David Pierce | The Verge

Smart rings are looking like my kind of AI gadget

2026-07-28T07:39:01-04:00

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to my computer. One underrated feature of the LLM revolution has been a remarkable leap in all kinds of dictation technology — even the fastest, cheapest models are getting very good at understanding and processing speech. I’ve tested lots of these apps, from WisprFlow to Monologue to Spokenly to Handy to so many others, and have found them all to be useful ways to quickly write emails, Slack messages, and more. They sometimes default to giving everything a too-formal style of formatting and love ending a text message with a period (like a sociopath), but they’re getting better at that too.

But nothing has convinced me of the future of talking to my computer quite like a demo I got recently from Mina Fahmi. Fahmi is the CEO of Sandbar, which is making a smart ring called the Stream that is scheduled to ship later this year. As I sat in a conference room in Sandbar’s New York City offices, Fahmi gave me a rundown of the device’s features, including the latest one: dictation to all your devices. He opened up a new note in Apple Notes, held the ring up to his mouth, pressed the device’s touchpad with his thumb, and chatted quietly to himself for a few seconds. A moment after he finished, two complete — and correctly transcribed — sentences appeared in the note.

Introducing Universal Dictation on Stream

Push-to-talk across iOS and Mac: Instantly. No app switching, no reconnection.

We built Notes so nothing gets lost, and Chat so you can think out loud. With Dictation, your voice goes anywhere.

Notes, Chat, Dictation—in one voice ring pic.twitter.com/JmygS73zoH
— Mina Fahmi (@minafahmi) July 16, 2026

The Stream itself is basically just a microphone, a battery, and a Bluetooth connection to your phone. You could describe a lot of AI gadgets the same way, now that seemingly everyone wants to sell you a way to record your conversations and meetings to extract summaries and action items. Companies like Plaud and Pocket and FoCase and Mobvoi and so many others are all happy to sell you these portable recorders — bonus points if it sticks to your phone to record phone calls.

Fahmi and Sandbar are trying to do something different. The Stream is a more introverted device, focused on capturing your voice rather than everyone else’s. (Another of the ring’s promised features is a whisper mode — Fahmi spoke to the thing so quietly I couldn’t hear a word he said, and the Stream still transcribed perfectly. Or at least Fahmi said it did.) Fahmi says the idea for the device came because he likes to walk a lot and got annoyed having to dig out his phone every time he had an idea or wanted to ask his AI assistant for something.

The Stream ring, accordingly, has three jobs: to start a chat with an AI assistant, to take notes, and to dictate text. Right now, most of those things happen in the Stream companion app. But that’s not the right long-term answer, nor is it Sandbar’s long-term plan. Ultimately, devices like these should be connected to all the other tools you use, so that you can chat with whatever assistant you want, take notes straight to your existing app, and dictate into any text box anywhere. On that last front, Stream is already making some fascinating progress: At one point in his demo, Fahmi flashed a new firmware onto the ring, connected it to his Mac and his iPhone, and was able to seamlessly dictate text into one device and then the other. He wouldn’t tell me how it worked, but it worked shockingly smoothly.

The Pebble Index is an even simpler take on the ring-as-input system.

| Photo: Core Devices" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Core Devices" />

I’ve tested a lot of AI gadgets, and most of them are just poor replacements for your smartphone. But our phones are terrible input systems. You have to get your phone, unlock it, open an app, create a new note or start a new conversation, tap, and type, just to get a thought out of your head. Voice assistants and AI chatbots make some interactions easier, but a lot of modern life still involves typing in text boxes. Nattering away at my laptop is fine in the comfort and quiet of my own home; in a coffee shop, on a train, or even walking down the street, it’s both socially problematic and technically much harder. (And frankly, I’m not that interested in normalizing everyone talking to their AI best friends in public.) Smart rings might solve the problem: You just bring the ring to your mouth, press a button, and talk. The gesture feels natural, the mic is close enough to your mouth to pick up your voice accurately, and the whole process is far more unobtrusive than shouting into your headphones.

A few companies are already working on this kind of AI ring. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky created the Index 01 for the same reason Fahmi built the Stream: He needed the fastest possible way to get ideas, reminders, and notes out of his head. There’s also Vocci, a more meeting-focused version of the same thing. Over time, we might see existing rings from companies like Oura and Ultrahuman start to add some of this tech too. It’s not complicated tech! It’s a microphone. All the complicated stuff happens elsewhere, on the devices you almost certainly also have with you.

