Emma Roth | The Verge

Apple is ‘not able to predict’ when it’ll have enough iPhone Duos to go around

2026-11-02T18:27:09-05:00

Apple CEO John Ternus doesn’t have a timeline for when iPhone Duo supply constraints could lift. During an interview with Reuters, Ternus said the company is “working hard to get it to as many customers as quickly as possible, but at this point, we’re not able to predict when supply and demand will be in balance.”

Apple launched its first foldable last month for $1,999, featuring a 5.4 outer display and 7.6-inch inner screen. Preorders for the iPhone Duo quickly sold out, with some shipments expected to arrive in 2027. Apple also made a limited number of iPhone Duo models available in-store at launch.

In his interview with Reuters, Ternus also addressed reports about cracked screens, saying “a very small percentage” of iPhone Duos were returned for this issue, and that Apple is replacing them.

The company has contended with supply chain constraints and rising memory costs for months now. This resulted in price increases across its product lineup, along with higher iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max starting prices. “What we’re seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented,” Ternus said during Apple’s Q4 2026 earnings call on Monday. Ternus added that the company expects to see “even higher memory costs” during Apple’s December quarter but notes that this is “partly offset” by recent price increases.

Even without a standard iPhone 18 model, Apple reported record-breaking iPhone revenue at $57.58 billion during its fourth quarter.

Apple set an iPhone sales record even without a new standard iPhone

2026-11-02T17:56:51-05:00

Apple had a record-breaking quarter for iPhone sales — despite not releasing a standard model during its latest refresh. In its fourth-quarter earnings report released on Monday, Apple says it earned $57.58 billion in iPhone revenue, a 17 percent jump from the same time last year.

The increase in revenue follows the launch of Apple’s iPhone 18 lineup in September, which included a pricier iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max model. The company raised prices across its older models at the same time. Apple also took the wraps off its first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, but its preorder sales aren’t included in this earnings report.

Like other device-makers, Apple has been dealing with supply chain constraints and rising memory costs, leading it to raise prices across its products. Meanwhile, Apple only had a “limited” number of iPhone Duos available in store at launch, with some estimated shipment dates extending into 2027. “We saw higher memory costs as compared to the June quarter, and that was partly offset by the benefit of carrying inventory and lower costs on non-memory components,” Apple CEO John Ternus said during an interview with CNBC.

Apple reported a 12 percent increase in revenue overall, ballooning to $114.5 billion. Its Mac business grew 24 percent to $10.79 billion, while Apple’s services division, which includes App Store commissions along with subscriptions to services like Apple TV and Apple Music, grew to $31.57 billion. iPad revenue declined 10 percent year over year, with $6.23 billion in sales.

Apple shook up other areas of its product lineup with some other major launches over the past several weeks. It made a big push into the smart home space with its first smart home display and a series of video doorbells, security cameras, and door locks, made in collaboration with LG and Schneider Electric. Last week, Apple also revealed a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen — a design choice that its executives famously resisted.

OpenAI pitches data center power plants as a way to protect nearby areas

2026-11-02T13:01:30-05:00

In an announcement on Monday, OpenAI says it will pilot its “Grid Protectors Program” at an upcoming data center in Effingham County, Georgia, where the company promises to free up to 1,000 megawatts of power during extreme weather or emergencies, enough to power air conditioners in around 700,000 homes.

The announcement comes as opposition to data centers spreads across the US, in response to massive projects that have begun development and construction, frequently with little or no input from local residents. In Utah, residents protested after Box Elder County commissioners signed off on a data center expected to consume more than double the state’s peak electricity demand in 2025, and spread hot air in the desert valley surrounding the data center.

Now OpenAI’s approach is to pitch the construction of power plants that feed the electricity required by the new AI data centers it’s building as “a resource that utilities can call on when communities need it most.”

Several states like Tennessee, Florida, Oklahoma, Oregon, and others have enacted laws that say they will prevent AI companies from passing energy costs on to residents, in addition to moratoriums and other restrictions. This is besides the environmental impacts, as a recent study by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) said that powering proposed Texas data center projects could undo decades of air quality gains over just five years.

