Meta Quest 3 review: almost the one we’ve been waiting for

Meta Quest 3 review: almost the one we’ve been waiting for

Meta’s new headset is better than its predecessors in almost every way. But until there’s more to do in mixed reality, this won’t be the headset that gets everyone wearing headsets.

The Meta Quest 3 is much better than the Quest 2. It’s more comfortable, more powerful, easier to figure out, more pleasant to use for long stretches, and just flat-out better. If that’s all you’ve been wondering about Meta’s latest headset, there’s your answer. The passthrough improvements alone — the fact that I can now easily find my coffee / safely walk around the room without taking my headset off — makes this a worthwhile upgrade, even if you picked up a Quest 2 just a couple years ago and perhaps haven’t used it as much as you thought you might.

But that’s about the only thing I can say with total confidence about the Quest 3. Because when I really think about it, I’m not entirely sure what the Quest 3 even is. If it’s a VR headset, a direct successor to the Quest 2 from 2020, it’s certainly better but also nearly twice the price. If it’s a state-of-the-art mixed reality headset meant to usher in a future where the digital and real worlds are blended seamlessly together, it has some serious flaws and not nearly enough content. If it’s just a super-immersive game console, it’s great, but its library can’t hang with Sony and Microsoft.

Meta keeps calling the Quest 3 “the first mainstream mixed reality headset.” Strictly speaking, that’s true: at $499.99 for the model with 128GB of storage and $649.99 for 512GB, it’s a steep climb from the $299.99 Quest 2 starting price but still on the right side of the too-expensive line, especially compared to Apple’s forthcoming $3,500 Vision Pro. And unlike the mixed reality devices we’ve seen from Magic Leap, Microsoft, and so many others, an individual consumer can actually buy this one. But what Meta really wants is for this to be more than just the best reasonably priced headset. It wants the Quest 3 to be the one that makes people care about, use, and develop for mixed reality in a big way.

So here’s the real question, I think. Is the Meta Quest 3 a very good VR headset? Or is it, as Meta would have you believe, the first in a new line of a new kind of device?

I’ve used the Quest 3 enough to convince me that mixed reality could be awesome. It probably will be, eventually, once these devices are lighter and more socially acceptable and there’s a whole lot more MR content available for them. But that’s probably a ways off. For now, the Quest 3 is just a very good VR headset.

All smart, no glasses

Let me just get this bit quickly out of the way: I’m mostly going to be talking about the Quest 2 as a comparison in this review. The Vision Pro isn’t shipping, and there really are no other straightforward competitors to the Quest 3. The Quest Pro, Meta’s other mixed reality device, has some interesting tech but costs $1,000 and is really not worth considering. The question here, really, is whether the Quest 3 is worth the extra money over its predecessor.

The fit and finish of the Quest 3 is about what you’d expect for a second- to third-gen upgrade. Meta’s long-term plan for headsets is to make them look like a typical pair of sunglasses, and the Quest 3 is very much not that. But in the realm of “big, blocky plastic doodads on your face,” it does a lot of things better than its predecessor.

The headset itself is significantly smaller than the Quest 2, though the padded black face mask that attaches to it is much larger, so the overall footprint is about the same size. The whole package is about 160mm across and 98mm tall, compared to 142mm and 102mm on the 2. (You absolutely will not notice the small differences there.) The three vertical, pill-shaped cutouts on the front give the Quest 3 more personality than the bland face of the Quest 2. I’m not sure that’s a good thing — the Quest 3 looks like a character from WALL-E that was rejected because nobody could tell if it was good or evil — but it doesn’t really make a difference. You’ve got a giant headset on your face; people will point and laugh if you wear it in public. Let’s worry about the aesthetic details when we get a little closer to smart glasses.

The Quest 3 (left) is smaller, a little heavier, and a lot more comfortable than the Quest 2.

The Quest 3 is actually a bit heavier than the Quest 2 (515 grams compared to 503), but it wears its weight much better. The Quest 2’s heaviest bits stick out from your face, so it always feels like it’s pulling down toward your nose. The Quest 3 is comparatively more balanced. It’s still a blocky thing on my head, but where my Quest 2 always feels tight somewhere — the top of my head, the back of my head, or most often right on my forehead — I found a comfortable Quest 3 setup almost immediately, and it stays in place even when I’m bouncing around during a workout. Adding the $70 Elite Strap makes it better still since it moves some of the weight to the back of your head and sits a little more rigidly. But unlike the Quest 2, I don’t think you absolutely need one.

Speaking of that setup: one small but welcome hardware change in the Quest 3 is that it brings back the little wheel underneath the headset that you can use to control the distance between the lenses. (The original Rift had a slider, while the Quest 2 just made you move the lenses, which is awkward and bad.) Everyone’s interpupillary distance is a little different, and it’s an important adjustment to get right — when you first turn on the Quest 3, it instructs you to turn the wheel to see what looks good. Even if you’re just going to set it once and forget it, it’s still a better system than the Quest 2. And if you share the device with co-workers or family members, it’s far easier to get dialed in.

The Touch Plus controllers are nice, but losing the tracking ring doesn’t change all that much

The new Touch Plus controllers look and feel just like the old controllers, minus a large tracking ring at the top. They’re lighter and smaller as a result, but other than smacking them together a little less than I used to, I haven’t noticed much difference in actual use. And while losing the rings hasn’t made the Quest 3 worse at tracking the controllers, it also hasn’t made it better: the headset still struggles to follow the Touch Plus controllers when they’re even slightly out of your field of view. They look like a non-camera-studded version of the Quest Pro’s Touch Pro controllers, which you can, in theory, buy to replace the Touch Plus, but I don’t think those are worth the $299 upgrade. In part because the Touch Plus’ battery is much closer to the Quest 2’s controllers than the Pro’s: I’ve been using the heck out of this thing for over a week and haven’t killed the AAs yet.

The Quest’s Touch Plus controllers are small but will be familiar to Quest users.

You’re going to want to keep those controllers handy, by the way, because the Quest 3’s hand tracking is pretty rough. In theory, you can do most navigational things just by waving your arms around; move the round cursor over what you want to click on, tap your thumb and index finger together, and you’re off. But because the Quest 3 doesn’t do inward-facing eye tracking and only uses its external cameras to follow your hands, it’s imprecise and frequently wrong — you have to very carefully move your hand a millimeter at a time to get the cursor in the right place. (Eye tracking might be the only thing about the Quest Pro I wish the Quest 3 had copied.) You can also just reach out and touch stuff, which works a little better, but the Quest 3’s depth sensing also misses a lot: you go to grab the Home menu to move it toward you, and your hand just flies through it. After testing hand tracking, I’ve stopped using it altogether.

