Technology

lundi 9 octobre 2023

The best Sonos speakers to buy right now

An image of the Sonos Roam and Sonos Move side by side. — *Sonos has a speaker for practically every price point.* | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Sonos has an ever-growing lineup, and after you’ve bought your first speaker, you’ll likely want to put one in every room.

Editor’s note: Amazon’s fall Prime Day event is less than a week away. If you were hoping to nab some deals before the event, however, we’ve put together a guide to the best early Prime Day deals you can already get.

Sonos has built out a large collection of smart speakers, soundbars, subwoofers, portable devices, and more. And we can’t forget about the many Symfonisk speakers that the company has released in partnership with Ikea. 2023 has seen the company introduce major new products including the Era 100 and Era 300, and more are on the way.

With such a broad portfolio of hardware at prices ranging anywhere from $120 to $899, picking the best Sonos speaker for your needs isn’t always as straightforward as it might seem. You probably have some idea of the category of speaker you want — soundbar, desk speaker, or something portable — but even then, it takes some narrowing down to land on the right product.

I’m The Verge’s audio reviewer and have closely followed Sonos over the last several years. I’ve also spent many, many hours listening to each of these devices, so I’ve got you covered when it comes to the right recommendations.

Best speaker for getting started with Sonos

Sonos landed on a successful formula for a smart speaker with the Sonos One. And with the Era 100, the company has improved upon the One in numerous ways. It’s very similar in size — still perfect for any desk, bedside table, or countertop — but the newer speaker is capable of stereo playback, while the One could only do mono (unless you had two of them in a stereo pair). The enhanced bass response is also instantly noticeable. Despite its relatively compact size, the Era 100 produces a full, nicely balanced sound signature.

Aside from better sound, the Era adds support for Bluetooth playback and line-in audio. The former makes it easier for friends to play music from their own devices when visiting, and the latter allows you to run a turntable through your Sonos system. That was previously a much pricier proposition and required either the Sonos Five or something like the Amp. It’s great to see it come to the entry-level tier.

A photo of the Sonos Era 100 speaker on a home office desk. — *The Era 100 is small enough to make for a great desk or countertop speaker.*

The Era 100 retains the One’s hands-free voice controls and smart assistant capabilities, but unfortunately, Google Assistant isn’t available on this speaker. Instead you’re left with Amazon Alexa and Sonos Voice Control. Sonos revamped the topside controls, so you get dedicated track controls and an indented bar for volume adjustments. The new entry-level Sonos speaker is slightly more expensive than the Sonos One was, but it adds enough new functionality to easily justify a price increase.

If you move around the house a lot throughout the day or find yourself outside, it might be worth considering the Sonos Move portable speaker as your starting point. It doesn’t sound quite as rich as the Era 100, but it packs plenty of volume and good overall audio quality into a speaker that you can carry wherever you need it.

Read my full review of the Sonos Era 100.

Best budget Sonos speaker

The Symfonisk lineup of speakers is jointly developed by Sonos and Ikea, and they can be a great entry point to the world of Sonos. There’s perhaps no better deal in the entire portfolio than the versatile bookshelf speaker, which sells for under $150. This stylish unit is great for so many different use cases: it’s a great option for anyone getting started with Sonos, delivering sound quality that’s basically on par with a Sonos One in a different form factor that some people might prefer. Remember that you can pair two bookshelf speakers together for stereo audio (or to use as surround speakers). Ikea sells plenty of accessories for it, including a floor stand and wall bracket.

A photo of the Ikea Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker with bottles behind it. — *Ikea’s Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker is a perfect choice for anyone new to Sonos.*

Best sounding Sonos speaker

What the Sonos Five lacks in smarts (there are no integrated mics on this product), it makes up for with pristine sound. Excluding soundbars, the Sonos Five is Sonos’ largest, most powerful speaker. Play some of your favorite tracks through the Five, and you’ll quickly come to understand why it ranks above the rest of the lineup in audio fidelity, detail, and overall performance. It’s among the very best standalone speakers on the market at its price point and will outclass any HomePod, Echo, or Nest Audio speaker you test alongside it. Pair two of them together in stereo, and your music will sound sublime; a pair of Fives can also be used as rear surrounds, though there are more affordable options for that scenario.

It also outperforms the Era 300 — at least when it comes to stereo playback. The newer speaker has a unique advantage with spatial audio music; the Five isn’t capable of playing Atmos mixes since it’s a traditional, stereo unit. But it still sounds better overall and especially when you crank the volume. If you care about lossless audio and getting the highest level of fidelity from your Sonos system, this is the company’s very best option.

