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After a long stretch of slim pickings, the last couple of years have been huge for Android smartwatches. Now there are more good options than ever.

But the market is fragmented. Wear OS 5 is here for Samsung’s Galaxy Watches, Google’s Pixel Watch 3, and soon, the OnePlus Watch 3 when it ships later this month. However, the larger ecosystem is catching up. Some features, like Google Assistant, are not yet available on certain Wear OS 3 smartwatches, and Wear OS 4 still isn’t widely available. Even so, the Android wearable ecosystem is barreling ahead.

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How we test smartwatches

Smartwatches are meant to help you keep track of your notifications, as well as your health and activity. We do a mix of benchmark testing and experiential, real-life testing. That means snoozing with them, taking them out on GPS activities like runs and hikes, working up a sweat in several workouts, and comparing how they do against long-term control devices for heart rate, sleep, and GPS accuracy. It also means evaluating how easy they are to pair, how annoying are notifications, and in the case of Android watches, checking to see if features are universally available across different phone makers (i.e., do all the Galaxy Watch features work if you have a Pixel phone?) Some factors we consider in our rankings are durability, performance, accuracy versus consistency in metrics, and of course, battery life.

Processor

Android smartwatches have long been foiled by outdated processors. Is the chip under the hood powerful enough to run Wear OS or the platform’s own proprietary operating system smoothly?

Ecosystem

Does a watch work better within one company’s product ecosystem versus another? Will you have to buy a new watch if you switch phones?

Smart features

These days, most wearables are capable fitness trackers. However, they’re not all capable of controlling your smart home, contactless payments, or interacting with digital assistants.

Support

Is this device likely to last you a while, or will you need to upgrade sooner than you’d like? How communicative is the OEM about forthcoming changes?

Battery life

Can you get through the day without reaching for a charger? If not, does it support quick charging?

If you’d rather wait until Wear OS settles down a bit, there are platform-agnostic smartwatches and fitness watches you can buy in the meantime. Otherwise, you’ll want to be aware of the chip and Wear OS version powering your watch. Mobvoi, for instance, has generally been a step behind Google and Samsung in rolling out the latest version of Wear OS. Meanwhile, you might want to pay attention to whether a watch is running the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Plus or the base W5 chip. The W5 Plus has some extra processing advantages, but for the record, the base chip isn't bad. The Pixel Watch 3 and OnePlus Watch 2 both sport the W5 and have notably improved performance and battery life.

So long as you keep the aforementioned caveats in mind, Android users have more smartwatch options than ever before. I’ve rounded up my top picks, but if none of these is the right fit, you can always check out our fitness tracker buying guide.

Best smartwatch for Samsung phones

Sizes: 43mm, 47mm / Weight: 77g, 85g / Battery life: Up to 30 hours with AOD, 40 without AOD / **Display type: **Always-on OLED / **GPS: **Built-in GPS / Connectivity: LTE (optional), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi / Water resistance: Up to 50 meters, IP68 / Music storage: 16GB

If you have a Samsung phone, you’ll get the most mileage out of a Samsung smartwatch. And of the four watches Samsung has in its current lineup, I recommend the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 Classic. Although Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch 7 in August, there wasn’t a refresh for the Classic. That means you ought to be seeing some good deals for the Classic soon, if not already. It’s not often that I recommend a last-gen device, but such is my deep love for the physical rotating bezel.

If you want the latest and greatest, the Galaxy Watch 7 offers an upgraded 3nm Exynos W1000 chip and a new 3-in-1 BioActive Sensor. It’s a marginal improvement over the 2023 models, but I don’t feel like Samsung introduced anything last year that requires having them. It also has Wear OS 5 and One UI 6 Watch, though Samsung is rolling out the newer OS to older watches (including the Galaxy Watch 6). Mostly, I recommend the 7 if you prefer a smaller size, don’t care about the rotating bezel, and want something a smidge more futureproof.

The Classic’s rotating bezel is 15 percent thinner than the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. The updated design is sleeker than its predecessor, and the larger display is easier on the eyes and is only slightly bigger at 43mm and 47mm. I have small wrists, but the 47mm was still quite comfortable for everyday wear. It’s launching with Wear OS 4, which adds extended battery life, and — finally — cloud backups. One UI 5 Watch also adds some minor health and sleep tracking improvements, but this will eventually make its way to older models. While I prefer the Classic, the base Watch 6 model may be the better option if you want a smaller, lighter, sleeker, and cheaper smartwatch.

