Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 118, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, please take my Switch away so I can get some work done, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about moon factories and railroad monopolies and backing into parking spots, finally digging into the Acquired podcast archives, taking tons of notes on Michael Pollan’s new book about consciousness, watching everything Look Mum No Computer has ever made, breaking my computer trying to get the Obsidian CLI to work for me, giving the Zen Browser another try as my default, and building a bunch of Ikea furniture for my bedroom. I love building Ikea furniture.
I also have for you Apple’s cheap(er) new laptop, a new model from OpenAI, a fun new feature for your Pixel phone, and SO MANY great games to play this weekend. Let’s do this.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / gazing wistfully at right now? 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 Apple MacBook Neo. I described this on a Vergecast stream as “Fisher Price My First MacBook,” and I think that’s about right. But I suspect this thing is going to be the exact right mix of fun colors, just enough power, and a terrific price ($599!) to make it a lot of people’s first MacBook. I will say, though: I don’t love the yellow. Indigo all the way.
- OpenAI’s GPT-5.4. OpenAI is pushing hard to catch up to Claude Code, and I keep hearing that this new model is a big step in that direction. Plus it adds native computer use, which you should approach EXTREMELY carefully, but puts an LLM in a position to be even more useful. One to play with this weekend for sure.
- Formula 1 on Apple TV. One, I think if you’re reading this there’s a strong chance you’d appreciate F1, which is as much a tech thing as a sports thing. Two, the races will now be on Apple TV, and so far it appears Apple has some great ideas about how to show them. You have until Sunday to catch up on Drive to Survive!
- Slay the Spire 2. Oh boy were a lot of you in my inbox about this this week. The much-anticipated sequel to a beloved roguelike is out (technically in early access, but it seems to be extremely playable already), and I know has already ruined the productivity of many of us in the Installerverse. Don’t miss this one.
- Pokémon Pokopia. What a week for endlessly playable games! Imagine Pokémon, but instead of spending all your time fighting and collecting, you mostly just hang out and make friends and build stuff. It’s not Animal Crossing or Minecraft, but it’s definitely those things-ish. And I mean that as a compliment.
- Android Desktop Mode. If you have a recent Pixel, you need to update to the latest Android and then plug your phone into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. No, we’re not quite at “it just becomes a Chromebook!” levels of greatness. But Desktop Mode really, actually, genuinely works. I’m very excited about it.
- Marathon. This is the kind of huge live-service game that almost never works anymore. (So far, the next Fortnite is just… Fortnite.) But Marathon is at the very least a very good, very shiny, very intense game, the kind you hope and expect Bungie to pull off. Don’t sleep on this one — you never know how long it’ll last.
- Glaze by Raycast. Vibe coding may not be coding, but it’s still pretty technically complex. I love this approach from Raycast, which tries to automate a bunch of design work and product implementation so literally all you have to do is describe the features you want. I’ve been playing with it for a few days now, making a million little tools I both do and don’t need, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.
- The Nothing Headphone A. I’ve come around on Nothing’s retro-future headphone design, and I really like the whole kit when it only costs $199. I wish the mic sounded better, but it has all the controls, connectivity, and battery life you could ask for.
The last few nights, it’s been feeling like 2018 again. I get a notification a few minutes before 9, and suddenly Scott Rogowsky is on my screen running a live game show. It’s not HQ Trivia anymore, though, and it’s not even trivia. The app is called Savvy, the game is called TextSavvy, and it plays like a real-time Wordle competition. It’s very different, and very fun, and I can’t believe how quickly the game has become part of my evening routine again.
The game has been in testing for a while, but this week was its official launch. To mark the occasion, I asked Scott to share his homescreen with us, hoping I’d see whether he really is cheating during the games or not. (He swears he’s not.) I also wondered if he still had HQ on his phone, like I did for a bunch of years.
Here’s Scott’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 16 running iOS 18.5.
The wallpaper: My five-year-old super mutt Buscemi, in a barrel.
The apps: Messages, WhatsApp, Savvy, Notes, Camera, Settings, Slack, Substack, Google Calendar, Phone, Mail, Safari, Google Maps.
Call me crazy, but I mostly use my phone for communication: Messages (I keep notifications off), WhatsApp (my sister lives in Scotland, and I have a bunch of friends abroad), Phone (the missed calls are all spammers… I’ll get back to them soon), Gmail…
Calendar might be my most-used app, always so much to do, and I’m always forgetting when it’s time to do them. I used to keep a physical notebook on me at all times when I started doing comedy; still constantly writing things down, but now it’s in the Notes app.