I can see clearly now

The Quest 3’s two most important upgrades become immediately obvious as soon as you stick your head in the headset. It puts a 2064 x 2208 LCD in front of each eye, which is the best screen in any Quest ever. You can tell: everything from on-screen text to high-res games looks significantly crisper and better, like you’ve upgraded from a standard-def TV to a high-def set. It’s not quite as sharp or as dynamic as what we’ve seen from the Vision Pro’s dual 4K micro-OLED displays, but it’s enough that I can comfortably read small text in the headset for the first time. I could never shake that nagging feeling in the Quest 2 that everything was just a hair out of focus, and the Quest 3 hardly ever feels like that.

The display sharpness is the thing for the Quest 3

The field of view in the Quest 3 is a bit larger than before, too, which is nice, but it still has that “I’m looking through binoculars” rounded black shape around your periphery. The sharpness is the real win here. The screens are so much clearer, in fact, that they show just how low-res some games are: playing NFL Pro Era on the Quest 3 was like playing an N64 game on an HDTV, where I could see every pixel and every stutter with new clarity. But games like Red Matter 2 and the updated Pistol Whip, which are ready for the resolution bump, generally look fantastic. I’ve never had so much fun just wandering around in VR than I have with the Quest 3.

Not every game is updated to look good in the Quest 3, but the ones that are look great.

Upgrading the display even opens up a bunch of new uses for a device like the Quest 3. It’s a pretty useful entertainment system, both for VR and non-VR content — apps like PlutoTV and Peacock work really well. All those educational apps for seeing art and far-off places are much more immersive now, too. Apps like Virtual Desktop actually work for streaming your computer to your headset without hurting your eyes, though the display isn’t quite high-res enough for me to actually want to work like that for very long. (Meta’s whole “you’ll do your job in VR!” thing is still a ways away, and let’s not even talk about how bad Horizon Workrooms still is.)

The other big upgrade is the speakers. The Quest 2’s audio still pours out into whatever room you’re in, which is a bummer, but it’s noticeably better than before. This thing gets loud if you want it to, and the spatial audio does a nice job of anchoring sound in place. You’re still going to get the best experience with a pair of headphones — my over-ear Bose cans fit around the headset fairly comfortably, but I prefer a pair of wireless earbuds just to keep some weight off my head.

Thanks to the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor and 8GB of RAM in the Quest 3, it’s also noticeably snappier than the Quest 2. The headset boots faster; games load more quickly. I was able to play Dungeons of Eternity at high settings at about 80 frames per second, which isn’t up to gaming PC standards but is plenty for most purposes. I’ve hardly noticed any lag in head movements or any of the other stuttering that can make VR unpleasant. The only consistent performance issue I’ve had is with scrolling the Quest’s menus, which still wobble and lag like the screen’s refresh rate isn’t quite high enough. In general, though, the Quest 3 is as fast as I need it to be and can stand up even to the platform’s most demanding games like Red Matter 2.

I’ve been impressed with the growth of the Quest’s ecosystem over the last couple of years

And by the way, there’s now a lot to do in the headset. I’ve been impressed with the growth of the Quest’s ecosystem over the last couple of years, and there’s now a solid stable of games, ranging from casual puzzlers to ultra-intense shooters and practically everything in between. I used to warn VR buyers that you might eventually run out of content in there — I don’t worry about that anymore. And, of course, through Quest Link, you can plug your headset into your computer and play a library of PC VR games as well.

In my testing so far, I’ve gotten a hair over two hours of battery life from the Quest 3, no matter how I’m using it. Two-ish hours of movies, two-ish hours of games — it seems that as long as the thing is on, it drains about the same. That’s less life than I’d like, but two hours is a pretty long session in VR, and thanks to Meta’s new charging dock (which comes separately and costs $129.99), I can just drop in my headset between sessions, and it seems to always be charged. The dock is a really terrific accessory, though it pushes the headset even higher in price.

The feeling of an alien actually crashing through your ceiling never gets old.

VR meets IRL

Up to this point, I’ve been talking about the Quest 3 as a direct successor to the Quest 2. In that sense, it’s a lot of little upgrades and one huge one (the screens) that make it a much better VR headset. Considerably more expensive! But much better. If you want a VR headset to play games, watch movies and TV, and do other VR things in, this is the one.

But let’s talk about the other bit. The thing really enabled by those pill-shaped cameras and sensors on the front of the Quest 3, the thing that has Meta believing the Quest 3 isn’t just “the third Quest” but the first of something else entirely. The Quest 3’s mixed reality features are simultaneously the most impressive and most frustrating part of this headset: they’ve convinced me that there’s some seriously cool and fun tech at work here and also that we’re really not particularly close to mainstream MR.

The first and most practical thing the cameras do is provide better passthrough, the view that lets you see your real-world space through your headset. On the Quest 2, that was a grainy black-and-white mess. Now it’s in full color and dramatically higher resolution. Not high resolution, mind you — just higher. Good enough that you can see your cup of coffee; not good enough to see if it’s coffee or tea. Good enough to see the time on your watch; not good enough to read the text of your notification.

The Quest 3’s passthrough lets it automatically scan your room, which is much better than creating boundaries yourself.

The improved passthrough makes a lot of things about Quest Life easier. The frame rate is smooth enough to stay comfortable as I walk around with the headset on, which makes it easier to wear for long stretches. It can automatically set your boundaries in your room, so you don’t have to scan the floor anymore. You can double-tap on the side of your headset at any time to jump into passthrough mode in case you need to look at something or see which dog / chair / family member you just whacked while playing Supernatural.

But the reason the passthrough really matters is because it’s what makes mixed reality possible. The Quest can take those camera feeds and superimpose content over them in real time. The headset first has you walk around to scan your surroundings — in my case, my messy basement — and then lets you play in them.

