David Pierce | The Verge

After resurrecting an iconic PC brand, Commodore is getting into flip phones

2026-06-16T12:06:52-04:00

It won’t be for everyone, but there’s something delightful about the retro look. | Photo: Commodore

When Christian Simpson, a retro gaming YouTuber also known as Peri Fractic, bought the remains of an early PC company called Commodore in 2025, he decided to pick up right where the original Commodore left off. Which meant starting product development in the mid-1990s. Simpson and his team first set to work reviving the company’s most iconic product, and you can now buy a Commodore 64 that is the spitting image of the 1982 original (other than the Wi-Fi connectivity, the USB ports, and a few other slightly modern niceties). It’s a pure nostalgia play, and by most accounts a very good one. Commodore says it has sold 30,000 of them since last year.

After that, things began to get hypothetical. The turn of the 21st century was the beginning of the cellphone era, when companies like Nokia ruled the technological world. Simpson found himself asking: What would Commodore have done? Made a phone, surely. “I think they would have followed Apple,” Simpson tells me, “and ultimately released an iPhone. Or, at least, a phone. Every other company did.”

The new Commodore is now getting ready to ship the phone the original Commodore never dreamed of. It’s called the Callback 8020, it’s a flip phone, and it starts at $499. With features and colors straight out of the early aughts, Simpson seems to hope it can once again satiate people’s gadget nostalgia, while also providing an answer to a very 2026 problem: We’re all on our phones too much.

The translucent blue looks great — but you’ll pay extra for it. | Image: Commodore" data-portal-copyright="Image: Commodore" />

It’s not an impressive piece of computing hardware, but it’s not really trying to be. It has a 3.25-inch, 480 x 640 screen on the inside, a MediaTek Helio G81 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a headphone jack, and an FM radio antenna. The retro stylings read “retro”; the spec sheet reads “probably a little slow.”

Philosophically, the Callback has a lot in common with devices like the Light Phone and tries to strike the same tricky balance between giving people all the features they need and exactly nothing else. “This is really the phone between dumb and smart,” Simpson says. It blocks social media and web browsers entirely; the phone isn’t even allowed to access Facebook’s servers. Because the device runs a version of Jolla’s privacy-focused Sailfish operating system, though, it can technically run just about any Android app.

Rather than try to guess exactly what users want, Commodore’s plan is to build an allow-listing system, by which users can request to have an Android app added to the Callback’s store, and a combination of AI and human reviewers will decide what’s acceptable. (And, of course, for everything else, there’s sideloading.) Simpson seems game to add things like Uber and Spotify and is fully ready to stop time-sucks like Slack and Gmail from ever ending up on a Callback.

For at least one computer company, it’s the 20th century all over again. | Photo: Commodore" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Commodore" />

Commodore imagines the Callback as a nights-and-weekends phone for getting away from all your work apps and notifications. The whole phone is designed to be quieter: It has five colored LEDs that glow when you have a notification, rather than buzzing in your pocket. The phone’s outer screen only ever shows the time, date, battery level, and connectivity status. You can take pictures with the 48-megapixel camera, send messages via voice or old-school T9 typing, listen to music with the “audiophile-grade” DAC and included headphones, make calls, and not much else.

The standard Callback model comes in beige, white, and silver. There’s also a very cool translucent blue model for $549.99, and a gold “Founders Edition” model for $640. Commodore’s plan is to start shipping the phones by the end of this year, and Simpson seems confident he can get it done even with the shrinking supply of RAM and other components. “We’ve built in a buffer to the pricing,” he says. “And if we don’t use that buffer, it allows us to offer a discounted launch price instead.” The starting price is a bit high for a second phone, but Commodore’s timing is actually quite good. More and more people are looking for a way out of their smartphone, and Y2K nostalgia is back in full swing. Maybe Commodore’s time really has come again.

The impossible dream of the universal remote

2026-06-15T06:03:12-04:00

You don’t really ever have to explain why a universal remote is a good idea. You have a bunch of stuff that needs controlling; this thing controls them all. Many companies have set out to build a product worthy of this idea, and one product came much closer than most. It was called the Harmony, and for many years it was the best universal remote on the market. Maybe the only one that mattered. And still, even the Harmony couldn’t make it work.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Harmony. The Verge’s David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and John Higgins are joined by Matt Rogers, the CEO of Mill and former cofounder of Nest, to reckon with two decades of buttons and touchscreens. The product begins as the Easy Zapper, takes off, sells to Logitech, expands like crazy for a number of years… and then begins to fade. Sure, you could argue smart TVs and integrated entertainment systems just made the whole idea irrelevant. But there’s something about the universal remote that feels as enticing as ever. So we try to figure out why.

This is the first episode of the fourth season of Version History. (We are so back.) For the next several weeks, we’re telling a bunch of stories about the smart home, from Hue lights to Keurig coffee to the viral sensation that was The Clapper. Here’s how to get every episode, and all our other fun stuff, as soon as it drops:

If you’re a Verge subscriber, you can also get access to Version History (and all our other podcasts) with no ads. All you have to do is visit your account settings.

