The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.

This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.

There was just one problem wi …

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The US smartphone market is pretty boring. There are iPhones, there are Galaxies, Google will happily give you a Pixel if you remember it exists, and that’s about it. But as soon as you get out and see the world a little, you realize: there are a lot of new ideas about smartphones out there.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we explore a few of those ideas. The Verge’s Allison Johnson and Dominic Preston join the show to talk about their trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, the annual smartphone extravaganza. They saw phones that twist, phones that fold, phones with inexplicably enormous camera lenses attached, phones with lots and lots of AI, and phones with speakers so loud you’ll be ostracized from polite society. Now they’re back to tell the tale of interesting smartphones, and try to figure out if any of it might change our devices forever.

After that, we pivot to a new take on an old idea about social networks. Digg is back! Sort of. Right now, it’s a landing page and a waitlist, but an all-star roster of social veterans is serious about rebooting one of the internet’s first huge social hits. Kevin Rose and Justin Mezzell join the show to talk about …

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This year’s iPad Air was a surprise to me. Apple launched the last Air less than a year ago, and that was a very good device that could already support Apple Intelligence — and most of Apple’s recent gadget upgrades have been about supporting Apple Intelligence. I figured Apple might launch a better Magic Keyboard for the Air (which it did), and that maybe we’d see some big new software ideas at WWDC this year. But a whole new model? Didn’t see that coming.

In fairness, there’s really only one new thing about the new model: it runs on an M3 chip instead of last year’s M2. So maybe instead of a whole new iPad Air, this is more like a mid-cycle refresh. Apple’s chip production changes, and so its devices change too. The new one, just like the old one, starts at $599 for the 11-inch model and $799 for the 13-inch screen. It comes in the same very pale colors. You get it.

I’ve had a 13-inch M2 Air for many months and an 11-inch M3 Air on my desk for the last several days. The story is the same as ever: it’s an excellent tablet, and I wish Apple would use iPadOS to make it a more versatile one. But we don’t need to litigate the reason for tablets to exist — yo …

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 74, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry in advance for my terrible TV taste, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Bybit, Walmart, and sports analytics; devouring the first season of Running Point and the seventh season of Drive to Survive; listening to Scam Inc and Tested; obsessing over my progress in Fantasy Hike; getting the hang of Tiny Wings again; and making a lot of pancakes for a toddler who suddenly won’t eat anything else.

I also have for you a couple of exciting new Apple products, some fun stuff to watch this weekend, the return of a legendary social media platform, and much more. Plus, I’m an idiot. More on that in a minute. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What are you playing / reading / watching / downloading / building / eating with toast this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

• The new MacBook Air. The M …

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Apple updated a couple of its most-loved products this week, both in relatively minor ways. The iPad and iPad Air both got new processors and not much else, the MacBook Air got a new processor and a new color, and the Mac Studio got a new processor. All this is both good news, and thoroughly unexciting.

So of course, on this episode of The Vergecast, we talk for nearly an hour about all these chip bumps. The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes joins Nilay and David to talk about the state of Apple’s various device lineups, the ongoing failure of Apple Intelligence to be a reason to upgrade, and whether reinventing the gadget wheel is what we even want from Apple anymore.

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After that, the hosts do a lightning round of tech news. We talk about the latest Digg comeback, the Nothing Phone 3A, the Volkswagen ID. EVERY1 (ugh, that name!), the end of Skype, and more. Then it’s time for a politics and policy lightning round: we talk tariffs, DOGE, the FAA, Brendan Carr’s ongoing assault on free speech, and the latest at the CFPB. And finally, we end on a happy note — by discussing one of the wilder camera / …

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The AI-ification of Google Search continues to accelerate: the company announced on Wednesday that it will start showing AI Overviews for even more kinds of queries, and that users around the world, even those who are logged out of Google, will start seeing them too.

There’s an even more ambitious AI search tool coming to Google, too. It’s called AI Mode, and it brings a search-centric chatbot right to the core Google experience. It is, more or less, Google’s take on Perplexity or ChatGPT Search. For now, AI Mode is just a test — it’s only available to users paying for Google One AI Premium, and even they will have to enable it in the Labs section of Search.

The idea behind AI Mode is that a lot of people searching Google would actually prefer to have their results be primarily AI-generated. If you switch to AI Mode (it’s a tab in the search page or the Google app, like Images or News) and enter a query, you’ll get back a generated answer, based on everything in Google’s search index, with a few supporting links interspersed throughout. The user experience feels a little like Gemini or any other chatbot, but you’re interacting with a Search-specific model, which means it’s more able to tap real-time data and interact directly with the web.

