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 questio …

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It's been a couple of days since Apple's big smart home announcement, and we have some more information - and a bunch of new questions - about the Apple HomeView. The device has plenty of computing oomph, is always connected to power, and looks like a perfect place to run a bunch of apps. And yet the HomeView is relying almost entirely on CarPlay. What gives here?

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay try to make sense of the HomeView's app situation, and why Apple would choose not to make its home hub into its own app platform. After that, they talk about the latest Gemini model and whether building the best model matters if yo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 147, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I missed you all, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

I'm back from parental leave! Part time, anyway. Thanks to everyone who sent well wishes and tips for managing three kids. I need 'em all. This week, I've been reading about McMansions and data centers and sports cards and ICANN, trying to run my life on the Dell XPS Googlebook, testing a new and very purple Kindle, reinventing my whole note-taking system now that Google Docs can handle Markdown files, listening to episode …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's gadget season, and a lot of companies are launching a lot of new products. But whether it's Microsoft dropping a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet, or Apple diving headlong into the smart home, the actual strategy appears to be almost always the same. All these companies believe AI assistants and agents are the future of computing, and they're building devices that put them front and center.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay dig into all this new hardware to figure out whether any of it has the right take on AI. (Or if "the AI should run the computer" is even the right idea in the first place.) The …

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Google's new operating system is off to a rocky start. The five newly launched Googlebook laptops have hardware that ranges from great to excellent, but the software in its current state is the weak point. There are four of us on staff at The Verge actively testing Googlebooks and, frankly, our internal Slack discussions have been mostly filled with collective venting of frustrations, disappointments, and bewilderment.

The promise of Googlebooks as a fresh and smartly designed alternative to Windows or Mac for Android phone owners sounds great, but there's more than just a few kinks and quirks to work out. Some of its issues and challenges …

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Amazon is launching a new lineup of tablets that bear almost no resemblance to any tablet Amazon has ever launched before. They're not even called Fire, the name Amazon has used for its tablets for the last 15 years. They're called Alexa Tablets, and they're designed to do two things: bring Alexa Plus to the center of your whole computing life, and be straight-up excellent tablets.

The most important thing about these new tablets' software? They run Android. Full, Google Play-supported, all-the-apps Android. There are plenty of preloaded Amazon apps, of course, and some built-in ways to quickly access Prime Video content or shop for basica …

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For the first time in years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - better known as ICANN - is accepting applications for new top-level domains. These are the suffixes at the end of all URLs, and you may know them as things like .com, .org, and .pizza.

ICANN just announced the 1,615 applications that have been submitted so far, from 481 different applicants. The trend will not surprise you: AI is everywhere. Ten different companies, including both Meta and OpenAI, applied for the .agent domain. Seven, including OpenAI, applied for .agi. Six, including OpenAI, applied for .asi, clearly attempting to get in on President Tru …

Read the full story at The Verge.