If you want to know more about the history and legacy of the Harmony, here are a few links to get you started:

From The Washington Post: Control Issues
The original Easy Zapper website, on Harmony launch day
The first remote
From CRN: Harmonic Convergence At Hand
Harmony remotes are fading in relevance as streaming takes over, says Logitech CEO
From PC World: Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes

A better way to manage all your screenshots

2026-06-12T21:59:49-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy soccer, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been preparing for a month of getting absolutely nothing done during the World Cup. I’ve also been reading about Steven Spielberg and wearables and the Boeing 747, overloading on computer nostalgia thanks to The Virtual OS Museum, watching that Knicks game winner over and over and over, listening to the fabulous new This Was SportsCenter podcast and the fabulous old The Renner Files podcast, and trying to tame my increasingly disastrous inbox with Avec. It’s going… medium.

I also have for you an early candidate for movie of the summer, a new way to watch an old classic show, a portable camera and mouse worth a look, and much more. Let’s do this? Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / downloading / playing / listening to / slathering with sunscreen 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

Pool. I remain totally convinced that “take a bunch of screenshots and let AI make sense of it” is a fundamentally great interface for using computers. Pool, which is finally out of beta, is exactly that — a way to bookmark and do things with anything you see on your screen. It starts by grabbing and sorting all your old screenshots, too, which has been a wild blast from the past.
Disclosure Day. Spielberg making an alien movie: pretty much always a good thing! The trailer for this one made me nervous, but the reviews are mostly good. Even the ones that aren’t good are like, “It’s very fun but also it’s just a Spielberg alien movie,” which is actually precisely what I’m looking for.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. A formative TV show for generations of kids is finally, officially on YouTube. The channel’s brand-new, but already has clips, full episodes, and livestreams to watch. That’s my toddler’s YouTube diet sorted for the foreseeable future.
The Logitech Mobi Fold. If you carry a portable mouse for working on the go, there’s a good chance this $80 one’s an upgrade. It’s tiny, has a few useful customization options, and I think I like that it’s a touchpad instead of a scroll wheel? Very curious to drop this one into my travel iPad setup.
Claude Fable 5. Leaving aside my many feelings about the fact that Anthropic shipped a variation on the model that two months ago it called too dangerous to release, I have been very impressed with Fable’s power and thoroughness so far. It’s a heck of a vibe-coding tool. And use it now, since it’ll start costing extra in nine days!
The Insta360 Luna Ultra. This is like the Rolls-Royce of gimbal cameras. Two lenses, upgraded processing, a very clever detachable screen / remote control, and more. The $769 price is too high for me, but I suspect it’ll be worth it for a lot of creators.
Incorruptible by Eric Ries. Ries’ other book, The Lean Startup, is one you’ll find in basically any tech company’s office. This new one asks a very good and timely question: Is it possible to be successful without compromising all your morals and values? Ries says yes, and boy I hope he’s right.
Bluesky group chats. It really seems like the Twitter-style, feed-based era of social is ending. Which is great news. Smart of Bluesky to get on top of it, and I really like the idea of creating spaces like this that are much smaller but still more than one-to-one chat. If you add me to a group, I promise to only send a few unhinged memes every day.
The Boox Go 6 Gen II. This is Boox’s most Kindle-like device, and the new model adds note-taking features, has a bunch of color options, and of course comes with access to all your Android apps. I’d be all in on this thing if it didn’t run a SIX-YEAR-OLD version of Android, but even still I’m curious to give it a whirl.
NotebookLM. Google’s little research tool continues to impress me, and a bump up to Gemini 3.5 both makes the app smarter and gives it a bunch of new ways to present information. As a way to upload and query a bunch of websites / documents / PDFs, NotebookLM is tough to beat.

Screen share

The big news of this week was WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference. That’s where Apple announces all the most important software it has coming this year. This edition was pretty much all about AI: the new Siri that seems to be very good so far, a lot of generative image editing stuff that seems simultaneously cool and creepy and bad, and Apple Intelligence stuff all over the place. I have a lot of testing to do, and developers have a lot of updating to do, before we know exactly how that’s going to go.

But there’s one feature that’s already changing how I use my phone: widgets. Specifically, the monster, whole-page homepage widgets Apple now supports. Almost as soon as I started playing with them, I wound up completely redesigning my homescreen setup, so I have a page of apps and then what amounts to a side-scrolling set of giant widgets. I love it, and figured I’d share:

I’ve spent forever trying to build or find a great way to see everything I have going on — my calendar, my tasks, the weather, all that stuff — at a glance. Something about these big widgets feels uncluttered in a way I just love. I’m definitely going to end up with 100 pages of them.

On the off chance giant widgets excite you as much as they excite me, a couple of quick caveats. One, you probably shouldn’t install developer betas on your primary device; so far I’ve found iOS 27 to be pretty stable, but definitely bad for my battery life. Also, most apps don’t offer these huge widgets and won’t for a few months while developers figure out the new tools. Lastly, these widgets are big, but they still don’t quite take up the whole screen, and that might aesthetically irritate you too.

Still, while widgets may not be the most important feature of iOS 27, or even the one that most changes the way you use your phone (that’d be Siri in both cases), I am firmly in favor of any feature that gives me more information without making me open apps. Big-ass widgets do just that.

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.

