Your guide to the internet’s most (and least) important moments

Your guide to the internet’s most (and least) important moments

Image: William Joel / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 12, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome. I’m so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been testing the Superlist tasks app, reading about the high-stakes race to crack crypto wallets, rehearsing my case for buying an e-bike, taking voice notes like a boss with Whisper Memos, and avoiding all my problems by watching Between Two Ferns bloopers on YouTube.

I also have for you a new pair of AR glasses, a Netflix thriller, all the great sci-fi you could ever need, a great parenting app, a super-deep interview about Windows, a new puzzling platform, and a bunch more.

As always, of course, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What app should everyone be using? What movie / show / podcast / book / spaghetti recipe does everyone need to know about? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you want to get Installer in your inbox and a day early every week, subscribe here.

So much good stuff this week — let’s get into it.

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The Drop

• Internet Artifacts. Neal Agarwal’s whole website is an endless string of delightful games and other silly things, and this museum of important internet things — the first MP3, the first-ever “LOL,” footage from the web’s first webcam, Pizzanet, and much more — is some of his best work yet. So much cool stuff here I’d never seen before. (A lot of people sent this in this week, and with good reason — thanks to all who mentioned it!)
• The 2023 Hugo Awards. If you’re a science fiction fan, here’s your reading / viewing list for the next year or so. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (who is just Ursula Vernon under a pen name) won best novel; Samantha Mills’ Rabbit Test won best short story; The Expanse and Everything Everywhere All At Once and Dune and Andor are all among the nominees and winners. There’s so much good stuff here.
• Apple’s Journal app. iOS 17.2 is starting to roll out now, bringing with it the private-diary app Apple announced at WWDC this year. I’ve been playing with the app for a bit, and it’s… fine? Like, it is, in fact, a journal app. But I’m not quitting Day One yet.
• The Killer. You already know this about me, but I’m here for anything about spies and assassins and, in general, people who are both good and bad and don’t know where the lines are. I am also an unabashed David Fincher fan. This one’s in theaters now and on Netflix in two weeks, so, yeah, I’ll be keeping my outrageously expensive Netflix subscription a bit longer.
• Google Maps. I know, new app, super exciting, right? But Maps actually got a really useful update this week. I don’t care much about the immersive views, personally, but the better tools for EV charging and especially the improvements to the “what cool stuff is happening nearby” features are going to be super useful.
• The Leica M11-P. It’s $9,195, and I’m sure it’s fantastic because it’s a Leica. But I’m more interested in the built-in support for Adobe’s Content Authenticity tools, which sign and verify each image. In this increasingly messy AI-filled world, I love this idea.
• Alan Wake 2. A horror-story action game that’s also a detective thriller with a lot of super-weird storytelling that seems to add up to a coherent, fun, intense package? Sign me up. (Also, I officially have too many great games to play and not enough time. Please consider this my vacation request.)
• The Fight Over AI Music. The music industry is having to figure out its rules and norms about AI faster than just about anybody. Cleo Abram does a good job digging into how it all works and why it’s so complicated. And she asks a really important question that not a lot of people do: is any of this AI-generated stuff actually something we want?
• Xreal Air 2. There are basically two kinds of AR glasses right now. One type is the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which look cool but are all audio. These are the other kind: they’re a screen that goes on your face. That’s it. That’s the whole $400 idea. But… I kinda get it.
• “How Does AI Actually Work?” From our friends over at the Waveform podcast, this is a super accessible, thoughtful dive into what we mean when we talk about AI — and intelligence in general. It gets kinda deep!

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Pro tips

A couple of weeks ago, a lot of you told me you like the app Sequel for tracking all the movies, books, TV shows, and everything else you want to get to. Romain Lefebvre, the app’s developer, just launched Sequel 2.1 — which integrates with the discovery and scrobbling app Trakt, has a bunch more cast and crew info, and adds spoiler-avoidance features.

I asked Romain to give us some tips on how to use Sequel and, in general, how to make the most of a stuff-tracker app like his. Here’s what he said:

• Start with what you’re actually excited about. “Avoid the temptation to catalog everything you’ve ever consumed, as this can be overwhelming. First, focus on adding recent or upcoming releases you’re looking forward to. This will help you gauge if the app is right for you. Coming up blank? Explore works from the actors and directors of your favorite movies and series! If you use a service like Trakt, check if the app can sync with your account, as this will help you evaluate it even more easily.”
• Put the app one tap away. “Place the app where you can quickly add your friends’ recommendations or mark items as watched as soon as you finish them. Widgets are also a great way of surfacing recent releases and can serve as a quick entry point, too. (Sequel has a quick access widget to allow you to open up the search from your homescreen and lockscreen.)”
• Enable notifications. “Turn on notifications for new releases from your tracked list. These reminders not only keep you updated on exciting new content but also encourage you to track what you’ve recently consumed.”
• Regularly trim your list. “It’s easy to accumulate more than you can realistically consume. Avoid an overwhelming and stale backlog by periodically reviewing and removing items you’re unlikely to finish. (Sequel, for instance, allows you to archive a series and ‘abandon’ a book or game you don’t intend to finish, keeping your list realistic and up to date.)”

Be intentional with your choices. “Your tracker is a valuable tool to guide your media consumption. Avoid jumping into the first recommendation from a streaming service. Instead, take the time to browse your tracker and choose something that you really care about. This can also help you curb impulsive purchases by checking what games or books you already own before buying the latest bestseller.”

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Screen share

Alex Cranz, The Verge’s managing editor, loves terrible TV. Like, earnestly loves bad shows in a way that almost makes you forget that they’re bad — even though they’re definitely for sure bad. That is just one of many delightful things about Alex Cranz.

In addition to covering the streaming biz and spending an alarming amount of time defending The Morning Show to haters everywhere, Alex also keeps a lot of The Verge running in the right direction and on time. So I’ve always been curious how she manages the many things going on, seems to have always watched and played everything, and keeps it all straight. So I asked her to share with the class!

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

The phone: iPhone 14 Pro

The wallpaper: Remember those photos that went viral after a woman found them on an old roll of film? I thought they looked neat, so I made them my wallpaper. Turns out they were rejected images for an advertisement shoot.

The apps: I love flicking between pages on my phone, so my most used apps don’t necessarily mean the ones on the front page. Slack is where the work and group chats live, Outlook is where the email and calendars live, Carrot is where the weather lives, and Ulysses is there to remind me I should write more. I try to keep everything else in folders, which means I forget to open other texting and social media apps unless the notification pops when I’m looking at my phone. The only other apps I keep at the ready are Parcel, a great package tracking app; Storygraph, which is like if Goodreads was actually good; Wikipanion, because I like browsing Wikipedia articles when I’m bored; and Google Authenticator, because work.

