edition over the past week, and I was surprised to see that Meta has actually tweaked its Quest setup process to incorporate the carbon black and green styling of this headset and controllers into the UI. This Xbox Edition VR headset is even pre-paired with the Xbox controller and boots directly into the Xbox app.

The Xbox app on the Quest 3S Xbox Edition is the same one found on other Meta VR headsets, and it lets you stream games from Xbox Cloud Gaming. You'll need an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to do this, but Microsoft has thrown in a three-month code that works for new and existing Game Pass subscribers.

I played a variety of games on this headset, both in the immersive Xbox app experience with a 26-foot virtual display and in the pass-through view that turns an Xbox game into an augmented reality object that sits in the real-w …

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An image of the Vessel sculpture in Google Earth.

Google Earth can display a Street View timeline of certain locations, like New York’s Vessel sculpture.

Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time.

Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you can look through images captured across different years — just like you can in Google Maps. Last year, Google launched the ability to view historical satellite and aerial imagery, which was previously only available in the Earth Pro desktop app.

Google is also planning to roll out a new feature that gives professional users “AI-driven insights” about the planet. That includes information about tree canopy coverage, allowing users to see where an area is more heavily shaded and which places might benefit from cooling approaches. It will also offer access to land surface temperatures, which professionals can use to see which areas of a city are hotter. These insights are rolling out in the “coming weeks.”


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photo of a Waymo robotaxi in Atlanta.

Uber customers in Atlanta now have the option of hailing a driverless Waymo robotaxi, the company announced today. Atlanta is the second market, after Austin, to play host to Uber and Waymo’s burgeoning autonomous ridehail partnership.

At launch, Waymo’s vehicles will be available exclusively on the Uber app in Atlanta. The two companies first announced a deal to put Waymo’s robotaxis on the Uber app back in 2023, indicating that Austin would be first, followed by Atlanta. Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in Atlanta; customers who open Waymo One will be redirected to Uber’s app.

Waymo’s vehicles will only operate within a 65-square-mile service area that includes Atlanta’s Downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don’t drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider: simply calling an Uber in Waymo’s service area doesn’t guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Like in Austin, the companies will start with a small fleet of vehicles and grow from there.

Customers can increase their chances of being matched with a Waymo vehicle by opting into autonomous rides in the Ride Preferences section of their Uber app. The rides will cost the same as a typical UberX, Uber Comfort, or Uber Comfort Electric ride. Once the Waymo vehicle arrives, customers can unlock the door, open the trunk, and start the ride from the Uber app. Rides can also be started by pressing the button on the rear touchscreen in the vehicle.

Uber will manage fleet services, including vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, EV charging, and depot operations. The company is contracting with Avmo (formerly Moove Cars) to handle these tasks. Waymo is still responsible for vehicle testing, roadside assistance, and certain elements of rider support. The companies will obviously share in the costs and the revenue produced by the robotaxi service, though both companies have declined to share the split.

A gif of the Uber app.

Uber and Waymo, former rivals turned unlikely partners, have said they will work together to get more people to use driverless vehicles. But the partnership isn’t exclusive; Uber also is working with over a dozen other autonomous mobility companies, including sidewalk robot operators for its Uber Eats business. The company says it has quickly grown to an annual run rate of 1.5 million robotaxi and delivery robot trips on its network.

While many Atlanta residents will be experiencing a driverless car for the first time, Waymo isn’t new to the city. The company first started gathering mapping data and manually testing its vehicles in Atlanta back in 2018. Fully driverless testing started in January 2025, followed by early passenger trips in May 2025.

For those keeping score, there were approximately 283 days between identifying Atlanta as a future robotaxi city and launching the service on the Uber app.

Waymo’s success depends partly on narrowing that window for future cities in order to prove its scalability, while keeping an eye on safety. Waymo currently conducts approximately 250,000 rides each week in its four main markets. The company has also said it will launch in Miami and Washington, DC with its own Waymo One app.


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Riot Games is closing the studio behind Hytale, its Minecraft-like game that has been in development for nearly a decade. Hypixel Studios, which Riot acquired in 2020 for an undisclosed sum, is shutting down “over the next few months,” according to Hypixel CEO Aaron “Noxy” Donaghey.

“After years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise,“ says Donaghey in a post on X. ”This is a painful decision. We still believe in Hytale. We believe in the team, and are forever grateful to every member, past or present, who poured their love into the game.“

Hytale has been in development since 2015, when Hypixel was founded as a small indie studio by members of a popular Minecraft server network. A trailer was released in late 2018, and Hypixel was supposed to deliver a beta of Hytale in 2021 following the Riot acquisition a year prior. That beta never arrived, and in 2021 there was a major change to the game engine powering Hytale that set development back.

“Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be,“ says Donaghey. ”It became clear we’d need a lot more time to get it to a place where it could support the ambitious vision for the game.“

The Hypixel closure won’t affect the Hypixel server on Minecraft, which is run separately from Hypixel Studios. Despite the studio closure, Donaghey says he’s “deeply grateful to Riot” and that the team is being “supported with generous severance and resources to help them find what’s next.”


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Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools. The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement.

The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior vice president of customer experience at Verizon, told The Verge that the Verizon AI assistant will transfer customers to a human agent either upon request or if it’s unable to handle the enquiry it’s been given.

Butler says the company had “worked very closely with Google” to prevent the Verizon AI agent from hallucinating by creating small language models that are personalized to Verizon services and customers. “To date, we are seeing north of 90 percent accuracy with very minor mistakes being made.”

Verizon says it’s now providing a so-called “Customer Champion” that will leverage Google’s Gemini and Cloud AI models to help customers resolve “complex issues.” The press release is vague, but in 2025 we’re going to assume that those champions are still humans utilizing Google’s AI tools. The goal is for customers to contact Verizon once, and for the champion to then provide updates via the My Verizon app, text messages, or call backs.

Verizon is also expanding the operating hours of its live customer service agents and introducing 24/7 live chat support that can cater to “diverse customer schedules and preferences.”


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At a pristine, multimillion-dollar lab on the Manhattan waterfront, just down the street from a men's homeless shelter and the medical examiner's office, a slice of summer plum is being converted into fragrance code. This is the work of Osmo, a fragrance tech startup claiming to build artificial olfactory intelligence. Osmo has parlayed this innovation into offering turnkey fragrance compounding that promises a 48-hour sample turnaround from initial client prompt. In the time it takes your Amazon Prime order to arrive, you may now order a custom perfume.

Traditionally, creating a fragrance isn't fast. After a client provides a brief - usually a mood, memory, or concept - a perfumer begins weeks or months of formulation trials, compounding and revising dozens of modifications, or "mods." Each must settle before it can be evaluated for balance, projection, and drydown. Raw materials often need years of cultivation. Bottling, regulatory reviews, packaging, and testing follow. From concept to shelf, a single perfume can take six to 18 months - even longer in luxury. And like fine wines, fragrance materials vary with climate concerns. One year's yield will not smell like the next one …

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The hardware indicator pop-ups can now appear in the top-left of a screen.

Microsoft is testing a new feature in Windows 11 that will let you move hardware indicators pop-ups like volume and screen brightness to the top-left and top-center positions of a display. The customization feature is part of a new Dev Channel build of Windows 11 that also includes a new Recall homepage that lists the top three apps and websites you’ve used in a 24-hour period.

Currently, Windows 11 shows the volume, brightness, and airplane mode indicators in the bottom center of a screen. In the latest Dev Channel build you can now choose the position of these on-screen indicators so they’re less in the way of apps you’re using. You won’t be able to pick the top right position though, presumably because that would place the indicator too close to the minimize, maximize, and close buttons for apps.

Alongside the indicator changes, Microsoft is also testing a new Recall homepage. “The new homepage brings your recent activity and top-used content front and center, enabling you to easily get back to your previous tasks,” says Microsoft’s Windows Insider team. The homepage shows recent snapshots as well as top apps or websites that have been used in the past 24 hours.

Recall is also getting a new navigation bar on the left side, which lets you quickly switch between this new home interface and the Timeline feature to scroll through all your snapshots. Microsoft is currently testing these changes with Windows Insiders, so expect to see them appear more broadly in Windows 11 in the coming months.