“My kids and I *love* the new Bluey game, Bluey’s Quest for the Gold Pen. The story is fun for them, but it’s also a very good introduction to platform mechanics for kiddos. And there is basically no way to ‘die’ or lose items, so the stress level is very low (unlike when they watch me trying to figure things out in Breath of the Wild…)” — Craig

“Animal Kingdom on Netflix. Can’t believe I waited so long to watch it.” — Justin

“Might be too late, but I just downloaded Mosaic a few weeks back and absolutely love it. Might be the perfect app for baseball scores/news/info. Still in beta but so so good.“

“The indie web is alive and thriving. Bubbles is another attempt to highlight blogs you can follow. Built on top of the fediverse, and RSS, and web mentions.” — Renganathan

“I’m obsessed with the Mood.camera app. It recreates film photography, and I basically don’t use the built-in camera app on my iPhone anymore. There’s a lot of fun to be had creating your own presets or scouring the Mood subreddit to try out those put together by others.” — Tom

“Playing the final update to Destiny 2, it’s been the end of a 12-year era! Bittersweet, but it’s a good sendoff for a game that could have been so much more.” — Nikki

“I’ve been obsessed with the Teenage Engineering x Kanye West collab — a tiny stem player for ‘Jesus is King’ called SP-1 that I guess was largely unreleased. A few enterprising folks on Reddit and a group called Solderless ended up figuring out a way to let you wipe the Kanye album and load up new audio tracks. Huzzah! You can find it for under $50 and it’s super fun.” — Spencer

“The new Skrillex album, Soma, is so damn good. It might be his best work. Just dance banger after banger, I don’t get tired of it!” — Óli

“I recently started my summer college semester and I wanted to branch off from lugging a laptop around constantly, but also I enjoy taking notes, so I decided to move my iPad mini from the shelf to my desk again for like the millionth time. I found a neat little device called the Nillkin Cube Pocket Foldable, and truly it has been one of the best things I’ve purchased in a while. It folds up into a pocket-size square and it’s extremely light but also feels nice to type on when I wanna put a note into Obsidian. Also, gesture swipes work on it, so that’s another plus when I’m swiping through apps I refuse to close even though they aren’t being used.” — Brandon

Signing off

I have included Widow’s Bay in this newsletter a few times already, but the wildest thing keeps happening: Every time I ask you all for recommendations, week in and week out the most popular thing in my inbox is Widow’s Bay. I should probably stop talking about it at some point, but as it happens I agree with you. It’s handily my favorite show of the year so far, a show with a premise and a shtick that absolutely should not work and instead somehow just keeps getting better.

The season finale is this week, and the show was just renewed for its second season. I’m preaching to the choir here, but I cannot say this strongly enough: GO WATCH WIDOW’S BAY. It is special. And we all need to talk about the finale when it drops.

See you next week!

Siri is good now??

2026-06-12T13:17:04-04:00

You’d be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between “sort of useful at a few things” and “utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer.” But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone’s built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There’s very little about Siri AI that feels bleeding edge or brand new, but it works. And that might change everything.

After that, they talk about the changing winds in social networking, as Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube all announced new features designed to make their huge ecosystems feel a little smaller and a lot more personal. Group chats have been replacing public posts for a while now, but is the era of the Twitter feed really over? After that, it’s time for the Hype Desk, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, and a lightning round filled with news about the Trump Phone, Claude Fable, solar energy, and a surprisingly good deal for iPad users.

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In case you missed it this week: We also livestreamed our initial reactions to WWDC, went deep on Steve Jobs’ career arc and legacy, answered all your WWDC questions, and tried to figure out whether YouTubers are the future of movie theaters. And we want to hear all your thoughts about all of it! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, and tell us everything that’s on your mind. And make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

Apple’s best AI idea looks a lot like vibe coding

2026-06-09T09:34:48-04:00

Most of Apple’s current AI ideas are roughly the same as everyone else’s AI ideas. A chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; bizarre, borderline creepy image-generation tools. The company spent most of its WWDC keynote playing catch-up with the state of the AI art, announcing Siri features you can already find on Android phones and in the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The pitch, in so many cases, is just “this thing you know, but on your iPhone now.”

But a few minutes after I downloaded the first developer beta of iPadOS 26 (I didn’t want to risk it on my Mac or my iPhone, both of which are too important to my daily life to install one of Apple’s notoriously buggy and battery-crushing first betas), I found one of the few ways in which Apple can make a genuinely better AI product. I opened up the Shortcuts app, pressed the Plus button to create a new shortcut, and typed “Send a text to Anna with three kissy emojis.” This is a thing I do from time to time, just to let my wife know I’m thinking of her. A few Apple Intelligence-powered seconds later, the shortcut was up and running — I tapped it, and it sent the right emoji to the right Anna. Thank goodness.

Apple Shortcuts has always been a good idea in desperate need of a simpler interface. It’s a hugely powerful tool, essentially a way for users to visually create scripts that take actions automatically and across apps. But even creating simple shortcuts can be complex and brittle, and the app itself doesn’t exactly help you along. At WWDC, though, Apple touted AI as the way to make the app easier to use. Cecilia Dantas, a product marketing manager at the company, called the new system “more approachable than ever.”

In the first beta, it mostly doesn’t work. I haven’t successfully rigged up anything more complicated than texting emoji. I asked for a shortcut that would turn on Do Not Disturb automatically when I opened the Kindle app and instead just got a shortcut that turned on Do Not Disturb whenever I tapped the shortcut. I asked for one that would put my device into Do Not Disturb, and start a 30-minute timer with “Stop Playing” as the setting in the “When Timer Ends” section, but the key “Stop Playing” step didn’t work even after some follow-up requests. I asked for a shortcut that took a photo with the front camera, then the rear camera, then stitched them together side by side, and saved the result to the Photos app. Shortcuts understood all the steps correctly! And failed every time. Whenever I tried to make a shortcut that involved a third-party app, Shortcuts directed me back to the standard editor. It appears developers have some work to do to support the new feature.