As always, I also asked Alex to share a few things she’s into right now — bad TV shows ideally not included. Here’s what she came back with:

• Ugly Betty on Netflix. I’ve been rewatching it, because America Ferrera, and really enjoying how it accidentally explores two enormous transitions that happened in the late 2000s: the decline of print media and the rise of the phone as a do-everything device.
• He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan. It’s the sequel to She Who Became the Sun and is a queer fantasy retelling of the founding of the Ming dynasty. Parker-Chan is a part of this new class of fantasy writers that all seem to be asking, “What if more big violent fantasy sagas were centered on the experience of women and queer people?”
• For All Mankind. I know the fourth season of this Apple TV show isn’t available to most people yet, but I’m obsessed with the new season, which is set in 2003 on a rapidly commercializing base on Mars. If you’ve struggled to envision a near future where space mining matters, this show will help.

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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.

“The Quiche Browser is really great! You can rearrange the whole search bar area to your liking and also add / remove buttons to / from the search bar area in the settings and change the layout of all the buttons, too. You can also add a ‘reading time’ to the search bar area, which shows approximately how much time it would take you to read the page. You can edit every pop-up menu in the settings. You can customize the color of the search bar area. It’s a really great browser!” — Harun

“Not a new feature but one I just remembered and utilized: sometimes I use the iPad as a white noise machine for the kids when we’re traveling, but I was using a free app that would cut off after eight hours and wake them up early. I just remembered iOS 15 introduced ‘Background Sounds,’ so now I use that as a built-in white noise machine!” — Thaddaeus

“Bodies on Netflix so far has been rather interesting.” — James

“I decided to move away from the native Google keyboard (GBoard), seeking something new and refreshing. I remembered SwiftKey, the pioneer in gesture / flow input before Microsoft acquired it. Recently, Microsoft added Bing Chat to it, which was a pleasant surprise! It’s now effortless to modify tone and compose messages with various parameters like format and length without ‘leaving’ the keyboard. It feels revitalized, and I’ve adopted it as my main keyboard, much like a decade ago.” — Andriy

“I just recently learned about the TP-Link AV-2000 Powerline Adapter, and I think it’s exactly what I need to get a wired internet connection from my horribly placed router to my home entertainment center!” — Charles

“Worth a watch: a three-hour interview with Dave Cutler, ‘The Mind Behind Windows.’” – Michael

“The app that helped us through those first few months of parenthood was Nara Baby. Great design, highly customizable to choose what you want to track, and you can use it like a power user or more casual one. I still use it to keep track of my daughter’s height and weight and sometimes to track medicine use when she is sick.” — Jasper

“Apple’s Reminders app: now with columns! I just switched from paper to-do lists to this, and it’s kind of blowing my mind. I can add things from any device! I can mark them off anywhere. This is not an absurdly techie thing, but it’s made things easier for me.” — Will

“I’m absolutely loving Pikmin 4. During a crowded time for games, I keep going back to it over others. It’s great for newcomers and series fans alike. It’s gorgeous and has very chill vibes. A lot of time pressure from previous games has been removed and allows the player more freedom to complete levels and challenges.” — Bobby

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Signing off

Y’all. A new Taylor Swift album came out this week. CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT? I’ve spent the last 24-ish hours mostly streaming “Say Don’t Go” on repeat while also continuing to read and watch everything I can about what a phenomenon Swift has become. Bloomberg has a great data visual thing about her new billionaire status, The Wall Street Journal has a good look at what you might call the Taylor Swift Industrial Complex, The Eras Tour is still one of the biggest movies on the planet, TikTok is melting down trying to figure out who all the new songs are about, and honestly, no one on the planet makes a lyric video better than Taylor Swift.

You may not like her music (though you should), but there’s no denying that Taylor Swift is on pretty rare celebrity and artist ground here. And also, I mean, any excuse to listen to “Blank Space” 4,500 more times is fine by me.

See you next week!

Google researchers use off-the-shelf headphones to measure heart rate

Google researchers use off-the-shelf headphones to measure heart rate

Illustration: The Verge

Typical heart rate monitoring in wearable tech, like smart watches or wireless earbuds, relies at least partially on photoplethysmography (PPG), which uses light pulses to measure blood activity. It works generally well, but it has its limitations. Google scientists wrote in a new research blog spotted by 9to5Google yesterday that they had tried a different approach, called audioplethysmography (APG), that uses ultrasound to measure heart rate. And they did it with off-the-shelf active noise-canceling (ANC) earbuds and a software update.

The trick works by bouncing a low-intensity ultrasound signal off the inside of the ear canal and using the tiny microphone that helps make ANC work to detect skin surface perturbations as blood pumps through it. According to the blog, the technique was “resilient” even given a bad ear seal, differing ear canal size, or darker skin tones. That last one is notable since heart rate accuracy with darker natural skin tones or tattoos has been an ongoing problem with smartwatches and other wearables until now.

Image: Google

A gif illustrating audioplethysmography.

Google’s researchers also found the ultrasound approach worked fine when music was playing, but said that it had issues in noisy environments and that “the APG signal can sometimes be very noisy and could be heavily disturbed by body motion.” However, they found they could overcome the motion problem by using multiple frequencies and teasing out the most accurate signal among them.

In addition to commercially available earbuds, the researchers also used purpose-built prototypes to test the effect of microphone placement. The field study was performed with 153 participants. The researchers said the median error rate for heart rate and heart rate variability was 3.21 percent and 2.70 percent, respectively.

Heart rate monitoring headphones have been around for a while, but they use the PPG approach and can be very sensitive to intense movement or a bad fit.

Bear in mind that this is only a study and doesn’t mean Google is about to release headphones that do this (or update your Pixel Buds Pro to do it). Still, it hints at the company’s ideas as it makes more of an effort in the wearables space. If you want to read Google’s study in detail, you can download it on Google’s site.

Blue-Collar Workers Are the New Social Media Stars

Blue-Collar Workers Are the New Social Media Stars A new crop of popular social media personalities includes a trucker, a shepherd and a commercial fisherman. What they earn from sponsorships is just a nice bonus.

The jury finally hears from Sam Bankman-Fried

The jury finally hears from Sam Bankman-Fried

The royal “we.” | Photo Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Michael M. Santiago, Getty Images

He was an introvert!

It is honestly kind of incredible to watch a man torpedo his own credibility on direct testimony. We’re not even at the cross yet, and the judge has already instructed him to answer the question he’s being asked by his own lawyer.

The jury is watching all of this intently.

The main thing that’s been clear so far from Bankman-Fried’s testimony is that the man really loves the sound of his own voice. So far, the count of “Objection, narrative!” to Bankman-Fried’s answers, followed by “Sustained” is at three.