A photo of a Sonos Five next to a record player on a wooden table. — *The Sonos Five offers the best sound quality of the company’s entire speaker lineup.*

Aside from its powerful, enveloping sound, the Five has one relatively unique hardware feature among the Sonos lineup: there’s a 3.5mm aux input that can be used for plugging in a record player or another audio device of your choosing. The only other Sonos devices with line-in functionality are the Amp and Port.

Best portable Sonos speaker

Sonos’ Move 2 isn’t “portable” in the same sense as the much smaller Roam, but it’s easy enough to lug around different rooms of your home or haul out to the backyard for a party. It’s a hefty little thing at over 6 pounds, but at least there’s a handle molded into the back of the speaker for easier carrying.

The second-generation Move offers substantial improvements compared to the original. Battery life has doubled to around 24 hours on a single charge. And the speaker now outputs proper stereo audio thanks to its dual tweeters. (The original Move was limited to mono.) The Move 2 includes support for line-in via USB-C, and you can now broadcast anything you’re playing over Bluetooth to the rest of your Sonos system — both features that the original lacked.

A photo of Sonos’ Move 2 portable speaker.

Sound-wise, the Move 2 might very well be Sonos’ best speaker dollar for dollar. It’s like an Era 100 that you can take anywhere, and this speaker is more than powerful enough to fill an outdoor patio area with sound. The revamped internals produce greater clarity and a fuller soundstage than the first-gen Move.

Sonos’ portable speakers have what’s called automatic Trueplay, meaning they use their own built-in mics to produce the best possible audio for whatever environment you’re using them in. Whenever the Move (or Roam) is picked up and put somewhere new, this process automatically happens in the background while you listen. Like the original Move, Sonos has made efforts to help the Move 2 last long into the future by offering a battery replacement kit that can be purchased when the included battery no longer holds a satisfactory charge.

Read my full review of the Sonos Move 2.

Best Sonos speaker for travel

The Sonos Roam is a small, lightweight Bluetooth speaker that’s easy to toss into your bag and bring anywhere or travel with. It also makes for a great bathroom speaker and can be placed throughout the home in areas that might be lacking audio coverage from your other Sonos devices. When used around the house, the Roam will play music over Wi-Fi just like your other Sonos speakers — and it has built-in mics for voice controls. Take it on the road, and it works like any Bluetooth speaker. And if you happen to own a turntable that supports Bluetooth, you can play your vinyl collection across your entire Sonos system by pairing the turntable with the Roam.

A photo of the Sonos Roam speaker on a kitchen counter. — *The Sonos Roam is far more portable than the Move and is easy to take anywhere.*

You can only expect so much from the tiny Roam in terms of sound quality. It outputs clean, detailed audio and can fill small rooms, but the bass and overall presence are no match for something like the Sonos Move or the Era 100. You can always link two Roams together for a more immersive stereo listening experience.

Read my full review of the Sonos Roam.

Best Sonos speaker for spatial audio

The Sonos Era 300 is a promising glimpse into the future of music. With six drivers inside (including an upward-firing speaker), it’s built to showcase spatial audio. Find the right Dolby Atmos track from Apple Music or Amazon Music and it can be a mind-blowing experience: you’ll really feel like music is coming from beyond the speaker’s relatively small footprint. The Era 300 bounces sound off your walls and ceiling to heighten immersion and give songs more dimensionality.

A photo of the Sonos Era 300 speaker on a home office desk. — *It’s a safe bet that the Era 300 doesn’t look like any other speaker you own.*

The Era 300 is also the only Sonos speaker that can deliver full Dolby Atmos audio — including height effects — when you use a stereo pair as rear surrounds for an Arc or Beam (Gen 2) soundbar. If you’re a home theater enthusiast, that perk alone could be enough to choose this speaker over the Sonos One SL, which would otherwise be my recommendation for rear surrounds.

But we’re still in the early days of spatial audio from streaming music services, and the quality of Atmos mixes can vary wildly from album to album. If you want to experience the best of what’s out there, the Era 300 is a worthwhile investment. But if you’re still mostly listening to stereo in 2023, the Five remains the way to go.

Read my full review of the Sonos Era 300.

