Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 7, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, first of all, hi, hello, welcome, and second of all, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about the AI writing lives of real writers, rewatching the John Wick movies to prepare for The Continental, shopping for StandBy-capable iPhone docks, getting back into VR exercise with Supernatural boxing, and really, really, really hoping Microsoft’s controller-first vision for the future of gaming comes true soon.I also have for you a new super-slick Windows laptop, two crypto-related podcasts you should hear, a reason to try Bard again, OpenAI’s new image-making tool, a smart home platform to try, and the Tesla of baby monitors.Oh, and fair warning: this week’s pretty Apple-heavy. But it’s New Apple Software Upgrade Week, so there’s just a lot to go through. We’ll do the same for Android 14 in a couple of
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NASA collected a sample from an asteroid for the first time — here’s why it matters
The Verge - Sun Sep 24 18:26
NASA completed its first-ever sample return mission from an asteroid today, with a science capsule containing material from an asteroid landing after having traveled on a 1.2 billion-mile journey from the asteroid Bennu. The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morning, entering the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph. The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched in 2016, has collected as much as several hundred grams of asteroid material, which could help scientists understand the earliest stages of the solar system.“NASA invests in small body missions like OSIRIS-REx to investigate the rich population of asteroids in our solar system that can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” said Melissa Morris, OSIRIS-REx program executive, in a mission overview briefing. “It’s our own origin story.”The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morningThe science capsule was slowed by parachutes and landed in the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52 AM ET, a landing area chosen as it is the largest restricted airspace in the United States and has been used for previous NASA sample return missions like Genesis and Stardust. The landing area is 36 miles by 8.5 miles, and the entire mission has required a very high level of precision — particularly for the spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid and collect its sample in 2020.“The really precise navigation required to orbit Bennu and to touch down and collect our sample, we were under a meter away from our target,” Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager, said in a pre-landing briefing. “So that illustrates what kind of navigation precision we’ve had throughout this mission.” Recovery teams collected the sample from the Utah desert, with a helicopter carrying the sample taking off at 12:15 PM ET. The capsule will be taken to a temporary clean room for first disassembly, removing some of the larger parts such as the backshell. It will then undergo a process called a nitrogen purge in which nitrogen is pumped into the canister to protect the sample. This prevents any of Earth’s atmo
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There are very few surprises from new smartphones these days. Breakthrough new features? Astounding new camera hardware? Get out of here. That’s the stuff of early 2010 mobile technology. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are no exception to recent trends: they’re not seismic shifts; they’re just a bit better than the things that came before them in a lot of small but meaningful ways. What’s unusual this time around is how easy it is to boil those changes down to the simple numbers and specs: 19 grams, USB 3, 120mm. This isn’t just a vibe shift; these are updates you can see and measure. And they add up.There’s one big number to consider, of course: the price. The 15 Pro starts at $999, like the 14 Pro did, but the 15 Pro Max’s entry-level price is $100 higher this year at $1,199. You get 256GB of storage for that price, which is what the 256GB 14 Pro Max cost last year; it’s just that there isn’t a 128GB option for the Pro Max anymore.It all amounts to a familiar phone with some much-appreciated modern conveniences. Not all of them were included by choice, per se, but they’re all welcome. As someone who uses a lot of different phones throughout the year, I’m not used to just picking up any old USB-C cable lying on my desk to charge an iPhone. It was a pleasant surprise to remember that yes, I can take a decent photo of the top of that skyscraper, even though I’m using an iPhone. As usual, Apple took its time getting here — and it may have been dragged part of the way by the EU — but it’s in a good place indeed.The Pro models are mercifully lighter this year. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The VergeIf there’s one number I appreciated the most while using these phones over the last week, it was 19 — that’s how many grams lighter the Pro and Pro Max are compared to their predecessors. That’s thanks partly to the new titanium alloy used on the phone’s exterior in place of stainless steel. It makes a noticeable difference. The iPhone 15 Pro isn’t light by any means, but it feels that much more comfortable to use for a long period of time. The 15 Pro Max, down from 240 grams to 221, actually feels like a regular phone and not an oversized paperweight.The sides of both phones are very slightly curved compared to last year’s models. They retain enough of a flat edge that they still have that iPhone look, but they’re a little more comfy in the hand. Display size remains the same: the 15 Pro still has a 6.1-inch screen, and the Pro Max goes big with the 6.7-inch display. And believe it or not, the iPhone 15 Pro actually shrank a little compared to the 14 Pro thanks to some slimmer bezels. In this, the year 2023 of Big Phones! It’s just one millimeter less on the height and width, but combined with the lighter weight and the curved edges, it’s noticeably nicer to use than the 14 Pro. The 15 Pro is ever so slightly smaller than the 14 Pro and noticeably lighter. Did we mention it’s lighter? Photo by Allison Johnson / The VergeThe color options this year are muted as ever. Officially, they’re natural titanium, white titanium, black titanium, and blue titanium. Realistically, they’re all just different shades of neutral. If you’re looking for a “fun” color, you’ll want to go for blue. It’s the best one, and I won’t be taking any questions on that. And I’ll just tell you right now to skip the FineWoven cases and accessories. If you run your fingernail over the fabric the wrong way — which is very easy to do! — you’ll end up with a faint but seemingly quite permanent scratch. Not a good look.All four iPhone 15 models have USB-C — hat tip to the EU regulators who made that happen — but only the 15 Pro and Pro Max are USB 3 compatible. You’ll get faster file transfer speeds if you have a USB 10Gbps cable, which I don’t because the one that comes in the box only supports USB 2 transfer speeds. That would be awfully nice to toss in with a $1,200 phone! You could shell out an extra $69 for Apple’s Thunderbolt 4 data cable, but you shouldn’t; 10Gbps USB-C cables are like $15 on Amazon. Transfer speeds aside, the USB-C port on all four iPhone 15 models basically just works with whatever USB-C cable or gadget you want to use it with. Apple is being uncharacteristically permissive and letting you use the port with a lot of your existing dongles, adapters, and hubs, and that’s a wonderful thing.I know we all have a lot of mixed feelings about USB-C, but let me tell you about a beautiful thing that happened: the 15 Pro Max’s battery was low, so I unplugged the USB-C charging cable from my MacBook Air and plugged it right into the phone. No searching for another cable. No dongles. Just a USB-C charger powering a USB-C iPhone.No dongle necessary. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The VergeI think that sort of sums up how the switch to USB-C is going to go: either you’ve wanted a USB-C iPhone for years because you hate having that one special cord for your phone, or you’ve been living a peaceful existence with Lightning and you’re irritated about having to swap out your cables or accessories. These are both valid positions, but having spent the past week with a USB-C iPhone, I’ll tell you something from the other side: it’s friggin’ great. I plugged a Satechi hub into the 15 Pro and watched it read photos from an SD card. Then I connected an ethernet cable and switched over to a wired internet connection just like that. Again, no dongle or special accessory was involved in this process — just the same kind of hub you’d plug right into your MacBook. Having spent the past week with a USB-C iPhone, I’ll tell you something from the other side: it’s friggin’ greatLots of people will never plug anything but a charging cable into the port, and that’s fine. Even if you’re reluctant about the change, I think there will come a day when USB-C makes your life a little easier. Your friend with an Android phone will lend you their charging cable, and you’ll think, “Oh, that was nice.” As for the other ways to connect your phone to the rest of the world, there are all the usual flavors of 5G — supposedly faster this year thanks to Qualcomm’s new X70 modem but very hard to see in practice — and for the first time on an iPhone, Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi 6E runs at 6GHz, which is less congested than the familiar 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands we’ve been using for years — it can be wicked fast, but the tradeoff is that 6GHz signals don’t travel through walls and other obstructions nearly as well. You can set 6E to “off” or “automatic” in iOS settings; in automatic, the phone is meant to drop back to a 2.4 or 5GHz signal when the 6GHz signal gets weaker or slower.If you have very fast home Wi-Fi, the 15 Pro can keep up. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The VergeIn practice, this is somewhat hit or miss. Our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, has synchronous gigabit internet service and an Eero Wi-Fi 6E network at home, and the iPhone 15 Pro could consistently pull upload and download speeds of between 700 and 900Mbps when it was connected to 6GHz in the same room as one of the Eeros. That’s incredible for a mobile device on Wi-Fi. The flip side is that iOS 17 holds onto that 6GHz network a little too aggressively. When Nilay moved to a different floor from that same Eero, speeds dropped to just 60–90Mbps until he flipped the 6E switch in settings to “off.” Once the phone connected to the 5GHz network, speeds jumped back up to a fairly normal 300Mbps. Apple’s shipped a few Wi-Fi 6E devices already, but the iPhone 15 Pro is the first one that moves around as much as it does — an indicator showing which flavor of Wi-Fi was active would be helpful here, just like the various 5G indicators.Since you keep your phone silenced all the time anyway, why not have a button instead of a mute switch? Photo by Nilay Patel / The VergeThere was a time — a dark time — when it seemed like Apple would take all of the buttons away on the iPhone 15. I’m sure that will happen eventually, but until then, the iPhone 15 Pro actually gave us an extra button: the much-anticipated Action Button. The mute
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Watch as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission brings asteroid samples back to Earth
The Verge - Sun Sep 24 13:40
Today marks the final step of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which launched in September 2016, as a small capsule containing a sample of the asteroid Bennu descends through the Earth’s atmosphere, landing in the Utah desert for NASA to collect and analyze. This is similar to the method used to collect particles from a comet with the Stardust mission that dropped off a sample in Utah in 2006. The audacious mission flew the spacecraft to a small, near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and attempted something that hadn’t been done before by orbiting the asteroid, getting close enough to scrape up some material and collect it, and then returning to Earth with the sample. NASA TV will stream coverage of the sample return on its YouTube channel starting at 10AM ET today.After OSIRIS-REx launched, it employed a slingshot maneuver to sweep around the earth and use its gravity to fling it towards Bennu — you know, like the time The Enterprise whipped around the sun to go back in time and save the whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. OSIRIS-REx collected even more than the 60 grams of Bennu material NASA was aiming for when it made the scoop in 2020 before starting its trip back to Earth in 2021. An animation of still images showing the OSIRIS-REx grabbing its rock sample from Bennu. Image: NASAFollow along here for all of the updates about the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return.NASA’s asteroid-punching spacecraft begins its trek back homeThe Bennu asteroid, captured by NASA’s Osiris-REx spacecraft NASAThe NASA spacecraft that snatched a sample of rocks from the distant Bennu asteroid last year fired up a suite of thrusters on Monday and committed to its two-year journey back home. The maneuver kicks the minivan-sized spacecraft, dubbed Osiris-REx, onto a winding cosmic path around the Sun and toward Earth’s orbit. When it returns to Earth in 2023, it’ll toss a capsule packed with asteroid samples through the atmosphere somewhere over Utah. The spacecraft’s Asteroid Departure Maneuver (ADM) was no sweat for the Osiris-REx team, but it marked a significant step towards the return of the first pristine cache of asteroid samples in NASA’s history. Spacecraft engi
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California governor vetoes a bill requiring humans in autonomous big rigs
The Verge - Sat Sep 23 22:04
Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed Assembly Bill 316, which would have required human attendants in driverless vehicles over 10,000 pounds, reports Reuters. The bill saw broad support among state legislators and was backed by the Teamsters and other labor organizations. At the moment, The governor wrote in his veto message that the bill “is unnecessary for the regulation and oversight of heavy-duty autonomous vehicle technology,” adding that the existing regulatory framework is “sufficient.”The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) was given regulatory authority over autonomous v
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The Apple Watch Series 9 has officially landed, bringing with it a few minor improvements under the hood, watchOS 10, and a new Millennial pink(!) color. The new smartwatch is technically the best Apple has ever made, though the updates are all pretty iterative. Thankfully, if you’re looking to pick up an Apple Watch for the first time or make the jump from an earlier model, the last-gen Series 8 is on sale at Best Buy in select styles starting at $279 ($120) or at Amazon for $20 more.So, what exactly do you lose out on opting for the Series 8 over the Series 9? Well, for starters, the Serie
