Technology

mardi 19 septembre 2023

Logitech’s Yeti GX is a new USB mic with RGB lighting

A picture of the Yeti GX microphone sitting on a desk with pink and blue RGB lighting on the bottom. — *The Yeti GX.* | Image: Logitech

Logitech is releasing a new set of products that will start shipping on September 24th and are aimed squarely at the likes of gamers, streamers, podcasters, and other creators. The big one is the $149.99 Logitech G Yeti GX, a “broadcast-style” USB microphone with a heavy stand and RGB lighting.

The Yeti GX is a dynamic supercardioid microphone, which is a kind of unidirectional mic designed to focus on sound in front of the pickup rather than behind the microphone. That’s a good thing if you don’t want the noise of your keyboard overtaking your voice. It also means if you move off-axis, your voice quickly falls away, but the trade-off can be worth it when you’re contending with poor recording spaces. Soren Pedersen, Logitech’s global product manager, described it as having the vibe of a Shure SM7, a popular broadcaster microphone.

A picture of the logitech Yeti GX sitting on its stand. It attaches to the stand on the side. — *The Logitech Yeti GX on the included stand.*

Of course, it wouldn’t be a gamer mic without configurable RGB lighting. There are two configurable LEDs — one in a circle on the back of the mic and one behind the Logitech G logo on its side — and you can set various animated effects or just choose a specific color for the lights. An LED stripe in the digital volume wheel is either red or blue, depending on whether the mic is muted.

Pressing the volume wheel turns on Smart Audio Lock, a feature Pederson described as a “safety net” to keep the mic from clipping and distorting when, say, a streamer gets excited and starts yelling about something. The mic does this with an analog limiter — like you’d find on the Razer Seiren V2 X — which compresses the signal when you get too loud to stop the mic from distorting. The feature also uses a built-in downward expander to lower the volume of background noise or unwanted echo in a bad recording environment.

The mic ships with a USB-C to USB-A cable desktop mount but can be attached to a standard boom mic stand as well, with adapters for 5/8-inch and 3/8-inch connections.

A picture of the Logitech Orb sitting on its small stand, which looks like a chicken’s foot. — *The Logitech Yeti Orb.*

Logitech also announced the $59.99 Yeti Orb, a small ball-style USB mic similar to the Yeti Snowball. The mic has a more muted look than the Snowball, with a cloth-covered front and with configurable RGB lights on top. Like the Yeti GX, it has a USB-C port on the back for connecting to your computer. The Orb is a condenser cardioid mic, and Logitech says it will also minimize background noise. It can also be removed from its small desktop stand for use with a boom stand.

A picture of the Litra Beam LX on a stand just behind a monitor. The front is the tunable white LED side, while the back is the RGB side. — *The Litra Beam LX.*

Logitech also announced an updated version of its Litra Beam X LED light bar, the $149.99 Litra Beam LX. The LX is dual-sided, with a tunable (2700K – 6500K) white bar like the original on one side and an RGB light on the other. Senior product marketing manager Andrew Siminoff said the lights are UL-certified for safe, all-day use. The light has 1/4-20-inch-threaded fittings for mounting either on its end or the middle of the light, and it connects either via USB-C or Bluetooth.

All three work with Logitech’s G Hub app for configuring lighting effects, as well as vocal effects and specific audio profiles through the software’s Blue Voice feature presets. If you have multiple Logitech Lightsync devices, you can synchronize lighting effects, too, if you really want to be awash in strobing, pulsing RGB colors while you game. Logitech says they’ll also be compatible with Windows Dynamic Lighting, through which you can sync lighting effects with other non-Logitech lighting.

It’s worth noting — and I do so with some nostalgic sadness — that these are the first Yeti microphones that don’t feature the “Blue” branding since Logitech bought the company in 2018. In a FAQ earlier this year, Logitech said it would no longer use the Blue brand in its product names, and instead will use it “to describe our technologies.”

Pour one out for old Blue, my friends.

This is Microsoft’s new disc-less Xbox Series X design with a new controller

*The planned ‘Brooklin’ Xbox Series X.* | Image: FTC vs. Microsoft

Microsoft is planning to refresh its Xbox Series X console in 2024 with an all-new design and features. Codenamed Brooklin, the unannounced console refresh has been accidentally revealed in new FTC v. Microsoft documents this week.

The new Xbox Series X design looks a lot more circular than the existing console and will ship without a disc drive. Internal confidential Microsoft documents the company reveals it has 2TB of storage (up from 1TB), a USB-C front port with power delivery, and an “all-new, more immersive controller.”

“Sebile” Xbox controller redesign revealed in court documents with wireless upgrades and modular thumbsticks. It’s a gamepad with a two-tone white / black color scheme split across the top and bottom when viewed from above. — *“Sebile” Xbox controller redesign revealed in court documents with wireless upgrades and modular thumbsticks*

The new controller, codenamed Sebille, is set to be announced later this year and will include an accelerometer for gyro support. It has a two-tone color scheme and will support a direct connection to cloud, Bluetooth 5.2, and a presumably updated “Xbox Wireless 2” connection. Microsoft also lists “precision haptic feedback” and “VCA haptics double as speakers” as specs for the controller. It will also have quieter buttons and thumbsticks, a rechargeable and swappable battery, modular thumbsticks, and you’ll be able to lift it up to wake it.

Inside the new Xbox Series X design Microsoft is also adding Wi-Fi 6E support, a Bluetooth 5.2 radio, and the company is shrinking the existing die to 6nm “for improve efficiency.” The PSU power will be reduced by 15 percent, according to Microsoft’s document. Microsoft is targeting the same $499 launch price of the Xbox Series X.

*Microsoft’s roadmap for its refreshed Xbox consoles.*

Microsoft lists a roadmap for this new Xbox Series X console and controller, alongside a refreshed Xbox Series S with 1TB of storage. Microsoft just launched a refreshed Xbox Series S in black, but there could be another refresh on the way in 2024 with Wi-Fi 6E support and Bluetooth 5.2. It will also include this new Xbox controller.

Microsoft is tentatively planning to launch this new Xbox Series S refresh next September, with the Xbox Series X refresh in November.

Strike Is a High-Stakes Gamble for Autoworkers and the Labor Movement

Strike Is a High-Stakes Gamble for Autoworkers and the Labor Movement Experts on unions and the industry said the U.A.W. strike could accelerate a wave of worker actions, or stifle labor’s recent momentum

lundi 18 septembre 2023

Apple made it way cheaper to repair an iPhone 15 Pro’s broken back glass

Apple iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in natural titanium — *iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.* | Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge

It’s significantly cheaper to repair the back glass on an iPhone 15 Pro than it was on the iPhone 14 Pro. Apple posted price estimates for its new phones over the weekend, listing a repair price of $169 for the 15 Pro and $199 for the Pro Max to replace either phone’s shattered back glass.

That’s up to a $350 decrease from the repair price for last year’s models. For the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max, Apple charged $499 and $549 for back glass replacement — frankly, outlandish prices that ran more expensive than the cost of an (admittedly much lower-end) new iPhone SE.