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The Raleigh One e-bike from the side but angled slightly toward the viewer.

The Raleigh One commuter e-bike in white.

The Raleigh One e-bike is now official after The Verge first published details of it last week. It was developed for the Accell Group’s Raleigh brand with help from VanMoof’s cofounders, Ties and Taco Carlier, according to my sources. The announcement never mentions their involvement, which could be viewed as good or bad — good if you view the brothers as innovators, bad if you got burned during the VanMoof bankruptcy or the turmoil that preceded it.

I think everyone can agree, however, that the decision to put several functions behind monthly subscription tiers that start at £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) per month is annoying, especially for a list price of £2,399 / €2,699 (around $3,000 USD) when Raleigh One sales begin next month in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. That’s expensive for a Raleigh, but it’s still close to the €2,681 average for European e-bikes.

The Raleigh One looks very VanMoof-ish but with several features that fans and critics alike have asked for: the 360Wh battery can be removed for easy charging, and it’s fitted with a single-speed belt drive paired to a motor housed in the hub of the rear wheel. If you squint, it could be easily mistaken for a Tenways CGO009.

When asked about the Carlier brothers’ involvement with the e-bike, Ertu Bilgin, Accell Group brand lead, confirmed that “some former VanMoof team members have brought their experience” to the Raleigh One, but it’s “very much a product of the Accell Group.“

The urban commuter comes with beefy tires to soak up bumps and a few mounts to help haul your gear around the city (with more to come). The integrated lighting adapts to conditions with a “dual-front” light that can be moved off the frame and onto the optional front rack. There’s a simple controller on the bike to adjust power, which can also be set in the Raleigh app. The app lets riders tap into additional features like an integrated alarm system and GPS tracking.

The bike weighs 21kg (46.3 pounds) and is only available in a single step-over frame model. It ships with a 5A brick that can charge the e-bike to 50 percent in one hour or to full in a fast 2 hours and 20 minutes. Range is estimated at 80km (50 miles) in eco mode or at 50km (31 miles) when adding more pedal-assisted power. This is Europe so there’s no throttle here, and there’s no button to provide a temporary boost.

Unlike VanMoofs, the Raleigh One uses a lot of off-the-shelf parts. I’m seeing hydraulic disc brakes from Tektro, a Gates Carbon belt, a 250W Mivice motor, and bike mount from SP Connect. “Built to last and easy to maintain, the Raleigh One delivers on reliability, with high-quality and low maintenance parts, backed up by a comprehensive dealer network,” the announcement promises. Those are important claims given the historical context.

VanMoof’s downfall under the Carliers’ leadership can be directly attributed to bikes that shipped before they were ready, using custom parts of their own design that were assembled without enough emphasis on durability and serviceability. Concerns that VanMoof’s new owner — McLaren Applied — has addressed with its new S6 e-bikes.

Now, about those subscriptions, or “memberships” in Raleigh vernacular. The Basic tier provides a rider dashboard, basic security, a stolen mode, and updates over Bluetooth for free. You can then pay £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) per month, or £84 / €96 ($110) per year, to become a Core member, which adds automatic stolen mode activation and smart maintenance alerts. And for a limited time, you’ll also get over-the-air updates, some kind of bike-sharing feature for up to four people, “touch-and-go” functionality, and remote arming — but only until those features are moved to a new, more expensive “Icon” tier sometime in 2026.

Subscriptions have become an unfortunate norm for just about everything we used to own outright, and e-bikes are no different. VanMoof is developing its own €4.99 (about $6) per month or €49 ($57) per year subscription offering, and even industry heavyweight Bosch can’t resist the lure of that recurring revenue stream as the industry continues to grapple with too much inventory and declining demand.

Raleigh’s parent company, Accell — the bicycle giant responsible for brands like Batavus, Sparta, Carqon, and Babboe — has suffered financial troubles of its own in recent years, including recalls and the bankruptcy of its Stella brand. But unlike VanMoof, Cake, and many other mobility companies that have gone bust since the COVID-19 pandemic boom, Accell had the resources to survive the “Bikeaggedon” created by a sudden collapse of the supply chain followed by a period of massive oversupply.

The Carlier brothers are undeniably trailblazers. They introduced sleek, desirable e-bikes to a category of transportation once dominated by bolt-on batteries and septuagenarians. But can they be trusted, even under Accell’s tutelage, after bankrupting the company they founded 16 years ago?

Raleigh has also seen better days since its founding in 1887, its brand sullied by an embrace of mass-market retailers that push its lower-end bicycles. That’s probably why the Raleigh One is launching on a new website — to set it apart from its siblings and mark a new beginning for everyone involved.

Images provided by Raleigh


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Jony Ive onstage at the Code Conference in 2022.

Thanks to a related trademark lawsuit, we know what OpenAI and Jony Ive's first AI device won't be.

In court filings submitted this month, leaders from io - the consumer hardware team OpenAI recently acquired from Jony Ive's design studio for $6.5 billion - testified that the first device they plan to release won't be an "in-ear device" or a "wearable." They also say the AI device won't ship until "at least" 2026.

"The prototype Sam Altman referenced in the video is at least a year away from being offered for sale," Tang Tan, io's chief hardware officer and a former Apple design leader, said in a June 16th declaration. "Its design is not yet finalized, but it is not an in-ear device, nor a wearable device."

Over the weekend, OpenAI was forced to remove public references to the io brand (which stands for "input/output") due to a temporary restraining order that was granted on behalf of an audio device startup called Iyo. To support its case that OpenAI willfully infringed on its trademark, Iyo provides emails showing that leaders from io and OpenAI, including CEO Sam Altman, knew about its existence and even asked to demo the product - a yet-to-be-released, in-ear headphone bil …

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A black push-button door lock on a half-open door.

Yale’s new Matter-over-Thread smart lock is designed for Google Home.

The Yale Smart Lock with Matter is launching tomorrow, June 24th, for $189.99 — $20 more than when it was first announced in March. Yale tells The Verge the price increase is due to the impact of tariffs. The lock will be available on Amazon and Yale’s website.

According to Yale, the new smart lock was built for Google Home and Matter and designed specifically to complement Google Home’s Nest video doorbells. However, thanks to its Matter-over-Thread connectivity, it can work with multiple smart home platforms, including Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant.

In a briefing, Catelyn Herman, senior product manager at Yale, told The Verge that “tariff costs and overall product costs led us to have to increase the price slightly.” All the other features are the same as when it was first announced, which is also when Yale confirmed it had discontinued the two companies’ previous collab: the Next x Yale lock.

The new Yale Smart Lock with Matter comes in white, black, and, this fall, gray.  It has a promised 12 months of battery life on 4 AAs, thanks to Matter-over-Thread connectivity, which should also provide faster response times compared to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth locks. It’s one of a growing number of full-deadbolt replacement locks that use the new protocol; others include Kwikset’s Halo Select, Level Lock PlusEufy E30U-tec’s Matter lock, and Yale’s Assure SL.

Several control methods are available, including inputting a code on its backlit push-button keypad and using a key. You can lock and unlock it remotely using the Google Home app (as well as other Matter-apps) and with your voice control via Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Jesse Stroh, product manager at Google Home and Nest, confirmed that you can now unlock Matter locks using a voice PIN code via Google Assistant.

Unlike the Nest x Yale lock that could disarm Google’s Nest Secure security system, the new lock won’t integrate with any security system at launch, which is surprising considering both Yale and Google’s close relationship with home security company ADT.

Unlike Yale’s other locks – including the Yale Assure 2 line – the Yale Smart Lock doesn’t have an auto-unlock function, just auto-lock. The lock also features a keyway, which the Nest x Yale didn’t. Herman says Yale’s research shows that a push button and a keyed option are what most people prefer. I’m on board with the push buttons, but I think these locks would look much sleeker without the keyhole.

The lock can work with any platform that supports Matter, but Stroh said it has a “best in class integration with the Google Home platform.” He said it’s able to take “full advantage of the Matter features Google Home supports.”

These currently include creating and editing codes for the lock, including guest codes with set schedules. You can also view lock activity in the Home app’s activity feed and get lock and unlock notifications, said Stroh, adding that current Google Nest doorbells will integrate with the lock so you can control it while viewing a live feed from the doorbell.