OpenAI, which has switched to calling its AI data centers “compute campuses” in an effort to separate from their poor public reputation, claims it helps reduce costs for customers by operating year-round:

“Electricity demand also rises and falls with the seasons, with different regions facing their biggest peaks at different times,” OpenAI’s announcement says. “Our compute campuses need power year-round. With the right agreements, that steady demand can help spread the grid’s fixed costs across more electricity sales, while flexibility lets us reduce demand when the system is busiest.”

OpenAI says it’s going to continue working with policymakers and utility services to make “arrangements for our future campus to reduce electricity demand when the grid is under strain.” Along with its data center in Georgia, OpenAI is also partnering with Oracle and SoftBank to build its “Stargate” data centers across the US, including in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and Milam County, Texas.

Squarespace is laying off 19 percent of employees

2026-11-02T11:57:45-05:00

The website-building platform Squarespace is laying off 19 percent of its employees as it works to “simplify” its operations, Squarespace spokesperson Jeff Seedman says in a statement to The Verge. The job cuts will affect around 300 of Squarespace’s 1,800 employees.

“The changes are intended to simplify how we operate, sharpen our priorities and enable the company to move faster as we position Squarespace for its next phase of growth,” Seedman says. “We are grateful for the contributions of our departing colleagues and are providing comprehensive support to help them through the transition.” Seedman adds that impacted employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay and healthcare benefits into May 2027.

The layoffs come a little over two years after Squarespace’s big push into AI. In 2024, the company announced its Blueprint AI tool, which uses AI to build websites as well as generate website copy, blog posts, product descriptions, and more. The private equity firm Permira also closed its acquisition of Squarespace around that time.

SpaceX could buy Boost Mobile as part of its big mobile carrier plans

2026-11-02T09:32:33-05:00

SpaceX has discussed a deal with Boost Mobile to launch its own service through the budget-friendly carrier, according to a report from The Washington Post. The deal, which comes as SpaceX aims to make Starlink a “major” mobile carrier, reportedly involves the Elon Musk-owned company acquiring Boost Mobile or accessing its network.

Musk discussed the potential agreement with Charlie Ergen, chairman of Boost Mobile parent company EchoStar, last month, as reported by The Washington Post. Boost Mobile’s network is currently powered by T-Mobile and AT&T, meaning SpaceX may need permission from the two carriers to launch its service.

Neither SpaceX nor Boost Mobile immediately responded to The Verge’s request for comment.

In recent months, SpaceX has ramped up efforts to build out its mobile service, which will combine its satellite-to-mobile constellation with a terrestrial network. The company acquired wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar last year and recently purchased a portfolio of low-band spectrum licenses that could allow Starlink Mobile’s signal to penetrate buildings. Last month, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX is in talks to gain access to at least 80,000 cell sites in the US.

The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping

2026-10-30T18:04:23-04:00

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually.

The shared “policy token” signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It will live within a website’s robots.txt file, which has long signaled which web crawlers can and can’t scrape a site — whether for search indexing, archiving, or AI training. Currently, sites have to signal their AI training preferences separately to each AI company.

The announcement comes as publishers grapple with the continuing influx of AI crawlers scraping their sites and feeding their content into AI models. Some companies and organizations have attempted to combat unauthorized scraping, with the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard giving publishers the ability to charge crawlers that visit their sites, and Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers by default.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will restrict their AI crawlers from accessing a site if they encounter the shared token. Meta communications head Andy Stone also signaled support for the new setting, but doesn’t say whether the company will honor it. “We believe creating a common signal that conveys such preferences to multiple providers at once is an important step,” Stone says. “And we look forward to working with other AI companies on the standards and their implementation across the industry.”

Microsoft says it will offer granular controls that will give publishers the ability to opt out of AI training or AI grounding, the process of pointing an AI model to a verified source of information to reduce hallucinations. Microsoft notes that websites will still appear in Bing’s search results regardless of their preferences. Google previously implemented similar controls that allow sites to control whether their content appears in AI search features or is used for AI training, without impacting visibility in search.

While Anthropic has already adopted the signal, Google and Microsoft plan to support it next year. OpenAI says it will implement it in the “coming months.”

