David Pierce

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 15, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hello, sorry in advance for all my terrible jokes, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been watching André 3000 talk about life after “Hey Ya,” reading this fun profile of Marques Brownlee and this wild story about the Mirai hackers, finally conquering all 48 Mario Kart 8 courses, watching unhinged Phil Collins music videos…

Can you make an app that’s good for music, podcasts, audiobooks, discovery, library management, and like 100 other things? That’s what Spotify’s trying to figure out. Meanwhile, Disney is out here trying to eat the entire entertainment business one brand at a time. And trust me, friends: it’s going to be called Disney Plus. [Attachment: https://megaphone.link/VMP7024592027]

Two years ago, Opal launched a camera with a tweet. (They were still called tweets back then.) It was the middle of a global pandemic, a work-from-home revolution, and a truly brutal time to start a hardware company — and Opal suddenly had tens of thousands of people signed up for the webcam that Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder and Opal investor, promised was “mind blowing.” Opal at the time had four employees, CEO Veeraj Chugh tells me, and it took all the company’s time and attention jus…

The first killer app of AI for businesses, it appears, is a simple thing: to be able to find information in the morass of files, folders, attachments, incompatible enterprise software apps, and everything else that constitutes modern knowledge work. Notion, which aims to replace most of those things in a single tool, is launching a feature it thinks can help. It’s called Q&A, and CEO Ivan Zhao describes it to me as essentially an all-knowing AI executive assistant that knows everything about eve…

The will-they-won’t-they of Threads direct messages has been going on for a while now. Last we heard, Instagram (and Threads) head Adam Mosseri said that Threads was not planning to build DMs. That still appears to be true — but it’s not the whole story. Mosseri said on Tuesday, in a Threads post replying to Platformer’s Casey Newton, that his reluctance to build DMs into Threads stems from the fact that he thinks Instagram’s messaging service might be the right one for Threads. Threads is, aft…

When I ask Frank Cifaldi, the founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation, to explain the importance of preserving and maintaining old video games, he answers with a movie analogy. Imagine, he said, “if movies were only released on, like, VHS, ever. You want to watch Back to the Future? All right, you have to go on eBay, and you have to find an antique VHS copy that’s degraded a bit from use. You have to find a VCR that works, a TV that it plugs into — or the external scalers that…

When I ask Frank Cifaldi, the founder and director of the Video Game History Foundation, to explain the importance of preserving and maintaining old video games, he answers with a movie analogy. Imagine, he said, “if movies were only released on, like, VHS, ever. You want to watch Back to the Future? All right, you have to go on eBay, and you have to find an antique VHS copy that’s degraded a bit from use. You have to find a VCR that works, a TV that it plugs into — or the external scalers that…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 14, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, you’re my favorite, so happy you’re here, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been traveling a bunch, so I’ve watched Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and most of Rick and Morty. I’ve also been reading about life as an OnlyFans star and the insane growth of WhatsApp, doing som…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 14, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, you’re my favorite, so happy you’re here, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been traveling a bunch, so I’ve watched Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and most of Rick and Morty. I’ve also been reading about life as an OnlyFans star and the insane growth of WhatsApp, doing som…

Because Nilay doesn’t usually have enough stuff to fiddle with during the Vergecast recordings, you know what I mean? There was a ton of news this week, from the AI Pin to the Steam Deck to custom GPTs. But that’s all just the sideshow to the grand (or not so grand) finale of Nilay’s experiments with Samsung Dex. Is it the end of the road, or the beginning of the future? You be the judge. [Attachment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooOSF4h5sBE]

On Thursday, after months of demos and hints about what the AI-powered future of gadgets might look like, Humane finally took the wraps off of its first device: the AI Pin. The device, as we revealed yesterday, is a $699 wearable in two parts: a square device and a battery pack that magnetically attaches to your clothes or other surfaces. In addition to that price, there’s also the $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription, which gets you a phone number and data coverage through T-Mobile’s netw…

On Thursday, after months of demos and hints about what the AI-powered future of gadgets might look like, Humane finally took the wraps off of its first device: the AI Pin. The device, as we revealed yesterday, is a $699 wearable in two parts: a square device and a battery pack that magnetically attaches to your clothes or other surfaces. In addition to that price, there’s also the $24 monthly fee for a Humane subscription, which gets you a phone number and data coverage through T-Mobile’s netw…

Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year. It’s scheduled to launch the Pin on Thursday, but The Verge has obtained documents detailing practically everything about the device ahead of its official launch. What they show is that Humane, the company noisily promoting a world after smartphones, is about to launch what amounts to a $699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24-a-month subscription fee and runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s ne…

In 1989, ancient history in the gaming era, Nintendo released a three-and-a-half-minute commercial for its new device. A kid shouts angrily because he has to stop playing games so the family can leave on vacation; the car sags, and its tire deflates when his dad shoves a giant CRT TV into the back seat. “The secret to Nintendo’s success lies in bringing arcade games forward, into the home,” says the jaunty narrator. “Taking it out of the home is another story.” And then, the grand reveal: the…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 13, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been watching Barbarian and No Hard Feelings, reading about the challenges of building “the next Twitter” and Marvel’s complicated future, using Pager to make sense of all my screenshots, and sending everyone this article about aphantasia to explain that n…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 13, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been watching Barbarian and No Hard Feelings, reading about the challenges of building “the next Twitter” and Marvel’s complicated future, using Pager to make sense of all my screenshots, and sending everyone this article about aphantasia to explain that n…

What do we expect our phones to be able to do for us? And what does it mean to be a good steward of the open web? Apple, Google, and the rest of us all have to answer those questions for ourselves — but on the internet, nothing’s ever quite as simple as it seems. (I almost just compared backlighting and SEO, but this metaphor is getting away from me.) Also, Disney is buying Hulu, and we have tips on how to raise a troll army to defend you online. All that in one podcast episode! Imagine! [Atta…

Death. Taxes. All your streaming services getting a little more expensive all the time. These are the new certainties in life, it seems. In recent years, as the streaming TV and movie business has gotten more competitive and companies around Hollywood have thrown billions into building their own platforms and libraries in order to compete with Netflix, participating in the streaming era has gotten steadily more expensive. Netflix has raised the cost of its subscription multiple times since its…