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Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Riot Games’ investment into its Vanguard system is paying off. Multiplayer games on PC were a mess back in 2020. Developers were struggling to respond to blatant cheating as more and more people turned to gaming at home during the covid-19 lockdowns. Call of Duty: Warzone, PUBG, and Destiny 2 were all riddled with people using aimbots to automatically shoot opponents or wallhacks to see everyone on a map.
Riot Games’ Valorant stood out because of its controversial and aggressive anti-cheat system, Vanguard, which had the potential to keep cheaters away. Now, four years later, it’s clear that Vanguard is winning the war against PC cheaters unlike any other anti-cheat system.
“We don’t see as many of the cheats that try to function on the machine and get access,” says Phillip Koskinas, director of anti-cheat on Valorant, in an interview with The Verge. “That has just become too much of a chore for cheat developers.”
Vanguard has made it far more difficult for PC gamers to use things like aimbots or wallhacks. This is partly due to a controversial kernel-level driver that is always running after you boot your PC. Riot’s Nick “Everdox” Peterson developed a system in Vanguard that detects when cheat engines are trying to get access to Valorant. “He came up with a fairly novel way to know that something has been mapped into kernel memory that isn’t supposed to be there,” says Koskinas. “The method is so cute that I can’t explain it because they’ll figure it out too quickly.”
The method sounds like it works similarly to when you crack open a piece of hardware and those little plastic clips fall off to let the device manufacturer know you have voided the warranty. “Once that’s done, we know that something happened and then we just wait to see something occur on Valorant that confirms you’re using it for cheating,” says Koskinas.
That’s led cheaters to move increasingly toward hardware to bypass systems. One of the most popular ways that cheat engines now hook into games involves direct memory access (DMA) with dedicated hardware. “You’re basically using a PCIe card to request reads of physical memory,” explains Koskinas. “They have developed techniques with these cards, the most popular one being Squirrel, to do a lot of traditional memory scanning but totally externally.”
That means a cheater will have a secondary PC that is scanning the memory space of Valorant, looking for player positions. A cheater can use this second PC with a monitor to display a special new radar that lets them know exactly where opponents are. It’s a devastating cheat in a game like Valorant, where players rely on tactics, positioning, and stealthiness to get an advantage.

Image: Riot Games
DMA cheating involves dedicated hardware.

Riot has also developed methods to detect this new form of hardware-level DMA cheating thanks to Peterson. His invention essentially blocks reads to internal memory by suspicious devices. I recently ran into an issue with this DMA protection, as Vanguard started blocking my network card every time I loaded into a Valorant game. Riot has a list of hardware and firmware that is trusted, but the network card on my motherboard was using a method that looked suspicious. The issue was rectified within hours, but it showed how powerful Vanguard was that it could knock out my PC connectivity until I rebooted.
Most of the cheats for Valorant these days have been reduced to triggerbots, programs that use screen readers to look at the center of your monitor and then automatically shoot when a player’s crosshair is placed over an enemy. Koskinas says these account for “about 80 percent” of cheats in the game.
The addition of Vanguard to League of Legends earlier this year also dramatically reduced scripters, and the League team revealed in August that it had banned more than 175,000 accounts for cheating since Vanguard was introduced.
That’s encouraging for Valorant and League, but the situation isn’t as bright for other game developers that build their own anti-cheat systems. A recent study from the University of Birmingham revealed that cheats for Activision’s Call of Duty: Warzone remain accessible and affordable, and that Activision’s Ricochet anti-cheat falls short against more sophisticated cheats. Activision even had to fix an anti-cheat hack in Warzone and Modern Warfare III that led to legitimate players getting banned.
“Ricochet has talented individuals on the team, but they clearly do not have enough funding or freedom,” says zebleer, the developer behind Phantom Overlay — one of the most popular cheat engines for games like Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, and more. “Call of Duty is overrun with cheaters. They are implementing quick fixes. They are not implementing things they should be implementing likely because Activision won’t let them.”
Zebleer thinks Vanguard is clearly winning against cheaters, thanks to the anti-cheat team having funding, talent, and freedom. Riot has hired engineers that have developed cheat engines in the past, including Koskinas, who developed and sold cheats more than 15 years ago to help fund his academic career.
Unsurprisingly, the researchers at the University of Birmingham agree that Valorant has the best anti-cheat system. It was ranked at the top of the anti-cheat pile, followed by Fortnite, which also uses a kernel-level system. Counter-Strike 2, Battlefield 1, and Team Fortress 2 were ranked at the bottom.
The researchers also highlighted weaknesses in Windows protections that allow cheat software to inject itself into the kernel, just like malware does. After the devastating CrowdStrike incident, Windows kernel access has become a hot topic as Microsoft is increasingly looking at ways to help CrowdStrike and other security vendors operate outside of the Windows kernel.
Riot is looking to Microsoft to help secure Valorant further. “Microsoft got a lot more proactive about revoking the certificates for drivers that were malicious,” says Koskinas. “We kind of chase what Windows is willing to do, so if they start requiring virtualization-based security to be on, or hardware-enforced stack protection, or hypervisor code integrity, we will leverage those features that protect Windows for us and just require them to be on and recede from the kernel space.”
Vanguard will soon only start when the game launches, provided you’re using all of the latest Windows 11 security features, instead of being always-on after boot. That should help with some of the privacy concerns, too.
Riot’s focus for anti-cheat is on Windows right now, and there are no plans for Linux support with Valorant or League of Legends. While the Steam Deck supports some anti-cheats, developers like Riot are increasingly shying away from Linux. “You can freely manipulate the kernel, and there’s no user mode calls to attest that it’s even genuine,” says Koskinas. “You could make a Linux distribution that’s purpose-built for cheating and we’d be smoked.”
Respawn just dropped support in Apex Legends, citing similar concerns to Riot about cheating. Epic Games also refuses to support Fortnite on Steam Deck / Linux due to a lack of users. “Imagine if Steam Deck just has the security handled so we know it’s a genuine device, it’s fully attested, all these features are enabled, we’d be like cool, go game, no problem,” says Koskinas.
While Riot seems to be on top of traditional PC cheating, it may have to contend with AI-powered cheating soon. That could come from dedicated hardware like MSI’s monitor that helps you cheat in League of Legends or screen readers that get increasingly complex. Riot is particularly concerned with image reading. “That is where all cheating is heading,” says Koskinas. “We’ve done a lot of research into what human mouse and keyboard input looks like, but it is a concern.”
One possible future could see AI cheats and AI detection battling against each other in a virtual war. “We’re at a disadvantage, honestly. [AI models] can learn what human input looks like,” says Koskinas. Valorant is winning the war right now, but AI could reset the playing field of this ongoing cat-and-mouse game.

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Riot Games’ investment into its Vanguard system is paying off.

Multiplayer games on PC were a mess back in 2020. Developers were struggling to respond to blatant cheating as more and more people turned to gaming at home during the covid-19 lockdowns. Call of Duty: Warzone, PUBG, and Destiny 2 were all riddled with people using aimbots to automatically shoot opponents or wallhacks to see everyone on a map.

Riot Games’ Valorant stood out because of its controversial and aggressive anti-cheat system, Vanguard, which had the potential to keep cheaters away. Now, four years later, it’s clear that Vanguard is winning the war against PC cheaters unlike any other anti-cheat system.

“We don’t see as many of the cheats that try to function on the machine and get access,” says Phillip Koskinas, director of anti-cheat on Valorant, in an interview with The Verge. “That has just become too much of a chore for cheat developers.”

Vanguard has made it far more difficult for PC gamers to use things like aimbots or wallhacks. This is partly due to a controversial kernel-level driver that is always running after you boot your PC. Riot’s Nick “Everdox” Peterson developed a system in Vanguard that detects when cheat engines are trying to get access to Valorant. “He came up with a fairly novel way to know that something has been mapped into kernel memory that isn’t supposed to be there,” says Koskinas. “The method is so cute that I can’t explain it because they’ll figure it out too quickly.”

The method sounds like it works similarly to when you crack open a piece of hardware and those little plastic clips fall off to let the device manufacturer know you have voided the warranty. “Once that’s done, we know that something happened and then we just wait to see something occur on Valorant that confirms you’re using it for cheating,” says Koskinas.

That’s led cheaters to move increasingly toward hardware to bypass systems. One of the most popular ways that cheat engines now hook into games involves direct memory access (DMA) with dedicated hardware. “You’re basically using a PCIe card to request reads of physical memory,” explains Koskinas. “They have developed techniques with these cards, the most popular one being Squirrel, to do a lot of traditional memory scanning but totally externally.”

That means a cheater will have a secondary PC that is scanning the memory space of Valorant, looking for player positions. A cheater can use this second PC with a monitor to display a special new radar that lets them know exactly where opponents are. It’s a devastating cheat in a game like Valorant, where players rely on tactics, positioning, and stealthiness to get an advantage.

Riot has also developed methods to detect this new form of hardware-level DMA cheating thanks to Peterson. His invention essentially blocks reads to internal memory by suspicious devices. I recently ran into an issue with this DMA protection, as Vanguard started blocking my network card every time I loaded into a Valorant game. Riot has a list of hardware and firmware that is trusted, but the network card on my motherboard was using a method that looked suspicious. The issue was rectified within hours, but it showed how powerful Vanguard was that it could knock out my PC connectivity until I rebooted.

Most of the cheats for Valorant these days have been reduced to triggerbots, programs that use screen readers to look at the center of your monitor and then automatically shoot when a player’s crosshair is placed over an enemy. Koskinas says these account for “about 80 percent” of cheats in the game.

The addition of Vanguard to League of Legends earlier this year also dramatically reduced scripters, and the League team revealed in August that it had banned more than 175,000 accounts for cheating since Vanguard was introduced.

That’s encouraging for Valorant and League, but the situation isn’t as bright for other game developers that build their own anti-cheat systems. A recent study from the University of Birmingham revealed that cheats for Activision’s Call of Duty: Warzone remain accessible and affordable, and that Activision’s Ricochet anti-cheat falls short against more sophisticated cheats. Activision even had to fix an anti-cheat hack in Warzone and Modern Warfare III that led to legitimate players getting banned.

“Ricochet has talented individuals on the team, but they clearly do not have enough funding or freedom,” says zebleer, the developer behind Phantom Overlay — one of the most popular cheat engines for games like Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, and more. “Call of Duty is overrun with cheaters. They are implementing quick fixes. They are not implementing things they should be implementing likely because Activision won’t let them.”

Zebleer thinks Vanguard is clearly winning against cheaters, thanks to the anti-cheat team having funding, talent, and freedom. Riot has hired engineers that have developed cheat engines in the past, including Koskinas, who developed and sold cheats more than 15 years ago to help fund his academic career.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers at the University of Birmingham agree that Valorant has the best anti-cheat system. It was ranked at the top of the anti-cheat pile, followed by Fortnite, which also uses a kernel-level system. Counter-Strike 2, Battlefield 1, and Team Fortress 2 were ranked at the bottom.

The researchers also highlighted weaknesses in Windows protections that allow cheat software to inject itself into the kernel, just like malware does. After the devastating CrowdStrike incident, Windows kernel access has become a hot topic as Microsoft is increasingly looking at ways to help CrowdStrike and other security vendors operate outside of the Windows kernel.

Riot is looking to Microsoft to help secure Valorant further. “Microsoft got a lot more proactive about revoking the certificates for drivers that were malicious,” says Koskinas. “We kind of chase what Windows is willing to do, so if they start requiring virtualization-based security to be on, or hardware-enforced stack protection, or hypervisor code integrity, we will leverage those features that protect Windows for us and just require them to be on and recede from the kernel space.”