Here’s what the current pricing looks like for these repairs:

These newly reduced prices, first spotted by 9to5Mac, are likely due to a major design change made by Apple: on its newest phone models, the back glass can be removed and replaced independently of the rest of the phone. Earlier models more deeply integrated the back into the body of the device, making them much more complicated to fix. iFixit called earlier iPhone back glass repairs, “One of the most expensive and difficult repairs possible.”

Apple first made this change on the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus, and this year, the company announced that it did the same for the 15 Pro models, too. All around, it’s great news for anyone who drops their phone and is sick of looking at a spiderweb of cracks.

The repairs are cheaper, of course, if you pay for Apple’s insurance plan, which costs $199 on the new Pro and Pro Max for two years of coverage, then just $29 for the back glass repair. But you’ll need to buy that ahead of time.

You can watch iFixit’s breakdown of the new repair process in this video on last year’s iPhone 14:

Activision was briefed on Nintendo’s Switch 2 last year

Rumors of a Nintendo Switch 2 announcement have grown recently after reports of developer demos at Gamescom last month. Now we know that Activision was briefed on a next-generation Nintendo Switch last year, thanks to internal emails from the FTC v. Microsoft case.

Activision executives, including CEO Bobby Kotick, met with Nintendo executives in December 2022 to discuss a next-generation Switch. In an internal email chain, Chris Schnakenberg, head of Activision’s platform strategy and partner relations, prepared a summary of the “Switch NG” (Switch next-generation) inside a document labeled “NG Switch Draft.pdf.”

The document is heavily redacted, but it does reveal that performance of the next-generation Switch will be close to that of the PS4 and Xbox One:

Given the closer alignment to Gen8 platforms in terms of performance and our previous offerings on PS4 / Xbox One, it is reasonable to assume we could make something compelling for the NG Switch as well. It would be helpful to secure early access to development hardware prototypes and prove that out nice and early.

*Activision internal emails about the next-generation Nintendo Switch.*

The executive briefing summary and preparation materials are then sent on to Bobby Kotick ahead of the December 15th meeting with Nintendo CEO and president Shuntaro Furukawa. Kotick went on to testify in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing that he regretted not bringing Call of Duty to the Switch. This led to questioning from both the FTC’s lawyers and Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley about Call of Duty on the Switch. The FTC revealed that the agreement Microsoft signed with Nintendo also purports to bring a future Call of Duty game to a future Nintendo console if Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal is approved by regulators.

FTC: So even without Microsoft buying Activision, it’s likely that Activision would on its own make Call of Duty available for Nintendo’s future console, right?

Kotick: We would consider it once we had the specs, but we don’t have them at present. We missed out on the opportunity for this past generation of Switch, but we’d have to wait until the specifications. We don’t have any present plans to do so.

FTC: It’s likely that Activision on its own would make a Call of Duty game for Nintendo’s future generation console, right?

Kotick: I think once we get the detailed specifications. We missed out on this past generation of Switch, so I’d like to think that we’d be able to do that. We’d have to wait until the specifications, but wee don’t have any present plans to do so.

Nintendo has clearly been preparing key publishers like Activision for the next-generation Switch for months now. VGC reported in July that a new Nintendo Switch is being planned for a 2024 release. The new console is said to include an LCD screen instead of OLED and continue to support cartridge slots for playing physical releases of games.

Earlier this month Eurogamer reported that trusted developers got an early look at the Nintendo Switch 2 during Gamescom in August, including some tech demos of how games run on the unannounced system. There was reportedly a demo of an improved version of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that’s designed to run on the more advanced hardware inside the Nintendo Switch 2.

VGC then corroborated the claims and added that Nintendo also showcased Epic Games’ The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo running on the hardware Nintendo is targeting for its next-generation Switch. The demo reportedly used Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology with ray tracing enabled, suggesting the chip inside the next Switch could be capable of delivering the latest AAA games.

Apple’s AirPods Pro just got much better — no matter what port is on the case

The new AirPods Pro software update is available starting today. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Last week, as predicted, Apple announced that the second-generation AirPods Pro would start shipping with a USB-C charging case instead of one using the company’s Lightning port. But surprisingly, this refresh isn’t strictly about the case: Apple also added dust resistance (on top of the existing water resistance) to the USB-C AirPods Pro. And the company announced that these AirPods Pro — and not the model from last year — will support lossless audio when paired with the upcoming Vision Pro headset next year.

I’ve been using the refreshed second-gen AirPods Pro for a few days now, and while the dust resistance makes for some added peace of mind, I can’t imagine that anyone except for the staunchest USB-C loyalists will feel any temptation to upgrade. (It’s a shame that Apple isn’t selling the USB-C case by itself.) From a user’s perspective, everything else about these is identical to last year’s model.

That’s a good thing, because all second-generation AirPods Pro owners get to enjoy the new software features that are being introduced alongside iOS 17: Adaptive Audio, Personalized Volume, and Conversation Awareness. I’ve only just begun testing and getting familiar with all three, and I plan to update our AirPods Pro review in the near future after putting in more time with them. But I can already tell that these are some of the most significant new tricks that Apple has brought to the AirPods in quite some time. They’re not all original ideas; Sony and Samsung have been offering a “speak to chat” feature for several years now. But as usual, Apple’s implementation is second to none.

Adaptive Audio is meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it mode that blends active noise cancellation and transparency, canceling loud distractions where needed while also helping you stay present in your environment. In my experience so far, this feature rarely cancels my surroundings to the same degree as the full noise cancellation mode (I wouldn’t use it on a plane), but it reduces outside sound enough to not take away from my music — even at lower volumes. To my ears so far, it’s basically an even smarter version of the adaptive transparency that Apple debuted with last year’s AirPods Pro.

One of Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro pictured in a person’s hand with the ear tip detached. — *The USB-C AirPods Pro offer dust resistance, which is something the Lightning model lacks.*

If you’re regularly wearing your AirPods Pro on busy city streets, you should give Adaptive Audio a try. I think this is something Apple will continue to refine and tweak as it collects feedback from customers about which sounds they do and don’t want their earbuds to let through.

Conversation Awareness is designed to make it easier to chat with people for brief interactions without having to remove your earbuds. Start speaking, and your music volume will instantly get dialed way down while transparency mode activates to help you clearly hear whatever’s being said back to you. Apple says the feature reduces overall background noise while enhancing the voices of anyone you’re talking with. So far, I’ve been very impressed with Conversation Awareness. It’s smart enough to avoid being triggered by a cough or other non-speaking noises. But if you’re like me and have a habit of quietly singing along with your music, that’ll quickly become a problem if you keep this setting on.

Personalized Volume is the new trick that I’ve experimented with the least so far; I’m someone who just prefers manual control over how loud my audio is instead of letting software make random adjustments based on my past preferences. I’ll try to give it a chance more over the next few weeks and see how good Apple is at knowing what I want — or if I find myself reaching for the volume for a manual override.

Aside from those three main new features, Apple says the latest AirPods firmware also “adds convenience and control on calls with press to mute and unmute for AirPods (third generation), AirPods Pro (first and second generation), and AirPods Max, as well as significant improvements to the Automatic Switching experience for all available AirPods across Apple devices with the latest software updates.”

