Plus, in this week’s Installer: Apple’s smart home gear, a tiny Xbox controller, a new Fitbit, and more.
Plus, in this week’s Installer: Apple’s smart home gear, a tiny Xbox controller, a new Fitbit, and more.
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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 148, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re enjoying all your pumpkin-flavored everything, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Marc Andreessen and the future of math and Mike Tomlin and Citizens United, reminiscing about the heyday of MySpace, sending this article to everyone as an apology for my bad texting, listening to the Pet Shop Boys’ new Alan Turing album and Dwarkesh Patel’s thoughts on AI, barely keeping myself from preordering an iPhone Duo, asking a lot of questions about that “flying” Tesla Roadster, and endlessly shopping for tripods to hold my phone for social videos. I have thought way too much about tripods this week.
I also have for you a couple of huge new tech docs and a whole bunch of gadgets worth a look. Gadget season, baby! Let’s go.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / playing / throwing in the trunk 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.)
I’ve been reading Kevin Roose’s new book, The AGI Chronicles, this week, and I truly cannot recommend it enough. We sometimes make fun of Kevin for loving (and being loved by) AI too much, but this book is fabulously reported, has taught me a ton, and makes so many things about the AI industry make a lot more sense.
And Kevin’s not done! He and (friend of Installer) Casey Newton are getting ready to launch their new show, Machine Gods, sometime next week. (If you were a Hard Fork fan, you’re gonna need to be listening to this one.) So I figured now was a good time to see how Kevin gets it all done — and whether he’s just Claude Code-d himself out of existence altogether. Have I even been texting with the real Kevin this week? WHO KNOWS.
Here’s Kevin’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 15 Pro (barely works, battery life is a joke, storage is full, but I’m holding out until I can preorder the Duo and become a new man).
The wallpaper: A photo of my son fishing at the Russian River.
The apps: Voice Memos, WhatsApp, Signal, Spotify, Google Maps, Safari, Day One, Brick, Stash, Superwhisper, Substack, Slack, Town, Apple Notes, Phone, Gmail, Messages.
I’m a big dictation guy, I barely type anymore, and I use Superwhisper and Voice Memos for everything. I vibe-coded a Pocket replacement called Stash that is still a delight many months later. (Building your own apps is so fun!) And I’m running a swarm of AI agents that includes Skynet (my ChatGPT Dot, which I use mostly for personal tasks), Hootie (my work agent, which runs on an app called Town that Casey got me into), and Nancy (my Muse agent, who trades Kalshi on my behalf and has lost me $41 to date).
I have a “red flags” app folder for social media and everything else I know is rotting my brain, a “green flags” folder for things that feel vaguely enriching, and an AI folder for all of my silly little bots.
I also asked Kevin to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
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’ve been using the markdown writing app, Em. I’m a longtime fan of iA Writer, but this plays so nicely with Ghost that my head has been turned.” — Chris
“Just got my Bose Wired Earbuds, and I haven’t felt this excited and happy for a pair of earbuds since AirPods.” — Sai
“I’ve been liking the app Shelf & Story for finding good books for my kids. Goodreads never quite cut it for me for that.” — Martha
“Made by the founder of TV Time, Bingers is my new favorite media tracker. Lots of really neat features (like easily updating dates and automatically populating a watchlist). Still can be improved but it’s off to a great start and is the first thing I reach for over Letterboxd these days.” — pegasusisme
“Just finished the most recent season of Jet Lag: The Game. Probably their best one yet. A fantastic jumping on point for anyone new to it.” — Shane
“Carrie, as soon as my internet provider resolves the outage affecting my area.” — Kev
“Doing my annual listen to Snow Crash — very much worth picking up in current times for anybody who has or hasn’t had the pleasure (Jonathan David is a PLEASURE to listen to).” — Jonathan
“Still playingFire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. Completed my first path. Just in time for the expansion pass to get announced.” — Connor
“I’ve been really hooked on small roguelikes, like the city-builder meets Balatro in Combolands and the same twist but billiards in Ultrapool. I’ve been playing them on the Steam Deck which is good with some mouse tweaks, but you need to be comfy with the trackpads.” — Scott
I mentioned last week that I’ve switched notes app, this time to Capacities. Again. A few of you asked what finally clicked for me, and the answer is really simple: Capacities has this concept of “objects” instead of “notes,” which treats everything you save as a discrete type of thing. Images get treated and categorized one way; PDFs another; text notes another. Everything lives on its own, but is also organized by tags, dates, and however else you want. Getting this setup right is a lot of work, because you have to create and tune each object the way you want, but I spent an afternoon watching football and entering metadata and suddenly I can find things in my notes app again.
This system won’t be for everybody — even at its best it’s pretty fiddly — but if you do wind up mucking around in Capacities, stare long and hard at this page in the documentation first. It’ll help.
