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The Verge's Installer newsletter highlights a new Facebook-focused film starring Jeremy Strong and written by Aaron Sorkin, along with Amazon's newly launched Alexa Tablet 12 Pro. The edition also rounds up other recommended shows, games, gadgets and a book about the AI industry.
In a recent episode of The Vergecast, hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel examine a wave of new devices—including a high-end Microsoft Surface laptop, an Amazon Android tablet, and Apple's smart home push—that all center around AI assistants. The hosts also discuss the Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery acquisition and its implications for streaming, plus a segment on media regulation.
OpenAI has released Dots, an AI assistant aimed at business tasks like launching websites, rescheduling calls, and building slide decks, priced at a minimum of $100 per month. The Verge's staff compared it to Perplexity's Muse, which they've been testing for personal tasks such as managing Facebook Marketplace listings and sorting email.
Mark Zuckerberg has said in recent interviews that Ray-Ban Meta glasses signal photo-taking more clearly than smartphones do, since the glasses light up when capturing an image while phones typically do not. Journalist Joanna Stern countered that holding up a phone is itself a visible cue, even without a light indicator.
Apple used its latest launch event, led by new CEO John Ternus, to unveil the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, alongside updated iPhone 18 Pro models with a variable aperture camera and new Apple Watches featuring an expanded sensor array. The Watches also gain an always-on microphone capable of summarizing conversations, a feature The Verge's team discussed at length on this week's Vergecast alongside a segment on running local AI models on Mac.
In her new book, New York Times reporter Natasha Singer documents how Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies embedded themselves in K-12 education over the past 15 years, supplying free coding curricula and tools like Swift and Minecraft to promote computer science as a path to jobs. She argues AI companies are now pitching schools with a nearly identical playbook, offering free resources while cultivating future customers and workers.