The reason passthrough really matters is because it’s what makes mixed reality possible

Technically speaking, the mixed reality on the Quest 3 is… fine. It struggles badly in low light, turning everything grainy and low-res, but if you’re in a well-lit space, it’s mostly accurate. There’s some warping a bit around the edges, so it can seem a little bit like the floor is moving or you’re on a light dose of some hallucinogenic drug. It also warps and distorts around your hands as they move through space. But for a first generation of mixed reality, it’s a solid start.

The problem is, there’s almost nothing compelling to do in mixed reality on the Quest 3. The single most fun MR experience I’ve had so far is First Encounters, a mini-game in which tiny Koosh ball-looking aliens blow holes in your room and try to attack you while you try and capture them. It’s fun, silly, and really does make it feel like an alien craft has crashed into your house. It’s much more fun to play First Encounters in my basement than it would be in a purely VR space. But First Encounters is the demo experience to teach you how to use mixed reality! It’s a bad sign that that’s the best thing on the platform. Practically everything else I’ve tried is fun but simple — like Cubism, a puzzle game — or still basically a tech demo.

Passthrough looks pretty good when the room’s well lit — and pretty grainy in low light.

In the long run, while I think VR is perfectly suited to immersive gaming, MR is likely to be much more of a real-world tech. That’s why the form factor matters so much: walking around the world with a cool heads-up display is only really going to take off if that display doesn’t look stupid or gadget-y. MR will be cool for navigation, education, making Pokemon Go even more fun. The Quest 3 is mostly focused on MR for business and gaming, but both are better experiences in VR right now. For MR to really take off, we’re going to need more than just VR games reworked for passthrough; we’re going to need an entirely new class of apps and ideas. There’s not much of that in the Quest 3 yet.

That might help explain why even some of the MR games that do exist would be better off in VR. Drop Dead: The Cabin has an MR mode called “Home Invasion,” but its MR features work so badly the game’s basically unplayable in that mode. Figmin XR is a fun game for building stuff, but it seemed to have no idea that my coffee table is a hard surface that objects shouldn’t just fall through. Many of these games need to update for the Quest 3’s new depth sensor and passthrough abilities; others need to rethink their whole strategies. Very few things I tried actually interacted with my physical space in the way true mixed reality should.

I’m sure that will change eventually. The Quest 3 and Vision Pro are the first compelling reasons for developers to care about mixed reality, so I’m hopeful that over the next year or so, we’ll get a lot of good MR content and games. But right now, it’s pretty bleak out there. Even the exciting new games coming to the Quest 3, like Assassin’s Creed: Nexus and Roblox and the all-important Powerwash Simulator, are still VR games.

That’s because, for all it’s technically capable of, the Quest 3 is still a VR headset. A very good one, to be clear; my favorite one yet, even. But even great VR headsets are far from a mainstream product right now. If you believe mixed reality could change that and could entice even people who don’t care about VR headset and VR worlds to strap something to their face — and I do believe that — the Quest 3 just doesn’t quite deliver.

Maybe this is the headset before the headset, the one that helps entice developers to make cool stuff that turn into killer apps for the Quest 4. Heck, maybe none of this matters until the device itself is less “headset” and more “glasses” and until we’ve had a series of societal debates about whether you should make fun of people who wear these things in public. It’s going to take a lot of technical and social change to make mixed reality mainstream, and it’s probably going to take a few years.

Until then, the Quest 3 will remain what it is: an excellent VR headset and nothing else.

Photography by David Pierce / The Verge

Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI

Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI

Online designers are upset over what appears to be an AI-generated stock image in the poster for Loki’s second season. | Image: Disney / Marvel

A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative AI. Illustrator Katria Raden flagged the image on X (formerly Twitter) last week, claiming that the image of the spiraling clock in the background “is giving all the AI telltale signs, like things randomly turning into meaningless squiggles” — a reference to the artifacts sometimes left behind by AI-image generators.

The creative community is concerned that AI image generators are being trained on their work without consent and could be used to replace human artists. Disney previously received backlash regarding its use of generative AI in another Marvel series, Secret Invasion, despite the studio insisting that using AI tools didn’t reduce roles for real designers on the project.

Image: Disney / Marvel / The Verge

Visual errors like wonky linkes, smudged lettering, and ‘meaningless squiggles’ can be seen in the image — suggesting the background was created using generative AI.

Several X users (including Raden) noted that the background on the Loki artwork appears to have been pulled from an identical stock image on Shutterstock titled “Surreal Infinity Time Spiral Space Antique.” According to @thepokeflutist who purchased the stock image, it was published to Shutterstock this year — ruling out the possibility of it being too old to be AI-generated — and contains no embedded metadata to confirm how the image was created. Several AI image checkers that scanned the Stock image also flagged it as AI-generated.

Running the actual image itself through various AI image checkers (aiornot, illuminarty, huggingface, hive), led to 3/4 stating its AI (not a large sample size I know) pic.twitter.com/xhbjwqhBuy

— Angel ️ (@thepokeflutist) October 3, 2023

According to Shutterstock’s contributor rules, AI-generated content is not permitted to be licensed on the platform unless it’s created using Shutterstock’s own AI-image generator tool. That way the widely used stock image site can prove IP ownership of all submitted content. Shutterstock says its AI-generated stock imagery — which is clearly labeled as such on the platform — is safe for commercial use as it’s trained on its own stock library. Shutterstock did not respond to The Verge when asked if the time-spiral image violates its own rules about AI-generated content, or to clarify what the company is doing to enforce such rules.

AI-generated stock imagery is a real issue for many creative professionals. As Raden notes: “licensing photos and illustrations on stock sites has been a way many hard-working artists have been earning a living. I don’t think replacing them with generated imagery via tech built on mass exploitation and wage theft is any more ethical than replacing Disney’s own employees.”

Image: Shutterstcok / Svarun

Shutterstock doesn’t label the image as AI-generated, but does promote it as a “top choice” that’s in high demand.

Image: Shutterstcok / Svarun

Many of the other images uploaded by the same stock contributor also appear to be AI-generated, despite not being labeled as such.

Companies like Adobe and Getty are also promoting ways for AI-generated content to be commercially viable, but it’s unclear if these platforms are any better than Shutterstock at moderating submissions that don’t abide by their contributor rules.

Image: Apple / Disney / Marvel

The poster has been widely distributed across platforms like Apple’s App Store since its release.

It also isn’t clear if generative AI was used elsewhere by Disney to create the promotional material for Loki. Some X users have speculated that it may have been used on sections of the image like the miniaturized characters surrounding Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, noting their awkward positioning. Disney has ignored our request to clarify if AI was used in the Loki promotional art, and to confirm if the company had licensed the aforementioned Shutterstock image.