Still, there is something about Shortcuts that feels like a model for implementing AI. It’s not flashy or overwrought, and it’s not AI as an entirely new revolutionary interface that will change how you do everything forever and just trust me bro AI is the new UI. It’s not trying to be creative or proactive, it’s there to do what AI actually does well: figure out what you’re asking for and navigate the databases to try and make it happen.

These natural-language shortcuts are effectively just vibe-coding projects, which is slightly ironic, given Apple’s apparently hostile stance toward the vibe-coding apps on its platform. But rather than let you vibe-code an app, Apple’s just letting you vibe-code your phone. You tell it how you’d like it to work, and it sets out to make it happen. And because Apple has unique access to everything from your location to your app logins, it can do so in a vastly more powerful way.

Making this actually work will, of course, be an outrageously huge amount of work. A version of Shortcuts that kind of works, some of the time, is in fact a total failure. Apple has to quickly convince every developer in the store to support Shortcuts as thoroughly as possible, so that anything a user could possibly want to do in their app they can do through Shortcuts. That’s a big ask, given there are lots of good reasons developers might want to avoid this feature like the plague, starting with the fact that using Shortcuts often means never opening their app at all. If Apple can’t get everyone on board with App Intents, it’ll have to hope its AI models can figure out various APIs, URL schemes, and other ways of using apps on a user’s behalf. This is the eternal problem of agentic AI, of course, and Apple’s going to experience it in its own proprietary way.

Apple’s other new vibe-coding platform should be a little more straightforward. In addition to using AI to automatically organize and categorize Safari tabs, the new operating systems now allow you to create browser extensions in a similarly natural-language way. Just type “copy the page as a Markdown link,” and, poof, extension created. The simple things I’ve tried have worked so far and are extremely easy to create. They don’t seem to be able to use AI or interact with other apps, though, so the most ambitious thing you can really do is redesign websites. Like with Shortcuts, though, the principle is clear: This is a way to mold your devices the way you want them, without having to build them from scratch.

Apple spent a lot of WWDC describing the tools it made to help people (and kids in particular) use their devices a little less, and one great way to accomplish that is to make it easier to actually do the things we do on our phones. We all have the tasks we do over and over, our own particular smartphone idiosyncrasies. We’ve spent two decades opening and closing apps, swiping and tapping, copying and pasting, navigating between things that have no knowledge of each other. Now, the AI industry is desperately trying to build a better way, a new platform where all you have to do is ask and things get done. They’re all desperately trying to build super apps that become your default digital home for everything.

Apple already has that. It’s called the iPhone. If Apple can make all this stuff actually work — and make no mistake, that’s still a very big if — it has an opportunity to to use all this new tech not to reinvent everything but to just make everything a little easier.

The next YouTube phenomenon hitting the big screen

2026-06-05T22:13:05-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 131, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy last week of productivity before the World Cup starts, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about the World Cup and peptides and parasocial media, catching up on Clarkson’s Farm ahead of the new season, buying literally every single new item in The Verge Shop, watching so so so many BTS concert clips on my social feeds, brainstorming ways to resurrect my old Facebook Portal, testing Spokenly to see if it’s the dictation app for me, and ponying up for a full year of GeForce Now just to play 007 First Light. No regrets.

I also have for you a YouTube phenomenon-turned-Hollywood hit, a bunch of Lego sets I bet you’ll want, new places to play Final Fantasy, new headphones and soundbars, and much more. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / playing / crocheting 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 Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act. TADC is one of the most successful animated series on YouTube, and one of the platform’s most impressive success stories. (It’s also just very good.) This is apparently the show’s series finale, and it’s in theaters for the next couple of weeks before it hits YouTube. The YouTube takeover continues!
Lego’s Smart Play Pokémon. I’m still torn on Lego’s whole Smart Brick concept, which has lots of potential but not much actual cool use right now. But I suspect a lot of us are going to want to preorder the 12 new interactive Pokémon sets before they come out in August. I want that Jigglypuff bad.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Yeah, fine, whatever, this is a two-year-old game, but it’s finally on Xbox and Switch! I know how many FF fans there are out there, and by all accounts this is one of the series’ best titles. I have always been too intimidated to get into it… but now that there’s a new way to jump into the story, I might need to change that.
The Shokz OpenDots Air. This kind of clip-on, open-ear headphone definitely isn’t for everyone, but I love them for the times when I want to listen to music or a podcast without actually disconnecting from the real world — and I’m psyched to see a cheaper model. I’ve heard some people had connectivity issues with the previous model, so here’s hoping the upgrade fixes that.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra. I am fascinated by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip lineup, and the whole PC industry’s bet that AI will change the way we use our laptops forever. I’m not convinced, but I do love the sound and look of this ultra-powerful Surface Laptop, even though I’m sure it’ll be out of my price range when it launches later this year.
Cape Fear. This trailer has been following me around the internet for a couple of weeks, and it sure seems like Javier Bardem pulled off yet another terrifying villain performance. At the very least, let this new Apple TV series be your sign to go watch both the 1962 and 1991 versions of the story. Cape Fear apparently just never misses.
The Corasir Nightsword V2 mouse. “Nightsword” is just a hilariously overwrought name for a computer mouse, but I love the idea of a dedicated button for launching Stream Deck controls. I’m also just now realizing I need to make a lot more use of the virtual Stream Deck anyway, which is a pretty powerful way to control your computer.
The WiiM Bar. Lotta WiiM fans out here in the Installerverse, so this is exciting news: a soundbar with pretty impressive specs and plenty of connectivity (other than AirPlay, alas), all for $479. I’m not sure I love the front-and-center touchscreen, but I’ve been shopping for a soundbar, and this one has serious potential.
Swan Song. This is the kind of puzzle game I love: It’s not terribly chaotic or complex, but it does give you a million different things to do and think about. This one also makes incredibly clever use of music! I’ve been hearing great things about the demo, and the (warning: apparently pretty sad) story underneath the puzzles.

