Technology

While the best iPad deals usually land during major sale events like Black Friday, many great iPad deals are available outside of those times. The day-to-day discounts come and go like changing winds, so there’s often some amount to be saved, particularly on Apple’s most affordable iPad and the latest iPad Mini. Hell, you can even often find discounts on the latest M5 iPad Pro, which is already on sale at multiple retailers.All that being said, it’s difficult to know where exactly you can find the most notable iPad deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing, so let us help you out. Below, we’ve rounded up the best prices on every current iPad model, from the 11th-gen base iPad to the more powerful mode...

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes (the universal billing codes hospitals use) and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as "inpatient" even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical trainin...

The next-generation Xbox console will play both Xbox and PC games, and its codename is “Project Helix,” according to Asha Sharma, who took over as Microsoft’s gaming CEO last month.“Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console,” Sharma wrote on X. “Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!”Microsoft has already indicated that the next Xbox will be some kind of hybrid of a console and a PC, with former Xbox president Sarah Bond also saying that “The next-gen console is going to be a very premium, very high-end curated experience.”In her ...

The decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing one source familiar, will bar defense contractors from working with the government if they use Claude, Anthropic’s AI program, in their products. Though the designation is typically applied to foreign companies with ties to adversarial governments, this is the first time that an American company has publicly received this label.At the heart of the conflict is Anthropic’s refusal to allow the Pentagon to use Claude for two purposes: autonomous lethal weapons without human oversight, and mass surveillance. The Pentagon has argued that Anthropic’s demands for control over government usage would place too much power in the hands of a private company, while Anthropic was not reassured that the government would respec...

A package of child safety bills is headed to the House floor following an hours-long session that left Democrats and Republicans divided. On Thursday, lawmakers on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted to advance the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act; Sammy’s Law; and the App Store Accountability Act, which would require app stores to introduce age-gating.Several Democrats opposed the law, arguing it would prevent states from strengthening online protections for young users. KOSA has been introduced in several forms over the past few years, but has repeatedly failed to pass.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said the KIDS Act uses child safety as a “smoke screen” for the desires of Big Tech lobbyists. “What big tech lobbyists want is a national surveillance progra...

United Airlines has updated its “Contract of Carriage” to include a line that requires passengers to wear headphones while listening to audio and video content on flights, CBS News reports.Under the updated contract, United can “refuse transport on a permanent or temporary basis” to passengers who don’t follow a list of rules, which now includes listening to audio without wearing headphones. The policy also states that United can remove those passengers from the aircraft “at any point.”United spokesperson Stella Balaskas confirmed in a statement to The Verge that the policy was updated on February 27th, saying, “We’ve always encouraged customers to use headphones when listening to audio content – and our Wi-Fi rules already remind customers to use headphones.” Balaskas added that the ex...

Roku users who struggle to figure out what they want to watch might have an answer in the form of “Roklue,” a new game coming to the streaming platform on March 7th. Announced on Thursday, Roklue is a pop culture trivia game that Roku says helps users discover new content and “tests players on the movies and TV shows that everyone is talking about, as well as the beloved favorites they want to watch again and again.”The first Roklue theme will be “awards season,” with “clues inspired by Hollywood’s biggest award show moments and celebrated films.” Themes for the trivia game will change throughout the year. Users don’t need to download anything to try it out — Roklue will appear in the Roku home screen once it launches on Saturday.Roklue joins the existing line-up of games available on R...

Pokémon Pokopia features, of all things, a 3D printer. I wasn’t sure why this surprised me so much, given all the other high-tech gear in pretty much every Pokémon game. But I was not expecting to find, inside the once-crumbling Pokémon Center I’d just worked hard to restore, a kind of machine I’d never seen before.Until Pokopia, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about tech in the Pokémon world. I’ve been Pokémon-pilled for so long that I took all its sci-fi technology for granted. Sure, there are magic PCs that can digitally store living creatures — that’s how it’s always been. Obviously fossils can be resurrected and obviously sometimes pokémon can travel through time. These are just facts. The power of science is amazing.Pokopia is different. In this world, humans are long gone, and ...

If you’re having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music, you’re not alone. Downdetector is showing a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seems to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps.Several Verge staffers have experienced issues themselves. Clicking through to many products produces a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that do load are not showing pricing. Users have reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that are working seem to be loading slowly.Amazon confirmed that some customers are experiencing issues in a post on X, but has not yet responded to a request for comment.The company ha...

Today, Netflix announced that it has acquired InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s AI company that specializes in tools for film and television production. The deal will see all 16 of InterPositive’s current team of engineers and researchers move over to Netflix. Affleck is also set to join the streamer as a senior adviser.In a statement about the acquisition and his reasons for founding InterPositive in 2022, Affleck said he was inspired to get into the tech space after “observing the early rise of AI in production” and finding many of the tools lacking. Affleck felt that he “had a responsibility to [his] peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it.” And he thinks that Netflix’s history of “applying and scaling technology responsibly” makes them th...