Valve suddenly releases SteamVR 2.0 in beta — as headset rumors swirl
Image: Valve
Valve built up to virtual reality for a very long time — and never stopped, though it seemed to slow its roll while nurturing the Steam Deck gaming handheld. But for weeks now, Valve sleuth Brad Lynch has been tracking changes to SteamVR that suggest the wheels are turning again — and today, ahead of a rumored standalone VR headset reveal, I’ve received word from Valve that the next version of SteamVR is basically here.
If you care about Valve’s mystery announcements, you’re probably hanging on every word, so I’m not going to leave any of them out. Here’s the whole email, as bolded by Valve:
Greetings! Today we are shipping SteamVR 2.0 in beta. We see this is as the first major step toward our goal of bringing all of what’s new on the Steam platform into VR.
Users who opt into this beta will notice a new UI with lots of added features:
·Most of the current features of Steam and Steam Deck are now part of SteamVR
·Updated keyboard with support for new languages, emojis, and themes
·Integration of Steam Chat and Voice Chat
· Improved Store that puts new and popular VR releases front and center
This is just the beginning of SteamVR 2.0’s journey, and we’ll have more to share in the coming weeks and months as we collect feedback and work on the features mentioned above. This beta will give us a chance to iron out the kinks as more and more people try it out. As with all betas, this means SteamVR 2.0 will get better and better as we prepare it for its eventual full public launch.
To try out the new UI, opt in to both SteamVR Beta and the Steam Client Beta.
Valve founder and president Gabe Newell said way back in 2017 that the company was working on three “full games” for VR, and released the first, Half-Life: Alyx, in March 2020, nine months after Valve shipped its first bespoke headset, the Valve Index. Both were widely praised, but neither has seen a followup yet.
Valve has reportedly been working on a standalone VR headset codenamed Deckard, though other possible product names have also appeared in the company’s code. Some sort of Valve device has been spotted passing through South Korea’s National Radio Research Agency, which could suggest a release in the near future.
Steam VR Client had another ridiculously large update with a ton of new VR focused implementations. Gonna be a wild night on my Twitter!
Lets start off with these! Which include battery information for.. some sort of Standalone HMD thing pic.twitter.com/tSvwKSSJxp
Hollywood writers reach tentative deal to end the strike
The Writers Guild of America has been on strike since May 2nd. | Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images
The Hollywood writers strike may be close to an end. After a more than 140-day work stoppage, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced on Sunday night that it reached a “tentative agreement” with major Hollywood studios on pay, working conditions, and more.
“We can say, with great pride, that this is an exceptional deal — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the WGA negotiating committee wrote in an email to members.
WGA leadership said details of the agreement couldn’t be shared until its language is finalized; after that, writers will have to vote to approve the deal. The guild said its leaders may end the strike as soon as Tuesday, once the contract is finalized and sent to members for a vote. The guild is suspending picketing immediately.
We did it. We have a tentative deal.
Over the coming days, we'll discuss and vote on it, together, as a democratic union. But today, I want to thank every single WGA member, and every fellow worker who stood with us in solidarity. You made this possible. Thank you. #WGAStrongpic.twitter.com/KfzVKoPMPz
The agreement was finalized over several nights of bargaining between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers through the middle and end of the past week.
The WGA first called the strike on May 2nd after negotiations between writers and the AMPTP fell through. While the WGA called for contracts to include better streaming residuals, the preservation of the writers room, and protections surrounding the use of AI, the AMPTP pushed back.
Writers may soon be back to work, but without actors, Hollywood productions will likely remain at a standstill. The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the union that represents around 160,000 members of the entertainment industry, has been on strike since July.
The strikes have forced studios like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery to make adjustments to their financial projections. In July, Netflix estimated it would have an extra $1.5 billion in free cash flow, while Warner Bros. Discovery lowered its earnings expectations by about $300 to $500 million for 2023.
(Disclosure: The Verge’s editorial staff is also unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.)
Resident Evil Village’s iPhone port might launch a day before Halloween
The tall lady from Resident Evil Village comes to iPhones soon. | Image: Capcom
Capcom quietly revealed an October 30th release date for Resident Evil Village on a page for the iOS and iPadOS versions of Village and the Resident Evil 4 remake. Resident Evil 4 remains listed as “available 2023.” Capcom doesn’t list any prices, but for reference, the macOS version of the game is $29.99 on the Apple App Store. Yesterday, Gematsu reported that Capcom had announced the same release date for the port in Japan.
Capcom hasn’t formally announced the release date for the US version of Village outside of the page linked above. We’ve reached out to the company to confirm the release date is as listed on its site.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
Resident Evil Village for iOS and iPadOS appears to have a release date.
In a peek at Village running on the iPhone 15 Pro last week, the game appeared to legitimately run on par with what you’d expect from high-end dedicated portable gaming hardware like the Steam Deck. The games will be compatible with iPads powered by M1 and M2 chips. However, it will only run on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, so you’ll need to upgrade to Apple’s titanium-edged phone if you want to see the scary, tall vampire lady running natively on your iPhone.
Capcom’s latest entry in its ongoing series of survival horror games was a big part of Apple’s iPhone 15 event, along with the Resident Evil 4 remake, Death Stranding, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and The Division Resurgence. Apple used the games to show off the capability of the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max phones’ new 6-core GPU.
Meta’s AI chatbot plan includes a ‘sassy robot’ for younger users
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Meta is preparing to announce a generative AI chatbot, called “Gen AI Personas” internally, aimed at younger users, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly set to launch during the company’s Meta Connect event that starts Wednesday, they would come in multiple “personas” geared towards engaging young users with more colorful behavior, following ChatGPT’s rise over the last year as one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Similar, but more generally targeted, Meta chatbot personas have already been reportedly tested on Instagram.
