Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you Appleâs 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. Letâs 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 …
On the one hand, Appleâs latest iPhone is a huge victory. The iPhone 16E comes with most of what youâd want from a smartphone â a modern processor, a good camera, nice design â for hundreds of dollars less than youâd typically spend on a brand-new device. On the other hand, itâs a bit odd that this thing exists at all. Itâs missing a couple of the best things about the iPhone ecosystem â MagSafe, multiple cameras â and if youâre already spending $600 on a phone, itâs 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 Vergeâs Jake Kastrenakes and Allison Johnson to go through all the ins and outs of Appleâs 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, …
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
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 couldnât do that much before. And it doesnât matter anyway, because you almost certainly didnât buy one. But if you did, thatâs the bad news: Humane is shutting down the AI Pin â almost exactly a year after it first started shipping the little chest-mounted device â 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 companyâs founders, Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, have now gone from celebrated Apple product makers to⦠working on AI stuff for HPâs 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. Itâs all just over.
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.
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:
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 71, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, happy long weekend to all those allowed to celebrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a place to watch all the best SNL sketches, a great new pair of Beats headphones, a new drawing tablet for creators of all kinds, a fun-sounding sci-fi movie on Apple TV Plus, and much more.
Oh, and thanks to everyone who sent in music thoughts last week! I got a ton of good responses, and to be completely honest, I havenât been able to properly read and respond to everything yet. That means next weekâs gonna be a big, huge, music-setup extravagan …
There are no bad iPads. That’s the best news about Apple’s tablet lineup: 15 years after Steve Jobs first debuted the device, the iPad is the best tablet on the market, and it’s not particularly close. Apple’s App Store is enormous and filled with great apps, Apple’s performance and battery life are consistently excellent, and the iPad is still the company’s most versatile device. That’s one easy answer to your question: yes, if you want a tablet, you should buy an iPad. Even last year’s iPad, or heck, last-last year’s iPad, is still a solid device. Buying an older but better device — last year’s Pro instead of this year’s Air, for instance — is a tried-and-true iPad formula.
But which of all those good iPads should you buy? That’s never been more complicated. Apple sells six different iPads — the Pro in two sizes, the Air in two sizes, the Mini, and the regular ol’ iPad — all of which come with different specs and accessory options. It’s all too much.
I’ve tested every iPad currently on the market and have been an iPad user and reviewer since the very first model. (I’m pretty sure I got a job in 2010 because I had a brand-new iPad with me at the interview, but that’s another story.) After using all these tablets and all these accessories, I think I can help you make the choice.
How we review iPads
iPads are incredibly versatile gadgets, so we test them in as many real-world ways as possible. We use them for video chats, we play high-end games and casual ones, we edit complex video, we fall asleep on the couch watching Netflix. We pay close attention to performance, battery life, durability, and compatibility with important apps and accessories. We’ve reviewed every iPad on the market, along with their most important competitors, and track software updates closely as they change the devices’ appeal.
Price
Yes, this is obvious, but it’s good to know how much you want to spend before shopping — otherwise, you risk succumbing to Apple’s incredible ability to always get you spending just a little more. You can get a new iPad for as little as $350, or you can spend well over $1,000 for a top model. Knowing how much you want to pay will guide you to the right models. It might even guide you to older models; sometimes the last-gen iPad, at a steep discount, can be the one to buy.
Size
The most common iPad size these days has a roughly 11-inch screen. This is probably the right size for most people: 11 inches is ideal for a wide variety of things and is flexible for both holding in your hands and using with a keyboard. If you primarily plan to use your iPad for reading, you might want to go with something smaller; if you intend to replace a laptop with an iPad, you might want a bigger model. Be warned, though: a 13-inch iPad is a truly humongous thing.
Accessories
Apple’s accessory compatibility is somewhat fragmented across its iPad lineup. It has four different Pencil stylus models, three different keyboard attachments, and a wide variety of case options. While some iPad models share accessories with others, not all of them do, so if you want to use a specific accessory with your iPad, it’s important to make sure both are compatible before you buy them.
