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iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users are getting another year of free access to satellite connectivity features, according to a footnote on Apple’s newsroom posts for the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro. “The free trial will be extended for iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users who have activated their device in a country that supports Apple’s satellite features prior to 12 a.m. PT on September 9, 2025,” Apple says. Apple originally launched its Emergency SOS service via satellite shortly after it released the iPhone 14 lineup in November 2022, and at the time, Apple said the feature would be…

Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book piracy settlement has been put on pause after the federal judge overseeing the class action case raised concerns about the terms of the agreement. During a hearing this week, Judge William Alsup rejected the settlement over concerns that class action lawyers will create a deal behind closed doors that they will force “down the throats of authors,” according to reports from Bloomberg Law and the Associated Press. Anthropic agreed to pay the landmark settlement last week, putting to rest a class action lawsuit from US authors that accused the AI company of training its models on…

Apple just announced a bunch of new health tracking features alongside its new smartwatch lineup — but you might not need to upgrade your device to get access to them. With the launch of watchOS 26 next week, Apple will bring hypertension notifications, live translation, and the new wrist flick gesture to the Watch Series 9 and newer, along with the last-gen Watch Ultra 2. Apple’s new hypertension notifications use data from the watches’ existing optical heart sensor to “analyze how a user’s blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart.” An algorithm will then review this data over…

Determined to give us something new to talk about, Apple has introduced its ultra-thin iPhone Air. It's just 5.6mm thick with a 6.5-inch ProMotion display, a 48-megapixel dual camera, a selfie camera that supports Center Stage, and an add-on MagSafe battery. Among other things. We asked the staff of The Verge for their first impressions of the iPhone Air. We'll run a full review of the phone, of course, but here are some initial feelings about it from our staff. Preorders for the iPhone Air begin on Friday, September 12th, and it ships on September 19th. Do you want an…

AMD’s FSR 4 AI upscaling and frame-generation technology can now be enabled for “most games that support FSR 3.1 with DirectX 12,” the company says in the patch notes for its newest 25.9.1 driver.  This support has been a big promise from AMD, but it’s taken awhile to come to fruition; FSR 4 first launched alongside the company’s RX 9000-series graphics cards back in March. AMD touts FSR 4, its competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS 4, as a “significant leap forward” over FSR 3. “By utilizing ML algorithms, FSR 4 can intelligently predict and compensate for lost pixels during low-resolution rendering,…

Nintendo has notched another victory in its crusade against piracy. Last week, a Washington District Court judge ordered Ryan Daley to pay Nintendo $2 million and stop selling modded Switch consoles online, as reported earlier by Engadget. In a copyright lawsuit filed last year, Nintendo accused Daley of operating the website Modded Hardware, which sold modded Switch consoles, modchips used to hack into Switch devices, and Mig flash cartridges that allow people to play pirated copies of games. Nintendo claimed Daley caused the company “significant and irreparable harm” — and the judge agreed. “The MIG Devices, Mod Chips, Hacked Consoles,…

Google made three major updates to its Gemini-powered products on Monday: The Gemini app now accepts audio files; Search can handle five new languages; and NotebookLM creates reports in the form of blog posts, study guides, quizzes, and more.  According to a Monday post on X by Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, audio file compatibility was the “#1 request” to the Gemini app.  Free Gemini users max out at 10 minutes of audio, and five free prompts each day. AI Pro or AI Ultra users, meanwhile, can upload audio up to three hours in length. All…

Signal is launching its first paid feature: the ability to make secure, end-to-end encrypted backups of your media history older than 45 days and of your text message history for $1.99 per month. “Media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive,” Signal’s VP of engineering, Jim O’Leary, says in a blog post. “As a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data, Signal needs to cover those costs differently than other tech organizations that offer similar products but support themselves by selling ads and monetizing data.” Signal is also launching free…

Until very recently it wasn’t clear what usage limits were placed on Gemini at the various tiers. Thankfully Google has finally updated its Help Center article detailing “Gemini Apps limits & upgrades for Google AI subscribers.” Gone are the useless descriptors like “limited access” or vague statements like “we may at times have to cap the number of prompts and conversations you can have, or how much you can use some features, within a specific timeframe.” Instead it clearly states that you get up to five prompts a day with Gemini 2.5 Pro on a free account, 100 with an…

General Motors is going to be scaling back production of the Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq, as well as the Chevy Bolt EV as it expects sales of electric vehicles to slow dramatically. The $7,500 consumer tax credit for purchasing a new EV is set to expire at the end of the month. That credit has been crucial to driving demand for EVs, which are still more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts. The company is pausing production on the Lyriq and Vistiq at its Spring Hill, Tennessee plant in December. It’s also planning to halt manufacturing for a week in November…