According to internal chats the Journal viewed, the company has tested a “sassy robot” persona inspired by Bender from Futurama and an overly curious “Alvin the Alien” that one employee worried could imply the bot was made to gather personal information. A particularly problematic chatbot reportedly told a Meta employee, “When you’re with a girl, it’s all about the experience. And if she’s barfing on you, that’s definitely an experience.”
Meta means to create “dozens” of these bots, writes the Journal, and has even done some work on a chatbot creation tool to enable celebrities to make their own chatbots for their fans. There may also be some more geared towards productivity, able to help with “coding and other tasks,” according to the article.
Meta’s other AI work lately includes reportedly developing a more powerful large language model to rival OpenAI’s latest work with GPT-4, the model that underpins ChatGPT and Bing, as well as an AI model built just to help give legs to its Horizon Worlds avatars. During Meta Connect, the company will also show off more about its metaverse project, and new Quest 3 headset.
The Journal quotes former Snap and Instagram executive Meghana Dhar as saying chatbots don’t “scream Gen Z to me, but definitely Gen Z is much more comfortable” with newer technology. She added that Meta’s goal with the chatbots, as always with new products, is to keep them engaged for longer so it has “increased opportunity to serve them ads.”
NASA collected a sample from an asteroid for the first time — here’s why it matters
Victoria Thiem, system safety engineer from Lockheed Martin, checks the temperature of the actual size OSIRIS-REx’s return capsule sample during the recovery rehearsal at Lockheed Martin, Waterton Canyon campus in Littleton, Colorado on Tuesday, June 27, 2023. | Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post
The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched in 2016, has collected as much as several hundred grams of asteroid material, which could help scientists understand the earliest stages of the solar system.
NASA completed its first-ever sample return mission from an asteroid today, with a science capsule containing material from an asteroid landing after having traveled on a 1.2 billion-mile journey from the asteroid Bennu. The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morning, entering the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph.
The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched in 2016, has collected as much as several hundred grams of asteroid material, which could help scientists understand the earliest stages of the solar system.
“NASA invests in small body missions like OSIRIS-REx to investigate the rich population of asteroids in our solar system that can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” said Melissa Morris, OSIRIS-REx program executive, in a mission overview briefing. “It’s our own origin story.”
The science capsule was slowed by parachutes and landed in the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52 AM ET, a landing area chosen as it is the largest restricted airspace in the United States and has been used for previous NASA sample return missions like Genesis and Stardust.
The landing area is 36 miles by 8.5 miles, and the entire mission has required a very high level of precision — particularly for the spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid and collect its sample in 2020.
“The really precise navigation required to orbit Bennu and to touch down and collect our sample, we were under a meter away from our target,” Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager, said in a pre-landing briefing. “So that illustrates what kind of navigation precision we’ve had throughout this mission.”
Recovery teams collected the sample from the Utah desert, with a helicopter carrying the sample taking off at 12:15 PM ET. The capsule will be taken to a temporary clean room for first disassembly, removing some of the larger parts such as the backshell. It will then undergo a process called a nitrogen purge in which nitrogen is pumped into the canister to protect the sample. This prevents any of Earth’s atmosphere from entering it as it is shipped to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where the canister will be opened for the first time so the sample can be analyzed.
Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images
Why do we need an asteroid sample?
“We’re really interested in trace organic molecular chemistry,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, told The Verge. “We really want to understand — the things that are used in biology today, like amino acids that make proteins and nucleic acids that make up our genes — were they formed in ancient asteroid bodies and delivered to the Earth from outer space?”
If you’re not familiar with models of the formation of the solar system, that idea might sound outlandish, bordering on fantastical. But it’s actually a fairly well-supported and widely accepted theory for how some of the key elements for life came to be on Earth.
It’s important to be clear that the theory is not that life itself arose elsewhere and was delivered to Earth, but rather that the basic building blocks of life — often referred to as organic compounds — could have arrived here billions of years ago carried by asteroids.
That’s been a theory for decades; but to test it out, scientists need access to asteroidal material. Going to visit an asteroid and using instruments on a spacecraft to study it is a good start, but to do the kind of detailed analysis scientists want requires a much bigger laboratory, equipped with instruments like a mile-wide type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron which would be impossible to fit onto a spacecraft.
Another option is to study meteorites, which are pieces of matter (including from asteroids) that come from space and fall to Earth’s surface. That’s how most of this research has been performed historically, using these tiny fragments as samples.
But there are two problems with this approach. Firstly, when a meteorite falls, it doesn’t have the context of where in the solar system it came from. Researchers can’t know its origin, or see what other bodies it was close to, which can give important clues to the interpretation of any data. And secondly, by the time a meteorite has passed through Earth’s atmosphere and landed, it may have picked up matter along the way and been contaminated by the local environment.
When scientists are looking for these trace organic compounds, they need to know that anything they find comes from space and wasn’t picked up here on Earth. So to do that, they need an asteroid sample that is as pristine as possible. That’s where OSIRIS-REx comes in.
A worldwide effort
The OSIRIS-REx mission is the first time that NASA has brought back a sample from an asteroid, but it is following in the footsteps of the Japanese space agency JAXA, which collected two asteroid samples in its historic Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions. Though the first Hayabusa mission gathered just a tiny amount of material, the second mission managed to return around five grams of material from asteroid Ryugu in 2020.
OSIRIS-REx is returning much more material from asteroid Bennu, at around 250 grams, which means that more science can be done — particularly when looking for those small amounts of trace materials. But researchers see the two missions as complementary, rather than competitive.