Your iPad buying journey starts with one crucial question: what kind of iPad user are you? There are, broadly speaking, two types. The first and most common iPad user mostly uses it like a larger iPhone: it’s a bigger screen on which to send emails, do the crossword, watch Netflix, and do other fairly casual activities. The second type of iPad user, on the other hand, uses it like a touchscreen Mac: it’s for video editing, 3D modeling, creating presentations, crushing spreadsheets, and generally Doing Work of all sorts. You’ll also email and Netflix, of course, but you want your iPad to be a primary computing device.
I think I can safely assume most people fall into the first category. (Honestly, I also think a lot of people who believe they fall into the second category… mostly don’t.) For them, the choice is actually simpler than you’d think:
The best iPad for most people
Screen: 10.9-inch, 2360 x 1640 resolution / Processor: Apple A14 Bionic / Storage: 64 or 256GB / Port: USB-C / Cellular: 5G (optional) / Speakers: stereo / Compatible accessories:Apple Magic Keyboard Folio, Apple Pencil (USB-C)
If every iPad is a good iPad, the cheapest iPad is the obvious place to start. Apple’s base tablet is still a really solid tablet and a really good deal: you could buy the $349 tablet and the (wildly overpriced but still very nice) $250 Magic Keyboard Folio for the price of the iPad Air. The 10.9-inch screen is the right size for most iPad things, the camera is good and located in the right place, it supports the Apple Pencil — though not the newer Pencil Pro — and even its now-outdated A14 Bionic chip is plenty for most casual iPad users. All the other iPads do have slightly nicer screens, particularly the antireflective coating that helps mitigate glare, but that’s almost certainly not worth the additional price.
The only thing the base iPad is missing these days is Apple Intelligence. But there’s not much to miss there, at least not yet.
All that said, though: if you do want the base iPad, you shouldn’t buy it right now. The last model came out in October 2022, and there are rumors of a new model coming as soon as March or April of this year. It’ll probably just be a spec bump, but that means the tablet you buy this year will last you much longer. (It also means the existing model will almost certainly be cheaper, if you choose to go that way.)
If you’re not worried about price tags, this is easy: the latest iPad Pro is my favorite tablet of all time. The Tandem OLED screen is bright and crisp, the tablet is barely thicker than its USB-C port, it’s light, it’s thin, and it’s about as well made as you could expect a tablet to be. The M4 chip is plenty fast even for high-end games and ultra-complex creativity apps. It supports the new, lighter, better Magic Keyboard case and the Pencil Pro. I have plenty of qualms about how powerful an operating system iPadOS is, and the limits it places on just how powerfully you can use an iPad, but the M4 Pro is everything you’d want in a tablet.
But oh boy, the price. The Pro starts at $999 for the 11-inch model, and if you want a keyboard, a Pencil, and even a single storage upgrade, you’re quickly looking at a $2,000 purchase. If we’re just talking about a Netflix and email machine, we’re long past the point of diminishing returns. But if you don’t care, and you just want the best thing money can buy? Here it is. You won’t be disappointed.
Screen: 8.3-inch, 2266 x 1488 resolution 60Hz Mini LED / Processor: Apple A17 Pro / Storage: up to 2TB / Port: USB-C / Cellular: 5G (optional) / Speakers: quad /Compatible accessories:Apple Pencil Pro, Pencil USB-C, Smart Folio
You’re either an iPad Mini person or you’re not. I very much am: I’ve used a Mini for years as my device for reading in bed, watching movies on airplanes, and playing games on the go. This year’s Mini is a bit of a disappointment, with a slightly underpowered processor and an old design that could have used smaller bezels and a relocated camera. But it’s still the iPad Mini, and it’s still good enough for most tablet things. If you want an iPad Mini, this is it.
Once you’ve picked an iPad model, you still have a bunch of decisions to make. And many of them are about specs and features that will cost you hundreds of dollars. Here are my recommendations for some of the things you’ll encounter:
Cellular coverage: You probably don’t need this. Unless you live in a really remote area, Wi-Fi is available in most places. That said, I’ve found that I use cell-equipped iPads far more often when I can just pull them out and know they’re connected — there’s something about busting it out in the park or on the subway that just feels great. Plus, it’s a really useful hotspot for other devices. This isn’t the first place I’d spend my money, though.
Storage: This is the first place I’d spend my money. The base iPad comes with 64GB of storage, which is fine in a pinch but will fill up really fast. The others start with at least 128GB, which is better, but I even recommend springing for 256GB if you can afford it.