For more outdoorsy folks, the $649.99 Galaxy Watch Ultra might be the more sensible choice. Of all Samsung’s watches, it has the best battery life, lasting around three days in our testing. (Though, we never got the full 100-hour estimated battery life.) It’s got dual-frequency GPS, a new multisport activity, an emergency siren, increased durability, 10ATM of water resistance, and a Quick Button, which acts as a customizable shortcut button. It’s basically an Apple Watch Ultra for Android.

Meanwhile, if you’re on a budget, there’s the new $199.99 Galaxy Watch FE, which is essentially a rebadged Galaxy Watch 4.

The Samsung Health app also delivers a good overall fitness tracking experience, especially since you can enable turn-by-turn navigation for hiking and **** cycling activities. We weren’t too impressed with nightly SpO2 readings, but Samsung’s overall sleep tracking continues to improve. You also get built-in GPS, body composition analysis, irregular heart rate notifications, fall detection, emergency SOS features, and EKGs. Most recently, Samsung added a new Energy score, AI-powered wellness insights, FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection, and a confusing AGEs Index metric for metabolic health. While the Energy score is broadly accurate, I found the AI-generated features to be hit or miss and the AGEs Index to be more gimmicky than useful. The latter feature is also limited to the Galaxy Watch 7 and Ultra.

We don’t necessarily recommend the Galaxy Watches if you don’t have a Samsung phone. EKGs and sleep apnea detection **** require the Samsung Health Monitor app, which is limited to Samsung phones. You can work around it, but all Samsung watches work best with other Samsung devices.

Read my full Galaxy Watch 6 series review.

Best Android smartwatch for non-Samsung users

Sizes: 41mm, 45mm / Weight: 31g for 41mm, 37g for 45mm / Battery life: Roughly 24 hours with AOD enabled / **Display type: **Always-on OLED / **GPS: **Built-in GPS / Connectivity: LTE (optional), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Safety Signal with Fitbit Premium / Water resistance: 5ATM / Music storage: 32GB

The $349.99 Google Pixel Watch 3 is done playing catch-up. It’s an annoying truth that if you have a Samsung phone, a Samsung smartwatch is probably the best choice for you. However, for everyone else, I highly recommend the Pixel Watch 3.

There are several updates to the Pixel Watch 3, but the gist is that it’s a more refined watch that also expands into new territory. One major update is that there are now two sizes: 41mm and 45mm. You get extra screen real estate on the larger watch, but the bezels are also smaller on the 41mm model. (If you’re trying to pick between sizes, I prefer the 45mm.) The displays are brighter as well, ranging from a minimum of 1 nit to a maximum of 2,000 nits.

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Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to attend over 1,300 “Hands Off!” protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk yesterday. Today, estimates from groups involved in planning the protests suggest the protesters in the US and abroad may have actually numbered in the millions.

Activist group MoveOn is “estimating millions of attendees” went to the 1,300-plus scheduled events, with more than 100,000 turning out for the Washington, DC protest, Britt Jacovich, the group’s communications director, told The Verge via email. A press release published on the official Hands Off! website yesterday tells the same story:

Millions of people flooded the streets today at over 1,300 “Hands Off!” peaceful protests across all 50 states, U.S. territories, and a dozen locations globally, demanding an end to the authoritarian overreach by Trump and Musk.

The protests were laser-focused on Musk and Trump, but the concerns that drove yesterday’s demonstrations are wide-ranging, covering everything from Trump’s trade war and DOGE’s relentless federal agency cuts and layoffs, to LGBTQ+ and other civil rights issues, to the war in Ukraine. More than 150 groups participated in their organization, including those mentioned in this story, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and labor unions like the AFL-CIO and those representing federal workers, such as the National Treasury Employees Union.

Indivisible, another of the more than 150 organizations involved in planning the protests, gives a similar estimate to MoveOn’s in a statement reported by Common Dreams, in which it says that “at virtually every single event the crowds eclipsed our estimates.” From Common Dreams:

"This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office," the group added. "And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."

Other reported estimates from yesterday are smaller. The Guardian , The Hill , and _Al Jazeera _each put the number in the hundreds of thousands. Even so, millions doesn’t seem implausible. According to Axios, over 45,000 people gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the outlet reports more than 100,000 people demonstrated both in Washington, DC and New York City. Organizers say more than 30,000 showed up in Chicago, writes WBEZ Chicago.