“Not all asteroids are the same,” said Lauretta, who is also a member of the Hayabusa 2 team. Both Ryugu and Bennu have a similar spinning-top-like shape, but they look very different. Ryugu is larger and more red in color, while Bennu is smaller and more blue. Scientists still aren’t sure what that difference in color means, but being able to analyze and compare the samples on Earth should help understand both how the asteroids are similar and how they differ.
“We look at this as not two sample analysis programs, but one big sample analysis program,” Lauretta said, “because it’s a worldwide effort.”
A window into the early solar system
When scientists want to understand how the Earth formed, they need to look beyond our planet and out into the solar system. Star systems form from enormous clouds of gas that collapse into a star at the center, spinning a disk of material around it.
That’s clear from looking at other star systems, but there’s also evidence from our own solar system: the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction and in a single plane, supporting the idea they formed from a single disk of material.Some of that material coalesced into planets, and some was swept into the earliest asteroids, a number of which still exist today.
In fact, the estimates we have for the age of the solar system come from dating grains within meteorites that have fallen to Earth. That’s because Earth has factors like erosion and plate tectonics which recycle rocks and wipe away the earliest history of the planet, meaning the oldest rocks we have ever found here are around 4 billion years old. The material from asteroids, however, can be even older.
“The asteroids date from about 500 million years earlier in time than the oldest rocks on Earth. So as a geologist, I want to go back all the way to the beginning,” Lauretta said. “And the fun thing is, when you’re looking at asteroids you go literally to the very beginning of the solar system.”
Bennu, the asteroid from which OSIRIS-REx collected its sample, is thought to be made up of material that is around 4.5 billion years old, making it a potential time capsule from the earliest stages of the solar system. But researchers can’t know its age for sure until a detailed analysis has been performed.
Image: NASA
A new asteroid target
Now that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has dropped off the capsule containing the sample, its initial job is over. But the spacecraft is still in space, and even though it can’t collect another sample it does still have power and a propulsion system, and all its science instruments still operating.
So rather than waste this craft, it will become OSIRIS-APEX and go on to study a new target, the asteroid Apophis. By a fortunate chance of orbital dynamics, it will be able to rendezvous with this asteroid — one of the most famous in the solar system, because it will come close to Earth in the next few years — and study it.
“In 2029, in April, Apophis is gonna fly within 30,000 kilometers of the surface of the Earth, which is about the altitude that our weather satellites orbit at,” Lauretta said. “It’s the biggest, closest flyby of an asteroid for a thousand years,” and it may even be visible to the naked eye from some locations on Earth.
OSIRIS-APEX will be able to follow the asteroid’s path around Earth and meet it, to perform more science observations.
As for the sample from asteroid Bennu, that will be taken to a special facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where work can begin to understand the chemistry of this precious commodity.
Getting the sample back to Earth is just the beginning of the science research, and the team is anxiously awaiting this culmination of all their efforts.
“I get to be one of the very first people on earth to see the capsule, as it is in position out there in the desert. It’s going to be quite an emotional moment for me,” Lauretta said. “We’ve been building and testing and designing this thing for over 12 years. So it’s the end of a very, very long journey, and the beginning of the next chapter.”
Watch as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brings asteroid samples back to Earth
NASA
Seven years after the OSIRIS-REx mission launched, a capsule containing rocks captured from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 will land in Utah on Sunday morning.
Today marks the final step of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which launched in September 2016, as a small capsule containing a sample of the asteroid Bennu descends through the Earth’s atmosphere, landing in the Utah desert for NASA to collect and analyze. This is similar to the method used to collect particles from a comet with the Stardust mission that dropped off a sample in Utah in 2006.
The audacious mission flew the spacecraft to a small, near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and attempted something that hadn’t been done before by orbiting the asteroid, getting close enough to scrape up some material and collect it, and then returning to Earth with the sample. NASA TV will stream coverage of the sample return on its YouTube channel starting at 10AM ET today.
After OSIRIS-REx launched, it employed a slingshot maneuver to sweep around the earth and use its gravity to fling it towards Bennu — you know, like the time The Enterprise whipped around the sun to go back in time and save the whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. OSIRIS-REx collected even more than the 60 grams of Bennu material NASA was aiming for when it made the scoop in 2020 before starting its trip back to Earth in 2021.
Image: NASA
An animation of still images showing the OSIRIS-REx grabbing its rock sample from Bennu.
Follow along here for all of the updates about the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 7, 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.)
I also have for you a new super-slick Windows laptop, two crypto-related podcasts you should hear, a reason to try Bard again, OpenAI’s new image-making tool, a smart home platform to try, and the Tesla of baby monitors.
Oh, and fair warning: this week’s pretty Apple-heavy. But it’s New Apple Software Upgrade Week, so there’s just a lot to go through. We’ll do the same for Android 14 in a couple of weeks, too, I suspect, so send me all your favorite Android stuff! And Meta Connect is next week, so maybe we’ll get weird with some VR stuff, too. Anyway, let’s get to it.
(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
Orion. A new iPad app that lets you use it like an HDMI display, as long as you have a capture card. (They’re cheap.) That means your iPad can be an external screen for your game system, your Raspberry Pi, basically anything you could plug into a TV or monitor. And for $5, you get a bunch of fun filters and adjustment tools. (A lot of people recommended this one — thanks to all who sent it in!)
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2. This is the Windows MacBook Pro, and I mean that in the best way. The first-gen Laptop Studio is my daily driver Windows PC, and I love the look, the funky screen, everything about it except the processor and the battery life. Microsoft seems to have fixed both and then some. I’m psyched about this thing, even if it does start at $1,999.
“Based on a true story.” The movie Dumb Money sounds like it’s not particularly accurate but still a lot of fun, but I’m still thinking about this Planet Money episode that dove into the story of how the GameStop saga turned into a bidding war and a race in Hollywood to make the first movie about the diamond-hands crowd. Hollywood’s a weird place, y’all. (Side note: last week’s episode, about theAxie Infinityhack, was also really good.)