Also, sometimes when Bankman-Fried says “we,” he only means himself.

Yesterday, during an evidentiary hearing, Bankman-Fried was repeatedly scolded by Judge Lewis Kaplan for not answering prosecutor Danielle Sassoon’s questions on cross-examination. Today, Bankman-Fried was scolded by Kaplan for not answering his counsel Mark Cohen’s questions on direct examination. Bankman-Fried has also occasionally interrupted Cohen with “yes” and “yup.”

We spent a lot of the morning explaining vocabulary. I will spare you the full list, though I will say that explaining “Amazon Web Services” and “database” was a bit too detail-oriented. Then Bankman-Fried tried to define “market manipulation.” After Bankman-Fried gave his definition, Kaplan told the jury that he was the final authority on that, thanks.

In fairness to Bankman-Fried, he has been clearer and much easier to understand than he was at the evidentiary hearing yesterday. There was a minimum of word salad today. I don’t know if he was more relaxed, or he’d just been more rehearsed, but I will certainly be watching to see if he suddenly becomes much less coherent when Sassoon gets him for the cross.

Here is the story of FTX, from his point of view.

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Bankman-Fried, who informed us he’s “somewhat introverted, naturally,” gave us a rather prolonged tour of his pre-Alameda Research life, which I will skip. In 2017, during a crypto bull run, he started his cryptocurrency trading firm. He knew “basically nothing” about cryptocurrency at the time, he explained, but he wanted to do arbitrage on it anyway.

Alameda Research was named for Alameda County in California, which was where its first office was set up. As for its name, here’s what Bankman-Fried said on the stand:

Effectively, we wanted to be under the radar at that point in time. I didn’t want to call it Sam’s Crypto Trading Firm or anything like that. We — there are a lot of competitors and people who we didn’t particularly want to know what we were building out because they would race to do it. “Research” was a sort of generic word, which filled out the company name. And that was — it was far better than the internal name that we had at that point, which was Wireless Mouse.

I would find this much more believable if I hadn’t already watched a video of Bankman-Fried explaining on a podcast that the name made it easier to get a bank account. That happened during the first day of Gary Wang’s testimony. Bankman-Fried was there, too. You know who else was there? The jury.

Anyway, Bankman-Fried went on a hiring spree for Alameda. He rounded up his merry gang of alleged co-conspirators. First, Wang, to program the computers. Then, Nishad Singh, about a month after founding Alameda Research. Finally, Caroline Ellison.

Not having a risk team, when you are any kind of financial anything, is certainly a choice

Though Bankman-Fried was the CEO, and also the majority owner, he wanted to be clear: he did not supervise Wang’s direct work. Anyway, after a bunch of wildly successful arbitrage — 50 percent to 100 percent annualized returns, per his testimony — he decided to found a cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. He figured he’d fail; that there was only a 20 percent chance of success. Bankman-Fried did not define what he expected the time period to be on this estimate, but arguably 20 percent was a much higher chance of success than FTX would enjoy once Alameda dipped into the customer deposits.

By the way, because he was such a good guy, Bankman-Fried made a point of “periodically” handling support tickets himself. “I worried if I didn’t, I would lose touch with the actual concerns of the customers,” he testified. What he did not do was create a risk team, which he is now characterizing as a “big mistake.”

Risk is an inherent part of a futures exchange, which is even more like a casino than regular cryptocurrency. Not having a risk team, when you are any kind of financial anything, is certainly a choice. It is especially a choice when you go around telling everyone your crypto exchange is very good and safe.

FTX’s big selling point was its “risk engine,” which was supposed to prevent big losses that would then be spread around all the rest of the customers. But Bankman-Fried testified that in 2020, the “risk engine was effectively sagging under the weight” of the exchange’s rapid growth. So its time to liquidation went up — it took minutes to determine which accounts needed to be liquidated. As a result, at one point the risk engine got stuck in a catastrophic feedback loop that would have created losses in the “trillions of dollars,” Bankman-Fried testified. As part of that feedback loop, Alameda teetered on the brink of liquidation, which “would have disastrous consequences” for FTX.

“At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening.”

Because of that experience, Bankman-Fried suggested an “alert” or “delay” that would keep Alameda from being liquidated by a bug. This is the supposed origin story of “allow_negative,” which Bankman-Fried says was the eventual result of that conversation, and that he says he didn’t know about until very recently.

There is a problem with this story. “Allow_negative” was coded and switched on in 2019. I saw the code in court, and so did Bankman-Fried, who was also there for the testimony. Perhaps you are wondering, was the jury also there? Reader, it was.

Bankman-Fried denied he knew about the effectively infinite line of credit Alameda Research received from FTX. This argument was peculiar; essentially my take-away was that the CEO of a financial company simply didn’t pay attention to finances.

FTX couldn’t get bank accounts right away. Bankman-Fried anticipated it would take a year or two. Rather than wait, he decided to use Alameda as the “payment provider” for bank transfers. “My understanding at the time was that there were teams managing the process,” he said. “At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening.”

Well, sure, understandable! He’s an introvert!

Bankman-Fried definitely did not know that Singh, his employee, had backdated interest payments to get FTX “over the line” to $1 billion

In 2021, FTX was growing to millions of users, with $1 billion of revenue. Bankman-Fried said he worked 12 to 22 hours a day, and took one day off every couple of months. Because FTX had grown so much, he could no longer run both companies, he said. Bankman-Fried handed the company off to Caroline Ellison and Sam Trabucco, who immediately after being named co-CEO promptly drifted away to early retirement. (Quiet quitting king!) Bankman-Fried did remain involved in hedging and risk at Alameda, though.

About that $1 billion of revenue in 2021: Bankman-Fried definitely did not know that Singh, his employee, had backdated interest payments to get FTX “over the line” to $1 billion. See, he’d just asked his employees to check and see if there was any source of funds that was missing to get to $1 billion. This testimony was especially rambling.

Oh, also that MobileCoin loss? The one Wang said Alameda took to keep off FTX’s balance sheet? Yeah, so it was a totally innocent thing where what actually happened was that Bankman-Fried thought it was appropriate that Alameda take the position as a backstop liquidity provider, that’s all.

In June 2022, Bankman-Fried heard about the account called “fiat@ftx” tracking how much money Alameda owed to FTX, he testified. He did not know what it was and did not bother to find out. He was busy! That was when Bankman-Fried directed Ellison to repay Alameda’s lenders, because he thought Alameda was good for it. He also gave BlockFi and Voyager, two crypto lenders, some capital infusions for good measure.

He was “very surprised!”

Remember that testimony Adam Yedidia gave about a conversation with Bankman-Fried in August 2022 about the enormous amount of money Alameda owed FTX? Well, Bankman-Fried remembers it differently. See, Yedidia was just asking about Alameda’s risk profile, and Bankman-Fried wasn’t talking about insolvency at all.

