Tuesday’s top tech news: Elon squares off against Apple

Hello there! I hope you all had a nice break. Thanksgiving food is not my thing, but I did enjoy watching the last third of Saturday Night Fever with my parents and in-laws (shockingly depressing!). 

Back to the grind. Today, Spotify Wrapped copycats make their debut and Google and iHeartMedia get a slap on the wrist for a misleading ad campaign.

Today, Nintendo gave fans a second look at The Super Mario Bros. Movie with a new trailer, giving us another opportunity to hear Chris Pratt as the preeminent pixelated plumber. We also got the first official glimpse of Donkey Kong and Princess Peach and heard Anya Taylor-Joy’s rendition of the Mushroom Monarch.

It’s interesting that we’re getting a second trailer a little more than a month after the first one captivated the internet. The constricted release schedule might have to do with the fact that promotional materials for the film leaked after the first trailer. Ironically, shortly before today’s presentation, posters for the movie were also apparently leaked, giving us more looks at Toad, Luigi, and perhaps most distressingly, Princess Peach.

Amazon has a new AWS service, AWS SimSpace Weaver, that lets users build massive simulations that look like real-world SimCity maps. The idea of this new service is that users can take advantage of Amazon’s massive AWS resources to run simulations that scale across multiple servers without running into computing or memory limitations, which could be useful for things like modeling the foot traffic surrounding a new sports stadium.

You can see AWS SimSpace Weaver in action in this impressive video demo from uCrowds, which simulates 1 million people walking around Las Vegas. By layering in geospatial data with the hordes of simulated people, it can give you an idea of how people might move around the computerized streets of the city if they were all let loose at once. With 1 million people, there are “simply not enough walkways” to fit them, according to the video, and even reducing that number to 50,000 shows where people start to bunch together.

It’s a good day when you get a free replacement for something broken. For me, it was a new controller. My old controller had its right joystick snap off in my bag. Despite the protruding nub snapping off, the analog mechanism still worked — so I reached out to the manufacturer for a replacement stick, and instead, they sent me a very nice and very new replacement. The thing is, like Carrie from Sex and the City, I didn’t want a replacement Blueberry iBook, Aiden! I just want my PowerBook fixed.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, I am just as grateful for the replacement as I was for the Thanksgiving turkey I’m still digesting. But my request to customer service wasn’t for a replacement — it was for a part. I inquired again about the part, but they said to just dispose of the broken controller. Not a fan of wasting a good controller, I headed over to eBay and found a broken one I could source parts from. Once I got that in, all it took was 11 screws and I was able to harvest my joystick.

My request has been granted: Samsung’s jaw-dropping lineup of ultra-wide, ultra-curved, ultra-fast gaming monitors is about to have much-needed competition. LG and MSI are both angling for your dollars, and unlike Samsung, they’re doing it with OLED panels.

On December 12th, LG will introduce the first 240Hz OLED gaming monitors we’ve ever seen, and it won’t just be the $999.99 27-inch flatscreen we told you about last week. The company will also open preorders for the $1,699.99 LG-45GR95QE, a 45-inch curved OLED beast. It’s a 21:9 monitor at 3440 x 1440 resolution, so not quite as wide or high-res as the 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9, but it could make up for that in other ways.

Cyber Monday is behind us — but is it really, though? Many of the deals that started on Black Friday continued through the weekend, remained with us on Cyber Monday, and now, we’re here. It’s Tuesday, and there are still many great tech deals available on gadgets like earbuds, smart speakers, smartwatches, and even some smartphones.

Sure, some hot deals cropped up during that time and have since sputtered out, but if you didn’t get your chance to shop already or were indecisive, you may still be in luck. Check out all the deals we’ve compiled and rounded up for you, ranging from all types of handy products across a variety of price points. The holiday shopping season may continue to bring a smattering of great deals, though not all will be this good, so save what you can on those gifts. Or, if you’ve already been checking people off your list, maybe it’s time to treat yourself to a little self-care with something new.

The inaugural season of Overwatch 2’s battle pass is almost done, with season 2 starting on December 6th. With the new season come a fresh set of skins, a new hero, new map, and a new game mode, all with a Greek mythology flavor that might make you forget about that other god of war. (Unlikely.)

The biggest development coming with season 2 is the release of the sexy sentient robot Ramattra. Over the weekend, Blizzard revealed more about his design, abilities, and play style, creating what Blizzard’s calling a “tempo tank,” reflecting his unique ability to change his form and thereby his abilities to fit the flow of battle.

Streaming services just keep creeping up in price. Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Apple TV Plus all announced price hikes this year, which means we’re forced to have to pay more money to keep up with the shows that are actually relevant, like Andor or Stranger Things.

The truth is, this trend isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Streaming services need to raise their prices or embrace advertising if they want to meet investors’ expectations. They’re just going to have to risk losing subscribers who don’t want to pay these jacked-up prices along the way.

On Monday, NASA’s Orion spacecraft reached its farthest distance from Earth, clocking in at 268,563 miles away from our planet. This marks the halfway point of the 25.5-day Artemis I mission, and the spacecraft will now continue its orbit around the Moon before heading back toward Earth.

