Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 128, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry this one's so Mac-heavy, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about David Attenborough and scree...
Consumer Tech
Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They're worried about looking cool at a big party. They're obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is...
Plus, a game with a perfect Tamagotchi pun for a name.
The company is also testing the ability to reposition the Windows 11 taskbar.
Even new creators can sign up for access.
The companies are facing numerous other legal challenges.
Xbox just allcapsmaxxed: Meet XBOX. This isn't a joke; Microsoft appears to be actually rebranding Xbox to XBOX. Asha Sharma, Xbox CEO, ran a poll on X earlier this week, asking fans whether Microsoft should use Xbox or XBOX. The results were in favor of XBOX, and the company has now renamed its ...
YouTube is expanding its AI likeness detection program to all users over the age of 18 - meaning just about anyone can have the platform hunt for potential deepfakes of themselves. The likeness detection feature uses a selfie-style scan of a person's face to monitor YouTube for lookalikes. If the...
Two crashes since July 2025 involved robotaxis being driven by remote operators.
Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test will allow you to reposition the taskbar and change the size of the Start menu. The update, which is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Experimental channel, lets you place the taskbar on the bottom, top, left, or right side of the screen. Microsoft first...
ArXiv, a popular platform for preprint academic research, is taking a new step to attempt to reduce the volume of papers that include AI slop. If a paper has "incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation," such as hallucinated references or "meta-comments...
Game preservation group Stop Killing Games advised on the bill.
Who's up for a Jak & Daxter / Half-Life hybrid?
Bungie details how it plans to grow its extraction shooter.
If you’re not staying on top of Analogue 3D updates, now’s the time to start. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Analogue has released a new firmware update for its Analogue 3D console that adds the Memories save state feature. Memories, which was first introduced with its handheld A...
OpenAI announced yet another reorganization Friday, consolidating certain areas and making company president Greg Brockman the official lead of all things product. In a memo viewed by The Verge, Brockman wrote that since OpenAI's product strategy for this year is to go all-in on AI agents, the co...
The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was billed by the company in late March as one of its “fastest gaming desktop processor ever.” That hype was evidently accurate, as benchmarks done by Gamers Nexus show the processor giving AMD’s pricier X3D cache-equipped Ryzen 9000-series CPUs a run for their mo...
AI radio DJs demonstrated their volatile personalities. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI...
A bundle of both games, along with some DLC, arrives this summer.
The T1 Phone has the wrong number of stripes, but it does at least have 50 stars. | Screenshot: Trump Mobile Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. This week, despite our best hopes, we s...