Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 99, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy pumpkin spice season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Lizzo and Uniqlo and book thieves and Max Verstappen, obsessing over both Black Rabbit and The Lowdown, eating aggressively too many Pop’ums pretzels, listening to everything in the AirPods Pro 3s, updating my old Ray-Ban Metas to see if the AI is any good, meal planning with Crouton, and posting all my junk for free on Nextdoor.
I also have for you an impressive new GoPro, an email service worth trying, a couple of exciting new games, and much more. Oh, and send me more info about your lists! I’ve gotten a million great emails about what lists you make and how you make them — we’re going to do something big here next week, and I’d love to feature everybody’s thoughts.
Finally, a big change to tell you about: in a couple of weeks, Installer is becoming one of The Verge’s subscriber-only newsletters! That means going forward, the only way to get Installer will be to subscribe to The Verge. Why? Because building a community of subscribers is the best way forward for The Verge, and making the subscription worth paying for is how we get there. Our list of subscriber perks is full of good stuff, and going forward that includes this newsletter.
If you have any questions, hit me up, I’ll answer them all as best I can. Here are a couple of key things:
- If you’re already subscribed to Installer via email, you’ll continue to get it for free whether or not you subscribe to The Verge. That means, if you want to get Installer for free and you haven’t signed up via email yet… do it now. You have a couple of weeks before we go behind the paywall.
- If you subscribe to both Installer and The Verge, nothing will change, except you’ll manage all your subscriptions in one place instead of two. Which, hurray!
If all goes well, this change should go into effect the week after next, with issue 101. But I’ll keep you posted. Anyway, enough housekeeping! Let’s get into the good stuff.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you excited about this week? What have you been reading / watching / playing / listening to / building out of Legos? 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 GoPro Max2. This is the kind of camera GoPro is great at: impressive specs, super modular, really durable, hard to shoot boring stuff with. And $500 is a lot, but it’s not crazy for what it can do. I like GoPro when it goes hard for its power users, and doesn’t try to be all things to all people. (Oh, also: the new gimbal looks really cool.)
- ChatGPT Pulse. This is the AI assistant stuff I like: an automatically generated feed of stuff based on what you asked ChatGPT about, what it knows you care about, and more. Frankly, Google is the company that ought to be doing well, but it’s, uh… hard.
- “iPhone 17 Pro Review: Apple Listened, but…” It’s been a minute since I saw a gadget review on YouTube that really blew my mind. This one from HTX Studio fully did it: the spinning wheel of all the iPhones alone is worth the watch. Plus, this video is just a really good explainer about how iPhones work and how they upgrade.
- Proton Mail. From a product perspective, I think Proton is slowly but surely building the best alternative to Google’s Workspace apps. The updated Mail app for Android and iOS is cleaner and faster, and it finally works offline. If you’re ditching Gmail, or just want another place to email, this is a good one to try.
- Silent Hill F. A violent, scary, decidedly adult horror game that seems to be a constant mix of puzzles, fog, and really powerful storytelling. This strikes me as a really hard kind of game to make well, and it was made really well.
- The Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2. In the endless over-ear headphone wars, I think Bowers & Wilkins probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves next to Sony and Bose and Apple and the rest. Everyone I know who has a pair, raves about them! The $799 new ones have some nice upgrades, and I still really like the way they look.
- All of You. The premise — a rom-com of sorts about a test that can tell you who your soulmate is — sounds kind of like a Black Mirror episode, but by all accounts this Apple TV Plus movie is sweet and funny and well-made. I’m excited to see it this weekend.
- Google Mixboard. Fair warning: this is an experimental Google product, so I assume it will be gone in a month or two. But it’s actually pretty impressive! It’s basically a moodboard generator, where you can add stuff or ask Gemini to find it for you. I’ve been playing with it to come up with decorating ideas at my new house, and it’s fun.
- Hades II 1.0. After some time in early access, this dungeon-crawler game is officially out. Our friend Jay Peters is super into it, and I trust Jay more than most when it comes to video games.
- Montblanc Digital Paper. You probably shouldn’t buy this: it’s $905, and there are lots of other digital writing tablets out there that are probably better products. But I continue to love the push from pen-and-paper companies to figure out a digital equivalent, and I love a fancy pen.