AI Mode is just the latest signal of just how important AI-generated content has become to Google Search, and how confident the company is becoming in what its models can deliver despite its well-documented issues with rock eating and glue pizza. “What we’re finding from people who are using AI Overviews is that they’re really bringing different kinds of questions to Google,” says Robby Stein, a VP of product on the Search team. “They’re more complex questions, that may have been a little bit harder before.” Google is bringing the Gemini 2.0 model to AI Overviews, and Stein says that will make Google more useful for questions about math, coding, and anything that requires more sophisticated reasoning.

As Google moves ever deeper into AI search, it seems to be running away from linking to websites — and the fundamental value trade it made with the internet. Stein is adamant that’s not the case. “We see that with AI Overviews, people will get the context, and they’ll click in. And when they click in and go to websites, they’ll stay longer on those websites. They’re probably better customers of those websites because they already have context coming in.” He says he hopes AI Overviews and AI Mode bring new people to Google for new things, rather than cannibalizing their existing behavior.

Stein says that AI Mode isn’t a Trojan horse for a complete search overhaul, because people use Google for too many things to replace it all with a chatbot. But there’s no denying that Google’s AI efforts are starting to completely surround, and quickly change, everything about what happens when you Google.

Sometime last fall, Kevin Rose started thinking seriously about Digg again. A smidge over two decades ago, he’d launched a social and link sharing website that, for years, was known as “the homepage of the internet.” Since then, Digg had been through several owners and many pivots, Rose had gone on to several other careers, and the internet had moved on. Rose had thought about building something like Digg again, and had even been approached to buy back the domain and website a few times, but the timing had never been right.

This time, though, things started to click. Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners,” which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mezzell, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform. “I would call Alexis up and we would chat,” Rose says, “and we’d be like, ‘hey, what if, what if, what if?’ And a lot of those things started giving us both that butterflies-in-the-stomach situation, where you’re like, ‘oh, this could be cool. This could be really cool.’”

Now, Digg is making a comeback. Rose will be its chair, Mezzell its CEO, and Ohanian an adviser. (Both Rose and Ohanian are also venture capitalists now, and their firms are investing in the new venture.) They bought the domain and other assets from Money Group for a price they wouldn’t disclose and are bringing it back. The site is relaunching today, but only in a limited form. Its ultimate ambitions, however, are enormous: Digg aims to build the kind of community-first social platform that basically no longer exists on the internet. And its new founding team thinks AI could be the secret to pulling it off.

If you’ve been on the internet long enough to remember the old Digg, you already have a rough idea of how the new Digg will work. Everything is based on content and links: someone shares a link, and people can comment and vote on the links. (If you like something, you “Digg” it; the old “Bury” downvote option is now gone.) The most popular stuff ends up on the homepage — which Rose and Mezzell tell me they hope will once again be the homepage of the internet — but there will also be countless smaller communities surfacing and sharing stuff in their own niche.  

There are, of course, plenty of ways to talk about links on the internet. One of them, Reddit, continues to be very popular! The team isn’t shy about the comparison but thinks that by better engaging with the community, and without the growth-at-all-costs requirements of being a public company, they can build something that takes better care of its users. If Digg does this right, the homepage will feel like Old Digg, and everything else might feel like Better Reddit.

Rose says he and Ohanian are both convinced — and both learned the hard way — that the real trick, the thing nobody has yet done properly, is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate. This is where AI comes in. So much of a moderator’s job, Rose says, is just grunt work: fighting spam, reviewing obvious policy violations, litigating pointless fights. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers,” he says, “and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community’ than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff that comes in through the front door?” 

The new Digg, Rose says, will include lots of AI-forward ways to sort through and make decisions on content. He also hopes AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Users will be able to tap AI models to build stuff right in their communities, too. “If we can create more of a dynamic canvas where agents are layered on top to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games, to do whatever that community wants them to do, then we have something,” Rose says. 

The new Digg, if the team does it right, should feel more like a community-driven art project than an old-school internet forum. But Rose and Mezzell both say the whole thing depends on doing what users want — and nothing else. “One of the things that I believe that made Digg, and makes Reddit, a special place on the internet,” Rose says, “is that there are humans behind the scenes with real opinions, real conversation, real stories that they find interesting. The second you start to sterilize that, you’re just an aggregator of information. You’re a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it.”

