The Breaker Times

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.) 

I also have for you some expensive but excellent new gadgets, a couple of great new tech podcasts, the best pause music ever, a new game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be watching, reading, playing, building, buying, or singing in the car? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

• The PS5 Pro. I can’t imagine spending $700 on any game console, let alone one with no disc drive. That said, I do love the idea of flying around in Spider-Man 2 — the only game I love to just aimlessly explore for hours at a time – with perfect graphics at blistering frame rates. Technically this isn’t up for preorder for a couple of weeks, but I’m sharing it now because we’re all going to need to start saving money ASAP.
• The AirPods 4 with ANC. I’m sure the iPhone 16 is fine, but to my mind, this is the most exciting thing Apple launched this week — a set of open-ear headphones with decent noise cancellation is a rare and exciting thing. (The AirPods Pro hearing aid stuff is also extremely cool.)
• The Huawei Mate XT. This is the phone of the week. I can’t stop watching the video of the trifold, which gives intense Westworld tablet vibes, in the best possible way. You probably can’t buy it, and at $2,800, you probably wouldn’t want to anyway, but I love that this thing exists.
• Will & Harper. I keep hearing great things about this doc, in which Will Ferrell and Harper Steele drive across the country and try to make sense of their relationship after Steele came out as trans. There’s a great New York Times interview with them about the process, too.
• Channels with Peter Kafka. Nobody does insidery tech media pods like Kafka, so I was psyched to see him back on the digital airwaves once again. (I guess, disclosure, he’s making the show with Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.) The first episode, with New Yorker editor David Remnick, was a good one.
• Panic World. Another great new podcast! Ryan Broderick writes one of my absolute favorite newsletters about the internet, Garbage Day, and the first episode of the podcast has the same “smart but borderline unhinged” vibe to it. It’s delightful.
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. I’m a pretty simple gamer. I like games where I get to battle with and / or against cool robots, and I love when everything is needlessly intense and gory. All of which is to say, I’m confident I will find the latest Warhammer installment utterly ridiculous and delightful — just as everyone else seems to.
• “Goldeneye Watch Music.” This song is 100 percent guaranteed to be on my Spotify Wrapped this year, just based on this week alone. The epic pause music from an all-time great game is now six minutes long, super high-def, and constantly on repeat while I work.
• iFixit’s FixHub Smart Soldering Iron. I trust The Verge’s Sean Hollister completely when it comes to techie DIY, and he loves iFixit’s super-portable, super-simple tool for all things liquid metal. It’s not cheap, but it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.
• Chrome Tab Groups on iOS. A tiny but really welcome browser upgrade: you can now sync tab groups from your computer to your iPhone. (It already worked on Android.) Tab management on mobile is generally trash, and tab groups are a really good, not-quite-bookmarks way to keep things in order.

When I mentioned a couple of months ago how much I liked Andrew Bosworth’s idea of “Inbox Ten,” which focuses on ending every day not finished with everything but in a manageable place, I heard from a bunch of you who liked the approach, too. Bosworth’s system is simple and straightforward but also a good way to keep a lot of things in order.

When he’s not a productivity blogger, Bosworth (everybody calls him Boz) is the CTO of Meta. He’s been there a hair shy of two decades and right now seems to spend a lot of his time thinking about AI, AR, headsets, the metaverse, and apparently all of the other 60 million things Meta is up to these days.

I asked Boz to share his homescreen to see how he manages it all and what else he might be thinking about. Here’s Boz’s homescreen — he’s a company man! — plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: I actually have two phones, an Android and an iPhone; my work phone is an Android, and that’s where I have beta versions of our apps to dogfood. I’ve always been into smaller phone form factors, so I’m currently using a Motorola Razr Plus for work, but I did have to go in for the iPhone 15 Pro because I love the wide-angle camera.

The wallpaper: My lockscreen is a composite of photos I took of the solar eclipse in 2017. My homescreen wallpaper is a valley oak that is special to my wife and me, at the property in Carmel Valley where we got married.

The apps: Savant, Alarm.com, Authy, 1Password, Siedle, Unity Video, Find My, Clock, Tidal, Asana, Noom, Settings, Mercedes Me Connect, Bill, Meta Horizon, Meta View, Messages, Phone, Camera, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Instagram, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Safari.

Definitely a one-screen guy so I try to keep all my most used apps on one screen with no folders. If they aren’t there, I just search for them.