Screen share

Last week, I finally caved and bought the tiny Xteink e-reader that has been all over my social feed the last few months. The very first thing I did after opening the box? Install the CrossPoint firmware, an open-source project that has become a huge hit in the e-reading community. (And the center of some interesting drama — I have a story on that coming soon.)

The person at the center of CrossPoint is Justin Mitchell, a developer I’ve known for a long time. I think we first met chatting about Newton Mail, one of my all-time favorite email apps. He also worked on a great voice notes app called Cleft Notes, and a bunch of other cool projects.

After Justin and I chatted this week about the state and future of CrossPoint, I asked him to share his homescreen with us. I half thought he’d just send a picture of his Xteink device, but what I got from him was even more surprising. And delightful. Here’s Justin’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Unihertz Titan 2. Full QWERTY keyboard and a massive screen / battery = I just work from my phone most days, no laptop needed. You didn’t ask but I’m also using Nothing earbuds and headphones.

The wallpaper: I have really leaned into the minimal and dark mode-only approach to homescreens over the last few years. No visual stimulation allowed.

The apps: Email, Slack, Messages, WhatsApp, Vivaldi, Discord, Reddit, X.

I’m running the always amazing Niagara Launcher. I have a custom widget of an app I built called In Your Space, which is a shameless rip-off of the iOS app In Your Face. What’s amazing about the world we live in now is that I can just AI-code my perfect meeting reminder app, and I don’t even have to share it with anyone else! This app exists solely on my phone and does exactly what I need, down to the most personal and unique details about how my life works, not yours or any other user’s.

I’m running Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, and Vivaldi for my browser. No YouTube, no TikTok, just pure productivity and connectivity. Claude is also pinging me about some code it wrote in my notification banner.

I also asked Justin to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

As someone who spends 16-odd hours a day working on a computer, I’m currently enjoying anything that gets me away from a backlight and holding something tactile. My Xteink is always in my pocket, and I blow through chapters of my books instead of doomscrolling on my phone now. It’s legitimately the best gadget I’ve bought in 10+ years.

I’ve been finishing up the rest of the Threshold series of books by Peter Clines and listening to the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book.
Kinfire Delve is a fantastic series of co-op board games my wife and I are quite enjoying right now.
I’ve been 3D printing any and all fidget toys I can get my hands on, such as the very cool Zorbles from Blob Lab.

Crowdsourced

“Been having fun with Roost. It’s a messaging app that delivers a message at the speed of whatever bird you are sending.” — Michiel

“I just started using LazyVim, and it may actually replace a niche use case for me. I use Jetbrains for most coding, but every once in a while I just need to edit a Python or JS script and not wait for PyCharm or VS Code to launch. LazyVim gives me the IDE experience without the bloat.” — Kevin

“Widow’s Bay continues to be the best thing on right now. Every week is a countdown ‘til the next episode.” — Pip

I am constantly watching for updates on my Clicks Power Keyboard, which have now started shipping to folks. Can’t wait to get my clickity clackity typing on without having to use the full (large) case on my Pixel 10 Pro.” — Josh

“Using Tuna to configure my workflow on my newly acquired IBM M2 keyboard. There’s a ton of Mac launchers out there, but Tuna is quick. It’s also configurable enough to make it powerful, but doesn’t feel like overkill like Raycast.” — Mike

“Hank Green has a new podcast, Humans.” — Stefan

“Marathon season two is spooky now, with a night map that’s actually dark, and gear was wiped, so everyone’s on (near) equal footing. It’s a great game that deserves more praise and attention.” — Train Man Emeritus

“Sesame. It’s a voice dialog with an AI bot to talk about pretty much anything. They don’t mention friendship or anything like that, although maybe it’s possible. I used it to explain details of a few topics that I needed to learn about. Conversations are extremely realistic. Almost like what Alexa should be but isn’t.” — Jay

“Unlike traditional clipboard managers that rely on keyboard shortcuts, Layr is designed from the ground up to be activated via trackpad gestures. The app’s design and gesture-first approach actually convinced me to replace Maccy. Because I already use Swish for window management, adding another trackpad gesture to my workflow felt completely natural. Despite some early bugs, the core concept is solid.” — Travis

“I got the RingConn Gen 2 Air about a year ago for $200. There’s no subscription, it looks like any other smart ring, the battery lasts for a week, and it tracks workouts and sleep. I would think that for the people (like me!) that don’t need all the bells and whistles of an Oura, a ring like this is an obvious choice.” — Bruce

Signing off

There are a lot of big movies coming out this summer, but in my house the only one that matters is Toy Story 5. The movie’s out in two weeks, but the media tour is already in full swing, and it appears we’re due for a lot of really fascinating discussions about screentime, technology, and what it means to be human. Andrew Stanton, the movie’s director, gave a terrific interview to Polygon with some great perspective on all this, and why screens actually aren’t just a villain. Tom Hanks has some thoughts, too. I love that a “kids movie” might be our best chance in forever to have these conversations for real.

