David Pierce

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 32, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy weekend, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about AI search engines and the future of Disney Plus, reading about Anne Hathaway and Andrew Huberman and Jonathan Kanter, talking productivity apps with the WVFRM crew, continuing to watch every “how they made Dune” video I can get my hands on, liste…

Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers — but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers — but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces: Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, the companies announced on Tuesday. The two sides declined to share the cost of the acquisition, but both made clear Yahoo is acquiring Artifact’s t…

There are fewer things more ubiquitous in technology than QWERTY keyboards. If you type anywhere, you almost certainly type the QWERTY way. But why? It turns out that by almost any objective measure, the keyboards we use are decidedly unoptimized. Commonly used keys are too hard to reach; your fingers have to move side to side too much; it requires way too much movement overall. There are a million theories about why QWERTY was invented — the most common one holds that its creator wanted to make…

Google Podcasts is dead. It has been dying for months, since Google announced last fall that it was killing its dedicated podcast app in order to focus all its podcasting efforts on YouTube Music. This is a bad idea and a big downgrade, and I’d be more mad if only I were more surprised. The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fit…

I’m just going to call it: we’ll look back on April 2024 as the beginning of a new technological era. That sounds grandiose, I know, but in the next few weeks, a whole new generation of gadgets is poised to hit the market. Humane will launch its voice-controlled AI Pin. Rabbit’s AI-powered R1 will start to ship. Brilliant Labs’ AI-enabled smart glasses are coming out. And Meta is rolling out a new feature to its smart glasses that allow Meta’s AI to see and help you navigate the real world. Th…

Okay, so you want a 13-inch MacBook Air. But you probably want some more RAM, right? Maybe a storage bump since you’re hopefully going to have this computer for a decade? Okay, well, at that price, you might as well get the 15-inch Air. It’s basically the same price. But you probably want some more RAM, right? And maybe a storage bump? The sneaky upgrade path is one of Apple’s most ingenious sales tools — and it applies almost across the board, whether the company is steadily upselling you fro…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 33, 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 writing about the end of Google Podcasts and the rise of AI gadgets, watching Girls5eva and rewatching Middleditch and Schwartz, reading about the ubiquity of AllTrails and Danny McBride’s comedy compound, listening to Ezra Klein’s podcasts about AI,…

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies… or even not-that-beautiful movies. It’s meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a p…

A few weeks ago, it looked like the US government was on a fast track to banning TikTok. A committee in the House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of a bill that would see the app either banned or sold, before the broader House passed the same bill in sweeping fashion, and even President Joe Biden said he’d sign the bill if it hit his desk. Then, the momentum just... stopped. The bill is in limbo and TikTok is still here, for now, while the debate rages over what should happen to th…

Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information — Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation. The company’s founders, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, are two longtime web developers and app creators (and, in Ford’s case, also an influential writer about the web) who previously ran a well-liked agency called Postlight. They did a bunch of interesting work on parsing websites to pull out…

Beeper, the upstart messaging app that attempts to corral all your messaging services into one inbox, is being acquired by Automattic, the giant that runs Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and a number of other hugely popular web properties. The deal closed last week and was announced officially on Tuesday. Along with the announcement, Beeper is also opening up its app to everyone for the first time across platforms, shutting down its waitlist for good. There’s a fascinating backstory here on all sides of…

The idea behind the Humane AI Pin is a simple one: it’s a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system Humane calls CosmOS. Want to make a phone call, send a text message, calculate the tip, write something down, or learn the population of Copenhagen? Just ask the AI Pin. It uses a cellular connection (only through T-Mobile and, annoyingly, not connected to your exis…

Seven. Hundred. Dollars. After a year of asking questions about this much-hyped AI wearable, the Humane AI Pin is here, and, well, we still have lots of questions. We’re also still trying to figure out how it all works — and where it goes from here. --- [Image: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6DChWqATOdAYLVUNAC6zW9PZ5lY=/0x0:1080x1080/1080x1080/filters:focal(540x540:541x541)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25383040/VST_Webby_Sidebar.jpg] The Vergecast is up for a Webby Award, and we…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 34, 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 writing about the Humane AI Pin and the Aboard app, reading about the Com World War and why studios cancel already-made movies, watching Ripley and a deep dive into the Game Boy’s incredible sturdiness and power, listening to The Rest is History take…

The Limitless Pendant doesn’t exactly scream “AI.” As Dan Siroker, the CEO of the company behind the new device, lifts it up to show me over Zoom, the round, rubbery-looking gizmo reminds me more of an old-school clippable Fitbit. But what Siroker is actually showing me is a device that can be clipped onto your shirt or worn on a string around your neck that is meant to record everything you hear — and then use AI to help you remember and make sense of it. The Limitless Pendant is part of the w…

Hundreds of cables. Hundreds of thousands of miles. The internet runs, in vastly more ways than we realize or think about, through a series of garden-hose size tubes on the ocean floor. Without those tubes, the modern world sort of collapses. And the folks responsible for keeping them functioning have bigger, harder, stranger jobs than you might think. On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk to The Verge’s Josh Dzieza, who has been reporting on the undersea cable world and just published a fe…

AI is taking over at Google, and the company is changing in big ways to try to make it happen even faster. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called “Platforms and Devices” that will oversee all of Google’s Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google’s hardware efforts. Hi…

The TikTok ban appears to be for real this time. (Technically, “the TikTok ban or divesture but hopefully divesture” is probably more accurate, but everybody’s just calling it a ban.) Only a few weeks ago, all momentum for the ban seemed gone. Now, it’s back with a vengeance, with a couple of small tweaks and a new political strategy. And it could get a vote in the Senate in the next few days. There’s also a new bill, known as the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), starting to gain some tracti…

I haven’t been to a gadget launch like this in… a long time. We’re at the swanky TWA Hotel in NYC, where a bunch of early Rabbit adopters will get their AI gadgets. There’s a 360 Photo Booth! And a speakeasy! And a whole installation of scroll wheels! AI! [Attachment: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pAxTk3rMBUvCxxVVORuDQIl-BFU=/0x0:4032x3024/4032x3024/filters:focal(2016x1512:2017x1513)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25414819/IMG_0441.jpeg]

There were times I wasn’t sure the Rabbit R1 was even a real thing. The AI-powered, Teenage Engineering-designed device came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest stories at CES, promising a level of fun and whimsy that felt much better than some of the more self-serious AI companies out there. CEO Jesse Lyu practically promised the world in this $199 device. Well, say this for Rabbit: it’s real. Last night, I went to the swanky TWA Hotel in New York City, along with a few hundred reporte…