Also, when Singh and Bankman-Fried had the dramatic balcony conversation at their penthouse, it was just that Singh thought Alameda’s liabilities had gotten too high, and FTX was spending too much money on marketing. But Bankman-Fried still thought that Alameda had more assets than liabilities, so it was all fine, and besides, if Singh thought he was going to be better at marketing, he could take it over. It didn’t have anything to do with the money Alameda owed FTX at all.

Of course not! Bankman-Fried didn’t learn about the $8 billion liability associated with Alameda until October 2022, he said. And he learned it all by himself, by looking at a computer database. When he found it, he was “very surprised!”

Besides the two obvious lies Bankman-Fried told on the stand — about Alameda Research’s name and about “allow_negative” — I have been struck by how little he seems to know about his own companies. Apparently, Singh, Wang, and Ellison were out there just doing whatever their little hearts desired. Because Bankman-Fried was a CEO, but definitely not the kind that pays any attention to money at his crypto trading firm and futures exchange.

We had to stop for the day, but I am very excited to hear on Monday about what new surprises Bankman-Fried will have in November 2022, when FTX falls.

Humane’s Ai Pin could cost $1,000 — and require a subscription

Humane’s Ai Pin could cost $1,000 — and require a subscription

Image: TED

The Ai Pin, the new gadget / wearable device / projector / thing from the secretive startup Humane, might cost as much as $1,000 and may require a monthly subscription for data, according to The Information.

The mysterious device has been in development for years, but we got our first good look at it during co-founder Imran Chaudhri’s presentation at TED this year. In the presentation, he used then unnamed device to accept a phone call, get information about where to buy a gift, translate a sentence that is then spoken in an AI-made version of his voice in French, and even get an opinion on whether he can eat a chocolate bar. It was an impressive demo, though we had a lot of questions about how it all worked.

As the November 9th launch of the device draws near, however, the shape of the Ai Pin is becoming clearer — and The Information’s report has some new details. (Including that the company moved to a November 9th announcement from a planned launch timed with the October 14th eclipse after reports that Sam Altman, Humane’s biggest shareholder, was in discussions with Jony Ive about some kind of AI gadget.)

The Ai Pin is “a small, screenless device about the size of a saltine cracker,” The Information reports, that will have “a camera, a microphone and speaker, a variety of sensors, and a laser projector.” You’ll attach it to your clothes magnetically (as seen in the device’s appearance at Paris Fashion Week). It will have a Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm that will give it “smartphone-level speed, connectivity, camera capabilities and security,” and Humane plans to be an MVNO so that it can sell cellular data that customers can use with the Ai Pin. (Humane co-founder Bethany Bongiorno described the Ai Pin this month as a standalone device that is a “phone, contextual computer, and software platform.”)

a stand-alone device.
a phone, contextual computer, and software platform.
built from the ground up for Ai. https://t.co/LVZz9YB8F8

— Bethany Bongiorno (@bella_bongiorno) October 5, 2023

The AI features in the Ai Pin will be powered by a proprietary large-language model, The Information says — which we kind of already knew from a short Time writeup that said the device uses “a mix of proprietary software and OpenAI’s GPT.” (A previous version of that article said the Ai Pin used GPT-4, but it that “4” is not present in the live version.) The Time piece also described a “Trust Light” privacy indicator that activates when the camera, microphone, or “input sensors” are on.

Our Ai Pin made the “@TIME Best Inventions” list. Thank you to our team, partners, and investors across the planet. See you on November 9th! https://t.co/S7xZsDFD32

— Humane (@Humane) October 24, 2023

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the device, or Humane’s future once it launches. But according to The Information’s sources, Humane has a grander vision than just the Ai Pin; “they suggested that Humane is hoping to create a total paradigm shift in consumer computing.” I’m a little skeptical about that one, but I guess we’ll see if Humane hints at that future when it shares more about the Ai Pin on November 9th.

Did A.I. Write Product Reviews? Gannett Says No.

Did A.I. Write Product Reviews? Gannett Says No. Writers and editors at Reviewed, a product recommendation website, say that the company used artificial intelligence to create reviews last week.

Ford hits the brakes on $12 billion in EV spending because EVs are too expensive

Ford hits the brakes on $12 billion in EV spending because EVs are too expensive

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Ford is postponing $12 billion in EV factory building, including a planned battery factory in Kentucky. The reasons given were an unwillingness by customers to pay extra for its electric vehicles. You see, they’re too expensive, and now Ford’s massive transformation into an EV company is now going to take a lot longer than before.

Ford’s EV business continues to lose money, around $1.3 billion this past quarter in adjusted earnings. So far this year, Ford has lost $3.1 billion on its EV spending and has said it’s going to lose a total of $4 billion for the year.

The Kentucky plant, a “mega campus” that builds lithium ion batteries for electric cars, would be put on hold

The Kentucky plant, a “mega campus” that builds lithium ion batteries for electric cars, will be put on hold. But its Blue Oval City project in Tennessee was still moving forward.

Ford’s not alone in all this, of course. General Motors is pushing back production of its new slate of electric trucks and SUVs. Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent a large chuck of his last earnings call moaning about interest rates. It’s rough out there right now.

Customers would probably agree. Most of the early adopters have, well, adopted, and the next tier of possible customers has enough sticker shock to keep their wallets closed. Ford has tried to address this with new releases like the F-150 Lightning Flash, a mid-priced trim of its electric truck. The company says that the customers will decide how many EVs it makes — and right now, that means tapping the brakes on big projects.

It’s not all bad news. Ford reached a tentative agreement with the United Auto Workers last night, being the first of the Big Three US automakers to get a deal. Sure, the strike cost it around $1.3 billion, and the company pulled its guidance for 2023 — meaning its not confident it can hit the targets it laid out earlier in the year.

Here is Intel’s new Bong-filled hip-hop hold music

Here is Intel’s new Bong-filled hip-hop hold music

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

I know, I know, my headline is a lot — but it’s true!

Intel, the chipmaker, has turned its iconic five-note Intel Bong sound mark into a piece of music that now greets investors, analysts, and journalists who tune in to the company’s earnings calls. It’s got a drum kit, record scratch, and everything:

“Wait, is that Intel?” asked my wife the moment the conference call hold music began playing over my speakers. Mission accomplished, I presume! Also... it’s kind of catchy?

Intel corp comms director William Moss confirms this is the first time the company’s used the tune.

In case you’re more interested in Intel’s future than its muzak, its Q3 2023 earnings call suggested it’s doing well! While sales aren’t exactly growing and the PC sales slump isn’t over just yet, the company made a second consecutive quarterly profit, in this case $310 million, and reported better results from nearly every business compared to last quarter.