Engraving: Don’t do this. It screws up returns and makes selling or giving it away harder. Just don’t do it.
Apple Pencil: As much as I’d love for this to be an all-purpose accessory, it’s really not. Buy it (either the USB-C or the Pro) if you plan to handwrite or draw a lot. Otherwise, skip it.
Magic Keyboard: This is the first accessory I’d recommend to most people — most people type a lot on their iPads, and it’s also a handy stand and dock for the tablet. You can find cheaper keyboard docks than Apple’s, but I haven’t found one I like better. It’s expensive no matter which model you buy, though.
There’s one other thing to consider as you shop for an iPad, which is that your tablet is almost certainly going to last you a long time. In normal use, you should expect your tablet to work well for at least five years, and even limp along for a few more years after that. (It’s 2025, and I know multiple people still using the iPad Air 2 from 2014 even though it doesn’t get software updates anymore.)
My gadget shopping advice is always to buy the best thing you can afford and hold onto it for as long as possible, and that’s more doable with an iPad than almost any other device category. If you have the extra $100 to spend on storage, do it. If you want to upgrade because you think AI will get more powerful in the next few years, go for it! Just make sure you know which kind of iPad user you really are, and get the best one you’ll actually make use of.
Itâs hard to think of a time when a single figure has been so central to seemingly everything in the way that Elon Musk is right now. Musk is overseeing and overhauling the federal government, while bending it toward his own financial gain. Heâs also ubiquitous in the artificial intelligence world, where this week he offered to buy part of OpenAI, adding more pressure and chaos to an already complicated company in an already complicated spot.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about Elon Musk. (For what itâs worth: we hear those of you who would like us to talk less about Musk on the show. Frankly, weâd also like to talk less about Musk on the show! And weâre working on ways to do that. But whatâs happening with DOGE in particular is so urgent and important and central to all the things The Verge cares about that we feel we have to keep talking about it. We want outlets too, though, and weâll find them together.) We talk about the latest with DOGE, look through some deeply silly government websites, and dig into all the ways the Trump administration is using boring government inform …
Over the last few weeks, OpenAI has done the previously unthinkable: it has consistently shipped interesting new user-facing products. First there was Tasks, a way to engage ChatGPT in helping you get things done. Then there was Operator, a way for the chatbot to actually do things for you. And finally there was âdeep research,â an extremely imperfect but still very interesting tool for generating deep dives.
For now, Operator and deep research are both gated behind ChatGPTâs most expensive subscription, the $200-a-month Pro tier. (Tasks is available on the $20 Plus plan.) So on this episode of The Vergecast, we paid up and got to testing. The Vergeâs Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about her experience with the shiniest things about ChatGPT â the good, the bad, the ugly, and the really, really, impossibly slow.
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 70, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, go Chiefs I guess, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a couple of new games guaranteed to eat up the rest of your year, a couple of new apps for reading the web, a cool new way to consume Bluesky, a creepy smart home thriller, and much more.
And I have a question for you: whatâs your music setup? I want to know whether you use Spotify or Apple or Tidal, but also if you have an app you love for managing your record collection, or just an upcycled old iPod, or 600 Bluetooth speakers all rigged together for parties. Whatâs your favorite part of your setup? Iâll tell you mine if you tell me yo …
I have a cable problem. Iâm the guy with a giant box (three, actually) of ancient power cables that connect to nothing, just in case a time traveler appears with my hard drive from 2006 and demands I plug it in. I have approximately a thousand Lightning cables, even though the only Lightning-charging device I have left is my AirPods. (Which I charge wirelessly anyway.) I have a bunch of fancy braided USB-C cables, which I bought just so Iâd know who was absconding with my chargers at family gatherings. When I travel, I have a case roughly the size of a family-sized Doritoâs bag just for cables and chargers.