Best Sonos soundbar

At $899, the Sonos Arc soundbar doesn’t come cheap. But this Dolby Atmos soundbar is a true powerhouse that will bring out the most from the latest Hollywood blockbusters or your Netflix streams. With 11 drivers in all (including two up-firing height speakers), the Arc delivers truly immersive home theater audio. The company has continued to improve its flagship soundbar with firmware updates that have focused on clearer dialogue and other enhancements.

An image of the front of the Sonos Arc soundbar with a TV in the background. — *The Sonos Arc is among the very best, most immersive soundbars on the market today.*

The Arc includes mics for voice assistants and smart speaker functionality, but you can optionally purchase the Arc SL from Costco if you’d prefer to go without them. If you’re serious about your home theater system and want the best, most powerful soundbar that Sonos offers, the Arc is the move. You’ll quickly get over the steep price once you hear it.

Read my full review of the Sonos Arc.

Best budget Sonos soundbar with Dolby Atmos

Stepping down to the mid-level Sonos Beam doesn’t mean you’ll be settling for lackluster sound. While it lacks proper up-firing height speakers for Dolby Atmos content, the second-gen Beam does an impressive job of virtualizing those channels in a way that’s convincing to your ears — especially in small- to mid-size rooms. The inclusion of eARC means you don’t have to worry about any lip sync issues when watching movies or audio delay while gaming.

An image of the Sonos Beam soundbar with a TV screen in the background. — *The Sonos Beam soundbar is a great option for getting Dolby Atmos without breaking the bank.*

While the second-gen Beam is similar in size and weight to the first, it features a perforated plastic grille instead of the hard-to-clean fabric of the original model. And priced at $449, it’s certainly easier on your wallet than the flagship Arc.

Read my full review of the Sonos Beam (Gen 2).

Best Sonos soundbar for a bedroom

With its optical-only design and no HDMI connection, the entry-level Sonos Ray is best suited for smaller rooms or secondary TVs. You don’t get any Dolby Atmos support with this $279 soundbar, and it doesn’t have a dedicated center channel for dialogue. Still, the Ray provides balanced, crisp audio and surprisingly big sound for its relatively small size.

A photo of the Sonos Ray soundbar next to a TCL TV. — *If you want a soundbar for the bedroom or a smaller apartment, the entry-level Sonos Ray makes a lot of sense.*

Bass output is limited compared to Sonos’ pricier soundbars, but if you’re looking for a simple solution that sounds good for both movies and music, the Ray isn’t a bad purchase. I’d recommend saving a bit more for the Beam if you have any plans to build out your home theater system with additional Sonos speakers, however.

Read my full review of the Sonos Ray.

Best Sonos subwoofer

If you want to unleash the full potential of any Sonos home theater setup, the Sub is an essential piece of kit. It’s got plenty of boom and floor-shaking power (if you want it) for those blockbuster action sequences, and the Sub also adds another layer of depth when you’re playing music through your system.

The Sub can either be positioned upright or laid flat on the floor; you can conveniently hide it under a couch, which can’t be said of the cylindrical Sub Mini. But there’s no denying that the best low-end rumble that Sonos offers comes at a stiff premium: the Sub costs $799, and sales on the subwoofer are rare to come by.

Best budget Sonos subwoofer

The Sub Mini can’t fully match the loudness of the full-size Sub, but it gets you surprisingly close — and for substantially less money. It’s also arguably more stylish, trading the dust-magnet glossy finish for a matte design. The Sub Mini’s reduced size makes it easy to place discreetly somewhere near your TV without calling much attention to the hardware itself.

Read my full review of the Sonos Sub Mini.

Most stylish Sonos speaker

The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is a great deal, but it still looks like a speaker. If you’re looking to camouflage tech in your home so that it blends in with other decor, that’s where the Symfonisk picture frame speaker shines. When mounted on your wall, it looks like a piece of artwork — albeit with a power cord coming out of the bottom. If you don’t love the default pattern, Ikea sells a rotating variety of replacement art panels, including these colorful limited-edition ones.

A photo of the Ikea Symfonisk Picture Frame Speaker on a wall next to a guitar and concert poster. — *Not everyone likes gadgets clashing with their home decor, and the Symfonisk Picture Frame Speaker is a great option for them.*

Behind the front piece of art are Sonos drivers and waveguides that help distribute sound from the picture frame speaker throughout a room. There are many possibilities and potential use cases for this thing: you can mount two picture frame speakers together on the same wall for surround sound with any Sonos soundbar. And when the TV’s off, they fit into the room better than any traditional speaker can.

Read my full review of the Symfonisk Picture Frame speaker.