Most of these are not finished or shipping products, but I’m increasingly compelled by the prospect of talking more with my devices — and increasingly convinced that there’s no better place to put a microphone than on my finger. Smart rings don’t try to replace or obviate your phone — they just let you keep it in your pocket a lot more often.

The vertical video takeover is here

2026-07-24T13:29:13-04:00

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

How it started

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

How it’s going

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

What happens next

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

By the way

The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.

Read this

New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.

Folding and flipping phones are getting seriously good

2026-07-24T22:14:46-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 137, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy phone season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about Google Zero and armored cars for rich people, watching a lot of That’s a Bad Idea videos now that YouTube knows my love for Curry Barker, testing the new 2Do redesign for my tasks, watching this excellent doc about the legendary designer Susan Kare, obsessing over every sound on the Jauffre’s Sounds TikTok, sending myself lockscreen notes with the new Mononote app, and trying to vibe-code a searchable archive of everything that’s ever been in Installer. I think we’re gonna need more tokens.

I also have for you a couple of exciting new ideas about phones, a tiny e-reader you might love, a fun way into the Linux world, and much more. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / plugging into a generator 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.)

The Drop

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8. I haven’t held this new wide foldable yet, but almost everyone who does seems to immediately think it’s the right shape and size. Yes, it’s still twice the price it needs to be to really be competitive, but I think Samsung is finally starting to make a compelling argument for foldables. Also: love the purple.
Tagline. Fun new game from the folks at Merriam-Webster in which you have to solve three puzzles with words made from the same seven letters. It is tough! It’s also a perfect middle ground between word games and trivia games, and I’m very much enjoying failing at it every day.
The Xteink X4 Pro. Tiny e-readers are officially a thing. (Even Boox is making one!) I could take or leave the touchscreen on the new $99 model, but the built-in light makes it immediately the best of the bunch. I cannot believe how many people tell me they love these little devices.
“Technically Competent: Installing Linux.” I love the McElroy family (MBMBAM forever), but I did not expect to be here appreciating their tech prowess! But this is a fun, funny video that is also a helpful and approachable intro to the Linux world. It’s nice to know dongles break for everyone, you know?
The Dink. Is this recommendation completely biased by my love for Jake Johnson and New Girl? Very much so. But I do think pickleball culture is a perfect setting for jokes, and boy are there not enough 100-minute comedy movies out there now. I’m in on this one.
Splatoon Raiders. The Splatoon aesthetic, with paintball fights and hyper-colored everything, is very much my thing. Online team-based shooters… aren’t, really. This one is much more single-player, much lower-stakes, and much more my speed.
“It’s been a wild year.” I’ve really enjoyed C. Scott Brown’s YouTube channel, and really appreciated his raw take on his first year as a YouTuber. Lots of real talk about how hard it is to make it as a creator, the ups and downs of the life, and the deep strangeness of life at the mercy of YouTube.
The Peak Design Field Bracket. A really clever camera accessory from a company that knows how to make ’em. Between the two models, it supports most cameras, and in addition to more easy vertical shooting it also adds Find My compatibility, new straps, and ways to add even more accessories. I’ve been starting to slowly shop for a new DSLR, and this makes me want a new one to play with ASAP.
Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. The Avatar lore is so deep that this new movie apparently has a whole “Previously On” sequence at the beginning! Love that. The consensus for this one seems to be something along the lines of “looks great, meh story,” which means it’ll probably at least be a good time.

Screen share

I’ve been following the journey of the Light Phone since the very beginning. The Light Flip, which the company announced this week, looks like both its best idea and its best product yet. It’s a beautiful, $299 block of a minimalist flip phone, designed not to replace your phone but just to convince you to leave it at home from time to time. It’s not shipping until early next year, but I’m getting on the preorder list as soon as I can. I think Light may have finally nailed it.

To mark the launch, I asked Kai Tang, Light’s CEO and cofounder, to share his homescreen with us. I told him I knew he was hiding a smartphone somewhere, and that I wanted to see it. He swears he’s not, he’s all in on the Light Phone life, and sent his homescreen in the smallest image file I’ve ever received. Here it is, plus some info on how Kai’s device is set up:

The phone: A Light Phone III.

The wallpaper: There is no wallpaper or background setting on the Light Phone III. So it’s either matte black or light grey. I have it in black. I like my phone visually muted.

The apps: Phone, Alarm, Weather, Directions, Music, Language.

Most of the tools on my phones are pretty straightforward: phone for calls and texts, directions / maps, music, etc. The “Language” tool is a customized tool we created for Dave Free and Kendrick Lamar’s pgLang back in 2023. The limited edition Light Phones that have this tool preinstalled sold out in the first few hours, which was so exciting. We are also big fans of their music. The tool is basically an Eight Ball tool but named “Language.” You can shake the phone for a random answer, i.e., “ask again, but less aggressive,” “not much doubt,” or “I’d rather not say.”

