Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple has been staring down the barrel of numerous antitrust investigations this past year, after app developers like Spotify and Rakuten accused the company of unfairly advantaging Apple’s own apps ahead of theirs. But Apple is apparently working on a new feature that might address at least one of the common concerns, by proactively suggesting third-party apps (apps that Apple doesn’t make) to iPhone and iPad users when they first set up their devices. Will Apple suggest Spotify alongside Apple Music? That could be on the table.

9to5Mac spotted the feature in the new iOS 14.3 beta, and it seems pretty clear from the accompanying text that the feature is designed to satisfy countries who take a dim view of Apple’s current stance. “In compliance with regional legal requirements, continue to view available apps to download,” reads part of the code, suggesting that it’ll only be rolled out in regions where Apple feels compelled to do so.

There are also those companies that bypass the app store cut

Assuming Apple actually makes the feature a reality in a future version of iOS, it might not be enough to satisfy some of the companies that have spoken out against Apple, though. For one thing, the iPhone’s default set of apps is only one place where, they argue, Apple gives itself an edge. Apple has also been accused of prioritizing its own content in search — though Apple says that’s not true — and compared to changes to search, a one-time attempt to recommend a small handful of apps to users who stick with the onboarding process wouldn’t make as much of an impact.

But Apple does seem to be making more than one such change this year; in iOS 14, it finally lets you set your own default browser and email apps — though it has run into a few bugs there.

Apple’s also fighting a somewhat different antitrust battle with Epic Games over Fortnite, and it’s been under fire for its stewardship over the App Store for a while. Recently, Apple changed some of its App Store rules to allow some of the kinds of apps that it had blocked or attempted to remove — when blocking them led to unwanted attention.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Many Mac users reported that their computers have been running slower than usual on Thursday — including a number of Verge staffers — with apps launching slowly or not at all, alongside other Apple service issues.

It appears that the problem is due to many people rushing to download macOS Big Sur, which was officially released today, which in turn seems to have crashed Apple’s OCSP (online certificate status protocol) service — which is used for several key aspects of macOS, including validating digital certificates for both Apple and third-party software on the Mac, as Ars Technica reports.

Hey Apple users:

If you're now experiencing hangs launching apps on the Mac, I figured out the problem using Little Snitch.

It's trustd connecting to https://t.co/FzIGwbGRan

Denying that connection fixes it, because OCSP is a soft failure.

(Disconnect internet also fixes.) pic.twitter.com/w9YciFltrb

— Jeff Johnson (@lapcatsoftware) November 12, 2020

Apple’s status site notes that the company had resolved an issue earlier today that may have prevented users from downloading macOS software updates, although it hasn’t been confirmed that the Big Sur update was the cause of the outage. The company also reported issues with iMessage and full-blown outages with Maps routing and navigation as well as its traffic tracking, which may have been related to the OSCP failure, too.

Mac and iOS developer Panic reports corroborates the reports, noting that the downed service had disabled Apple’s Gatekeeper technology, which checks validity of apps when you try to launch them. Panic also reports that the issue appears to be resolved, but it’s not clear if things have totally cleared up for everyone yet.

Looks like, when apps are launched, Gatekeeper is unable to check their validity over the internet, due to overwhelmed Apple servers. So, uh, let’s all hang in there! You got this, Apple devops!

— Panic (@panic) November 12, 2020

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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It’s been a good two years for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, the gaming tablet has been the bestselling console in the US for 23 straight months. And according to data from the NPD Group, it just had its best October ever, moving 735,926 units of both the Switch and Switch Lite in the US. The company says that represents a 136 percent increase compared to last year. To date, the Switch has sold 22.5 million units in the US, and last week Nintendo revealed that more than 68 million units have been sold globally. “We’re excited about our momentum,” says Nick Chavez, Nintendo of America’s SVP of sales and marketing.

Chavez puts the company’s big October down to two main factors. One is a better supply of stock; this year in particular, it’s often been hard to find a Switch on store shelves. This has only been exacerbated by increased demand due to a combination of the pandemic and the breakout success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. “Certainly the covid pandemic has created more opportunities to stay at home, more play time at home,” he tells The Verge. “We’ve seen unprecedented demand for Nintendo Switch throughout the course of the year.”

The second reason is the Animal Crossing-themed Switch that was introduced early this year. “That came back into the marketplace around October 4th, and many people were excited to get their hands on that as quickly as possible,” says Chavez. “And we’re going to continue to have that in ample supply throughout this holiday and into 2021.”

“A lot of our growth has been driven by an influx of women.”