Also: We got a new Taylor Swift song to go with the movie. So it’s already a win.

See you next week!

This is your laptop… on AI

2026-06-05T12:39:07-04:00

We’re now deep into developer conference season, and one of the themes so far is the relentless conviction from Big Tech companies that AI is going to change everything about how we do everything. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang made that clearer than anyone this week, when he described a completely new way of using our laptops — and a completely new kind of laptop made to support it. It’s all very interesting, but it raises the same question we have around so many AI products: Does anyone actually want this?

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David run through a lot of the products coming out of Microsoft Build and Google I/O, from Gemini Spark to the Nvidia RTX Spark to Microsoft’s Scout and Solara projects. AI agents are everywhere, doing everything, and we’re not exactly sure how to feel about it. Are we due for a complete re-think of our laptops, just so they can run AI models? Or is “more powerful laptop” enough to get the job done?

After that, it’s time for the Hype Desk, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, our thoughts about WWDC, and a deeply silly Meta hack.

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Also: We’re now a week in to The Vergecast’s new life as a daily podcast! We’ve talked about the state of posting, Nvidia’s chip ambitions, the Steroid Olympics, and Microsoft Build. We already have new ideas for the show and some stuff we want to improve, but we also want to hear how you’re feeling about the new format. Tell us everything! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, and tell us everything that’s on your mind. And make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

Gemini Spark is the most impressive and terrifying AI experience I’ve had yet

2026-06-02T10:29:06-04:00

Spark is Google’s new agentic answer for everything.

According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you’re going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will exhaustively search travel options, read up on all the fun things to do, check all the local hotspots, and offer you a fully fledged itinerary. So far, I’ve found this to work only in the most generic ways: If you want to do the six most obvious things in any city on planet Earth, AI has you covered, but that’s about as far as it goes.

I had a very different experience using Spark, Google’s new always-on AI agent. Spark is a hugely ambitious thing: Google intends it to be the interface through which you can use external apps, and over time even operate your computer. (“OpenClaw with better internet access” is a not-wrong way to describe it.) Spark is currently rolling out to Google’s $99 / month AI Ultra plan, but Google allowed me to try it early. I tested some simple action-oriented stuff, like having Spark go through my Gmail inbox and suggest a bunch of things I should unsubscribe from and having it comb my Google Docs for old tasks I still haven’t finished. In both cases, it did a fine job, even creating me a nicely organized document with a bunch of links to quickly unsubscribe from various marketing emails.

Then I gave Spark a simple trip-planning job. “I’m going to be in Hershey PA with my wife, two kids, and dog the weekend of July 18th. Can you make a plan for the whole weekend, including places to stay, eat, things to do, and everything else?” I left out a few salient details, like the concert tickets I have for that Saturday night, but figured I’d start with the six most obvious things to do in Hershey and go from there.

A few minutes later, Spark pinged me back. “I have created a comprehensive, family-friendly, and dog-friendly weekend itinerary for your trip to Hershey, PA, from Friday, July 17 to Sunday, July 19, 2026.” It shared a link to a Google Doc it had made me, and a couple thousand words of shockingly detailed, useful itinerary.

To begin with, it offered driving directions from my house, an address that of course Google knows but I had not offered. It included a few hotel options, including their pet fees, and some dog-friendly activities that Frida might like. I never told Google my dog’s name is Frida; my only guess is that Spark found it through emails from my vet.

Spark also casually noted that my son Lewis will get into Hershey Park for free, because he’s not a year old yet, but that because Arthur is three, he’ll need a ticket. I don’t know if Spark was guessing what time Lewis naps in the afternoon, or if it knew it somehow, but it was right to schedule nap time for 1:30PM.

The whole Spark itinerary was filled with details like this. It included my wife’s name, and took into consideration the fact that she doesn’t like to eat onions or scallions. It included the Thomas Rhett and Niall Horan concert on Saturday night, presumably based on the Ticketmaster confirmation in my email, and noted that parking is included in the tickets we bought. When I got to the part where it mentioned getting a babysitter that night, I remembered to note that my parents are coming along for just that purpose, so I added a note to the conversation.

“That is a wonderful update!” Spark replied, happily calling my parents by their names, and switching its recommendations from a hotel to an Airbnb. When I asked Spark to put all the information in a Google Doc and share it with Anna, it found my wife’s email, attached the document, drafted a note that sounded like we were business colleagues instead of a married couple, and sent it along.

The only time Spark failed me was when I asked it to book an Airbnb. It prompted me to allow Gemini to interact with websites on my behalf, navigated to Airbnb, and appeared to be promptly blocked. “Due to security and authentication policies on Airbnb, I am unable to log in, handle payment, or complete bookings directly on your behalf.” It instead offered up a few relevant places with availability on the right days, and reminded me of the information I’d need to book.

On the one hand, this is one of the most astonishingly impressive AI experiences I have ever had. Google’s AI prowess, combined with the vast quantity of data it has on me through Google’s Personal Intelligence feature, produced a personalized and useful itinerary that was well suited to my needs and my family. It put together the itinerary, and presented it to me, the way an actual human assistant would have — with lots of details specific to our situation, with the names of the people who matter, and with affordances made for all of our specific needs. Every time I read the itinerary I’m blown away by another detail of it; I suspect we’ll follow it almost exactly.