Automatic Switching has behaved erratically and proven unpredictable for me in the past — so much so that I normally disable the feature altogether on my devices. But some of my colleagues including deputy editor Dan Seifert have noticed that this update really does seem to improve things when switching from one Apple product to the next. Just keep in mind you’ll need to have installed iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma on their respective devices to experience the more reliable automatic switching. The concept has always been great, but nothing’s more frustrating than earbuds that have a mind of their own and switch to the wrong device at the worst possible time.

On the whole, the new AirPods Pro update is yet another example of Apple making the most of its ecosystem. I suspect we’ll see some of these features come to future version of the regular AirPods and the next AirPods Max headphones — presumably whenever each of them makes the transition to USB-C.

Sonos Move 2 review: a slam-dunk sequel

With stereo sound, twice the battery life, and line-in playback, the Move 2 improves upon the original at every turn — unless you need Google Assistant.

When you’re considering the sequel of any tech product, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that it’s “everything the original should’ve been.” And as I’ve been testing out the new $449 Sonos Move 2 speaker over the last several days, it’s been tempting to lean on that narrative. The Move 2 improves upon the company’s first portable speaker with better, broader sound — it now does stereo instead of just mono audio output — and huge strides in battery life. It’s also more versatile thanks to the inclusion of line in and the ability to reverse charge your phone and other devices via the speaker’s USB-C port. The only downside might be that all of those improvements come with a $50 price hike.

But in truth, the first Move was never going to be anything like this. It came before Sonos figured out how to seamlessly juggle Bluetooth audio with music played over its Wi-Fi-based whole-home audio platform; you had to choose one or the other via a button on the back. (Sonos solved that awkward dilemma with its much more compact Roam speaker.) At the time of the Move’s release, the entry-level Sonos One was also limited to mono playback. It wasn’t until the Era 100 that the company crammed two tweeters into a relatively small single speaker enclosure. Now, it’s running the same play with the Move 2, giving the product dedicated left and right channels instead of blending everything together. But time hasn’t benefited the Move 2 in all ways: amid an ongoing legal rift between Sonos and Google, this smart speaker ships without Google Assistant, which is present on the first-gen hardware.

Save for the tweaked controls on top, the Move 2’s looks haven’t changed much. It’s still the same shape. And it’s still fairly tall (9.53 inches) and weighty (6.61 pounds) to be considered very “portable” — but at least you’ve got the built-in handle for carrying it around. As with the first Move, this is really designed to be moved around different spots inside and outside your home, not so much to accompany you to the beach like a traditional Bluetooth speaker.

A photo of Sonos’ Move 2 portable speaker. — *The Move 2 sticks closely to the original’s size and overall design.*

Apart from the standard black and white options, Sonos is offering a green color of the Move 2, and I’ve really come to enjoy the olive shade while reviewing it. It’s not overly bold, but it’s stylish and not boring. In the box, you get a wireless charging base station, and unlike the first time around, this one can be detached from its wall plug instead of the whole thing being hardwired. As before, the Move 2 can alternatively be charged through its USB-C port.

Around back is the power button, Bluetooth pairing button, a physical switch for the Move 2’s built-in microphones, and the USB-C port. In keeping with the original, the Move 2 supports automatic Trueplay, which uses the microphones to analyze the speaker’s surroundings and optimize the sound whenever you move it to a new spot. Hands-free voice controls are possible with both Sonos Voice Control and Amazon Alexa. There are two ways to disable the mics: you can tap a speech bubble button on top of the speaker to deactivate voice assistants while keeping features like auto Trueplay enabled. If you want to shut off the microphones altogether, that’s what the rear switch is for.

But Google Assistant remains absent after first being dropped from the Era lineup. With JBL now offering a speaker that concurrently runs Alexa and Assistant, I’m really hoping that Sonos and Google can put their legal quarrels aside and figure out a way to bring Assistant back into the fold. For a certain set of customers, its absence makes the Move 2 a nonstarter.

Another aspect of the Move 2 that disappoints me (albeit to a lesser degree) is that it can’t serve as a speakerphone for calls. If the thing works with Bluetooth and has mics that I’m already speaking to on a semi-regular basis, why not go the rest of the way, Sonos? Many lower-priced Bluetooth speakers and even Apple’s Bluetooth-less HomePods include this feature, so it’s frustrating to see Sonos omit it yet again.

A photo of the Sonos Move 2 portable speaker. — *It’s available in a new olive green color alongside black and white.*

But there are several ways in which the company has favorably expanded the Move 2’s capabilities. Like the Eras, it supports line-in (if you purchase Sonos’ $19 USB-C adapter) so you can plug any audio source, such as a turntable, into the speaker and play that content across the rest of your Sonos system. Anything you’re listening to over Bluetooth can also be synchronized across your grouped speakers, which is a convenience that the first-generation Move lacked. Sonos continues to support Apple’s AirPlay 2, and you can directly control its speakers with music services including Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, and many more.

Another new trick is that the rear USB-C port can be used for charging external devices. It supplies 7.5 watts of power, which isn’t particularly fast, but it’s a good fallback if your phone battery is running low when you’re playing tunes at the park or beach far removed from any outlet.

Battery life on the Move 2 has more than doubled, with Sonos saying it can reach up to 24 hours of continuous playback. That big jump can be attributed to two things: there’s a larger 44Wh battery inside, and the company also made power-saving optimizations under the hood. The bigger battery is backward-compatible with the original Move, but dropping it into that speaker won’t magically get you 24 hours of listening time since the first-gen Move lacks some of the newer efficiency tweaks.

“Placing a Move 2 battery in an original Move will increase the Move’s battery life by about 25 percent, yielding around 13.5 hours of battery life,” Sonos spokesperson Olivia Singer told me by email. “Move 2 has a much more efficient system which contributes to the additional playback improvements.” Either way, I very much appreciate that the battery is easily replaceable to begin with; this ensures a long lifespan for the Move 2 compared to many consumer speakers where the battery will gradually hold less of a charge over time.

I’ve said more than a few times that the original Move became my favorite overall Sonos product because of its portability and potent sound. The Move 2’s upgrade to stereo isn’t a monumental change — a single-unit speaker is limited in how much separation it can produce — but you can clearly hear the difference. When playing a test file, I could easily distinguish the left and right tweeters within the Move 2. The main benefit of this stereo arrangement is that you won’t need to worry about details of a song being lost in the background as can happen when everything is downmixed to mono.

The overall sound signature is faithful to the original Move, meaning the Move 2 still has a tendency to underemphasize treble; I’m also currently testing the new similarly shaped Ultimate Ears Epicboom, and the UE speaker puts a bigger focus on those crisp upper frequencies while Sonos takes a more even-handed approach. If you want more high end, that’s easy to accomplish using EQ sliders in the Sonos app. Bass response was more than adequate for my needs, but I can see some people wanting more oomph from the Move 2 when really cranking the volume.