As with last year, Nintendo says that a large part of its growth comes from continued adoption by women and families. “This year a lot of our growth has been driven by an influx of women playing Nintendo Switch, more kids and teenagers playing Nintendo Switch, as well as parents,” says Chavez. In terms of what hardware people are buying, he adds that “we are still seeing a strong preference for the flagship system at $299.”

The timing of the announcement is particularly interesting as this week also saw the launch of both the PlayStation 5 and two new Xbox consoles from Microsoft. Going into the ever-important holiday season, there will naturally be increased competition, which could bring Nintendo’s 23-month streak to a stop. Nintendo has a few big releases to buoy its holiday — including Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit and the upcoming Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity — but the company also believes it’s not necessarily in direct competition with Sony and Microsoft.

“It’s always exciting when new consoles enter the video game marketplace. It’s great to see the PS5 and the Xbox Series S and X coming into the marketplace,” says Chavez. “But we do think that the Nintendo Switch occupies a fundamentally different position, and really has a unique proposition for shoppers and players.”

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Render: Apple

It’s been a little bit weird that Apple would sell both a 13-inch MacBook Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro simultaneously, but perhaps never more than today — because Apple’s new $999 and $1,299 laptops seem nearly identical if you look beyond the differently curved frames. They’ve got the same M1 processor, the same memory and storage options, the same ports, and very similar screens.

I’m not joking when I say: the biggest difference is a fan.

This fan, which is exclusive to the MacBook Pro:

Render: Apple

The 13-inch MacBook Pro’s fan.

I mean, yes, it is a little bit hilarious the MacBook Air is now a laptop that doesn’t blow air, just like it’s amusing that the Air technically continues to be a thicker laptop than the 13-inch Pro. (I guess it’s been a long time since manila envelopes were a thing.)

Image: Apple

Compare the MacBook Pro’s dimensions...

Image: Apple

...to the MacBook Air. The main difference is a tapered frame.

But you shouldn’t knock that fan, because here’s a little-known fact about today’s CPUs: they can almost all run far faster if you give them better cooling. A CPU’s thermal design power (TDP) in watts is a better predictor of performance than its gigahertz clock speed because some of the weakest laptop and phone chips can “boost” up to multiple gigahertz these days... until they heat up. In a small, fanless chassis, they have to throttle down quickly, but they can go for longer in a larger or better-cooled one.

That’s basically what’s happening in the new Apple M1-powered MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, Apple confirms to The Verge. Each computer has the same exact processor (with one wrinkle I’ll address in a sec), which can theoretically run at the same speed — but the fan in the MacBook Pro and Mac mini lets them sustain peak performance for longer.

Render: Apple

The Mac mini’s fan.

Apple is trying to have it both ways, of course: during its presentation, it first lauded the MacBook Air for going fanless, then talked up the “active cooling solution” (aka the fan you’ve had for years) in the MacBook Pro. We’ll have to see which design is actually better in our upcoming reviews.

While the fan might be the most meaningful difference, it’s not the only one. Remember that wrinkle I told you about? Here it is, and more:

• At $999, the MacBook Air comes with seven GPU cores instead of eight, because Apple is salvaging some weaker chips (a common process known as binning) by disabling one core.
• But at $1,249, the MacBook Air has the same eight CPU cores and eight GPU cores as the $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro.
• The 13-inch MacBook Pro has a slightly larger battery (58.2Wh vs. 49.9Wh) and quotes two additional hours of battery life compared to the MacBook Air.
• The 13-inch MacBook Pro’s screen is slightly brighter at maximum (500 nits vs 400 nits).
• The 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with the Touch Bar instead of physical function keys, though both have a Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

You might also be interested to learn that both laptops top out at 16GB of RAM, which is a current limitation of Apple’s M1 processor. Here’s Apple’s own spec comparison if you want to take a closer look.

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Image: Mark Gurman

Apple’s MacBook Air is one of a collection of the company’s computers to receive the newly announced M1 chip today. The beloved laptop appears almost identical from the outside, but if you open it up you’ll notice the familiar keyboard has changed. Apple’s traded out some of the function keys on its new MacBook Air, adding in new ones for Spotlight, Do Not Disturb, and Dictation.

The last time the functionality of the MacBook Air keyboard changed was to add Touch ID for securing passwords and payment details. This change goes further, removing the brightness keys for the keyboard along with the Launchpad key that pulled up macOS’s SpringBoard-inspired app launcher.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first noticed the change and shared the new layout in this tweet:

The new MacBook Air has updated keyboard function keys, adding Spotlight, Dictation, and Do Not Disturb - replaces Launchpad and Keyboard brightness. pic.twitter.com/1BM6wTWQZh

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) November 10, 2020

All three of those functions required keyboard commands or accessing the Notification Center to use — this change should make them easier to access. I know I typically don’t adjust my keyboard brightness, so making that adjustment an extra step away doesn’t seem like too much of an ask. Similarly, I don’t know anyone who uses Launchpad to launch apps, so a dedicated key doesn’t seem necessary anymore. This isn’t quite as dramatic a design change as the temporary move to butterfly switches, nor should it impact the actual usability of the laptop, but future users will have to judge it for themselves.