It’s not available publicly, but it was almost sentimental for me from that collaboration three years ago, so I kept it on my homescreen.

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

NASA’s public image and video library! I can spend hours looking at those and pondering how insignificant and at the same time magical we are here on this spinning/flying ball called Earth.

I also joined a local astronomy club called Rockland Astronomy Club, a non-profit astronomy education organization. I found them while I was trying to find a real dark site near NYC to stargaze, and they are only a few hours’ drive away from the city! Although I wish I had more time to go to their events.
I saw Hamilton, one of the best Broadway shows, and I loved it.
And lastly, I have been enjoying the Lincoln Center’s “Summer For The City” $5 pay-as-you-wish Orchestra events. Highly recommended!

Crowdsourced

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.

“The Incident at Galley House was released last week and I finished it yesterday. It’s a brilliantly voice-acted, lushly-illustrated remake of last year’s Type Help, one of the best deduction games I’ve ever played.” — Andy

“The Hawk on Netflix. Will Ferrell is like a comfort hug for a millennial 😂” — Tyler

“The New Guys audiobook is a delightful author-read book about the Shuttle series of astronauts. I cannot recommend it enough as a sequel to A Man on the Moon.” — James

“My wife and I have been playing Unrailed on Switch Online with her sister and husband… it’s like Overcooked but more laid back.” — Dan

“The Boroughs is a really cool show starring an older cast and it’s very cool to see a hip, relevant sci-fi show led by an older cast, touching on really relevant social topics. It’s fantastic so far.” — Shane

“The App Store is full of great film-simulation camera apps, but those kinds of apps on Android are sketchy garbage that take bad photos. Not Candela Camera, though! It properly uses the Android camera API with high-quality film simulation, built-in & imported LUTs, and it’s $5 for a lifetime license!” — Evancito

“Reading Dead Hand Rule by Max Gladstone. Necromantic lawyers, magic capitalism, it’s a real vibe. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve enjoyed every book he’s written in the setting.” — Vernacular Ham

“Open Minis. After reading Federico Viticci’s article, I immediately installed it and linked it to Claude. Watching it do agentic things ON MY PHONE is mesmerizing. I’m an iOS-first kind of person, and being able to describe a complicated Home Assistant automation, from my phone, and watch it figure out the APIs, is truly next level.” — Burns

“I recently started playing some video games again. I was doing some Game Boy emulation. Touch controls kinda stink, so I grabbed a used Backbone Pro and was instantly a convert. The experience is great and is a great way to turn any phone into a top-tier game console.” — Tanner

Signing off

Last week, when we talked about reading setups, I ended by asking you for tips on dealing with newsletters. I got a bunch, but the vast majority of them amounted to something like: “I just get them in my email and deal with it.” Fair enough! Same, honestly. But there is one tool I heard about a few times. It’s called Kill the Newsletter. It gives you an email address with which to subscribe to newsletters, and then dumps everything sent to that address into a feed you can read anywhere. Pipe that feed into an RSS reader, show it to your favorite AI chatbot, do with it all as you please! If I were starting a newsletter habit now, this is exactly what I’d start with. Let me know if you use it, or have any other great newslettering tips!

See you next week!

You can’t ignore Google Zero anymore

2026-07-24T13:29:48-04:00

The web and Google once had a deal: Google collects data and indexes webpages and in exchange sends oceans of traffic to websites. The deal wasn’t perfect and certainly made Google more money than it made the websites, but it worked for a long time. Now, however, the deal seems to be dead. And the web is being forced to reckon with what happens when the Google traffic dries up.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about the week’s Google Zero news, including Reddit’s interest in getting out of an AI training deal, and the publishers considering blocking Google from crawling their sites altogether. (Nilay also takes a bit of a victory lap on the whole “Google Zero” term, but only a short one.) Even Google’s Search business is feeling the AI crunch, and it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.

After that, it’s time for some AI news, including questions on how much to panic about OpenAI accidentally hacking Hugging Face, and the many dubious AI detector systems coming to platforms near you. We also have a Hype Desk, an episode of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, some news on an Apple payment plan, a new minimalist phone, and a special guest appearance to talk about Ford and Apple Maps.

