JBL has announced an upgraded version of its first wireless earbuds with a touchscreen charging case. The new JBL Tour Pro 3’s case features a larger screen and now works as a transmitter, broadcasting audio to the earbuds from a wired source such as a plane’s in-flight entertainment system. However, that larger screen also comes with a steeper price tag. They’ll sell for $299, which is nearly $50 more than the JBL Tour Pro 2.

The 1.57-inch touchscreen on the JBL Tour Pro 3’s charging case is 30 percent larger than the screen on the Tour Pro 2’s, giving it enough room to fit additional info like the name of the song currently playing. That will potentially make it even more useful as an alternative to reaching for your smartphone if you want to skip tracks, set alarms, or even check text messages or incoming call notifications.

The argument can be made that the case’s screen is unnecessary for those who already wear a smartwatch that offers similar functionality. But the Tour Pro 3’s charging case also provides easier access to earbud settings, including noise-canceling modes and EQ profiles, which are otherwise only accessible through the JBL smartphone app or by customizing the earbud’s gesture controls.

The less obvious but more interesting upgrade on the Tour Pro 3 is the charging case’s audio transmission capabilities. It can be plugged into any analog or USB audio source and isn’t only limited to older devices with a headphone jack. And with newly added support for Auracast, that audio can be broadcast to multiple Bluetooth devices nearby that also support Auracast — such as Samsung’s earbuds.

Image: JBL

The Tour Pro 3 earbuds now feature larger 11-millimeter drivers — up from 10 millimeters on the Tour Pro 2. Despite the driver upgrades and larger touchscreen, JBL is still claiming up to 10 hours of music playback for the earbuds with ANC turned off, or up to 40 hours in total when paired with the charging case. If the buds do happen to die at a bad time, a 10-minute charge will provide three hours of listening.

Spatial sound is included with built-in head tracking, and while JBL claims it works with “stereo sound from any source or device,” what the company is essentially doing is keeping the left and right audio signals locked in 3D space so, as you turn your head, they always sound like they’re coming from the same place. For comparison, Apple’s Spatial Audio is designed to simulate a more expansive surround sound experience through a pair of headphones, with audio sounding like it’s coming from all around you.

The JBL Tour Pro 3 are expected to be available starting on September 22nd, 2024, in black or latte color options.

Google is upgrading its Gemini writing tools in Gmail to help you polish drafts that you’ve already written. Now, among other Gemini-powered “Help me write” options like Formalize and Elaborate, you can tap “Polish” to refine your emails, Google says in a blog post. The company has also added shortcuts that appear in the body of your emails on Android and iOS, making it more obvious that there are AI writing tools to use.

The tools are available to people who pay for Google One AI Premium accounts or who have paid for Google’s Gemini add-on for Workspace. If that’s you, when you open an empty draft, you’ll see a “Help me write” shortcut appear that you can tap to have Gemini draft text for you. Once you have 12 or more words in a draft — AI-written or not — you should see a new “Refine my draft” shortcut, shown in gray letters below the words.

GIF: Google

Swipe your thumb across the text, and you’ll be given the choice to Polish, Formalize, Elaborate, or Shorten, or to have Gemini just write a whole new draft for you. (And if the “Refine my draft” shortcut doesn’t appear, tapping the pencil icon does the same thing.)

Google will have to face a class action lawsuit that accuses it of collecting users’ data through Chrome without their consent. In a decision on Tuesday, a federal appeals court reversed a December 2022 ruling that dismissed the case, saying the lower court should’ve reviewed Google’s disclosures and determined “whether a reasonable user reading them would think that he or she was consenting to the data collection.”

The class action lawsuit, first filed in 2020, alleged that Google collected data from Chrome users — regardless of whether they enabled Chrome sync. This feature saves bookmarks, passwords, open tabs, and other data to your Google account, giving you easy access to this information when signed into Chrome on multiple devices.

The plaintiffs claimed Chrome “intentionally and unlawfully” sent Google browsing history, IP addresses, persistent cookie identifiers, and unique browser identifiers without their explicit permission. At the time, Google argued users consented to this by accepting the company’s privacy policy. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed, stating in her order granting dismissal that “Google adequately disclosed, and plaintiffs consented to, the collection of the at-issue data.”

However, Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. writes in today’s decision that Judge Gonzalez Rogers didn’t take into account whether users actually understood this agreement. “Google had a general privacy disclosure yet promoted Chrome by suggesting that certain information would not be sent to Google unless a user turned on sync,” Smith writes. The case will be returned to the lower courts for reconsideration.