Update, October 30th: Added a comment from Meta.

Google’s satellite AI server transmits its first response to Earth

2026-10-30T14:21:38-04:00

Google’s AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space:

Blue marble below

Data streams in silent grace

Starlight feeds my core. ✨

Google says it tried out other space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts as well. The test is part of Google’s Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space. Google launched the satellite into orbit earlier this month.

A ‘hello world’ milestone for Project Suncatcher 🚀

After launching our prototype satellite a few weeks ago, we’ve now successfully sent a command up to orbit, booted up the TPU, ran the prompt, and received our first complete response back on earth – a haiku! pic.twitter.com/kOFmETUskm
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 30, 2026

“Next, we will continue with a series of tests to evaluate how TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation exposure in orbit,” Google says. “Verifying our TPUs can reliably execute workloads in space paves the way for our next milestone of twin interconnected satellites in 2027.”

Starbucks wants to use AI to show you a ‘personalized digital menu’ at the drive-thru

2026-10-30T13:38:04-04:00

Starbucks could eventually show you a personalized digital menu when you pull up to the drive-thru. During an earnings call on Thursday, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is going to explore “experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus, and make payment more effortless,” as spotted earlier by More Perfect Union.

It sounds similar to the technology that Taco Bell is experimenting with, which could change the layout, content, and visuals on a digital menu board “on a car-by-car basis.” McDonald’s also recently showed off an AI-powered feature it’s piloting at a handful of drive-thrus, allowing its “ArchIQ” chatbot to identify repeat customers and let them order their “usual.”

Starting in 2027, Starbucks will also begin testing background AI models at the drive-thru to help baristas “input orders more accurately and efficiently,” according to Niccol. The company also plans to integrate AI into the Starbucks app’s search and discovery features, and may allow “conversational and agentic” ordering in the future.

Starbucks has already started allowing customers to place orders through ChatGPT, and also rolled out an AI-powered Green Dot Assist that employees can use to ask questions about things like recipes and service standards.

It’s still not clear how soon we can expect to see personalized digital menu boards at Starbucks, but Niccol says it’s still “early,” adding that “we’ll test, learn, and scale what works.”

Pope Leo calls for the disarmament of AI: ‘Machines are tools, not persons’

2026-10-30T11:14:37-04:00

Pope Leo XIV says AI systems should be “disarmed,” adding that humans “have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications.” In Friday’s Papal Address, Pope Leo encourages United Nations member states to “take concrete steps toward banning lethal autonomous weapons” during their meeting in Geneva next month.

The address reflects many of the ideas Pope Leo laid out in his first major papal document in May, which highlighted “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” In line with his encyclical, Pope Leo tells participants that “Machines are tools, not persons,” and warns about the dangers of granting AI systems rights or legal personhood. “Decisions affecting human life, freedom, and the use of force must always remain subject to effective, informed, and responsible human oversight,” Pope Leo says.

In 2024, Pope Francis similarly called for a ban on autonomous weapons, saying, “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.” AI has become a popular topic for Pope Leo, who suggests he chose his name because he must confront advances in the technology — similar to how Pope Leo XIII presided over the church at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.

Pope Leo closes out his address by calling for international institutions to safeguard the common good from AI-related risks, along with “shared standards, independent oversight and clear mechanisms of accountability so that decisions concerning the development and use of AI can be examined, challenged when necessary, and accompanied by appropriate remedies for any harm caused.”

Patrick Stewart has died at age 86

2026-10-30T10:54:22-04:00

Patrick Stewart, best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has died at age 86. A message posted to Stewart’s Instagram account says the actor died in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday “following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia.”

Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart began his acting career in theater. He eventually landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. Stewart returned as the Star Trek captain in subsequent films, including Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). Stewart also starred as Professor Charles Xavier in several X-Men movies. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010.

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“His sonorous voice and singular talent will forever be synonymous with indelible performances in every genre,” the message on Instagram says. “He explored the human condition in all its poetic complexity and brought hope not only to the far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but into science fiction’s most iconic final frontier aboard the Starship Enterprise.”