Watch | Listen | Get ad-free

In case you missed it this week: We also talked about the state of the US / China AI race, the rise of the EV golf cart, all of Samsung’s new foldables, and the end of reading. And we want to hear all your thoughts about all of it! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, and tell us everything that’s on your mind. And make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

The Light Flip is a minimalist flip phone with a point to prove

2026-07-21T10:36:35-04:00

It’s a Light Phone. It’s a flip phone. | Photo: Light

A few years ago, the team at Light shipped the most smartphone-like device they’d ever created. The Light Phone III still kept to its minimalist, no-distractions ethos, but it was a phone-size rectangle with a phone-size touchscreen, a camera, and a number of other features. Some people loved having an almost-smartphone, but Kaiwei Tang, Light’s cofounder, says he started getting feedback he didn’t expect. Lots of users, particularly young ones, didn’t want a smartphone. More than that, actually: They didn’t even want something that looked like a smartphone. “We have users who tell us, ‘Hey, I hate smartphones. I don’t want to be seen using a smartphone,’” Tang says. Then they’d almost always ask for the same thing: a Light Phone, but a flip phone.

So Light made a flip phone, set to ship early next year. “The Light Phone in flip phone form” is even roughly the right way to think about it. This one comes in a bunch of colors – a big departure from the all-black Phone III — but keeps Light’s chunky vibes. There’s a 2.8-inch screen on the top half, but it’s not a touchscreen; all the interaction comes via the bottom half’s standard numberpad, D-pad, and function buttons. The whole thing is powered by a MediaTek MT8873 processor, 128GB of storage, and 6GB of RAM. There’s a USB-C port for charging, a headphone jack for headphones, a single camera on the back, a notification light on the front cover that glows when there’s something for you to see, and not much else.

Early in the process, Tang says, Light decided to really emphasize the flipping of the flip phone. The team opted not to put any kind of screen on the outside of the device, wanting to make sure you had to deliberately open up the device. Tang says he loved “this action of opening up your technology, and then you close it down and it goes away.”

He says the Light Flip is designed mostly as a second phone, not so much to replace your iPhone or Galaxy device entirely but to give you an easy way to leave it at home. That was the idea behind the Light Phone III, too, but that was a hard sell for a $699 device — Tang says most of the negative feedback he’s heard about the Phone III was about its cost. The Light Flip is comparatively priced to move: You can buy it for $299, or you can pay $39 a month for a Light Flip connected to Light’s cell service, and after 24 months, the phone is yours.

The software in the Light Flip is the same LightOS as the Light Phone III — Tang says the only thing this new device can’t do is tap-to-pay, since there’s no NFC chip inside. Everything else, from camera to notes to navigation, should work just the same. And as of recently, you can add to the device’s software yourself: Light recently released an SDK for its app “toolbox,” so you can write apps for your own device or submit them to a broader app library.

Letting other people write Light software is a long time coming. Some Light Phone III users resorted to hacking full-fledged Android on the device, just to run the apps they wanted. The whole thing seems to have taken Tang time to get used to. But he knows Light can’t build all the software people need, and he’s found a way to help users solve their problems without inflicting the solutions on everyone else. “You own the device,” Tang says. “You own your software at the same time. Obviously, I don’t want to see people using social media on our phone, but that’s my problem. That’s your phone, you should be able to do whatever you want.”

Tang says he expects developers will hack their AI agents into LightOS and will create ways to communicate with their OpenClaw-running Mac Minis at home. He’s not worrying about it, nor is he particularly interested in making it easier. “When I interview young people,” he says,
“one thing that never comes up? No one wants an AI button on their phone.” In fact, he says, it’s the opposite: More and more users want him to guarantee there’s no AI anywhere in the Light universe.

In a way, the Light Flip is a nod toward retro nostalgia, a long-gone era before our phones were huge screens that demanded all of our attention all the time. But Tang says he doesn’t see it that way — he thinks flip phones got thrown away far too soon. “This form factor, young people have never experienced it,” he says. “They love the idea of closing it, and it goes away.” As poll after poll shows people revolting against the incursion of AI into their lives, and more and more people find themselves looking for a way out of their relationship with their smartphones and their feeds, Light Phone has decided to take on the smartphone not by trying to sneakily replace it but by building something that no one would ever mistake for a smartphone. That might be its best feature.

The Clapper was a bad smart home gadget — and a viral sensation

2026-07-19T09:28:26-04:00

Clap on. Clap off. Well, more like, Clap, pause for half a beat but no longer because otherwise it’ll stop hearing you, clap again because you waited too long, clap louder and faster, that didn’t work, clap two more times, and suddenly: on. The Clapper didn’t always work — and even when it did, it might fry your gadgets in the process — but it managed to become a big hit anyway.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of The Clapper, from its beginnings as The Great American Turn-On to its debut alongside one of the great advertising campaigns of all time. The Verge’s David Pierce and Victoria Song are joined by Allison Marsh, a writer and professor at The University of South Carolina, to dig into the device’s history and legacy, and to try and figure out once and for all whether this was a good product or just a great commercial.