My homescreen is more or less apps by frequency of use, with the apps at the bottom left used most often and toward the top right used less often. Communication roughly in the lower-left segment, home things upper left, media lower right, and miscellaneous upper right. 

I also asked Boz to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

• I’m a huge photography buff and I’ve really gotten into developing my own film lately using a Lab-Box. I’ve been shooting a lot with film cameras, including a medium format Mamiya C330 Professional and Hasselblad 500C/M — then I scan to digital from there. 
• I also collect and shoot with rare or unusual lenses and am in the early stages of building my own lens, but still very much in the design phase, and this will likely take me a while to execute.
• I have young kids, so a lot of my time revolves around transporting them to various activities and locations, but I really enjoy the time I spend with them and the people who support them in all their myriad pursuits.
• I’ve got glasses on the mind — I’ve been talking about the challenges we’ve overcome building our first working AR glasses prototype, and I’m very excited about them, as is Mark [Zuckerberg]. We’ve seen the success and appeal of displayless smart glasses with AI built into them with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and the prototype we’ve built is on the other end of that spectrum, where you now also have a wide FOV display in a true glasses form factor. That, coupled one day with always-on sensors and contextualized AI, will be a game-changer for personal computing, and we can’t wait to share more on that work in the coming weeks.

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.

“I’ve recently picked up a pair of the brand-new IK Multimedia MTM MKII studio monitors, and I am BLOWN AWAY by the quality of the sound. They’ve got to be the best-sounding ‘desk-friendly’ studio audio monitors available. They literally make me giddy by how full and rich and accurate they sound.” – Brooks

“I’m giving Mammoth a try, and it’s quickly becoming my favorite Mastodon client. It does a good job of combining the firehose with curated and algorithmic feeds. And the UI is nice.” – Joseph

“I’m running out of iCloud space at 200GB. I have 18,500 files in my Photos app, but Apple provides no way to tell which are larger. Turns out, the trial of the PowerPhotos Mac app lets you sort by size while your photos are still in the cloud! In my case, just 500 files take up 100GB. That’s honestly totally feasible to sort through manually and will give me back 50 percent of my storage!” – Nikolaj

“I’m basically just watching Chappell Roan’s VMA performance on repeat.” – Noah

“After the recent ebook versus paper book debate on The Vergecast, I wanted to point to Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf. It’s a really fascinating dive into how digital reading affects the brain — with the latter half focused on childhood exposure. Definitely an important consideration!” – Brad

“No Rolls Barred, especially “Monopoly, but Communist.” The channel is all about playing board games, and they will also do classic games, but they add some rules or use the board game as a base and essentially make a completely new game that you can kind of relate to the original (“Monopoly, but Communist,” for example).” – Anthony

“Atlas Creed is a new indie author that I really enjoy. He self-published a crime thriller with some supernatural elements called Armitage, and it’s surprisingly killer. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrators do a great job! Not terribly important, but the inside cover for the hardcover is sick, too.” – Steve

“‘How to Monetize a Blog.’ Maybe read this article / commentary / art piece / disaster on desktop instead of mobile? It’s worth it.” – Hunter

“While reading the most recent issue, I thought of a video essay YouTube channel that I want to recommend. The channel is called Summoning Salt. It focuses on the history and techniques used to obtain world records in various video games. The videos are captivating, and the narrator does a fantastic job of keeping your attention. I highly recommend it.” – Grant

“After a successful playtest, friends and I have had our first session of Daggerheart this week. It’s a TTRPG, like D&D, from the folks at Critical Role. The mechanics are simpler, and it focuses on collaborative storytelling and quick decisions. It feels much lighter to play and it’s less load on the DM! Highly recommended for newbies, too!” – René

“I don’t usually buy new games at full price, but Astro Bot is awesome!” – Sam

Sometimes I find myself in a brand-new corner of YouTube. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, of course there are tons of people doing cool gardening tutorials on YouTube!” But sometimes, like what happened to me recently, it’s a total surprise. I’ve spent a lot of the last week or so on what I guess you’d call “Short Film YouTube” — it’s just an endless supply of short, simple movies on every topic and story you can imagine: horror flicks; inspirational shorts; extremely meta stories; action movies; stories about coffee runs with big-twist endings; student films; more student films; so many student films. I don’t know how I never thought to look for this before, but this is now my go-to way to relax when I have a few minutes to kill. And if you’ve never seen “Nothing, except everything,” you should. It’s a Short Film YouTube classic.