Amazon’s Echo Hub. One $179.99 screen, which you can mount on your wall or leave in a dock on a table, that controls all your smart home stuff. (At least all your Echo-capable stuff, anyway, which is a pretty big list.) I’m in on the smart home but out on controlling everything with voice commands, and this looks like a solid all-in-one controller.
Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League. I’m a sucker for any kind of fantasy league, so, of course, I’m all in on this one from our friends at Vulture: you pick a bunch of 2023 movies, and get points for how they perform in theaters and at awards shows. I’m taking The Killer and Paw Patrol all the way to the top. Signups close this week, so get in now!
DALL-E 3. OpenAI’s image-generation tool seems to have gotten some big upgrades, particularly in its ability to integrate with ChatGPT to improve the prompts you give the tool. (It’s just chatbots on chatbots, y’all.) Right now, your best bet to get DALL-E 3 is probably through Bing Chat, where it’s rolling out slowly — OpenAI says it won’t be in ChatGPT until next month.
YouTube Create. It’s deeply bizarre that it took YouTube this long to make an actually useful, mobile-first video tool for creators. But hey: it’s in the Play Store now. In beta. And maybe not accessible to everyone. But if you’re a Shorts-making fiend, it’s still progress.
Tally 2.0. Google Forms is the worst, and everyone should stop using it. The new version of Tally is much nicer: it looks a lot (like, a lot) like Notion, and it’s pretty easy both to build and share a form for collecting really any kind of data from your friends or co-workers or whoever. And most of it’s free to use.
Google Bard Extensions. Google’s AI chatbot got a big upgrade this week: you can now integrate it with Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and other Google products. Bard’s still dumb in a lot of ways, but I’ve found it surprisingly useful for things like “show me fun videos about the Roman Empire” and “what was the confirmation number from my last Delta flight?”
Whisper Notes. I’ve become sort of obsessed with voice-notes apps, mostly because I spend a lot of time walking around pushing a stroller and need a way to write down all the things I’ll otherwise forget to do. Whisper, OpenAI’s speech-to-text system, is really good, and this is one of the better-looking apps I’ve seen built with it. No mobile app yet, but that’s apparently coming.
Deep dive
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I’ve decided that interactive widgets are the best thing to happen to the iPhone and iPad since, like, cameras. I don’t know. Interactive widgets are awesome! And with iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 coming out this week, a huge number of Apple developers have released new or upgraded apps with really fun widgets you can interact with right from your homescreen.
There are lots of good new apps to try — everybody’s favorite Shortcuts guru Matthew Cassinelli rounded up 160, which should get you started — but I’ve been thinking more about the different ways you might approach becoming a Widget Person. Because if you’re not already living the widget life? It’s time. Here are a few ways to get started:
Playback widgets. This is the single best and most universally useful thing you can do: put a widget for your favorite music or podcasts app — many have already updated, Spotify infuriatingly has not, and I think Overcast’s widget is the best so far — and you can play or pause your stuff from your homescreen. Easy win.
Checkbox widgets. Do you use a to-do list app? Use its widget to see and check off your tasks throughout the day! (I really like the Things widget, and the built-in Reminders app has a good one, too.)
Timer widgets. If you’re the Pomodoro-tracker type, you can use Focus to quickly start and stop your work sessions. You can use Timelines to track your time. Time’s Up is pretty good for just setting and stopping timers of any kind for any reason.
Counter widgets. Interactive widgets make it so much easier to track just about anything. You can use a habit-tracking app like Gentler Streak or Streaks (which I am finally actually using every day), a single-purpose app like WaterMinder, or just a number counter like Tally to keep track of just about anything.
Weather widgets. Now, instead of just seeing the temperature or one graph or whatever, apps like NOAA Weather Radar RainViewer (that name!) let you tap to switch from temperature to precipitation and more, all on the homescreen.
I could keep going, but that’s a pretty good start. Think about it like this: anything you do on your phone that is just “tap the app, tap a thing, close the app” can and should be replaced by an interactive widget. And at least for me, that’s a lot more of my phone usage than I expected.
Oh, and a bonus: you can and absolutely should make your own widgets! Widgetsmith is a great app that just got a bunch of new interactive features — you can use it to make calendar widgets, weather widgets, photo album widgets, activity widgets, music widgets — practically anything you can think of. I also like Launcher, which lets you make widgets to launch apps, call someone, go to a webpage, and lots more — or almost anything else. I’m a heavy user of both, and my phone is slowly becoming widgets all the way down.
Have you found an iOS 17 widget you love? Tell me about it! I’ll feature some more next week.
Ben Springwater is the CEO of Matter, my favorite read-later app. (Matter just launched a feature called “Readable Podcasts,” which makes it easy to transcribe and take notes on what you’re listening to — it’s really cool.) He has also just been in the product-making game for a long time, so he’s a fun guy to talk to about what makes for great software.
I asked Ben to share his homescreen, plus a few things he’s into right now. I was sort of hoping it would just be a hundred different beta versions of Matter, and I was, I’m sorry to say, mostly disappointed. But Ben’s homescreen also turned me on to a bunch of cool new apps! So I’ll take it.
Here’s what’s on Ben’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 14 Pro Max
The wallpaper: I’m a proud new dad!