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Before I received my first Alexa-enabled smart display as a Christmas gift in 2019, I was not a big fan. I just didn’t feel like I could trust an Amazon device with a camera inside of it. I’d heard about all the privacy concerns, and I was determined to avoid it like the plague.But then a plague really did happen — and right when my mom got sick. And then, suddenly, this device I was once suspicious of became a vital part of our support system. Those people Amazon always claim love Alexa? I somehow suddenly found myself becoming one of them.To be clear, Mom had been sick for years. Mom has Parkinson’s disease, an incurable neurological disorder that affects everything from mobility to memory. At first, she suffered from a few tremors every now and then, but she was still able to go for a run at the gym. Then the pandemic happened. I don’t know why — maybe it was the stress and isolation of the time — her condition suddenly took a drastic turn for the worse. The woman who impressed even the diehard gym buffs with her ability to quickly run a mile was suddenly unable to walk longer than ten minutes. Thankfully, there are medications the doctors prescribed to help her manage the condition, which allows her to walk for a little longer. Side effects — like high blood pressure — were the tradeoff. Shortly after the stay-at-home order went into effect in March 2020, she was hospitalized for a hypertensive crisis and nearly had a stroke. It was the first hospitalization of many more to come during the pandemic. The list of medications began growing at as rapid of a pace as her Parkinson’s symptoms — and the side effects of those meds — intensified. Each day was getting more overwhelming. I thought it would be years before she would reach this stage in her disease, but it had arrived and during a global pandemic to boot. Suddenly, I was forced into becoming a carer during the most isolated time in modern history. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I sure as hell had no idea how to cope. It was so hard to see my mom — this strong force of nature, who single-handedly raised three children as a widow with little money — suddenly become so helpless. I was terrified I was going to mess everything up and, as a result, lose her — my best friend and the only parent I have had since my dad died at 7 — too. We — I — needed support
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If you want to hear a love story, ask any photographer about their favorite lens. They’ll probably get a little glimmer in their eye as they tell you about the fast 35mm they carry everywhere or the long portrait lens with the bokeh that hits just right. Camera bodies come and go, but your favorite lens is a lifelong relationship.Phone camera lenses are a different story. They’re built like a regular camera lens — only, you know, tiny — and they’re with us literally everywhere we go. But I don’t know anyone who would wax poetic about the 24mm equivalent wide angle on their iPhone or the 5x telephoto lens on their Pixel. Our relationships with them are much more transactional, and the results have as much to do with the image processing pipelines they’re attached to as any physical optics. If telephoto lens compression is your thing, then you’ll be very happy with the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new 5x lens.Photographically inclined smartphone owners might not have any special attachment to those lenses, but they definitely have strong negative feelings about digital zoom. Many photographers would rather use a native focal length and crop later in software, which makes sense when you’re working with a traditional digital camera. But the latest round of flagship phone cameras is flipping that traditional wisdom upside down. Nowhere is this more evident than on three of the best you can buy right now: the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the Google Pixel 7 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. I’ve been shooting with them over the past 10 days, and I’ve come away with two major impressions: optical zoom still wins, but digital zoom isn’t as far behind as you might think. And it might be time to come around to digital focal lengths, even if using them made you feel icky in the past.Optical zoom still winsLet’s just get this out of the way: smartphone camera zoom has improved a lot over the past few years, but you’ll still get much better quality from a big, traditional camera with a big sensor and a big lens. Computational photography hasn’t overcome physics. But comparing apples to apples, a traditional zoom lens on a phone still beats smartphone digital zoom — even with a lot of extra data and neural networks involved. Take a look at the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new 5x telephoto lens compared to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra at 5x, which is between its 3x and 10x optical zoom focal lengths. The iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens does fine in bright light, but indoors, the phone still occasionally switches to the main camera in dim lighting or if your subject is too close for the tele’s minimum focus distance. You can sometimes get it to switch back to the 5x lens by changing your framing or moving back slightly, which I did between the two shots below. And oh, what a difference it makes.A digitally zoomed 5x portrait from the main camera sensor (left) compared to a similar shot taken with the optical 5x zoom, also in portrait mode (right).Digital zoom is getting betterBut even when digital zoom is the only option, there are better approaches than others. At 10x, the Pixel 7 Pro crops into the middle 12 megapixels of the high-res, 4