I started a Substack on my 40th birthday, and it’s been one of the most creatively rewarding experiences of my life. I write about whatever the hell I want, and make podcasts about whatever the hell interests me. I just began “The Savvy Diaries,” where I share the joys and challenges of running a startup mobile app at the nexus of tech and entertainment (techertainment?).
I also asked Scott to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
- The first thing that comes to mind are these black-and-white, Paranormal Activity-style TikToks I see every time I open the app, with cats bursting into bedrooms and waking up their French-speaking owners by playing guitar or captaining a pirate ship. I dunno, might be AI.
- The Ben and Emil Show. I’m partial because Ben is a friend (and a softball teammate), but he and his buddy Emil have been making quality content on the regular, including a recent masterpiece called “We took Acid at the Train Festival.” Drop everything for the next 20 minutes and watch it now. Hilarious and heartwarming and absolutely gorgeous.
- Lowkey obsessed with Clavicular… I’ll never forget where I was the day I learned he got framemogged by an ASU frat leader (I was mid jestergooning with a group of Foids). I started a campaign to get him co-hosting with me on TextSavvy — even made a direct appeal to him. Unfortunately, the hashtags #TextClavvy and #Savvicular haven’t taken off in the way I hoped. [EDITOR’S NOTE FROM SCOTT: Mr. Rogowsky wishes to make clear that his interest in Clavicular extends only to the young man’s status as a cultural artifact — and what it signifies about the social organism that creates this kind of celebrity.]
- And am I allowed to plug myself? I co-founded and co-funded Savvy, so the game really should be called Win Scott Rogowsky’s Money. One could argue that I’m a funnier, more or less Jewier Ben Stein — with better politics.
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.
“As a fellow dad of tiny humans, I’d suggest giving a sling bag a try. I’ve been using the Fyro Citta Sling 3L daily and it’s been a game changer. Having my wallet, keys, headphones, phone all easily accessible and collected in one place has been great. Especially useful while wearing a diaper bag backpack.” — kborer
“I’ve been going back to the MP3 days and ripping all my CDs. If anyone has recommendations for apps that will auto tag a massive collection of MP3s, I’ll take it.” — B
“Pok Pok and PBS Kids fight way above their level for kids games. There is a deep untapped market for not crappy toddler games.” — Rahul
“Re-listening to the audiobook version of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos after his passing last week, while impatiently waiting on my special-edition hardcovers to come.” — Marcos
“Obsessively listening to the podcasts: Well There’s Your Problem, Tran Girlismo, and Remap Radio.” — Oliveoiltrain
“Reverse: 1999 released the latest version of Critter Crash, an incredibly cute auto battle mode (think TFT from Riot). While I’ve loved the whole game since day one, I love this mode they release 2-3 times a year more than anything.” — Kiro
“Check out Everything Weather on iOS and Android. It uses the National Weather Service as its source, and is well presented. And almost all of it is free. It even includes space weather.” — Kurt
“Hulu’s Paradise, Season 1 and Season 2 (so far). See what the human spirit goes through and how it prevails in unprecedented times.” — Sam
“This new video / mini documentary on HyperCard, a forgotten gem of the golden age of the Mac that let ordinary people create applications. A kind of web before the web.” — Gregory
“Pentaton: it just plays music. This hid under my radar for too long, but finally a super clean, super focused, sufficiently audiophile appealing FLAC file player that focuses on just playing files well and is DAC and headphone aware to boot. Best part is you just point it at a folder of files and that’s it: no copies, no files renamed, no weird extra directories of odd UUID aliases… it just reads files and their tags. And plays them back *perfectly*.” — Noah
Allow me some very brief self-promotion: The new season of Version History launches this weekend! We’re getting better and better at making this show, and I really love the six episodes in this season. First up is Furby, which is a truly wild episode. It drops this Sunday.
To that end, I have a favor to ask. We created new pages for Version History on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and I would be so grateful if you’d subscribe or follow one or all of them. Growing new things is really hard, and I really love this show, and we have big plans for it. So check out the new episodes, like, subscribe, tell your friends, hold their eyes and ears open while they check it out too, and know I am eternally grateful. The Installerverse remains undefeated.