Image: Intel

Intel’s Q3 2023 revenue.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says his customers already completed their inventory burn in the first half of the year (so perhaps the killer deals we’ve been seeing on PCs and components will subside?), and he spent a lot of time heralding an “AI PC” revolution. The word “AI” was uttered over 60 times on today’s call.

That’s far more often than Intel’s previous favorite phrase, “five nodes in four years,” though the latter got plenty of airtime as well. (Intel says the plan is still on track, with three customers lined up for Intel 18A as of now.)

Inside Google’s Plan to Stop Apple From Getting Serious About Search

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Valve officially releases SteamVR 2.0

Valve officially releases SteamVR 2.0

Image: Valve

Valve announced Wednesday that it has released SteamVR 2.0, launching the major update exactly a month after the surprise launch of the SteamVR 2.0 beta in September.

“In this release we’re bringing all of what’s new and exciting on the Steam platform into VR,” Valve says in a Steam post. “This is our first big step in a larger ongoing effort to better unify the Steam ecosystem for all users, providing a more consistent experience across devices. This update also allows us to add new Steam features in the future much faster and more frequently.”

SteamVR 2.0 has been a long time coming, with Valve saying in a 2019 year-in-review Steam post that it was “hard at work” on the update. Here are some of Valve’s highlights for what you’ll find in SteamVR 2.0, which match pretty closely to what Valve pointed to in September:

Most of the current features of Steam and Steam Deck are now part of SteamVR

Updated keyboard with support for dual-cursor typing, new languages, emojis, and themes

Integration of Steam Chat and Voice Chat

Improved Store that puts new and popular VR releases front and center

Easy access to Steam notifications

Interestingly, the update arrived without any sort of announcement of new hardware — Valve is rumored to be working on some kind of new VR headset, though it’s unclear what form it might take. A mystery gadget passed radio certification in South Korea in September, which could point toward a potentially imminent hardware announcement of some sort, VR headset or not. And Valve has also reportedly been developing a standalone VR headset codenamed “Deckard,” which, if released, would compete with Meta’s standalone Quest VR headsets.

Honor says its new phone lets you open apps with your eyes

Honor says its new phone lets you open apps with your eyes

The Magic Capsule technology is coming to Honor’s next flagship. | Image: Honor

We were expecting — and we got — a lot of talk about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm’s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. But the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship came with a surprising detail: it includes a feature that lets you interact with the device using your eyes. With some notable concerns about privacy implications, it looks kinda cool.

The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this technology will look like, showing a woman looking at her phone with a snippet of the Uber app running at the top of the screen — something like a Live Activity. By changing the direction of her gaze, she opens the app in full.

Honor calls the technology Magic Capsule, and describes it as “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction,” which is more descriptive but less fanciful than Magic Capsule.

Image: Honor

What if your phone just did your bidding based on your gaze? That would rule.

It’s one feature on the upcoming Magic 6 that will also feature a virtual assistant that utilizes Qualcomm’s on-device AI. You can ask it to do things like gather all the videos on your device that meet a certain criteria, whittle them down by other characteristics, and have it generate a new video highlighting your clips. We’re going to see a lot more of that kind of thing in the near future, too, because this year’s Snapdragon Summit is All About AI. We were 15 minutes into the main keynote before 5G was even uttered once, for the record.

Whether — and how — Magic Capsule works is a question mark. The demo video is hardly a real-life representation, and it seems like a feature with the potential to introduce more frustration than it’s worth. The “multi-modal” descriptor seems to indicate that gaze is just one input in the system, so it could be coupled with other gestures to work reliably —perhaps like how we’ve seen PSVR 2 games use eye-tracking to highlight things before you click to confirm. Also: do you want your phone to know where you’re looking? It’s no small issue when you’re talking about a state-backed company like Honor.

All of that aside, it’s nice to see device OEMs pushing for advances in how we use our phones that don’t begin and end with an AI chatbot. Reliable eye-tracking technology would have some real accessibility benefits, and it’s not entirely out of left field. It could be handy for moments when your hands are full — Apple certainly seems to think there’s a need for new ways of controlling your devices.

Honor hasn’t said specifically when the Magic 6 will ship, but Qualcomm says that phones with its new flagship chipset will start arriving in the coming weeks.

What the U.S. Has Argued in the Google Antitrust Trial

What the U.S. Has Argued in the Google Antitrust Trial As the government wraps up its case in the landmark monopoly trial, it has built a picture of how Google became dominant in online search — and the harms that it says resulted.

Microsoft now thirstily injects a poll when you download Google Chrome

Microsoft now thirstily injects a poll when you download Google Chrome

Microsoft Edge now pops up a poll after you press the “Download Chrome” button. | Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Google Chrome download in Microsoft’s Edge web browser? How many times will the company try to steer me away?

Let’s check!

One:

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

“There’s no need to download a new web browser,” reads the top of a search for “Chrome download” in Microsoft Edge.

Two:

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

“Microsoft edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft,” reads a pop-up that appears after you land on Google’s site.

Three:

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

“We love having you! Can you please take a minute to tell us why you are trying another browser?” reads a new pop-up poll.

Four:

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

“Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft,” reads an injected ad that appeared after my download.

Four.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

To be fair, it did appear after the download was finished.

The pop-ups are nearly two years old, and the injected ads are from earlier this year. The poll seems to be new, though — Neowin reports it first saw the poll last weekend.

But hey, it could be worse:

I cannot believe how many stories we’ve written about the shit Microsoft has pulled to steer you away from Chrome. Even today, the company still won’t always respect your choice of default browser, though that may finally be changing in the EU.

Sadly the poll doesn’t include an “I’m boycotting Edge because you don’t respect me as a user” option.

Apple is reportedly planning to turn the TV app into the streaming hub it always wanted

Apple is reportedly planning to turn the TV app into the streaming hub it always wanted

The Apple TV app’s ambitions have always been huge. | Image: Apple

Apple appears to be working on a revamp of its TV app that the company hopes will turn it into users’ go-to place for all their shows, movies, and more. A new Bloomberg report says Apple is planning to remove its apps for buying and renting content and bundle that with its streaming content, channel-subscription options, and more. The new app could launch as early as this December on the Apple TV box, across Apple’s other platforms, and on the other TV operating systems the Apple TV app is available on. (The fact that the Apple TV is distinct from the Apple TV app, which is not the same as Apple TV Plus, and that “Apple TV is available on Roku” is a technically true phrase never fails to blow my mind. These names! But I digress.)

