This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Peloton, stay in your lane
17 Apr 2026, 2:00 pm by Victoria Song
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
The camera zooms in on two well-formed cheeks clad in white shorts. These buns of steel belong to one Hudson Williams, star of the steamy hockey romance Heated Rivalry. As the camera pans up, a bead of sweat drips down his chin toward his clavicle. Sweaty abs are shown. The music swells. Hollywood’s mega-hunk of the moment is swaying his chiseled visage back and forth, semi-gyrating on… a Peloton treadmill. A $6,695 …
The South Korean president is doing quote-post diplomacy
17 Apr 2026, 2:00 pm by Sarah Jeong
“This is no different from Comfort Women or the Holocaust,” wrote South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on X last week, quoting a post with a video of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers throwing a body off a rooftop in Gaza.
The president’s post kicked off an internet firestorm for a thousand different reasons, not least because the video in question was misleadingly labeled. The quoted post reads “LIVE FOOTAGE: IDF soldiers tortured a Palestinian kid and threw him off a roof.” The video was actually from September 2024, and depicted Israeli soldiers kicking, dragging, and eventually hurling a limp body from a rooftop. The incident – involving …
Ghost orchid in the machine
17 Apr 2026, 2:00 pm by Cath Virginia
Vacuum cleaners, personal massagers, electronic baby rockers, and walking pads: These are the secondhand machines Rachel Youn sources to create their kinetic sculptures. Made with artificial flowers, metal hardware, and these used electronic components, each one possesses a humanlike presence.
Slow Burn is made from an artificial orchid, a neck massager, bits of metal that clamp the orchids’ petals, and a monitor mount attaching the entire apparatus to a gallery wall. A motor on the massager animates metal rods that force the orchid open and close, a visual that feels caged in its sexuality, a flower forced to furl and unfurl infinitely fo …
The ‘AI is inevitable’ trap
17 Apr 2026, 1:24 pm by David Pierce
In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI, or at least a peak of AI?
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On this episode of The Vergecast, we look at both the data and the vibes. David and Nilay explore a new study from Stanford that says AI is getting better at lots of things, a …
The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
17 Apr 2026, 12:51 pm by Jess Weatherbed
All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe’s time has come. The Creative Cloud provider’s suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades – despite unpopular decisions to fully embrace generative AI and abandon software licenses in favor of expensive, complicated subscriptions.
Pricing in particular has given competitors an opening to attack. Some of the best alternatives aren’t just undercutting Adobe’s price – they’re available for free. People love free.
One example that was announced this week is Autograph, motion design software akin to Ado …
A giant cell tower is going to space this weekend
17 Apr 2026, 11:25 am by Thomas Ricker
This weekend’s scheduled Blue Origin rocket launch is rather momentous. Success would signal an end to SpaceX’s monopoly on reusable orbital launch vehicles, and set up a three-way race to make that “No Service” indicator on your phone disappear forever.
On Sunday morning, Jeff Bezos’ massive New Glenn rocket is scheduled to launch with the first-stage booster that launched and landed on the program’s second mission last November. It’s a critical test, because cost-effective booster reuse is what’s made SpaceX’s Falcon 9 so dominant.
Amazon desperately needs a reusable rocket of its own to accelerate its Leo launches. Without one, it’s onl …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
