Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 126, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I need 10 or 15 skirts from Calvin Klein, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

Happy Ruthless Self-Promotion Week! We’re dedicating almost all of this issue to the stuff we’ve been making recently. Personally, I’ve been reading about the Tesla diner and Dwarkesh Patel and The Rest Is History, starting a Ted Lasso rewatch to get ready for season 4, watching a robot injure Joanna Stern, continuing down the rabbit hole of gorgeous Japanese stationery, wondering if those cool shoes would also help me run a sub-two-hour marathon, following lots and lots of folks from Chris Plante’s great list of games media, and hunting for the perfect recipe for Rice Krispies Treats. I know it’s out there somewhere.

I also have for you a new gaming controller, a bunch of fun stuff to watch this weekend, a couple of interesting AI-y things, and a lot of feelings about how we use technology. Let’s get to it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / scouring estate sales for this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

• The Steam Controller. I really respect the way Valve just understands what its users want. In this case, users want a super comfortable, outrageously customizable $99 controller that can be used in basically whatever bonkers way you can imagine. Sounds like we all would tweak the joysticks a little, but that Valve basically nailed this.
• The Devil Wears Prada 2. I swear, this and Hokum have all the makings of a Barbenheimer-style doubleheader. And if you don’t get to a theater this weekend for what is evidently a pretty solid sequel, at least watch the original Devil Wears Prada this weekend. Holds up.
• Widow’s Bay. All my TV-nerd friends have been waiting with bated breath for this new Apple TV show, and apparently it delivers. Funny and scary in equal measure is very hard to pull off, and I’m thrilled Matthew Rhys and co. are going straight on my watchlist. 
• Zed. I’ve been hearing good things about this super-fast code editor for a while, and it finally officially launched. Some interesting AI integrations in here, but really its job is to work everywhere and never ever slow down. On that front, it seems to be a hit.
• Talkie. Such a cool idea: a large language model exclusively trained on text from before 1931, with all the trappings of modern AI interaction but no knowledge of the modern world. These “vintage models” are starting to become a thing, and they’re a fascinating way to interact with history.
• “I’m done renting my digital life.” Really great video in which Iskren gets fed up with all the subscriptions in his life, and tries to go hard into physical media, self-hosting, and more. It’s fascinating! And hard! And expensive!
• John Oliver on AI chatbots. I know, I know, more John Oliver, surprise. But I feel like I’ve been screaming into a void that AI chatbots are not your friends, should not be your friends, dear lord stop treating them like friends, and Oliver does that and more in an extremely fun and thoughtful way.
• Saros. A brutally difficult game in which you try to stop a bad tech company from taking over a planet to strip it of its resources — a little too on the nose for our present times, maybe? Still, it’s a solid follow-up to Returnal that I suspect will make a lot of people happy.
• Cursor Camp. A new John Oliver thing and a new Neal.fun thing? What a week! I don’t even really know how to explain this one. It’s a little Club Penguin-y, in the most delightful way. I played this way longer than I planned.
• Lovable’s mobile app. A lot of y’all out in the Installerverse have told me you’re using Lovable for vibe-coding projects. Now there’s an app for Android and iOS, so you can make mobile apps with your mobile apps. 

Screen share

For the last several weeks, I’ve spent a lot of my free time (and a lot of my work time, let’s be honest) messing around in Claude Code to build myself a productivity tool. For a while, I thought I’d build a whole to-do list system from the ground up; that fell apart by about the third feature. Ditto the Google Keep-meets-Obsidian thing I was trying to build. But then I had an epiphany: What if I treated all these tools like infrastructure, let them handle all the hard technical work, and built myself a UI I loved? I could handle that. And more importantly, $20 a month of Claude Code could handle it.

I call it Daily, because it doesn’t need a better name, because it’s just for me. Here’s what it looks like:

I use it on the web on my computer, and through an iOS app I just managed to get functional the other day. Basically the way it works is this: I connect the app to Google Calendar and Todoist, and it shows me everything I have to do today. Another tab is synced to Raindrop, which shows a simple list of everything I’ve bookmarked in reverse chronological order, plus buttons to quickly delete a link or move it to a specific folder. Just being able to see all this stuff in one place, in a way I find visually pleasing, was kind of the whole ballgame.