Among Sonos’ other speakers, I’d rank the Move 2 below the flagship Sonos Five and the Atmos-oriented Era 300. You’re basically getting a wireless Era 100 that can be taken anywhere, and that’s an enticing thought. Like any of the company’s speakers, you can stereo-pair two Move 2s if you want that wider, more immersive presentation that a single unit can’t quite pull off by itself. But as this is a device meant to be moved around, a stereo pair might not be as practical here as with Sonos’ other speakers.

On that point, the Move 2 is in no way as “portable” or easy to pack with luggage as a Roam, but it’s no trouble to carry around the house, bring out to the backyard, or throw into the trunk when traveling. If you plan to take it on the road constantly, Sonos sells an extremely overpriced $79 carrying case. The original Move came with a fabric carrying bag, but that’s gone this time, and Sonos told me it was only ever intended to keep the speaker protected during transit and shipping.

If you already own the original speaker, you’re no doubt wondering whether this one is worth an upgrade. In most cases, assuming you’re satisfied with what the Move has offered to this point, I’d say the answer is no. The original remains an excellent product — especially if you bought it on sale. But if you constantly find yourself exhausting the Move’s battery or already have a use in mind for the Move 2’s line-in feature, then stepping up to the new one starts to make more sense. The stereo sound will be more enjoyable and truer to your favorite music, but that alone isn’t enough to fork over $450.

As a complete package, the Move 2 is a slam-dunk sequel that will only get better when you factor in Sonos’ long-term software support. The company needed to draw on lessons learned from other products to get here, but anyone who loved the first Move will find even greater value in its successor. Hopefully Google Assistant will eventually make a comeback. But even if not, the Move 2 offers plenty of features and good enough sound to make it a unique standout in Sonos’ hardware lineup.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge

Amazon’s fall Prime Day sale is happening October 10th and 11th

It’s another sale to convince you to subscribe (or stay subscribed) to Prime. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

We knew it was coming, but now we can officially mark our calendars for the next Prime Day sale. Amazon has announced that its fall Prime Day is scheduled for October 10th and 11th. Last year’s fall sales event from around the same time was called the Prime Early Access Sale, and this time around, Amazon is calling it Prime Big Deal Days.

Setting aside the confusing fact that Amazon can’t settle on consistent naming, Prime Big Deal Days is designed to kick off the early holiday shopping season well ahead of Black Friday / Cyber Monday, and frankly, it sounds a whole lot like last year’s event.

Amazon says there will be big discounts and seasonal deals from brands like Sony, iRobot, Dyson, Jabra, and likely more. The entire event is exclusively for Prime subscribers ($14.99 per month / $139 annually), with some deals being invite-only, running from 3AM ET / 12AM PT on October 10th through October 11th.

If the exclusive status of this sale has you battling with a tiny bit of FOMO, keep in mind that when Amazon does these promotions, other retailers often run counter sales with the same or very similar discounts — and there are always price-matching policies at retailers like Best Buy. So you may not really need to be a Prime member to get a solid deal around that time, and keep an eye on our Verge Deals coverage, where we can help distill the worthwhile discounts from Amazon’s usual tidal wave of swill.

This is how Microsoft reacted to Sony’s PS5 announcement and price hike

The PlayStation 5 console on a wooden table — Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Microsoft was, as you’d expect, following Sony’s reveal of the PS5 very closely. Sony announced the full PS5 tech specs in March 2020, which prompted an Xbox executive to provide Xbox chief Phil Spencer and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with a summary of Sony’s console, internal emails from the FTC v. Microsoft case reveal. Then, more than two years later, Microsoft also reacted to Sony’s PS5 price increase.

The emails show Liz Hamren, former head of platform engineering and hardware at Xbox, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of Sony’s PS5 specs compared to Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. PlayStation hardware lead Mark Cerny detailed the PS5 specs just two days before Microsoft publicly announced its own Xbox Series X specs.

Hamren lists the variable GPU and CPU clock rates of the PS5, “versus us running at higher sustained rates.” Hamren admits Sony has a clear advantage on SSD performance with the PS5:

Cerny talked at length about the move to SSDs and the advantages for game developers and consumers. They have optimized for raw higher raw throughput (2x ours with slightly better hardware compression and associated performance improvements) as opposed to a more integrated streaming architecture enabled by Sampler Feedback Streaming.

Elsewhere, the 12 teraflops of performance versus Sony’s 10 teraflops was also briefly discussed. “[Cerny] emphasized that GPU teraflops and CU is not a good measurement of performance. We made this same point with Digital Foundry, but we do have a clear performance advantage (12 v 10),” wrote Hamren.

*The heavily redacted PS5 reaction email.*

The former Xbox exec also said that Cerny “spent what seemed like a disproportionate amount of time on audio innovations,” but the rest of this discussion is redacted from the email chain. Hamren also claims Sony’s expandable storage solution for the PS5 is “similar to us in reality due to minimum size and speed requirements.” But in reality, Sony’s approach means consumers can use any regular NVMe SSDs, instead of the proprietary and often more expensive Xbox drives that are only available from Seagate and Western Digital.

In internal emails, Microsoft was also quick to react to Sony’s PS5 price increase last year — despite not hiking Xbox prices immediately. Xbox CFO Tim Stuart emailed Xbox chief Spencer and Microsoft CFO Amy Hood early in the morning of Sony’s announcement in 2022, noting that the Xbox team had “anticipated this and are moving quickly toward a plan now that we’ve seen confirmation.”

There’s a discussion in the email chain, which is heavily redacted, but it appears that Spencer wants the company to remain gamer-focused with any price increases. Ami Silverman, who at the time was head of Microsoft’s consumer sales and marketing, responds with “all good points, let’s be gamer obsessed here as we have not gotten out of the woods... we know this could be our time to win fans vs lose being a follower.”

Silverman is clearly referring to Xbox sales being behind PlayStation ones and not wanting to lose any momentum by immediately following Sony’s price hike with Microsoft’s own increase in Xbox prices. Microsoft repeatedly mentioned losing the console wars and being in a distant third place during the FTC v. Microsoft hearing.

*Microsoft’s Xbox chief bought a PS5 last year.*

Spencer then explains he purchased a PS5 in August 2022. “Sony has been force bundling HZD for $50 [additional] for awhile now,” said Spencer. “I bought my PS5 2 weeks ago and only option was HZD bundle at $549.” HZD incorrectly refers to Horizon Zero Dawn here, as it was Horizon Forbidden West that Sony bundled with the PS5.

The back and forth might explain why Microsoft held off on an Xbox Series X price increase for nearly a year. Microsoft increased its Xbox Series X prices in most countries in August, apart from the US, Japan, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. The updated Xbox Series X console pricing largely matches the price hike Sony announced for the PS5 in 2022.

Microsoft is planning to stream PC cloud games, internal emails reveal

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft has been planning to stream PC games over the cloud, internal emails from the FTC v. Microsoft case show. Microsoft currently streams games through its Xbox Cloud Gaming service, but it’s limited to Xbox titles as the servers run specialized Xbox Series X chips. Microsoft has been working on leveraging its Azure servers to stream PC games over Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Xbox chief Phil Spencer, Kareem Choudhry, head of cloud gaming at Microsoft, and Sarah Bond, head of Xbox creator experience, in July 2021 after rumors emerged of Google turning Stadia into a white-label cloud gaming service for developers to run their games on.

