Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods,filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), seeing You Can See Everythingand then reading and listening to absolutely everything about it, painstakingly updating all the stuff in my 1Password, making tiny documents with Tiny Little Office, watching Conan O’Brien own Subway Takesthe way he once owned Hot Ones,finally getting properly good at CapCut, and blasting the soundtrack to The Mandalorian and Grogu all workday long.
I also have for you a new AI assistant, the most Duo-y new app for the iPhone Duo, my hunt for the next great browser, and much more. Let’s do this.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you playing / reading / watching / listening to / modding with Claude this week? 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.)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Obviously, Grand Theft Auto VI is the biggest game release of the year, but a new COD is always a big deal. This one doesn’t sound like some grand reinvention of the form, but rather an even more playable, even more powerful version of what works. I was particularly excited to hear that the campaign mode is a huge improvement this time.
- The Blink Mini 4K. Ring cameras get a lot more shine, but Amazon’s cheaper brand also makes some pretty good stuff. This one’s part of a whole new lineup of devices, but $80 for a 4K camera with two-way audio and plenty of smart security features? Not a bad deal.
- JustWatch TV. As streaming services get incessantly more expensive, I’m starting to bail on some paid services and spend more time on the free ones. JustWatch’s new service is surprisingly well-stocked out of the gate — I suspect they’ve been watching what people search for, and making some smart content bets.
- Claude Duet. Here’s Anthropic’s answer to Muse, Instinct, and Dots. Duet seems to be focused on helping you get stuff done at work by making to-do lists, coordinating meetings, and compiling data for you. Still waitlist-only right now, but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s as thirsty for attention as Muse is.
- Wildwood. Before you see this gorgeous, by all accounts excellent stop-motion movie, read everything you can about how it was made. Not a pixel of generative AI in sight, just an unbelievable amount of hard work and human creativity. Humans rock, artists rock, this movie rocks.
- The Teenage Engineering EP-35. When you go to buy this thing, it’s technically called “Life is fantastic!” Which, sure. This thing is a battery powered, multi-input, multi-instrument amp with lots of effects. As always, it is extremely cool-looking. I have no use for it, and I want it quite badly.
- Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Nintendo basically hasn’t changed the formula here since Wii Sports from two decades ago, and I have absolutely no problem with that. Anything that gives me that super-active tennis and bowling (plus volleyball, boxing, thumb wrestling, and more) is a win in my book.
- Delta 2.0. The next couple of weeks are going to be full of interesting app updates as developers try to figure out what to make of Apple’s foldable phone. But one of the best is already available; Delta can now pretty successfully cosplay as any handheld console ever. (Plus the Sega Genesis!)
- Kindle Plus. This is mostly just a rebranding of Kindle Unlimited, but Amazon put a couple of interesting new features in its $12 monthly reading subscription, including AI-narrated audiobooks. I am dubious of those, but excited about expanding access to audiobooks. We’ll see.
The worst news of the week here in the Installerverse is that Arc is going away. This was obviously coming: The Browser Company bailed on Arc two years ago in favor of the more AI-centric Dia, and Arc has been in maintenance mode ever since. But now it’s not just being ignored, it’s going away. By Christmas, you won’t even be able to use the app anymore.
So now a lot of us are stuck looking for another browser. There are a million new ones out there, many of them somewhere between “heavily inspired by Arc” and “a direct copy of Arc I made in Codex this morning.” I need to test a lot of them. I don’t know exactly where I’ll land yet, but I figured I’d share a bunch of the ones I’m looking at:
- Dia. It has recently gotten a lot of Arc’s best features, and some of the AI stuff is pretty cool. (And mercifully easy to turn off.) The Browser Company’s attention to aesthetic detail remains the best in the biz, so I’m starting here.
- Zen. A total ripoff of Arc, and I mean that as a compliment. Zen runs on Mozilla’s Gecko engine rather than Chromium, which is a win for anyone looking for a little less Google influence in their lives. Last time I tried Zen it was a little buggy and unpolished, but I’ve heard it’s come a long way.