Who's your favourite AI Loki abomination? I'm torn between Ministry of Silly Walks, Flamingo Stance and T-Rex Arms over here pic.twitter.com/lbeSVEWhiM

— Mike Maynard (@SkullPirateMike) October 3, 2023

There’s the argument here that since the clock image used for Loki isn’t labeled as AI-generated by Shutterstock, Disney might not be aware of its origins. Still, the errors present in the stock image would be easy for most graphic designers to spot, so the inclusion of random artifacts in the final poster isn’t a good look for Disney’s design or editing process.

The creative industry has become saturated with AI-powered tools like Adobe Firefly and Canva Magic Studio over the last year. These tools aim to make things easier for folks with limited design experience, and are typically promoted to organizations who want to produce cheap art at scale. Stock images are often used by companies because they’re fast, affordable, and accessible, reducing the need to hire experienced designers to make content from scratch. As AI-generated stock also grows in popularity, it’s easy to understand why creative professionals are concerned about the future of their industry.

Rooster Teeth pulls Red vs. Blue and other shows from YouTube

Rooster Teeth pulls Red vs. Blue and other shows from YouTube

Red vs. Blue is now all but gone from YouTube. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

Rooster Teeth has moved some of its popular content, including most Red vs. Blue seasons, off the YouTube platform entirely and onto its own website. Rooster Teeth senior writer and showrunner for RWBY Kerry Shawcross posted a video on Thursday announcing the change, explaining that “YouTube revenue is just not cutting it for us right now.”

Shawcross said Rooster Teeth also moved Camp Camp to the site, where episodes will continue to be ad-supported and free to watch. He added Rooster Teeth gets “approximately 5 – 10 times more value” from ads it runs on its own website, adding that “animation’s hard and it’s expensive.”

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A post shared by Rooster Teeth (@roosterteeth)

He didn’t say specifically what was moved or when, but multiple threads on Reddit from the second half of September say that most of the Red vs. Blue series appeared to have disappeared from YouTube.

How the Big Chip Makers Are Pushing Back on Biden’s China Agenda

How the Big Chip Makers Are Pushing Back on Biden’s China Agenda Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm are campaigning to protect their businesses before further crackdowns on the sale of semiconductor technology to Beijing.

Apple’s next Vision headset might ship from the factory with custom lenses

Apple’s next Vision headset might ship from the factory with custom lenses

The next Apple Vision headset could get built-in prescriptions. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today that a future Apple virtual reality headset could be smaller and lighter, and each unit could ship customized from the factory for people with impaired vision. With the first-generation Vision Pro, the company’s solution for glasses wearers is to stock optional Zeiss-made lenses in its retail stores, which creates its own problems with managing the supply, and turning its electronics store into a health provider.

The article points out how fraught tying a product to a custom display could be, given how prescriptions can change with time and how it would limit the ability to share the headset or resell it.

But Apple has almost certainly already thought about this, and it’s filed patents as recently as August that show it’s interested in making a VR or AR display that can be adjusted to correct someone’s vision. Doing something like that would keep the company from adding a new barrier to entry to a product that’s already probably too expensive. And it could be good for customers who don’t realize they even have bad vision when they buy a new VR headset.

Meta’s plans to beat Apple’s Vision Pro include cheaper headsets and no controllers

Meta’s plans to beat Apple’s Vision Pro include cheaper headsets and no controllers

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta is looking down the road at a follow-up to the Quest 3, which is releasing this week, and plans to take cues from Apple’s Vision Pro while it races to mainstream its VR tech. That’s according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, who writes that the company’s Quest headset marketing plans have changed in response to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement earlier this year. Part of the plan is to release a VR headset without controllers to get the cost down next year.

Gurman says a person within Meta told him the company is “in the ‘afraid of Apple’ stage,” comparing it to the mobile phone industry just before the iPhone’s launch. He writes that the company’s shift away from a heavy focus on the metaverse and more to pushing the practical uses of the headset — gaming and productivity — is a direct response to Apple’s pitch for the Vision Pro. You could argue that Apple’s headset is more down-to-Earth than immersive virtual worlds, even if its price is very much not.

Meta’s roadmap has involved making its next headset, codenamed Ventura, even cheaper — The Quest 3 is already less than 15 percent the cost of a Vision Pro — and more comfortable without sacrificing screen resolution. And apparently, according to Gurman, Meta is also looking at doing away with controller bundling to help with that, letting customers either just use hand gestures or buy controllers separately.

Apple and Meta are ultimately after different markets, but at the moment, the existing VR headset market is pretty much just “people who want VR headsets” — you know, early adopters. Meta is trying to figure out how things will shake out when the market actually grows, and to plant a foot in it, the company needs a different product, or it risks the Quest going the way of feature phones.

The AI gadgets are coming

The AI gadgets are coming

Image: William Joel / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 9, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hurray! I’m so happy you’re here, and also, you can catch up on all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading Zeke Faux’s excellent crypto book and the story of the viral cookies that suddenly disappeared, trying desperately to figure out what the heck the Humane AI Pin actually does, pouring all my notes and tasks into NotePlan, watching the new-to-Netflix season of The Great British Baking Show and anything at all I can find about The Sphere in Vegas, and am on like my fourth week of being totally obsessed with the history of the AltaVista search engine.

This week, I also have for you a new smartwatch, a great new Spotify feature, several new games to dive into, a recipe app, and some new book recommendations.

I also have a specific question for you: What do you use to track all the stuff you want to watch, read, and listen to? Do you have a bunch of apps? Some lists? A wild Excel spreadsheet? Your own memory? Nothing at all? I want to know all your media-tracking tips, and I’ll share a bunch in next week’s Installer. Send an email to installer@theverge.com, text me at (203) 570-8663, or find me on all the socials.

In general, of course, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What app should everyone know about? What show / podcast / game is everyone missing out on? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you want to get every issue a day early in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Okay, we have a lot to get to this week. Let’s go.