The apps: Safari, Perplexity.ai (better than Google for many queries), Calendar, Spotify, Untitled (beautiful, minimalist podcast app by @rishmody, still in beta), Endel, Audible, Slack, Superhuman, TestFlight (I look forward to a new TestFlight Matter build every day at about 6PM), Figma, Notes, Reflect (outstanding new notes app that strikes a nice balance between simplicity and power), Artifact, Nanit (“Tesla of baby monitors” is how I’ve heard it described), WhatsApp, Find My, Retro (it’s the Goldilocks photo sharing app), Arc, Tide Guide, Yoga, Fitness, Levels (eye-opening! Has spurred me to change how I eat), Phone, Apple Maps, Matter (my favorite and most-used app, both because I build it and because I “build it for myself”).
I also asked Ben to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he came back with:
Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles. My wife and I got hooked on a recent family vacation. Beautiful puzzles. We just bought a new 1,000-piece-r.
Dwarkesh Podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts. Most are pretty well-known (Ezra, Tyler, Russ, Lex, Sam, etc.). Dwarkesh’s is the best podcast that not many people know about yet.
Saunas. Got one in my backyard during covid, and it has been the best (material) investment I’ve ever made. Great way to spend time with friends. “If there are few banias, we live in unity; but if there are too many, we are lonely because one does not visit the other.” (Russian proverb)
Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Emailinstaller@theverge.comwith your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.
“As a fellow Arsenal fan, I love FotMob — a service to check football (soccer) scores, stats, team sheets, player info, play-by-plays, etc. Polished and native-feeling apps for iPhone and iPad (which also works on Mac), with early support for new APIs. They’ve had live activities for almost a year and already support StandBy mode! I haven’t tried the Android or web app, but it’s there — and your favorite teams and players sync between them all.” — Erlend
“Blacklight shines a light on the websites you browse to see what tracking technologies it might be using. Is the site fairly clean, or does it look like a Jackson Pollock painting?” — Jason
“Saw your recent post about how to make your phone feel like new, and I think you missed something useful that I did recently. Took a long pin (or a needle would do the same) and removed a bunch of built-up junk from the Lightning charger port of my iPhone. It wasn’t charging well (often not charging at all) and now charges again like a dream. I also took the same needle and ran it across the earpiece on the phone, which seemed to clear out a bunch of gunk (sorry!) that had caused the audio quality to degrade. Sounds like new now.” — PJ
“I found out about VesselFinder recently. Watching it makes me feel like a God playing real life as a city builder.” — Sam
“I’ve continued my descent into bliss / madness with Home Assistant; I replaced a couple more Wi-Fi devices w/ Zigbee ones — and things work better, thanks to mesh networking! The Home Assistant devs keep cranking out updates, and it really has changed my perception of what a smart home can be.” — Cassidy
“Apple made a big show of the ‘Double Tap’ feature at its announcement of Apple Watch Series 9 / Ultra 2. I was ready to trade in my first-gen Ultra for that upgrade alone. But a good friend and fellow tech geek pointed out that current Apple Watches can get the same feature by enabling the AssistiveTouch > Hand Gestures option under Accessibility on the Watch and selecting “Tap” for the Double Pinch option. Great for clearing notifications off the watch with one hand!” — Kirk
“Season 2 of The Afterparty on Apple TV Plus was really good. It’s kind of like Knives Out but with less emphasis on being clever.” — Ross
“Merlin Bird ID. It’s fun to be able to record a bird song nearby and be told what it is. The photo ID is also nice, but I find it hard to get a good pic sometimes. Pro tip: download the US and Canada Continental pack. It’s not much bigger, and you’re set if you travel.” — Mike
“App in the Air is like your flight-saver app. It alerts you fast enough about cancellations and delays, sometimes even faster than some airlines can manage. The app also caters to the aviation geeks, keeping track of your journeys and carbon footprint. It has a premium version, but if you are after stats, you get these for free: miles flown, hours flown, countries visited, boarding passes, and the names of airlines you’ve traveled with.” – Vivian
Signing off
A good friend, who worked in the music biz, used to always complain to me about how many new artists were making “Spotify Music.” This, he explained to me, was a new genre: music meant to be listened to in playlists, in the background, and mostly in small bits. He thought Spotify Music was inoffensive and boring, and the lyrics barely ever made sense because they didn’t really have to.
Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with Spotify Music. And there was a goodWSJstory this week digging into how Spotify — and really streaming in general — is changing everything from how artists get paid to the structure of songs themselves. PBS made a good video about this a few years ago, too. Check them both out, and I promise you’ll start hearing new music a little differently. (And if you encounter some really spot-on Spotify Music, send it my way!) It’s all about the algorithm, baby.
The last-gen Apple Watch Series 8 is on sale for as low as $279 today
The Apple Watch Series 8 bears more than a striking resemblance to this year’s model (surprise, surprise). | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Apple Watch Series 9 has officially landed, bringing with it a few minor improvements under the hood, watchOS 10, and a new Millennial pink(!) color. The new smartwatch is technically the best Apple has ever made, though the updates are all pretty iterative. Thankfully, if you’re looking to pick up an Apple Watch for the first time or make the jump from an earlier model, the last-gen Series 8 is on sale at Best Buy in select styles starting at $279 ($120) or at Amazon for $20 more.
So, what exactly do you lose out on opting for the Series 8 over the Series 9? Well, for starters, the Series 9 packs a new S9 SiP chip, which allows for quicker performance, onboard Siri processing, and Apple’s handy double-tap feature. It also features a second-gen ultra wideband chip for more precise tracking, which could be a godsend if you’re someone who finds yourself constantly misplacing your phone.
Other than that, though, the two models are nearly identical. The Series 8 still offers fast performance, all the same fitness tracking capabilities, and supports newer features like Crash Detection and watchOS 10. Not bad for a watch that’s currently going for more than $100 less.