Vanguard will soon only start when the game launches, provided you’re using all of the latest Windows 11 security features, instead of being always-on after boot. That should help with some of the privacy concerns, too.

Riot’s focus for anti-cheat is on Windows right now, and there are no plans for Linux support with Valorant or League of Legends. While the Steam Deck supports some anti-cheats, developers like Riot are increasingly shying away from Linux. “You can freely manipulate the kernel, and there’s no user mode calls to attest that it’s even genuine,” says Koskinas. “You could make a Linux distribution that’s purpose-built for cheating and we’d be smoked.”

Respawn just dropped support in Apex Legends, citing similar concerns to Riot about cheating. Epic Games also refuses to support Fortnite on Steam Deck / Linux due to a lack of users. “Imagine if Steam Deck just has the security handled so we know it’s a genuine device, it’s fully attested, all these features are enabled, we’d be like cool, go game, no problem,” says Koskinas.

While Riot seems to be on top of traditional PC cheating, it may have to contend with AI-powered cheating soon. That could come from dedicated hardware like MSI’s monitor that helps you cheat in League of Legends or screen readers that get increasingly complex. Riot is particularly concerned with image reading. “That is where all cheating is heading,” says Koskinas. “We’ve done a lot of research into what human mouse and keyboard input looks like, but it is a concern.”

One possible future could see AI cheats and AI detection battling against each other in a virtual war. “We’re at a disadvantage, honestly. [AI models] can learn what human input looks like,” says Koskinas. Valorant is winning the war right now, but AI could reset the playing field of this ongoing cat-and-mouse game.

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The French-language app shows new movies like Terrifier 3 and Venom: The Last Dance. | Image: Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Another illegal streaming app has made its way to the App Store — but it only surfaces pirated films for people in certain regions outside the US, including France, Canada, and the Netherlands.
As shown in a post on Threads, the App Store listing for “Univer Note” presents itself as a productivity platform that can “easily help you record every day’s events and plan your time.” However, if you’re a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie à Deux, and Terrifier 3. Options within the app are labeled in French, while films stream in their original language with French subtitles or dubbing.
Anyone else who downloads the app in an unsupported region, such as the US, will only see a productivity app, a strategy we’ve seen used by other piracy apps to evade detection from reviewers. One recent example was Kimi earlier this year, which posed as a vision-testing tool and was quickly removed after news outlets began reporting about it. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about this app.

The French-language app shows new movies like Terrifier 3 and Venom: The Last Dance. | Image: Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Another illegal streaming app has made its way to the App Store — but it only surfaces pirated films for people in certain regions outside the US, including France, Canada, and the Netherlands.

As shown in a post on Threads, the App Store listing for “Univer Note” presents itself as a productivity platform that can “easily help you record every day’s events and plan your time.” However, if you’re a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie à Deux, and Terrifier 3. Options within the app are labeled in French, while films stream in their original language with French subtitles or dubbing.

Anyone else who downloads the app in an unsupported region, such as the US, will only see a productivity app, a strategy we’ve seen used by other piracy apps to evade detection from reviewers. One recent example was Kimi earlier this year, which posed as a vision-testing tool and was quickly removed after news outlets began reporting about it. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about this app.

Read More 

The hardware is chunky and the software is clunky, but this is the best portable audio player I’ve ever heard. Do you want to hear the best-sounding portable music player in creation? Something that plays your favorite songs better than you’ve ever heard them? Do you have an extra $3,000, another couple grand worth of headphones, and a high tolerance for bulky hardware and laggy software? If you said yes to all of the above, then Astell & Kern’s flagship digital audio player — the SP3000T — is about to make your sonic dreams come true.
Analog stalwarts write love letters to the warm, natural, lifelike sound of the tube amp; proponents of solid-state digital amplifiers praise their precision and faithful reproduction of the source material. But why choose? Alongside a peerless digital op amp, the SP3000T has an honest-to-goodness tube amp, complete with a pair of vintage Raytheon JAN6418 vacuum tubes. Tube amps are generally only found in much larger home hi-fi equipment, so integrating them into something that (barely) fits in your pocket is a serious feat of engineering. And the SP3000T lets you choose between the digital amp, the tubes, or a hybrid mode with five different levels of crossover. The result is absolutely astonishing sound.

The SP3000T is a brick of a device, with the left and right edges sticking out a bit in shallow pyramids. It’s 3.33 inches wide, 5.57 inches tall, and 0.7 inches deep, and it weighs more than a pound — 17 ounces, or 18.5 ounces if you use the yellow calf leather case that comes with it. And you’ll want to, because those silver-plated steel edges and corners are uncomfortably sharp. I would genuinely be afraid of it tearing through a pocket without the case. Even with the case, it’s awkward, and if you’re wearing sweatpants, you’d better have the drawstring tied. Fortunately, the case looks good and makes it comfortable to hold, though it also obscures the four side buttons, rendering them almost useless. It has slight indents to show where they are, but they’re not nearly distinct enough to find by feel. The fact that it’s leather may also make this a nonstarter for vegans.

The 5.5-inch, 1080p touchscreen is bright enough to see on a sunny day and sharp enough for album art to look good. On the left side of the device are four small buttons for play / pause, track forward, track back, and amp selection. On the right side is a chunky volume knob with LED underglow that changes color depending on the music bitrate. Up top, it has a standard 3.5mm unbalanced audio jack, 3.5mm optical output, and 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs, plus the power button. On the bottom, there’s a USB-C port and a microSD card slot. The back features a glass window that reveals the tube amps, lit by a red LED when they’re active. Because, I mean, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. The SP3000T even has a pair of (virtual) VU meters you can conjure with a tap, giving it even more of that vintage hi-fi aesthetic. It’s a nice touch.
The SP3000T runs on an eight-core Snapdragon 6125 processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and 256GB of built-in storage. You can add up to 1.5TB via the microSD card slot. It also has dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, which supports HD codecs like AptX HD, LDAC, and LHDC. It works with Roon ARC — if you have to ask, don’t worry about it — as well as whatever casting protocols are built into its streaming apps. It can even be used as a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for your computer when connected via USB-C.

Those VU meters are virtual, but the yellow leather is real.

Astell & Kern has its own music-focused operating system based on Android 10, which came out in 2019. And if you’re expecting a $3,000 music player to run at least as smoothly as a $400 Android phone, prepare to be disappointed. It stutters pretty regularly when scrolling through lists, it often drops keystrokes when you’re typing, and the interface is unintuitive and buggy. Settings take too many swipes and taps to get to, and some are plain broken: under Downloads, you can choose “default folder” or “selected folder,” but there’s no way to actually select a folder. When I tried to log in to my Qobuz account using Google, the whole system kind of freaked out because it sensed that I was using an Android operating system, but there isn’t a way to log in to your Google account in the OS. Now I have an “Account action required” message in my notification tray that I can’t get rid of.

You won’t have access to Google’s apps or the Play Store, either, though you can download a limited selection of streaming apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, and Tidal through Astell & Kern’s onboard portal (and even then, they aren’t always up to date). If you’re hoping to add your favorite podcast or news app, you probably won’t see it there, though you may be able to sideload it. You probably shouldn’t, though; the less exposure this outdated OS has to the outside world, the better.
The other big issue is battery life. Astell & Kern claims it can get up to 10 hours under certain conditions in op-only mode, but in most cases, you’re going to want to at least be in hybrid mode. I did two battery run-down tests in hybrid mode, with two different sets of headphones, and got about 4.5 hours each time. That isn’t enough to last a full coast-to-coast flight across the US without using supplemental power.
All of that adds up to make it feel less portable than it ought to be. Yes, you can take it on the go, but not super comfortably, and maybe not for as long as you’d like. It’s portable but not necessarily made for your pocket.

Photo by Brent Rose / The Verge
The rug — and the $3,000 Grados — really tie the room together.

But nobody’s buying this thing for its operating system or because their iPod kicked the bucket. They’re buying it for the sound, and the sound is sublime. The SP3000T features entirely separate systems for processing digital and analog signals, with two of Astell & Kern’s flagship DACs for each, which allows the right and left channels to be processed independently without interference. That effectively eliminates any potential noise between the two, which makes the player silent in between the musical notes you hear. Each system is in its own little silo. And because tube amps are delicate glass bulbs, each is housed in several layers of silicone to protect them from shock and dampen vibration. It seems to have worked because I didn’t notice any distortion while I was making the questionable choice of skateboarding around a parking lot with it in my pocket.
To appreciate the capabilities of a high-end digital audio player (DAP) like this, you need high-quality music sources as well as top-notch headphones. I used the SP3000T with both the Grado GS3000x over-ear headphones ($2,000) and the Ultimate Ears Premier custom in-ear monitors ($3,000), both of which I’ve used for testing other audio devices and both of which sound incredible. I listened to a mix of downloaded FLAC, PCM, and DSD files, plus HD and Ultra HD music streamed or downloaded from Qobuz and Amazon Music.

The A&K SP3000T pairs well with the $2,000 Ultimate Ears Pro UE Premier in-ear monitors. As it should!

For a listening system as expensive as either of those setups, you would expect nothing short of magnificent, and the SP3000T doesn’t disappoint. Music comes across full, detailed, lively, and incredibly nuanced. If you’re coming from listening on your phone — even with good headphones — you’re going to hear things in your favorite songs that you’ve probably never noticed before. The scrape of a guitar pick, the subtle breath at the end of a sung line, nearly undetectable harmonics shining through. A really well-mastered album will come across like it sounded in the studio. In all my years of testing audio devices, I’ve never had anything transport with me quite like this (with the possible exception being the 15 minutes I spent listening to the $55,000 Sennheiser Orpheus headphones).
The differences between the digital and tube amps are striking. The digital amp is remarkably precise, with detail at the forefront. It’s as clean as reproduction gets. In full tube mode, what you lose in precision (and it isn’t much), you gain in liveliness. It feels like it moves more air, so bass, snares, and vocal plosives have more presence, and it has an inviting, warm sound. The hybrid mode, however, is the best of both worlds. You get digital accuracy married with that vintage tube sound, and it carries you away. The soundstage is broad and three-dimensional, and the emotion of the music really hits you.

Hybrid mode: engage!

For classical music, I tend to prefer digital, but for classic rock like Fleetwood Mac, and especially for live performances, I go full tube amp. Listening to Jimi Hendrix live in tube mode with the Grado headphones is as close as I’ll ever get to hearing what it was like to be in the audience for one of his shows. That said, I kept it in hybrid mode most of the time because everything just sounds so good in it.
There are other ways to customize the sound, too. There’s an EQ (which I barely touched) and a proprietary Digital Audio Remaster option that effectively upscales lower-resolution music into either a PCM file up to 384kHz or a DSD up to 12.2MHz. That makes older recordings come to life without introducing any digital weirdness by analyzing and virtually increasing the sample rate. It’s surprisingly seamless. There are also six different options for DAC filters, which change the amount of roll-off and echo, and three different current levels for the vacuum tubes. Half the fun is tinkering with these settings as you’re listening to find the best combination for a given track, album, or genre.
One of the most jaw-dropping experiences was listening to Lemonade on the Grado GS3000x with the SP3000T turned to Hybrid 3 and the digital remaster turning it to a DSD. It sounded like Beyoncé was standing just a few feet away, softly singing directly at me while other singers whispered in my ears. It gave me chills. This setup brings out the best in anything you throw at it: Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” soundtrack, Yo-Yo Ma’s cello suites, Miles Davis, A Tribe Called Quest, Radiohead, Lizzo, Jazmine Sullivan, Led Zeppelin, pretty much any Björk or Sigur Rós, the list goes on. These artists soar over you and engulf you in the music. Using the UE Premier in-ear monitors through the balanced audio jack sounds just as good, with even more precision, and when I was on a succession of four five-hour flights in a week, I was able to check out and go to a different sonic landscape whenever I wanted.
I also tested the SP3000T against the FiiO M11S, a capable but much more affordable DAP that supports lossless audio and comes in around $500. Of course, music sounds wonderful on the FiiO player when listening with those Grado and Ultimate Ear headphones. It’s leagues better than when plugging those headphones into my phone or computer output. But music doesn’t sound nearly as lively as it does with the Astell & Kern SP3000T. The FiiO’s OP amp just doesn’t have quite the same detail or clarity, and there’s no tube amp, so it doesn’t have that lively, holographic soundstage. (Of course, it’s $2,500 cheaper. It’s a great entry-level hi-fi device, but it really can’t go toe-to-toe with the SP3000T.)