We’re building a #PeoplesMovement. Today, over 3 million people across the country stood up to say HANDS OFF our democracy. And history shows that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained, peaceful resistance—transformative change is inevitable.#50501movement #HandsOff #April5

-- 50501: The People’s Movement (@50501movement.bsky.social) 2025-04-06T00:00:04.412Z

One of the most specific numbers reported so far comes from the social media accounts of 50501, one of the most prominent protest movements that have sprung up in the wake of Musk’s actions as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The group posted late yesterday that “over 3 million people across the country stood up to say HANDS OFF our democracy.”

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My home network is a small miracle of backward compatibility, slinging data across 60-plus devices that span five generations of Wi-Fi. Everything on it, from my iPhone 15 Pro all the way down to my Nintendo Wii, manages to connect to the internet, most of it wirelessly through my router, with shockingly few issues. Thata€™s possible because of Wi-Fia€™s essentially unbroken line of interoperability that stretches from its 1999 introduction in consumer products through today.

Wi-Fi devices do this by being shapeshifters. When two of them connect, the one using the newest generation of the standard will automatically switch to the highest Wi-Fi version the other one is equipped for. Making sure that works means lots of testing for compatibility, maintaining old parts of the standard, and coming up with new ways to make existing tech more viable. That approach has led to a level of backward compatibility and long-term device support that few gadgets or standards in the tech world can match.

One reason Wi-Fi operates this way is the glacial transitions between generations of the standard. It can take a long time for a new version to proliferate a€" see the 2022 Apple HomePod and it …

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If you're taking your laptop away from the safe environs of your home or office desk and still want to stay online, you've got a couple of choices (assuming it doesn't have cellular connectivity built in): hunt around for a Wi-Fi network you can connect to or run a Wi-Fi hotspot from your phone.

Running a hotspot from your phone comes with advantages and disadvantages. It's more secure than a public Wi-Fi network, as you're in charge, and you may well get better upload and download speeds, too a€" though this will, of course, depend on the 4G and 5G coverage in your part of the world. On the downside, you may be limited in terms of your data allowance, and battery life on your phone will take a hit.

If you want to take the mobile hotspot route, here's how to do it.

Set up a hotspot on a Pixel

With Android devices, as always, the exact steps vary depending on the manufacturer. These are the steps for using a Pixel device with Android 15:

• Open Settings on Android.
• Choose Network & Internet > Hotspot & tethering.
• You can toggle Wi-Fi hotspot from here to enable it, but if youa€™ve never used the hotspot before, tap on it to set your options.
• Youa€™ll see options to set …

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The Nintendo Switch may be remembered as much for repopularizing portable gaming as it will for a hardware issue that affected millions of gamers: joystick drift.

Drifting is the most common term for an issue where joysticks detect false inputs a€" even when no one is touching a controller a€" causing unwanted movements to happen in a game. The issue also affects controllers from Sony, Microsoft, and third-party accessory makers.

Hall effect sensors emerged a few years ago as a potential solution to the problem, but there's an even better option out there thata€™s easier to retrofit into existing controller designs. That solution is tunneling magnetoresistance, or TMR, a technology that revolutionized hard drives two decades ago using quantum mechanics and magnets.

Like Hall effect sensors, TMR sensors avoid the fundamental problem with more traditional joysticks: their sensors wear down as a matter of their design. The controllers that ship with the last few Xbox consoles, the PS4 and PS5, and the Switch are all built around sensors like this a€" potentiometers, a component that can be used to change or measure electrical resistance.

Solid objects rubbing against each other i …

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Surrounding the Washington Monument Saturday were thousands of signs with messages spanning innumerable topics. a€oeSupport Ukraine,a€ a€oeBeware of DOGE,a€ a€oeProtect Trans Lives,a€ were just a few of them. Others struck a note of exasperation: a€oeWhere do I starta€¦a€

The nationwide Hands Off protests this weekend turned out millions of protesters across 1,300 different events, organizers estimate, motivated by a wide array of causes but two people: President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk. In the signs they brought to the DC rally, some protesters focused on a single issue. Others tried to fit as many as they could. The throughline was a message to the US government: protect democracy, and stop messing with programs and agencies that matter.

The crowd in Washington, DC a€" more than 100,000, per organizersa€™ estimates a€" was peaceful and orderly. On a stage behind the Washington Monument, lawmakers like Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL) and organizers including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler spoke. Attendees around them quietly listened, save for the occasional call-and-response chant, cheers, or boos for the Trump administration. Farther away, a gr …

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Breaking down the confusing world of color spaces.