*Satya Nadella’s email about Google Stadia.*

“Seems like they will have a leg up because their stuff is more generic Linux VMs + Network.... But I am assuming we will do the same for Game Pass PC – right?” asked Nadella. Spencer was quick to respond in just over an hour to offer up his thoughts on Stadia and confirm that Microsoft is working on an Azure solution for streaming native PC games from the cloud.

“Google has the ability to reuse their Linux cloud hardware and yes as we stream PC native games from an Azure GPU SKU we would have more re-use scenarios to recoup costs,” said Spencer, referring to the ability to offer a similar white-label cloud gaming service to developers and publishers.

“Phil is correct. Sarah [Bond] and I in partnership with Jason’s [Zander] team are driving a suitable Azure SKU... as part of a series that will serve the customer demand we see externally for IAAS and to run our xCloud PC streaming stack,” said Choudhry in the email chain. Part of the Azure SKU is redacted in the court document, but it’s clear Microsoft was working on streaming PC games over the cloud in July 2021.

*The full July 2021 email from Xbox chief Phil Spencer.*

Work on Xbox Cloud Gaming has slowed over the past year inside Microsoft, sources told me recently. Microsoft previously promised that Xbox Cloud Gaming would support your existing game library by the end of 2022, but that never happened. Microsoft also scrapped plans to launch a dedicated subscription version of Xbox Cloud Gaming.

But earlier this year, Microsoft dropped some more hints about PC games being available on Xbox Cloud Gaming. British mobile network EE signed a 10-year deal with Microsoft to bring Xbox PC games to EE customers, but EE doesn’t currently offer a streaming service. It’s possible EE is building out a service, but it’s more likely that Microsoft is closer with its Azure service to stream PC games. Microsoft has been openly testing mouse and keyboard support for Xbox Cloud Gaming — but only for Xbox console games so far.

Elsewhere in this specific internal email chain, Spencer also offers up his thoughts on Stadia in July 2021. “I honestly think Google is in the process of just trying to turn Stadia into a Google Cloud SKU and do away with their first party consumer service,” said Spencer. “Google is a massive and aggressive competitor but honestly I’ve been surprised by their lack of progress with Stadia. To date our #1 competitor here is really nVidia with GeForce Now. But we keep our eye on both Google and Amazon with Luna (also struggling).”

Nearly a year after Spencer’s emails, Google announced it would shut down its Stadia service in January 2023.

How to Tell if Your A.I. is Conscious

How to Tell if Your A.I. is Conscious In a new report, scientists offer a list of measurable qualities that might indicate the presence of some presence in a machine.

dimanche 17 septembre 2023

Tim Cook talks advertising on X, Vision Pro, and more in a new interview

A picture of Tim Cook on a multicolored background. — Laura Normand / The Verge

Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledges in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that there are “some things about” the platform formerly known as Twitter that he doesn’t like. Cook called the platform’s apparent anti-Semitism problem “abhorrent” but said, “Twitter is an important property; I like the concept that it’s there for discourse.” He didn’t say whether he believes Apple should be advertising on X, only that it’s something the company “constantly” asks itself.

Dickerson also pushed Cook on the Vision Pro’s release schedule, asking him about reports that the headset is facing manufacturing delays. Cook said emphatically that the Vision Pro remains on track, echoing his claims from the iPhone 15 “Wonderlust” event last week. He added that he watched all of the third season of Ted Lasso through the upcoming device.

The interview also touched on Apple’s environmental initiatives which include product claims like those around the new Apple Watch Series 9’s carbon friendliness.

Cook says he wants Apple to show it can be profitable to be carbon neutral in hopes other companies “rip it off.” Apple’s gross carbon emissions are, by its own reckoning, falling while the company as a whole continues to thrive.

Apple’s USB-C shift could bring back the MagSafe Duo and Battery Pack

A picture of the USB-C port on the bottom of an iPhone 15 — Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Mark Gurman writes in the subscriber edition of his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg from this morning that he expects Apple to finish its transition to USB-C by 2025. Gurman says that, in addition to other products, he expects the company will release USB-C versions of the now-discontinued MagSafe Battery Pack and the MagSafe Duo “eventually. But don’t hold your breath.”

By comparison, Apple took either a little over a month or about two years to totally move over to Lightning, depending on how you look at it.

The company retired the 30-pin port from its most important products when it launched the fourth-gen iPad a little over a month after the iPhone 5’s September 2012 debut. But it also kept the iPod Classic in its stable until 2014, when it finally discontinued the famous MP3 player’s older form factor.

Gurman also writes that a new iMac, which could launch next month, will bring USB-C “Magic” accessories like a mouse and keyboard. Then he expects the company will release new non-Pro and Max AirPods with USB-C. That leaves few first-party products Apple sells that still use Lightning, like the first-generation Apple Pencil and the iPhone SE.

The Home Assistant Green is here to make the most powerful smart home platform more accessible

A Home Assistant Green box surrounded by smart plugs, lights, sensors, and other gadgets. — *The Home Assistant Green can be the main command center for your smart home.* | Image: Home Assistant

Buy enough tech and you can’t escape the siren call of a smart home. Amazon practically throws Echo Dots at you. Google will sneak a Nest Mini in the box with almost anything you buy in its store. Good luck buying a new kitchen appliance that doesn’t beg to be connected to the internet. All of those come with platforms that are locked down and cloud-dependent, requiring you to bend to their corporate wishes to use them.

But for the last decade, Home Assistant has been the go-to software for privacy-focused nerds who want all the benefits that Apple, Google, and Amazon products provide with infinitely better flexibility and fewer security risks. And now, for the software’s 10th birthday, the people behind Home Assistant are introducing a new product in the hopes of extending it beyond the domain of nerds: the Home Assistant Green.

“Our ideal future, long term, is that we want for people to get a privacy-focused smart home is not only something rich people or nerds have access to,” Home Assistant founder and CEO of Nabu Casa Paulus Schoutsen told me in an interview.

Like a lot of people, I originally ended up finding Home Assistant because I had too many devices that did not play well or at all with each other: Hue lights, smart speakers, a NAS, an air conditioner, not to mention with random switches, motion presence sensors, and other misfit dongles I bought on AliExpress. And while bigger companies are adopting Thread in an attempt to make everything play nice together, even interoperability on that has been a mess. A general dissatisfaction with the state of things and a need for painful specificity is apparently a common pathway to Home Assistant.

But there have been many roadblocks. While the process of getting Home Assistant set up is not tremendously difficult for the kind of person that screws around with Raspberry Pis regularly, it is still not an experience for the faint of heart. It is, at this point, still an enthusiast piece of software, and setting things up is still a very intentional process by design. But there’s a huge segment of people that want to jump in without messing around with hardware. The Home Assistant Green is a convenient little package and an attempt to make the onboarding part easier for everyone.