Photo by Brent Rose / The Verge
How can you say no to a tube like this?

Ultimately (and obviously), the SP3000T is for audiophiles who are comfortable spending a hefty amount of money for the incomparable experience of having a hybrid digital / tube amp in their pocket. It brings best-in-class sound that’s more customizable than any player out there. The magic is in the lively, transportive tube amps, the stunning precision of the digital amps, and the absolutely wonderful hybrid modes that bring them together. Phonic purists probably don’t care all that much about my UI gripes, the archaic operating system, or even that it’s not as portable as one would hope. The sound is simply spectacular, it works flawlessly as a USB DAC, and if you have killer headphones, all of those little annoyances don’t amount to much. It’s liable to open up your music in ways you’ve never experienced. It’s enchanting.
I found myself wanting to sit my friends down, stick the Grados on their heads, and put on their favorite songs — then crank up the voltage on the tubes, just so I could see the looks on their faces as they got swept away.

The hardware is chunky and the software is clunky, but this is the best portable audio player I’ve ever heard.

Do you want to hear the best-sounding portable music player in creation? Something that plays your favorite songs better than you’ve ever heard them? Do you have an extra $3,000, another couple grand worth of headphones, and a high tolerance for bulky hardware and laggy software? If you said yes to all of the above, then Astell & Kern’s flagship digital audio player — the SP3000T — is about to make your sonic dreams come true.

Analog stalwarts write love letters to the warm, natural, lifelike sound of the tube amp; proponents of solid-state digital amplifiers praise their precision and faithful reproduction of the source material. But why choose? Alongside a peerless digital op amp, the SP3000T has an honest-to-goodness tube amp, complete with a pair of vintage Raytheon JAN6418 vacuum tubes. Tube amps are generally only found in much larger home hi-fi equipment, so integrating them into something that (barely) fits in your pocket is a serious feat of engineering. And the SP3000T lets you choose between the digital amp, the tubes, or a hybrid mode with five different levels of crossover. The result is absolutely astonishing sound.

The SP3000T is a brick of a device, with the left and right edges sticking out a bit in shallow pyramids. It’s 3.33 inches wide, 5.57 inches tall, and 0.7 inches deep, and it weighs more than a pound — 17 ounces, or 18.5 ounces if you use the yellow calf leather case that comes with it. And you’ll want to, because those silver-plated steel edges and corners are uncomfortably sharp. I would genuinely be afraid of it tearing through a pocket without the case. Even with the case, it’s awkward, and if you’re wearing sweatpants, you’d better have the drawstring tied. Fortunately, the case looks good and makes it comfortable to hold, though it also obscures the four side buttons, rendering them almost useless. It has slight indents to show where they are, but they’re not nearly distinct enough to find by feel. The fact that it’s leather may also make this a nonstarter for vegans.

The 5.5-inch, 1080p touchscreen is bright enough to see on a sunny day and sharp enough for album art to look good. On the left side of the device are four small buttons for play / pause, track forward, track back, and amp selection. On the right side is a chunky volume knob with LED underglow that changes color depending on the music bitrate. Up top, it has a standard 3.5mm unbalanced audio jack, 3.5mm optical output, and 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs, plus the power button. On the bottom, there’s a USB-C port and a microSD card slot. The back features a glass window that reveals the tube amps, lit by a red LED when they’re active. Because, I mean, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. The SP3000T even has a pair of (virtual) VU meters you can conjure with a tap, giving it even more of that vintage hi-fi aesthetic. It’s a nice touch.

The SP3000T runs on an eight-core Snapdragon 6125 processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and 256GB of built-in storage. You can add up to 1.5TB via the microSD card slot. It also has dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, which supports HD codecs like AptX HD, LDAC, and LHDC. It works with Roon ARC — if you have to ask, don’t worry about it — as well as whatever casting protocols are built into its streaming apps. It can even be used as a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for your computer when connected via USB-C.

Astell & Kern has its own music-focused operating system based on Android 10, which came out in 2019. And if you’re expecting a $3,000 music player to run at least as smoothly as a $400 Android phone, prepare to be disappointed. It stutters pretty regularly when scrolling through lists, it often drops keystrokes when you’re typing, and the interface is unintuitive and buggy. Settings take too many swipes and taps to get to, and some are plain broken: under Downloads, you can choose “default folder” or “selected folder,” but there’s no way to actually select a folder. When I tried to log in to my Qobuz account using Google, the whole system kind of freaked out because it sensed that I was using an Android operating system, but there isn’t a way to log in to your Google account in the OS. Now I have an “Account action required” message in my notification tray that I can’t get rid of.

You won’t have access to Google’s apps or the Play Store, either, though you can download a limited selection of streaming apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, and Tidal through Astell & Kern’s onboard portal (and even then, they aren’t always up to date). If you’re hoping to add your favorite podcast or news app, you probably won’t see it there, though you may be able to sideload it. You probably shouldn’t, though; the less exposure this outdated OS has to the outside world, the better.

The other big issue is battery life. Astell & Kern claims it can get up to 10 hours under certain conditions in op-only mode, but in most cases, you’re going to want to at least be in hybrid mode. I did two battery run-down tests in hybrid mode, with two different sets of headphones, and got about 4.5 hours each time. That isn’t enough to last a full coast-to-coast flight across the US without using supplemental power.

All of that adds up to make it feel less portable than it ought to be. Yes, you can take it on the go, but not super comfortably, and maybe not for as long as you’d like. It’s portable but not necessarily made for your pocket.

But nobody’s buying this thing for its operating system or because their iPod kicked the bucket. They’re buying it for the sound, and the sound is sublime. The SP3000T features entirely separate systems for processing digital and analog signals, with two of Astell & Kern’s flagship DACs for each, which allows the right and left channels to be processed independently without interference. That effectively eliminates any potential noise between the two, which makes the player silent in between the musical notes you hear. Each system is in its own little silo. And because tube amps are delicate glass bulbs, each is housed in several layers of silicone to protect them from shock and dampen vibration. It seems to have worked because I didn’t notice any distortion while I was making the questionable choice of skateboarding around a parking lot with it in my pocket.

To appreciate the capabilities of a high-end digital audio player (DAP) like this, you need high-quality music sources as well as top-notch headphones. I used the SP3000T with both the Grado GS3000x over-ear headphones ($2,000) and the Ultimate Ears Premier custom in-ear monitors ($3,000), both of which I’ve used for testing other audio devices and both of which sound incredible. I listened to a mix of downloaded FLAC, PCM, and DSD files, plus HD and Ultra HD music streamed or downloaded from Qobuz and Amazon Music.

For a listening system as expensive as either of those setups, you would expect nothing short of magnificent, and the SP3000T doesn’t disappoint. Music comes across full, detailed, lively, and incredibly nuanced. If you’re coming from listening on your phone — even with good headphones — you’re going to hear things in your favorite songs that you’ve probably never noticed before. The scrape of a guitar pick, the subtle breath at the end of a sung line, nearly undetectable harmonics shining through. A really well-mastered album will come across like it sounded in the studio. In all my years of testing audio devices, I’ve never had anything transport with me quite like this (with the possible exception being the 15 minutes I spent listening to the $55,000 Sennheiser Orpheus headphones).

The differences between the digital and tube amps are striking. The digital amp is remarkably precise, with detail at the forefront. It’s as clean as reproduction gets. In full tube mode, what you lose in precision (and it isn’t much), you gain in liveliness. It feels like it moves more air, so bass, snares, and vocal plosives have more presence, and it has an inviting, warm sound. The hybrid mode, however, is the best of both worlds. You get digital accuracy married with that vintage tube sound, and it carries you away. The soundstage is broad and three-dimensional, and the emotion of the music really hits you.

For classical music, I tend to prefer digital, but for classic rock like Fleetwood Mac, and especially for live performances, I go full tube amp. Listening to Jimi Hendrix live in tube mode with the Grado headphones is as close as I’ll ever get to hearing what it was like to be in the audience for one of his shows. That said, I kept it in hybrid mode most of the time because everything just sounds so good in it.

There are other ways to customize the sound, too. There’s an EQ (which I barely touched) and a proprietary Digital Audio Remaster option that effectively upscales lower-resolution music into either a PCM file up to 384kHz or a DSD up to 12.2MHz. That makes older recordings come to life without introducing any digital weirdness by analyzing and virtually increasing the sample rate. It’s surprisingly seamless. There are also six different options for DAC filters, which change the amount of roll-off and echo, and three different current levels for the vacuum tubes. Half the fun is tinkering with these settings as you’re listening to find the best combination for a given track, album, or genre.

One of the most jaw-dropping experiences was listening to Lemonade on the Grado GS3000x with the SP3000T turned to Hybrid 3 and the digital remaster turning it to a DSD. It sounded like Beyoncé was standing just a few feet away, softly singing directly at me while other singers whispered in my ears. It gave me chills. This setup brings out the best in anything you throw at it: Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” soundtrack, Yo-Yo Ma’s cello suites, Miles Davis, A Tribe Called Quest, Radiohead, Lizzo, Jazmine Sullivan, Led Zeppelin, pretty much any Björk or Sigur Rós, the list goes on. These artists soar over you and engulf you in the music. Using the UE Premier in-ear monitors through the balanced audio jack sounds just as good, with even more precision, and when I was on a succession of four five-hour flights in a week, I was able to check out and go to a different sonic landscape whenever I wanted.

I also tested the SP3000T against the FiiO M11S, a capable but much more affordable DAP that supports lossless audio and comes in around $500. Of course, music sounds wonderful on the FiiO player when listening with those Grado and Ultimate Ear headphones. It’s leagues better than when plugging those headphones into my phone or computer output. But music doesn’t sound nearly as lively as it does with the Astell & Kern SP3000T. The FiiO’s OP amp just doesn’t have quite the same detail or clarity, and there’s no tube amp, so it doesn’t have that lively, holographic soundstage. (Of course, it’s $2,500 cheaper. It’s a great entry-level hi-fi device, but it really can’t go toe-to-toe with the SP3000T.)

Ultimately (and obviously), the SP3000T is for audiophiles who are comfortable spending a hefty amount of money for the incomparable experience of having a hybrid digital / tube amp in their pocket. It brings best-in-class sound that’s more customizable than any player out there. The magic is in the lively, transportive tube amps, the stunning precision of the digital amps, and the absolutely wonderful hybrid modes that bring them together. Phonic purists probably don’t care all that much about my UI gripes, the archaic operating system, or even that it’s not as portable as one would hope. The sound is simply spectacular, it works flawlessly as a USB DAC, and if you have killer headphones, all of those little annoyances don’t amount to much. It’s liable to open up your music in ways you’ve never experienced. It’s enchanting.

I found myself wanting to sit my friends down, stick the Grados on their heads, and put on their favorite songs — then crank up the voltage on the tubes, just so I could see the looks on their faces as they got swept away.