This is the sixth and final episode of the fourth season of Version History. If you haven’t yet checked out the story of the Harmony remote, the Roomba vacuum, the Nest thermostat, the Keurig coffee maker, or the Philips Hue smart lights, don’t miss out! We’re taking a few weeks off to get the next batch of episodes ready, so you’ve got time to catch up. Here’s how to get every episode, and all our other fun stuff, as soon as it drops:

If you’re a Verge subscriber, you can also get access to Version History (and all our other podcasts) with no ads. All you have to do is visit your account settings.

If you want to know more about The Clapper, here are some links to get you started:

One of the many great Clapper commercials
From IEEE Spectrum: The Cheesy Charm of the Clapper
From Tedium: The Clapper History: Please Clap For Home Automation
From How Stuff Works: How the Clapper Works
From Technology Connections: The Clapper: Yes, that one

The apps, gadgets, and tools every reader needs

2026-07-17T16:27:52-04:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope your neighborhood isn’t as smoky as mine, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been recording the next season of Version History (this season’s finale is out on Sunday!), reading about data center heists and Backyard Baseball and the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, canceling my October plans to see Digger 30 or 40 times, taking on the new Knockout Tour routes in Mario Kart World, learning more than I ever intended about Staten Island thanks to Revisionist History, reading up on the history of the very first chatbot, and setting up my Flipper Busy Bar. I love the thing, and have no idea what to use it for.

I also have for you the movie of the summer, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app for organizing your photos, and much more. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / soldering together 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.)

The Drop

The Odyssey. I’ll be honest: I expected this movie to not be great. Hot director bites off too big a story, not even Christopher Nolan can hit every time, right? WRONG. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very current, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and soak in the epic-ness of this one. Several dozen times.
Bear 2.9. Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a little too limiting to me, but expanding the idea into Workspaces makes it way more powerful without being any more complex. So clever, so useful, still one of the best apps to write in across Apple devices.
The World Cup final. By just about any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest thing on TV… until we do this again in four years. This year’s tournament has been spectacular, and whether you like soccer or not, the final tends to be good TV. Treat it like the Super Bowl! Have a party!
“How Microtransactions (Almost) Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder.” Really good episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that makes an imperfect but very compelling argument that we have almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the fight is not yet entirely lost.
Aphera. I’ve been hearing good things about this new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aimed directly at replacing the ever-rising price of Adobe’s tools. Ditching Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot.
Parchment. Chris Lawley, friend of Installer, shipped his notes-and-tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s really well done! It goes hard on just showing you what matters right now and hiding everything else, and I kind of appreciate that.
The Loading Museum. What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have made us wait on our computers. Watch a photo load like it’s 1997, remember what it felt like to wait for the internet to connect, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things feel faster.
The Codex Micro. I love a shortcut button, and while I think $230 is an absurd price to pay for a bunch of buttons you could re-create with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I do think these agent-controlling keys are pretty delightful. Work Louder stuff just tends to feel good.

Group project

(Tiny housekeeping note: From now on, when we do a special section like this, it’ll be in place of Screen Share for that week. I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that some issues are actually too much, and this feels like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win!)

They say reading is dead. They are, in fact, incorrect. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading setups — the gadgets, the apps, the bookstores, the bookmark brands, the highlighter colors, everything. As always, you delivered! Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all your great gear and advice, here’s my current setup:

I read mostly on one of three devices: a Kindle Paperwhite, an iPad Mini, or a Boox Palma 2. The iPad is for when I need to take lots of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my ebooks are in the Kindle universe; I wish that weren’t the case, and should probably switch to something more open, but it’s a hard change to make.
As a result, I mostly read books in the Kindle app, but all of the rest of my digital reading happens in Readwise Reader. I frequently dabble with both Instapaper and Matter, but Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and convert PDFs into a nice reading experience are just unmatched.
I use Feedbin for RSS reading. On my computer, I use Feedbin’s website; on mobile I mostly use Unread.
When I buy physical books, which I’m trying to do a lot more now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from Bookshop.org. Or from my local library / bookstore. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, and it’s a delight.

