After trying out a paid membership several years back, Newegg has announced a replacement: Newegg Plus. You can opt into the program for free, giving you access to benefits like free shipping, member-only deals, faster returns, warranty discounts, and a dedicated customer service line.

Our pals at Rest of World have a deep dive into the TSMC chip fab in Arizona, one of the major plants funded by the Chips and Science Act. It was meant to come online this year, but it’s fallen well behind schedule, and culture shock is a major reason why:

Several American former employees said they felt relief after quitting. In group chats, engineers celebrated the departure of their friends. “TSMC was the worst possible place to work on Earth,” one American ex-TSMC engineer told Rest of World. Another, who recently left the company, described TSMC as having “a purely authoritarian work structure.”

Shades of Foxconn in Wisconsin, but at least this time there’s an actual factory.

Josh Dzieza got a rare glimpse at the meticulous work of undersea cable repair — the secretive industry that keeps internet infrastructure around the world up and running. If you haven’t read his excellent feature yet, here’s a quick overview of how cable repair works.

Coca-Cola has made a $1.1 billion commitment to the Microsoft Cloud and the company’s generative AI capabilities. Coca-Cola will use the Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot for Microsoft 365 in a five-year strategic partnership. The deal comes a day after Cognizant also partnered with Microsoft for generative AI, and just days before Microsoft’s earnings report where AI growth is a big focus for investors.

The Pixel 8a leaks continue. This time, Google’s upcoming entry-level smartphone appears in a short hands-on video by an apparent smartphone dealer in Casablanca — who three days ago posted that they’re getting the goods.

God, that mint is good.

Unfortunately this X-Men ‘97-themed Xbox is only available through a sweepstakes, which is disappointing since reading the comic book panels would be great for killing time while your controller updates.

People using Amazon’s AI library can check if an image was made with Amazon’s Titan Image Generator, which is now publicly available. Right now, the platform will only check Amazon’s own watermarks and not other developers.

Amazon also added the ability to customize guardrails and to bring people’s own models to Bedrock.

And Huawei just released its premium Pura 70 series a few days ago as followup to its wildly successful and sanction-skirting Mate 60.

Monthly active users were up 19 percent year-over-year to 615 million, while subscribers were up 14 percent to 239 million. Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek noted that the company just turned 18-years old, and “as an adult company we are now consistently profitable, which is great news.”

Ok, so where’s Spotify HiFi, Mr. Man?

The third generation of Firefly generative AI — which Adobe claims can provide more accurate and photorealistic results than its predecessor — can be accessed via the Firefly web app.

This includes the Structure Reference and Style Reference tools in the Text to Image module, and a new Generative Expand feature for increasing the aspect ratio of images in the Generative Fill module.

Grimes manager DAOuda made a lengthy post on X to clear the air about the technical mishap that occurred during Grimes’ Coachella set last weekend. It apparently boils down to a last-minute update and a computer swap.

NASA has finally found a fix after the 46-year-old space probe stopped sending readable data to Earth in November. Voyager 1 can only send information about its health and status for now, but NASA says it’s working to get it back to transmitting scientific data, too.

There are plenty of great stories to read today from our sister site, Vox — on everything from more efficient (and yet controversial) appliances to how phones affect kids’ experiences in nature and how climate change is transforming our sense of home.

And stay tuned this week for more reporting on reforestation in Costa Rica from The Verge. We published the first story — about restoring Indigenous territories — in our Earth Week package today.

Aaron LaBerge is a big name at ESPN and Disney — he’s been there most of the last two decades, overseeing a lot of big projects including the recent Hulu / Disney Plus combination. He cited “personal reasons” for leaving in a note to staff, but also has a new job: after working on the joint betting project between ESPN and Penn Entertainment, he’s Penn’s new CTO.

The firings included “non-participating bystanders,” according to Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid. Google initially fired 28 employees after last week’s protest against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion defense contract. The sit-in lasted for eight hours before nine employees were arrested.

Chung said in an email to The Verge that these additional firings bring the total to over 50. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.