A couple of weeks and a few trips ago, though, I replaced all those cables with just two. Theyâre retractable USB-C cables, made by a company called Baseus. In case youâre wondering, itâs a China-based company founded in 2009. Apparently, the name is a shortening of the phrase âbase on user.â Which, sure. The company has been growing in China for years, but only relatively recently started selling in the US through a warehouse and storefront in Ohio. Like Anker, Ugreen, and other China-based brands you probably discovered on Amazon, Baseus sells what appears to …
Elon Musk and the team at the Department of Government Efficiency figured out one thing really fast: if you control the computers, you control everything. And so Musk and his merry band of engineers have spent the last week or so parading into various US government agencies and taking control of their systems. Thereâs so much about whatâs really happening here â who has what access, when anyone will try and stop them, whether this small group really will successfully shut down agencies and convince thousands of federal employees to leave their jobs â that we donât know. But however it shakes out, the X-ification of the US government is not a good thing.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by trying to, if not make sense of things, at least try and explain them. Nilay, David, and The Vergeâs Richard Lawler talk about why DOGE is operating the way it is, how it has been able to so quickly assume so much control over the government, and what might come next.
Tapestry is a particularly colorful way to look at all your feeds.
The folks at Iconfactory, which once made a wonderful Twitter client called Twitterrific, launched a new app on Tuesday. Itâs called Tapestry, and itâs a cross between a social app and a news reader. The app can ingest feeds of all kinds: someoneâs Bluesky posts, your favorite YouTube creatorâs videos, a blogâs new posts, all your go-to podcasts. You add the feeds, and Tapestry shows them to you in chronological order. No recommendations, no algorithms, just what Iconfactory calls a âpersonal, unified timelineâ of content you care about.
Tapestry has a bunch of clever ways to filter your content, too. You can pick keywords to âMuffle,â which will make their entry in Tapestry much smaller, or you can mute them and remove them from your timeline entirely. You can search across all your feeds at once, too, and create timelines within your timeline â I set one up for my podcast feeds, for instance, and now Tapestry is a passable podcast player. Tapestry syncs both your content and your place in the timeline across devices, and it gives you lots of control over how things look.
Iâve been using Tapestry in beta for a while, and I quite like the app. Itâs fairly …
After almost exactly 18 years, you could make the argument that the tech industry has finally finished what the iPhone started. Itâs not that thereâs no innovation left in phones, or that there arenât other big ideas to be had about the devices we carry around, but the specific thing the first iPhone was â a candy bar-shaped slab of glass in your pocket â might have reached its final form. Maybe thereâs another reason that Samsungâs Galaxy S25 lineup looks so familiar, and why it appears this yearâs other flagship devices will too. But maybe itâs just that thereâs not much left to do here.
On this episode of The Vergecast,The Vergeâs Allison Johnson tells us all about her experiences with the S25 Ultra, supposedly the most interesting and experimental device in Samsungâs lineup, and why sheâs a bit underwhelmed despite the fact that the Ultra remains an excellent phone.
We also discuss the phones left to launch this year, and whether this might finally be the year a new phone shape â flipping, or folding, or maybe tri-folding? â hits the big time. We have some theories, and a lot of hope, but are mostly planning for another year of the same o …
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 69, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youâre new here, welcome, get ready for some web-slinginâ, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a new place to buy and read books, the return of one of my favorite shows, a great book for anyone looking for a better online life, a couple of great Spider-Man things, and lots more. Letâs do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now that everyone else should be playing / building / reading / watching / learning / writing / hanging from ceilings? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe her …
The DeepSeek story contains multitudes. Itâs a story about the stock market, whether thereâs an AI bubble, and how important Nvidia has become to so many peopleâs financial future. Itâs also a story about China, export controls, and American AI dominance. And then, somewhere in there, thereâs a story about technology: about how a startup managed to build cheaper, more efficient AI models with few of the capital and technological advantages its competitors have.
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about all these angles and a few more, because DeepSeek is the story of the moment on so many levels. Nilay and David discuss whether companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should be nervous, why reasoning models are such a big deal, and whether all this extra training and advancement actually adds up to much of anything at all. (Nilay has a long comparison to Bluetooth, in case that helps you guess where we land.)
After that, we go through our email inbox ([email protected]) and the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), and talk about some of your responses to last weekâs question about how people use AI. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in and called! There a …
The Pebble Time Round just got a new lease on life. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge
Eric Migicovsky still wears his Pebble. Thirteen years after he founded the wearables company and found huge success on Kickstarter, and more than eight years after he sold the company to Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google, Migicovsky’s watch still works. (In case you’re wondering: when I saw him at CES a few weeks ago, he appeared to be wearing a white Pebble Time Round model. But he has a box full of them at home.) It hasn’t gotten a software update since December 2016, though, and he’s been worried for a while that it will eventually stop getting notifications, or connecting to his phone, or run into some other show-stopping problem.