But enough about me! Here are the things I heard the most about from you:

The library! Yay libraries! So many of us are using Libby and Hoopla and MyLibro and Sora and so many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love to see it.
The Kindle and the iPad Mini are the big winners among reading devices. No big surprise there, really. But I also heard from Kobo fans (both Clara and Libra), more than one devoted iPod Touch fan, and lots of believers in the Xteink X4. Oh, and of course, the Boox Palma remains a winner.
The most popular reading apps were, also unsurprisingly, Kindle and Apple Books. But there are some devoted BookFusion fans out there, too, and Bookshop.org’s app appears to be catching on.
We love a way to track our collection, and our progress. Both The StoryGraph and Book Tracker have a lot of fans, and practically everyone either quit or is looking to quit Goodreads.
Lots of us like to listen to books, which of course means Audible came up a few times. But a lot of us are also making good use of the 15 hours of audio that come with Spotify Premium.
BookBub, a great site for finding ebook sales, came up a bunch. So did Chirp, its sister site for audiobooks.
Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for a lot of us. Lots of Readwise users out there, syncing stuff to Notion and Craft and Obsidian, but also a lot of folks building their own apps to make this easier.
I heard about, conservatively, 50 different RSS readers. Unread and Reeder were the RSS favorites, and Instapaper, Readwise Reader, and Wallabag are the go-tos for saving stuff for later.

One last note: I heard from a lot of people that keeping up with newsletters is a hard and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to a reading app? An RSS feed? Try to manage it in Gmail? Who knows! As you may have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading setups!

Crowdsourced

“I’m moving from Google (Gmail) to a fantastic European alternative: Cirrux. With a sync service you can untie yourself from Big Tech, without losing your emails.” — Olaf

“The Ghost in the Shell anime on Amazon is the best looking thing on TV. It’s as lore-dense as a concrete brick, but if you can look past that, it’s absolutely worth the watch.” — B Carzo

“Gravity is the best / simplest note-taking app. Most note apps, as you take notes, they get lost as you add more, losing their relevance; with Gravity you can snap any note to the top of the page. The simplicity is brilliant.” — Andrew

“Thanks to Rohit for the 4×3 suggestion in last week’s Installer. The other game on the site, Smush, is also fantastic. Both are wonderful fresh takes on games from the New York Times.” — Kurt

“I ordered the Pebble Index 01 ring. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself and opening an app on my phone is a lot of friction.” — Anna

“I just finished the book Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu. It follows a bunch of people in a small town as they get an emergency ‘incoming missile’ text, then the ‘false alert’ message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was fantastic.” — Matt

“Recently stumbled upon Joon Lee’s YouTube channel. Fantastic deep dives on current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler – Most things have been ruined by gambling & private equity. In an age of hot takes and clickbait, he’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need.” — Brett

“I’ve been playing around with Hypertexting, a new app that treats RSS (and your personal blog) like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” — Chris

“This week I’ve been reading The Interface Series, which was a sci-fi/horror web serial from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but it’s all been collated at /r/9M9H9E9. Fascinating speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium.” — Andie

Signing off

I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard Matt Damon recently explain how strange it is to act into an IMAX camera, I don’t think I really understood how remarkable and complicated the technology really is. So of course I loved this Tested video on how IMAX is projected, this Christopher Nolan interview on how he thinks about formats, this dive into the dying art of 70mm, and this excellent explainer on the overall technology. Fine, Chris, I’ll drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. You win.

See you next week!

Apple’s plot to crush OpenAI

2026-07-17T13:41:32-04:00

Apple is suing OpenAI. The complaint is readable and intense, as these things often are, though many experts seem to think many of the allegations are just the ways things are done. So what does Apple really want here, and why is it picking such a public fight with OpenAI?

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David go through the lawsuit, and look at Apple’s history of splashy litigation to determine whether Apple is worried about a possible competitor or simply looking to capitalize on a weak moment for OpenAI. All this is happening as Apple ships the public betas of its new software, headlined by the new Siri AI, and we have thoughts about what it all means — and whether the new Siri is actually any good.

After all that, the hosts turn to the week’s gadget news, which includes leaks about OpenAI gadgets and Pixel phones, and OnePlus bailing on the US and Europe. The Samsung-Apple duopoly continues to rule in the US, and it looks increasingly hard for anyone to challenge. Unless you just go and buy T-Mobile.

Finally, in the lightning round, we catch up on Brendan Carr, the latest chaos in your X feed, the cracking face emoji, the foothills of the singularity, and more.

Watch | Listen | Get ad-free

In case you missed it this week: We also ranked AI gadgets, listened to AI music, debated our review of the Steam Machine, and learned about AI detectors. And we want to hear all your thoughts about all of it! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, and tell us everything that’s on your mind. And make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode!

