How the Amazon Echo learned to talk — and listen
How the Amazon Echo learned to talk — and listen A photo of a black speaker, the Amazon Echo, on a gray background. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Jeff Bezos badly wanted a voice computer. He had been saying so publicly since the very early days of Amazon, telling anyone who would […]
The Macintosh changed computers forever
The Macintosh changed computers forever Apple’s most legendary computer has two legacies: there’s the computer itself, and there’s the commercial. That commercial. Only a couple of days before Steve Jobs debuted the computer that would both help cement his legacy and contribute to his unceremonious exile from Apple, the company dropped a Super Bowl ad […]
The fast rise and epic fall of Clubhouse
The fast rise and epic fall of Clubhouse In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app – not as popular, but growing fast, and already […]
How TiVo killed live TV
How TiVo killed live TV For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You […]
The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird
The wild, intense rise and fall of Flappy Bird Flappy Bird was almost preposterously simple. If you ever played the game, even once, you surely remember how it worked, but here’s a summary just in case. You were a bird. Your job was to fly, left to right, for as long as possible without crashing […]
How AIM taught the internet to chat
How AIM taught the internet to chat If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there’s a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat […]
Inside the high drama of the iPhone 4
Inside the high drama of the iPhone 4 By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea – the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! – but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty […]
What Google Glass got right — and really, really wrong
What Google Glass got right — and really, really wrong Google didn’t invent the concept of smart glasses, but it did help make them mainstream. In retrospect, 13 years after their launch, this is both a good and bad thing. Glass made a lot of people dream about new ways to use computers without staring […]
Vine walked so TikTok could run
Vine walked so TikTok could run What are thooooose? Well, they’re my Vines, the six-second videos that helped mint a generation of famous comedians and also kicked off the era of endlessly looping vertical video that has consumed us all ever since. If you weren’t there at the time, most Vines might seem utterly nonsensical. […]
The tale of the Fire Phone, Amazon’s very strange smartphone
The tale of the Fire Phone, Amazon's very strange smartphone When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get in the smartphone game, he went all in. And the resulting device, the Fire Phone, wound up more densely packed with big ideas than just about any gadget you’ll find anywhere. There was just one tiny problem: […]