The best method that we have for defining color is by using math. Specifically, mind-boggling mathematical models called color spaces that use geometry to assign colors as a fixed point that we can reference, ensuring the blue __ that I see is the same blue you see. As a creative-leaning person who can barely split a bill without a calculator app, all that math is extremely daunting.

The good news is that computing software will do all these complicated calculations for us, allowing us to rely on our eyeballs to pick whatever colors look best. The bad news is that therea€™s an equally daunting number of color spaces to choose from, and theya€™re all optimized for different tasks across web design, photography, video editing, physical printing, and more. And if you select the wrong one at any point between creating, editing, and viewing something, it can really mess with what colors are supposed to look like.

Ita€™s a lot to absorb. Thankfully, most of us will only ever need to understand the basics, and that knowledge can be useful to everyone a€" not just creative professionals. Learning about it can help you buy your next phone, TV, laptop, or computer monitor, and get the most o …

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Your House is a visual novel that is the closest game Ia€™ve played to reading an actual book.

In Your House, you play as Debbie, a girl who receives a mysterious postcard on her birthday with an address and a key. The address leads to a mansion thata€™s filled with secrets and puzzles for you to solve, and the gamea€™s presentation does a lot to sell the feeling of curling up on the couch with a good mystery novel.

Much of how you interact with the game is by reading through pages of text to know what room youa€™re in, whata€™s going on, what you can interact with, and where you can go next. As you scroll down the a€oepagea€ youa€™re reading, certain words, rooms, or locations will show up in bold. Click on those, and something will happen, whether it's more text appearing on the page or a little animation that shows Debbie moving from one room to another. When you reach a dead end, youa€™ll usually be offered a link back to a hub area like a living room.

Many pages also have gorgeous pictures in a a€‹a€‹noir comic style that you can click on to investigate in more detail or interact with to solve puzzles. One had me note the number of consonants and vowels in a name under a p …

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 78, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If youa€™re new here, welcome, sorry everythinga€™s about to get so expensive, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, Ia€™ve been reading about baseball bats and work-life balance and BYD and Scarlett Johansson, watching Paradise, rekindling my love of pear-flavored jelly beans, sharing Robin Sloan a€™s AI take with anyone who will listen, grooving to the greatest unexpected Doechii remix of all time, and finally finding the monitor mount that makes my webcam upgrade work.

I also have for you a couple of great new apps for streaming and gaming, a look back into Microsofta€™s history, the latest on the Switch 2, a screed against screen time, and much more.

Oh, and a programming note: Installer is off next week. Taking a little break before we ramp up for Developer Conference season. But we have lots to do today! Leta€™s get into it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / listening to / watching / downloading / sipping on this week? Tell me everyth …

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“Hands Off” protesters in Manhattan.

People are gathering in cities all over the United States and globally to protest an “illegal, billionaire power grab” by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They’re being put on by over 150 different organizations, including civil rights groups, labor unions, and LGBTQ+ advocates, and span more than 1,200 locations.

Last weekend, “Tesla Takedown” protests targeted Tesla showrooms around the country to show disapproval for Musk, its CEO, who has spearheaded an effort to carry out mass federal workforce layoffs and hollow out government agencies. As Tesla’s sales have plummeted this quarter, Musk has threatened to “go after” the company’s critics, while the FBI has created a task force to investigate individual acts of vandalism and other actions aimed at the company.

Rain or shine (mostly rain)

-- Mia Sato (@miasato.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T18:21:40.575Z

The scope of these protests is much broader, targeting both Trump and Musk, who the Hands Off website accuses (accurately) of “shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid.” The Verge ’s Mia Sato is in Manhattan’s Bryant Park in New York City, where she took the above video. She told me it wasn’t clear how many people are there, but that it’s “wall to wall everywhere” despite the fact that it’s “raining here and really nasty.”

Hands off rally in Washington, DC today

-- Lauren Feiner (@laurenfeiner.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:58:28.578Z

My colleague Lauren Feiner, who attended the protest in Washington, DC, said the protest there “is very big, thousands here around the Washington monument.” She described it as “very peaceful and orderly,” with attendees listening quietly to the speakers, occasionally chanting in response.

Jessica Toman, who went to the protest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, texted the above image to me. A person posting images of the same protest on Bluesky guessed that protesters numbered in the thousands.