Based on my experience using Matter-enabled locks in Apple Home and Samsung SmartThings, you should get these same features on those platforms as well. But, while it will work with other platforms, it’s clearly designed to appeal to Google Home users. Although those who are looking to upgrade from the Nest x Yale lock may not be thrilled with the new look. The white and gray may match the Google Nest doorbells, but without the options of rubbed bronze or satin nickel that the Nest had, it’s not going to match your existing door hardware.

One benefit of the new lock is that you can set it up directly in the Google Home app (or other Matter app) without needing to use the Yale app. However, as a Matter-over-Thread device, it does require a Matter controller and a Thread border router; the Matter hub needs to be a Google one if you want to use it in the Google Home app.

Without these, you can control the lock using the Yale Home app over Bluetooth, something Yale’s other Matter-over-Thread lock, the Yale Assure SL, didn’t offer. But this only works when you’re in range, i.e., at home, as there’s no built-in Wi-Fi.

The lock can work over Wi-Fi with Yale’s $90 Wi-Fi Connect bridge, but I wouldn’t buy that just to use this lock. You’re better off picking up something like the Google TV Streamer for $95 to get the Thread connectivity, Google Home Matter hub, and a good streaming box. I plan to review the Yale Smart Lock soon.


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Image: The Verge | Image: The Verge

If you missed the chance to pick up Nintendo’s new GameCube Controller for the Switch 2, your time has come. It’s back in stock for $64.99 at the My Nintendo Store. To add one to your collection, you’ll need to have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, which starts at $19.99 a year for individuals. Once signed up, you can place an order by signing into your Nintendo Account and adding the gamepad to your cart, though you’re still limited to one controller per account.

As fun as it’s been playing Mario Kart World and the updated versions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on the Switch 2, I’ve been enjoying catching up on GameCube titles available through the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. The controller provides a genuine experience when playing classic titles like Wind Waker and Soulcalibur II, with some notable upgrades.

The biggest change is the addition of wireless connectivity, so you’re not tethered by a short cable. It also has Nintendo’s “C” button for opening up GameChat, a new Discord-like voice chat feature that’s free until March 31st, 2026. And if you like taking screenshots, the controller has a dedicated capture button, allowing you to document your first-place finishes in Mario Kart World.

Although it works best with GameCube titles, you can also use the controller to play Switch 2 games, complete with gyro controls. However, Nintendo warns that the GameCube Controller “doesn’t have all the buttons and features found in other controllers that can be used with the Nintendo Switch 2 system,” which means you may run into some issues when playing games on the new system.


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If you’ve been itching to get a handheld, but the Switch 2 isn’t quite up your alley, now you can get your hands on a Steam Deck OLED. As spotted by @Wario64, Valve has started selling the device on its online store again after it was out of stock in the US and Canada for over a week.

Earlier this month, Valve cited “recent supply chain constraints” for the Steam Deck OLED’s unavailability, adding that it expects the device to come back in stock by the end of the summer. It looks like Valve may have resolved its supply chain issues — at least for now — as the 512GB Steam Deck OLED is currently on sale for $549, while the 1TB version is available for $649.

Both devices come with a 7.4-inch HDR OLED display, up to a 90Hz refresh rate, a carrying case, and battery life ranging from three to 12 hours, depending on content. The 1TB version adds a “premium anti-glare etched glass” display, a removable liner with the carrying case, and an exclusive startup screen and virtual keyboard theme. However, neither model includes the Steam Deck Docking Station, which is available separately for $79 (there are plenty of third-party options out there, too.)

But if you’re still holding out for a Switch 2, the $450 console has been popping up intermittently at retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.


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Let’s see what unfolds.

Samsung’s summer Unpacked is officially on, starting at 10AM ET on Wednesday, July 9th. The invitation features a jazzy little bop and the words “Ultra Unfolds,” so I think it’s safe to assume we’re getting that foldable Ultra phone the company previously hinted at.

The event is set to take place in Brooklyn, but you can watch along over at Samsung’s YouTube channel.

The invitation seems to suggest a thinner device, or at least that’s how I’m reading it. That would line up with some of the rumors, and super-thin foldables has certainly been a trend so far this year. I’ve wedged plenty of chunky foldables into the side pocket of my yoga pants, so I for one would welcome this development.

Per usual, Samsung is offering a little incentive to reserve a device for pre-order ahead of the big reveal: $50 in credit to use at Samsung.com. That’ll cover a chunk of the cost of a case for a foldable phone, which run between $85 and $100 for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 on Samsung’s website right now. If the Ultra comes with an Ultra price tag, it might be worth shelling out a little more to protect it from the wear and tear of daily use. Just a little free advice.


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T-Satellite is go for takeoff.

After spending the first half of the year in beta testing, T-Mobile’s Starlink-powered satellite service will go public on July 23rd. While it will only include messaging at launch, the company has some ambitious plans to expand the service before the end of the year.

When it goes live next month, “T-Satellite” will be available as an included service with just one T-Mobile plan — Experience Beyond — and will otherwise cost $10 per month. Like the beta service, it will be available to anyone in the US, not just T-Mobile customers.

At launch, T-Satellite will only include SMS on Android and iOS, as well as MMS on Android. T-Mobile says that MMS on iOS is “to follow.” And on October 1st, its satellite connectivity will get another upgrade: data.

But don’t expect to be able to use every app on your phone in a dead zone just yet. The company has a handful of app makers that it “anticipates” will enable satellite data connectivity, including AllTrails, Accuweather, and WhatsApp. The announcement also names Apple and Google as partners, but doesn’t list specific apps from either company.

T-Mobile’s approach to satellite connectivity looks a little different from the competition’s. Verizon and AT&T have both partnered with AST SpaceMobile to provide satellite service to customers. Earlier this year, the companies demonstrated cell-to-satellite calling. Of the two, only Verizon has introduced messaging for customers — and it’s limited to certain Android phones at the moment.

Verizon and AT&T have taken issue with T-Mobile and Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, claiming its satellite implementation will hamper their efforts. It doesn’t seem like those complaints have slowed Starlink and T-Mobile down.


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My biggest complaint with Liquid Glass in the first iOS 26 developer beta was that it sometimes made Control Center nearly unreadable, but Apple has seemingly fixed that with the second beta, which is out now.

In the first beta, the glassiness of everything meant that you could still see a fair amount of what was under Control Center, making it all look really cluttered. With the second beta, what’s under Control Center is much more opaque, making it much easier to read at a glance.

Take a look in this comparison slider:

Developer beta 1 on the left, developer beta 2 on the right. This isn’t a perfect comparison because I’ve switched a few app icons on my homescreen, but hopefully you can get the idea.

In the second developer beta, some colors still bleed into the Control Center buttons in a way that could potentially be confusing. But overall, I think Apple is moving in the right direction here. I’m curious if the company will make more changes ahead of the general release this fall.

As reported by 9to5Mac, the beta includes a few other changes, too, including an excellent new ringtone that’s an alternate of the Reflections song. It sounds like something you’d hear in an Ace Attorney game. I switched to it right away.

If you want to try the developer beta yourself, here’s our guide on how to install it. If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge but still want to try what Apple is working on, the company is set to launch a public beta next month.


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Apple’s first macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta introduced a big change to the Finder icon that I really didn’t like, but thankfully, the company has reversed it with the second beta released today.

A big feature of macOS 26 is Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language, which it has applied across the operating system to give it a new look. But for some reason, for the initial version of the updated Finder icon, Apple bucked tradition and flipped the location of its blue and white elements. An outrage!

Fortunately, Apple has seen reason and shifted the colors back to their rightful places with the Finder icon in developer beta 2. 9to5Mac has a handy comparison.

View Link

The second macOS 26 developer beta also includes an option to add a background back to the menu bar, 9to5Mac reports, which should help make it more legible. The second iOS 26 developer beta got a good change to Control Center to help improve legibility, too.


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The all-Republican Federal Trade Commission agreed to approve a $13.5 billion ad merger if it includes a ban on steering ad dollars away from platforms or publishers based on “political or ideological viewpoints.” The order, which was reported by The New York Times earlier this month, would prevent ad giant Omnicom from wholesale avoiding platforms like X based on their political viewpoints without explicit direction from its advertiser customers. X lost advertisers in 2023 after placing ads next to pro-Nazi content.

