Kara Verlaney | The Verge

2024 in review: AI

2024-12-04T11:20:10-05:00

In 2024, you couldn’t escape hearing about AI. From smartphones to wearables to the smart home, it seemed every tech company wanted to pitch their next great AI innovation.

The year was filled with impressive technological leaps and useful new tools, endless hype and frequent misfires, and implications for the future that range from truly exciting to unpredictable. This is the year we got a sense of what AI might actually do — and just how unprepared we still are to grapple with it.

Here at The Verge, we thought a lot about AI’s impacts on the industries and people we cover. From strikes across industries like gaming to its impact on our climate to the desire for policy protections for Hollywood and the AI Act, AI is already reshaping nearly every area of our lives.

So let’s take a look back at some of the biggest, boldest, weirdest AI stories from the last year — and look ahead to what could be in store for 2025.

AI lookback

AI in the news

AI, reviewed

The Verge’s guide to moving

2024-07-08T08:24:01-04:00

Moving is one of the most stressful events that can happen in your life. It takes a lot of time and effort, it’s expensive, it’s complicated, and there’s just a ton to do.

It’s not just a matter of finding a place you can afford, signing the lease or arranging for a mortgage, and figuring out how to get your stuff from one place to another. You probably have to downsize and declutter before you move. You have to figure out which furniture to move, and which to keep, and get rid of all those old and outdated laptops and phones that have been moldering in the closet.

And then, once you’re in your new home, you have to set everything up again — including the tech. You have to reassemble your home office. You have to find a solid (and hopefully not too expensive) ISP and set up your wireless network and smart home devices. It’s enough to make anyone cry.

Take a long breath. In The Verge’s moving guide, we do our best to make the process as painless as possible. And hopefully, some of these articles can act as the aspirin that will keep that pain to a minimum.

Today’s smart homes: the hopes and the realities

2024-03-04T09:18:40-05:00

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At The Verge, we work hard to bring you the most recent news and expert hands-on reviews. But another way, and sometimes the best way, to judge smart home technology is to learn about it from those who have used the tech on a day-to-day basis in real-life situations.

In these articles, we’ve concentrated on how our own experiences, and the experiences of others, have affected how we regard smart home tech. We’ve got personal accounts by one reporter who decided to put together a brand-new smart home and another whose brother moved into a home haunted by the ghosts of someone else’s smart tech. Several of our staffers wax enthusiastically about their favorite devices and automations. A writer describes how smart tech makes his home more accessible. Our smart home reviewer tells how she uses technology to keep her varied pets (and she has a lot of them) happy and healthy. We talk to people who use smart devices to help them care for their parents — and more.

We’ve got a lot of interesting experiences — and information — to offer you. We hope it’s helpful, and if you can add your own personal anecdotes and advice to share in the comments, please do!

Building for tomorrow

2023-12-04T08:50:49-05:00

How do you build a better future? What systems need to be in place to ensure we have the best, most sustainable outcome for the planet? Why is so much stuff broken?

These were the questions we asked ourselves as we outlined this special issue on infrastructure. We know that things like roads and bridges and wastewater treatment facilities are what make modern life possible. But there’s a lot more to our infrastructure that mostly goes unnoticed. So let’s change that.

We explore why the next few years are pivotal for self-driving trucks, look into the broadband industry’s long history with racial discrimination, ask what it will take to get rural Americans to adopt electric vehicles, and investigate the reasons Wi-Fi is so slow in most people’s homes. We also look at some very cool stuff, like space lasers, EV battery recycling, and the enormous triumphs of a simple bike lane.

We’re building for tomorrow. And we’re starting right now.

We only get one planet

2023-11-13T12:39:10-05:00

Sustainability is one of those words that has lost most of its meaning thanks to a steady drumbeat of corporate marketing and greenwashing. “Going green” often means buying some useless carbon credits or slapping a few choice buzzwords on a label. Rarely does it seem to hold any value anymore.

But as the planet careens toward a future made uncertain by climate change, true environmental stewardship requires we take a closer look at the meaning of sustainability — and how we can achieve better results in a world ruled by digital devices.

In this series, The Verge looks at how key aspects of our lives — from the devices we use, to the food we eat, to the cars we drive, to the houses we live in — are changing in ways previously thought impossible. Along the way, we sought to answer some key questions like: Can we build houses to withstand climate change? Is there such a thing as a truly repairable smart phone? How can you charge an EV in the middle of nowhere? Can AI help farmers meet the demands of the future? And will robot cars make pollution worse?