The other thing it does is input: This app has a single window through which I can create a task (which syncs to Todoist), an event (to Google Calendar), or a note (which creates a text file that immediately gets picked up in Obsidian). After years of fiddling with apps like Drafts and Raycast to build this kind of universal capture system, I finally have one that works exactly the way I wanted it to.

I’m still “using” all the same apps as before, and paying for most of them, it’s just that now I have a way to see them all at once, and interact with them all the same way. It has gone a long way toward taming the chaos of my day-to-day planning. And all it took was approximately 450,000 hours of copying and pasting error logs into Claude Code — I didn’t create this thing so much as bugfix it into existence. But it works, mostly, and it’s working great for me.

Crowdsourced

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asking you to share the things you’ve been making recently. Apps, games, albums, crochet projects, anything and everything. This newsletter only works because you share the things you’re into, so I figure every once in a while we should just turn this place into a bit of Installerverse show and tell. 

Thank you to everyone who wrote in! There’s no space here to feature nearly all the cool ideas I’ve seen this week, so we’re going to have to do this again. Here’s a whole bunch of my favorites so far. (I’ve done my best to vet these, but as always, and especially in this vibe-coded moment in which we find ourselves, you should click and use and try everything on the internet with caution.)

“I’m a lawyer, and I had an important order due to be released sometime on a Friday afternoon — I figured there must be a way to automate checking for that order. And from that little python script (thank you Kagi AI) grew SCOTUSWatch (with Claude Code’s help). The iOS (App Store), Windows (Microsoft Store), and Android (sideload) apps all receive push notifications of new opinions and orders from an AWS Lambda instance that scrapes the Supreme Court’s website on a calendar-aware schedule. The iOS and Windows apps also get optional brief AI summaries (the Android app is currently notification-only). The AWS code also writes to a Bluesky bot (just because it can).” — Scott

“I host Business of Tech, a daily podcast covering the business side of the technology industry — not the consumer stuff, but the companies and people who actually run the tech that keeps businesses alive. Think managed service providers, IT service companies, the vendors who build for them.” — Dave

“Just a few months ago I launched my app Cross. Cross is a to-do app that syncs to Notion. And makes it so much easier and faster to create a task in Notion.” — Luis

“One of my favourite things is grab & go food, in particular Itsu and its fresh sushi. As a youthful spendthrift artiste, I particularly enjoyed their ‘everything is half price 30 minutes before we close’ policy. But since all the (almost 50) outlets have different opening hours, it was always a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you were near one that was closing when you’re hungry fo sweet sweet soosh. My Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank) dream was an app that could tell me where and when the 50% bargs were available. And then Claude Code was born and made my dumb little dream come true!” — Simon

“I made Buena Vida Run Club. It’s Strava + MyFitnessPal + Runna + more in one app. This is no weekend vibe code… I’ve spent the past 16 months researching, designing & building. No AI hallucinations, just lots of detailed math & science.” — Cole

“I made a short film in 2023 about our current ever creeping descent into AI madness called Eating 38 Cheeseburgers. In a time when so many of us already feel isolated from one another, I saw this technology as something that could super charge that disconnection. This film was my way of unpacking those ideas.” – Andrew

“I built a macOS app to automatically organize your files: Rulebook. You can set up rules, and it quietly sorts, renames, converts, beeps, moves, copies, archives, and tags your files in the background — like a personal assistant for your folders.” — Lucas

“I’ve built GamePal as a way to catalogue my ever growing game collection and track my play in a journal. As a designer it’s always been my dream to build my own iPhone (and soon iPad/Mac!) app and October 2024 was the moment. I’ve been chipping away at it for the past year or so and I’m not stopping anytime soon.” — Jeremy

“I’ve started vibe coding an app that transcribes, summarizes, and takes notes of my lectures using only the horsepower in my computer thanks to open models that are very efficient at understanding human language. This means that I don’t even have to bring a notebook anymore! I just need to take a voice recording on my phone, plug it into the app and 10 minutes later I have a transcription that I can later summarize with Gemma 4 on my computer or plug into Claude so that it adds the notes into my Notion. No Otter or Memo AI or other unnecessary subscription needed.” — Franklin