On Monday, the agency published a proposed consent order that it says would “resolve antitrust concerns” over Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group, which it says are the “third- and fourth-largest media buying advertising agencies in the U.S.” Under the proposed terms, the newly-merged company could not direct or deny advertisers’ spending on any given platform based on that website’s political or ideological views, or those of the content the ads might run alongside. Advertisers who work with Omnicom can still directly request that the media buying agency avoid certain publishers based on political viewpoints.

The FTC commonly places conditions on companies seeking to merge through consent orders to prevent anticompetitive effects, but this unusual provision addresses a particular complaint of congressional Republicans and former “First Buddy” Elon Musk, whose company X (formerly Twitter) claimed advertisers engaged in an “illegal boycott” by pulling ads off the platform in the wake of reports on far-right content and Musk’s own promotion of antisemitic conspiracies. The FTC is investigating news outlet Media Matters for encouraging advertisers to drop X; Media Matters sued in response today.

One of Musk’s primary targets was the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a voluntary initiative organized by the World Federation of Advertisers that helped companies avoid advertising against illegal or otherwise harmful non-”brand safe” content. GARM disbanded due to limited resources in the wake of the antitrust suit from X.

The FTC mentions GARM in its complaint against the Omnicom merger, saying allowing two major companies to merge could have a similar impact.. “With one fewer major competitor in the Media Buying Services industry as a result of the Acquisition, the remaining competitors have fewer impediments to coordinating the placement of advertisements, monitoring one another, and punishing one another for taking actions that harm them collectively,” the complaint says.

The Supreme Court has previously protected the right to boycott. But in a statement, Republican Chair Andrew Ferguson claimed the provision would not infringe on advertisers’ First Amendment rights. “The decree goes to great lengths to avoid interfering with the free, regular course of business between marketing firms and their customers,” Ferguson says. “Omnicom-IPG may choose with whom it does business and follow any lawful instruction from its customers as to where and how to advertise. No one will be forced to have their brand or their ads appear in venues and among content they do not wish.”

The order, however, says Omnicom can’t maintain any policy that “declines to deal with Advertisers based on political or ideological viewpoints” or “directs Advertisers’ advertising spend based on the Media Publisher’s political or ideological viewpoints.”

The proposed order was approved by Ferguson and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, with Commissioner Mark Meador recused from the matter. President Donald Trump previously attempted to fire the agency’s two Democratic commissioners and has not yet nominated new ones, leaving the typically bipartisan and five-member agency in the hands of three Republicans.


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The white Hue Button V3 and its plate for wall mounting.

The next generation of Hue’s smart button is bigger, but is it better?

Smart lighting company Hue has released a new version of its Smart Button, one of the simplest ways of controlling Hue’s colorful smart lights. The new Smart Button has a bigger design and a bit of price hike — in the U.S., at least, where it now costs $32.99 compared to $29.99 for its predecessor. That’s significantly more than the UK and EU pricing for the new button — £19.99 and €21.99 respectively — possibly a sign of things to come.

The new button is available now directly from Hue’s site.

A Zigbee device, the Hue button can be programmed to control any single or group of Hue light bulbs and fixtures through the Hue app. According to Philips Hue’s website, the button “allows you to trigger scenes based on time of day, or cycle through a selection. Press and hold to dim and brighten your lights, or even set it to start an automation.” This is the same functionality as the prior model, meaning all that appears to have changed is the design and the price.

The new button is almost twice the size, with a 45mm diameter (about 1.8 inches) versus 32mm (about 1.3 inches). It’s now more angular and flatter, versus the more bulbous style of the prior model. It also doesn’t come with a large plastic wall plate that resembles a standard light switch – handy for people who are used to using regular switches. Instead, it only comes with a small metal plate to magnetically attach the button to the wall, according to HueBlog’s hands-on with the button.

The Hue button uses the same CR2032 battery, which, according to Hue, should last for two years. HueBlog called out the battery for being a lot easier to replace on this new button than on the previous one.

As it works over Zigbee, the button requires a Hue Bridge and is compatible with Matter-supported platforms through the bridge (as its predecessor was). This includes Apple Home, where it shows as a single-press button.

I reviewed the first generation of the button when it launched in 2019 for $24.99, and it’s long been one of my favorite easy ways to control Hue lights. An update in 2023 added more control options, including the ability to cycle through Hue’s natural light scenes based on time of day, so you could get the right type of tunable white light for the time of day with just one press.

I like the idea of a slightly larger design, which could be easier to use, but the fact that it’s more expensive in the States than in the EU and UK is a worrying sign.

Hue is already one of the most expensive smart lighting brands, and based on an email the company sent to users earlier this month, it may be getting even more expensive — at least for those of us on this side of the pond.  According to the promotional message I got on June 9th, Hue’s “prices go up on July 1.”

The note about the price increase appears to have only been sent to US customers, indicating the increase may be due to Trump’s tariffs. We’ve reached out to Signify (Philips Hue’s parent company) to confirm and to find out which products will be affected.


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Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.

A fair warning here: I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and I was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps seems a little bit risky. So I always end up approaching conversations about dating apps a little bit removed.

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

I asked Justin what it’s like to be the married CEO of a dating app company who doesn’t use his own product anymore, especially as his own personal romantic journey is very intertwined with Hinge. The entire idea of the company and how it has evolved over the years connects to Justin’s own life and his decision to reconnect with his college girlfriend, just a month before she was supposed to marry someone else. The story is so unbelievable that it was turned into an episode of Netflix’s Modern Love.

You’ll hear Justin explain how that experience connects to the company’s values, culture, and his vision of what Hinge is really for  — and how all of that is geared toward helping people find lasting connections. Hinge bills itself as the app that’s “designed to be deleted,” and that, of course, is in deep tension with how mobile apps and services grow users and revenue.

Then there is the AI of it all. Hinge, as part of Match Group, is using AI both internally and within its product, just as Tinder and other competitors are. There’s AI coaching features to help you improve your profile, pick better photos, and even catch an inappropriate message before it gets sent.

But pull the string on all these ideas, and you get to a place where people might be talking to AI all the time, even falling in love with it, or having AI agents dating each other before meeting in person. Justin had some pretty strong feelings about the importance of centering real human connection and encouraging people to put their phones down and go out on dates in the real world. Justin also called the idea of AI companionship “playing with fire” and compares those relationships to junk food.

There’s a lot more in this conversation. We got on the topic of the Trump administration and how seriously Hinge takes the privacy of its users’ data during an unprecedented crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. We talked briefly about Apple and its App Store restrictions, now that companies like Epic Games and Match Group are free to send people to the web to process in-app purchases. Hinge has some plans that you’ll hear Justin get into near the end. There’s a lot going on in this one; you might even fall in love.

Okay: Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Justin McLeod, you’re the founder and CEO of Hinge. Welcome to Decoder**.**

Thanks for having me.

I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve got to tell you, this is one where I feel like Jane Goodall or a sociologist of some kind. I’m old. I’m married to a divorce lawyer. I can’t even download this app. It’s too risky. I’m watching through the looking glass here. I asked my younger staff for their Hinge feature requests. Don’t worry, I’ve got a million of those.

Great. Excited to hear those.

When TaskRabbit comes on Decoder, I’m like, “I booked a TaskRabbit.” This is very different. When was the last time you actually used Hinge as a user?

Over a decade ago.

Wow.

Yeah.

What’s that like? What’s it like trying to run this team? Is it all just data driven for you, because there’s a real element of dogfooding here.

Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our team at Hinge, so there’s a lot of internal dogfooding for sure, and a lot of opinions. I think that the relationship is different. So, I started the company in 2011, and I was single at the time, and I was single for the first four years of Hinge, and then, long story: I got back together with my college girlfriend, and we’ve been together for the last 10 years, married with kids and all.

Did you get back together on Hinge?

We were together. I tried to get her back. She said no. I started Hinge in response to that. And then someone whom I met on Hinge inspired me to go back. She was about to get married to someone else. She was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding. She called off her wedding and moved back to New York, which led to the whole reboot of Hinge. The whole story is very interconnected.

I feel like I should throw out my questions. We should just do an episode of Call Her Daddy or something like that. That sounds very complicated.

Yeah, it’s been a ride. An incredible ride, and very intertwined with Hinge. But back to your question, I think that we can overweight our own personal experience a bit, especially as the CEO of the company. What I found over time is that people have a wide array of very diverse experiences, and to some extent, I think it actually helps that I’m not in there overweighting my own niche feature requests that would matter to me but not to the whole population. So the app has evolved. It’s more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original idea of Hinge.

How do you think about the connection between what the data is telling you, the data about what Gen Z daters are doing versus millennial daters, which is the cohort you started with, versus the very emotional experiences people have on this platform, which are out of your control? Eventually, you’ve got to take the meat sack to the bar and look at the other person and not fuck it up, right? Hinge can’t solve that problem, but that’s the heart of the whole enterprise. How do you connect those two in your brain?

This is a very complex, nuanced industry. I think sometimes people look at their Hinge feed and they’re like, “Why doesn’t this understand my taste as well as my TikTok feed does?” People don’t quite understand that people aren’t products; they’re not infinite copies of everyone.They don’t always behave the same. Your videos on TikTok don’t have to like you back. There’s just a lot of nuance to getting this right.

And you’re right. A fair amount of this comes down to the people on the platform. So what we’re trying to do is to [not only] build a great product but also an environment and a community where people are encouraged to be intentional and authentic, and attract users who are looking to find their person. So that’s definitely the art and the nuance of trying to build a dating app like ours.

One of my big criticisms of social media apps right now in 2025 is they’ve all become marketing platforms in some way. At the end of the rainbow, Mr. Beast is trying to sell you an energy bar. That’s what they’re for. And smaller creators are trying to get their first-brand deals or whatever. But there’s a real organization around just marketing. And the platforms try to encourage people to create content for a whole number of reasons, but their reason for being is advertising spend, and then a lot of the content creation on the platform happens for marketing purposes. You can just see how it goes.

Hinge and other dating apps are different. You’re trying to incentivize content creation. You’re trying to get people to talk about themselves, to talk to each other. The goal is to market yourself. How do you divorce that from the actual thing you’re trying to do, which is to have people fall in love and get into stable relationships?

Well, it’s very much about what you’re optimizing for. And you’re right; social media is ultimately optimizing for engagement, retention, and time in app. That is the lifeblood of any of these companies. How long can they keep you sucked in? That is their objective, and so everything is built around that. And we’ve seen what the consequences of that are. They’re pretty dire.

I think Hinge is almost the polar opposite of that. We’re trying to get you to spend less time on your phone and more time out in real life on dates. It’s interesting. When I started Hinge back in 2011, as venture capitalists looked at our business they asked those questions around engagement and retention. They were looking at social media, and they’re like, “What’s your daily over monthly? How much time are people spending in the app? How many sessions per day?” We were optimizing for those things, because that’s what VCs were asking about. That’s how we were raising money.

Then Hinge did a pretty big pivot in 2015, when I let go of half the company and we rebooted from scratch, because we felt as if we’d really lost our way. We’d become more of a piece of entertainment that was just about getting people more matches and more activity, and getting them back every day. We’d lost sight of what we were trying to do, which was to have people come to us to find a relationship. We weren’t really optimized around that anymore.

When we did that pivot in 2015, the biggest change we made was to stop focusing on the competition. We started focusing on the customer, and we made our North Star metric actual great dates. We introduced the “We Met” survey, where we asked people we suspected had gone on a date if they did in fact go on that date and whether it was good. Everything became oriented toward optimizing for that. That ended up creating a very, very different experience.

That actually became the primary differentiator of Hinge. A lot of the other apps in the industry were based on engagement and retention and just getting people back; they were more like entertainment platforms. Hinge became a utility. We started growing through word of mouth, and today we’re the fastest-growing, and in fact the only growing, major dating app. We grew 40 percent last year, while other dating apps are shrinking, because we built a very sustainable business model that delivers on value. The lifeblood of our company is getting more users out on dates, so they tell their friends and then their friends come and join Hinge.

The interesting thing about that business model is it’s in the tagline of the company. I always laugh when you all put out a press release, because it says, “Hinge, the app designed to be deleted,” and then a little trademark logo follows every time it’s mentioned, which is just very funny. I appreciate that you have to do it, but it just makes me laugh every time. That means you’re trying to graduate users. You’re a utility, you pay until you’re done, and then you’re out.

Yeah, precisely.

It means you constantly have to find new users. You basically have a different churn problem. How do you think about that life cycle?

We think about it in terms of good churn. We want people turning off the app for the right reason. We don’t want people turning off the app because they gave up too early or because they don’t like Hinge. We want people turning off the app because they found someone, ideally on Hinge.

What does it mean to find somebody on Hinge? Like you’re married? You’ve gone on three dates?

It’s different for different people. When we did the reboot, our core market was definitely 25- to 35-year-olds, and very much people who were, I would say, looking to find their person and get off the app. Now our fastest-growing segment has been 18- to 25-year-olds, and they’re at a different phase in their lives. It was pretty interesting. When we saw that segment starting to grow, it came as almost a surprise to us. I think what attracted these younger daters wasn’t so much a focus on finding a long-term relationship, or a marriage partner today; it was very much about the authenticity and vulnerability and intimacy they found on Hinge, and a moving away from platforms that felt very gamified and flat to something that felt very human and intentional and authentic.

So we think about our daters as having a journey mindset. They’re headed in a direction, they’re on a journey of self-exploration. They don’t want to waste their time on bad dates, but they aren’t necessarily looking for their marriage partner today, and that’s totally fine. We’re just looking to help people get off the app and out on great dates, and form intimate connections in real life.

But there’s a difference between getting off the app and going on great dates, and then deleting the entire thing, right?

Forever, yes.

There’s one exit ramp that is very different from another exit ramp. Not to keep comparing it to social media, but again, I feel as if I’m just viewing this from the outside, so it’s all metaphors for me. Mark Zuckerberg is terrified that young audiences will just abandon his core app, or whatever the core social media dynamic is at the time. This is why he bought Instagram. You can read his emails over the course of these trials. He’s like, “There’s another mechanic. I need to buy it before they overtake us.”

Zuckerberg keeps going down the line, whether that’s Stories or Reels or whatever the next thing is. You have the same problem, only you don’t get to keep the old users on the old mechanic. You don’t get to run Facebook and buy Instagram. How do you think about reinventing the app for that new, younger cohort that has different dynamics on the internet?

We always stay in tune with where the culture’s going. I think it’s just imperative, because, you’re right, we can’t rely on only a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture and where it’s going, and then continually evolve the app accordingly. Right now, a big focus is on AI, and how we can  increase the effectiveness of the app in a couple of different dimensions.

We’re actually finding, for example, the extent to which coaching has become really, really important right now. Especially during the pandemic, we saw social skills atrophy. People felt less comfortable meeting up with others in real life and interacting. So we’re helping people create their profiles, write their prompts, things like that. Another big thing that came out during the pandemic was more of a focus on voice, and adding voice prompts, which I think is, again, an example of our moving where the culture goes. So we’re always making these kinds of tweaks to continually keep the app fresh.

Do you feel the same existential pressure? There’s this idea that some cohort of people will delete the app — the old millennials will be married or tired or whatever it is they’re going to do, and you’ve got to go get a bunch of new Gen Z users or Gen Alpha users, which is frankly terrifying. How do you think about, “Okay, we’ve got to break the old model, because it’s existential for us if we don’t capture the younger user,” or is it more of a gradation?

If you look at the relatively brief history of this industry starting in the ‘90s, there’s only been one major disruption moment, which was around 2012. So you had the birth of the industry in the late ‘90s, where you had Match and eHarmony come on the scene, and then they dominated from 1996 to about 2014. It was actually a much smaller niche industry at the time. The users were older, people who felt as if they’d really struggled to find someone in real life.

Then you had the mobile dating apps come on because of a few different technologies that started to come online all together — one was mobile, one was the cultural change of everyone having a social media account. Another was data-processing power and moving away from the world of searching for people to a world of a feed of relevant people, one after another. That created a pretty big paradigm shift, where suddenly technology enabled an entirely new type of experience that it was hard for the old incumbents to mirror. They tried to pivot to mobile, but they couldn’t unseat themselves from their way of thinking about the world. It resembles a very classic disruption problem.