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Image: Nintendo

For a character that’s been around so long, Mario is in something of a golden period. Since last year his mustache has been spotted in theaters, theme parks, and the best (and weirdest) side-scrolling Super Mario game in a long time. But he’s had a particularly strong run in role-playing games on the Switch, with recent remakes of both Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and the original Super Mario RPG. Now we have Mario & Luigi: Brothership which keeps the streak alive with a blend of charm, humor, and clever gameplay.
Brothership, once again, starts with the brothers getting whisked away to a fantasy realm in need of help. This time it’s the oceanic world of Concordia, which has been broken apart into a series of islands. The bros end up in a place called Ship Shape Island, a name that’s a bit of a misnomer. While it’s technically an island, it’s also a ship, a floating city like something out of Waterworld. Soon they learn that they need to find the other broken-off pieces of Concordia and literally tether them back to Ship Shape, thus putting the world back together again. Also, for some reason, almost everyone in this world has a power socket for a face.

It’s weird, but things start out simple enough, as you have to pilot the seas to find each island, and then travel to them by firing yourself out of a cannon. There’s an overarching plot about an important lighthouse, a revered tree, and some evil electrical components, but Brothership has the most personality when you visit each of the disparate islands to solve their particular problems before connecting them.

Image: Nintendo

What has always separated the Mario RPGs — aside from all of the Nintendo trappings — is their sense of humor. These games are funny. And Brothership is just as goofy as its contemporaries, with communities suffering from chronic hair gel shortages and characters that include a floating pig (who definitely isn’t a pig) and an old turnip who gives terrible advice and makes even worse puns.
That sense of playfulness extends to the gameplay. Brothership is a turn-based RPG with some light platforming and puzzle-solving. The battles, like the rest of the Mario & Luigi series, are based on timing; you have to hit a button at just the right time to get the most out of an attack. The timing varies whether you’re stomping on a bad guy’s head, smacking them with a hammer, or firing a Koopa shell in their direction, and the brothers can work together on most attacks. This means that, unlike most turn-based RPGs, you aren’t simply selecting actions from a menu. You have to be more involved even for the simpler battles.
This was all true of past games, and so initially Brothership can feel very familiar. But a few hours in it starts to open up with some clever role-playing features. Most notable is something called “plugs,” which are essentially buffs or actions that you can craft and then equip. These do everything from let the brothers heal automatically without using a turn, to increasing your attacks against flying enemies. There are a bunch, so you can really customize your bros, but the twist is that each plug can only be used a certain number of times before it has to recharge for a while. This forces you to experiment and think about what bonuses you want to use and when.

Image: Nintendo

The other major new feature is also my favorite: Luigi logic. The idea is that, at key moments in the game, Mario’s brother will use his unique brain to find a solution to a particular problem. This could mean finding a strange way to navigate an obstacle or a weird new attack to down a boss. You don’t have any control over these ideas, but they’re very funny, and go a long way towards building out the goofy vibe that makes these games so charming. For once, Luigi is bumbling in a way that’s actually helpful.
Of course, Brothership is also notable for being potentially the last major Switch exclusive. There are some more remasters on the way, like Xenoblade Chronicles X, along with possible cross-generation games like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokémon Legends: Z-A. But Brothership joins the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Princess Peach: Showtime in ushering out the Switch in what is sure to be its last year as Nintendo’s main focus (for real this time). The wait for the next console has been an odd one, but games like this make it a lot more tolerable.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership launches on November 7th on the Nintendo Switch.

Image: Nintendo

For a character that’s been around so long, Mario is in something of a golden period. Since last year his mustache has been spotted in theaters, theme parks, and the best (and weirdest) side-scrolling Super Mario game in a long time. But he’s had a particularly strong run in role-playing games on the Switch, with recent remakes of both Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and the original Super Mario RPG. Now we have Mario & Luigi: Brothership which keeps the streak alive with a blend of charm, humor, and clever gameplay.

Brothership, once again, starts with the brothers getting whisked away to a fantasy realm in need of help. This time it’s the oceanic world of Concordia, which has been broken apart into a series of islands. The bros end up in a place called Ship Shape Island, a name that’s a bit of a misnomer. While it’s technically an island, it’s also a ship, a floating city like something out of Waterworld. Soon they learn that they need to find the other broken-off pieces of Concordia and literally tether them back to Ship Shape, thus putting the world back together again. Also, for some reason, almost everyone in this world has a power socket for a face.

It’s weird, but things start out simple enough, as you have to pilot the seas to find each island, and then travel to them by firing yourself out of a cannon. There’s an overarching plot about an important lighthouse, a revered tree, and some evil electrical components, but Brothership has the most personality when you visit each of the disparate islands to solve their particular problems before connecting them.

What has always separated the Mario RPGs — aside from all of the Nintendo trappings — is their sense of humor. These games are funny. And Brothership is just as goofy as its contemporaries, with communities suffering from chronic hair gel shortages and characters that include a floating pig (who definitely isn’t a pig) and an old turnip who gives terrible advice and makes even worse puns.

That sense of playfulness extends to the gameplay. Brothership is a turn-based RPG with some light platforming and puzzle-solving. The battles, like the rest of the Mario & Luigi series, are based on timing; you have to hit a button at just the right time to get the most out of an attack. The timing varies whether you’re stomping on a bad guy’s head, smacking them with a hammer, or firing a Koopa shell in their direction, and the brothers can work together on most attacks. This means that, unlike most turn-based RPGs, you aren’t simply selecting actions from a menu. You have to be more involved even for the simpler battles.

This was all true of past games, and so initially Brothership can feel very familiar. But a few hours in it starts to open up with some clever role-playing features. Most notable is something called “plugs,” which are essentially buffs or actions that you can craft and then equip. These do everything from let the brothers heal automatically without using a turn, to increasing your attacks against flying enemies. There are a bunch, so you can really customize your bros, but the twist is that each plug can only be used a certain number of times before it has to recharge for a while. This forces you to experiment and think about what bonuses you want to use and when.

The other major new feature is also my favorite: Luigi logic. The idea is that, at key moments in the game, Mario’s brother will use his unique brain to find a solution to a particular problem. This could mean finding a strange way to navigate an obstacle or a weird new attack to down a boss. You don’t have any control over these ideas, but they’re very funny, and go a long way towards building out the goofy vibe that makes these games so charming. For once, Luigi is bumbling in a way that’s actually helpful.

Of course, Brothership is also notable for being potentially the last major Switch exclusive. There are some more remasters on the way, like Xenoblade Chronicles X, along with possible cross-generation games like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokémon Legends: Z-A. But Brothership joins the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Princess Peach: Showtime in ushering out the Switch in what is sure to be its last year as Nintendo’s main focus (for real this time). The wait for the next console has been an odd one, but games like this make it a lot more tolerable.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership launches on November 7th on the Nintendo Switch.

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The Verge

AI search company Perplexity is putting to the test whether it’s a good idea to use AI to serve crucial voting information with a new Election Information Hub it announced on Friday. The hub offers things like AI-generated answers to voting questions and summaries of candidates, and on November 5th, Election Day, the company says it will track vote counts live, using data from The Associated Press.
Perplexity says its voter information, which includes polling requirements, locations, and times, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group powers similar features from Google). And that its election-related answers come from “a curated set of the most trustworthy and informative sources.”
Perplexity spokesperson Sara Plotnick confirmed in an email to The Verge that both AP and Democracy Works are official partners for the hub. Plotnick elaborated on Perplexity’s sources:
We selected domains that are non-partisan and fact-checked, including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We’re actively monitoring our systems to ensure that we continue to prioritize these sources when answering election-related queries.
The hub serves up details about what’s on the ballot for whatever location you enter (for instance, an address or city). There are also tabs for monitoring the elections for the President, US Senate, and US House as they come in starting Tuesday, with per-state breakdowns showing the percentage of votes counted and who’s leading.

Screenshot: Perplexity Election Hub
Amusing, but perhaps not what Perplexity is going for.

The AI summaries when I clicked on candidates had some errors, like failing to mention that Robert F. Kennedy, who’s on the ballot where I live, had dropped out of the race. It also listed a “Future Madam Potus” candidate that, when clicked, led me to the above summary of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy, except with some meme pictures that aren’t in her normal summary.
Plotnick said the company is looking into why the summary didn’t mention that Kennedy had dropped out. “Depending on your location, sometimes write-in candidates will appear,” Plotnick added by way of explaining why Future Madam Potus’ listing may have appeared. (It doesn’t explain why it summarized Harris, but Future Madam Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate, according to Ballotpedia.)
The errors illustrate the challenge of using accuracy-challenged generative AI for such a high-stakes use case, and why other AI companies have shied away from doing it. ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini each deflect voter information questions to other resources like canivote.org or Google Search. Microsoft’s Copilot simply refused to answer when I tried.

The Verge

AI search company Perplexity is putting to the test whether it’s a good idea to use AI to serve crucial voting information with a new Election Information Hub it announced on Friday. The hub offers things like AI-generated answers to voting questions and summaries of candidates, and on November 5th, Election Day, the company says it will track vote counts live, using data from The Associated Press.

Perplexity says its voter information, which includes polling requirements, locations, and times, is based on data from Democracy Works. (The same group powers similar features from Google). And that its election-related answers come from “a curated set of the most trustworthy and informative sources.”

Perplexity spokesperson Sara Plotnick confirmed in an email to The Verge that both AP and Democracy Works are official partners for the hub. Plotnick elaborated on Perplexity’s sources:

We selected domains that are non-partisan and fact-checked, including Ballotpedia and news organizations. We’re actively monitoring our systems to ensure that we continue to prioritize these sources when answering election-related queries.

The hub serves up details about what’s on the ballot for whatever location you enter (for instance, an address or city). There are also tabs for monitoring the elections for the President, US Senate, and US House as they come in starting Tuesday, with per-state breakdowns showing the percentage of votes counted and who’s leading.

Screenshot: Perplexity Election Hub
Amusing, but perhaps not what Perplexity is going for.

The AI summaries when I clicked on candidates had some errors, like failing to mention that Robert F. Kennedy, who’s on the ballot where I live, had dropped out of the race. It also listed a “Future Madam Potus” candidate that, when clicked, led me to the above summary of Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy, except with some meme pictures that aren’t in her normal summary.

Plotnick said the company is looking into why the summary didn’t mention that Kennedy had dropped out. “Depending on your location, sometimes write-in candidates will appear,” Plotnick added by way of explaining why Future Madam Potus’ listing may have appeared. (It doesn’t explain why it summarized Harris, but Future Madam Potus is indeed running as a write-in candidate, according to Ballotpedia.)

The errors illustrate the challenge of using accuracy-challenged generative AI for such a high-stakes use case, and why other AI companies have shied away from doing it. ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini each deflect voter information questions to other resources like canivote.org or Google Search. Microsoft’s Copilot simply refused to answer when I tried.

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This, but blasting demons. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

What do John Deere tractors, Ikea smart bulbs, Lego bricks, and the MacBook Pro Touch Bar have in common? They can all run Doom, and naturally, so can Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo alarm clock. It was only a matter of time before someone pulled that off, but what I didn’t expect was that when it happened, it would be playable.
That’s exactly what hacker GaryOberNicht, who recently figured out how to run custom firmware on the Alarmo, did in a video posted to Mastodon and their X account yesterday. In it, they play by turning or pressing the mushroom-shaped blob on top of the Alarmo to move and pressing the other buttons to shoot or open doors. Here, have a look:

Gary said it’s “possible to load the shareware version of Doom entirely from USB, without modifying the Alarmo.” And they’ve put the software and instructions for running it on Github, so almost any sufficiently knowledgeable and determined Alarmo owner can do it, too. Best of all, it can be done without opening the clock up at all.
How did they pull this off? Gary explains in a blog post that after another person called Spinda hacked the Alarmo (with a Flipper Zero) and dumped the firmware from memory, Gary worked out a method that uses a USB mode and the USB-C port to point the Alarmo to custom external firmware, instead.