We’ll have a review soon, but if you’re interested in seeing these new keys for yourself, the new MacBook Air is available for purchase today and ships next week, starting at $999.

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Xbox Live users are struggling to log into the service today, amid the launch of both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Xbox Support tweeted at 2:33PM that its teams were “closing in on a fix for this issue.” However, some users were still struggling to sign in across multiple platforms as of 4:40PM. A resolution is still pending.

Microsoft’s next-gen consoles arrive today (though it might be tricky to find a console, thanks to the challenges of high demand in a pandemic). In addition to launch titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the console also allows for backwards compatibility for Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games playable on existing Xbox One hardware.

Online services are already important for players to download new games, updates, and more for their consoles. For the Xbox Series S, however, a working connection is a must-have to play anything at all. The system is an all-digital one that does not use use disc gaming.

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Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge

In our review of Google’s $99 Nest Audio speaker, we wrote that it’s “unfortunate that you can’t use two Nest Audio speakers paired with a Chromecast for home theater audio, like you can do with a couple of Amazon Echo speakers and a Fire TV.”

But it appears that Google originally intended to offer just such a feature — and we’re wondering if the company might still introduce it in the next few months.

As 9to5Google points out, Google seemingly forgot to remove a rather telling arrangement of words from the HTML source for its Nest Audio product page:

With Chromecast & Google TV Nest Audio becomes your home theater sound system.

The UK version of the page even had an alternate localization of the same sentence, which suggests intention.

With Chromecast and Google TV, Nest Audio becomes your home cinema sound system.

There’s not a whole lot of ways to interpret that phrase. Here are a few that spring to mind:

1. Google was working on the exact thing we wanted, but decided to scrap the feature before launch and forgot to update one portion of its website.
2. Google is now working on the exact thing we wanted, and has quietly inserted a hint into its website.
3. Someone who was building the website drastically misinterpreted their instructions and made a funny mistake.

But even though it would have been easy to admit the mistake, that’s not the direction Google has chosen to take: the company tells The Verge it has “no news on this front,” which suggests that it’s likelier to be #1 or #2.

We’re not sure which, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if the feature arrived in a future software update. We already know the new Chromecast with Google TV is slated to get an update with Google Stadia cloud gaming support in the first half of 2021. Perhaps it’ll add some speaker pairing, too.

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If you’re like us, you probably haven’t thought about the Slingbox in a good long while; the idea of beaming your own TV over the internet has largely been replaced by streaming TV services, even if watch-anywhere DVRs like the Fire TV Recast do still exist.

But if you are still relying on a Slingbox of your very own, you’re officially on notice: Dish subsidiary Sling Media is discontinuing all Slingbox products and will permanently shut down the Slingbox servers on or around November 9th, 2022 — “at which point ALL Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable,” says Sling.

Why now? Please enjoy this illuminating explanation:

Screenshot of Sling’s FAQ

Right then!

The company’s also nixing a variety of its SlingPlayer apps, including its app for Windows Phone, which... it’s been a while since the Slingbox was fully relevant, OK? But it sounds like there’ll still be a version available for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, and even the web for a little while yet.

Since 2015, Sling has been a little more focused on its own over-the-top streaming platform: Sling TV. So far, it’s not a bad deal.

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube says a video claiming President Donald Trump won the election does not violate any of its policies and has allowed it to stay on the platform, despite the election not being called by major news outlets for either candidate yet. The decision stands in contrast to Twitter and Facebook’s more aggressive attempts to clamp down on misleading claims and misinformation over election results.

The video, titled “Trump Won. MSM hopes you don’t believe your eyes,” was published by pro-Trump network One American News Network (OANN) on Wednesday. YouTube says the video violates its advertising guidelines but not its content policies, so it can stay online but will run without ads, the company confirmed to The Verge. The story was first reported by CNBC.

In the video, an OANN anchor says Trump won another term, baselessly claims that Trump would win a number of swing states if it weren’t for voter fraud, and then equates counting outstanding mail-in ballots with an attempt to steal the election. Despite this information being incorrect, the video doesn’t cross the line on YouTube.

YouTube’s current policies regarding misinformation and the election pertain to content “aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means or eligibility requirements for voting, or false claims that could materially discourage voting,” according to a company spokesperson. YouTube took down several livestreams related to the election between yesterday and today for violating its spam policies, according to the company, although Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen has tracked instances where misleading content has managed to appear on the site via livestreams.