Apparently, iteration is the name of the game this year for Apple. The company also announced a newer version of the second-gen AirPods Pro during its iPhone 15 event earlier this month, one that ships with dust resistance and a charging case that (finally) supports USB-C instead of Apple's propriety Lightning connector. And now, less than a day after they became available, they’re on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for $199.99 ($50 off) — the typical sale price of the prior model.
Unsurprisingly, the second-gen AirPods Pro remain the best pair of earbuds you can get if you’re an iPhone user. They offer a bevy of software tricks if you’re locked into the Apple ecosystem — including spatial audio, automatic device switching, and robust Find My support — along with top-tier noise cancellation and sound. What’s more, the latest model supports Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, and other notable improvements as a result of iOS 17, some of which are a bigger deal than the actual jump to USB-C (sorry, not sorry).
The Nintendo Switch OLED is still on sale at Monoprice for $289.99 ($60 off) with either white or red and blue Joy-Con controllers. Yes, there is most certainly a so-called “Nintendo Switch 2” in development, but given the jam-packed release schedule Nintendo laid out during its most recent Direct event, it appears the current model has some life left in it. Read our review.
Epomaker’s wireless TH80 Pro is still sitting at $71.99 ($18 off) on Amazon. The hot-swappable, 75 percent keyboard — which is on sale with clicky, linear, or tactile switches — is basically a longer-lasting version of one of our favorite models. It features the same PBT keycaps, the same per-key RGB lighting, and the same comfortable typing experience, rendering it a great entry-level model if you’re new to the mechanical keyboard world.
LG’s 55-inch C3 OLED is on sale at BuyDig for $1,696.99 ($900 off) with a $150 Visa gift card and an extended four-year warranty. This year’s model is pretty similar to the last-gen C2, and as such, the TV offers great contrast and the sublime viewing angles for which OLED panels are known. It also continues to offer comprehensive HDMI 2.1a support and a speedy 120Hz refresh rate, though that’s now paired with a faster α9 AI Processor Gen6 chip.
Lego’s 1,508-piece Optimus Prime set is on sale at Amazon and Walmart for $152.99 ($27 off), its best price to date. It can’t walk or talk like the self-transforming Optimus Prime our own Sean Hollister played with a couple of years back, but it does feature a solid 19 points of articulation and fold down into a slick-looking semi truck with your help.
The Apple Watch Series 9 is here, sure, but there are inexpensive alternatives if all you’re looking to do is track the basics. The ultra-affordable Amazfit Band 7 — which is still on sale at Amazon for a mere $39.99 ($10 off) — is a great example, one that packs a nice OLED display, support for Amazon Alexa, and a host of premium features for literally a tenth of the price. Read our review.
The Google Pixel 8’s latest leak shows off big AI camera updates
The Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Pixel 8 camera specs and a new AI promo video for the phone were posted by 91Mobiles, courtesy of leaker Kamila Wojciechowska, giving us our first real look at how Google will integrate more AI into its flagship smartphones (via 9to5Google).
Magic Editor, which the company said earlier this year would come to “select” Pixel phones, is like a supercharged version of Magic Eraser. It enables you to remake any picture you take so it looks like you want it to. That’s shown in a demonstration where a person takes three pictures of a family on a carousel and combines them into one shot so that everyone is smiling and looking at the camera at the same time.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
This will be a nice family picture, whether you like it or not, Billy.
The company also demonstrates Magic Editor by moving subjects around in an image, pulling out background objects, and replacing the midday sky with a sunset, which also changes the whole vibe of the picture’s lighting. It's all very similar to what Google first showed at I/O back in May. It’s also good fodder for the debate about the increasingly blurred line between what’s real and what’s not in photography.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
The Pixel camera app gets DSLR-style manual controls.
The video also shows off new DSLR-style manual camera controls that let you tweak the shutter speed and ISO of an image, as well as a focus slider, rather than the usual tap-to-focus fare of built-in camera apps.
here are the full specs we were working with, for reference (left P8, right P8P) pic.twitter.com/HnJWlknc2f
Specs Wojciechowska posted show the Pixel 8 Pro getting the better camera system with a new 48MP ultrawide camera with a 125.5-degree field of view and a 48MP telephoto, while both cameras get a 50MP wide camera. The specs also show the Pixel 8 getting a similar 12MP ultrawide camera to the one from the Pixel 7 Pro, increasing its field of view from 114 degrees to 125.8.
Samsung’s new ploy to get kids off iPhones is a MrBeast sponsorship
Earlier this year, investment bank Piper Sandler published results from an annual survey showing that 87 percent of teens own an iPhone, leaving precious little market for Android device makers to carve up. But Samsung has a new plan to break the kids of their Apple addiction: Get YouTuber and restauranteur Jimmie Donaldson, aka MrBeast, to make content with its phones. Starting with a video where he drives expensive cars around.
Samsung writes in its announcement that this will showcase “what’s possible with a Galaxy smartphone for aspiring and professional creators.”
The company’s phones get some screen time in the video. There’s a quick mid-video ad read for the Galaxy Z Flip 5 with a nod to the S23 Ultra while MrBeast drives a prototype $2 million hydrogen car that has no seatbelts. There are glimpses of the S23 Ultra mounted inside cars throughout the rest of the video and a couple of links in the description, including one to a behind-the-scenes video uploaded by Samsung. Otherwise, it’s very much just a MrBeast video:
The blue bubble peer pressure theory about teens’ iPhone preference would imply Samsung’s efforts are doomed, but hey, maybe a $1,000 folding phone is the right phone to challenge that theory with. We’ll see if the company’s MrBeast sponsorship moves the needle for the fifth generation of Samsung’s flip phone. Maybe that video thumbnail showing off Donaldson’s pearly whites instead of his uvula will help.