One big challenge, Mezzell says, is figuring out how to reward and promote users for doing good work. Digg won’t show how many followers you have because that creates bad incentives; same with competing to be the most-“Dugg” person on the platform. “There are all these very simple systems that we already have, for commenting systems and branching and all that stuff. But even if we start there, we cannot stop asking the question about how to give people the respect for being really insightful, for being really encouraging, for being really funny.” He doesn’t have a perfect answer for it yet, but he knows that’s key to making it work.

There’s a lot more that the new Digg team doesn’t have a perfect answer for yet. Rose and Mezzell both say, a few times each, that what’s launching today is essentially a prototype. It’ll have a homepage, a few sub-communities, some links, some comments, and that’s about it. The goal is to get people excited that Digg is back, and then both introduce them to the new platform and build it alongside them. “If you come on day one,” Rose says, it’s 99.9 percent nostalgia and you’re like, damn, this is like a slightly updated version of Digg that looks really cool.” Give it some time — maybe even just a few weeks, if the new team ships as fast as Mezzell promises — and it’ll be something different.

For the first time in more than two years, there’s a new base-model iPad on the market. Apple just announced the 11th-generation iPad with a press release, but unlike the new products Apple has launched lately, this one doesn’t come with Apple Intelligence.

Instead, the new iPad comes equipped with an upgraded A16 chip, along with “double the starting storage” at 128GB. It starts at $349 and will be available on March 12th in an array of colors, including blue, pink, yellow, and silver.

With its launch, the 11th-gen iPad will remain the only new iPad without Apple Intelligence. The new iPad Air, which Apple also announced on Tuesday, supports AI-powered features, and the same goes for the iPad Mini and iPad Pro released last year.

The 10th-generation iPad, this new device’s predecessor, was a somewhat confusing entrant in Apple’s tablet lineup. Apple launched the device in 2022 with a more modern design, a faster chip, and a bigger screen than the 9th-gen iPad, but it also cost $449 instead of the long-standing $329 base price. (Just to make things more complicated, Apple kept selling the 9th-gen model for $329 — so which one was really the base iPad is hard to say.) Since then, we’ve gotten a new iPad Pro, a new Air, and a new Mini, which left only the base model feeling out of date. All Apple had given it was a price cut, down to $349.

The iPad lineup has been confusing for a while, but as ever, the good news is that there are no bad iPads. And minor upgrade or not, the base iPad is still likely the right iPad for most people.

The iPad Air is a tricky tablet. At times, it has been the most compelling of Apple’s lineup, the Goldilocks-perfect combination of features and price. Other times, it starts to feel like an awkwardly placed option, both too expensive and not good enough. With the new model, which Apple just announced via a press release, Apple is once again trying to strike the perfect balance.

The new Air is primarily a spec bump over last year’s device. It has an upgraded M3 chip, and of course supports Apple Intelligence. It’s not Apple’s most modern chip — that would be the M4 — but Apple says it’s twice as fast as the M1-powered Air and the A14 Bionic-powered Air. (Those are older devices, and Apple’s comparisons notably don’t include last year’s model.) It comes in four colors, 11- and 13-inch models, and starts at $599 for the smaller model and $799 for the larger. There’s also a new Magic Keyboard attachment ($269 for the smaller model and $319 for the larger), which includes the extra row of function keys and larger trackpad you could previously only get on the Pro.

Apple CEO Tim Cook teased the announcement on X on Monday, posting a graphic that said “there’s something in the Air.” It’s a fast revision for the Air, given that the last-generation model started shipping less than a year ago. Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Apple is eager to capitalize on recent tablet momentum — last year’s iPad Pro and iPad Air were both excellent and well-received devices, and Apple’s tablets in general are increasingly among the first devices to get its new technology.

Apple continues to have exactly zero meaningful competition in the tablet market, and the iPad continues to improve. But Apple’s still stuck with the same question it has reckoned with for the better part of two decades: what is the iPad actually for? The new Air looks like another in a long line of solid technical upgrades, but it’s not always clear how much those upgrades change or even improve the tablet experience. It’s also a little odd to see Apple update the Air and still not give it the latest chip. But if you’re upgrading from a much older iPad, as most prospective iPad buyers are, it’s still a pretty big spec bump.