“We disagree with this ruling and are confident the facts of the case are on our side. Chrome Sync helps people use Chrome seamlessly across their different devices and has clear privacy controls,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda says in a statement to The Verge. And while Google will soon no longer require users to enable Chrome sync to access saved information, Castañeda says, “This announcement is not related to the litigation.”

Today, Google announced it’s making assigning group work in Google Classroom easier and faster with a new feature called Student Groups. Teachers will now be able to add individual students to predefined groups before creating and assigning group work.

Google is entering this school year with a bunch of new updates for the now 10-year-old Classroom platform, like a new Education Navigator, a Read Along feature, and Dark Mode to the mobile app. But teachers have been waiting for something like Student Groups for a long time.

Previously, teachers would need to create an assignment first and then individually add students to that assignment if they wanted to assign group work. For occasional group projects, this worked okay, but it was a pain for teachers who regularly have their students do group work — especially if their students remained in the same groups throughout the school year.

Image: Google

But now, the process of assigning group work is no longer as much of a hassle. From inside the People tab, teachers can use the new Group button above the class roster to create, name, add, and modify custom student groups. These groups will be an available option whenever a teacher creates an assignment.

Previously, Google added the ability to import class rosters from certain Student Information Systems (SIS), which meant some teachers no longer had to manually add student names one at a time into every new Classroom they created.

The Shein complaint about Temu kicks off with a bang, accusing Temu of being “an unlawful enterprise built on counterfeiting, theft of trade secrets, infringement of intellectual property rights, and fraud” in just the first sentence. But I guess you have to go big when the lawsuit against you accuses you of using “Mafia-style” intimidation tactics.

It gets worse, Shein alleges. Temu isn’t a marketplace at all. “It controls every aspect of its seller’s activity,” the complaint says. “It directs what products they can list and the prices for which they can sell; encourages them to infringe the intellectual property rights of others; and even prevents them from removing their products from Temu’s website after they have admitted to infringement.” I would like to be clear: I am still in the first paragraph of this complaint, a paragraph which uses bitchy scare-quotes around every incidence of calling Temu a “marketplace.”

This is just the latest sally in the ongoing legal wrangling between the two bargain retailers. They’ve sent each other legal nastygrams before: Temu accused Shein of browbeating manufacturers to cut Temu off, Shein claimed Temu told influencers to say “false and deceptive statements” about Shein in promotional material. Those two suits were dropped in October. Then, in December, Temu sued Shein again, alleging that Shein had “gone so far as to falsely imprison merchants doing business with Temu.”

Pretty intense beef over who can sell $5 skirts, if you ask me.

Shein has filed paperwork to go public in the US, and it could do so as early as this year. It’s been trying to shed its reputation for bad working conditions and a sketchy supply chain, which relies heavily on China.

Shein also has a reputation for ripping off independent designers, so its accusations that Temu is “built on counterfeiting” is really something. Shein began selling in the US in 2017, and was followed by Temu in 2022, as part of a race to the bottom from online retailers including Amazon. When Temu followed Shein into the US, Shein’s valuation dropped by more than $30 billion, Temu alleged in its December lawsuit. In December 2023, Temu sold three times as much as Shein in the US. Both are using a trade loophole, the de minimus exception, that means packages worth less than $800 entering the US from China are duty-free.

“This relentless pursuit of low prices is central to its business model and competitive strategy but its low prices are achieved by any means,” Shein writes of Temu in its lawsuit today. I wonder who else we could say that about!

Among Temu’s alleged tactics:

• Stealing trade secrets, including internal pricing information
• Pretended to be Shein on Twitter “in an effort to misdirect customers”
• Used Shein’s trademark in Google ads for Temu
• Losing “an average of $30” on every order placed to secure its market

Shein itself is facing a class action lawsuit alleging that it’s engaged in “industrial-scale scheme of systematic, digital copyright infringement of the work of small designers and artists.” It has also been sued by For Love and Lemons, H&M, Levi Strauss, and Uniqlo, among others.

If you want the old Sonos app back, it’s not coming. In a Reddit AMA response posted Tuesday, Sonos CEO Spence says that he was hopeful “until very recently” that the company could rerelease the app, confirming a report from The Verge that the company was considering doing so. But after testing that option, rereleasing the old app would apparently make things worse, Spence says.

Since the new app was released on May 7th, Spence has issued a formal apology and announced in August that the company would be delaying the launch of two products “until our app experience meets the level of quality that we, our customers, and our partners expect from Sonos.”