It looks like a similar story in Boston, where “thousands” are seen in this video from today:

WOW: Thousands are currently protesting in Boston. This is just one of more than 1200 'Hands Off' protests underway today across the nation as people rise up against the Trump-Musk regime. (via Rob Way)

-- MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-04-05T16:06:41.143Z

Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul posted aerial footage of a massive crowd gathered at the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota:

Demonstrators gathered in massive numbers in Daley Plaza in Chicago, Illinois, too, where a CBS Chicago livestream showed what looked like many thousands of people streaming from one side of the street to another for many blocks while this story was being written. Protests are also taking place overseas, in cities like Berlin, Germany and London, England.

It’s not just major **** cities. Hundreds appear to have shown up to protest in cities like St. Augustine, Florida, which the US Census Bureau estimates has less than 16,000 people, and Riverhead, New York, where only about 36,000 people live. Cars honked in apparent support of a protest in Manhattan, Kansas (under 54,000 residents), according to the Bluesky user who posted this video:

4/5/25 Manhattan, KS-a college town & home of NBAF, in Sen Marshall’s district, 5 min after it was to begin & they’re still coming!😁✊🏻💜 Proud of my Blue Dot in a red state! #manhattankansas #handsoff

-- M (@snflwr6684.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T16:43:22.728Z

A similar scene plays out in this video, apparently taken in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, today:

Here’s a gallery with some more images taken by Sato, Toman, and The Verge ’s Chris Welch:

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Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says it’s delaying shipments to the US this month while it works out how it will deal with the wide-ranging tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week, according to The Guardian.

“As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR told The Guardian. The automaker is responding to a 25 percent Trump-ordered tariff on imported vehicles that went into effect Thursday and could add $5,000 to $10,000 or more to the price of a new car in the US.

JLR said this week that its business remains “resilient,” but those living in the town where its cars are made weren’t optimistic, with one telling The Guardian that the tariffs could lead to job losses. About a quarter of the 400,000 vehicles JLR sells every year go to US buyers, as The Sunday Times notes in its own story about the pause this morning. It’s thought that the automaker has enough existing US stock to last about two months, and it would take about 21 days for more to come once shipments resume, the Times writes.

JLR isn’t alone in its concerns. Earlier this week, Nintendo blamed Trump’s new tariffs as it delayed US preorders of the Switch 2, originally scheduled to start on April 9th. In the wake of the tariffs announcement, the US Stock market lost $6.6 trillion in two days — a record, according to The Wall Street Journal — and industries are bracing for negative impacts to the cost and availability of just about everything, including the high-powered GPUs used by AI companies, gadgets of all types, and even board games

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Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success a€" more views, more fun.

But ita€™s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.

You may not need me to remind you of this. Wea€™ve known for years that view counts are meaningless, to the point that Facebook wound up getting sued for aggressively inflating view counts in an effort to convince people to make Facebook videos. Others have written thoughtfully about how stupid view counts are. But we still talk about view counts, view counts are still everywhere, so leta€™s talk once again about view counts.

A a€oeview,a€ in reality, is not a universal metric. Ita€™s not really anything. It is whatever a platform wants it to be, which usually has no actual correlation to whether someone actually encountered and experienced a piece of content. You can just make the views whatever you want! And if you dona€™t like the way the numbers look, make views something else!

Leta€™s just r …

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Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikToka€™s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone a€" from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans a€" was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.

As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump a€™s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok.

People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDancea€™s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity.

The proposal, which would have licensed the appa€™s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and Ia€™ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government.

On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance …

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In the second major disruption of today’s 50th anniversary event at Microsoft’s headquarters, another employee stood up and began yelling at Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates — the company’s current and past CEOs — in protest of Microsoft’s dealings with the government of Israel.

“Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites,” she said as some in the crowd began to boo. “50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology. How dare you. Shame on all of you for celebrating on their blood. Cut ties with Israel.” The protestor then mentioned No Azure for Apartheid, the group that coordinated today’s protests both inside and outside the venue. It’s been a long-running movement among some employees at the company.

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Gates chuckled and said “alright,” before returning to the discussion. “I think Steve and I almost cared too much, and our life was the company, and Satya has this ability to care as much as we did, but with more of a team,” he said.