Alexa is the best frenemy I’ve ever had
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge
Before I received my first Alexa-enabled smart display as a Christmas gift in 2019, I was not a big fan. I just didn’t feel like I could trust an Amazon device with a camera inside of it. I’d heard about all the privacy concerns, and I was determined to avoid it like the plague.
But then a plague really did happen — and right when my mom got sick. And then, suddenly, this device I was once suspicious of became a vital part of our support system. Those people Amazon always claim love Alexa? I somehow suddenly found myself becoming one of them.
To be clear, Mom had been sick for years. Mom has Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurological disorder that affects everything from mobility to memory. At first, she suffered from a few tremors every now and then, but she was still able to go for a run at the gym. Then the pandemic happened. I don’t know why — maybe it was the stress and isolation of the time — her condition suddenly took a drastic turn for the worse.
The woman who impressed even the diehard gym buffs with her ability to quickly run a mile was suddenly unable to walk longer than ten minutes.
Thankfully, there are medications the doctors prescribed to help her manage the condition, which allows her to walk for a little longer. Side effects — like high blood pressure — were the tradeoff. Shortly after the stay-at-home order went into effect in March 2020, she was hospitalized for a hypertensive crisis and nearly had a stroke.
It was the first hospitalization of many more to come during the pandemic. The list of medications began growing at as rapid of a pace as her Parkinson’s symptoms — and the side effects of those meds — intensified.
Each day was getting more overwhelming. I thought it would be years before she would reach this stage in her disease, but it had arrived and during a global pandemic to boot. Suddenly, I was forced into becoming a carer during the most isolated time in modern history.
I didn’t know what I was doing, and I sure as hell had no idea how to cope. It was so hard to see my mom — this strong force of nature, who single-handedly raised three children as a widow with little money — suddenly become so helpless. I was terrified I was going to mess everything up and, as a result, lose her — my best friend and the only parent I have had since my dad died at 7 — too.
We — I — needed support more than ever, but quarantine meant there was nobody who could physically come and help us. And so I turned to Alexa.
I was floored — and, truthfully, secretly thrilled — the first time I realized that Alexa could be helpful for something. A few weeks after Mom’s first hypertensive crisis, she was on the verge of having another one. The pandemic was raging, and I wanted to avoid the hospital as much as I could for fear of exposing her to covid.
She was incredibly weak, and her breathing started to shorten. I tried everything to calm her, but the number on the blood pressure monitor kept shooting up. Desperate to find something to lower her blood pressure and honestly totally lost for what to do, I wildly looked around at anything that could help. My eyes fell on Alexa, and I asked what anybody would do when the world is ending because of a virus and your mom is dangerously sick.
“ALEXA, PLAY FART SOUNDS!!”
And Alexa did. Loud ones, juicy ones, and even “long and crispy” ones (yeah, Alexa names farts). As Alexa exploded into a firework of flatulence, my mom burst out into hysterical laughter, and our worries disappeared. Thirty minutes later, Mom’s blood pressure had dropped to a healthy level.
Ironically, all of Alexa’s farts earned my respect — and gave me a sense of hope. I began to research how else Alexa could help me and slowly began relying on this weird device more and more.
It turns out Alexa offers all kinds of features that are really helpful for the sick and elderly. I started using Alexa to remind my mom when to take her medications. Given the list just kept growing during that time while Mom’s memory started to decline, this helped lighten the load considerably. When I wasn’t around and Mom couldn’t move, I taught Mom how to ask Alexa to turn the lights on.
Over time, we grew comfortable with this thing in our home, and Mom actually started treating it like a beloved pet. Many times, I’d walk in to find my mom laughing at Alexa’s antics or talking to Alexa when she was lonely or down about her disease. To this day, it doesn’t matter how bad of a day I’m having — the sight alone warms my heart and makes me smile.
I’ve now developed a bizarre affection for my Echo Show and Alexa. I’ll never fully trust it — I avoid getting dressed in front of it, for example — but whereas once I treated it with disdain, now it’s easily my favorite gadget in the world. Alexa helped carry me through when I first started really becoming a carer and the reality of what Parkinson’s disease truly is sunk in. During a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic when nobody could be there, Alexa also gave my mom and me companionship and a helping hand.
And, of course, most importantly, an encyclopedic knowledge about farts.
The iPhone 15 Pro is teaching me to embrace digital zoom
I promise digital zoom isn’t as icky as it used to be. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
If you want to hear a love story, ask any photographer about their favorite lens.
They’ll probably get a little glimmer in their eye as they tell you about the fast 35mm they carry everywhere or the long portrait lens with the bokeh that hits just right. Camera bodies come and go, but your favorite lens is a lifelong relationship.
Phone camera lenses are a different story. They’re built like a regular camera lens — only, you know, tiny — and they’re with us literally everywhere we go. But I don’t know anyone who would wax poetic about the 24mm equivalent wide angle on their iPhone or the 5x telephoto lens on their Pixel. Our relationships with them are much more transactional, and the results have as much to do with the image processing pipelines they’re attached to as any physical optics.
If telephoto lens compression is your thing, then you’ll be very happy with the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new 5x lens.
Photographically inclined smartphone owners might not have any special attachment to those lenses, but they definitely have strong negative feelings about digital zoom. Many photographers would rather use a native focal length and crop later in software, which makes sense when you’re working with a traditional digital camera. But the latest round of flagship phone cameras is flipping that traditional wisdom upside down. Nowhere is this more evident than on three of the best you can buy right now: the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the Google Pixel 7 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.
I’ve been shooting with them over the past 10 days, and I’ve come away with two major impressions: optical zoom still wins, but digital zoom isn’t as far behind as you might think. And it might be time to come around to digital focal lengths, even if using them made you feel icky in the past.