A box for everyone

A view of the back of the Home Assistant Green showing its ports. — *The Green box is similar in size to Raspberry Pi computers and just needs power and Ethernet to get connected.*

Priced at $99 and planned as a permanent item alongside the Home Assistant Yellow, what makes the Home Assistant Green novel is not that it has powerful, high-end hardware, although the RK3566 quad-core CPU is fast enough to run the software without issue. What makes the device unique is the 32GB eMMC storage that’s preloaded with Home Assistant’s platform. It’s a more affordable and much easier entryway for people who want to dip their feet in the water without having to flash a memory card from another PC. The unit also comes with 4GB of LDDR4x RAM, a few USB 2.0 slots, an HDMI out, and a microSD slot for expansion.

The device is explicitly made to just run the Home Assistant Operating System — it’s not meant to be an all-purpose computer like a Raspberry Pi. It’s also not a piece of hardware you can just give to a tech-phobic relative yet but rather something for the person who is aware of Home Assistant but hasn’t wanted to deal with the hassle of getting it all running.

To get started, you just plug it in with the included power adapter, connect it to your router via ethernet (the Green does not have Wi-Fi “because the backbone of your smart home should use ethernet,” Schoutsen explains), and go through the setup process using your phone or another computer. The system will automatically detect devices on your network that can work with it. If you don’t have a Hue hub or existing way to connect to Zigbee devices (and experimentally Thread), you can add a Skyconnect dongle later. There are countless devices Home Assistant already works with, but for Home Assistant Green, simplicity is the point.

A shot of the Home Assistant Green in front of the Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant Blue. — *The Green joins the existing Home Assistant Yellow and Blue boxes.*

I received an early sample of the device for testing, which came in a nice frosted plastic case with a metal base and simple-to-follow instructions. This is a much nicer-looking setup than what I currently have, which is a bare Raspberry Pi 4 Model B just kind of chilling out on my bookshelf with cables jutting out at various angles.

After plugging everything in and visiting the address of the Green in your computer’s browser (https://ift.tt/wEia9Kk) or the Home Assistant mobile app, you are greeted with a quick installation screen asking if you want to start a new smart home or restore an old one. Since I was already running Home Assistant, I made sure to do a full backup of my instance and downloaded it to my PC before unplugging it for my router. From there, I just uploaded the backup and waited for like 20 minutes while it put everything in place. It currently doesn’t let you know when it is done, so you just kinda have to refresh your browser window, but sure enough, all my stuff was exactly where I had left it, all my painstaking UI tweaks and integrations were there, and my Skyconnect functioned. It all just worked.

If simplicity is the goal, the team achieved it.

A screenshot of the Home Assistant set up screen. — *Once it’s plugged into your router, you set up the Home Assistant by visiting its IP address in your browser.*

“Currently we’re aiming for the audience we call the ‘outgrower,’” Schoutsen explained via Discord. “It’s the one that uses Amazon / Apple etc., runs into the limitations and wants more. Searches the web and finds Home Assistant. At that point users already know they want a smart home and are looking for solutions to their problems, which Home Assistant generally can solve. We believe that with requiring a Raspberry Pi to get started or the relatively high price of the Yellow (you don’t know if your problems will get solved for $200), we were missing out on a good chunk of outgrowers. So with Green, we’re trying to offer a way for anyone to get started with Home Assistant.”

10 years of Home Assistant

Home Assistant, which celebrates its 10th birthday today, has grown a lot in the last 10 years. Like myself, Schoutsen got into the game after getting an expensive set of Philips Hue bulbs and hitting a wall with what they would let him do.

“I didn’t start Home Assistant because I wanted to write a smart home platform,” he explained. “Hue got released, and I bought it. I was at that point a visiting scholar at UCSD finishing my MSC thesis and was doing a bunch of Python stuff, so I wrote some code to talk to Hue.”

Since then, the project and the team have expanded to 28 people. Development of Home Assistant is funded by subscriptions to the company’s cloud service Home Assistant Cloud, as well as the sale of hardware like the Yellow, limited edition Blue, the SkyConnect dongle, and now the Green hub, allowing the company to develop without outside investors breathing down its neck. Outside of the core team itself, there are countless people adding blueprints and contributing to the code in their spare time. According to Schoutsen, Home Assistant is the second most active open-source project on GitHub.

*The newest Home Assistant logo, redesigned for its birthday.*

When I inquired about possibly extending the project beyond the home, Schoutsen said he was not interested. “Anytime you expand the focus, you need to add features that fit one use case well, the other not so well,” he explained. “I wouldn’t want to go after hotels or offices. When talking to companies, people always thought we would go there, as that’s where the money is but not the fun . And we have no investors to steer us away from our focus on the home.” Building into offices would also require very strict access control, Schoutsen said, which would slow down the process by which they add features. This is a more sober vision for a product than you normally see coming from founders, one that was further compounded when I inquired about where they see the Home Assistant relative to Google or Apple’s offering.

“I don’t see us competing directly with Google / Amazon / Apple anytime soon for the segment of users that need to be taught about a smart home because the thing is that anyone with a smartphone has access to Google Home and Apple Home. We don’t claim that those users have a smart home, though. Even having multiple connected devices doesn’t make a smart home. A home only qualifies as ‘smart’ when people start caring about having their connected devices with unified control or work together.”

Having used both HomeKit and Home Assistant, I am inclined to agree. Home Assistant’s main market will always be people who want an intentional smart home, something that does exactly what they ask it to, not an overly curated closed garden. And while there is still tons of work to make it more inviting to newbies (finding user-created blueprints should be easier, Schoutsen admits), the core of what makes it work remains the same: thousands of users getting devices for their home, saying “this doesn’t work like I want it to,” finding a workaround, and sharing their progress.

“It takes quite some effort to keep the machine moving,” he said.

While I am, by my nature, a person who loves to tinker, I also live my life with the understanding that most people are not like that. You can invite curiosity with Raspberry Pis, but a lot of people want something that gets them most of the way there already. So much IoT hardware is sold on being seductively easy and inviting at the cost of being closed, insecure, and invasive. Looking at the semi-opaque plastic case of the Home Assistant Green, I hope that Schoutsen is right. I hope more people get into running Home Assistant, into open-source software, and ultimately about having total control over a truly “smart” home.

Apple continues to use our own mortality as marketing

A screenshot showing an iPhone with a happy birthday message — *Apple touted the watch and iPhone’s lifesaving feature in a new ad.* | Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge

In recent years, Apple’s presentations have started to feature a new type of messaging: without an Apple Watch, you might be mauled by a bear, drown inside a sinking car, get stuck in a trash compactor, or even succumb to hypothermia after falling through an icy lake.

These disasters have always been averted by the presence of an Apple Watch. But this year, Apple’s messaging has started to change again: it’s not just the Apple Watch that can save you from possible death — but the iPhone, too.

At Apple’s iPhone 15 showcase, the company opened with an ad that weaved together the lifesaving potential of both the Apple Watch and the iPhone. The video depicted people celebrating their birthdays with friends and family, blowing out candles, and of course, getting “happy birthday” wishes on their iPhones.