In a sense, there’s actually nothing new about this strategy. Apple has long wanted the TV app to be the place users went not just to find Apple’s own content but to find, subscribe to, and manage everything else. Remember that famous quote where Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he’d “finally cracked” the future of TV? Jobs imagined a TV that didn’t have complicated remotes or countless inputs and that had “the simplest user interface you could imagine.” Apple hasn’t yet built a TV set, but this forthcoming update to the TV app appears to carry on that spirit. (Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.)

Some of that spirit is already present in the current TV app. You can open it to see recommendations from multiple streaming services, and you can use the app to subscribe directly to other streaming services — giving Apple a cut in the process, of course. By combining the iTunes collection of shows and movies, Apple can make the TV app a place worth going even more often.

Image: Apple

Apple imagines the Vision Pro as the future of TV — and that requires a TV app.

One reason for Apple to try and make its streaming dreams come true: the impending launch of the Vision Pro headset, which is many things but is most of all a television. The TV app is likely to be prominently placed in users’ headsets as they’re learning new interfaces and new behaviors; not all third-party apps are going to be there immediately, and that could give Apple a chance to build the kind of viewer habit few other apps have created.

The problem with this vision, of course, is that it’s just about impossible to pull off. Content providers have been reluctant to make their data and content available outside their own apps, preferring to keep users inside their own universes. (Netflix would much rather you find the new Great British Baking Show season by opening Netflix than by searching in the TV app.) As more services become ad-supported, too, they’re going to be even more competitive for your watch time. Apple’s Channels strategy has had ups and downs, too; a number of big services, even those like Max that were once available on the platform, no longer are. Many have tried to make the “universal streaming guide” work, and none have succeeded. Not even Apple.

The problem with Apple’s vision is that it’s just about impossible to pull off

Apple does have some important advantages here, though. The Apple TV Plus streaming service has become a surprise power player, churning out hit shows and critically acclaimed ones, with titles like Killers of the Flower Moon coming soon to the service. The MLS streaming service has evidently been a huge success for the company, too. As a result, many users are already accustomed to opening the TV app to find content.

For all the complications and setbacks, the dream of a better streaming experience just won’t die in the tech industry. And Apple, perhaps most of all — the company that revamped music buying with iTunes, made a fortune with the App Store, and is, in general, better than anybody at selling you content and collecting its commission — just can’t stop trying to make it work.

Automattic is acquiring Texts and betting big on the future of messaging

Automattic is acquiring Texts and betting big on the future of messaging

Texts is a messaging app... for all your messaging apps. | Image: Texts

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a number of other popular web properties, just made a different kind of acquisition: it’s buying Texts, a universal messaging app, for $50 million.

Texts is an app for all your messaging apps. You can use it to log in to WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and more and see and respond to all your messages in one place. (Beeper is another app doing similar things.) The app also offers some additional features like AI-generated responses and summaries, but its primary purpose is to unify your many inboxes into a single interface.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, says Texts is not just a product acquisition but also the beginning of a huge new investment for the company. So far, he says, Automattic’s two main areas of focus have been on publishing and commerce — now, messaging is the company’s third pillar. “I like to pick areas I feel are so fundamental to the human condition that I can work on this the rest of my life,” he says. “Self-publishing, commerce, and messaging covers a good chunk of all human activity, and they’re also three areas where I think an open-source solution is necessary for the long term.”

In that long term, Mullenweg says he’s bullish on solutions like Matrix, which offers a decentralized and open-source messaging network, and other up-and-coming standards for messaging. He’s already thinking about how Texts might gently nudge people toward more open protocols over time. But for now, “I think the most user-centric thing to do is not try to pick one of those standards and force people into it, but actually support them all and let the market and users decide.”

“I think the most user-centric thing to do is not try to pick one of those standards and force people into it”

Mullenweg points to two other things he likes about Texts in particular. First, its founder, Kishan Bagaria: “Kishan is, I think, a generational tech genius who we’ll be talking about for many decades to come,” Mullenweg says. The second is Texts’ security model, which relies on on-device encryption rather than storing a copy of all your messages in the cloud. “Just as an engineer, I can’t ethically support” the cloud-first model, Mullenweg says. He also thinks the cloud security model might give existing messaging apps a reason to shut down Beeper and other attempts at interoperability. “I think the argument that there shouldn’t be interop is more difficult to make, politically, especially with regulators,” he says. “But the technical argument for why it’s not as secure is a good one for why to block things.”

The first thing the Texts team will do at Automattic, it seems, is finish its mobile app. “To do this on mobile with push notifications, and efficient battery, and everything, is pretty tricky,” Mullenweg says. “But I think we’ve cracked it in a way that maintains all the end-to-end encryption, and where Automattic has no access to your keys, your anything.” Right now, Texts is a $15 a month power-user tool, but Mullenweg says that could change over time. “There might be some limited free version in the future,” he says. “But if you’re serious about this, you’ll want the paid — for less than like the price of one streaming service or two cups of coffee a month, you’ll get something that you’ll be able to use for hours a day.”

Mullenweg and Automattic see a big future for messaging, as more online interaction shifts away from public-first social networks and toward things like group chats. Hardly anyone has figured out how to build a meaningful and sustainable business from chat, but Mullenweg thinks it’s possible. And he thinks it starts with making your messaging a little less messy.

Stop, Before You Close This Tab (or Any Others) …

Stop, Before You Close This Tab (or Any Others) … Think of your browser like an ongoing autobiography. Why would you ever delete it?

Qualcomm’s next big Snapdragon chip has leaked, and it’s full of AI features

Qualcomm’s next big Snapdragon chip has leaked, and it’s full of AI features

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The next big Snapdragon chip headed to Android phones is likely to be announced this week — and details have leaked early revealing a heavy focus on AI. According to MSPoweruser, Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will support some handy and creative AI camera tools, including the ability to remove objects from videos, expand areas of a photo, and generate fake backgrounds.

The leaked marketing materials also boast about the chip’s ability to run various AI models, including both Stable Diffusion and Meta’s Llama 2. Making that happen is supposed to be an upgraded Hexagon neural processor, which the leaked document says is 98 percent faster (presumably than last year’s processor, but the image doesn’t clarify). Qualcomm showed off the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2’s ability to run Stable Diffusion back in February, but the company seems to be making AI execution more of a focus on the Gen 3 given the year AI tech is having.

This chip is likely headed first to Samsung’s Galaxy S24 line, which is expected in the first quarter of 2024. As Qualcomm’s flagship mobile chip, it’ll appear in other top-of-the-line Android phones throughout the year, with the notable exception of Google’s Pixel line, which relies on the company’s own Tensor processors. Qualcomm’s AI focus makes the stakes high for Google to do a good job with its Tensor chips since its ability to develop custom AI features is a key reason the company decided to move away from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has a bunch of other updates in store for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that go beyond AI. The leaked materials promise a 30 percent faster CPU, a 25 percent faster GPU, support for 240fps gaming, improved ray tracing, night vision video capture, and Dolby HDR photo capture. 5G Advanced support is supposed to be included, too, so maybe your 5G connection will actually start to feel 5G this time.

