Author: News Room
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 135, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, crank the AC, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about cold plunges and Colson Whitehead and the food truck mafia, finally getting to the theater to see Obsession, watching The Agency because it’s apparently everyone’s favorite underrated show, nodding sadly to Adam Conover’s video about the death of sitcoms, making a lot of noises during the Dune: Part Three trailer, testing Atlas as a visual journal,…
Imagine buying a watch and getting a free holiday thrown in. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to one very lucky Norqain customer. Norqain has just launched the Freedom GMT Enjoy Life “Holiday” Limited Edition. It’s a run of 500 watches, but one of them is hiding a secret… Somewhere is a hidden “Golden Ticket”. Whoever ends up with it will win a week-long trip for two to the Ayada Maldives, a swanky overwater resort in the Indian Ocean. I love this idea. It’s basically Willy Wonka for watch nerds, and it turns an already fun limited edition into something…
At WWDC 2026, Apple didn’t even bother to provide ‘new feature’ cards for iOS and macOS. Instead, updates were grouped into themes: ‘oops Liquid Glass’, ‘think of the children’ and ‘AI! AI! MOAR AI!’ So tvOS – often the forgotten child of Apple’s operating system family – never stood a chance. There was no painfully short segment featuring an Apple exec trying very hard to sound excited. And although the Apple TV platform wasn’t ignored entirely, the revealed tvOS 27 updates were meagre: smoother app launches, a refreshed Podcasts app and a setting to adjust system text size. If rumours are true,…
Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that’s easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea of spending hundreds on a portable shower seem less absurd.I’ve been testing the Hottap Go from Australia-based Joolca while vanlifing to shower after surfing and to wash up after cooking. It features a 12L integrated water tank which is an improvement on other portable showers…
Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in AI creations without the account owner’s permission.“Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference,” Meta says in an update to a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model. “Our intent was…
We’re aware of at least two forged letters circulating on the internet, including this one, that purport to be cease-and-desist letters from our legal department. To be clear: these letters did not come from me or from anyone at Flock.Flock welcomes and encourages public debate about our technology. We have not and would not seek to discourage, prevent, or prohibit such discussion and debate. In fact, we would be happy to participate in any such discussions the group in question might host in the future. Read the full article here
Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They’re just two of the many firms DJI is suspected of starting to skirt the United States’ foreign drone ban.But it appears the FCC is finally doing something about “DJI front companies,” as watcher Konrad Iturbe dubbed them last year. Today, the FCC is fining eight of them $25,000 each — and giving them until Monday, July 20th, just 10 calendar days, to answer the FCC’s questions before the agency takes…
At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so. Read the full article here
Though Instagram head Adam Mosseri doesn’t want to filter out AI content on the platform, he argues that you “shouldn’t have it in your feed” if you don’t like it. “I don’t think we should filter out AI content,” Mosseri said during an interview on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. “I think we should let you know if content is AI content or not.”At the same time, Mosseri seems to be drawing a distinction between content-based sorting and banning AI from the platform entirely. In fact, he believes people who love AI content “should be able to have a feed that’s just…
Spotify has announced some tweaks to its weekly Release Radar streaming playlist that’s supposed to bring you the latest from artists and genres you’ve previously enjoyed, but has been a bit hit and miss in recent times. I used to swear by this playlist. It delivered all the tracks from my favourite bands, others I’d listened to before, and the occasional curve ball that I loved anyway. I’ve found some of my favourite music this way. However, it has fallen off and Spotify appears to have acknowledged this. In a blog post, the streaming giant confirmed the music discovery playlist…
As the AI boom boosts demand for RAM, SK Hynix – one of the world’s biggest suppliers of memory chips – launched on Wall Street Friday. The South Korean chipmaker opened at $170 per share and raised $26.5 billion, surpassing Alibaba’s record as the largest debut of a foreign company, according to reports from Associated Press and CNN.After reaching a $1 trillion valuation in May, SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company. SK Hynix is one of three major companies benefitting from a surge in demand for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). These components have become…
It’s all go in the streaming world this week! After reports that Netflix is considering adding live channels and BBC iPlayer potentially hosting Channel 4 shows, we have new speculation Disney+ is considering adding a free streaming tier. The service began as ad-free, then added a tier with ads for a reduced fee. Now, Business Insider reports, Disney wants to being more people into the fold by dropping the paywall on certain content. The word reportedly comes from a company town hall meeting where product and technology boss Adam Smith raised the prospect of offering some Disney+ content free of…