Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 52, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I swear I don’t always just share absurdly expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Chappell Roan and college football and the problem with pennies, watching Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist and Jennifer Garner’s delightful AD home tour, taking copious notes on Ben Thompson’s newslettering process, making surprisingly great bread with a random recipe from Reddit, and trying out Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold.I also have for you some expensive but excellent new gadgets, a couple of great new tech podcasts, the best pause music... Continue reading…

Have you noticed an annoying issue when using your Surface device? If so, there's a good chance that Microsoft has just published a fix for it. The Redmond giant spent some time publishing patches for three of its Surface devices, and they seem well worth a download if you've been noticing weird behavior with your own laptops.

Home lab setups are often characterized by powerful server PCs that possess an obscene number of CPU cores and enough memory to make a RAM-starved MacBook user faint in disbelief. But you can look into more budget-friendly, space-efficient, and low-power devices to house your containers and VMs when youre just starting out.

You've probably heard a lot about Hall Effect keyboards in recent months. With keyboards from the likes of Wooting, Glorious, SteelSeries, and more, Hall Effect keyboards are starting to take off in a big, big way. While you'll be happy picking up any good mechanical keyboard, I would argue that mechanical keyboards are inarguably worse than Hall Effect keyboards for practically everyone, and there are a ton of reasons why.

One of the hardest things about traveling is getting used to the time zone difference. Most of our devices nowadays update the time zone automatically when you arrive in a different region, but Windows 11 PCs aren't quite there yet.

Buying a new Mac is certainly exciting. You're ready to download your favorite macOS apps and put Apple's refined ecosystem to good use. After all, macOS Sonoma packs plenty of features that can boost your productivity and simplify your workflow. One of the lesser known macOS features that can help you organize your digital life is multiple desktops. This means you can configure different desktop experiences unique to the setting and needs you have. Some have multiple desktops with apps and files arranged in a curated view for work, personal, or research purposes. It's true, you don't have to depend on a single desktop experience on your Mac, and we've detailed how to create and use multiple in the steps below.

Adam Driver in a Megalopolis trailer. | Screenshot: YouTube Francis Ford Coppola wanted voice recognition software to let audience members ask Adam Driver’s Cesar character a question during theatrical showings of Megalopolis, according to a Telegraph interview with the director. Then, the software would trigger the theater’s projector to play a clip of “the most relevant response” from Driver.Apparently, it was actually in the works. Amazon had agreed to make a “custom version of its Alexa voice-recognition software” to do this, but the team working on it was laid off during a huge round of layoffs in 2022, writes The Telegraph. Alas.“Imagine!” Coppola beams. “You could see Megalopolis five times in its opening week and it would be different each time! It would have been the future of the... Continue reading…

Image: Hungry Eyes Film & Television R.T. Thorne’s postapocalyptic thriller frames farming and community as the keys to humanity’s survival after society collapses. Continue reading…

Image: Goblinz Publishing Shogun Showdown sometimes breaks my brain. The new deckbuilding roguelike is all about tactics, and a key part of the game is that you can always see what the enemies plan to do next. Every once in a while, that gets me in a quandary where I know I’ll lose. But when things click into place and I clear everyone out in one fell swoop, I feel like a strategic genius. In the game, which just left early access, you’re constantly trying to position your character across a small level to either attack your foes or dodge their moves. As you play, you can upgrade your “tiles” (think: cards) to improve their damage, add perks like freezing ice, or lower their cooldown so that you can use them more frequently. You’re also able to stack up to... Continue reading…

macOS Sequoia, and earlier versions of macOS, come with a collection of default apps that help you with productivity, note-taking, and much more. Great first-party apps are one of the better reasons to pick up a high-end Mac over a comparable Windows PC. In fact, I think some default macOS apps are underutilized, like the Preview app. Another huge perk of using the macOS defaults is that they're free, forever. Meanwhile, on other operating systems such as Windows 11 and ChromeOS, things like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace can require subscriptions.

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge For so many years, the Evernote elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to embrace smartphones, to enable cross-platform sync, and to make it really easy to store and create almost anything. And so Evernote was huge.But Peak Evernote was roughly a decade ago. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company churned through executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. Not gone, not even forgotten, just sort of... there.In 2022, when Bending Spoons acquired the company and soon after laid off nearly all its staff, millions of Evernote users were confused about what the future held for the tool they had relied on for so... Continue reading…

Being a gamer or tech enthusiast can get expensive pretty quickly, especially if you love having the latest and greatest gadgets. I can't lie it's pretty cool to have the most cutting-edge technology on the market, like great laptops and gaming handhelds, so I invest a fair bit of money into refining my productivity and gaming setups. Still, it's always good to remember that you don't need to spend a fortune in order to improve your workflows and gaming experiences with fantastic accessories. In fact, some of my most-used accessories that are critical to my daily needs cost less than $50.