I think the next opportunity for that kind of disruption is going to be a big technology shift. We haven’t seen that up until very recently. Like with VR, AR, and other technologies like that, I just don’t see those working until they’re deeply adopted by 70 percent to 80 percent of the population, and that’s when I think it will really become something that people start using for dating. AI I think is a very different story, and it’s unclear at this point whether it becomes a disruptive force for the current players or whether it becomes more of an evolution. Obviously, Hinge has a tremendous amount of data we can use to train AI models. We’re seeing huge gains in our ability to match people up more thoughtfully given the tools, and at the same time we could introduce very new paradigms for dating.

I want to talk about AI with you, but you mentioned Match, so I think this is a good time to get to the Decoder questions. You’re part of Match Group. You sold to Match Group, and now Match Group owns all of the dating apps minus one, which is a little contentious. It doesn’t own Bumble. There’s a lawsuit. We can set that aside. What’s it like being part of Match Group? When you sold your company, what was that decision like for you?

Honestly, at the time we were in a tough position as a company. I’d done the reboot, and we were about a year into that reboot experience, and we had not really cracked the code yet. There were green shoots there that made me believe and made, I would say, the trained eye believe that there was really something there. But VCs just saw that we were popular, and then we tore down our business, and we restarted, and we started to rebuild again. There wasn’t a lot of juice there.

So we went with a strategy of recognizing the value of what we were seeing, including massive increases in effectiveness, women coming to the platform in a much higher proportion than on other dating apps. So that was very interesting to Match. And so we received a strategic investment from the company in 2017, and that gave it a path to buy the rest of the company, which it did at the end of 2018.

What’s that structure like inside of Match Group now?

It’s evolving. There’s a brand-new CEO, Spencer Rascoff, who just started, and I think he’s taking a fresh look at some of that. But up until recently, and still today, the company operates pretty independently. We’re in New York. We pretty much have our own space. We have our own product teams, our own engineering teams, our own marketing teams that operate very independently. We share learnings across the platform. We use shared services like accounting and legal and things like that. But for the most part, the company has its own independent culture, its own independent mission, product road maps, marketing strategies, all of that.

You said you shared some central services, like accounting and finance. Is there any product or data that you’re sharing?

We certainly share learnings. Especially on things that we don’t really want to compete on, such as safety or monetization or things like that. So there’s certainly that, and there’s sharing for safety purposes. Those are the main ways we share.

So if you’re a young and carefree single on Tinder, and you graduate to Hinge, you don’t get to just bring your data along for the ride?

[Laughs] No.

Again, I’m just looking from the outside. Tinder is interesting. The CEO of Tinder just stepped down. Your new CEO at Match, Spencer, stepped in to run Tinder for a minute. In any normal circumstance, you would be on the attack. If Tinder wasn’t part of the same company as you, this would be a moment to say, “Okay, there’s some strategic weakness over there. We’re going to go get them. We’re going to put the screws on.” Are you allowed to do that inside Match Group?

So first of all, I’ll just say that we don’t really think too much about Tinder as Hinge’s competition. We think about Tinder in a very different psychographic mindset. You come to Hinge because you want to really take your time, be intentional, be thoughtful, find your person. Tinder has a much more casual, younger, “anything can happen” mentality. And so that was a very intentional portfolio strategy decision that Match made back when it acquired us. So no, we don’t think about it like that.

That’s why I asked about the data and the lifecycle question. There’s a time in your life where you might use Tinder, there’s a time in your life where you might use Hinge. It seems from the overall umbrella company perspective, you want to move that user around your family of apps, but it doesn’t seem as if that’s actually happening at the top level.

Yes. From the outside that would make sense. It’s a bit nuanced, because there are very different brand reputations. We like to think of Hinge pretty independently, and I think so do our users.

So there’s no pop-up on Tinder that’s like, “Maybe, it’s time to cool it and download Hinge”?

There’s not.

[Laughs] Okay, feature request for you. What’s your org chart like? How is Hinge structured?

That’s also been evolving over time, and we’re still a relatively small company. We have about 350 employees. If I think about the evolution of Hinge growing from one person to the first 100 to 150 people, originally, it was very centrally run. There was tight coordination. A lot of direction came directly from me and my executive team. Then as we started to grow beyond 100 people, I would say a lot of the technology was relatively stable. Like with social, mobile, big data, the question became, “How do we keep optimizing and iterating around this?”

We became a pretty decentralized organization, where we had principles around pushing decision-making down to the lowest levels possible, keeping it really on the front lines. We had pretty independent cross-functional product teams that would work on their individual little missions or surfaces. We oscillated back and forth between that.

People felt they had a lot of autonomy. That was the main ethos of the company. And then I think with AI over the last couple of years, we felt like, “Whoa, we really need to make a pretty big shift.” Like I said, the risk of disruption is high, with very big opportunities to shift the product experience in a new direction. It now requires pulling decision-making back in toward the center a bit, and giving a much clearer strategic direction to the team, so that we’re all working in concert toward one thing. Because the whole app really has to move together. Different parts of the app have to talk to each other in ways that when we weren’t going through much change, wasn’t as essential. That said, we still have very highly cross-functional product teams where product managers sit with a dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, and tech lead to attack very mission-oriented problems.

You mentioned “surfaces” and “missions.” Are those expressed as just the tabs at the bottom of the app? Is that how they’re broken down, or are they actual user journey missions?

That’s what I mean — surfaces versus missions. I think we’ve gone in different directions. There’s never really a clear line of one versus the other. Do you own the Discover tab, where users just discover new people, or is your job to help people find the right person? In that case, you have to think more cohesively about operating across different surfaces or parts of the app. Now we think about our teams operating less as individual surface units and more as part of a cohesive dating-outcomes team, where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different surfaces.

How do you think about assigning product managers to those teams? Because PMs, at least in my experience, are like, “I own this square, and I will mess with this square to make this number go up as much as I can.” But “I can mess with all the squares” is really hard, right?

Yes, that’s why we have strong directors at the VP level who oversee an overall mission the way that a head of dating outcomes or a head of growth, who’s coordinating a set of product managers, would. And again, we ask our PMs. Their primary identity is as a dating outcomes PM, not as a discover PM, or a profile PM, or something like that. And while day to day most of their work may focus on the profile and identity work, they see themselves as very much operating as part of this team.

That feels like something you evolved to. You’re a relatively young founder. I think you founded the company right out of Harvard Business School. How has your decision-making framework evolved? How do you make decisions?

That’s also hugely evolved. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through doing it all the wrong ways first and then eventually getting to the right way. When you’re a founder and you have a small team of 10, 20, or 30 people, you’re just making decisions by the seat of your pants. What feels good? What feels right? You’re just using your own gut.

As we started to get toward 100 people or so, what I noticed was I would be making different decisions on different days that weren’t always consistent. They were based on my mood that day or whatever data was in front of me or what I had last read or whatever. I was just finding I was getting pretty inconsistent. So what I started trying to do was to write down my whole management algorithm. I started putting it in a Google Doc, like “Here’s how I make decisions, here’s what I believe is true.” I started publishing that to the whole company, so everyone could just read it. We would be just very transparent about how we made decisions.

It was around the time that I think I read Ray Dalio’s book Principles, and got super dialed in on how we make decisions. What are our principles, and what do we believe is true? Then I opened it up so everyone could comment on it. We would have long debates in the comment margins of a Google Doc to consider everything from our product-strategy principles to whether Hinge should have a dress code. Literally anything. It was all just there so that everyone could debate it.

We had hundreds of principles, and then as the company got even bigger and we got to 300 or 400 people, it was very hard. One, you just can’t have these endless debates in Google Docs anymore. Also, the principles started to stabilize. There wasn’t as much debate and churn anymore, and then it actually became an exercise in distilling down the most essential things to communicate about our culture.

I worked a couple of years ago to write an internal book called How We Do Things, which distilled it all down to four or five principles. For example, what are the most fundamental things to understand about how we make decisions here? And then individual teams and individual projects would then write their own principles that were more specific to what they were doing at any given time.