As the ad introduced its main players, captions faded in at the bottom of the screen, such as one that said, “Apple Watch notified her of a low heart rate. Went to the hospital and received vital pacemaker surgery.” The next described a person using the iPhone’s Emergency SOS feature to get rescued while trapped in a blizzard, while another said a pregnant woman was rushed to the hospital for an emergency delivery after her Apple Watch detected a high heart rate.

These follow recent ads from Apple showing how an iPhone 14 might save you if your car rolls over or you’re stranded on top of a mountain.

The ads aren’t exactly wrong: there are dozens of real-life reports about people getting saved thanks to their iPhone or watch. After rolling out Emergency SOS to its Apple Watch in 2016, the company added fall detection, an electrocardiogram, and even a blood oxygen sensor. Last year, Apple touted a new Crash Detection feature for the Apple Watch and iPhone 14, which automatically alerts emergency services when it detects you’ve been in a car crash (or are just on some wild rollercoaster ride). And last year, Apple added a feature to iPhones that let users contact emergency services over satellite in case there’s no cellular connection.

These are undeniably great features, but there’s a reason Apple’s approach to advertising them has a tendency to make us uncomfortable: they sell us a product using concern for our own mortality — buy an Apple device or risk your life. They’re ads that play off fear rather than hope, and they stand in stark contrast to the ads that Apple used to release about its devices. A watch ad from two years ago shows people happily using their Apple Watch to improve their fitness; an early watch ad shows people using the device to connect with loved ones.

There might be a reason for this shifting approach. Features like fitness tracking and connectivity on your wrist no longer help the Apple Watch stand out among the competition.

Rivals like Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 6 and Google’s Pixel Watch have caught up to the Apple Watch in terms of health-tracking sensors, but they still haven’t added Crash Detection. The same goes for the iPhone. Apple might’ve only just added USB-C and periscope cameras, but Android phones still don’t have satellite connectivity (though it’s likely coming soon). Not only that but the addition of new safety features, including satellite connectivity, Roadside Assistance, and Crash Detection, helps differentiate Apple’s newer devices from its older ones, potentially giving users a good reason to upgrade.

On Tuesday, Apple revealed yet another reason why we might want to have our Apple devices with us at all times: Roadside Assistance. The service, which is compatible with the iPhone 14 and later, lets you contact AAA via satellite in case your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. While Apple doesn’t pose some catastrophic scenario in which you might need to use Roadside Assistance, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see one depicted in an ad sometime soon.

These safety features have the potential to be moneymakers for Apple, too. Apple’s services sector raked in record revenue last quarter thanks to its over 1 billion paid subscribers to Apple Music, TV Plus, iCloud Plus, and its bundled Apple One service. Soon, this list of services will include Apple’s satellite connectivity and Roadside Assistance features, as the company’s satellite service is only available for free to iPhone 14 users for two years, and it’s offering the same promotion for Roadside Assistance on the iPhone 15.

We still don’t know how much Apple will make users pay after that trial period, which will come to an end for iPhone 14 users next year. But Apple seems confident that, once it has a customer, they won’t put these devices down. “They’re with us all the time,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said when talking about the watch and iPhone. “And if you left either one at home, I bet you’d go back and get it.” When your life depends on it, who wouldn’t?

How to reinvent your phone without buying a new one

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 6, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, first of all, hi, hello, welcome, and second of all, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been watching the wacky sci-fi series Command Z from Steven Soderbergh, updating all my browsers to fix a scary security issue, reading and listening to Cory Doctorow rage against Big Tech, cackling at this video about the state of the Hyperloop, trying the Endel app as work music instead of my all-day movie soundtracks playlist, and slowly cleaning up my camera roll with some help from Swipewipe.

Also this week, I have for you a bunch of new Apple gear (shocking, I know), two books worth reading, an app for keeping your family on schedule, some fun AI, and Graham MacAree’s seriously minimalist homescreen.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you want to get every issue of Installer a day early in your email inbox you can subscribe here.)

The Drop

The iPhones 15. It’s been a few days since the Apple event, and I’m still not sure whether I’m excited about the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro. I like the titanium on the Pro, the camera, and that it’s lighter! And yay, USB-C! But that’s… kinda it. I think my 14 will do me just fine for another year, but if you do upgrade, know that I’ll be at least slightly jealous.
Apple’s USB-C EarPods. Now these, I am unequivocally into. I’ve spent years telling everyone to just buy a pair of EarPods and keep them in your bag — they’re $19, their sound quality is meh, but their mic quality is fantastic, and they’re super useful for phone calls / voice dictation / whenever your wireless headphones’ battery dies. The new ones will work with your phone, laptop, work computer, and basically everything else. I already bought two pairs.
A Million Miles Away. Amazon’s latest original movie is based on the story of José Hernández, a migrant farmworker who became a NASA flight engineer and went to the International Space Station. (He was also apparently the first person to tweet in Spanish from space, which is a very cool and very specific thing to track.) A feel-good movie for the weekend if that’s what you’re looking for.
The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts. Speaking of great space stories, Bloomberg reporter (and Verge alum!) Loren Grush wrote a great book about the six women who helped expand and change the American space program and the huge amount of sexism and pushback they received in the process. Grush was also on our Decoder podcast this week, too — it’s a good listen.
Elon Musk. Big week for tech books, apparently! I confess I have not yet cracked Walter Isaacson’s 688-page tome, but I’ve been devouring excerpts and reviews, many of which say the same thing: Elon Musk is a deeply complicated person, definitely a smart person, maybe not a very good person, and it’s definitely worth asking hard questions about our present and future.
Spotify’s Daylist. The most interesting question in the music business right now is this: how do you differentiate yourself when everybody has all the same content? The thing Spotify does best is ultra-personalized playlists, and Daylist is an ever-changing, AI-curated one that supposedly matches your mood all day and night. So far, mine have been deeply weird — I woke up the other day to “mountain music indie folk thursday morning,” which, sure — but I really dig the idea.
Stable Audio. I’m currently deep down the rabbit hole of AI music-making tools (for a Vergecast episode coming Monday!), and Stable Audio is one of the more impressive tools I’ve seen. It comes from Stability AI, which also makes the image-generating Stable Diffusion, and works basically the same way: describe the music you want to hear, and a few seconds later, it appears. Nothing I’ve made so far is going to top charts anytime soon, but it’s an incredibly fun thing to play with.
Monster Hunter Now. This is definitely not a full-on Monster Hunter game for your phone. And The Verge’s Andrew Webster found it a little lacking in depth and strategy. But what it is — a real-world game like Pokemon Go in which you fight monsters and collect gear while you wait in line at the grocery store — is still pretty compelling.
Artifact Links. A very important genre of app to me is the Puttering App, the one I can just open and scroll through for a few minutes at a time in the hopes of finding something fun / interesting / useful. Twitter was kinda that, Instagram and Reddit are still kinda that, and Artifact wants to be exactly that. The news-reading app now lets you post any URL on the web, and already, I’m finding tons of good stuff following a few smart people.

Pro tips

It’s the time of year when suddenly I find myself hating my phone. There are new phones coming out, new versions of Android and iOS to be had, cool new features and apps and just so much new stuff to play with! But this year, rather than buy a new phone to satiate that urge, I’m going to try giving my phone a makeover.