Given how easy it appears to be reproduce what Gary has done, Alarmo software modding almost certainly won’t just stop at Doom. Of course, how far any online community efforts to turn the Alarmo into a bizarro game console will get probably depends on how Nintendo, which has been particularly active with its copyright disputes lately, feels about it.

This, but blasting demons. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

What do John Deere tractors, Ikea smart bulbs, Lego bricks, and the MacBook Pro Touch Bar have in common? They can all run Doom, and naturally, so can Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo alarm clock. It was only a matter of time before someone pulled that off, but what I didn’t expect was that when it happened, it would be playable.

That’s exactly what hacker GaryOberNicht, who recently figured out how to run custom firmware on the Alarmo, did in a video posted to Mastodon and their X account yesterday. In it, they play by turning or pressing the mushroom-shaped blob on top of the Alarmo to move and pressing the other buttons to shoot or open doors. Here, have a look:

Gary said it’s “possible to load the shareware version of Doom entirely from USB, without modifying the Alarmo.” And they’ve put the software and instructions for running it on Github, so almost any sufficiently knowledgeable and determined Alarmo owner can do it, too. Best of all, it can be done without opening the clock up at all.

How did they pull this off? Gary explains in a blog post that after another person called Spinda hacked the Alarmo (with a Flipper Zero) and dumped the firmware from memory, Gary worked out a method that uses a USB mode and the USB-C port to point the Alarmo to custom external firmware, instead.

Given how easy it appears to be reproduce what Gary has done, Alarmo software modding almost certainly won’t just stop at Doom. Of course, how far any online community efforts to turn the Alarmo into a bizarro game console will get probably depends on how Nintendo, which has been particularly active with its copyright disputes lately, feels about it.

Read More 

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

Guess the artist, win five bucks. Whether you’re a random person on the streets of New York, an A-list celebrity, or the sitting Vice President of the United States, that’s the pitch behind one of the most fun music shows on social media. You show up, you get some headphones and a microphone, and you hope you know what song is playing.
The show is called Track Star, and it’s hosted by Jack Coyne. On this episode of The Vergecast, the first in our three-part miniseries about the future of music, Coyne joins the show to tell us the story of Track Star.

We talk about the show’s beginnings as a trivia show about New York called Public Opinion, how Coyne and his co-creators figured out the show’s structure and pace, how he thinks about his role as the host, and why a bunch of famous people started clamoring to be on the show. Coyne never expected Track Star to feature the likes of Ed Sheeran, Olivia Rodrigo, Jack Antonoff, Nelly Furtado, Kamala Harris, and Oprah, but it happened. And somewhat remarkably, it didn’t change the show at all.
We also dig into why a show like Track Star works, and why it matters, in the current music landscape. Coyne and his team have big plans for expanding the franchise, too, and sees a place for Track Star even in an online world already overloaded with stuff to listen to. If you start with music, conversation, and a decent playlist, there are plenty of places you can go.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

Track Star on TikTok
Jack Coyne on Instagram
The Olivia Rodrigo episode
The “Every Track Star Song” playlist
The Malcolm Todd episode
Public Opinion

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

Guess the artist, win five bucks. Whether you’re a random person on the streets of New York, an A-list celebrity, or the sitting Vice President of the United States, that’s the pitch behind one of the most fun music shows on social media. You show up, you get some headphones and a microphone, and you hope you know what song is playing.

The show is called Track Star, and it’s hosted by Jack Coyne. On this episode of The Vergecast, the first in our three-part miniseries about the future of music, Coyne joins the show to tell us the story of Track Star.

We talk about the show’s beginnings as a trivia show about New York called Public Opinion, how Coyne and his co-creators figured out the show’s structure and pace, how he thinks about his role as the host, and why a bunch of famous people started clamoring to be on the show. Coyne never expected Track Star to feature the likes of Ed Sheeran, Olivia Rodrigo, Jack Antonoff, Nelly Furtado, Kamala Harris, and Oprah, but it happened. And somewhat remarkably, it didn’t change the show at all.

We also dig into why a show like Track Star works, and why it matters, in the current music landscape. Coyne and his team have big plans for expanding the franchise, too, and sees a place for Track Star even in an online world already overloaded with stuff to listen to. If you start with music, conversation, and a decent playlist, there are plenty of places you can go.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

Track Star on TikTok
Jack Coyne on Instagram
The Olivia Rodrigo episode
The “Every Track Star Song” playlist
The Malcolm Todd episode
Public Opinion

Read More 

Activists gather in New York City in August 2024. | Photo: Luis Yañez

Joe Biden raised hopes that the US would finally plan for climate-displaced migrants. Today, it’s still a glaring hole in climate and immigration policy. Joe Biden will leave office having taken more action on climate change, arguably, than any US president before him — but one pillar of his climate plan has fallen apart. Climate-driven disasters have displaced millions all over the world, an issue Biden acknowledged early in his term yet did little to address. But as climate change and migration are becoming increasingly intertwined, US policy is anything but prepared.
Without any explicit legal protections for climate migrants, the US continues to have a giant blind spot as it abandons those fleeing ecological disaster. Where Democrats have under-delivered — and, in some cases, moved to the right — on border issues, Republicans seek to entirely upend the immigration system, dismantle asylum altogether, and strip away environmental regulations. Former President Donald Trump has promised to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, an international treaty to stop global warming. Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged to continue the Biden administration’s climate initiatives and his tougher stance on the border.
“deep heartbreak”
“What’s coming up for me is deep heartbreak,” says Ama Francis, climate director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “There’s been this push towards more xenophobic immigration policies across both sides of the aisle. That has significant implications for who the United States considers itself to be — but also for how people can seek safety as we live in these times where our climate is changing and borders are becoming even more violent places.”
Climate migration is happening now
Under current national climate policies, “the best we could expect to achieve is catastrophic global warming,” the United Nations recently warned. Already, disasters push some 25 million people from their homes each year — typically more than the number displaced by conflicts or violence annually, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. In 2023, only one-quarter of those disasters were related to earthquakes. The rest were wildfires, droughts, storms, floods, or weather-related events. Climate change is making each of those problems worse, strengthening hurricanes, raising sea levels, and setting the stage for explosive blazes with hotter, more arid conditions in many parts of the world.
While the majority of people move to another part of the same country afterward, worsening environmental disasters can compound other factors that might eventually lead to international migration. A storm that wipes out crops or knocks down someone’s home could be the final straw that makes it untenable for someone to stay. Other disasters might be more drawn out and could exacerbate other crises. Struggles over dwindling resources can spark larger conflicts, one reason why climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier.”
Over the past year, IRAP and several other organizations that provide legal assistance to US-bound migrants surveyed more than 3,600 people of the individuals they’ve helped. The survey found that 43 percent of the people said they’d experienced some sort of climate-related disaster in the country of origin they left. The most common challenges people faced were severe rainfall and flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat.

Photo: Getty Images
Residents survey damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Otis in Xaltianguis, Guerrero state, Mexico.

“Hurricane Otis blew off the entire roof of our houses, and with everything exposed to the elements, everything was damaged and spoiled, including the loss of crops,” said a 39-year-old man from Guerrero, Mexico, in the report. The devastation added to other personal losses; the man says his brother was murdered amid ongoing violence in the region where organized crime has had a deadly foothold.
A 24-year-old woman from Guerrero, meanwhile, talked about drought affecting her home. “Due to lack of water, we did not have good harvests, which is what we rely on in Guerrero,” she said in the report.
While climate change might not be the only or even main reason why someone has to leave their home, its footprint is clear in these kinds of stories. Hurricane Otis intensified more rapidly than nearly any other tropical storm on record before making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in October 2023, becoming one of the costliest disasters of its kind to hit Mexico. Research conducted after the storm determined that heavy rainfall from Otis was “mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change.” Separate research also suggests that climate change will “significantly increase the risks that already vulnerable subsistence farmers’ face in the present” across regions of Mexico where many people grow their own food, including Guerrero.
Biden turns his back on climate migrants
These kinds of experiences are becoming more common, but climate change remains largely unacknowledged in US immigration policy. In the US, the only policy that carves out protections based on environmental catastrophes is called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The Secretary of Homeland Security can designate a country for TPS if there are “conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately.” That includes environmental calamities like hurricanes and earthquakes.
TPS safeguards people from those countries from deportation and allows them to legally work in the US. But as the name suggests, it’s temporary and doesn’t give someone a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Moreover, only people already in the US prior to TPS designation are eligible — it doesn’t extend to new arrivals. The policy is also vulnerable to the whims of each presidency; Trump tried to roll back TPS designations during his first term in office as part of his broader crackdown on anyone seeking refuge in the US. (A similar policy, called Deferred Enforced Departure, gives individuals from certain countries temporary reprieve from deportation if their country of origin has been affected by civic conflict or environmental disasters.)
Biden seemed to reverse course upon stepping into office, issuing executive orders saying he’d undo restrictive Trump-era immigration and asylum policies. An executive order in February 2021 directed the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs to produce a report that would include recommendations for how to recognize, protect, and resettle people “directly or indirectly” displaced by climate change.
“We were so excited,” Francis says. “There was a sense that this administration was really engaged on this issue, and there was this opening to really push the needle forward.”
But Biden’s attempts at undoing Trump’s most harmful immigration policies quickly gave way to a harsher stance on the border. In the end, Biden’s rightward pivot on immigration did little to appease his right-wing critics and only disappointed the migrant advocates who helped get him elected in 2020.
During his first two years in office, Biden kept one of Trump’s most stringent border policies in place: a pandemic-related asylum shutdown called Title 42. Under Title 42, migrants who arrived at the US-Mexico border could quickly be “expelled” to Mexico without a hearing. Customs and Border Protection continued its expulsion policy under Biden but also began granting exemptions to asylum-seekers who met certain criteria. When the Biden administration attempted to end the expulsion policy in 2022, a federal judge blocked it from doing so.
By the time Title 42 expulsions ended in the late spring of 2023, the public sentiment had largely shifted on immigration — and so had that of Biden’s administration. Title 42’s end was coupled with a new policy punishing migrants for attempting to enter the US without authorization. Under the administration’s “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule, most migrants could be denied asylum for crossing the border between ports of entry, even if they would have otherwise been granted protection in the US.

Photo: Getty Images
Migrants camping in the border area of Jacumba, California, attempt to cross the US border from Mexico as they are detained by US border patrol officers.

At the same time, Biden dramatically expanded TPS and created new parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as for people fleeing the war in Ukraine and the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The parole grants, however, are only valid for two years, and DHS officials recently said the department would not renew parole for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, or Nicaraguans after the programs expire. As of August, more than 530,000 people from the four countries had entered the US via parole.
Biden’s expansion of temporary migration programs notwithstanding, there are still no dedicated immigration policies for people fleeing climate change-fueled disasters. And while Harris has previously acknowledged that climate change helps drive unauthorized migration, her campaign hasn’t commented on the link between the two; instead, she’s promised to continue Biden’s crackdown at the border.
What’s next?
Congressional efforts to help people affected by climate change overseas resettle in the US have stalled. Congress has not voted on the Climate Displaced Persons Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Nidya Velázquez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) that would create a new visa category for those forced out of their countries of origin by climate disasters, allowing up to 100,000 immigrants to be admitted into the US each year.
Given the fact that Senate Republicans killed a bill limiting asylum because they believed it wasn’t restrictive enough, such legislation is unlikely to pass in the immediate future. If Trump wins the presidential election, there’s virtually no way the US will expand the criteria for asylum or refugee status. In his last year in office, Trump set the annual refugee limit at just 15,000 — the lowest in history. The administration had reportedly considered not admitting any refugees into the country at all.
“President Trump has been very clear on where he stands on this issue,” says Ahmed Gaya, the director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the Partnership for New Americans. “We would once again face far more extreme restrictions on the legal rights, safe pathways, and on legal immigration, as well as a promise for the largest deportation operation in history.”
In other words, while there’s no negotiating with Trump, advocacy groups may be able to convince Harris to use existing policies to grant protections to climate migrants.