On the other hand, I can’t shake the deeply creepy feeling I get from the whole thing. What Spark did feels sort of magical, and very invasive. It’s weird that Spark is so casually telling me the names and ages of my children, reminding me that it knows where I live, and finding information I know for a fact I’ve never volunteered to Google. Intellectually, I know that Google knows an incredible amount about me — add up my emails, my calendar, my photos, and my search history, and you’ve pretty much got me pegged. But seeing Spark treat all that data not as something to be protected, but as something to be mined, just feels bad.

This is the trade we’re all being asked to make right now. There is a direct correlation between how much of yourself you’re willing to share with an AI system and how useful that system can be. Google is in such a strong position precisely because it already has all that information, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest are desperately trying to figure out how to accumulate it. The AI tools we’re being promised are the ones that know us intimately, that can take action on our behalf, that can make decisions without even needing us around. None of that works unless we open ourselves up completely to the machine. So that’s what we’re being asked, even compelled, to do.

You know the phrase, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”? AI takes that one step further. We actually are paying for it. And we — our correspondence, our photos, our very lives — are both the raw material and the end product, everything constantly mined and sorted and fed back to us in new ways. Some of them might be incredible; all of them will require this trade. I suspect I’m going to have a fabulous weekend in Hershey this summer, but I’ll never shake the feeling that I’m being watched. Supposedly for my own benefit.

Casey Neistat’s guide to posting every day

2026-06-01T15:07:03-04:00

Some news: The Vergecast is now a daily podcast! Starting today, we’ll be posting every weekday, with even more gadgets and rankings and conversations and feelings and podcasts-within-podcasts. We’re excited for all the ways this new schedule lets us tell new kinds of stories, experiment with new tech and new formats, and involve you even more in the show.

(The other immediate change to know about: We’ll be publishing the show in the afternoons going forward, so we can include the day’s biggest news in our 90 Seconds on The Verge segment. The goal is to always be live before 4PM ET. Often well before.)

As we’ve been preparing for our new daily schedule, we’ve discovered that posting daily is… a lot of posting. So we sought some advice from a legend of the genre. Casey Neistat posted a video on his YouTube channel for more than 800 days in a row, starting in 2015, and learned a lot along the way. He understands YouTube, and the current creator ecosystem, as well as anyone, so we asked him to share all his thoughts and tips for how to post every day without losing your mind or running out of ideas. (Here’s the video he said took him nine months to get done.)

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In addition to the new episodes, we also have new merch! We’ve been working on some cool shirts, mugs, and other stuff for all our shows — if you want to rep Decoder, Version History, or The Vergecast, or you’re just very eager to remind everyone how you feel about Brendan Carr, head to The Verge Shop now. And keep that page bookmarked, because we have a lot of cool stuff coming.

If you have thoughts, feedback, or ideas about how we can make this new iteration of The Vergecast even better, we’d love to hear them! Call The Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11 and tell us everything, or send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com. We’re going to do another one of these tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and we’re excited to get to do it with you.

This is the James Bond game we’ve been waiting for

2026-05-29T15:01:14-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 130, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, don’t forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about Victor Wembanyama and mahjong and Merlin Mann’s pearls of wisdom, watching more of the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals than I expected, watching way too many videos about lighting a home studio, spending too many hours tweaking the settings in Vivaldi, belatedly cleaning up my Google Photos library, and finally — finally — getting my home office organized. Ish.

I also have for you the best new Bond game in years, an important update to a popular smart ring, a new entry in the Spider-Verse, and much more. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / downloading / cutting into pretty shapes 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

007 First Light. I have played a lot of James Bond games over the years, and been disappointed by most of them. (At least since Goldeneye, one of the best games of all time.) By virtually all accounts, this is the Bond game we’ve all been waiting for. I have no idea how I’m going to wait for the Switch 2 version to come out.
The Oura Ring 5. My main gripe with the Oura Ring has always been its size — it’s just big enough that it seems to bonk into everything when I’m wearing it, and I never quite get used to it. The new one has some clever new features, but is also substantially lighter and smaller. That’s a big win all by itself.
Spider-Noir. The Spider-Verse movies remain some of the coolest and most inventive superhero flicks I’ve seen in years. This new show sounds like it’s just as stylish, but maybe skimps a little on the substance… I’ll still be watching, though.
Halide Mark III. Halide is still the gold standard for third-party camera apps, and the new update brings a very useful feature: You can now take RAW photos with other cameras and use Halide to process them with Halide’s cool new set of filters and presets. Halide is a much better photo editor than I am, I’ll tell you that.
The Sennheiser Momentum 5. Sennheiser probably deserves more shine in the headphone world. I know a lot of people who love the Momentum 4s, and the new model comes with more battery life, better noise cancellation, and a user-upgradeable battery. Very curious to try these when they ship next month, especially to see if the ANC can really hang with Sony and Bose.
Mina the Hollower. According to, uh, everyone, this might be the best game of the year so far. It comes from the developer behind Shovel Knight, and people are comparing it to some of the great games of all time. It’s a fairly simple-looking game that hides something huge and ambitious, and I can’t wait to dig in.
Backrooms. I don’t know whether you should watch Kane Parsons’ incredibly cool, inventive YouTube series before you watch the movie he turned those videos into, or if you should go into the movie completely in the dark about what’s coming. Either way, this is a cool YouTube-Hollywood story, and a horror movie not to be missed.
Spotify Articles. A bunch of curated, narrated, long-form journalism, and Premium users can listen to a handful of them free every month. There are some odd article choices in here, but also some true classics, including the great cocaine treasure hunt.
Star City. For All Mankind is a long-standing favorite show here in the Installerverse, so this spinoff show focused on the Soviet Union might already be on your to-watch list. From what I hear, it’s not quite up to FAM’s standard, but the cool space stuff keeps coming, and I’m here for all of it.
The Ferrari Luce. This has to be the most expensive thing in the history of Installer, right? I really don’t care for the look of Ferrari’s first EV (and it seems neither does anyone else), but there are some genuinely brilliant things going on inside of it. If you want to give me a ride in yours, I won’t complain.