“I built Newslog. It bundles your newsletters, RSS feeds, and articles into a single daily digest with an index and summaries. It’s designed specifically for calm, distraction-free reading on Kindle and deep-work archiving in Obsidian.” — Lucas

“Daymark is an iOS app that allows you to send virtual postcards to your future self. I struggle with perfectionism and noticing my progress, so I use this app to remind my future self of how things were in the weeks/months before. Other people use it in different ways, like as a personal diary, as reminders of quotes they heard, and much more. All data is stored on-device and it is 100% free.” — Antonio

“I’ve been working on a project that retrofitted an Arduino Uno into an old touchtone landline phone. The idea is that you can ‘dial’ in to a couple of numbers that I programmed and you’d get a song or a Fallout style audio log. This project was for a class in my grad school program, and calling myself a ‘creative engineer’ has been a really rewarding experience as I transition out of ad agency life.” — Andrew

“I first released QuakeInfo in November of 2007, and it began as a way for me to learn iPhone development. QuakeInfo helped me stay informed about earthquakes around the world and near me (I live in the San Francisco Bay Area). My goal is to make it the best-looking, most usable, and most informative earthquake app on iOS. And lately, I’ve been trying Claude Code as a way to increase my velocity and ship more features.” — Adam

“It’s called ChangeLock and it’s simply shoving in your face how much you use (i.e. unlock) your phone. Then at the end of each month asks you to donate a cent for each unlock. Donation is voluntary of course, but the little bit of pain on each unlock actually helps make this work psychologically. It’s only on Android because iOS doesn’t give you the same kind of data access, unfortunately.” — Pascal

“I made a filter that hides Generative AI features on websites: Google’s AI summaries, Copilot buttons, Reddit Answers, and more. I created it because of the numerous AI features popping up everywhere, and I was surprised something like this didn’t exist already.” — Steven

“I made Tuesday Night Movie Night — the newsletter where readers get one good movie recommendation, every Tuesday. Our picks are 100 percent algorithm-free. We watch every movie we pick and write up the recommendation ourselves.” — Blake

“I’ve been writing fiction for about 10 years and trying to find agents of publishers in a changing, confusing writer’s market. I decided to make an old-skool static website to publish my three-part speculative fiction novel as a serial, week by week. I’ve finished the first two books and book three starts next week. On each page is the text of a chapter, and an audio reading (it’s also going out through podcast networks).” — David

“I built WedSearch entirely in Claude with zero coding knowledge. I’m now selling this to wedding suppliers and supplementing my wedding filmmaking income! Insane.​” — Arranv

“Two years ago, you featured my app Play for saving and organizing videos. Since then, it’s grown a lot: better video player, support for transcripts and new AI features like summaries and Q&A. You can also filter subscription videos to hide YouTube shorts, and much more.” — Marcos

“Did It, a daily wins journal I built, works on the opposite principle to a todo list. It only lets you record what you already did. No tasks waiting for tomorrow, just a quiet record of your day, however small or ordinary. Some days the win is shipping something. Some days it’s getting out of bed. Both count.” — Pascal

“I built a working Cyberpunk 2077 Radio. Hugely ambitious project (the FFT code to make the real-time spectrum display was a challenge, but authentic to how the radio works in the game).  I started by extracting the 3D model file from the PC version of the game, designing a 1:1 scale shell in CAD, printing it, then sourcing the LED matrix display, audio amplifier, and a few other power components, wiring it all together, then writing the Python code to make it all work. Took a few months.” — David

“I make OpenCase (well, my wife and I are the entire company), the patented iPhone case with the open space for MagSafe accessories. It’s crazy how many advantages we have been alerted to by our customers due to the uniqueness of the design.” — John 

“I got into home espresso two years ago and despite watching hundreds of YouTube videos, I felt like I was missing the right advice to pull better shots. I tried a few tracking apps and they all looked rough, so I built my own, called Dial. It’s Bauhaus-inspired (because I love it), and it tells you what you need to change for your next shot based on what you tasted.” — Christophe