Here’s Spence’s explanation as to why it can’t bring back the old app:

The trick of course is that Sonos is not just the mobile app, but software that runs on your speakers and in the cloud too. In the months since the new mobile app launched we’ve been updating the software that runs on our speakers and in the cloud to the point where today S2 is less reliable & less stable then what you remember. After doing extensive testing we’ve reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better. I’m sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing to me.

In the AMA, Spence also discussed things like two-factor authentication (“a possibility”). The app “remains my #1 priority,” Spence says, but he promises that he’s going to “pop back on Reddit some nights and weekends to engage on the most upvoted questions.”

Nomad may run its fair share of deals on its various phone cases and Apple Watch bands, but we rarely see steep discounts on its fancy, premium multi-chargers. But right now, the second-gen Base One Max is on sale in black or silver for $119 ($51 off) when you use coupon code VERGEB1M on Nomad’s site. The 30 percent discount is good through August 25th at 11:59PM PT.

If you have a MagSafe-compatible iPhone and accompanying accessories like an Apple Watch or a set of AirPods, the Base One Max is a great 3-in-1 home charger that won’t look like an eyesore on your desk or side table. The hefty charger weighs in at 1.7 pounds thanks to its metal and glass slab-style construction, and it can simultaneously fast-charge a compatible Apple Watch while topping up an iPhone at 15W wireless charging speeds — all while charging some AirPods or another pair of earbuds that support wireless charging.

There are cheaper MagSafe-compatible options out there from other brands, but few of them look this sleek and are built this well. Also, many of them do not meet Apple’s official MagSafe certification or the new Qi standard, but rather original Qi, which tops out at slower 7.5W charging speeds on iPhones. And if any family members or other cohabitants use an Android phone, the Base One Max’s flat pad can also wirelessly charge their handset (just without the benefit of the magnets for that perfect alignment every time).

For the first time in the game’s 30-year history, leaders and civilizations can be chosen independently of one another.

Imagine Caesar Augustus at the head of an army of Mongol warriors or Ben Franklin building the Great Wall of China. In Sid Meier’s Civilization 7, such flights of historical fantasy can become historical fact. The game has new ages to experience, new civilizations to build up, new leaders to guide them, and — for the first time in franchise history — the ability to mix and match leaders and civilizations to build the empire of your wildest dreams. The Verge had the opportunity to test out the game and talk with its developers at Firaxis Games. The brief, three-hour demo wasn’t enough time to get a feel for how well leaders and different civilizations work together, but I left feeling excited about all the ways Civilization VII aims to change the course of history.

In previous Civilization games, civs were always tied to a specific leader who was usually, but not always, a noteworthy head of state. Later iterations of the game offered multiple leaders for civs, and on a couple of occasions where it made historical sense, one leader could straddle multiple civs like France and England both having access to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who, during her unusually-long-for-the-time-period life, was the queen of both countries.

In Civilization VII, leaders are no longer tied to specific countries, giving players the opportunity to synergize the special abilities and bonuses of leaders with the unique attributes and units of different civs.

“We’ve known for a long time that our community has wanted a ‘build my own civilization’ tool kit,” Ed Beach, Civ 7’s creative director, says. Beach explained that balance issues made this feature unfeasible for previous games, but it was a priority for Civ 7. “If we make all the leaders balance with each other and all the civs balance with each other, then mixing and matching will work.”

Before a Civ 7 game starts, players will choose their leader, then their civ. The game will make recommendations as to what civ will best suit a particular leader according to the specific strengths and “styles” of each. I chose Amina, warrior-queen of Zazzau, as my leader. She’s an economic and militaristic leader suited for civs that like to fight or make a lot of money. I don’t like to fight, but cash rules everything around me, so I settled on pursuing an economic victory. And though her attributes make her well-suited to a civ like Egypt or Rome, I chose her to lead her native civ of Aksum.

In previous Civ games, Hatshepsut would lead Egypt. In Civilization 7, however, the choice is yours, and you can see what different civs she’s best suited to govern.

According to Beach, Civ games are developed according to a simple equation whereby one-third of the game is new, the other third is updated, and the final third stays the same.

Though Civilization is one of my “quintessentially me” game series, I completely skipped over Civ 6. But as I played Civ 7’s demo, I realized that the moment-to-moment gameplay fell into the “stayed the same” category. Despite missing out on an entire game, I was able to parse the new-to-me user interface. And what I didn’t quite grasp, like the feature that allows players to develop specialized districts within a city, the game’s tutorial was very good at catching me up on.