Bald head. Big muscles. Once a renowned businessman, now making a series of questionable decisions in order to obtain more political power. Weird side hobbies, some involving rockets. Perfect recipe for a Bond villain! Also a decent description of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. So maybe it’s appropriate that Amazon has struck a deal to give the company full creative control over the future of 007 and the world he inhabits.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see – but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

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Before that, though, there’s some big gadget news to talk about. Framework, a computer maker with a sharp focus on repairability and …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 73, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, belated happy Pokémon Day, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about the Zizians and fancy suits and Heavyweight, watching Suits LA and The White Lotus, obsessively tracking Formula 1 testing, apologizing profusely to anyone who watched The Gorge on my recommendation, working to an eight-hour mix of the Severance music, seeing if Bend will actually help me stretch more, and watching a lot of Encanto with a toddler who refuses to sleep.

I also have for you a new repairable laptop, a spiffy new mobile version of Photoshop, the coolest and strangest camera I’ve seen in a while, good explainers on app development and content moderation, and much more. Plus, the second part of our two-part exploration of all your favorite music gear. I’m psyched. Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon has been trying to make virtual assistants happen for more than a decade. Alexa is, by many definitions, wildly successful, but it has so far failed to become the kind of omnipresent, omnipotent helper the company imagines. (It has also, by all accounts, failed to become a compelling business for Amazon.) This week, though, Amazon launched the most ambitious version of Alexa yet, with new technology underneath and some big new ideas about how you might interact with AI.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what’s next for Alexa. David Imel — who you might know as the co-host of the Waveform podcast — joins the show to help us figure out what to make of Alexa Plus, and the whole idea that large language models can make virtual assistants both more useful and more accessible. Amazon’s description of Alexa Plus makes a lot of sense, and sounds pretty compelling, but we have reservations both about the user experience and about Amazon’s ability to actually pull this off.

After that, we dive into a busy week of gadget news, beginning with one of the more unusual camera launches we’ve seen in a while. We also talk about the iPhone 16E, and the ne …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Every day for the last few weeks, I’ve received a notification on my phone at 7:30 in the morning. The notification comes from ChatGPT, and it always contains the same thing: instructions for a 20-minute full-body workout and a 10-minute meditation. The instructions are simple, and I’ve actually come to appreciate the daily prodding. I do wish it would stop recommending the exact same thing every damn day, though. The mountain climbers and positive intentions are getting a little old.

OpenAI has added a number of new features to ChatGPT in the last few weeks, a couple of which attempt to turn the chatbot into a straightforward productivity app. There’s Tasks, which all paid users can access and allows you to set reminders and make to-do lists in ChatGPT; and there’s Operator, a so-called “agentic” model for Pro subscribers that attempts to actually accomplish tasks on your behalf. As an incorrigible tester of to-do list apps, I decided to throw my life into ChatGPT and see if it could help me get more done.

After using it for a while, I’m sold on the idea of AI-capable task apps. The best way to use AI is simply as a way to get you started — it’s a brainstorming partne …

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There was a time, not so long ago, when people wouldn’t shut up about a revolution in automobiles. No matter where you looked, you’d find someone telling you about how self-driving, all-electric vehicles would change the way we think about car ownership, lead to a total reinvention of how cities work, change the economy, and fix climate change forever. All by roughly 2020.

Obviously things didn’t quite turn out the way the EV and robotaxi boosters hoped. On this episode of The Vergecast, we dig into why. The Verge’s Andy Hawkins joins to explain why the momentum continues to turn against the EV revolution — but why carmakers simply can’t give up the fight, or risk losing it before it even really starts. He also tells us why robotaxis are suddenly cool again, as Uber and Lyft resume their plans to automate ride-sharing everywhere.

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After that, we pivot to the fediverse. Evan Prodromou, the research director at the Social Web Foundation and one of the people overseeing the ActivityPub protocol, catches us up on all things social. We talk through the rise of Bluesky, what’s going on with Threads, …

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Trello is launching several new features this week, all designed to turn the Atlassian-owned app into something like a universal to-do list for everything in your life. By integrating with Slack (and soon Teams), email, and Siri, the company is hoping it can help you put all your important stuff in one place – and then use Trello’s organization tools and a little AI to help you get it all done.

Trello originally became popular because of its structure: Kanban boards are powerful and flexible enough to contain almost any kind of project and system. That part doesn’t need to change, says Guarav Kataria, Trello’s head of product. “It’s just that there are too many things in too many places. You’re in email, in Slack, all the social media places and numerous other work tools… and then when you’re running or walking, you probably get ideas in your head.” So now, there’s a new Inbox column in every board, which you can dump things into from all over the web, to be organized later.