Instead, YouTube has removed ads from the specific OANN video

A panel appears below the OANN video stating that election results “may not be final,” with a link to Google’s main search page that shows updated election coverage. “All search results and videos about this election — including this video — surface an information panel noting that election results may not be final and we are continuing to raise up authoritative content in search results and recommendations,” the spokesperson added.

YouTube also has a policy that says creators or organizations can not use “thumbnails, description, or tags to trick users into believing the content is something it is not,” but declined to tell The Verge why this video is allowed to remain up if Trump, in fact, hadn’t won the election at the time the video was posted.

Instead, YouTube has removed ads from the specific OANN video. The company does not allow ads to run on videos undermining election confidence through demonstrably false information. Since the election has not been called at this time, the video is in violation of YouTube’s advertising policy. YouTube has routinely in the past kept borderline content (videos that YouTube doesn’t promote, but won’t take down as they don’t violate any policies) on its platform but removed the ability for creators and organizations to monetize said content.

While YouTube is known for its confusing policies, its handling of election misinformation looks even worse against the backdrop of Twitter and Facebook’s more aggressive actions.

Facebook removed a specific feature within Instagram’s hashtags to try and slow down the spread of misinformation that could result in voter suppression, according to the New York Times. The company has also turned off political group recommendations for similar reasons. On election day, Facebook also added a notification at the top of people’s news feeds to try and prevent users seeing false claims that one party won the election prematurely. Facebook relied on verified news results from publications like Reuters and the Associated Press. As election results come in, Facebook has also labeled false claims from parties that they’ve won specific states.

Twitter has aggressively labeled tweets from people, including President Trump, falsely claiming that mail-in voting has led to inaccurate results. False claims about winning specific states and the election at large have also been amended with warning labels saying that final results have yet to be counted and the election is not over.

YouTube claims that it’s also doing its part through information boxes that relate back to Google search results, which also relies on authoritative voices like Reuters and the Associated Press. It just won’t remove this one specific OANN video claiming that Trump won the election.

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Image: Valve

Gabe Newell, president of Valve, the video game company behind the Half-Life series and game marketplace Steam, is thanking the country of New Zealand for its hospitality by launching a gnome into space with aerospace company Rocket Lab in mid-November. Newell decided to stay in New Zealand at the start of the pandemic and is donating a dollar to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Starship Children’s Hospital for every viewer who watches the satellite launch livestream or the online recording within 24 hours of launch.

This soon-to-be astronaut gnome is actually a 150mm tall model of “Garden Gnome” or “Gnome Chompski,” an item that first appeared in Half-Life 2: Episode Two but achieved meme status following the speedruns and travelogues (like this charmingly detailed one written by former games journalist Tom Francis) that popped up around it. The gnome was likely a reference to an older prank involving photographing stolen garden gnomes “traveling” around the world, which gained further popularity when it was seemingly referenced in Amélie and when it served as the basis for Travelocity’s “Where is my gnome” viral ad campaign.

Chompski’s gone on to appear in Valve’s own Left 4 Dead 2, DLC for Dying Light and more recently Half-Life: Alyx, but this upcoming real-life rocket launch is a fitting homage to the “Little Rocket Man’’ achievement associated with the gnome from Episode Two. The achievement can only be unlocked if a player carries the gnome from the opening chapter of the game and places it in a rocket ship near the end — a task that’s difficult because the player has to set the gnome down to complete Half-Life’s environmental puzzles and combat scenarios.

Image: Valve

The gnome inside Rocket Lab’s rocket

This launch-ready version of the gnome is co-designed by special effects and prop house Weta Workshop and made from titanium. Rocket Lab hopes to use it “to test and qualify a novel 3D printing technique that could be employed for future spacecraft components”.

The gnome will be attached to the inside of Rocket Lab’s Kick Stage, the final stage of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket that allows more accurate placement of satellites in orbit. Once all of the rocket’s payload is dropped, the Kick Stage is able to reignite its engine to initiate deorbit. This mission is not quite the sequel fans might have imagined for Chompski after setting him down in Episode Two, though; the gnome will burn up alongside Kick Stage as both reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. Rocket Lab explains Kick Stage in the video below:

Gnome Chompski will be accompanied by 29 other satellites at Rocket Lab’s November 16th launch from the southern tip of the Mahia Peninsula. The small satellites loaded on the Kick Stage of the company’s Electron rocket span a wide range of uses from satellites focused on communications and maritime surveillance to New Zealand’s first student-developed satellite, the Waka Āmiorangi Aotearoa APSS-1.