The best time to buy Sonos products

One unfortunate thing about Sonos gear is that it rarely goes on sale. Occasionally the company will discount some products, but if you want to save money, your best bet is to shop the Sonos certified refurbished store. I also recommend checking your closest Best Buy(s) for open box speakers; you can land some excellent deals this way, and the products often look brand new.

Is it worth buying older Sonos speakers?

In general, I advise people to stick to the current lineup of Sonos hardware. But there are exceptions. For example, the second-generation Play:5 and Sonos Five sound identical and offer the exact same features. The newer model has more processing power, but that’s not going to matter to your ears, is it? If you can find the older speaker for the right price, go for it. You might also want to hunt down past products if you’re trying to form a stereo pair. But when it comes to other devices like the Beam soundbar, the second-gen model offers substantially better sound. There’s ample reason to pick the latest revision.

What about the Amp and Port?

If you want to retrofit your existing passive speakers and bring them into your whole-home Sonos system, that’s where the $699 Amp comes in. Sonos also sells the cheaper $449 Port that you can link to a receiver or other audio equipment for the same end result. The big difference between them is power: the Amp offers 125 watts per channel, so it’s able to power floor-standing or bookshelf speakers that lack their own amplification.

Sonos and privacy

While Sonos offers a selection of voice-enabled smart speakers, the company is very privacy conscious. The new Era 300 and 100 both include two ways of turning off the built-in microphones: there’s a button on top that temporarily mutes them, and if you want to fully disable the mics, there’s a physical switch on the back of each speaker for doing so. Sonos also sells “SL” models of its Arc soundbar (a Costco exclusive), Sonos One, and Roam that do not include microphones. When using Sonos Voice Control, all requests are processed locally on-device and not sent to the cloud.

Update October 9th, 2:00PM ET: The buying guide has been updated to replace the original Sonos Move with the newer Move 2.

California governor signs ban on social media ‘aiding or abetting’ child abuse

California Gov. Gavin Newsom talks to reporters after Republican primary debate — Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for “knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation” of children. It’s one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional.

Newsom’s office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California’s legislature in late September. The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that “knowingly” leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines “aiding or abetting” to include “deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation.” Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems.

As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users. Prominent supporters include the child-focused nonprofit Common Sense Media. But like many other online regulations, it raises questions about unintended side effects, including encouraging sites to under-enforce rules to avoid “knowingly” encountering illegal material or over-enforce them and remove innocuous content. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick likened the bill to “a kind of mini-California FOSTA,” referring to the widely criticized federal law that punished web platforms for content advertising sex services.

Tech industry trade associations TechNet and NetChoice raised concerns about the bill, with NetChoice urging Newsom in September to veto it. “Unfortunately, in the legislature’s desire to decrease CSAM online it passed a bill that imposes liability in a manner inconsistent with the First Amendment,” said NetChoice vice president and general counsel Carl Szabo.

Even so, AB 1394 has gotten less attention than a number of other California internet laws. Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) sued in September over AB 587, which requires sites to formulate and post plans for addressing hate speech. And NetChoice, which issued successful challenges to Texas and Florida social media moderation bans, convinced a judge to block the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act as unconstitutional last month. The organization did not immediately confirm to The Verge whether it’s planning a similar challenge to AB 1394.

Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries

Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.

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.

A side-by-side overhead photo of the Meta Quest 3 and 2. — *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 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.

A photo of two white controllers on a shiny metal background. — *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 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.

Two screenshots from the game Red Matter 2, showing the graphics. — *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.

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.

A screenshot of an alien craft coming through the ceiling, in the game First Encounter. — *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.

A screenshot of a scanned room in a Quest 3 headset. — *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.

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.

Two screenshots of a menu screen on the Quest 3, one in a bright room and one in a dark one. — *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

A close-up shot of the season 2 poster for Loki on Disney Plus. — *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.

Screenshots of the Loki season 2 poster with sections highlighted to show visual errors. — *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.”

A screenshot taken from Shutterstock of a spiraling clock stock image that appears to be AI-generated. — *Shutterstock doesn’t label the image as AI-generated, but does promote it as a “top choice” that’s in high demand.*

A screenshot taken from Shutterstock displaying images that are likely AI-generated. — *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.

A screenshot taken of the Loki season 2 poster on Apple’s App Store. — *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.

dimanche 8 octobre 2023

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

A screenshot of multiple Master Chiefs standing in front of a Warthog vehicle from Halo. — 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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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.

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

Apple Vision Pro headset on a stand photographed from a low angle. — 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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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!

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

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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