Screen share

I love talking shop with Danielle Steussy. Danielle is a product manager for The Verge, which means she spends her days thinking about and working on ways to make our experience, and the whole experience of journalism and storytelling on the web, better. (There’s also a non-zero chance you’ve met Danielle, now that I think about it — she spends a lot of time talking to people in the Verge community about how we can serve them better.) Danielle drove a lot of the work behind our new homepage, and has a bunch of extremely cool new features up her sleeve too. Including one, coming soon, that I know is going to make a lot of us very happy.

Anyway, I asked Danielle to share her homescreen with us, curious whether all Verge nerds are the same or whether, as a product person, she might have a totally different conception of her phone. Little of both, it turns out! Here’s Danielle’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps she uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 14 Pro in Deep Purple. I’m due for an upgrade, but I’ll ride this one out a little longer. Fun fact: I bought it while living in Australia when the 14 Pro first came out, so I ended up with the UK version that has one eSIM and one physical SIM. Moving back to the US with both of my phone numbers was a nightmare.

The wallpaper: Photo shuffle of my son!

The apps: Settings, Google Maps, Photos, Camera, ChatGPT, Google, Chrome, Brave, Calendar, Apple Notes, Find My, CareConnect, Phone, Messages, Spotify, Mail.

I’m attempting to spend less time on my phone by making it almost entirely utilitarian and boring.

I use Spotify for podcasts and music. I’ve been a diehard fan of Spotify for ages. I taught fitness for a decade and Spotify was my co-teacher. Definitely not a fan of the 20th anniversary icon though…

I LOVE the Hatch sound machine for my toddler. The app is pretty decent. I like curating ambiance for my kid’s bedtime routine.

I also asked Danielle to share a few things she’s into right now. Here’s what she sent back:

Death by Lightning. Just finished. LOVED.
ChatPRD. An AI tool for product managers, created by Claire Vo, who has been such an interesting person to also follow in the PM/AI space. I mostly use it for rubber ducking and processing my product thoughts.
The Techno Sapiens newsletter. Evidence-based guidance for parenting in the digital age. This is such an accessible newsletter by Jacqueline Nesi, a clinical psychologist and professor at Brown University. Makes me feel… better about raising a kid around this much technology.
Tomato gardening. Luckily, I live on the Central Coast of California, where tomatoes practically grow themselves. I’ve got 13 plants this year: last season’s survivors, volunteers, and a few additions purchased from our local university Ag department. I’m growing Tasmanian Chocolates, Bodacious, Beauty King, and others, all meticulously tracked in a very serious Google Sheets planting matrix.

Crowdsourced

“Finally getting around to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. Such a fun adventure game, very well performed and puzzles with just the right amount of challenge. Scratches that Uncharted itch. Really digging it.” — Colin

“With the prices of storage still insanely high, I’m rediscovering burning files / photos onto CDs and DCDs using the ImgBurn software.” — Allen

“Thinking about seeing Obsession in a cinema again after being floored by it (complimentary) on first watch.” — Kev

“I am currently obsessed with playing Huntdown: Overtime in early access on Steam. It’s an absolute blast. A retro themed, dystopian, Blade Runner-esque side scroller / shooter / platformer and it is SO addictive.” — Kent

“With the death of Allbirds, I’ve been rocking Oofos tennis shoes, which are a fantastic recovery shoe for the beach, the office, and definitely after the long run at the end of the week.” — Jimmy

“I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel from 1952, Player Piano, about a near-future dystopia where automation has displaced all labor and engineers and management live lives of luxury despite not actually doing anything. Nothing of relevance there!!” — Andy

“I bought a Kobo Clara BW in January in an effort to read more and scroll less. I’ve largely succeeded in that goal thus far, but I’d like to recommend the Red Rising book series by Pierce Brown. I’m on the third book, Morning Star, and it’s fantastic so far. It has sci-fi, romance, and societal commentary, it’s an excellent series with an escalating plot! I’m really enjoying it so far, and reading it on my Kobo has been a delight.” — James

“Watched Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu movie yesterday. It could have just been two episodes in the show but it was good.” — Justin

“I downloaded Poppy but find it too verbose and sometimes incorrect. Some months ago I came across Extra, an AI-first app for emails and calendar. It’s finally out of Beta and I’m really liking it. “ — Jay

Signing off

Spotify’s Page Match feature is my favorite new(ish) tech thing in forever. You use it by taking a picture of your book, on paper or on an e-reader, and Spotify figures out where you are in the book and immediately picks up the audiobook in the right spot. It can also do the reverse, guiding you back to the right page in your book. It rules.

I have Spotify Premium, so I get a bunch of hours of audiobooks for free every month, and being able to flip so easily between reading and listening has helped me get through books so much faster. Read in bed; listen while I walk the dog; read on the couch; listen while I fold laundry. Can’t recommend it enough.

Also: Listening to audiobooks is reading. I will not be taking questions. Yay audiobooks! See you next week!