One of our meta principles now is “decide with principles,” meaning that we don’t want decisions getting made based on some random person’s opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company and we hire someone else, they’re going to come in with a completely different set of ideas about how to do something. We really try to define our principles first, agree on those principles, and then see how our work maps to them. I’m happy to talk about what the other three principles are if you want, but that’s the framework we use to make decisions now.

Yeah, talk about them a little bit. There’s a beautiful website, we’ll link to it. It has storytelling, it’s well done. But tell people what the other three principles are.

So the next one is “love the problem.” What I would notice is we would get an inclination around a user problem, which maybe was not even validated 100 percent. Then we’d start getting feature ideas, and we’d get very attached to a feature, and sometimes the feature would drift and not even be solving the original problem. What I found was, if you want to build breakthrough innovative product features and products, you have to spend extra time with the problem to really understand the why behind the why behind the why of of it. You need to ask, “What’s really going on here? Can we really get deep into our users, into the data, into our users’ experiences?” You have to go to that level to get insight that just isn’t available on the surface, and then stay really committed to that problem. And that’s what, again, allows for innovation.

I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, the strategy is just to throw feature ideas against a wall and see what sticks: “Let’s see if this works. Oh, it doesn’t work, throw that out, let’s try something else.” When you have a lot of deep conviction around a user problem, and you really know you want to solve it, then you have the resilience to try and try again to solve that problem, even if your first or second iteration doesn’t make it. So one of the most foundational of our principles is, “love the problem.” Fall in love with the problem, don’t fall in love with the solution, as you must be willing to give up the solution at any given time if it’s not solving the core problem that you’re trying to solve. So that is “love the problem.”

Next is “keep it simple,” meaning that I think the best solutions are always the most elegant solutions. Overall, we want to keep the product very simplified and minimal. Our colors are black and white. If you look at the Hinge product today, it’s very clean, it’s very simple. We’re always stripping away features that don’t make sense and just recognizing that there’s complexity.

There’s a cost to complexity every time you add a feature. So even if you add a feature, if it’s only marginally beneficial, the cost of the complexity and maintaining that feature versus the marginal benefit it adds will end up gunking up the app over time and slowing you down over time. That’s a hard conversation to have with product managers, because they’ll work for months on a feature and they’ll ship it and say, “Yeah, it didn’t harm the user base, we like it, and it even moved this metric over here by 2 percent.” And you’re like, “Well, the cost of complexity is high, and so we need to focus on things that are actually going to have a major impact.”

Are you all the way two features out for every feature in? Do you think about it that way? I know some founders do.

I haven’t heard that before. I don’t necessarily think that way. But I do believe in constantly reevaluating what’s in the app, asking what needs to stay, and having a high bar for building a new feature. So does it actually accomplish what we need it to accomplish, and is the complexity worth the cost? So that’s the third one now.

The fourth, the last one, is “tend to trust.” I just find that trust is the lifeblood of an organization. You have to do a lot of work to proactively cultivate and tend to trust by creating strong interpersonal relationships, by creating lots of opportunities for transparency at the organization. We have always been very, very transparent about where the organization is headed. So much so that we had to make all Hinge employees Match Group insiders so they couldn’t trade Match Group stock except during trading windows, because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was.

Everyone should know that all the way down to any position at the company. I think the trust  that you create both interpersonally and from the leadership on down to the rest of the organization is absolutely essential. It just  saves you a lot of headaches when it comes to internal politics and all those types of things.

Let’s put this into practice. You obviously made a big decision to refocus on AI. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, “Oh boy, it’s happening”? Was it that Match Group put out a press release with OpenAI saying, “We’re going to work together”? Did you read that and say, “I got to figure this out”? How did this come about?

Certainly the release of whatever version of ChatGPT that sent shockwaves through the world was a pretty big wake-up call. Obviously, we’d already been using machine learning and things like that in the interest of safety, and in our algorithms, our recommendation algorithms. But I think the shot across the bow that came from the release of ChatGPT [with GPT-3.5] was what really woke us up to the potential capabilities here and to realizing that this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn’t really seen since we started Hinge.

It took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about what our thesis was on how this was going to affect matching and dating in the future. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but I think we have a pretty clear thesis now, and we’ve started to organize the company around that thesis.

What’s the thesis?

That there’s two main vectors that AI is going to impact: dating and matchmaking. I think the big story is AI is going to move Hinge much closer to the experience of working with a personalized matchmaking service, and away from the experience of feeling that you are joining a social platform on your own as you try to find your person.

So what does that mean? Two big pieces. One is personalized matching, and the other is effective coaching. On the personalized matching front, we should be able to move much further beyond the world we are in today, which is our users speaking to us in essentially Morse code as they try to communicate to us what they like and what they don’t like.

The idea is that they would be able to speak much more directly to us with “here’s what I’m looking for, here are my values, here’s my personality, here are my interests.” It means Hinge being able to listen to them and hear their preferences, and even integrate things like relationship science into the app to better understand what types of people are compatible and what types of people are not long-term compatible, and introduce them to a much more curated, higher-quality, less-quantity list of people, where they have much more trust that if you’re introducing them to this person, this is probably someone they want to go out with.

We’ve already seen big gains, by the way, just by using the power of LLMs to drive more of our recommendation systems using the data we already have. But we released a new algorithm a couple of months ago that increased matches and dates by like 15 percent, and that’s just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured, nuanced data, with people talking to us in their own voice about who they are and what they want, which we can use very effectively.

So that’s the whole personalized matching front. Then there’s the effective coaching front. A lot of our users struggle to get out on that first date, and they often don’t know why. I have friends who are incredible people, and they’ll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile. I’m flabbergasted that this is their attempt at putting themselves out there.

So we’re starting with pretty basic things. Hinge has these prompts, which are short questions designed to get you into a conversation, and you put them on your profile. A lot of people write great responses to prompts, but a lot of people write not-so-great responses, often just one-word answers that just don’t work. We found it’s just incredibly effective to have trained an AI model on good-prompt responses and give people feedback. And it’s mostly like, “Can you say more about that?”

[Laughs] Don’t just put “no.”

Yeah, and to be a little bit more specific and tell a little bit of the story. Good answers invite another question back, or get a conversation going. So we can give people those nudges so they write good prompts, so that they choose good photos. We have a team called Hinge Labs, which is always looking at why some people succeed, and why some people don’t on the app.

Some of it is, again, simply building product features that help solve those problems, but another part of it is just giving guidance and notes about how they can be using the product better. We have traditionally published those in date reports, and we publish them in the press and we place them in the help center. But for the most part people just don’t read them. But the idea that we can take this body of knowledge we have about how to succeed on Hinge, and then look at how our users are using Hinge, and then deliver the right piece of advice at the right time to the right user, I think is going to be pretty transformative for a lot of people.

There’s a pretty fine line between that and what I see lots of people already doing all day long, which is just talking to ChatGPT, just hanging out. We had Eugenia Kuyda, the CEO of Replika, on the show, and she said, essentially, “My plan is people are going to date AI bots that will coach them up into being fully formed people, then we’ll release them into the dating pool, and they will have confidence and self-assuredness.”

Again, there’s a fine line between prompting someone and coaching them inside Hinge, and we’re coaching them in a different way within a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside Hinge?

Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there’s actually quite a clear line between providing a tool that helps people do something or get better at something, and the line where it becomes this thing that is trying to become your friend, trying to mimic emotions, and trying to create an emotional connection with you. That I think is really playing with fire.

I think we are already in a crisis of loneliness, and a loneliness epidemic. It’s a complex issue, and it’s baked into our culture, and it goes back to before the internet. But just since 2000, over the past 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70 percent for young people. And it’s been almost completely displaced by the time spent staring at screens. As a result, we’ve seen massive increases in mental health issues, and people’s loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, that most people don’t have enough friends. But he said we’re going to give them AI chatbots. That he believes that AI chatbots can become your friends. I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment

The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and mo re drained over time. It will displace the human relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world.

How do you compete with that? That is the other thing that is happening. It is happening. Whether it’s good or bad. Hinge is offering a harder path. So you say, “We’ve got to get people out on dates.” I honestly wonder about that, based on the younger folks I know who sometimes say, “I just don’t want to leave the house. I would rather just talk to this computer. I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way.” That’s what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly?