If elected, Harris could grant parole to people from countries affected by hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters. She could designate TPS to those countries as well, so undocumented immigrants already living in the US could be shielded from deportation. None of these policies would guarantee that climate migrants have a permanent future in the US, but they would be a start.
Regardless of who is in office in 2025, immigration lawyers can also fight for asylum within the confines of the current law — and they’re already doing so.
Under the Refugee Act of 1980, someone who wants asylum or refugee status has to prove that they face persecution in their country of origin due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, an expansive category that even immigration attorneys say is difficult to define. The “particular social group” category is a fairly amorphous one, and some immigration judges have interpreted it generously: for example, it has been used to grant asylum to people fleeing gangs or intimate partner violence. This category’s vagueness also leaves it vulnerable to narrow interpretations. The Trump administration prohibited immigration judges and officers with US Citizenship and Immigration Services from granting migrants asylum on these grounds, a decision that was reversed under Biden. IRAP’s report includes several examples of environmental activists and land defenders who were granted asylum after being persecuted for their advocacy.
Taking swift action on climate change, of course, is what it’ll take to prevent displacement in the first place. That includes the US, the world’s biggest historical polluter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, slashing its emissions. Activists from less wealthy countries — including low-lying island nations most vulnerable to sea level rise and strengthening storms — have also pushed for international funds to help their communities recover and adapt.
“I think there need to be a host of options available, and one of those is supporting the right to stay safely in one’s community, knowing that most people do wish to stay,” says Jocelyn Perry, senior advocate and program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International.
For many people around the world, though, the option to stay is washing away with rising tides or dissipating in the heat. Looking back on their initial excitement after Biden’s executive order on climate migration and what little progress there’s been since then, Francis says, “I think we, like others, were disappointed.”

Activists gather in New York City in August 2024. | Photo: Luis Yañez

Joe Biden raised hopes that the US would finally plan for climate-displaced migrants. Today, it’s still a glaring hole in climate and immigration policy.

Joe Biden will leave office having taken more action on climate change, arguably, than any US president before him — but one pillar of his climate plan has fallen apart. Climate-driven disasters have displaced millions all over the world, an issue Biden acknowledged early in his term yet did little to address. But as climate change and migration are becoming increasingly intertwined, US policy is anything but prepared.

Without any explicit legal protections for climate migrants, the US continues to have a giant blind spot as it abandons those fleeing ecological disaster. Where Democrats have under-delivered — and, in some cases, moved to the right — on border issues, Republicans seek to entirely upend the immigration system, dismantle asylum altogether, and strip away environmental regulations. Former President Donald Trump has promised to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, an international treaty to stop global warming. Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged to continue the Biden administration’s climate initiatives and his tougher stance on the border.

“What’s coming up for me is deep heartbreak,” says Ama Francis, climate director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “There’s been this push towards more xenophobic immigration policies across both sides of the aisle. That has significant implications for who the United States considers itself to be — but also for how people can seek safety as we live in these times where our climate is changing and borders are becoming even more violent places.”

Climate migration is happening now

Under current national climate policies, “the best we could expect to achieve is catastrophic global warming,” the United Nations recently warned. Already, disasters push some 25 million people from their homes each year — typically more than the number displaced by conflicts or violence annually, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. In 2023, only one-quarter of those disasters were related to earthquakes. The rest were wildfires, droughts, storms, floods, or weather-related events. Climate change is making each of those problems worse, strengthening hurricanes, raising sea levels, and setting the stage for explosive blazes with hotter, more arid conditions in many parts of the world.

While the majority of people move to another part of the same country afterward, worsening environmental disasters can compound other factors that might eventually lead to international migration. A storm that wipes out crops or knocks down someone’s home could be the final straw that makes it untenable for someone to stay. Other disasters might be more drawn out and could exacerbate other crises. Struggles over dwindling resources can spark larger conflicts, one reason why climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier.”

Over the past year, IRAP and several other organizations that provide legal assistance to US-bound migrants surveyed more than 3,600 people of the individuals they’ve helped. The survey found that 43 percent of the people said they’d experienced some sort of climate-related disaster in the country of origin they left. The most common challenges people faced were severe rainfall and flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat.

“Hurricane Otis blew off the entire roof of our houses, and with everything exposed to the elements, everything was damaged and spoiled, including the loss of crops,” said a 39-year-old man from Guerrero, Mexico, in the report. The devastation added to other personal losses; the man says his brother was murdered amid ongoing violence in the region where organized crime has had a deadly foothold.

A 24-year-old woman from Guerrero, meanwhile, talked about drought affecting her home. “Due to lack of water, we did not have good harvests, which is what we rely on in Guerrero,” she said in the report.

While climate change might not be the only or even main reason why someone has to leave their home, its footprint is clear in these kinds of stories. Hurricane Otis intensified more rapidly than nearly any other tropical storm on record before making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in October 2023, becoming one of the costliest disasters of its kind to hit Mexico. Research conducted after the storm determined that heavy rainfall from Otis was “mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change.” Separate research also suggests that climate change will “significantly increase the risks that already vulnerable subsistence farmers’ face in the present” across regions of Mexico where many people grow their own food, including Guerrero.

Biden turns his back on climate migrants

These kinds of experiences are becoming more common, but climate change remains largely unacknowledged in US immigration policy. In the US, the only policy that carves out protections based on environmental catastrophes is called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The Secretary of Homeland Security can designate a country for TPS if there are “conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately.” That includes environmental calamities like hurricanes and earthquakes.

TPS safeguards people from those countries from deportation and allows them to legally work in the US. But as the name suggests, it’s temporary and doesn’t give someone a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Moreover, only people already in the US prior to TPS designation are eligible — it doesn’t extend to new arrivals. The policy is also vulnerable to the whims of each presidency; Trump tried to roll back TPS designations during his first term in office as part of his broader crackdown on anyone seeking refuge in the US. (A similar policy, called Deferred Enforced Departure, gives individuals from certain countries temporary reprieve from deportation if their country of origin has been affected by civic conflict or environmental disasters.)

Biden seemed to reverse course upon stepping into office, issuing executive orders saying he’d undo restrictive Trump-era immigration and asylum policies. An executive order in February 2021 directed the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs to produce a report that would include recommendations for how to recognize, protect, and resettle people “directly or indirectly” displaced by climate change.

“We were so excited,” Francis says. “There was a sense that this administration was really engaged on this issue, and there was this opening to really push the needle forward.”

But Biden’s attempts at undoing Trump’s most harmful immigration policies quickly gave way to a harsher stance on the border. In the end, Biden’s rightward pivot on immigration did little to appease his right-wing critics and only disappointed the migrant advocates who helped get him elected in 2020.

During his first two years in office, Biden kept one of Trump’s most stringent border policies in place: a pandemic-related asylum shutdown called Title 42. Under Title 42, migrants who arrived at the US-Mexico border could quickly be “expelled” to Mexico without a hearing. Customs and Border Protection continued its expulsion policy under Biden but also began granting exemptions to asylum-seekers who met certain criteria. When the Biden administration attempted to end the expulsion policy in 2022, a federal judge blocked it from doing so.

By the time Title 42 expulsions ended in the late spring of 2023, the public sentiment had largely shifted on immigration — and so had that of Biden’s administration. Title 42’s end was coupled with a new policy punishing migrants for attempting to enter the US without authorization. Under the administration’s “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule, most migrants could be denied asylum for crossing the border between ports of entry, even if they would have otherwise been granted protection in the US.

At the same time, Biden dramatically expanded TPS and created new parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as for people fleeing the war in Ukraine and the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The parole grants, however, are only valid for two years, and DHS officials recently said the department would not renew parole for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, or Nicaraguans after the programs expire. As of August, more than 530,000 people from the four countries had entered the US via parole.

Biden’s expansion of temporary migration programs notwithstanding, there are still no dedicated immigration policies for people fleeing climate change-fueled disasters. And while Harris has previously acknowledged that climate change helps drive unauthorized migration, her campaign hasn’t commented on the link between the two; instead, she’s promised to continue Biden’s crackdown at the border.

What’s next?

Congressional efforts to help people affected by climate change overseas resettle in the US have stalled. Congress has not voted on the Climate Displaced Persons Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Nidya Velázquez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) that would create a new visa category for those forced out of their countries of origin by climate disasters, allowing up to 100,000 immigrants to be admitted into the US each year.

Given the fact that Senate Republicans killed a bill limiting asylum because they believed it wasn’t restrictive enough, such legislation is unlikely to pass in the immediate future. If Trump wins the presidential election, there’s virtually no way the US will expand the criteria for asylum or refugee status. In his last year in office, Trump set the annual refugee limit at just 15,000 — the lowest in history. The administration had reportedly considered not admitting any refugees into the country at all.

“President Trump has been very clear on where he stands on this issue,” says Ahmed Gaya, the director of the Climate Justice Collaborative at the Partnership for New Americans. “We would once again face far more extreme restrictions on the legal rights, safe pathways, and on legal immigration, as well as a promise for the largest deportation operation in history.”

In other words, while there’s no negotiating with Trump, advocacy groups may be able to convince Harris to use existing policies to grant protections to climate migrants.

If elected, Harris could grant parole to people from countries affected by hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other disasters. She could designate TPS to those countries as well, so undocumented immigrants already living in the US could be shielded from deportation. None of these policies would guarantee that climate migrants have a permanent future in the US, but they would be a start.

Regardless of who is in office in 2025, immigration lawyers can also fight for asylum within the confines of the current law — and they’re already doing so.

Under the Refugee Act of 1980, someone who wants asylum or refugee status has to prove that they face persecution in their country of origin due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, an expansive category that even immigration attorneys say is difficult to define. The “particular social group” category is a fairly amorphous one, and some immigration judges have interpreted it generously: for example, it has been used to grant asylum to people fleeing gangs or intimate partner violence. This category’s vagueness also leaves it vulnerable to narrow interpretations. The Trump administration prohibited immigration judges and officers with US Citizenship and Immigration Services from granting migrants asylum on these grounds, a decision that was reversed under Biden. IRAP’s report includes several examples of environmental activists and land defenders who were granted asylum after being persecuted for their advocacy.

Taking swift action on climate change, of course, is what it’ll take to prevent displacement in the first place. That includes the US, the world’s biggest historical polluter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, slashing its emissions. Activists from less wealthy countries — including low-lying island nations most vulnerable to sea level rise and strengthening storms — have also pushed for international funds to help their communities recover and adapt.

“I think there need to be a host of options available, and one of those is supporting the right to stay safely in one’s community, knowing that most people do wish to stay,” says Jocelyn Perry, senior advocate and program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International.

For many people around the world, though, the option to stay is washing away with rising tides or dissipating in the heat. Looking back on their initial excitement after Biden’s executive order on climate migration and what little progress there’s been since then, Francis says, “I think we, like others, were disappointed.”