- Orion. I am a dedicated and very happy Kagi user, and I’ve heard good things about how simple and resource-friendly the company’s browser is. Given the seamless Kagi integration, I sort of hope this one wins for me.
- Vivaldi. I used Vivaldi for a while, and I love how customizable it is. I eventually got it set up exactly the way I wanted it. But right next to all that customization is just a feeling of fiddliness, and I couldn’t quite get comfortable in the browser. Might try again.
- Helium. The opposite of Vivaldi, this is a super minimalist, no-frills browser. It’s probably what I need, honestly.
- Firefox. Its confusing stance on AI aside, I like a lot of the recent design and feature choices Firefox has made. I’m also intrigued by some of the Firefox forks, like Waterfox and Floorp, which give it even more customization options.
- Brave. Brave has always felt too heavy to me, and like it’s always trying to convince me to use more of its own proprietary (and often underpowered) features. But it seems to always win in privacy comparisons, so I might need to give it a go again.
On mobile, it’s easy. Quiche is my favorite iOS browser by a mile. Arc was never great on Android, so I’m betting most of us never switched there in the first place.
There are also the default browsers, of course, like Chrome, Safari, and Edge. But each of those browsers continues to fail me in one way or another, and so my search continues. If you’ve found your browser of the future, tell me all about it! Otherwise, I’ll report back here periodically through my journey.
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.
“Youth is an absolute SCREAM on HBO Max at the moment.” — Jonathan
“Todoist has a stellar integration with Siri AI that has finally made me fully commit to just using it If you delete Reminders, Todoist becomes the default on Siri AI and you can add a to-do to any project with tag AND location support (using Apple Maps saved locations like home and work!). The best part is that it all works WITHOUT having to say ‘… in todoist’ at the end of each query!” — Sajishnu
“Apple added Sound Glow to existing HomePod models and it’s just kinda fun to watch the light on top of HomePod glow and flash. So I’m doing that with some of my favorite playlists.” — Connor
“I’m reading a book called How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler because I want to get better at analysis and reading for understanding vs. absorbing basic information.” — Rhoades
“My girlfriend took a train ride up the west coast and reported that no less than four different people asked her if her 2024 Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip 6 was the new iPhone Duo.” — Nicholas
“I recently read Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske, and it was excellent. What if med school was magical, but everyone was still sleeping with each other and stressing over student loans? Then an unexpected dead body shows up during finals.” — Emmett
“I got a Framework Laptop 13 Pro running Ubuntu last month, and I’m really happy with it. (I haven’t done anything with Linux in maybe 20 years — it’s come a long way!) So now I’m trying to see if I can replace Capture One with Darktable. If I can, that would break my last tie to macOS, and I’ll replace my iMac with a Framework Desktop.” — Morgan
“Exploring the new Nektropos Castle dungeon in EverQuest Legends. The game has been such a nostalgia trip back to 1999, but new content in an ancient game is a bizarre delight.” — Alex
“Setting up Navidrome and having Claude build me a definitive ‘Songs From the Black Hole’ playlist from my Weezer MP3 collection. (It’s harder than first appears: is ‘Lisa’ track 12 or not!?)” — Micheal
“Best Buy had a pretty insane deal on a Bambu A1 Mini, so we got my 12 year old son a 3D printer for his birthday. It’s amazing how easy it was to put out a seemingly perfectly accurate PLA print, compared to horror stories from older printers.” — Jeff
Last week, my wife and I went car shopping. Our plan was just to drive a bunch of cars — we knew we needed something with three rows, and really had no experience with any of them — and then go home. Somehow, a few hours later, we were the proud and slightly bewildered owners of a new Kia Carnival.
So far the car has been great, but wow are there a lot of weird tech ideas in cars now. I’m good with CarPlay and Android Auto. I hate how much everything has become a touchscreen. But I’m most thrown by how many features of my car now exist in a companion app. How do we feel about this? I almost miss when I had no idea what to do about the check engine light.
Anyway, I’m a minivan dad now. I think I’m okay with it. Send car tips! Send minivan tips! Send help! See you next week!