While sending a gnome to space comes off about as silly as the SpaceX launch of a Tesla Roadster, Newell’s addition of a charity element — even though he could just donate a sum of money rather than requiring people to watch — at least makes the stunt more meaningful than pure marketing. Interested fans should follow Rocket Lab’s socials for updates on specific launch timing heading into the 14-day launch window that starts on November 16th NZT (6AM ET/3AM PT on the 15th). The launch itself will be livestreamed on Rocket Lab’s site.

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Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The New York Post is back on Twitter, after Twitter updated its policy on policy changes. This story is going to be confusing, but not as confusing as Twitter’s attempts at moderation.

To recap: On October 14th, The New York Post published a (contested and possibly part of a disinformation campaign, though this is absolutely not the point I am here to tell you about) story about Hunter Biden, the son of presidential candidate Joe Biden. Very little of the contents of the Post story are pertinent to the discussion we are about to have, except this: some of the materials in it, Twitter alleges, seem to be the result of hacking.

Got all that so far? Great, there’s more

Twitter suspended The New York Post’s account for six tweets that linked to the story and blocked links to the story in question, citing its hacked materials policy, as well as a policy about private information. This caused, perhaps predictably, a massive uproar. On October 15th, Twitter’s trust and safety lead, Vijaya Gadde, tweeted that Twitter’s hacked materials policy would change, and the company would “no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them.”

On October 16th, Jack Dorsey tweeted that blocking the URL “was wrong,” and a Twitter spokesperson told The New York Times that the information that was previously “private information” had spread so widely that it no longer counted as “private.” Therefore, the Post article no longer violated the private information policy.

Got all that so far? Great, there’s more. Despite inspiring the policy change on hacked materials and no longer violating the policy on private information, The New York Post remained suspended, because of a different policy. See, Twitter has a policy on policy changes. If you were, say, a tabloid that had been suspended because of an old policy, a new policy wouldn’t supercede your suspension. Not even if you’d inspired the new policy.

So today, Twitter has updated its policy on policy changes, and The New York Post is taking a victory lap.

It didn’t have to go like this. Facebook, for instance, chose to limit the article’s reach while fact-checkers combed through it — but the company didn’t remove it. Basically, Facebook triggered its “virality circuit breaker,” which allowed The Post to post without giving it unwarranted lift, in case the article was disinformation. That decision was also controversial, but it was less severe.

Here we are, one Senate hearing and two policy changes later

Pilfered documents are unquestionably part of the journalistic tradition. This tradition was particularly part of the 2016 presidential election, when reporters published stories with emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been obtained through hacking. As a result, platforms began planning for what they would do in case of a similar 2020 hack-and-leak operation. Twitter evidently felt that The New York Post’s article rose to that level.

Anyway, the Republican party called foul on the whole thing and made everyone sit through a tiresome Senate hearing on October 28th.

So, here we are, one Senate hearing and two policy changes later. Insofar as it is possible to draw a moral from this bizarre saga, it seems to be this: Twitter’s moderation still doesn’t make any damn sense. But congratulations to them on updating their policy on policy changes.

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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Today, exactly one year after Apple first launched the AirPods Pro — and thus the same day the very first AirPods Pro owners will see their one-year warranties expire — Apple has launched a repair program that offers free repairs or replacements for another whole year if your AirPods Pro experience issues with noise cancellation or static.

Specifically, Apple will fix:

Crackling or static sounds that increase in loud environments, with exercise or while talking on the phone

Active Noise Cancellation not working as expected, such as a loss of bass sound, or an increase in background sounds, such as street or airplane noise

Apple says only a “small percentage of AirPods Pro” are affected by the issues, but it apparently wasn’t just an early batch — Apple says affected units were manufactured “before October 2020,” meaning every AirPods Pro ever made might be eligible. That’s quite a recall if so. Apple says it will repair faulty AirPods Pro for two years after you first buy them.

We’ve heard complaints about degraded noise cancellation before, and at least one Verge editor has replaced their AirPods Pro under warranty. It’s nice to hear that Apple isn’t just cutting buyers off as soon as that warranty expires.

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Almost a quarter of all transactions at Starbucks stores in the US are mobile orders through the company’s app, an earnings document revealed yesterday. Ordering ahead through the Starbucks app is the company’s suggested way to get in and out of its locations faster during the pandemic, hopefully making it easier to maintain social distancing in the process.

Starbucks launched “Mobile Order & Pay” in 2015, combining the company’s existing payment system with new online ordering features that let you order ahead for pickup at stores. This week’s new stats show how popular that feature has become, slowly growing over time until it dramatically increased over the course of 2020 — from 17 percent at the end of last year all the way to 24 percent of US retail orders last quarter.