Because if the future is going to be sustainable — truly sustainable — the work needs to start now.

Smart homes for smart people

2023-06-12T09:18:07-04:00

Everybody is talking about smart homes these days — but what exactly does that mean? If you have one or two Amazon Echo smart speakers in your apartment or a Google Nest router along with a speaker, do you have a smart home? Or is your home only smart if you’ve got a smart camera monitoring your smart doorbell, your smart lights automatically waking you while your smart blinds roll up, and your smart AC going on just in time to cool your office for the day’s work?

In our special Smart Home Week articles, we give you the down and dirty (or, if you have a robovac, the down and clean) on smart homes. We answer questions such as what exactly is a smart home, do you need one, and if so, which of the several ecosystems should you use? We also feature articles on each of those ecosystems — Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Home Assistant — written by people who actually use them and can tell you how well (or badly) each system worked for them.

We examine some of the privacy issues surrounding smart homes (and tell you which are myth and which are real). And finally, we take you to a community of ecologically smart homes, show you how these brand-new smart houses worked, and introduce you to one of the families who actually lives there.

Enjoy!

Smart Home 101

Advertiser content from Home Depot

8 Father’s Day gifts for the dad looking for tech upgrades

World wired

2023-05-17T09:10:07-04:00

Even though so much of our world is now wireless, most of those beautiful signals are still made possible by a worldwide network of hardwired cables — from the huge backbones of internet service providers to the ethernet lines in people’s homes. The cables that connect continents under the ocean alone span a length of more than 700,000 miles. Just 50 years after the invention of ethernet, our planet Earth is now literally wrapped in the embrace of the internet. It’s the cord that can’t be cut.

This special issue from The Verge takes a look at the impact ethernet has had on our world on its 50th birthday. In partnership with the Computer History Museum, we’re reflecting on the origins and consequences of this incredible technology. From LAN parties to Facebook and every other modern platform that now pervades our society, none of it would have been possible without the invention of the one port that rules them all.

You, me, and UI

2023-04-04T09:45:36-04:00

There’s a funny conflict to the idea of user interfaces: a good one tends to go unnoticed, the thoughtful design decisions too subtle to notice; a bad UX or UI is one that makes you want to scream. It’s a tension that designers have to think about every time they conceive a new website, app, or device.

In this special series from The Verge, we explore the small design decisions that have had an outsize impact on our lives. From simple card game browser UIs to deliberately complicated video game setups, all-too-forgotten accessibility options for colorblindness to the curious incentive-driven histories of the shuffle and log out buttons, these stories delve into the ways that user interfaces have driven us forward, or failed, or found an entirely new way of living.

The Verge’s 2022 in review

2022-12-21T10:13:38-05:00

Nobody can say that 2022 was an uneventful year. But if you wanted to escape reality occasionally by playing a really great game, enjoying a fantastic movie, or marathoning an exciting series, there were plenty of options to be found.

Now that the end of the year is approaching, we thought we’d share our recommendations and thoughts from 2022. We’ve got roundups of our favorite movies and series from Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, and a variety of other streaming services, along with our best-loved games for the Switch, Xbox, PC, and other devices. We also offer our thoughts on some of the best and worst tech that the year brought — including that strange phenomenon known as crypto — and an account of some of the most exciting space launches seen this year.

So welcome to our look back at some of our most (and least) favorite entertainment and events of 2022. We hope you enjoy some of the games and shows we liked so much over the last 12 months.

The year in review

Great entertainment

Gadgets that break things: our favorite hacking hardware

2022-10-17T14:32:51-04:00

Not all gadgets are meant to make life easier.

Some gadgets break things, exploiting cracks in our digital systems, prying them open, and crawling inside. Most often used by penetration testers — a kind of white-hat hacker hired to test a company’s security by breaking in themselves — these gadgets serve as a kind of road map to the most common vulnerabilities in our digital world.

For the most part, they’re commercialized versions of tech that already existed in a scrappier form, leaning on open-source software projects and decades of work developing attacks. But most importantly, they’re available, so if you decide you want to try out one of these attacks, the equipment is only a click away.

Please use them only for good.