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Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3 during its recent hardware event in New York City, introducing the two laptops alongside a flurry of AI-powered features for Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Bing. The high-end Surface Laptop Studio 2 starts at $1,099, while the Surface Laptop Go 3 starts at $799; both are slated to launch on October 3rd at 12AM ET.Although the forthcoming laptops look similar in design to their predecessors, the new Surface devices arrive with upgraded processors, better battery life, and other minor spec bumps. We’ve yet to fully test either laptop, but if you want to preorder them ahead of their official release, you can already do so via various retailers. Here’s what you should know.Where to preorder the Surface Laptop Studio 2 The new Surface Laptop Studio 2 looks similar to the prior model, with the same kind of 14.4-inch screen you can pull forward or lay flat like a tablet. However, it sports a few changes under the hood. Microsoft says it’s twice as fast as its predecessor, with new Intel 13th Gen i7 processors and Nvidia’s RTX 4050 and 4060 GPUs. It’s also the first Windows computer to come with the Intel neural processing unit, which should allow for faster, more powerful AI capabilities. Along with new chips and GPUs, Microsoft's premium convertible comes with two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, a microSD card reader, and the Surface Slim Pen 2. The laptop also features a customizable haptic touchpad Microsoft says is “the most inclusive touchpad on any laptop.” You can preorder the Surface Laptop Studio 2 at the Microsoft Store for $1,999 in its base configuration with 512GB of storage, 16GB of RAM, an Intel 13th Gen processor, and Intel Iris Xe graphics (or with an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU for $2,399 at Amazon and Best Buy). You can outfit it with as much as 2TB of storage, 64GB of RAM, and an Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU — though, as expected, the higher-end models will cost you north of $3,000. The laptop will be available on October 3rd. $1999Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 features a 14.4-inch display you can pull forward like a tablet. Microsoft claims it’s the most powerful Surface yet, one that’s configurable with up to 2TB of storage and a maximum of 64GB of RAM.Where to preorder the Surface Laptop Go 3The Laptop Studio 2 wasn’t the only Windows machine Microsoft also introduced at its Surface event this week. The company also unveiled the new Surface Laptop Go 3, which offers the same 12.4-inch 3:2 aspect ratio PixelSense touchscreen as last year’s Surface Laptop Go 2. The new laptop weighs less than 2.5 pounds — making it the lightest Surface device — and is supposedly 88 percent faster than its predecessor with all-day battery life. The Surface Laptop Go 3 will be available on October 3rd in four colors: gray, blue, pink, and green. You can preorder it from the Microsoft Store, Amazon, and Best Buy for $799.99 with 256GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i5 processor. You can also configure it with up to 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and an Intel Core i5 processor for $200 more.$800The 12.4-inch Surface Laptop Go 3 is an exceptionally li
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Pixel 8 camera specs and a new AI promo video for the phone were posted by 91Mobiles, courtesy of leaker Kamila Wojciechowska, giving us our first real look at how Google will integrate more AI into its flagship smartphones (via 9to5Google). Magic Editor, which the company said earlier this year would come to “select” Pixel phones, is like a supercharged version of Magic Eraser. It enables you to remake any picture you take so it looks like you want it to. That’s shown in a demonstration where a person takes three pictures of a family on a carousel and combines them into one shot so that everyone is smiling and looking at the camera at the same time.This will be a nice family picture,
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Earlier this year, investment bank Piper Sandler published results from an annual survey showing that 87 percent of teens own an iPhone, leaving precious little market for Android device makers to car
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“The new FineWoven iPhone cases are very bad,” according to my colleague Allison Johnson, so you probably shouldn’t buy one. Still, I’ve been curious to learn more about them, and iFixit’s new teardown just gave me even more information than I could have thought to ask for: it put one of the new cases under a microscope, tested how it stood up to things like hot sauce and coffee, and tore the thing apart — and, best of all, photographed every step of the way.There are some incredible zoomed-in photos of the fabric, for example; that black thing in a post from iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens is a human hair included for scale! Another photo shows how the fibers are affected when cut by a kn
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