Read More 

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 59, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about HotWired and DRAM and Mike Solana, watching The Diplomat, jamming to Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert, trying Smashing for news reading and cool-stuff discovery, testing my bandwidth caps downloading Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and listening to all six hours of the Acquired Meta episode.
I also have for you some interesting new AI search products, some new Apple gear, a couple of documentaries to watch this weekend, a calendar app for Windows, and much more.
Oh, and thanks to everyone who reached out about the Omnivore acquisition. Which sucks. I heard from a lot of folks wondering where to go next, and since I feel partially responsible for getting some of you into an app that is now dying, I’m gonna help you figure it out! But I need help: what about Omnivore, or any other reading app, do you 100 percent need? Tell me your desires and I’ll see if I can point us all in the right direction.
All right, lots to do this week. Let’s go.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? 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

ChatGPT search. It’s not called SearchGPT, lame, but it is what we expected: live web search baked into OpenAI’s chatbot. So far, it looks an awful lot like Perplexity and Bing and the rest, but I suspect a lot of people will use this just because it’s right there in ChatGPT.

Ask Maps. This is the kind of AI search I’m most bullish on: Google pointing Gemini at the Maps app, so you can more easily find stuff to do and places to go. If AI can just prevent me from having to comb through a million reviews looking for the word “kid-friendly,” all this nonsense might be worth it.

Fantastical for Windows. I do most of my calendaring in one of two apps: Fantastical or Notion Calendar. Notion Calendar is free and faster, but Fantastical is much nicer-looking and much more powerful. The new Windows app has all the features, all the design, and looks like a winner.

The new Mac Mini. There are reasons to be excited about the new MacBook Pros that launched this week, and I guess even the super-colorful iMac, but for me, the smaller, faster Mini is the most exciting computer Apple has launched this year. This thing will be my daily driver from the minute it ships.

The new Magic Keyboard. Two things, both true: $149 is way too much for this keyboard (much less $199 for the black one with the number pad), and also once you use a Mac keyboard with built-in Touch ID, there is just absolutely no going back. And it finally doesn’t require a Lightning cable! What a world!

Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Our friends at Polygon described this game as basically a game about a protagonist “and their traveling Deep Roadshow of trauma-drenched weirdos (complimentary),” which I love so much. Sounds like this game takes a beat to get going but is hugely rewarding once it does.

Uncanny Valley. A new podcast from Wired, hosted by a bunch of folks we like (and a couple of former Verge staffers!) talking about all the news and chaos happening in Silicon Valley. A surprising amount of hoodie talk in the first episode! But I’m excited to see where this goes.

Endurance. If you haven’t read the book this new series is based on — about the British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous attempt to sail to the South Pole — do that this weekend. I’m serious. It’s an all-timer. And I’ve only heard great things about the doc.

Nintendo Music. For years, I liked writing while listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, which made everything feel a little more epic. From now on, though, I’m all in on the Boss Battles playlist in this delightful new streaming app.

Music by John Williams. Big week for soundtracks, it turns out! John Williams is a legend, and it looks like Disney got an amazing roster of other legends to come talk about how important and special he has been to the movie business. I’ve been excited for this ever since the Jaws bit in the trailer.

Pokémon TCG Pocket. Truthfully, the Pokémon trading card games have never been my bag, but a game like this makes perfect sense as a mobile app you can play for a few minutes at a time. Or a few hours. Or days. Whatever works.

Screen share
A few weeks ago, I went to New York City and wandered into a coffee shop called Coffee Check. It was started by a guy named David Cogen, who you might recognize as the face of TheUnlockr YouTube channel. At the beginning of this year, after more than a decade as a creator, he decided to open a coffee shop. And still keep being a creator. Somehow.
I spent an hour with David talking about all this, which turned into a really fun episode of The Vergecast. But I left David still wondering how he balanced it all — and wondering what I might be able to tell about his priorities from his homescreen. So I asked him to share!
Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Pixel 9 Pro. I always switch fully into whatever phone I am making a video about, and as I am very behind on reviews (see the Vergecast episode for more on that), that’s the next one on the docket.
The wallpaper: The one that comes on the phone by default. I switch phones so often that I usually don’t change the wallpaper unless it’s obnoxious. In that case, I’ll still grab something minimalistic from Google’s Wallpapers app (maybe a landscape to remind me what outside looks like).
The apps: Spotify, Phone, Gmail, Chrome.
I generally have the multiple-clock widget, as it automatically shows me my current time and time back in NYC, which I find incredibly helpful while traveling as much as I do. Otherwise, the tools section has Notion, which I’m a heavy user of after Evernote got worse and worse over time — it has replaced that, along with Airtable.
That folder has since expanded recently thanks to the coffee shop as I now have Homebase for scheduling my baristas, Poplin to get our cleaning rags picked up and delivered, Shopify for inventory / POS / sales / obsessive data analyzing, Ring for all the cameras in the space and to make sure milk deliveries show up on time in the middle of the night (we use a service called Odeko, which has a key and brings supplies in / puts the milk in the fridges for us), and Peerspace to make sure I can respond to inquiries to rent out the back space.
I also asked David to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:

Probably comes as no surprise, but coffee. Particularly, I’m going to start roasting in the coffee shop soon and so I’m looking forward to sourcing beans from various places, getting better at roasting those beans, and tweaking roasts to get different flavors out of them.
I’m also wanting to take more classes and attend more coffee events to try and learn more about the coffee world and what people in that world are also experimenting with. And eventually figuring out how to balance these two worlds of coffee and YouTube but, you know, first things first.

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 recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads.
“I saw you had Coffee Golf on your iPad Mini homescreen. It has IAP and is really just ok. You’d be better off trying Golf On Mars. It’s the slightly more polished version of Desert Golfing by the same developer. Best quick-play golf game ever.” – Casey
“The story about Arc sunsetting in favor of a new browser kicked me into gear on finding a new home. I saw a comment on the Verge story that mentioned Zen Browser, pitching it as feeling like Arc but built from Firefox. I gave it a shot, and I love it!” – Tom
“I’ve been playing with different web browsers again. It came down to Brave and Vivaldi to try as a daily driver for a while, but I’ve settled on Vivaldi. Loving it. It is much snappier than the last time I tried it, plus it has the advantage of Chrome extensions and plenty of customization while locking down privacy. I think I’ve found my new web browser.” – Josh
“I’m a Letterboxd junkie for logging movies and this week I found a really nice app for logging TV watching! It’s called Marathon. The design of the app is niiiiiice.” — Garrett
“Started playing Rivals of Aether II, a new indie platform fighter like Super Smash Bros., and it’s *so* much fun. Learning curve is steep, but it’s so worth it.” – Anuj
“Loving the new season of Shrinking on Apple TV Plus. I don’t often get emotional, but they’re killing it (and me. Not sure I want to see where the father / son storyline goes). Big recommend.” – Matthew
“Redownloading Raindrop after the demise of Omnivore. Luckily I saved my config for the Obsidian plugin so it’s been an easy switch.” – Tynan
“Caught as much of the World Series as I could, but the Apple Sports live activity was awesome for keeping track when I couldn’t watch it.” – Justin
“I’ve been reading the Red Rising series because of one of my coworkers. The way that you get sucked into the characters and that every book builds on the previous ones, it has become one of my favorite series that I can’t recommend enough.” – Travis

Signing off
It’s Election Day on Tuesday! Wild, important, fascinating, terrifying, causing me to feel a lot of feelings. But one thing I unequivocally love about election season is a fresh set of reporting about some of the stranger and more annoying quirks of the American political process. Do you hate all the political texts? The Wall Street Journal has a fun investigation into how they work, The Washington Post has good tricks for turning them off, and our friends at Vox did a great podcast about how they became such a scourge. Elsewhere, Cleo Abram made a great video about why you can’t vote online, which is a question that keeps coming up.
Oh, and if you haven’t, you should really read The Verge’s guide to this year’s election. Particularly the endorsement.
See you next week!

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 59, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about HotWired and DRAM and Mike Solana, watching The Diplomat, jamming to Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert, trying Smashing for news reading and cool-stuff discovery, testing my bandwidth caps downloading Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and listening to all six hours of the Acquired Meta episode.

I also have for you some interesting new AI search products, some new Apple gear, a couple of documentaries to watch this weekend, a calendar app for Windows, and much more.

Oh, and thanks to everyone who reached out about the Omnivore acquisition. Which sucks. I heard from a lot of folks wondering where to go next, and since I feel partially responsible for getting some of you into an app that is now dying, I’m gonna help you figure it out! But I need help: what about Omnivore, or any other reading app, do you 100 percent need? Tell me your desires and I’ll see if I can point us all in the right direction.

All right, lots to do this week. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? 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

ChatGPT search. It’s not called SearchGPT, lame, but it is what we expected: live web search baked into OpenAI’s chatbot. So far, it looks an awful lot like Perplexity and Bing and the rest, but I suspect a lot of people will use this just because it’s right there in ChatGPT.

Ask Maps. This is the kind of AI search I’m most bullish on: Google pointing Gemini at the Maps app, so you can more easily find stuff to do and places to go. If AI can just prevent me from having to comb through a million reviews looking for the word “kid-friendly,” all this nonsense might be worth it.

Fantastical for Windows. I do most of my calendaring in one of two apps: Fantastical or Notion Calendar. Notion Calendar is free and faster, but Fantastical is much nicer-looking and much more powerful. The new Windows app has all the features, all the design, and looks like a winner.

The new Mac Mini. There are reasons to be excited about the new MacBook Pros that launched this week, and I guess even the super-colorful iMac, but for me, the smaller, faster Mini is the most exciting computer Apple has launched this year. This thing will be my daily driver from the minute it ships.

The new Magic Keyboard. Two things, both true: $149 is way too much for this keyboard (much less $199 for the black one with the number pad), and also once you use a Mac keyboard with built-in Touch ID, there is just absolutely no going back. And it finally doesn’t require a Lightning cable! What a world!

Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Our friends at Polygon described this game as basically a game about a protagonist “and their traveling Deep Roadshow of trauma-drenched weirdos (complimentary),” which I love so much. Sounds like this game takes a beat to get going but is hugely rewarding once it does.

Uncanny Valley. A new podcast from Wired, hosted by a bunch of folks we like (and a couple of former Verge staffers!) talking about all the news and chaos happening in Silicon Valley. A surprising amount of hoodie talk in the first episode! But I’m excited to see where this goes.

Endurance. If you haven’t read the book this new series is based on — about the British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous attempt to sail to the South Pole — do that this weekend. I’m serious. It’s an all-timer. And I’ve only heard great things about the doc.

Nintendo Music. For years, I liked writing while listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, which made everything feel a little more epic. From now on, though, I’m all in on the Boss Battles playlist in this delightful new streaming app.

Music by John Williams. Big week for soundtracks, it turns out! John Williams is a legend, and it looks like Disney got an amazing roster of other legends to come talk about how important and special he has been to the movie business. I’ve been excited for this ever since the Jaws bit in the trailer.

Pokémon TCG Pocket. Truthfully, the Pokémon trading card games have never been my bag, but a game like this makes perfect sense as a mobile app you can play for a few minutes at a time. Or a few hours. Or days. Whatever works.

Screen share

A few weeks ago, I went to New York City and wandered into a coffee shop called Coffee Check. It was started by a guy named David Cogen, who you might recognize as the face of TheUnlockr YouTube channel. At the beginning of this year, after more than a decade as a creator, he decided to open a coffee shop. And still keep being a creator. Somehow.

I spent an hour with David talking about all this, which turned into a really fun episode of The Vergecast. But I left David still wondering how he balanced it all — and wondering what I might be able to tell about his priorities from his homescreen. So I asked him to share!

Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: Pixel 9 Pro. I always switch fully into whatever phone I am making a video about, and as I am very behind on reviews (see the Vergecast episode for more on that), that’s the next one on the docket.

The wallpaper: The one that comes on the phone by default. I switch phones so often that I usually don’t change the wallpaper unless it’s obnoxious. In that case, I’ll still grab something minimalistic from Google’s Wallpapers app (maybe a landscape to remind me what outside looks like).

The apps: Spotify, Phone, Gmail, Chrome.