You can view the whole sheet of leaked specs at MSPoweruser. Qualcomm should officially announce the chip tomorrow at its Snapdragon Summit. The company is hosting an event starting October 24th at 3AM ET / 12AM PT.

Matter 1.2 is a big move for the smart home standard

Matter 1.2 is a big move for the smart home standard

New device types, including robot vacuums, smoke alarms, washing machines and refrigerators are coming to Matter. | Photo Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

One year in, and Matter is adding support for fridges, robot vacuums, smoke alarms, and more. It’s a major step toward a complete smart home, but success hinges on platform and manufacturer follow-through.

Matter — the IOT connectivity standard with ambitions to fix the smart home and make all of our gadgets talk to each other — has hit version 1.2, adding support for nine new types of connected devices. Robot vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines, and dishwashers are coming to Matter, as are smoke and CO alarms, air quality sensors, air purifiers, room air conditions, and fans. It’s a crucial moment for the success of the industry-backed coalition that counts 675 companies among its members. This is where it moves from the relatively small categories of door locks and light bulbs to the real moneymakers: large appliances.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the organization behind Matter, released the Matter 1.2 specification this week, a year after launching Matter 1.0, following through on its promise to release two updates a year. Now, appliance manufacturers can add support for Matter to their devices, and ecosystems such as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings can start supporting the new device types.

Yes, this means you should finally be able to control a robot vacuum in the Apple Home app — not to mention your wine fridge, dishwasher, and washing machine.

You should finally be able to control a robot vacuum in the Apple Home app

The initial feature set for the new device types includes basic function controls (start / stop, change mode) and notifications — such as the temperature of your fridge, the status of your laundry, or whether smoke is detected (see sidebar for more).

Robot vacuum support is robust — remote start and progress notifications, cleaning modes (dry vacuum, wet mopping), and alerts for brush status, error reporting, and charging status. But there’s no mapping, so you’ll still need to use your vacuum app if you want to tell the robot where to go.

Air purifiers and air quality sensors are also interesting additions. Currently, support across platforms for air purifiers is spotty, and products are expensive. Matter supports a wide range of air quality sensors (see sidebar) plus location for sensors, so individual sensors placed around a home can feed data to a device like an air purifier, HVAC system, or a connected oven hood.

What do these new Matter devices mean for your smart home?

Most smart appliances already provide most functions Matter supports, but they’re siloed in each manufacturer’s app. With Matter, you should be able to connect them to your smart home platform of choice, unlocking intriguing automation options.

While it’s possible today to get your lights to flash when your laundry is done, turn a light red when your fridge’s temperature rises, or shut off the HVAC system if the smoke alarm goes off, it can be complicated to set up and often wholly unreliable. You need to download multiple apps, maybe buy a sensor or two, deal with laggy cloud integrations, and worry about whether your washer is even compatible with your smart home app in the first place. With Matter support, this type of simple command and control should be much easier to implement in any ecosystem.

The future potential is also interesting, bringing into play the ambient smart home many companies are pursuing, where devices can talk to each other to take action on our behalf without us really having to get involved.

Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA, gave this example: “With more aggregate data and more information, we can see more interaction between devices,” he says. “With an edge AI engine to take care of it, if an air quality sensor senses something, then your favorite voice assistant platform can kick off the robot vac, boost the air purifier, and maybe hold off on the laundry and the dishwasher to save energy while the other devices are working.”

With manufacturers like Whirlpool, Panasonic, LG, Haier (which owns GE Appliances), and more all part of Matter, the potential is there for a broad implementation across home appliances. In particular, backward compatibility. I, for one, am not planning on buying all new appliances.

David Bean of Whirlpool told me it plans to implement Matter across all of its connected products in all of its brands. This includes KitchenAid, Maytag, and Hotpoint. While, initially, the ability to get notifications from your appliance across your smart home will be useful, “for us, it’s all about the possible abilities that are going to exist once we get Matter out there,” he said. “How we work with automations and scenes and how we build upon those and take digital experiences in the home to the next level.”

However, he didn’t share a timeline for when Whirlpool will implement Matter in any of its products. And while it’s just fridges, dishwashers, and washers today, “we see Matter going across the whole kitchen and laundry space,” he said.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

The release of Matter 1.0 arrived with a number of product announcements, including smart plugs and motion sensors like those pictured. Matter 1.2 arrives with none.

More Matter, but no new products

A benefit of Matter for manufacturers is being able to focus efforts on products and features and not have to build support for multiple protocols or ecosystems or even necessarily make an app. (If you’ve spent much time with the app for your dishwasher or coffee maker, you’ll know what a blessing that will be). An appliance can work with one or multiple Matter ecosystems with just Matter connectivity built in.

It’s not a requirement of Matter to support every device type

Assuming, that is, that the smart home ecosystems support the new device types. It’s not a requirement of Matter to support every device type, and while most currently support most devices, not all support all functions.

We don’t know yet if or when Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings will add support for everything Matter has announced with 1.2, but judging by the responses I got when I asked them, it’s not going to be anytime soon.

Amazon’s Chris DeCenzo told me the company plans to add support “over time.” “We’re working with partners to support the new device types included in the Matter 1.2 spec while maintaining our high bar for the customer experience with Alexa,” he said. Taylor Lehman at Google Home said, “We’re working hard to add more support for Matter devices to our ecosystem ... this will take time.” I also reached out to Samsung SmartThings and Apple but neither provided an answer.

However, Paulus Schoutsen of Home Assistant told me he expects support to be added to his platform soon. “We’ve already started testing with the new 1.2 version and working with the community and Matter device manufacturers,” he said. He also added that each new device type Matter supports “can be the reason for a manufacturer to adopt Matter, resulting in another private option for our users.” While manufacturers and ecosystems can leverage the cloud for additional features and remote control, it’s not a requirement.

The launch of Matter 1.2 isn’t coming with a slew of device announcements. I reached out to several companies that are members of the CSA and make products in these categories to see if they were announcing any new integrations. iRobot (makes of Roomba robot vacuums) and Resideo (owners of First Alert smoke alarms) said they had nothing to share, and Dyson (vacuums and fans), Google Nest (Nest Protect smoke alarm), and Samsung didn’t respond before publication.

Even the ever-eager Eve, which has been at the forefront of Matter adoption, told me it had nothing to announce. All this means we will likely not see new devices until early 2024. While it’s possible that over-the-air updates to existing gadgets could be implemented sooner, it’s not likely. Many of those updates promised with 1.0 took a long time to arrive, and some never did.