Kataria’s insight is not new — from Slack to Dropbox to Notion to Google, everybody’s trying to solve the too-many-tools problem by adding another tool. Trello’s way of solving the problem is not to integrate with a million other apps or try and help you Do More Work inside Trello itself, though, but rather to just more easily get everything in one place. Forward an email to Trello or save a message for later in Slack, or just tell Siri what you need to get done, and it’ll add it to the inbox. It’ll also summarize the message in the card, plus add relevant due dates and sub-tasks. Making capture fast and easy was the key to the whole design, Kataria tells me.

Since this is Atlassian we’re talking about, there are also a couple of Jira-specific integrations, but for the most part Kataria thinks summarizing the thing and linking out to it is all you really need. And he says that between your email and your messaging app, you’re covered on just about any kind of task. “We are not trying to become an uber project management tool,” he says. “It’s just that we can make an individual user more productive by bringing their action items into Trello, and organizing these action items.”

In addition to the side-scrolling boards, there’s also a new calendar view in Trello, called Trello Planner, which you can use to schedule time for all those emails, Slack messages, and tasks. (Time blocking is a huge trend right in productivity nerd circles.) Tasks you add in Trello sync back to your calendar as events, too.

The new features are in beta now, and rolling out to all Trello users in April. Kataria frames the new features as the beginning of a more AI-focused Trello, but also a return to what made the app a success in the first place. “The focus is homing in on an individual user’s productivity problems, not their company’s project-organization problem,” he says. “We are trying to simplify Trello.” Like so many productivity tools, Trello has become complicated and bloated as customers have demanded new features; now it’s trying to get back to helping you manage your life. And all the apps that come with it.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and the real economics of YouTuber life, using my month of Paramount Plus to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Yellowjackets, replacing my big podcast headphones with the Shure SE215 in-ear headphones, switching all my reading out of the Kindle ecosystem for increasingly obvious reasons, and taking copious notes on Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips.

I also have for you Apple’s slightly confusing latest smartphone, a couple of new things to watch this weekend, the best new Xbox game in a while, and much more. Also, the first part of our group project on all the ways we listen to music. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / hot-gluing this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tel …

Read the full story at The Verge.

On the one hand, Apple’s latest iPhone is a huge victory. The iPhone 16E comes with most of what you’d want from a smartphone — a modern processor, a good camera, nice design — for hundreds of dollars less than you’d typically spend on a brand-new device. On the other hand, it’s a bit odd that this thing exists at all. It’s missing a couple of the best things about the iPhone ecosystem — MagSafe, multiple cameras — and if you’re already spending $600 on a phone, it’s not clear that another $200 is a particularly huge deal. So why does the 16E exist? And who is it for?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and figure it out. With Nilay on vacation, David is joined by The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes and Allison Johnson to go through all the ins and outs of Apple’s latest smartphone. We talk about the trades Apple made to bring the price down, the ones it maybe should have made instead, and just how big a deal the new C1 modem might turn out to be.

After that, the three co-hosts talk about the other gadget news of the week. We marvel over the Oppo Find N5, a lovely foldable smartphone that none of us will ever own. We pour one out for the Humane AI Pin, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hello, and welcome to a special episode of Decoder! This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge. Nilay is off this week for a much-deserved break from what I can only describe as a pretty bleak news cycle. So I’m filling in for him, and the Decoder team thought this would be a good opportunity to switch gears a little bit from the political apocalypse beat and talk about something completely different. 

So today we’re diving into the video game industry and discussing a particular set of thorny problems facing Microsoft and its Xbox division. Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and for nearly half of that history, Xbox has been a central pillar of the company’s consumer hardware and software businesses. The first Xbox launched in 2001, and it has sat alongside Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo as the Big Three of console gaming for the last quarter century. 

But things in Xbox land have not been that great lately. In fact, Xbox has been struggling for quite some time now. And a lot of the issues it’s facing can be traced back to core problems at the heart of software distribution: as video games get more expensive to make, and the demands for their scope, size, and quality become greater, how do you produce certifiable hits that get people to buy your hardware? How do you finance those hits, and when they launch, how do you get them into the hands of more consumers — consumers who may not want to buy an Xbox anymore and balk at the idea of shelling out $70 for a new game?

Nintendo and Sony seem to have this pretty much figured out, and both companies have been reaping the benefits of dominating the console-gaming market, albeit in different ways, since at least 2017. That’s when the first Switch launched and when it became clear Sony’s PS4 had cemented the PlayStation as the clear winner of the 2010s. But 2017 is also when Microsoft launched Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service designed to be a bit like Netflix for gaming. 