Starbucks’ mobile orders as % of transactions:

Q4 2020 24%
Q3 2020 22%
Q2 2020 18%
Q1 2020 17%
Q4 2019 16%
Q3 2019 16%
Q2 2019 15%
Q1 2019 15%
Q4 2018 14%
Q3 2018 13%
Q2 2018 12%
Q1 2018 11%
Q4 2017 10%
Q3 2017 9%
Q2 2017 8%
Q1 2017 7%
Q4 2016 6%
Q3 2016 5%
Q2 2016 4%
Q1 2016 3%

— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) October 29, 2020

Mobile orders are the latest entry in Starbucks’ aggressive push onto phones, a project that started in earnest with the wide launch of mobile payments and the company’s app in 2011. The move quickly proved successful: by 2013, mobile payments made up 10 percent of the company’s transactions in the US.

Starbucks’ mobile payments have been so popular, they even beat out general purpose mobile payment systems. Research conducted by eMarketer in 2018 showed the Starbucks app was the most popular in-person or “proximity” mobile payment method overall, with 23 million people in the US making purchases at least once every six months. This surpassed Google and Apple’s own mobile payment options at the time:

the top payments app isn't Apple Pay or Google Pay... it's Starbucks. eMarketer says the ranking will remain unchanged through 2022.

This year over 23M people will use the Starbucks app to make point of sale purchase at least once every six months. pic.twitter.com/gOE95KuZer

— Sally Shin (@sallyshin) May 22, 2018

Growth in delivery and mobile ordering seems to be connected to COVID-19 and the increased viability of online ordering and delivery overall during the pandemic. Pew Research Center in April found that “Roughly a third of Americans living in urban (35%) and suburban (36%) areas say they have ordered from a local restaurant online or through an app because of the outbreak”.

Drive-thrus and mobile orders turn Starbucks into a fast food experience that’s a little different from the company’s traditional “Third Place” approach, but now that the interiors of stores are limited or closed during the pandemic, these features are vital to the company’s survival.

In Starbucks’ Q3 earnings call, Kevin Johnson, the company’s CEO, said that COVID-19 validated the company’s long-term plans around drive-thrus, contactless pickups and deliveries. This growth in mobile orders several months later seems to be further confirmation of COVID-19’s effects on the business and Starbucks’ ability to adapt to them.

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There are any number of VPN services you can use to help protect your privacy and security with an encrypted internet connection, and now Google has its own. Well, technically, it already did, but only for Google Fi cellular subscribers on Android smartphones. Now, the company’s announcing it’ll throw in an Android-based VPN free of charge to any 2TB Google One cloud storage subscriber in the US — and will expand to iOS, Windows and Mac and other countries “in the coming months.”

As you can see in the image above, you’ll need to be on the 2TB Google One plan which costs $9.99 a month or $99 per year, so it’s not exactly a free VPN. But if you’re interested, this Google GIF shows you how to turn it on:

A new VPN is just the latest way that Google’s trying to sweeten its cloud storage offering. In August, the company announced it would begin backing up your iOS or Android phone for free. It also reduced prices in 2018.

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A render of the unannounced Anker charging pad. | Image: GizmoChina

Just yesterday, we found FCC filings for a new Anker PowerWave wireless charging pad that mentioned an unannounced second generation of Echo Buds with wireless charging right in the name. That charger has since leaked in full in a Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) listing spotted by GizmoChina.

The now-pulled WPC listing included the render of the product at the top of this post that gives us a few hints about what the Echo Buds’ case might look like and some of the features of the pad. The charger appears to have an oblong indentation for the Echo Buds’ wireless charging case to rest in, indicating the case will have a much different shape than more rectangular one used with the original Echo Buds. (We observed a similar oblong shape in a diagram of the pad included with the FCC filings.)

The charger also looks to have different charging indicators for the case and the earbuds, which could be a handy way to know at a glance if your Echo Buds are fully charged but the case isn’t, for example. There’s also a charging light labelled “Phone,” which will presumably light up when you place a phone on the pad.

It’s unclear when this charging pad might come out, but the fact that it appeared both on the WPC and in FCC filings hints that it could be released soon. And if this charging pad for a new set of Echo Buds is seemingly on the way, that suggests the headphones themselves could be announced imminently as well.

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Microsoft has been slowly weaning users off its legacy Internet Explorer browser for a very long time, recently going so far as to use a forced Windows update to install its new Chromium Edge browser on your Windows PC. But next month, Microsoft’s planning to force your computer to automatically launch some 1,156 websites in Edge, too — if you try to launch an “incompatible” site in IE.