“I’m an author, and last year my debut novel The Phoenix Pencil Company was published (and picked as part of Reese’s Book Club!). While on the surface it’s historical fantasy about a pencil company in 1940s Shanghai, really at its core it’s a book all about data privacy. I think this book featuring a young software engineer and her relationship with her grandmother, and about the stories we choose to pass on or keep hidden, is very Verge-y :)” — Allison

Signing off

I do my best work while listening to movie soundtracks. I don’t know why — maybe it just makes life in a Google Doc feel more epic? I know I’m not the only one, either. My personal Mount Rushmore of the genre is probably: 

• Pirates of the Caribbean 
• Halt and Catch Fire
• The Dark Knight
• Billions

I finally saw Project Hail Mary the other day, and knew halfway through the movie that its score was going to go in my rotation. It’s a little pluckier than some of the others I like, but it’s a perfect mood-setter. It also got me listening to Daniel Pemberton’s other scores, including Steve Jobs and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, both of which are also fabulous. If my writing suddenly gets vastly more thrilling, dramatic, and dare I say world-saving, you’ll know why.

See you next week!

The trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI is officially upon us. And it is going to be a mess. As the two sides fight over the early days of AI, who deserves credit and cash for what, and more, we’re likely to spend the next few weeks hearing a lot of important people’s secrets made extremely public. Which may be exactly what Musk is going for.

Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Liz Lopatto joins the show to explain the origins of this case, how it got to trial, and why Musk is so willingly fighting a battle he’s almost certainly going to lose. Liz will be in the courtroom a lot over the next few weeks, and has some thoughts on what she’s paying attention to — and whether the actual trial is even part of it.

After that, The Verge’s Sean Hollister takes us through all the news from last week’s Framework event, at which the company debuted its most impressive laptop yet — without sacrificing the repairability and upgradeability that have won the brand so many fans. Sean has seen the laptops and typed on the keyboards, and has some ideas about where both this company and the PC business, are headed.

Sean then sticks around to help David answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about small laptops, particularly the Surface Go, and whether a new generation of chips could make these previously underpowered laptops finally sing. We have some good news on that front.

Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | More

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

• Musk vs. Altman is here, and it’s going to get messy 
• Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face 
• A look at the evidence of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Open AI
• Framework announces Laptop 13 Pro, ‘the MacBook Pro for Linux users’ 
• Framework is building a better couch keyboard because everyone hates the Logitech one 
• Framework’s first OCuLink eGPUs hack its laptop into a desktop PC 
• Microsoft Surface Go review: a little goes a long way

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 125, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me cereal recommendations, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about NASA seamstresses and friction and Muskism and scooters, highlighting the heck out of Jeff VanderMeer’s terrific new short story, listening to the Dissect podcast’s new season about Daft Punk, giving Firefox another run as my go-to browser, having my mind blown by amazing music video directors, and nodding along to John Oliver on prediction markets. I’ve also been dealing with sick kids and a bunch of emergency electrical work so my house doesn’t burn down. Fun times! Also the reason we’re gonna do Ruthless Self-Promotion Week next week — still going through all your emails, thanks again to everyone who wrote in!

I also have for you some very exciting new PC gear, the must-see movie of the Spring, a couple of genuinely useful new AI apps, a high-tech postcard, and much more. Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / dipping in hummus this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