Microsoft used its 50th anniversary celebration as a showcase for the company’s latest Copilot / AI advancements, but the interruptions definitely shifted the tone at times. Earlier at the event, another employee named Ibtihal Aboussad called Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman “a war profiteer.” A larger rally led by the protest group was occurring outside while Microsoft executives were speaking.

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Get ready for slick light strips and futuristic lightcycles.

Disney just released the first trailer for Tron: Ares, the long-planned Tron: Legacy sequel. The minute-and-a-half trailer doesn’t say much about the story but shows plenty of the movie’s visuals, which look dark, moody, and filled with the series’ signature light trails.

The trailer opens in the physical world at night, as Jared Leto’s Ares, a Program made physical, flees from police on a light cycle, slicing one in half using his light trail as a weapon. The shots that follow show a massive airship hovering over the real-world city, visible only by the red light strips on its outside. The rest has people looking on in horror at the airship, dogfights between human aircraft and fighters from the Tron digital world, and what looks like a clip of Ares being given his physical body.

All of that is set to the music of Nine Inch Nails, which is handling the soundtrack this time around. It ends with a voiceover from Jeff Bridges, reprising his role as Kevin Flynn and saying, “Ready? There’s no going back.” The movie hits theaters on October 10th.

Disney included the poster above in an email to The Verge announcing the trailer’s release. In a YouTube video from Thursday’s CinemaCon presentation about Ares , Leto said __ his character is “a highly advanced program” who has entered the real world on a “do-or-die mission to fulfill his directive,” and promised that the movie “will hit you right in the grid … wherever that is.” In addition to Leto and Bridges, Tron: Ares is directed by Joachim Rønning and its stars include Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, and Cameron Monaghan.

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Meta has announced the release of Llama 4, its newest collection of AI models that now power Meta AI on the web and in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Direct. The two models, also available to download from Meta or Hugging Face now, are Llama 4 Scout, a small model capable of “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU,” and Llama 4 Maverick, which is more akin to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. And the company says it’s in the process of training Llama 4 Behemoth, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says on Instagram is “already the highest performing base model in the world.”

According to Meta, Scout has a 10-million-token context window — the working memory of an AI model — and beats Google’s Gemma 3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models, as well as the open-source Mistral 3.1, “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks,” while still “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU.” It makes similar claims about its larger Maverick model’s performance versus OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and says its results are comparable to DeepSeek-V3 in coding and reasoning tasks using “less than half the active parameters,” or the variables that guide AI models’ behavior.

Meanwhile, Llama 4 Behemoth has 288 billion active parameters with 2 trillion parameters in total. The company again says Behemoth can outperform its competitors, in this case GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7, “on several STEM benchmarks.”

For Llama 4, Meta says it switched to a “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, an approach that conserves resources by using only the parts of a model that are needed for a given task. The company plans to discuss future plans for AI models and products at LlamaCon, which is taking place on April 29th.

As with its past models, Meta calls the Llama 4 collection “open-source,” although it has been criticized for its licenses’ less-than-open requirements. For instance, the Llama 4 license requires commercial entities with more than 700 million monthly active users to request a license from Meta before using its models, which the Open Source Initiative wrote in 2023 takes it “out of the category of ‘Open Source.’”

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Therea€™s a famous two-decade-old Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami in which he, one of the worlda€™s most celebrated novelists, details his daily routine. He wakes up at 4AM, works for five hours, goes for a run, reads, goes to bed, and then repeats it all over again. The rigor and repetition are the point.

I am not Haruki Murakami.

In addition to my work at The Verge, I write novels a€" my second one is out today a€" and while I admire Murakamia€™s commitment to an immovable schedule, Ia€™ve found that I produce my best work when Ia€™m constantly rethinking routines, processes, and, mostly, how Ia€™m writing. In the modern age, that means what software Ia€™m using.

What I am about to describe will be a nightmare to anyone who likes all of their tools to work harmoniously. All of these apps are disconnected and do not interoperate with each other in any way. Many of the things they do are redundant and overlap. I suppose this process is quite the opposite of frictionless a€" but thata€™s precisely the point. Ia€™m not sure I believe that ambitious creative work is borne from a perfectly efficient workflow.

This is, instead, a journey of moving the work through diffe …

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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has infiltrated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency that has a say over resources Musk needs or could benefit from for some of his private sector business, The Verge has learned.

Three people who have been identified as DOGE staffers are listed in a public directory called “Finding People at the FCC.” Tarak Makecha, Jordan Wick, and Jacob Altik are all listed in the FCC directory, with email addresses associated with the agency. Each is listed under the office “OCH,” which in other agency documents refers to the Office of the Chairman.