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.
To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.
The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old.
Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge
Pebbles were always gadget-y gadgets, which is still part of their appeal.
The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. “I’ve tried literally everything else,” he says, “and nothing else comes close.” Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements — lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it’s true that there’s been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. “For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there’s just nothing.”
The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn’t try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches.
If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that’s precisely the point. Migicovsky tells me over and over that the plan is not to reinvent Pebble, or AI the bejesus out of the concept, or do whatever else you’d do starting a hardware company in 2025. The fact that the Pebble on his wrist still works, and still works for him, is evidence that maybe Pebble had already finished its job. “We’re building a spiritual, not successor, but clone of Pebble,” he says, “because there’s not that much I actually want to change.”
A lot of other things have changed in eight years, though. Google, Apple, and Samsung all now have good smartwatches that are tied tightly to their other devices — Pebble always had trouble getting access to features on iOS, in particular, and that’s not getting easier. Smartwatches are currently health and fitness devices above all else, and they’re getting vastly more complex and powerful in pursuit of those features. Google obviously doesn’t see any form of Pebble as a threat; its best chance is to chart another path entirely.
The biggest difference this time will be how the company itself operates. Migicovsky wrote a long blog post in 2022 explaining what went wrong at Pebble the first time and ascribed its failure in part to taking a bunch of investment money and letting it change the company. Since then, Migicovsky has made plenty of money from Beeper and during a stint as an investor at Y Combinator; his new company is his alone. Right now, it’s just Migicovsky and a few part-time employees — it’ll grow, he says, but not too much. “The core thing here is: sustainable.”
Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform’s apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too. “There’s going to be the ability for anyone who wants to, to take Pebble source code, compile it, run it on their Pebbles, build new Pebbles, build new watches,” he says. “They could even use it in random other hardware. Who knows what people can do with it now?”
This whole project will take time, Migicovsky cautions. He only found out for sure that Google would open-source the software a few days ago, and he hasn’t been able to use it at all yet. But he’s already working on hardware prototypes, and he’s crystal clear on what he wants the new Pebbles to be. He knows he can do it because he already did it once. The evidence is right there on his wrist. All he’s trying to do is make sure it can stay there.
Whenever Netflix raises its prices — which seems to happen roughly as often as Ben Affleck falls in love with an A-list celebrity — the company always gives the same reason. It needs the extra money, you see, in order to keep investing in the kind of programming and product its 302 million subscribers demand. That’s how the standard monthly price of ad-free Netflix jumped from $7.99 to $17.99 over the course of the last 13 years, including a $2.50 jump just announced during the company’s recent earnings report. There’s still a $7.99 monthly plan, of course, but that one includes ads — and it’s a dollar more expensive than it was a week ago.
But let’s be real with each other. You want to know why Netflix keeps raising its prices? Because it can. Because Netflix won. The rest of the streaming industry is competing ferociously over a finite pool of money, dealing with carriage disputes because of dwindling subscriber numbers, and panicking over the future of TV. Netflix is the future of TV.
Over the last couple of years in particular, Netflix has gone from a solid streaming service to a practically unavoidable, virtually uncancellable part of mainstream culture. It has developed a...
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 68, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re staying warm and sane, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you the biggest new phone in the Android world, the GPU every gamer’s going to want, an impossible test for AI tools, a clever Google alternative, and much more. It’s been a somewhat quiet week for new stuff, honestly, since it’s both post-CES doldrums and utter political chaos. But we’ve still got great stuff to talk about! Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / cooking / downloading / building...
Samsung’s new phones will almost certainly be the most popular Android phones of 2025. They’ll probably also be among the best Android phones of 2025. And yet the Unpacked event this week felt like one of the most boring phone launches... ever. Are we entering a new phase of the smartphone industry, in which companies basically just launch the same thing over and over? Wait a second: have we been in that phase for a while now?
After that, we take a deep breath and wade into the first week of the new Trump administration. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner explains what’s going on with Stargate, and why a $500 billion AI data-center plan is being announced in the White House. We talk...
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Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge