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The Drop

• Google Pixel Watch 2. Google launched the Pixel 8 phone lineup this week and some cool updates to the Pixel Buds Pro headphones, but I think the new $349.99 watch is the best new thing of the bunch. More battery, more processor, more sensors, more Fitbit software under the hood — this sounds like the Apple Watch competitor the Android world really needed.
• Assassin’s Creed Mirage. I haven’t played this one yet, but I hear great things, and I love me some Assassin’s Creed. For years, it’s been basically the same game, only relentlessly bigger and more confusing, but this Egypt-set installment appears to be a return to its relentless form. This is my long-weekend project — one of them, anyway.
• Forza Motorsport. My other long-weekend project. An ultra-realistic, ultra-detailed game with endless side quests and upgrade tasks is pretty much everything I can ask for in a racing game. Now I just have to figure out how to sneak a full simulator rig into my house without anyone noticing…
• Spotify audiobooks. I don’t love the way audiobooks are integrated within Spotify, but I do love getting 15 hours of audiobook listening a month with a Premium subscription. That’s not a ton, but it’s roughly 1.5 Harry Potter books, almost exactly one listen through Ready Player One, or, you know, 1 percent of a Song of Ice and Fire book. Without any upcharge! That’s something! Audiobooks are too expensive, and this is a nice change.
• The Rewind Pendant. This is straight out of sci-fi: a device you wear around your neck that records everything you say and hear, summarizes it, and tells you what matters later. Awesome? Horrifying? Who knows. But Rewind is definitely one of the most interesting companies in AI.
• Loki season 2. Loki and Wandavision are easily my two favorite Marvel shows from the last few years, so I was psyched to see Tom Hiddleston back as the universe’s favorite long-haired trickster. And unlike so many Marvel things recently, Loki’s second season is pretty good! I might even rewatch season 1 just to be fully ready.
• The new Microsoft Lists. Microsoft is quietly building a really great set of simple productivity tools — between the also-new OneDrive, the always-great To Do, and the new Lists app that’s great for everything from shopping lists to to-watch lists, the ecosystem here is looking pretty great.
• “This is financial advice.” Someday, I won’t reflexively tell everyone to watch everything Folding Ideas publishes. Today is not that day: this is a 2.5-hour video about GameStop, WallStreetBets, Bed Bath & Beyond, the modern economy, and much more. Watch it. Watch it twice. Take notes. It’s wonderful.
• The Pixel 8’s generative wallpapers. I’ve become a big fan of frequently changing my wallpaper ever since Canoopsy recommended it in Installer a few weeks ago. Google’s new tool, which uses generative AI to create a wallpaper based on your prompts, is a super fun way to quickly make a wallpaper to match any mood of the day. It’s Pixel-only for now but should come to more devices soon.

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Pro tips

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in Installer that a new app called Orion had come out. It turns your iPad into a display for pretty much anything that uses a display, from a game console to a Windows 98 computer. It’s a simple concept, but Orion is a really fun and clever app.

I heard from a lot of folks (a lot of folks) that you were into Orion. So I asked Sebastiaan de With, the co-creator of Orion and Halide and other apps, to share a few unexpected tips and tricks on how to make the most of Orion. Here’s what he said:

• Tether it to your camera. “As a photographer, I use Orion with my camera when I am doing a small video production. We built a Halide update for the iPhone 15 Pro Action Button, and while recording a video tutorial, I set up my large 12.9-inch iPad Pro as a monitor so I can verify my manual focus is sharp and exposure looks great.”
• Daisy-chain your screens. “An extra tip with that: I actually sometimes AirPlay my iPad screen to my MacBook Pro or TV if I want to check Orion’s video monitor on an even bigger or closer screen. It works super well, and it’s pretty awesome. I’ve even shared my screen before so a friend could see what I was up to!”
• Screen-record all the things. “With Screen Recording on, I tap to hide the Orion chrome and record a full-fledged bit of video from my camera or gameplay for easy sharing. I really dig this feature.”
• Bring retro gear back. “It’s a little thing, but I only waited until this week (since it has been iPhone season, a busy time for us) to play some old classics, and the CRT effects included in Orion Pro are a treat on larger iPads.”
• Make it a status checker. ”An unexpected use case I saw from people was that lots of folks use it to check on and keep their headless servers / setups running. A monitor that you can just plug in in a pinch is super useful.”

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Screen share

Taylor Lorenz is the most online person I know, which makes her extremely qualified to write a book called Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. It also makes it totally unsurprising that the book is excellent. She charts the whole history of the social web and the rise of influencers alongside it. I’ve been following this space closely for a long time, and I still learned a huge amount from the book. It’s out now; you should read it! And if you missed Taylor chatting with us on The Vergecast a few weeks ago, check that out, too.

I asked Taylor to share her homescreen with us, figuring she probably had an app or three I’d never even heard of. I was exactly right.

Here’s Taylor’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps she uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 13

The apps: Photos, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Calculator, Weather, Google Docs (I write a lot of stories on my phone), Apple Notes (I write things that I wanna remember and never check again), Messages, Instagram, Settings, Signal, Erewhon (after two years in LA, I finally caved and got the membership), Bluesky (I’m still searching for a good Twitter alternative), TikTok, Mastodon, Discord (one of my favorite social media apps), YouTube, Threads, Spotify, Voice Memos, Hype Machine (I think Spotify is too algorithmic, and I like that Hype Machine gives me music that I would never find elsewhere), Slack, YouTube, Substack, Phone, Camera, Gmail, Safari.

The wallpaper: the internet’s favorite meme

As always, I also asked Taylor to share a few things she’s into right now. Here’s what she said:

• The Brian Jordan Alvarez extended universe. This man has created an entire cast of characters on his TikTok.
• Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant’s new book about the Luddite movement, is phenomenal. I can’t put it down! The Luddites have been so unfairly maligned.
• The Otherworld podcast, which is basically a This American Life of supernatural stories. The host of it is a phenomenal interviewer, and it’s fantastic storytelling whether or not you believe in ghosts / aliens / unexplained phenomena. It’s the perfect podcast to listen to for spooky season!

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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.

