Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 111, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a bunch of the best stuff out of this year’s CES! Our whole team does an incredible job of covering all the news, and you should be sure and check out our awards for the show’s best stuff. For our purposes here, I tried to just grab a bunch of the best and most interesting stuff that actually feels real. (I’m linking here largely to our coverage instead of normal product pages, because in many cases, there aren’t any yet.) Real in the sense that (a) it will actually ship and work and (b) it might actually be worth your money. A hard task the week of CES!
Oh, and before I forget, tiny housekeeping thing: this newsletter will now be live on our website the same time it hits your inbox. Since it’s all for subscribers, no good reason to wait a day anymore! Read it in email, read it on the site, read it in RSS — it’ll be there every Saturday morning starting now. Let me know if you run into any issues! Now let’s get into it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / listening to / bedazzling / still setting up from the holidays this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
Screen share
At some point in the very near future, I’m going to spend too many thousands of dollars on an e-bike. This will be almost entirely Andy Hawkins’ fault. In addition to being The Verge’s transportation editor, he’s also our foremost proponent of ditching your car and going full-on cargo bike. Yes, if you ask, he will lead your bike bus.
I asked Andy to share his homescreen this week, since there’s always so much interesting future-of-transit stuff happening at CES. (Side note: I test-drove an Infinite Machine Olto while in Vegas, it was fabulous.) Andy didn’t go to Vegas this year, presumably because he couldn’t bike that far, but he did agree to share with us.
Here’s Andy’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 16. I was content to run my iPhone 11 into the ground, but my mother insisted I join her family plan, so we all got upgrades last year. It’s a bit skinnier than my iPhone 11, which is fine but took some getting used to. A week after I got it, my kid touched the screen with a sparkler, and now it has a weird permanent burn in the lower left hand corner, kind of like the Eye of Sauron. So that’s cool.
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