• The Framework Laptop 13 Pro. I love Framework’s whole thesis that computers should be more upgradeable and repairable. For the first time, it seems to have also made a laptop that is just really, really nice. If this thing lives up to its spec sheet, and our first impressions, it’s going to be a big winner for Linux and Windows users.
• The Framework Laptop Sleeve. I love a good laptop carrier, and this one — especially the silver model, which isn’t duct tape but looks just like duct tape — is an awesome one. It’s obviously designed for Framework gear, but should fit lots of other laptops too.
• Stranger Things: Tales from ’85. I feel obligated to tell you about this new animated Netflix show — because, you know, Stranger Things — even though by all accounts it’s really not very good. If you watch it anyway because you can’t get enough of the Hawkins gang, just know that I get it.
• New Things. Our good friend Joanna Stern just started her own newsletter / YouTube channel / whole thing, and it’s already delightful and extremely Joanna-y. Go subscribe! And keep an eye out, because we’re gonna get Joanna back in this space one way or another.
• Extra. As I get worse and worse at maintaining my email inbox, I get more and more enticed by the possibility of managing it with AI. Using Extra requires a whole re-think of what your email is even for, but I’m finding it full of clever organizational ideas.
• Memo AI. These smart transcription apps are a dime a dozen now, but this one has a couple of things going for it. One, it’s made by the developer of NotePlan, which means it is thoughtfully designed and really clever. Two, it’s fast. So far, speed has been the difference between AI tools I ditch quickly and AI tools I keep using.
• Vampire Crawlers. Every once in a while, all of my gamer friends fall of the face of the Earth for a few days, because they’re all obsessed with some new title. It’s happening right now, and it’s all because of this extremely addictive, retro-styled deckbuilder. I probably shouldn’t get into this game. I’m going to get into this game.
• The Govee Table Lamp Classic. Half the power is currently out in my house, which has made this kind of product – a smart lamp that can either be plugged in or carried around — incredibly useful. In general, I’m finding Govee stuff to be almost as good as Hue, and way cheaper. Not a bad combo.
• Claude’s Spotify connector. If you’ve been skeptical or nervous about trying AI tools, here’s my advice: connect one to Spotify. (ChatGPT has had a connector for a while, Claude got it this week.) It’s such a fun, useful, surprising way to organize and discover music.

Screen share

Every 25 issues or so in this space, I like to share my own homescreen. As the Installerverse’s self-appointed Head of Thing-Trying, I am forever experimenting with new systems, new apps, and new ways to do everything. Plus it’s a fun record for me of where my own thinking is.

At the moment? My thinking is apparently… all over the place. This is about as unorganized as I have ever been, on a bunch of different levels. My homescreen is not organized intentionally, so much as it is just a record of my phone habits recently. (I also have way too many unread everythings.) Here it is, as of this week:

The phone: iPhone 17. I love the sage color, I am sort of annoyed that I’m still an iPhone user, but here we are.

The wallpaper: Blue. I had a solid black background for a long time, so I guess this counts as sprucing things up? Honestly, it’s too bright, especially at night — need to go back to all black everything.

The apps: Coffee Pool, RB College, Memo AI, Craft, DualShot Recorder, Todoist, Google Maps, MyMind, Obsidian, Readwise Reader, Phone, Pocket CAsts, Spotify, Camera, Messages, Notion Calendar, the app I’m vibe-coding, Arc.

Some of these are staples: Readwise Reader, Pocket Casts, MyMind, and Arc are all apps I’ve used for a long time and am very happy with. The rest are all experimental in one way or another.

I am a longtime fan of Retro Bowl, an essentially perfect mobile game, so of course I jumped on the college football game. I’m also a longtime fan of Coffee Golf, a fun game to play for a couple of minutes a day, and the pool-shooting version is just as satisfying. I don’t normally have homescreen games, so these probably won’t live here forever.

As you can probably see, I’m in a bit of a productivity app crisis. Craft, Obsidian, Memo AI, Todoist, even Notion Calendar – I’ve been trying them all, and many more (like Workflowy, Twos, and NotePlan) to see if I can find a new system that works. My life has a lot more deadlines right now than it typically does, so I’m leaning into some of the ideas behind time blocking to see if schedule-maxxing works for me. So far… kinda. 

(Also, that app with the nine dots? I hate the icon, thanks for nothing Claude Code, but it’s the beginnings of the tool I’m trying to build bringing all this stuff together for me. It will be useful to exactly no one, but I’m excited about it. More on that next week.)

Lastly, if you shoot a lot of video and you haven’t tried DualShot Recorder, change that ASAP. It captures horizontal and vertical video simultaneously, and is simple and fabulous whether you’re a content creator or just trying to get videos of your kids at the right aspect ratio. It’s not quite my default camera app yet, but it might get there. Best $10 I’ve spent on an app in a long time.

Oh, and the widgets: Notion Calendar is, you know, fine. Acme Weather is fantastic. It’s made by the folks who built Dark Sky, and it has the same ability to tell me everything I need to know — the weather, the chance of rain, the chance the forecast is wrong and actually it is going to rain — in about two seconds. Already my go-to weather app.