“Discover Quickly lets you fall into a rabbit hole of your Spotify library by letting you traverse through music quickly and visually. It displays album covers of all songs and playlists in your library (including the all-important Discover Weekly) and allows you to hear a short clip of each track just by hovering over the album cover of your choice. It’s more like a scavenger hunt than poring over pages of lists.” — Karan

“Currently watching the remake of Rurouni Kenshin anime in Crunchyroll.” — Christian

“I just have to let you know that for whatever reason, Pi is the most slept-on conversational AI there is, by far. It is capable of handling complex searches in the background and formatting the information it’s scanned to present it in a highly digestible and highly human way. My main critique of ChatGPT is that it can bombard the user with information, and most of the time, all I want is the gist.” — Jacob

“Fallout Shelter. Highly engaging strategy game, to just survive against all odds. Played two consecutive nights without dropping the tablet. Once you figure out the overall survival plan, maybe it’s easy. Yet to be determined.” — Prabhat

“Paprika. An app that lets you save recipes from anywhere, Raindrop-style, but it also extracts the ingredients and steps from even the most seo-text-laden of webpages. It’s so good.” — Luke

“I’ve been using and recommending RunPee to people for like over 10 years now. I know the UI / UX leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s an amazing app. When you’re watching a movie and need to pee, you open the app, and it tells you good times you can run to the bathroom. It tells you the cue in the film (whether it’s a visual or audio cue) and the amount of time you have to use the bathroom. It will also tell you a summary of everything you miss while you’re gone. It’s a family that runs it, and they keep it up to date with movies in movie theaters.” — Ryan

“Wellness by Nathan Hill! Arc Max for browsing.” — Nation

“If you’re into challenging puzzle games that also look positively gorgeous and sound absolutely mesmerizing, you cannot miss Cocoon. I just finished it (takes a couple of hours) but was consistently amazed at the art (both visual and audio) and the puzzle design. Not a single word is spoken in the entire game, and there are zero tutorials. You just drop to a planet and start playing. It’s brilliant and the best game I’ve played in a long time.” — Ismar

“For reasons I don’t fully understand, everyone I know seems to be rewatching The Good Wife. Myself included.” — Peter

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Signing off

I got an Ember Tumbler this week, the new $200 mug from the company that specializes in temperature-regulating drinkware. The company sent it to me to test, and I’ll end up writing something about it, but using it the last few days has reminded me of why tech is so much fun. So much of “tech” now is stuff we do on screens, specifically our PCs and our phones. Stuff like the Tumbler makes me miss the era of a million different weird gadgets, the single-purpose stuff that makes one tiny sliver of your life better through a huge amount of engineering. The Tumbler makes me think about, like, my very first portable CD player or the first time I brought a Kindle on vacation. Maybe we need more gadgets and fewer apps!

This mug is so expensive it’s ridiculous, but I love it so much already. My coffee, y’all. It’s so warm.

See you next week!

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MGM didn’t pay up after hackers broke into its system and stole customer data

MGM didn’t pay up after hackers broke into its system and stole customer data

K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The Wall Street Journal wrote on Thursday that MGM Resorts International didn’t pay the ransomware attackers who broke into its systems last month, forcing the company to shut down systems at several of its hotels and casinos. The hack kept many waiting to check into their rooms, including FTC chair Lina Kahn, who was in Las Vegas, Nevada to attend meetings about a merger between Kroger and Albertsons.

MGM said in a press release that hackers made off with customer data, including names, contact information, date of birth, and driver’s license numbers, as well as a “limited number” of customers’ social security numbers, passport numbers, or both.

The company didn’t specify how many people were affected by the hack, but according to its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the data hackers took was for “customers that transacted with the Company prior to March 2019.”

On the bright side, MGM said in its release that it “does not believe” the data thieves stole customers’ passwords, bank account numbers, or card details. It’s the small victories. MGM says it’s notifying customers via email and will give free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services to those affected.

The SEC filing says MGM’s domestic operations are back to normal, and “virtually all of the Company’s guest-facing systems have been restored,” adding that it expects the remainder will be “restored in coming days.” The company also wrote that it spent under $10 million on “technology consulting services, legal fees and expenses of other third party advisors” related to the attack, but it expects to lose about $100 million, all told.

If you think you were affected, here is what MGM says you can do:

The Company has set up a dedicated call center at 800-621-9437 toll-free Monday through Friday from 8 am – 10 pm Central, or Saturday and Sunday from 10 am – 7 pm Central (excluding major U.S. holidays). Please reference engagement number B105892 when calling. The Company also has set up a webpage at www.mgmresorts.com/importantinformation with additional information.

The Epic v. Google witness list: Andy Rubin, Sundar Pichai, and more to testify

The Epic v. Google witness list: Andy Rubin, Sundar Pichai, and more to testify

Illustration: The Verge

It’s been almost 10 months since a trial date was set in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, and with all of the other big tech cases going on right now, including Google’s other antitrust proceedings, you’d be forgiven for forgetting about this one. But believe it or not, the trial will start in less than a month, on November 6th, in the United States District Court in California’s Northern District.

The court released a tentative list of witnesses, mostly executives and leads from both companies, on Thursday. Epic listed 53 witnesses it either will or might call, including Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

Andy Rubin, one of the co-founders of the Android operating system and Essential, is also on the list. He worked at Google until 2014 when he left with a reported $90 million payout following allegations of sexual misconduct. He is listed in the court document as a “may call” witness, so it’s possible he won’t take the stand.

Other witnesses include two other Android co-founders — Nick Sears, who left Google in 2013 is on Epic’s list, while Rich Miner could be called by Google, where he still works. Epic also listed Activision CFO Armin Zerza and former Open Handset Alliance head Eric Chu.

Epic is suing Google over its Google Play store practices, alleging that, after Epic departed the Google Play store, Google launched an anticompetitive campaign to keep other developers from following suit, even going so far as to pay millions of dollars to some.

Here’s the full list of witnesses released by the court:

What’s up with the temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro?

What’s up with the temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro?

Temperature sensor. Temperature sensor? Temperature sensor. | Image: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro has an infrared temperature sensor. Why does the Pixel 8 Pro have a temperature sensor?

For an unusual feature on a $1,000 flagship phone, Google really isn’t saying much about it. The Pixel 8 Pro announcement mentions it almost in passing:

And on the back of the Pixel 8 Pro, a new temperature sensor lets you quickly scan an object to get its temperature. Use it to check if your pan is hot enough to start cooking or if the milk in your baby’s bottle is at the right temperature. We’ve also submitted an application to the FDA, to enable Pixel’s Thermometer App to take your temperature and save it to Fitbit.

Any off-the-shelf infrared thermometer can tell you the temperature of a hot pan or a baby bottle. But the instant you point it at a human being and start saying you’re measuring body temperature, congratulations: that’s medical data, you’re a Class II medical device, and you need Food and Drug Administration clearance.