Screen share
I like to share my homescreen here every six months or so, since as Installer’s number one Tryer Of Things I am perpetually changing it up. Since next week is Installer 100, and I have a fun (and much-requested) person lined up already, I figured I’d share this week instead. The last few months have included a lot of self-reflection about what, exactly, my phone is for. I uninstalled TikTok and Instagram, and haven’t missed them a bit. Any app that is designed to be looked at — watching something, scrolling, whatever — I either deleted or made harder to find. As much as possible, I want my phone to be for doing a task, and then putting the phone away. Except for podcasts, music, and reading. Those things are fine. They’re allowed.
All of that is to say, here’s my homescreen now, plus some info on the apps I use and why:
The phone: An iPhone 16, in blue. I still really love the color. I don’t love how quickly my battery dies, only a year later.
The wallpaper: Solid black. I’d been experimenting with this for a while, but once iOS 26 showed up and Liquid Glass made everything more chaotic and colorful, the all-black look just made everything feel a little calmer. I miss looking at my kid every time I turn my phone on — but the idea is to look at my actual kid a little more often, you know?
The apps: Google Maps, Diarly, Phone, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Camera, Messages, Notion Calendar, Workflowy, Arc Search, Joi Planner, Remind Me Faster, Craft, Instant Notion.
The first page is the apps I use, and want to use, every single day. The only one that might go away is Diarly – I just can’t decide whether I like it or Day One more. Everything else is probably unsurprising, except maybe Workflowy, an infinite outliner of a notes app that just works the way my brain does. That team has been shipping a lot recently, and they got me back in the app over the summer. It’s now where I manage everything… until I end up going back to Notion or Craft again.
The second page is all super-fast input. The top row is all Apple Shortcuts stuff for adding links or text to different places — my daily notes, a running list of stuff to include in Installer, that sort of thing. Joi Planner is the best-looking app I’ve found for just seeing Apple Reminders and calendar events in one place; I look at it every morning planning my day. Remind Me Faster is for super-fast Reminders input, and Instant Notion adds stuff to Notion way faster than opening the app itself. I use them both all the time.
So far this setup is working really well. I’m not sure it’s making me use my phone any less… but I’m definitely not catching myself infinite-scrolling as much. Small wins, you know?
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 Bluesky and this post on Threads.
“The new Ramble feature of Todoist is a game changer — can just brain-dump by talking, and it orders everything into perfect tasks with descriptions and due dates.” — Jim
“I’ve got my whole team using Klack now. We’re now slacking *with purpose.*” — Brett
“Slow Horses is back, that’s really all I care about this week.” — Eli
“When my wife heard you got back from paternity leave, she said that i have to recommend this app to you. It’s called Dairy Bar, it’s made by another mom to help track pumped milk that goes into storage, so you can ensure you use the breast milk while it is at its best and stay on top of the storage supply!” — Pradeep
“Borderlands 4, or as it should be called, Fourderlands. Turns out nailing headshots with a revolver sniper rifle is a timeless formula.” — Will
“This week I bought my first NAS: I got the AOOSTAR 4 Bay NAS with 4x4TB IronWolf drives. I’m a photographer and I’m finally done paying for Google Photos AND OneDrive, I’ll be using Plex to store all my media and continue on my journey to take back control of my data after recently moving from Windows to Linux!” — Craig
“Rogue Words for iOS is the next Wordle. I’m calling it now. Completely free, made by one dude. It’s Scrabble meets Balatro and it’s addicting as hell.” — Ryan
“Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is weirdly popular 25 years after the original AoE2 came out. Spending a lot of time playing and watching streamer T90 recap low ELO player games (i.e. people who play poorly like me).” — Ian
“Huge fan of Wednesday Season 2, but after watching it, I ended up bingeing A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and honestly enjoyed it way more. Totally hooked!” — Srirudran
Signing off
I generally try not to do too much self-promotion here in Installer, so apologies while I aggressively do just that: we’re launching a new show, it’s called Version History, and I am VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT. I’ve been noodling on this idea for a long time, and the pitch is basically “let’s do a rewatch show about technology.” (Watch the trailer here!) We’re telling the stories of the most important products ever, while also hanging out and chatting about our experiences with the products, their legacies, how we feel about them now, and so much more. We’ve already made eight episodes, and they’re coming out over the course of the next two months.
If you like… stuff, I think you’ll like Version History! And it would mean the world to me if you’d subscribe and give it a whirl. The show launches next Sunday, and I swear, eventually I’ll stop talking about it. Just not yet.
See you next week!
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