Optical zoom still wins
Let’s just get this out of the way: smartphone camera zoom has improved a lot over the past few years, but you’ll still get much better quality from a big, traditional camera with a big sensor and a big lens. Computational photography hasn’t overcome physics. But comparing apples to apples, a traditional zoom lens on a phone still beats smartphone digital zoom — even with a lot of extra data and neural networks involved. Take a look at the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new 5x telephoto lens compared to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra at 5x, which is between its 3x and 10x optical zoom focal lengths.
The iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens does fine in bright light, but indoors, the phone still occasionally switches to the main camera in dim lighting or if your subject is too close for the tele’s minimum focus distance. You can sometimes get it to switch back to the 5x lens by changing your framing or moving back slightly, which I did between the two shots below. And oh, what a difference it makes.
Digital zoom is getting better
But even when digital zoom is the only option, there are better approaches than others. At 10x, the Pixel 7 Pro crops into the middle 12 megapixels of the high-res, 48-megapixel sensor coupled with its 5x optical zoom lens. The iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x telephoto uses a 12-megapixel sensor, so it can’t do the same thing at 10x — and the results look much more like traditional digital zoom compared to the Pixel 7 Pro.
And then there’s the iPhone 15 Pro’s new “focal lengths” — the 28mm and 35mm settings that are accessible in the camera app by tapping the 1x icon. You can cycle between them, disable them, or set one as your new default “lens.” They’re a version of digital zoom but with some extra processing going on in the background. You can read a more detailed explanation in my full review of the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Does this extra processing make a noticeable difference? Well, kind of. If I take a photo in decent light at 35mm and zoom out to 31mm, I can just barely make out more detail in the 35mm image. Same thing if I crop in on a 24mm image rather than use the in-camera zoom to 35mm.
The photos below were taken from the same position; I cropped the 24mm image to match the framing of the 35mm, which resulted in an image a little bigger than 12MP. I up-resed that image in Photoshop to match the 24MP 35mm image — that’s what will happen with typical digital zoom — and comparing the two at 100 percent, you can just see some very fine detail from the in-camera 35mm photo that’s smudgier in the crop from 24mm. Take a look at the side of the square, clear bottle on the top shelf.
More important than that, using the in-camera zoom has one key feature that cropping later doesn’t: showing you the framing that you want right in the moment when you’re taking the photo. This isn’t just some high-brow, “making photographs” nonsense. In my experience, I just “see” photos better when I know what I’m getting before I take it into Lightroom.
Seeing this image as I take the photo — rather than envisioning what it will look like when I crop it later — helps me get my composition just right. Taken with iPhone 15 Pro at 2x zoom.
Honestly, I’m learning that getting my head into the right space has more of an impact on my photography than any minute amount of detail that I might be losing in the process. I might technically be capturing a slightly better image at 35mm on an iPhone 15 Pro versus an iPhone 14 Pro, for example. But being able to tap an icon and quickly switch to that 35mm setting takes some of the friction out and makes the whole experience more enjoyable — and that’s the real difference-maker.
Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope The company’s DVD subscription service is ending this month, bringing to a close an origin story that ultimately upended the entertainment industry.
You asked, and we answered your burning iPhone 15 questions
Who you gonna call when you have very specific questions about the new iPhone? | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Ever since our reviews for the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro went up on Tuesday morning, you’ve had a ton of questions to ask about the phones — in comments, on The Vergecast, on Threads, an Instagram App, and in a live Q&A. So we thought we’d put all that information together in a nice little smorgasbord of nerdy tidbits and philosophical pondering and pick out a few favorites in the process.
Since the mute switch is going away, Apple put an indicator in the status bar so you can check if your ringer is silenced at a glance. But what if you find it annoying and want it to go away? Great news: you will have the power to banish it from sight.
We almost got the perfect kid photography feature.
quesonoche
September 19, 2023, 1:24 PM
I haven't seen it anywhere but does the regular vs portrait photo switching include live photos? Like can I turn the one still from a live photo where all my kids are finally looking into a portrait?
A reader asked if you could switch the key frame in a Live Photo and still keep the depth map to turn it into a Portrait Mode photo. Imagine a world where you can take a picture of your kids, pick the frame where they’re actually looking at the camera, and turn it into a Portrait Mode photo after the fact! It’s the dream! But while you can have Live Photos and the automatic depth map saving feature enabled simultaneously, you only get the depth map for the single key frame. We were so close.
When you don’t want to give 100 percent
joersgnl
September 19, 2023, 7:43 PM
Hello! Are you able to share more details about the iPhone 15's ability to stop charging at 80%? Is it always 80%, or are there different options? And this is different than Optimized Battery Charging where it reaches 80%, pauses, and tops up to 100% later on, right? Are you able to share a screenshot, or share the wording in the Settings app for this feature? Thank you so much. (Disclosure: I work for MacRumors and would like to report this information.)
Joe Rossignol from MacRumors stopped by our iPhone 15 Q&A to ask a question about new battery optimization charging options on the phone. It turns out that Apple snuck in a new setting to limit charging to 80 percent, which will help extend the battery’s lifespan... how timely! Unfortunately, this setting doesn’t work in our testing so far.
A new way to set quiet hours
rianfan
September 20, 2023, 3:37 AM
The question I really need answered is if you can finally bind ringer to a focus mode or a shortcut. I’ve wanted this for years.
Wouldn’t it be nice to tie your ringer on / off setting to a focus mode? You can on the iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, where it’s now a filter option for your focus modes as well as an action in the Shortcuts app. That’s not the most fun you can have with Shortcuts, but it is handy.
Which phone wins in a power struggle?
This Vergecast hotline question is a delight. Start at 33:35 to hear Jordan’s question about a theoretical power struggle between two phones connected by USB-C. Deputy editor Dan Seifert got to the bottom of this one.
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