That’s the report from ZDNet, which also recorded a video showing how it works:

There’s a lot of big-name sites on the automatically-launch-in-Edge list, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, a number of Google products, Microsoft Teams, and quite a few banks and other big brands.

According to a Microsoft FAQ, the change will roll out in Microsoft Edge version 87, which is set to arrive the week of November 19th, and that Edge will automatically try to migrate your browsing data from IE unless you uncheck a box (see the image below).

Given that older versions of Internet Explorer have been the bane of web developers for a very long time, and given that even generous estimates suggest Internet Explorer counts for no more than 5 percent of today’s web traffic, this isn’t a particularly frustrating move. I personally haven’t touched IE in years, and I’m happy to hear it might become less of a security risk.

But I also understand that some people still use the browser, and those people might be confused when their computer suddenly launches Edge instead. This post is for them.

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Samsung

Samsung would like you to believe its new 85-inch Interactive Display can bridge the gap between students in the classroom and students studying at home, now that blended-learning is the new normal across the country. In reality, it’s just a slightly bigger digital whiteboard — but assuming it doesn’t cost too much, the tweaked vision does sound intriguing.

Now that COVID-19 has swept the country, some students are huddling around tiny Chromebook screens at home while others stay in class, and Samsung’s internet-connected digital whiteboard promises to let students and teachers collaborate with each other, whether they’re in that classroom drawing on the board or adding to it in real-time from their laptop at home. The goal here isn’t to necessarily connect everyone better – they’ve had a few months to get a handle on that over Zoom – but rather to let the kind of collaboration that can happen when everyone’s together, happen while students are apart.

Samsung

Samsung’s 65-inch Flip 2

While the Interactive Display is mostly just a larger version of Samsung’s existing Flip 2 digital whiteboards, the 85-inch size means it’s as large as an actual school whiteboard (though it weighs far more at 164 pounds). Compared to the previous 55- and 65-inch models, more students could theoretically use the board at once. Samsung imagines the display primarily mounted in a classroom where they can use its 4K touchscreen and support for four pens (it comes with two) to write and draw; it supports up to 20 fingers (and pen tips) simultaneously. Teachers might be able to hook up multiple computers or other video sources to the display, too, with two HDMI 2.0 ports compared to the one on the Flip 2.

But before you petition your school for one, it’s worth mentioning that the device has no announced price. The 65-inch Flip 2 comes in at $2,599.00, and Samsung’s 85-inch TVs start at $1,799.99, so perhaps the Interactive Display won’t cost too much more than those? Still, most schools are even more constrained during the pandemic than they would be normally, and this screen doesn’t even come bundled with some of the education software Samsung is advertising. I think it would be great for these to be used in schools, but to me, Samsung’s framing for the Interactive Display sounds a little more opportunistic than realistic.

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The end of OSIRIS-REx’s sample collector, showing asteroid sample leaking out into space | Image: NASA

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did its job a little too well on Tuesday, when it tried to scoop up a handful of rocks from an asteroid named Bennu more than 200 million miles from Earth. The vehicle actually grabbed too much material with its robotic arm, jamming the lid at the end of the arm open — and letting part of the asteroid sample escape out into space.

“We were almost a victim of our own success here,” said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission at the University of Arizona, in a press conference.

OSIRIS-REx’s mission is to bring a sample of asteroid material back to Earth so that scientists can study the rocks in a lab. But because OSIRIS-REx bit off more than it could chew, its mission team is racing to stow the sample inside the spacecraft’s belly, so the vehicle doesn’t lose too much material to the void. “Time is of the essence, and no, we won’t sleep,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a press conference.

“We were almost a victim of our own success here.”

The good news is that OSIRIS-REx seems to have grabbed an abundant and diverse group of asteroid rocks. The team’s goal was to snag up to 60 grams (2.1 ounces) of rocks from Bennu’s surface, and images from the spacecraft show that OSIRIS-REx likely grabbed up to 400 grams (14.1 ounces) of material, according to the mission team. The sample includes rocks that range in size, and some are so big that they prevented the spacecraft from sealing the sample shut.

Image: NASA

An artistic rendering of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft about to grab a sample from asteroid Bennu

The engineers are confident that the rocks aren’t escaping too quickly, so the spacecraft should be able to store a good amount inside the spacecraft before too much is depleted. They think that they lost between 1 to 10 grams of material yesterday, after moving the robotic arm around. However, NASA doesn’t plan to stow the sample inside OSIRIS-REx until Monday. The mission team has to take time to figure out all the commands for the spacecraft and ensure that this process will still work with rocks spilling out into space. It’s unclear how much of the sample will be lost as they wait.