Here’s where it gets a little bit complicated: Google doesn’t need clearance for the phone itself, or even for the temperature sensor per se. Technically, it doesn’t even need clearance to read your skin temperature as long as it’s using the data for something other than telling you your body temperature. (Several companies already use infrared temperature sensors built into smartwatches for sleep tracking and cycle prediction, but they’re all very careful not to show you that information as body temperature.)

You might think, “Okay, but what if I just take my temperature with it anyway?” While there’s nothing stopping you from pointing it at your forehead today, that won’t tell you your body temperature, just the temperature of the surface of your forehead. Not the same thing! My non-contact infrared thermometer says I have a body temperature of 98.3 degrees Fahrenheit. But when I switch it to surface mode, I’m a cool 94.7 F in the same spot.

There are a couple ways to get FDA clearance (not approval) for Class II devices, and Google wouldn’t tell us which avenue it’s going for or when it filed for approval. De novo authorization — which Apple sought for the Apple Watch’s on-wrist EKG detection back in the day — is for devices that aren’t like anything else on the market and are “reasonably safe and effective.”

There is nothing particularly novel about a non-contact infrared thermometer, though. It’s possible Google has asked for 510k clearance, which means that the company submits a bunch of data about the thermometer, and if the FDA decides it’s functional, unlikely to cause harm, and substantially similar to other approved clinical infrared thermometers, it is cleared for sale. Without that clearance, Google can’t let the Pixel 8 Pro tell you your body temperature, even if it’s perfectly capable of doing so.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

The temperature app uses the temperature sensor to tell you the temperature of something. As you’d expect.

Your body temperature is a good indication of whether you have a fever, and a fever is a good indication of whether you’re sick. That is information that can influence what kind of medical care you receive. And since that’s medical data, as part of the FDA clearance procedure, Google also has to show that its data privacy practices comply with HIPAA. That’s probably why body temperature data will be saved to Fitbit instead of your Google account. Fitbit data is siloed, and Fitbit has the capacity to comply with HIPAA.

What’s not clear yet is why Google put a temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro and is going to the trouble of requesting FDA clearance to use it for body temperature readings. We asked four different Google spokespeople, and all four responded (promptly!) with a variant on the following: “All we can share at this time is that we submitted an application to the FDA so you can separately use our Thermometer App to take your own temperature and then save it to Fitbit.”

The Verge’s resident wellness gadget and FDA clearance expert, Vee Song, speculates that data from an FDA-cleared body thermometer could be used for illness prediction and cycle tracking, which other companies have already done with wearable temperature sensors. Or it could just be laying groundwork for future medical tech plans. Maybe Google wants to sell a bunch of Pixels to hospital systems!

The whole situation is reminiscent of the skin temperature sensor on the Galaxy Watch 5 and 6. Samsung encourages you to use it as a contactless thermometer to check the temperature of household objects, and it is used to measure baseline skin temperature changes for sleep tracking and period tracking. But it explicitly won’t give you your body temperature. In both cases, it feels like the company added the sensor in order to track body temperature and is fishing around for other things to do with it that don’t require as much paperwork.

FDA clearance can take a while. The first Withings ScanWatch didn’t go on sale in the US for nearly two years while it awaited clearance for its EKG and blood oxygen features. That took 16 months. It’s worth noting that while the ScanWatch 2 has an infrared temperature sensor, Withings, like Samsung, is only using the data obliquely to avoid having to get FDA clearance. As far as I can tell, no smartwatch or phone has yet been cleared to offer body temperature data via infrared sensor, so who knows how long clearance will take for the Pixel 8 Pro.

In the meantime, at least your $1,000 phone has a cool party trick.

The Pixel 8 and the what-is-a-photo apocalypse

The Pixel 8 and the what-is-a-photo apocalypse

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

One of the first known photo fakes, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, was made just decades after the dawn of photography itself. Since then, photographers have found themselves in endless arguments about what truly constitutes a photo — what’s real, what’s fake, and when is editing too much? Now, as we head into an era where AI-powered tools are everywhere and easily accessible, the discussion is going to be messier than ever. And with the Pixel 8, Google has turned the question of “what is a photo” right on its head.

Google has been leading smartphone photography down this path for many years now. The company pioneered the concept of computational photography, where smartphone cameras do a huge amount of behind-the-scenes processing to spit out a photo that contains more detail than the camera sensor can detect in a single snap. Most modern smartphones use a system like Google’s HDR Plus technology to take a burst of images and combine them into one computationally-created picture, merging highlights, shadows, details, and other data to deliver a more pristine photo. It’s accepted practice at this point, but it also means that a baseline smartphone photo is already more than just “a photo” — it’s many of them, with their best parts combined.

The Pixel 8 lineup complicates things further by starting to transform how much a photo can be easily changed after the picture is snapped. It presents easy-to-use editing tools powerful enough to create a completely different image from the original photo you recorded when you hit the shutter button, and those tools are marketed as integral parts of the phone and camera. Photo editing tools have existed since the beginning of photography, but the Pixel 8 blurs the line between capture and editing in new and important ways.

Magic Eraser, Best Take, and Magic Editor

This starts with Magic Eraser, a two-year-old feature that Google has overhauled with generative AI for the Pixel 8 Pro. The original version could remove unwanted items from images by “blending the surrounding pixels” — that is, taking what’s already there and smudging it to hide small objects and imperfections. This upgraded version “generates completely new pixels” using generative AI, according to Google hardware leader Rick Osterloh; the result is no longer simply your photo but your photo plus some AI-assisted painting. In one example, Google showed how the tool could seamlessly remove an entire car and fill in details like wooden slats behind it. In another image, Google used the new Magic Eraser to basically Thanos snap two people into oblivion and fill in the horizon behind them.

The Pixel 8 also debuts a reality-defying tool called Best Take, which tries to solve the problem of somebody blinking in a photo by letting you swap in their face from another recent image. It looks like it might work well; based on what I saw from our tests at Google’s event, it can do some seamless face swaps.

And then there’s the big one: Magic Editor. First announced at Google I/O in May, Magic Editor uses generative AI to help you adjust entire parts of the photo in some dramatic ways. You can move a person so that they are in a better position just by tapping and dragging them around. You can resize that person with a pinch. You can even use Magic Editor to change the color of the sky.