I generally have the multiple-clock widget, as it automatically shows me my current time and time back in NYC, which I find incredibly helpful while traveling as much as I do. Otherwise, the tools section has Notion, which I’m a heavy user of after Evernote got worse and worse over time — it has replaced that, along with Airtable.

That folder has since expanded recently thanks to the coffee shop as I now have Homebase for scheduling my baristas, Poplin to get our cleaning rags picked up and delivered, Shopify for inventory / POS / sales / obsessive data analyzing, Ring for all the cameras in the space and to make sure milk deliveries show up on time in the middle of the night (we use a service called Odeko, which has a key and brings supplies in / puts the milk in the fridges for us), and Peerspace to make sure I can respond to inquiries to rent out the back space.

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

Probably comes as no surprise, but coffee. Particularly, I’m going to start roasting in the coffee shop soon and so I’m looking forward to sourcing beans from various places, getting better at roasting those beans, and tweaking roasts to get different flavors out of them.
I’m also wanting to take more classes and attend more coffee events to try and learn more about the coffee world and what people in that world are also experimenting with. And eventually figuring out how to balance these two worlds of coffee and YouTube but, you know, first things first.

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 recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“I saw you had Coffee Golf on your iPad Mini homescreen. It has IAP and is really just ok. You’d be better off trying Golf On Mars. It’s the slightly more polished version of Desert Golfing by the same developer. Best quick-play golf game ever.” – Casey

“The story about Arc sunsetting in favor of a new browser kicked me into gear on finding a new home. I saw a comment on the Verge story that mentioned Zen Browser, pitching it as feeling like Arc but built from Firefox. I gave it a shot, and I love it!” – Tom

“I’ve been playing with different web browsers again. It came down to Brave and Vivaldi to try as a daily driver for a while, but I’ve settled on Vivaldi. Loving it. It is much snappier than the last time I tried it, plus it has the advantage of Chrome extensions and plenty of customization while locking down privacy. I think I’ve found my new web browser.” – Josh

“I’m a Letterboxd junkie for logging movies and this week I found a really nice app for logging TV watching! It’s called Marathon. The design of the app is niiiiiice.” — Garrett

“Started playing Rivals of Aether II, a new indie platform fighter like Super Smash Bros., and it’s *so* much fun. Learning curve is steep, but it’s so worth it.” – Anuj

“Loving the new season of Shrinking on Apple TV Plus. I don’t often get emotional, but they’re killing it (and me. Not sure I want to see where the father / son storyline goes). Big recommend.” – Matthew

“Redownloading Raindrop after the demise of Omnivore. Luckily I saved my config for the Obsidian plugin so it’s been an easy switch.” – Tynan

“Caught as much of the World Series as I could, but the Apple Sports live activity was awesome for keeping track when I couldn’t watch it.” – Justin

“I’ve been reading the Red Rising series because of one of my coworkers. The way that you get sucked into the characters and that every book builds on the previous ones, it has become one of my favorite series that I can’t recommend enough.” – Travis

Signing off

It’s Election Day on Tuesday! Wild, important, fascinating, terrifying, causing me to feel a lot of feelings. But one thing I unequivocally love about election season is a fresh set of reporting about some of the stranger and more annoying quirks of the American political process. Do you hate all the political texts? The Wall Street Journal has a fun investigation into how they work, The Washington Post has good tricks for turning them off, and our friends at Vox did a great podcast about how they became such a scourge. Elsewhere, Cleo Abram made a great video about why you can’t vote online, which is a question that keeps coming up.

Oh, and if you haven’t, you should really read The Verge’s guide to this year’s election. Particularly the endorsement.

See you next week!

Read More 

Tim Stevens

My favorite feature of the new $420,000, all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre isn’t the cosseting ride quality or the illuminated stars embedded in the headliner of the insanely ornate interior. It isn’t the 577 horsepower or the 266 miles of range. It’s neither the “yes, that’s the spot” massaging seats nor the curbside presence of that upright, chromed front grille. It isn’t even the aerodynamically refined yet classically styled Spirit of Ecstasy statuette perched atop.
My favorite feature of the Spectre is the sound it makes. As an EV, it doesn’t really make any engine sound on its own. It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Rolls-Royce Spectre sound

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.
This heavenly chorus is so subtle, you almost can’t hear it, but with this Roller being as quiet as a tomb, the result is genuinely sublime. And that’s just one aspect of a completely refined experience that’s on a level above any other EV on the road.

A hushed destiny
The Rolls-Royce brand has been applied to top-tier machines since 1904, and it feels like the previous 120 years have been leading up to this moment.
If you’re lucky enough to see an early Rolls-Royce waft by, like a Silver Ghost or a Phantom, you won’t hear much. Despite massive engines in excess of seven liters (50 percent bigger than that of a current Ford Mustang GT), these early ultra-luxury cars featured exhausts designed to minimize drivetrain noise.
With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s first battery-electric EV, the company’s engineers can finally stop overengineering ye olde internal combustion to make it smooth and silent. The Spectre relies on two electric motors that make the combined 577 horsepower mentioned above and 664 pound-feet of torque. This thing weighs a massive 6,371 pounds, more than a Cadillac Escalade, yet it can accelerate to 60mph in just 4.4 seconds.
Yes, it’s fast when it needs to be, but you’ll see better range when driven calmly, up to 266 miles on a charge from its 102kWh battery pack.
Not only is relaxed driving more efficient but it’s also much more rewarding. The Spectre has a generally calm demeanor, like a throttle pedal that requires a deep application to unleash all that power. The brake pedal is equally laid back, as is the slow steering, with just enough feedback to let you know you are turning the wheels and tires.
All four of them, in fact. Rear-wheel steering makes this nearly 18-foot-long ultra-coupe a cinch to navigate through tight parking lots. The 360-degree camera and standard automated parking also help to ensure that you don’t curb one of those 23-inch wheels, something I appreciated during my loan, as replacing any of them would surely have bankrupted me.
On borrowed tech
That 360-degree camera is just some of the tech that Rolls-Royce engineers borrowed from parent company BMW, but I wish they’d stolen a bit more, like BMW’s hands-off driver assist system.
The touchscreen infotainment is also reasonably modern, offering integrated navigation and searching for charging stations. It’ll even do both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, though, curiously, I couldn’t get the latter to work. Perhaps the car considered my last-season Samsung Galaxy S23 too passé? And though the media is played through a 16-speaker bespoke audio system that is powerful yet beautifully subtle, it sadly lacks Dolby Atmos support.
So this highest of high-tech Rolls-Royces doesn’t quite offer all the world’s features, but what you get instead is an astronomically detailed interior, floor mats of the softest lambswool, and a comprehensive set of polished metal controls, all designed with the perfect weight and feel.

Mortgage time
While you can get into a Spectre for $420,000, you’ll never get through the buying process without ticking a few boxes. Given options like the chartreuse paint you see here costs $13,100 on its own, expect to spend a lot more. This car stickered at $560,100 after a $2,750 destination charge.
A worthwhile expenditure? That’s a difficult thing for someone with the budget of a mere mortal to say. The Spectre is hardly a good value, but it is exceptional, made all the more spectacular considering it’s Rolls-Royce’s. But the presence of That Sound does make it all seem worthwhile.
There are more EVs to come, but we’ll have to be patient; an SUV has been promised for 2027, ahead of the brand becoming all-electric in 2030. How well those future EVs look and drive is anyone’s guess at this point, but if they all sound this good, they’ll be off to a very good start.

Tim Stevens

My favorite feature of the new $420,000, all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre isn’t the cosseting ride quality or the illuminated stars embedded in the headliner of the insanely ornate interior. It isn’t the 577 horsepower or the 266 miles of range. It’s neither the “yes, that’s the spot” massaging seats nor the curbside presence of that upright, chromed front grille. It isn’t even the aerodynamically refined yet classically styled Spirit of Ecstasy statuette perched atop.

My favorite feature of the Spectre is the sound it makes. As an EV, it doesn’t really make any engine sound on its own. It’s a rolling cocoon made inherently anti-acoustic thanks to the tireless work of some surely big-eared scientists. So, to inject a little more life into the driving experience, the Spectre plays a little digital tone when you accelerate.

Yes, nearly every modern EV emits some kind of synthetic whir or trill when you get on the accelerator — but nothing like the Spectre. This car makes the kind of sound that you would expect to hear when an omniscient, all-powerful alien force swoops through the clouds in a sci-fi movie, the gut-shaking tone backing the moment when everyone realizes that humanity is about to get served.

This heavenly chorus is so subtle, you almost can’t hear it, but with this Roller being as quiet as a tomb, the result is genuinely sublime. And that’s just one aspect of a completely refined experience that’s on a level above any other EV on the road.

A hushed destiny

The Rolls-Royce brand has been applied to top-tier machines since 1904, and it feels like the previous 120 years have been leading up to this moment.

If you’re lucky enough to see an early Rolls-Royce waft by, like a Silver Ghost or a Phantom, you won’t hear much. Despite massive engines in excess of seven liters (50 percent bigger than that of a current Ford Mustang GT), these early ultra-luxury cars featured exhausts designed to minimize drivetrain noise.

With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s first battery-electric EV, the company’s engineers can finally stop overengineering ye olde internal combustion to make it smooth and silent. The Spectre relies on two electric motors that make the combined 577 horsepower mentioned above and 664 pound-feet of torque. This thing weighs a massive 6,371 pounds, more than a Cadillac Escalade, yet it can accelerate to 60mph in just 4.4 seconds.

Yes, it’s fast when it needs to be, but you’ll see better range when driven calmly, up to 266 miles on a charge from its 102kWh battery pack.

Not only is relaxed driving more efficient but it’s also much more rewarding. The Spectre has a generally calm demeanor, like a throttle pedal that requires a deep application to unleash all that power. The brake pedal is equally laid back, as is the slow steering, with just enough feedback to let you know you are turning the wheels and tires.

All four of them, in fact. Rear-wheel steering makes this nearly 18-foot-long ultra-coupe a cinch to navigate through tight parking lots. The 360-degree camera and standard automated parking also help to ensure that you don’t curb one of those 23-inch wheels, something I appreciated during my loan, as replacing any of them would surely have bankrupted me.

On borrowed tech

That 360-degree camera is just some of the tech that Rolls-Royce engineers borrowed from parent company BMW, but I wish they’d stolen a bit more, like BMW’s hands-off driver assist system.

The touchscreen infotainment is also reasonably modern, offering integrated navigation and searching for charging stations. It’ll even do both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, though, curiously, I couldn’t get the latter to work. Perhaps the car considered my last-season Samsung Galaxy S23 too passé? And though the media is played through a 16-speaker bespoke audio system that is powerful yet beautifully subtle, it sadly lacks Dolby Atmos support.

So this highest of high-tech Rolls-Royces doesn’t quite offer all the world’s features, but what you get instead is an astronomically detailed interior, floor mats of the softest lambswool, and a comprehensive set of polished metal controls, all designed with the perfect weight and feel.

Mortgage time

While you can get into a Spectre for $420,000, you’ll never get through the buying process without ticking a few boxes. Given options like the chartreuse paint you see here costs $13,100 on its own, expect to spend a lot more. This car stickered at $560,100 after a $2,750 destination charge.

A worthwhile expenditure? That’s a difficult thing for someone with the budget of a mere mortal to say. The Spectre is hardly a good value, but it is exceptional, made all the more spectacular considering it’s Rolls-Royce’s. But the presence of That Sound does make it all seem worthwhile.

There are more EVs to come, but we’ll have to be patient; an SUV has been promised for 2027, ahead of the brand becoming all-electric in 2030. How well those future EVs look and drive is anyone’s guess at this point, but if they all sound this good, they’ll be off to a very good start.

Read More