Robot vacuum maker Roborock did say it’s working to support Matter as a top priority. “Though the partnership is still ongoing and a timeline is not solidified, we foresee that Matter support will be integrated into our models as soon as the first half of 2024,” Marcus Lai of Roborock told me.

He said the integration will roll out in phases, with certain models getting support sooner, either built-in when you buy it or via a firmware update. The other big robot-vac manufacturer, Ecovacs, told me it’s planning to add Matter to its new products. Spokesperson Daniel Turk said the company is “working hand-in-hand with the CSA to integrate Matter into upcoming Deebots.”

While more device types are a good thing to help push the standard forward, there are still several big holes to fill. Matter now supports over 20 categories, including door locks, thermostats, smart lighting, security sensors, and smart shades. But cameras are still missing, as are security systems, two large components of the smart home today. Plus, there are more home appliances that need to be added, including a big one: ovens.

Image: Nuki

European smart lock maker Nuki was instrumental in adding the “unlock without pulling the latch” feature to the Matter spec.

One new feature and multiple more attempts to make Matter “just work”

Another important omission from the new release: new features for existing devices. We’re still waiting on support for dynamic lighting effects (including adaptive lighting) and energy management, both of which the CSA has said are on the roadmap. These are features that will really help make Matter, well, matter to smart home users.

The only notable new consumer-facing feature in Matter 1.2 is one that adds support for smart door locks that use a latch system, a common type in Europe. There are also several new building blocks that should make it easier for developers and platforms to work with Matter devices and add more device types in the future.

These include allowing devices to describe their appearance in Matter ecosystems (i.e., “I’m a bronze door lock” or “I’m a brown light switch”), the addition of semantic tags (which could help with things like energy management and support for smart buttons), and support for generic operational states (to make it easier to add certain new device types in future). The full spec can be viewed here.

Along with the new spec, the CSA also announced an effort called Ecosystem to Ecosystem that will address the “initial challenges of multi admin,” the biggest being that it doesn’t work half the time.

Chris LaPré, head of technology at the CSA, explained to me that the effort is designed to fix the problem of ecosystems not directly communicating, i.e., an Apple HomePod won’t talk to a Google Nest Hub. “Currently, the solution is multi admin, where, say, I’m a smart switch, I’m going to talk to both separately,” says LaPré. “With Ecosystem to Ecosystem, if I pair my smart switch to both sides and then I change it to ‘kitchen light’ on this side, it should make it ‘kitchen light’ on the other side.” The groundwork is in place to allow this better interoperability, says LaPré, but they are still working on its implementation.

Will more device types move Matter forward?

New device types should bring much-needed momentum to Matter and address the complaints of some existing smart home users that it has yet to add much to the experience other than headaches. But this hinges on manufacturers adding it to their products.

The resistance to adopting Matter seems to be growing. We’re a year in, and companies who initially said they would keep an eye on Matter with a view to adopting it still haven’t (Lutron being a notable one here). Some who seemed fully on board from the outset have slowed down or even completely stopped their development, pulling a Wemo.

Despite being a top-tier Matter member, Resideo still hasn’t adopted Matter in its products, such as the Honeywell T9 thermostat. It also owns one of the largest smoke alarm companies, First Alert, and I would love to see some better connectivity options in smoke alarms.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Samsung is all in on its smart home automation platform SmartThings and all in on Matter, promoting both heavily at the IFA tech conference earlier this year. But its appliances are not yet part of the new standard.

One issue is the inherent tension between Matter’s role in creating an even playing field — it’s removed interoperability as a hindrance but also a selling point. Companies now need to create enough differentiation to compel the customer to pick them.

Matter also has competition. Resideo is very active with the Home Connectivity Alliance, a rival slash potentially symbiotic organization to Matter working to have large appliance manufacturers connect and control each other’s devices through their own apps. It has wide adoption among the big appliance manufacturers, including LG, Haier, Samsung, and Electrolux (Whirlpool is not a member; Bean told me they are watching it closely).

The HCA’s approach is more appealing to these companies as it keeps everything in the manufacturer’s proprietary ecosystems and maintains the cloud connection, a valuable funnel for data. When I asked LG which product categories it planned to add Matter support to, Lea Lee of Global Corporate Communications told me she couldn’t share any specifics but that “we’ll keep working closely with members of industry groups to create positive impacts for customers.” Like Samsung’s TVs, LG’s webOS-based TVs are capable of being Matter controllers, but not Matter devices controllable by other ecosystems.

Samsung is leading the HCA. When I spoke to Jaeyeon Jung, global head of SmartThings, at the IFA 2023 tech conference, I asked if the company planned to make any of its appliances Matter device types. “Samsung devices already connect to SmartThings and with HCA we give an option for others to use Samsung devices through our partner’s apps,” she said. “So, we’ll see, we’ll wait and see.”

Samsung is one of Matter’s biggest supporters through its smart home platform SmartThings, and LG has “played a key role in the development and standardization of Matter,” according to Lee. But if neither company adds its large suite of connected appliances to Matter, they’ll kneecap the initiative before it’s jumped its first hurdle.

Tinder now lets mom pick your next date

Tinder now lets mom pick your next date

Now your mom and dad can help you find your next potential partner and stop dunking on your questionable dating choices. | Image: Tinder

If you’re the kind of person who asks friends and family for help with your love life, Tinder is aiming to make things a little easier by letting them suggest potential partners for you directly within the app. Tinder’s new Matchmaker feature lets users invite their loved ones, regardless of whether they have a Tinder profile or not, to view and recommend potential matches, essentially integrating a “friend test” into the dating app.

Tinder Matchmaker is available now in 15 countries including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Germany, with a global rollout expected “in the coming months.” Users can start a Matchmaker session either directly from a profile card, or within the app settings — creating a link that can be shared with up to 15 friends or family members. Participating loved ones (or ‘matchmakers’) then have 24 hours to recommend profiles before the session expires. Matchmakers cannot chat or send messages to potential dates on behalf of the user who invited them.

Image: Tinder

My friend’s tastes are just as poor as mine, but here’s hoping you have better luck!

Once the Matchmaker session expires, the Tinder user can then review which potential dating candidates their loved ones have suggested. Profiles liked by the matchmakers will be marked as a “recommendation” but the Tinder user who invited them still has the final say on who to officially ‘like’ in the app. Tinder says that profiles marked as nope by matchmakers won’t change.

If your friends and family are anything like mine then I can see Matchmaker being used more for trolling than to actually help your love life, but it’s still a neat feature for folks who need to vibe-check their dates. According to a study commissioned by Tinder, over 75 percent of young singles discuss their dating habits multiple times a month with their friends, so this just optimizes the process a little. And if you’re down on your luck anyway, why not let your grandma vet your next date?