There’s another complication, too: just moving the robotic arm around with the sample inside causes rocks to flee outward, so stowing the materials risks losing more pebbles. The engineers think they may lose up to 10 more grams of rocks just by stowing the sample inside the spacecraft. But it’s better to stow something than to wait for everything to leak out.

just moving the robotic arm around with the sample inside causes rocks to flee outward

To grab the sample from Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is equipped with a robotic arm that has a cylindrical sample collector at the end. On Tuesday afternoon, OSIRIS-REx slowly approached Bennu and gently tapped its surface with the collector. At the moment of contact, the collector puffed out a bunch of nitrogen gas, shaking up all the rocks and pebbles on the asteroid’s surface. Some of those rocks shot up inside the collector, while others danced and twirled out into space.

The OSIRIS-REx team couldn’t tell right away if it had a sample or not, as they had to wait to get images from the spacecraft. But they soon knew they had a problem when they finally got an up-close picture of the sample collector. The pictures show that part of the lid is jammed open by a centimeter; tiny pieces of asteroid can be seen hovering around the arm.

If the sample grab had gone more smoothly, NASA would have waited a little while longer to stow the material inside OSIRIS-REx. In fact, the mission team had planned to do a spin maneuver on Saturday with the spacecraft, twirling the vehicle up with its robotic arm outstretched. This would have helped the team figure out just how much material the spacecraft had collected. The engineers could measure the spacecraft’s inertia, comparing it to a time before when the spacecraft didn’t have a sample in its arm. But the spin is effectively canceled. “It would risk loss of material so that is not a prudent path to go down,” Lauretta said.

“the most important thing is to get the sample safely stowed.”

That means the OSIRIS-REx team won’t truly know how much sample is in the spacecraft’s belly as the vehicle returns back to Earth. “I think we’re going to have to wait till we get home to know precisely how much we have and that, as you can imagine — that’s hard,” Lauretta said. “We were looking forward to a sample mass measurement.” So it’s possible that all of the sample could fall out before Monday, and we wouldn’t truly know until the spacecraft comes back to our planet.

The OSIRIS-REx team also doesn’t plan to grab another sample from Bennu, so this is it. That’s why engineers are working quickly to store this sample on Monday. “I am highly confident that it was successful — that we have more than the 60 grams of material that we promised Thomas and the agency that we would deliver,” Lauretta said, adding, “the most important thing is to get the sample safely stowed and minimize any more loss.”

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.

A Facebook official sent a letter to the Ad Observatory researchers October 16th, saying that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.” The letter also threatened further enforcement action if the project did not shut down and delete the data it has collected, according to the WSJ. The company could change its own code to block the NYU team from collecting further data, a Facebook spokesperson told the WSJ.

The NYU group discovered this week that Facebook was not labeling all political ads to show who had paid for them as its own disclosure rules require, BuzzFeed News reported.

Last month, Facebook unveiled a list of new provisions it was putting into place to try to stave off election interference in the November 3rd US presidential election. It said it would stop taking political ads for a week before the election, would put a voter information center at the top of users’ Instagram and Facebook feeds, and would labels to misleading posts about election results.

Facebook did not immediately reply to an email from The Verge seeking comment.

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You can now buy the Pixel 4A from Google for just $9 per month over 24 months as part of the new Google Fi phone subscription program. That monthly cost means you’d pay just just $216 for the phone, a substantial savings over its $349 upfront price. After you’ve made all 24 payments, you own the phone.

You can also elect to add in a $6 per month device protection plan, meaning your monthly subscription cost is $15. That protection plan covers up to two incidents of accidental damage and one loss or theft claim in a year. (Loss and theft replacement isn’t available to New York state residents, however.) At $15 per month over 24 months, you’d pay $360 for the Pixel 4A over the course of the subscription, which is only $11 more than the phone’s typical $349 upfront cost.

But if you were hoping you could sign up for this subscription, not get a protection plan, and then pay off the device in full to save more than $100 on a Pixel 4A, that’s not an option — you lose the discount on the phone if you pre-pay your remaining balance ahead of time, according to Google’s terms for the subscription.

And despite falling under the Google Fi branding, the subscription doesn’t include a Google Fi cell phone plan, meaning you have to buy a Google Fi Flexible or Unlimited plan separately to make calls or use wireless data. If you’re already a Google Fi subscriber, though, the phone subscription cost will be added to your monthly Fi bill, according to Google’s terms.

Right now, the only phone you can purchase through the subscription is the Pixel 4A; you can’t buy the new Pixel 5 or Pixel 4A 5G (which don’t even come out in the US until next week). But my colleague Dieter Bohn found that the Pixel 4A has a good camera, good battery life, and good software, so depending on what you need, it could be a great option to consider — especially with this new subscription plan.

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