How Philips Hue got the smart home right

2026-07-12T10:38:01-04:00

A photo of a lightbulb glowing purple. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The state of the smart home can be frustrating, because it is just so obvious how things ought to work. You should be able to control everything from everywhere. Your spaces should adapt to what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. Making your home smart shouldn’t require renovating, and the smarts should be mostly invisible. All of this is, of course, incredibly hard to pull off — but the goal is pretty clear.

Until now, maybe no product has come closer to nailing the smart home than Philips Hue. And on this episode of Version History, we dig into all the things Hue got right. The Verge‘s David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined by smart home journalist and expert Richard Gunther to discuss Hue’s origins, which have an awful lot to do with the rise of the smartphone. They also talk about Hue’s early embrace of practically every smart home platform, its somewhat shocking price tag, and what it takes to make a smart device that actually just… works.

This is the fifth (and next to last) episode of the fourth season of Version History. If you haven’t yet checked out the story of the Harmony remote, the Roomba vacuum, the Nest thermostat, or the Keurig coffee maker, make sure you catch up! It’s smart home season this season, and there’s so much to get into. Here’s how to get every episode, and all our other fun stuff, as soon as it drops:

If you’re a Verge subscriber, you can also get access to Version History (and all our other podcasts) with no ads. All you have to do is visit your account settings.

If you want to know more about Hue, here are some links to get you started:

The perfect kit for all your tiny repairs

2026-07-10T14:03:53-04:00

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, giggling endlessly at the new InfoWars, and slowly perfecting the art of making s’mores on the grill.

I also have for you a cheap toolkit worth keeping around, a pair of earbuds you might want to try, a delightful new spin on toys for adults, and more.

And don’t forget to tell me about your reading setup! I’ve been loving all your cool Kindle hacks, fun book-shopping tricks, and the many ways to get stuff off the internet and onto your reading device. Tell me more! I want to hear it all! More to come on that next week. For now, let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / buying on Blu-ray 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.)

The Drop

The iFixit Megalodon Driver Kit. My last year has been filled with small and large home repairs, and I really should have gotten a kit like this. It’s not a full-on gadget repair set (though iFixit has a good one of those, too), more of a just-right set of bits, adapters, and drivers for all the small fixes life requires. This and a Hoto screwdriver are basically my toolkit going forward.
The Nothing Earbuds 3A. Nothing’s wireless earbuds have generally been among the best you can get for $99. I’m also very intrigued by the new Audio Snapshot feature, which records a snippet of whatever you’re listening to — for me, it’ll be mostly podcast moments I want to remember — and syncs it to your phone. Nifty! And really nice to have on the buds themselves.
Ugmonk’s Analog Card Variety Pack. I know there are a lot of Analog fans in the Installerverse, and all the new card types look great for some pen-and-paper productivity. The more I lean into just using a card a day to keep myself organized, the more I like it.
GPT-Live. AI Voice Modes have always struck me as a good demo and a weird product. I don’t think aimless chatbot chat is a good thing, and the bots never worked that well anyway. By all accounts, this is a huge improvement, much more useful and much less trying to be your best friend. Still too much active listening for my taste, though.
“Apple USB-C Earpods Review: Better Than You Think.” I have been shouting for years, to anyone who will listen, that everyone should have a pair or six of Apple’s $20 wired earbuds. They sound good, the mic is great — they’re just a fabulous pair of backup headphones. But don’t just believe me! Believe this great Adam Talks Tech video, with lots of good testing.
Blooms by Play-Doh. You can just imagine the meeting at Hasbro. “Adults love Legos, right? They’ll totally love Play-Doh, too!” I have a three-year-old who loves the stuff, and I gotta tell you: The logic tracks. I don’t know that I would have started with flower arrangements? But there’s something fun here.
Claude reflection. My colleague Hayden Field called it “Claude Wrapped,” and that’s about right. This is probably mostly a business-analytics tool (where did all those tokens go??), but if these AI tools are going to be part of our lives, a Screen Time-style report on how and how much we’re using them is also probably a good idea.
The Man Will Burn. Weirdly, I think understanding Burning Man is actually crucial to understanding this moment in technology, culture, and the world. This four-part series was made by people who love Burning Man, which definitely colors the doc — but at least the first episode shows the place off pretty well.
Knockoff. A browser extension that attempts to sort the nonsense Amazon brands from the actual brands and help you get to the best version of a product more quickly. An incredible referendum on the state of Amazon that this is even necessary, but… it’s extremely necessary. Goodbye, accidental purchases from brands called SKPVENT.