Where Magic Eraser and Best Take are more about “correcting” photos — fixing blinks and strangers wandering through — Magic Editor fully goes down the road of “altering” a photo: transforming reality from an imperfect version to a much cooler one. Take two examples from a Google video. In one, somebody edits a photo of a dad tossing a baby in the air to move the baby up higher. Another shows somebody leaping for a slam dunk at a basketball hoop but then removing the bench the person used to get the height for the jump.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating your own photos. People have done it for a very long time. But Google’s tools put powerful photo manipulation features — the kinds of edits that were previously only available with some Photoshop knowledge and hours of work — into everyone’s hands and encourage them to be used on a wide scale, without any particular guardrails or consideration for what that might mean. Suddenly, almost any photo you take can be instantly turned into a fake.

There are ways for others to tell when Pixel photos have been manipulated, but they’ll have to go looking for it. “Photos that have been edited with Magic Editor will include metadata,” Google spokesperson Michael Marconi tells The Verge. Marconi adds that “the metadata is built upon technical standards from [International Press Telecommunications Council]” and that “we are following its guidance for tagging images edited using generative AI.”

In theory, that all means that if you see a Pixel picture where the baby seems to be too high in the air, you’ll be able to check some metadata to see if AI helped create that illusion. (Marconi did not answer questions about where this metadata would be stored or if it would be alterable or removable, as standard EXIF data is.) Google also adds metadata for photos edited with Magic Eraser, Marconi says, and this applies to older Pixels that can use Magic Eraser, too.

Using Best Take does not add metadata to photos, Marconi says, but there are some restrictions on the feature that could prevent it from being used nefariously. Best Take does not generate new facial expressions, and it “uses an on-device face detection algorithm to match up a face across six photos taken within seconds of each other,” according to Marconi. It also can’t pull expressions from photos outside that timeframe; Marconi says the source images for Best Take “requires metadata that shows they were taken within a 10-second window.”

Small alterations can unambiguously improve a photo and better define what you’re trying to capture. And groups that care a lot about photo accuracy have already figured out very specific rules about what kinds of changes are okay. The Associated Press, for example, is fine with “minor adjustments” like cropping and removing dust on camera sensors but doesn’t allow red eye correction. Getty Images’ policy for editorial coverage is to “strict avoidance of any modifications to the image,” CEO Craig Peters tells The Verge. Organizations like the Content Authenticity Initiative are working on cross-industry solutions for content provenance, which could make it easier to spot AI-generated content. Google, on the other hand, is making its tools dead simple to use, and while it does have principles for how it develops its AI tools, it doesn’t have guidelines on how people should use them.

The ease of use of generative AI can be bad, Peters argued last month in a conversation with The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel. “In a world where generative AI can produce content at scale and you can disseminate that content on a breadth and reach and on a timescale that is immense, ultimately, authenticity gets crowded out,” Peters said. And Peters believes companies need to look beyond metadata as the answer. “The generative tools should be investing in order to create the right solutions around that,” he said. “In the current view, it’s largely in the metadata, which is easily stripped.”

Currently, we’re at the beginning of the AI photography age, and we’re starting off with tools that are simple to use and simple to hide. But Google’s latest updates make photo manipulation easier than ever, and I’d guess that companies like Apple and Samsung will follow suit with similar tools that could fundamentally change the question of “what is a photo?” Now, the question will increasingly become: is anything a photo?

Intel teases Windows ‘refresh’ for 2024 amid Windows 12 launch rumors

Intel teases Windows ‘refresh’ for 2024 amid Windows 12 launch rumors

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Intel has teased a “Windows refresh” for 2024 which it hopes will boost its revenues. During Citi’s analyst conference last month Intel CFO David Zinsner discussed a Windows refresh next year, suggesting that consumers might upgrade their PCs because of a new release of Windows.

“We actually think 2024 is going to be a pretty good year for client, in particular because of the Windows refresh,” said Zinsner at the Citi analyst conference on September 6th. “We still think that the install base is pretty old, and does require a refresh. We think next year may be the start of that given the Windows catalyst.”

Zinsner’s comments from a month ago were spotted by PC Gamer, and come months after references to Windows 12 were leaked from internal Intel documents. Intel is reportedly preparing its Meteor Lake desktop platform for a next generation of Windows, likely to be called Windows 12.

Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a chip inside to accelerate machine learning algorithms.

Intel has only officially announced Meteor Lake mobile chips so far, arriving in December with a dedicated AI coprocessor inside. Meteor Lake is Intel’s first CPU with different chiplets for each component and the first on its Intel 4 process node. The addition of an AI coprocessor could be important given Microsoft’s push for AI features inside Windows.

Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans for Windows 12, but there are signs the company is looking to future versions of Windows to integrate AI-powered features. “As we start to develop future versions of Windows we’ll think about other places where AI should play a natural role in terms of the experience,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, in an interview with The Verge earlier this year.

We’ve also seen Microsoft add its AI-powered Copilot directly into Windows 11 recently and focus heavily on AI during its recent Surface event. Microsoft also added a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) chip to its Surface Laptop Studio 2, only mentioning that it will light up Windows Studio Effects like direct eye contact and background noise removal. Microsoft appears to be quietly laying the foundations for a bigger focus on AI in Windows, and Windows 12 combined with a hardware refresh focused on AI coprocessors feels inevitable at this point.

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Redfall finally gets a performance mode on Xbox

Redfall finally gets a performance mode on Xbox

Image: Bethesda Softworks

Remember Redfall? The blood-sucking shooter with soul-crushing problems? The game that released in May without a 60fps performance mode on Xbox? The game that, according to a Eurogamer article from earlier on Friday, hardly anyone has been playing on Steam? Well, it got a big new update on Friday — including that long-awaited performance mode.

Arkane Studios detailed everything new in Redfall’s Game Update 2 in a blog post on its website. In addition to the performance mode, the update adds things stealth takedowns, more enemies in the open world, some changes to controller settings, improvements to screen narration, and a lot more. It seems like a pretty substantial patch.

Will it be enough for a Cyberpunk 2077-style turnaround, though? I’m dubious about that — I liked the at-launch Cyberpunk 2077, which I actually finished, a lot more than I liked the at-launch Redfall, which I stopped playing after a few hours. Fingers crossed, though. And Arkane has already promised that two DLC characters are in the works, so there should be more news about Redfall to look forward to some point down the line.