It’s a dream week for tech docs

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.) The Drop * You Can See Everything. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a documentary (especially a three-hour one). The pairing of Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder, the shocking level of access, the incredible meta-ness of the whole project. I’ll be seeing this the first minute I can. Oh, and after you watch the doc, watch Josh Johnson’s hourlong set on all things Elizabeth Holmes. Glorious. * Musk. And here’s four more hours of tech doc! The reviews here are also spectacular, and even if you’ve been following the news the last decade or so, I suspect seeing it all in a row at once is going to be an experience. * The Apple HomeView. I keep staring at the buy button on this new $299 home hub. I’m not sure what I need it for, really — my very basic smart home is working just fine — but there’s something almost old-school about the idea of this as a sort of family computer. I’m certainly in the market for fewer reasons to look at my phone. * The new Siri Remote. I cannot in good conscience recommend a $300 Apple TV, but I can totally tell you to drop $60 on the new Find My-enabled remote! I mean, wait until you lose your existing one first. But you will. These remotes are impossible. * The Fairphone Fairbuds 2. I’ve come to like both Fairphone’s minimalist aesthetic and its emphasis on repairability, and the fact that it gets both into a lighter, smaller, longer-lasting, cheaper-than-AirPods package is pretty exciting. * The Xbox Nano Controller. Look at this little guy! A pocket-sized game controller comes in handy more often than you think (makes the waiting room a lot more fun), and this one has all the buttons you’d expect for Xbox and other games. If the battery life is good, this one’s gonna be a winner. * The Fitbit Edge. I’ve been using a Fitbit Air for a while, and I like it a lot, but I do miss having a fitness tracker that also told me the time. This one does that, plus a little more workout and biometric tracking. It’s not the handsomest wristwear I’ve ever seen, but it is very Fitbit. * The CMF Speaker S. I am a sucker for a cool Bluetooth speaker, and these futuristic milk carton-looking devices are fabulous. I bought one of the small ones immediately, and I’m already debating a second to build out the stereo pair. More companies should make speakers that look good! * E Ink Kaleido 4. This isn’t so much a specific gadget as it is good news for a whole category of gadgets: We have a new version of the color E Ink panel found in lots of devices, with promises of both better colors and better performance. Kaleido has let down a lot of devices, but I’m excited to see what comes of this. Screen share 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: [Image: 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: * I’m hopelessly addicted to Balatro, a poker roguelike game that Casey got me into. (I will never forgive him for this.) * We’re starting a new, YouTube-first podcast, so I’m watching a lot of popular YouTube shows like New Heights and Good Work to get ideas. * For fun, I usually stick with my hobby channels: Served (a tennis podcast hosted by Andy Roddick) and Roffle Lite (a Balatro streamer whose videos I sometimes fall asleep to), plus some stuff my son likes (Mark Rober, Bluey, Yoto stories) that I’ve also gotten into. * My favorite new app right now is Dreambeans, a truly demented Google Labs app that sends AI-generated illustrations of personalized suggestions for things to do every day. I’ll open it up and it’s like, “Today you could go birdwatching at Point Reyes” and it’s just a stylized cartoon of me looking at a heron through binoculars. I don’t think people know Dreambeans exists but I love it and am preemptively sad for 6 months from now when Google shuts it down. 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. “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 playing Fire 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 Signing off 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. See you next week!