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 or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“I’m loving the Earth.fm app. Never felt like soundscape apps helped me focus or relax, but these nature field recordings are where it’s at for me. And it’s a beautiful app too!” — Ben

“I know I’m late to the party, but I’ve started using Nvidia GeForce Now — that thing is incredible on an iPad Pro.” — Jean-Francois

“Check out the Aviate app for Android. It’s like Flighty but for Android. It’s in early access — beautiful design.” — Guarav

“Absolutely loved Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. One of my top movies this year. Hilarious and great action. There’s a 5 minute argument between grown men over who the best boyfriend on Gilmore Girls was. It’s Logan btw.” — Justin

“Just picked up the Aune AC55 on-ear clip headphone recently and wanted to give a shout out that this headphone style is still out there rocking, didn’t actually fade away after the 90s/00s along with American Hi-Fi, and offers an excellent alternative (along with flathead earbuds) to large over-ear sets and IEMS. The Koss KSC75 is the venerable affordable set of this style, but Aune is breaking new ground with some very high-end sets.” — Brian

“Been playing enclose.horse for a few months now. Always enjoy it since it’s a quick daily game but not centered on words/letters.” — Peter

“Clayton Morris did a video on YouTube about great games for adults with no time. Really great recommendations. Vampire Survivors and Dredge in particular are great and both are included in Apple Arcade.” — Witzke

“A new, fully native font manager called Pica for macOS dropped this week and us design nerds are freaking out about it.” — Pedro

“Space Design Warehouse is a phenomenal under the radar Mac YouTube Channel. The host Nicholas Johnson, will get as nerdy over specs and testing as you could want, while keeping it accessible and fun. Everybody episode features a Mac on fire and Dunkin’ Donuts, so not sure what else you could want. He also does inventive things like having a secondary audio track on certain videos where he just riffs what he’s thinking about.” — Clinton

Signing off

The funniest thing has happened to my YouTube over the last few months. In the course of researching stories and Version History episodes, I’ve spent a lot of time watching really old YouTube videos — and this has evidently convinced the YouTube algorithm to send me more really old YouTube videos! Recently I’ve been reminded of some of the great Epic Rap Battles of History, some top-notch Lonely Island shorts, an iconic clip of Jay Z and Timbaland in the studio, and even Charlie The Unicorn. Early YouTube was a time, y’all. Mostly a very good one.

See you next week!

In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI, or at least a peak of AI?

Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we look at both the data and the vibes. David and Nilay explore a new study from Stanford that says AI is getting better at lots of things, and yet more and more people want less and less to do with the technology. Other studies suggest that even those who use AI a lot wind up wishing they didn’t have to. In the wake of the awful attacks on Sam Altman, the divide seems bigger than ever between the people saying “AI is coming and you’d better get on board” and the people who’d much rather simply not.

After that, the Hype Desk crew joins the show to talk Coachella and RAMageddon. Then, David and Nilay talk about the result in the Ticketmaster monopoly trial, Microsoft’s response to the MacBook Neo, and the incredible rising price of absolutely everything. Then it’s time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, an update on the Trump Phone, and some other news of the week.

Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | More

As always, if you have thoughts or questions, we want to hear from you! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11 or email us at vergecast@theverge.com. And if you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

• Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent
• The attacks on Sam Altman are a warning for the AI world
• Altman attack suspect proposed “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs.”
• Stanford’s 2026 AI study
• From The New York Times: Half of Gen Z Uses AI, but Their Feelings Are Souring, Study Shows
• Reese Witherspoon’s Threads post
• Ticketmaster is an illegal monopoly, jury finds 
• Microsoft counters the MacBook Neo with freebies for students
• YouTube Premium is getting pricier 
• Samsung is hiking the prices of its Galaxy phones and tablets 
• RAMageddon has come for Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop 
• Meta blames RAM shortage for $100 Quest 3 price hike
• From The New York Post: FCC’s Brendan Carr again blasts deals between NFL and streaming services, says antitrust exemption is at risk
• The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason
• Apple and Amazon are teaming up to challenge Starlink’s smartphone ambitions
• The new Trump Phone design is here
• Did Neuralink make the wrong bet?