Makecha is a finance executive who, according to LinkedIn, has most recently worked in a drone detection software company and previously worked at Tesla. Makecha has reportedly been involved through DOGE at OPM and the State Department. Wick is a former Waymo engineer who’s reportedly been given access to systems at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Altik is a lawyer who’s reportedly been involved at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Are you a current or former US federal government worker? Reach out securely and anonymously with tips from a non-work device to Lauren Feiner via Signal at laurenfeiner.64.

DOGE has recently expanded into other enforcement agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, as The Verge reported earlier on Friday. The FCC's authority over radio, TV, broadband, and satellite intersects with Musk’s businesses, like granting certain permissions for SpaceX’s Starlink operations. Its role as a regulator and enforcer also means it stores information on SpaceX and its competitors in order to make decisions. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has previously said that Musk would recuse himself from potential conflicts. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what the DOGE staffers’ role will be at the agency or what restrictions there will be on their data access.

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Four Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers have access to the governmenta€™s data on an untold number of immigrants, FedScoop reports.Â

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that handles legal immigration, recently granted access to Kyle Shutt, Aram Moghaddassi, Payton Rehling, and Edward Coristine a€" the 19-year-old DOGE employee who also goes by a€oeBig Ballsa€ a€" according to an internal agency memo obtained by FedScoop.Â

The March 28 memo asks Troy Edgar, the deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to have the department provide direction for the four DOGE staffersa€™ access to what the memo refers to as USCISa€™s a€oedata lake,a€ USCIS Data Business Intelligence Services, described as a a€oecloud-based centralized repository of data ingested from disparate USCIS applications and source data.a€

According to the memo, this system is accessed through Databricks, a€oean analytics platform that connects disparate sources of data into a unified system.a€ The memo also requests that DHS review and give direction for DOGE staffersa€™ access to both Databricks and Github.

The memo FedScoop obtained doesna€™t explain wh …

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Microsoft unveiled its Xbox AI era earlier this year with a new Muse AI model that can generate gameplay. While it looked like Muse was still an early Microsoft Research project, the Xbox maker is now allowing Copilot users to try out Muse through an AI-generated version of Quake II.

The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.

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While Microsoft originally demonstrated its Muse AI model at 10fps and a 300 x 180 resolution, this latest demo runs at a playable frame rate and at a slightly higher resolution of 640 x 360. It’s still a very limited experience though, and more of hint at what might be possible in the future.

Microsoft is still positioning Muse as an AI model that can help game developers prototype games. When Muse was unveiled in February, Microsoft also mentioned it was exploring how this AI model could help improve classic games, just like Quake II , and bring them to modern hardware.

“You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”

It’s clear that Microsoft is now training Muse on more games than just Bleeding Edge , and it’s likely we’ll see more short interactive AI game experiences in Copilot Labs soon. Microsoft is also working on turning Copilot into a coach for games, allowing the AI assistant to see what you’re playing and help with tips and guides. Part of that experience will be available to Windows Insiders through Copilot Vision soon.

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President Donald Trump’s additional 75 day delay to TikTok’s sale-or-ban deadline leaves service providers like Apple, Google, and Oracle on shaky ground, and, according to one influential Democrat, is straight-up “against the law.”

After Trump announced the extension on Friday, 12 Republican members of the House Select Committee on China, including Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), released a joint statement in response. The statement did not address legal concerns with the second extension, but it said that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans." The letter says signatories "look forward to more details" on a proposed deal.

In a separate statement, three Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) struck a similar note, saying that, “any deal must finally end China’s ability to surveil and potentially manipulate the American people through this app.”

“The whole thing is a sham if the algorithm doesn’t move from out of Beijing's hands”

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) was more critical in a phone interview with The Verge. “The whole thing is a sham if the algorithm doesn’t move from out of Beijing's hands,” Warner said. “And close to 80 percent of Republicans knew this was a national security threat — will they find their voice now?"

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office delaying enforcement of the TikTok divestiture law, a move legal experts already found questionable. Then, he failed to announce a deal before the new April 5th deadline amid chaos over new global tariffs. Letting the delay expire would have put US companies that serviced TikTok after the deadline at even greater risk of hefty penalties.

The original Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to address what lawmakers insisted was a pressing national security threat, then upheld by the Supreme Court in January. TikTok has long denied that the Chinese government could access US user data or put its thumb on the scales of the recommendation feed through ByteDance, but many lawmakers have consistently doubted that defense.