I’m starting to think very much about taking it head on. We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an essential part of the human experience, and they’re essential to our mental health. It’s not just because I run a dating app and, obviously, it’s important that people continue to meet. It really is a deep, personal mission of mine, and I think it’s absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this. Because it’s always easier to race to the bottom of the brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but leave them worse off. That’s the entire model that we’ve seen from what happened with social media. I think AI chatbots could frankly be much more dangerous in that respect.

So what we can do is to become more and more effective and support people more and more, and make it as easy as possible to do the harder and riskier thing, which is to go out and form real relationships with real people. They can let you down and might not always be there for you, but it is ultimately a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people. We can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. That’s another reason why I’m here today talking with you, because I think it’s important to put out the counter perspective, that we don’t just reflexively believe that AI chatbots can be your friend, without thinking too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means.

We keep going back to junk food, but people had to start waking up to the fact that this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food was detrimental to their health over the long term. And then as people became more aware of that, a whole personal wellness industry started to grow, and now that’s a huge industry, and people spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and mental health, and all these other things. I think similarly, social wellness needs to become a category like that. It’s thinking about not just how do I get this junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but how do I start building a sense of social wellness, where I can create an enriching, intimate connection with important people in my life.

[Content truncated due to length...]


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A view of a large nuclear power plant.

General view of the nuclear power plant Indian Point seen from Tomkins Cove, New York before it powered down in April 2021. | Photo: Getty Images

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans today to develop a new nuclear power plant, the first to be built in the state in decades.

It’s the latest signal that nuclear energy could see a comeback in the US thanks to wide-ranging support from some strange bedfellows: the Trump administration purporting to seek “energy dominance”; tech companies in need of more electricity for AI data centers; and climate hawks on board with nuclear energy as a carbon pollution-free alternative to fossil fuels.

Nuclear energy could see a comeback in the US thanks to wide-ranging support from some strange bedfellows

“The use of advanced nuclear technology can provide the State with a greater diversity of its energy resources that will support New York’s goal of a growing economy with a reliable, zero-emission electricity system,” New York State Energy Research and Development Authority president and CEO Doreen Harris said in a press release.

Hochul is directing the New York Power Authority to construct at least one new site for nuclear energy upstate with the capacity to generate at least 1 gigawatt of electricity (about half the capacity of Hoover Dam power plant).

The state is interested in advanced reactors that are still under development, in the hopes of overcoming some of the obstacles the nuclear energy industry has faced over the years. After a boom in nuclear reactors built in the 1970s and ‘80s, the technology struggled to compete as gas-fired power plants and solar and wind farms became cheaper sources of electricity. Fears about nuclear accidents like the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and conflicts over where to store radioactive waste have also bogged down the industry.

Next-generation designs for small modular reactors are supposed to cut down costs and make it easier to develop new sites for nuclear energy. President Donald Trump signed several executive orders last month to overhaul the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, speed up licensing for new reactors, and truncate environmental reviews. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, previously sat on the board of a nuclear energy startup with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The Vogtle power plant in Georgia has become an example of the kinds of problems that have plagued nuclear power projects; it’s the site of the first all-new reactors built in the US in more than three decades. After construction started in 2009, Vogtle units 3 and 4 finally came online in 2023 and 2024, roughly $17 billion over budget.

Now, the average age of a nuclear reactor in the US is 42 years old, with many retiring recently or scheduled to soon shutter. That trend is starting to reverse, with help from Big Tech and government incentives. Google and Amazon have both inked agreements to support the development of next-generation nuclear reactors. Meta signed a deal this month to help keep a reactor built in the 1980s alive for another 20 years. And Microsoft announced a power purchase agreement last year that’s supposed to lead to the restart of one reactor at Three Mile Island.

New York has a climate goal of slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent this decade compared to 1990. The state is about halfway to that goal, despite missing some key deadlines for finalizing pollution regulations.


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Microsoft is rolling out a new update to its Xbox Home UI that allows Xbox owners to pin apps and games on the homescreen. It’s part of a number of customization changes to the Xbox Home UI, including the ability to hide system apps and reduce the number of apps and games listed in the most recently used section.

You can pin up to three of your recently launched games or apps to the homescreen, and these will stay at the front of the recently used section even if you launch other apps or games. You can also turn off system apps, like Settings and the Store, from even showing up on the Xbox Home UI altogether.

If you really want to hide more of these recently used apps or games, you can also reduce the amount listed to just four tiles. There are options to pick between four and up to the nine that Microsoft shows by default.

All of these new customizations are part of the June Xbox dashboard update rolling out today, and can be found in Settings > General > Personalization > Games & apps. Microsoft first started testing these new customizations last month, so it’s a particularly quick rollout to all Xbox users this week.


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The House of Representatives has banned staff members from using WhatsApp on government devices, according to a report from Axios. In an email viewed by the outlet, the House’s chief administrative officer (CAO) tells staffers that the Office of Cybersecurity “has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk” because of a “lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks.”

The email says that congressional staff members can’t download or use the mobile, desktop, or web browser version of WhatsApp on any government device. “If you have a WhatsApp application on your House-managed device, you will be contacted to remove it,” the email reads.

Meta communications director Andy Stone pushed back against the decision in a post on X, saying the company disagrees with the CAO’s characterization of WhatsApp “in the strongest possible terms.” Stone adds that messages on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted by default, meaning third parties — not even Meta, which owns the platform — can read them. “This is a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAO’s approved list that do not offer that protection,” Stone writes.

As noted by The Guardian, the CAO’s message to staff recommended that they use other apps for communications instead, such as Microsoft Teams, Signal, iMessage, FaceTime, or the Amazon-owned messaging service Wickr. The CAO didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for more information.

WhatsApp isn’t the only app not allowed by the House. It has also banned TikTok on government devices and put restrictions on the use of the free version of ChatGPT.


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Microsoft is starting to test its new aggregated gaming library in its Xbox PC app on Windows. Xbox Insiders will now be able to see their Steam and Battle.net games all within the Xbox app this week — making it a single launcher for most installed PC games.

This new consolidated library will roll out to the Xbox app later this year, as well as new devices like the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. It’s part of Microsoft’s efforts to make the Xbox app on Windows the home of PC gaming and compete with Steam and SteamOS by combining Windows and Xbox.

“When a player installs a game from a supported PC storefront, it will automatically appear in ‘My library’ within the Xbox PC app, as well as the ‘Most recent’ list of titles in the sidebar — making it easier than ever to jump back into your games,“ explains Manisha Oza, product manager of the Xbox platform. Microsoft says support for additional PC storefronts will roll out over time.

If you want to try out the new aggregated library in the Xbox app on Windows, you can simply download the Xbox Insider Hub on PC and join the PC gaming preview. You can also manage the visibility of games by hiding any PC storefront in the Library & Extensions section of the Xbox app settings.


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Last year, I lost my old AirPods in my apartment and relied on my old-school Lightning EarPods for months before upgrading to an iPhone 16. Honestly, aside from missing wireless connectivity, I hadn’t noticed much difference. That’s why I still think they’re a good investment in 2025, and why I’m considering picking up the newer USB-C EarPods now that they’re on sale for $15.99 ($3 off) at Amazon and Walmart. That’s the best price we’ve seen and a smart buy if you’ve lost your entry-level pair or simply miss the simplicity of wired earbuds.

Released in 2023, the USB-C EarPods are designed to work with Apple’s latest iPhones, which have ditched the Lightning port in favor of USB-C. Aside from that, though, they’re virtually identical to the Lightning EarPods that once came bundled with the iPhone (they even include inline controls for volume and playback). They may lack pretty much all of the bells and whistles found on Apple’s latest AirPods, but many of us at The Verge still swear by their mic quality, which, surprisingly, outperforms a couple of pricier wireless options — including older AirPods models. They deliver impressively clear sound, too, which is why some of my colleagues still reach for them during calls.

For me, though, what I love most is how low-maintenance they are. I never had to worry about unwanted lag or battery life on long commutes — I just plugged them in and I was good to go. Best of all, they’re dirt-cheap to replace when you lose them, which, given my track record, I most certainly will.


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