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer developed a master plan to shift the Xbox business model. After the better part of 20 years having proprietary hardware at the center of its strategy, Microsoft pivoted. The idea was it would lean on its expertise in cloud computing and its considerable war chest of software profits from Windows to try something new. It would mix subscription gaming, cloud streaming, and a willingness to put its software on competing platforms to try and break free from a losing race against its rivals. 

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

Eight years later, and well… it hasn’t quite worked out like we might have thought. Xbox is still in a distant third place in the console race, with some estimates putting Xbox hardware sales at less than half the number of PS5’s Sony has sold. That’s despite some record-breaking game studio acquisitions that have cost Microsoft almost $100 billion dollars. 

Meanwhile, Nintendo is off in a league of its own. It has sold more than 150 million Switch units since that console launched, and the eventual Switch 2, coming later this year, is also expected to be a smash hit.

So, sure, GamePass is reasonably successful for what it is — but it definitely hasn’t changed the world like Netflix did to Hollywood. People are still mostly buying new games, sometimes even still on a disc from Best Buy or Walmart. Streaming a game to your phone or TV over the cloud remains pretty niche. 

So, what exactly happened here? Why did Microsoft’s master plan not pan out? And can it still succeed if the right combination of factors comes together over the next several years? To break all this down, I invited Ash Parrish, The Verge’s video game reporter, on the show to talk all about the struggles of Xbox and Game Pass, as well as where she sees the future of the game industry headed next. 

If you’d like to learn more about the topics we discussed in this episode, check out the links below:

• Xbox continues its push beyond consoles with new ad campaign | The Verge
• Why the video game industry is such a mess | The Verge
• The next Xbox is going to be very different | The Verge
• 2025 looks like a great year for Xbox | The Verge
• Microsoft prepares to take Xbox everywhere | The Verge
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Ten days from now, the Humane AI Pin will be able to tell you how much battery it has left, and essentially nothing else. To be fair, though, it couldn’t do that much before. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because you almost certainly didn’t buy one. But if you did, that’s the bad news: Humane is shutting down the AI Pin — almost exactly a year after it first started shipping the little chest-mounted device — and has sold some of its remnant technology to HP.

The details here are brutal for everyone involved. The $116 million HP is paying pales next to the $230 million the company raised since it was founded in 2018. (There was a rumor last spring that Humane was trying to sell to HP for somewhere near $1 billion.) The company’s founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, have now gone from celebrated Apple product makers to… working on AI stuff for HP’s printers and conference room gadgets. Pin owners will be stuck with a $699 paperweight, since Humane is neither offering refunds outside the normal 90-day purchase window nor appears to have a plan to open-source or otherwise make available any of its software. It’s all just over.

Humane will go down in th …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is clearly all in on AI, and for good reason. With models like Llama, products like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and a monetization plan like Facebook ads, it’s one of the companies best positioned to make AI really work. But it wasn’t that long ago that Meta was making a different, just as huge bet on the metaverse. It’s right there in the company name! So what does Meta really want to be when it grows up?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by digging into exactly that question. The Verge’s Alex Heath joins to discuss everything from smart glasses sales numbers to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to bring back “OG Facebook.” We also talk about a recent memo from CTO Andrew Bosworth that suggested 2025 will be the year the metaverse either takes off or falls apart. As all this is happening, of course, Zuckerberg is rapidly changing his company’s political stances and more forcefully declaring his own values. Meta never seems to stop changing, but this change feels bigger than most.

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After that, we pivot to another company in the midst of even bigger change. The Verge’s Chris Welch takes us through the last year at Sonos, in which the company launched a pretty good pair of headphones — and a new app so disastrously bad it overshadowed everything else Sonos shipped. Now there’s a new management team, another new product line coming, and lots of questions left as to whether Sonos can win back the fans it built over years and lost in a matter of weeks.

Finally, on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]!), we answer a question about business cards. Because it may be 2025, but business cards refuse to die. And so we need something to do with them.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

• Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta employees to ‘buckle up’ in internal meeting
• Meta says this is the make or break year for the metaverse
• Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses sold more than 1 million units last year
• Meta’s AR / VR hardware roadmap through 2027
• Meta CTO says the company is working to ‘catch’ leakers
• Zuck wants to bring the “OG Facebook” back.
• The Sonos app fiasco: how a great audio brand nearly ruined its reputation
• Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch
• Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees
• Sonos Arc Ultra review: don’t call it a comeback (yet)
• Sonos Ace review: was it worth it?
• After a bruising year, Sonos readies its next big thing: a streaming box
• Adobe Scan