For advice, I turned to Isaac Mosna, who you might know better as Canoopsy on YouTube and around the web. He makes great tech videos but also creates wallpapers, icons, and more cool phone stuff. I asked him to share a few tips on how to better customize your phone so that mine might look as cool as his does:

Start fresh. “Take everything off your homescreen, put it in the app library, and then start dragging things over. It’s a great way to start fresh without really starting fresh if you’ve had the same phone for a while.”
Have just one way to do things. “Try going with a very minimal setup. Don’t have your camera in the dock since you can use the Control Center. Android and iOS both can make your phone simpler, easier to use, and more enjoyable. No one likes to see 1,000 things when they turn their phone on.”
Keep it changing. “Find ways to cycle through different wallpapers, like by setting an album instead of a single picture. Whether it’s something that changes every hour or every time you turn your phone on, it’s a great way to have a new phone every time.”
Embrace space. “On Android, it’s really easy to leave empty spots on the screen. On iOS, you can use things like Clear Spaces to have blank spaces or put everything on one side of your phone where your hand naturally rests.”
Hide your widgets. “With Clear Spaces, you can also make widget stacks where you have the blank widget on your homescreen and then swipe to something else — it’s like a hidden drawer of widgets. It’s pretty fun.”
One homescreen. One. “I can’t think with multiple homescreens. Either put everything else in the app library or drawer or categorize things into folders on your homescreen.”

Screen share

Last week, when I asked Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to share her homescreen, it sparked a whole discussion in the Verge newsroom about how many apps we all had. Most people, not surprisingly, had a lot!

Graham MacAree, a senior storytelling engineer here at The Verge, did not have a lot. He had 22. And even that, he decided, was too many. So I figured, in a time of new phones and new software and general technological maximalism, I’d see what life was like alllllll the way on the other side.

Here’s Graham’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

An iPhone homescreen showing just 16 apps — *Now that is a truly minimalist homescreen.*

The Phone: An iPhone 13 Pro. This is the first phone I’ve owned that I actually enjoy using ... ish.

The Apps: Everyone’s on WhatsApp in England, so I only really need one chat app. Gmail, Messages, and Authenticator are all fairly standard. I’ve found Citymapper to be better than Maps at helping me navigate London’s various transit outages, and I reluctantly use Uber when said outages inconvenience me too much.

Monzo is a British bank, and it’s on my phone because it’s app-only. My Roomba helps keep my house “free” of dog hair, and then Pokémon Home lets me continue my extremely low-key quest for a living Pokédex. MLB is for when the Seattle Mariners are playing while I’m out and about (live sports are basically the only things I’ll watch on a phone screen). Spotify gets used a lot, as does Chrome. Having quit Twitter and Facebook, I don’t have any social media apps at the moment, but I’m sometimes briefly tempted by Bluesky.

In general, I’m exactly the right age to have learned to do everything on my computer instead of my phone, and I’ve never updated my habits in light of the fact that I live in the 21st century. If I use something more than once a month or so, it lives on the homescreen.

The Wallpaper: Normally, this would be a photograph of my children, but I’d rather they not be online. I temporarily switched my wallpaper to a cool picture of Sharpless 132, which is about 10,000 light-years away. It’s basically an enormous gas cloud, which hides some incredibly massive/bright stars. Also, my dad took the photograph, so that’s neat, too.

As always, I also asked Graham to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Dancing! I have begun choreography for an Argentine Tango recital in November, so that’ll occupy quite a lot of my life over the near future. I’ve been dancing seriously for almost three years now and do performances about twice a year. It’s nerve-wracking but fun.
Painting videos. I’m playing around with the idea of getting back into Warhammer 40,000 because painting tiny people / monsters / tanks seems potentially relaxing. Right now, that idea manifests itself as watching other people paint tiny people / monsters / tanks, which is definitely relaxing. Will I ever progress to doing this myself? Who can say.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.

“A lot of my life, online and offline, is captured on Futureland — a journal / routine organizer / tracker hybrid that can be a little hard to explain but feels wonderfully organic in practice. One of the few quiet, satisfying places on the internet, and the only app on my phone that consistently gets me looking up from the screen and moving toward what I want to be doing.” — Min-Taec

“Currently addicted to playing Finity on Apple Arcade.” — Scott

“Calculator apps are boring and haven’t seen any innovation, until Numbr! It’s a notepad mixed with a calculator, and I’ve used it exclusively as my calculator for several years. It’s primarily a web app, but there’s also a handy Chrome extension, and all the syntax is explained on their Github.” — Ross

“I have been OBSESSED with Usagi Shima, a little bunny-collecting chill island game with vibes reminiscent of Neko Atsume and a bit of Animal Crossing relaxation.” — Evelyn

“Subscribed to Tessie. Allows my Apple Watch to be used as a Tesla key similar to my phone. Not sure how to feel about it, but it’s been super convenient!” — Chris

“My wife found the app FamilyWall — it is our common app for recipes, meal planning, contacts, budgets, and bucket lists. What I like is that the app connects things: when I enter a recipe, I can plan the meal for a specific day and add the ingredients to the grocery list. I can also connect the calendar with other Outlook calendars so I have private and work calendars in sight. Additionally, we can share notes and pictures and make individual timetables.” — Chris

“One Sec. This app primarily allows you to set up a delay (referred to as an intervention) when opening specified apps. As an example, I have a 20-second breathing exercise intervention setup when opening up social media apps on my phone, and it won’t let me access the app until that exercise is complete. I have found it very useful in getting my attention when I mindlessly open up social apps during the day or during small waiting periods like waiting for a coffee. It’s a subscription app for iOS and Android (Android is a beta), but it’s pretty cheap, and they have a one-time license if you don’t want the constant subscription.” – Andrew

“The new Camera app from Blackmagic, plus their cloud integration so that multiple cameras can all upload to Davinci at the same time.” — Iestyn

“Instead of relying on Rotten Tomatoes for questionable movie ratings, use Letterboxd. As a bonus, some of the reviews for the really bad movies are super fun. The Flash, with 2.7 stars out of 5: ‘the cgi in this movie makes superman’s mustache removal look like a work of art.’ Honesty and humor. Chefs kiss. ” — Brandon

“Flight Radar 24 is wonderful. Want to know where that jet overhead is headed? Pop open the app and turn on AR for a live overlay. I also have all emergency alerts as silent notifications. Occasionally, you get military jets or big flight diversions. This week, I found out the SIN-JFK longest flight in the world goes over my parent’s house.” — Sean

“I’m actively listening and changing my ringtone and notification sounds with the ones introduced by iOS 17. They’re so good!” — Gabriel

Signing off

I am obsessed with scooters. Scooters you buy, scooters you rent, scooters you pay for by the minute and then throw into the river when you’re done — I love them all. And I can’t remember the last time I fell for a scooter like the new Honda Motocompacto. It is utterly impractical in every way — only 12 miles of range, weighs over 40 pounds, looks like a giant floppy disk on two wheels, costs $995 — but I want to toodle around my neighborhood on this thing in a way you would not believe. More weird scooter design, please!

See you next week!