As the Trump administration has opted to effectively ignore the law, however, Congress has been relatively quiet.

“Trump's unilateral extension is illegal and forces tech companies to once again decide between risking ruinous legal liability or taking TikTok offline”

A few Senate Democrats, including Ed Markey (D-MA), recently warned Trump that another extension would only introduce more legal uncertainty, and some expressed doubt that some of the reported deal scenarios could even resolve the app’s legal concerns. In a statement after Trump’s second extension, Markey says while he’d like to see the deadline pushed, “Trump's unilateral extension is illegal and forces tech companies to once again decide between risking ruinous legal liability or taking TikTok offline.” He called the move “unfair to those companies and unfair to TikTok’s users and creators.” Instead, Trump should go through Congress to pass Markey’s bill to the extend the deadline, he says.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the China Committee who’s criticized the law and warned it will harm free expression and creators’ livelihoods, also wants to see a solution go through Congress, but is seeking a full repeal of the law. Still, he called Trump’s delay a “good step.”

The new statements from China Committee and E&C Republicans appear to be the first coordinated moves to put a firm line in the sand on the topic. Some Republicans who support the divest-or-ban law have previously urged Trump’s compliance in one-off statements or writings. Moolenaar previously warned in an op-ed that an adequate deal must fully break ties with ByteDance after reports that Trump was considering a deal with Oracle that would potentially leave some ties intact. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters earlier this week that if a deal doesn’t comply with the statute, he “would advise the President against it.” If he can’t get a deal to sell the company in a way that fully complies, Hawley thinks Trump “ought to enforce the statute and ban TikTok. This middle way, I don't think is viable.”

Warner maintains that lawmakers want a TikTok sale that keeps the app in the US, and he says the Biden administration should have been more aggressive in getting negotiations started. He remains concerned that TikTok’s ownership structure could allow a foreign adversary government to influence young Americans.

"During the negotiations, we saw the enormous bias in TikTok on things like the Uyghurs, the Hong Kong protests, the conflict in Gaza,” says Warner. “That was how we got 80 percent of the vote.” Warner says he remains concerned about the security of US user data, but sees the potential for TikTok to be used to “shape public opinion” as the more serious threat. Still, lawmakers seem unlikely to do much beyond (maybe) trying to pass a new law should Trump continue to flout the existing one. “Congress,” says Hawley, “we don't have an enforcement arm of our own.”

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AI companies cana€™t figure out if the Trump tariffs are about to decimate them a€" and the fact that no one has a clear answer is sending them, and the tech industry overall, into a confusion spiral.

The markets are in disarray. Nvidia is down 7.59%, TSMC is down 7.22%. In San Francisco, sources tell us that this isna€™t a big deal. But in DC, people are panicking. The core question is whether GPUs a€" the graphics processing units that are crucial to AI computing and other industries a€" are exempted from Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, and the answer is startlingly ambiguous.Â

Inside AI labs, researchers expect that their industry will be granted a tariff exemption. a€oeI fully expect this to be a situation where Trump again gives companies he views as important/on his side/whatever a hall pass,a€ similar to what the President did with Apple during his first term, one source inside a major AI lab told The Verge.

In Washington, however, nobody seems sure what the current state of play is. The Trump administration spelled out an exception for the semiconductor chips at the heart of a GPU, but for now, complete electronic products that contain chips will apparently be subje …

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Nice economy you have there, said President Donald Trumpa€™s administration. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

The something, announced earlier this week, is a set of globally applied tariffs that make no sense on their face. No sane economist would endorse this. Through a combination of stupidity, incompetence and sheer gangsterism, the Trump administration has decided to levy a series of taxes that encourage blatant corruption, entirely fail to encourage American manufacturing growth, and leave people and companies poorer. That is, assuming that the taxes come into play at all.

a€oeThis is the craziest of the crazy things wea€™ve seen thus far.a€

The central, persistent thing Trump seems to misunderstand about tariffs is that they are paid in the US by people in the US. A reasonable person might also remember that he tried them a few years ago in a trade war, to negative effect. We have, as a nation, shot ourselves in the dick. But dona€™t take my word for it! Here are some actual experts:

• a€oeThis is the craziest of the crazy things wea€™ve seen thus far,a€ says Chris Barrett, professor of economics at Cornell Universitya€™s SC Johnson School of Business. …

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