How to Choose the Right Soundbar (2024): Size, Price, Surround Sound, and Subwoofers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is testing a new feature that will let creators use AI to “restyle” licensed songs for their shorts. The small group of creators with access can enter a prompt to change up different elements in a song, such as its mood or genre, and the expansion of YouTube’s Dream Track AI feature will generate a reworked 30-second soundtrack.
YouTube:If you’re a creator in the experiment group, you can select an eligible song > describ

Eufy’s new hardwired floodlight camera can record all day long. | Image: Eufy Eufy’s new Floodlight Camera E30 attaches a 2K camera that can tilt and pan 360 degrees to a pair of 2,000-lumen LED floodlights and throws in local video capture without subscription fees. Although Eufy, the smart home brand of Anker, sells similar products with batteries and solar panels offering more flexibility on where they can be mounted, most homes already have a floodlight. That makes the hardwired

Image: Rivian Volkswagen and Rivian have crossed all their T’s and dotted all their I’s in their new $5.8 billion joint venture, which officially kicks off its work on November 13th, the companies announced today.Last June, VW said it would invest $5 billion in Rivian as part of a new joint venture that’s focused on developing a new electrical architecture and vehicle software for future models, including subcompact cars, with the first planned for 2027. The investment size has

Image: BioWare EA has shared a lengthy blog detailing all the technical work that went into rendering hair in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.While it used to be, and in some cases still is, a struggle to find a game with a character creator that included a diverse range of hairstyles, newer games are getting better at providing styles to represent folks on the kinky / curly hair spectrum where a lot of people of color reside. However, the new struggle is getting those hairstyles to look and act natur

Get your red cup delivered straight to your door. | Photo: Starbucks A new way to spend $10 on a 12-ounce coffee just dropped. Starting today, Starbucks is accepting delivery orders right inside its app. Delivery is handled by DoorDash, and right now, it’s limited to “participating stores” in the US and Canada. But if you’re in the delivery area and willing to pay a small fortune in fees, getting your Starbucks order into your hands has never been easier.
Starbucks has be

Image: Nintendo Nintendo games rarely see big discounts, but the holiday shopping season always proves a good opportunity to save on some contemporary classics. After initially offering special holiday bundles of its Switch consoles, Nintendo has also announced a Black Friday sale on various games and controllers set to begin November 24th and run through the 30th.
Major Nintendo titles like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Pikmin 4, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and more will be $20 o

The Zefiro is a tiny USB-C MIDI controller that can be played like a wind instrument. | Image: Kickstarter An Italian startup called Artinoise has created an unusual USB-C accessory for mobile devices that turns them into playable musical instruments. The Zefiro looks like a flash drive or a tiny vape, but by gently blowing into one end, it can be used to play simulated instruments with even less skill than what was needed to play those plastic recorders in grade school.
The Zefiro is being made

The “Pro” versions are no longer available for purchase. | Image: VMware VMware made its Fusion and Workstation software that creates and manages virtual machines free for personal use earlier this year. Now, the company announced that as of Monday, it’s free for everyone, including commercial customers. Also, the Fusion (for Macs) and Workstation (for Windows and Linux) Pro versions are no longer available for purchase.
Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware in 202

Image: Sony Sony is cutting the price of the “slim” PS5 digital edition by $70, making it more affordable for the holiday season. Typically, that PS5 model costs $449.99, but it will start at $379.99 through December 24th, according to a new ad.This holiday deal brings the slim PS5 digital edition just under the original $399.99 price of the launch version of the PS5 digital console. The footnote at the end of the ad specifies that this price is only for the disc-free console, so it

The interior of the Hyundai Ioniq 6. | Photo by Patrick George for The Verge Hyundai, a company that has been just as guilty in the past of spreading the touchscreen scourge in cars as any other, has been course-correcting lately, putting more buttons and knobs into its cars. The reason isn’t surprising: people hate touchscreens, at least for certain essential controls like HVAC systems, and they told Hyundai so.
“As we were adding integrated [infotainment] screens in our vehicles, w

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge If you’ve been looking to replace your Android phone’s camera app with one that doesn’t overprocess photos to alter lighting and detail in sometimes extreme ways, now there’s an option. Zerocam is a barebones app that promises to “shoot in RAW and process your photos to remove all artificial effects, delivering soft, pleasant-to-eye images.”We’ve been talking about the definition of a photo for years, and we’re

Illustration: The Verge The iOS version of Google’s Chrome browser is getting upgraded with several features from the Android iteration, including simultaneous Google Lens image and text search. Chrome for iOS could already use Google Lens to search for a picture on your iPhone or one taken from the camera, but now you can add words along with it to narrow your search in one go.
For instance, you can upload a picture of a t-shirt design you like into Lens and type the name of a color that

Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion with former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) on October 29th, 2024, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Artificial intelligence is top of mind for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY). Zeldin plans to help “unleash US energy dominance” and “make America the AI capital of the world,” he said in a post on X today.The

The Verge Microsoft is planning to no longer support the Windows Mail, Calendar, and People apps later this year. The software giant has been moving existing users of these apps over to the new Outlook for Windows app in recent months, and now it has set an end of support date for the Mail, Calendar, and People apps of December 31st.
Once the apps reach end of support later this year, Microsoft warns that users who haven’t moved to the new Outlook app “will no longer be able to send

Logitech’s Circle View is one of only a handful of security cameras that work with Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service. The rumor is Apple is now developing its own. | Photo: Logitech It appears Apple’s rumored push into the smart home will include an Apple smart security camera. Supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports the company is planning to start production of a smart home IP camera in 2026 and aims to sell over 10 million units a year.
Kuo also reports that the camera

Logitech’s Circle View is one of only a handful of security cameras that work with Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service. The rumor is Apple is now developing its own. | Photo: Logitech It appears Apple’s rumored push into the smart home will include an Apple smart security camera. Supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports the company is planning to start production of a smart home IP camera in 2026 and aims to sell over 10 million units a year.
Kuo also reports that the camera

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images Waymo is ditching its waitlist in Los Angeles, much like it did before in Phoenix and San Francisco, making its fully autonomous vehicles available to anyone who downloads the company’s Waymo One app.There are still some geographic limitations with which to contend: Waymo only operates within 80 square miles of Los Angeles County, which includes neighborhoods such as Hollywood, Chinatown, Westwood, Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, and Playa Vista.Still, it was

Image: Epic Games Fortnite is going old school once again. Epic has announced that the throwback mode Fortnite OG, which brings back the battle royale’s original island, will become a permanent fixture of the game starting on December 6th.
OG first launched last November as a limited-time event, which turned out to be a big hit and was designed explicitly to bring back lapsed players to the game ahead of the release of Lego Fortnite. Its return means iconic Fortnite elements like Tilted To

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Netflix’s subscription plan with ads has reached a new milestone: it hit 70 million monthly users since its launch two years ago. That’s a big jump compared to the 40 million monthly ad-supported users Netflix reported in May.
Additionally, the streaming service said that the ad-supported plan accounted for 50 percent of all new signups in countries where it’s available. Netflix rolled out its ad-supported tier in the US, Australia, Braz

Image: The Verge Earlier this year Microsoft’s Edge browser automatically started up on my PC and imported my Chrome tabs without consent. Microsoft refused to explain why this behavior had occurred, and then quietly addressed the problem in a Microsoft Edge update. Microsoft hasn’t given up on trying to get your Chrome data though, as a new update is rolling out that automatically starts Edge and offers to import your Chrome tabs.
My colleague Richard Lawler noticed that Edge starte

Following its announcement that the second season of Andor (now subtitled A Star Wars Story) is set to premiere next April, Disney Plus has dropped a new sizzle reel giving us a proper look at the show and a whole bunch of other things coming to the streamer.
Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) is going to need a pilot in Andor season two, and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) might just be the man for the job judging from the way the new 2025 preview features footage of him stealing a ship. Cassian’s pen

There’s no better pair of AirPods you can buy for under $100. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge If you’re looking for a good opportunity to upgrade from an older pair of AirPods, then some of the early Black Friday sales going on right now are where you want to be. Walmart, for example, has chopped down the price of a pair of Apple AirPods (third-gen) with a Lightning charging case to $94, which is a massive $75 off and easily the lowest price we’ve seen to date.The fourth-gen A

There’s no better pair of AirPods you can buy for under $100. | Image: Chris Welch / The Verge If you’re looking for a good opportunity to upgrade from an older pair of AirPods, then some of the early Black Friday sales going on right now are where you want to be. Walmart, for example, has chopped down the price of a pair of Apple AirPods (third-gen) with a Lightning charging case to $94, which is a massive $75 off and easily the lowest price we’ve seen to date.The fourth-gen A

Cath Virginia / The Verge The European Union has accused Apple of unlawfully discriminating against EU customers after finding the Cupertino company’s geo-blocking measures may be violating the bloc’s consumer protection rules.Announced via a press release on Tuesday, the European Commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) said a joint investigation had identified “several potentially prohibited geo-blocking practices” that Apple applies to its App Store, iT

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images 23andMe is laying off 40 percent of its employees, or over 200 workers, as the company attempts to recover from last year’s massive data breach and reverse its plummeting stock price. The genetic testing company also announced that it will shut down its therapeutics business.
Though 23andMe says the restructuring plan will cost it around $12 million, it expects to save more than $35 million as a result, while “substantially” lowering operat