One feature that was part of the “update” slice of the Civilization development pie was the historical era system. Where before, the passage of time was marked by a civ progressing from the ancient era to the classical era, Firaxis has streamlined the many historical eras into just three chapters — antiquity, exploration, and modern. Within each chapter are legacy paths or goals the player pursues with each path arranged into one of four categories that’ll sound familiar to Civilization-heads like myself — economic, military, cultural, and science. Since I was gunning for the economic victory, its attendant legacy path required me to do things like establish several trade routes or amass a wide variety of resources other world leaders would pay top dollar to get their hands on.

At the heart of Civilization 7 is the idea that history is built in layers. Beach used the evolution of the city of London as an example, explaining how different empires dramatically changed the face of the city. The Romans built the city’s walls that the Saxons would later improve before the Normans came and updated them even further.

The ability to mix and match civilizations comes from this “layered” concept of history, and it doesn’t end when a player first picks their leader and civ. For the first time in the series’ history, players will be able to change their civilization at different points throughout the game. The game keeps track of the decisions players made and the legacy paths they pursued, then when a player progresses to the next chapter of history, they’ll get a new civilization to lead based on their choices.

Image: Firaxis Games

For example, at the start of the Exploration Age, I might have had the choice to change from Aksum into another economy-focused civ like the Dutch. Or, had I indulged her militaristic capabilities, I might have gotten the Spanish empire instead.

And though the idea of Ben Franklin leading the Chinese might upset some history buffs, the idea of civilizations evolving into something new based on the paths they take and the technologies they develop is sound history. London’s various evolutions from a regional Roman capital to the crown jewel of the British empire is just one example.

“We have a system that’s listening to events that are happening in the game world,” Beach says. “And it has multiple thousands of little stories that can come out of the game because something has triggered.”

Those events don’t have to be civilization-shaking in scale, either. My scientists had developed a new food treatment technique but needed to know how to deploy it: should they use it on some bitter berries to make them more palatable or use it to soak some hyena meat? Since the idea of eating grilled hyena didn’t sound too appealing, I chose the berries leading to the discovery of how to cultivate olives.

I bitterly lament that the demo didn’t let me progress to the next age to see how impactful the humble olive would have had on my civilization’s history or the new civs Aksum could have evolved into. That kind of dynastic storytelling has been missing from Civilization games, so I’m keen to see all the new histories Civilization 7 will enable me to write.

Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 launches on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch on February 11th, 2025.

A Tesla Semi truck crashed into trees and caught fire off the side of a highway in California early Monday, causing road closures on I-80 for almost 16 hours. As reported by KCRA 3 News, Cal Fire crews first headed to the crash site near the Nevada border after 3AM local time.

As reported previously by Electrek, firefighters doused the Tesla Semi with thousands of gallons of water to cool its lithium-ion EV battery pack down to a manageable target temperature of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit while waiting for its cells to burn out. Around 4PM the crew got the batteries to a safer temperature and began work to move what was left of the Semi to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. The highway was fully reopened after 7PM.

California Highway Patrol told KCRA 3 that the driver of the Semi was taken to a hospital after walking away from the crash. Now, authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, including whether the driver had fallen asleep. The Semi was operated by Tesla, which often uses the class 8 commercial truck to haul freshly made EV batteries from the Gigafactory to its Fremont, California car manufacturing plant. In this case, it was not pulling a trailer, so it seems the Semi’s own batteries were burning.

It’s not the first time big Tesla batteries have caught fire in California. The company’s Megawatt energy storage batteries went aflame at a local utility in 2022, shutting down part of a highway.

Microsoft and Bethesda are officially bringing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PS5 after it debuts first on Xbox. During Gamescom Opening Night Live, Bethesda confirmed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to Xbox and PC first on December 9th, before launching on PS5 in spring 2025.

The confirmation comes months after The Verge exclusively revealed Microsoft was considering launching Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. I wrote in February that Bethesda’s Indiana Jones game would have a rather short period of exclusivity, with Bethesda considering a PS5 launch months after the December 2024 launch on Xbox and PC.

Sources familiar with Bethesda’s plans tell me the company has been targeting an April 2025 release for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5, but this date could naturally shift depending on development schedules.

The Indiana Jones and the Great Circle release on PS5 is part of a new multiplatform approach for certain Xbox games, known internally as Project Latitude. Bethesda’s new Doom: The Dark Ages game is also coming to PS5 in 2025, and Microsoft has already launched previous Xbox-exclusive titles like Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded on PS5.