“Artemis I has had extraordinary success and has completed a series of history-making events,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference, pointing out that Orion was the first spacecraft designed to carry humans to enter a distant retrograde lunar orbit and that it has surpassed the record for the furthest distance traveled away from Earth by a human-rated spacecraft. 

It’s been 20 years since That ‘80s Show spectacularly failed to recreate That ‘70s Show’s monster success and wound up being canceled just weeks into its first season. The way That ‘70s Show went out with a lackluster bang a few years later could easily have been the end of the franchise, but Netflix is gearing up to bring the Point Place crew back with the very imaginatively named That ‘90s Show.

Similar to That ‘70s Show, That ‘90s Show revolves around a group of young Wisconsinites whose budding friendships are destined to become lifelong relationships as they all grow up and get to know one another. As much as Leia Forman (Callie Haverda) loves her mom and dad, she knows that if she ever wants to really get out there and explore the world for herself, she’s probably going to need more friends her own age. Other young people are the last thing Leia expects to find while visiting her grandparents Red (Kurtwood Smith) and Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp) at their place back in Point Place, where her parents first met all of their best friends. But when new faces like punk rocker Gwen (Ashley Aufderheide), unathletic jock Nate (Maxwell Acee Donovan), and nerdy MMA fighter Nikki (Sam Morelos) start to come into Leia’s life, she realizes that staying with her grandparents might be the key to having an unforgettable summer.

Kensington’s new version of its SlimBlade trackball mouse has a big improvement over the original model: wireless connectivity. With the SlimBlade Pro, which Kensington announced on Tuesday, you’ll be able to connect the trackball to your PC or Mac via Bluetooth or with a 2.4GHz wireless dongle (via 9to5Mac).

Kensington claims the SlimBlade Pro will be able to get up to four months of battery life on a single charge, so you should be able to use the trackball for quite a while before needing to plug it in. The dongle has a handy storage spot on the bottom of the trackball if you want to keep it out of sight. And if you prefer keeping your mouse or trackball hooked up to your computer all the time, the SlimBlade Pro works with a wired connection, too, thanks to a built-in USB-C port.

Rolls-Royce and European airline easyJet announced that they’ve successfully tested a hydrogen jet engine — technology the companies hope might eventually help erase aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions. The ground test marks “the world’s first run of a modern aero engine on hydrogen,” Rolls-Royce said in a press release yesterday.

Aviation is considered one of the most difficult industries to clean up because it’s much harder to make electric planes than electric vehicles. Batteries charged with renewable solar and wind energy are still too bulky for long flights. So airlines and plane manufacturers are working to develop planes that can run on cleaner fuels like hydrogen, which produces water vapor instead of carbon dioxide when burned.

Bose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the world: it was famous for the Wave radio in the ’80s, it invented noise cancellation, you can see its logo on NFL sidelines every Sunday, and of course, there are the popular consumer products like the QuietComfort headphones that reviewers like Chris Welch here at The Verge rate as some of the best in the game. Bose is in tons of cars as well: audio systems in GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more are developed and tuned by Bose.

Bose was founded in 1964 by Amar Bose, who donated a majority of the shares of the company to MIT, where he was a professor. That means that, to this day, Bose is a private company with no pressure to go public. However, Bose still has to compete against Big Tech in talent, products, and compatibility.

The end of the year is fast approaching, which means it’s time for the world’s biggest music streaming services to summarize your listening habits in the most shareable ways possible. First out of the gate this year is YouTube Music’s 2022 Recap feature, launching today. 

Like last year, the main attraction is the personalized music stats it pulls together, highlighting the artists, songs, music videos, and playlists you’ve most listened to and watched throughout the course of the year. But there are also some new inclusions, including highlights of artists you might have discovered before they blew up and a new “music personality” feature that attempts to analyze your listening habits to deliver a verdict on your “music vibe.” 

Twitter will no longer take action against tweets that contain covid misinformation or the accounts that post them. Instead of announcing the change, the platform added a note to the pages that outline its covid misinformation policies, saying, “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

Twitter first introduced these policies in 2020 and began applying labels to tweets that contained disputed information about covid and its vaccines. The platform also removed tweets that contained “demonstrably false or potentially misleading content” and permanently suspended accounts if they continuously broke the rules. According to data posted by Twitter, the company suspended a total of 11,230 accounts and removed nearly 100,000 pieces of content since January 2020.

Portal, the first-person puzzle game that spawned a thousand memes, is getting a glow-up on December 8th, courtesy of a free piece of DLC. Portal with RTX was originally announced alongside Nvidia’s new RTX 4080 and 4090 graphics cards and adds ray-tracing support along with remade hi-res textures and models to the game. The result is much more realistic lighting and reflections, making the 15-year-old title look almost brand new.

Nvidia says the DLC was created with RTX Remix, its new modding platform that’s designed to make it easier to add support for modern technologies like ray tracing, enhanced materials, and DLSS to classic titles. Portal with RTX supports DLSS 3, the latest version of Nvidia’s AI upscaling technology, which is designed to boost resolution and frame rate when used with the latest generation of Nvidia’s graphics cards.