Screen share

Ian Bogost is one of my favorite writers on tech, because he always seems to be asking the right question: Is any of this new technology good for us as people? I’ve come back many times to his love letter to landlines, his explanation for why email sucks, and many others.

Ian has a book out this week called The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, which answers the same question in a much broader and frankly much more bizarre way. His argument is that we’ve completely lost touch with the world around us, both figuratively and literally, and that we need to find ways to get it back. To explain any more would make me sound like your high friend talking about their own hand, but that’s kind of the fun of it. (If you want to hear that, I had Ian on The Vergecast this week, and it was great. And sort of trippy.)

I asked Ian to share his homescreen with us this week, but let him pick which device he wanted to share. I wasn’t sure what he’d pick as his digital home, but I sure didn’t expect Homebridge! I love it, though. Here it is, plus some info on what he uses and why:

The device: This is the plugin page — sort of like the apps page — for my home’s Homebridge installation. Homebridge is server software that makes smart-home devices that don’t work natively with Apple’s home-automation app appear and operate in the Apple Home app. It’s a pretty nerdy thing, and it requires running an always-on server, so it’s not for everyone. But it is, apparently, for me.

The wallpaper: You probably thought the answer was “what wallpaper?” but no, even server software that nobody sees allows personalization. Mine is running the Orange theme in Dark mode. (Other options include Purple and Deep Purple. I suppose I should also admit that Orange is the default.)

The apps: So much going on here. Bond allows me to control ceiling fans from Apple Home. Pico allows me to reprogram Lutron Pico wall switch remotes to do anything I want — such as controlling ceiling fans or opening garage doors and gates.

Speaking of which, Garage Door Shelly1 connects a Shelly relay that I soldered to a non-code-cycling, oldschool gate remote, which opens the gate at the end of the alley behind my house, which means I can press a button in Carplay and open it, my garage door, and unlock my house. UniFi Protect makes my Ubiquiti security cameras appear in Home — and also helps my doorbell work (long story). No cloud — I store all my camera footage locally on a 24TB RAID in my basement. Having all that supposed surveillance actually makes my house seem more boring and less interesting — a topic I wrote about for The Atlantic a few years ago.

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

The r/oddlysatisfying subreddit.
Asking ChatGPT for help with home repairs.
Backgammon (just a tabletop set, with a hard enameled surface that makes the dice dance and spin in a gratifying way).
Power over Ethernet (POE) splitters.
Mad Men, the best narrative television show ever made, which I rewatched for the second time this summer.

Crowdsourced

“Re-reading Neuromancer following Apple TV’s latest teaser. The Verge is totally right on Apple TV crushing sci-fi shows.” — Austin

“Playing the new puzzle game 4 x 3.” — Rohit

“Really loving Myke Hurley’s podcasts, hard to pick just one, but his Designed in California Kickstarter with Jason Snell on the history of Apple just completed with $300K raised. Pretty cool!” — Rowan

“I spent a few hours setting up a new Brother printer for my mom. It’s like the opposite of enshittification. Reasonable prices and it just prints. It shouldn’t be a breath of fresh air, but it is.” — Ben

“Reading the so-far excellent but bittersweet Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, before Taika Waititi’s movie version comes out in October.” — Gatherer Hunter

“I took my Sony Aibo ERS210 out of my mom’s attic to bring back to the US. But it didn’t fit in my luggage… So I will need to come up with another plan.” — Bart

“This video about the development of Western musical scales and notation was not only fascinating, but the production value was off the charts. Highly recommended even if you don’t know a ton of music theory!” — Arden

“The new The Ghost in the Shell anime on Amazon Prime is fantastic, true to the manga and done by the same studio that did Dan Da Dan! Only one episode out so far but I’m already psyched.” — Ryan

“‘The Story Behind Star Wars Galaxies’ Notorious Jedi Problem.’ Best interview / video I’ve watched on YouTube in a while. It’s a fascinating story of developing software for millions of users. Specifically the central role psychology plays, and whether the best interests of users can ever be reconciled with the incentives of corporations.” — JStaal

Signing off

The sad product news of the week is that TV Time, which a lot of people use to find and track their favorite shows, is shutting down. And you only have until July 15th (next Wednesday) to get your data out. The better news: Basically every other app in this category has since built a TV Time importer! You can import your data into a service like JustWatch, or use an Installerverse favorite media tracker like Trakt, Sofa, or Sequel, all of which have importers. Make sure you do this all ASAP, because losing years of tracking data would really suck. Here’s hoping this is the last of these apps to disappear for a long time to come.

See you next week!