verge-rss

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Netflix isn’t just programming content only a small group of people would like — it’s intent on having a little something for everyone. During an interview with The New York Times, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says he regrets comparing Netflix to HBO and its more limited selection of content in the past.
Here’s the quote, published in this 2013 GQ profile of Reed Hastings:
His dream project: a Netflix series created by Warren Beatty. “He’s great in long form,” Sarandos says. “His only problems have been when he’s constrained.” Sarandos is also warming up Jodie Foster, who directed an episode of Orange Is the New Black. “The goal,” he says, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” His seductive pitch to today’s new breed of TV auteurs: a huge audience, real money, no meddlesome ecutives (“I’m not going to give David Fincher notes”), no pilots (television’s great sucking hole of money and hope), and a full-season commitment.
He tells the NYT interviewer, “What I should have said back then is, We want to be HBO and CBS and BBC and all those different networks around the world that entertain people, and not narrow it to just HBO.” He adds that “prestige elite programming” is a “very small” business, which isn’t what Netflix is about anymore.

Instead, Sarandos explains that Netflix must have a “broad variety of things that people watch and love.” That’s why not everything the service offers may not appeal to your taste. “The people who love ‘Ginny & Georgia’ will tell you, ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is great,” Sarandos says.
As my colleague Alex Cranz pointed out earlier this year, Netflix’s programming strategy makes it more like cable TV, as the service now has everything from Young Sheldon to The 100 — and soon, WWE’s Monday Night Raw.
Netflix is still eyeing the competition from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Comcast. “Early on, we were discounted because I think the studios thought these tech guys are never going to figure out programming,” Sarandos tells the NYT. “We largely have proved them wrong. And I think it would be crazy for us to think, Well, these entertainment companies are never going to figure out the tech.”
Netflix has undergone a big transformation over the past few years, pushing ahead with some of the things it said it’d never do, including advertising and paid password sharing. As the streaming landscape shifts focus to revenue rather than subscriber numbers, we could see other streamers follow a similar path.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Netflix isn’t just programming content only a small group of people would like — it’s intent on having a little something for everyone. During an interview with The New York Times, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says he regrets comparing Netflix to HBO and its more limited selection of content in the past.

Here’s the quote, published in this 2013 GQ profile of Reed Hastings:

His dream project: a Netflix series created by Warren Beatty. “He’s great in long form,” Sarandos says. “His only problems have been when he’s constrained.” Sarandos is also warming up Jodie Foster, who directed an episode of Orange Is the New Black. “The goal,” he says, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” His seductive pitch to today’s new breed of TV auteurs: a huge audience, real money, no meddlesome ecutives (“I’m not going to give David Fincher notes”), no pilots (television’s great sucking hole of money and hope), and a full-season commitment.

He tells the NYT interviewer, “What I should have said back then is, We want to be HBO and CBS and BBC and all those different networks around the world that entertain people, and not narrow it to just HBO.” He adds that “prestige elite programming” is a “very small” business, which isn’t what Netflix is about anymore.

Instead, Sarandos explains that Netflix must have a “broad variety of things that people watch and love.” That’s why not everything the service offers may not appeal to your taste. “The people who love ‘Ginny & Georgia’ will tell you, ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is great,” Sarandos says.

As my colleague Alex Cranz pointed out earlier this year, Netflix’s programming strategy makes it more like cable TV, as the service now has everything from Young Sheldon to The 100 — and soon, WWE’s Monday Night Raw.

Netflix is still eyeing the competition from Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Comcast. “Early on, we were discounted because I think the studios thought these tech guys are never going to figure out programming,” Sarandos tells the NYT. “We largely have proved them wrong. And I think it would be crazy for us to think, Well, these entertainment companies are never going to figure out the tech.”

Netflix has undergone a big transformation over the past few years, pushing ahead with some of the things it said it’d never do, including advertising and paid password sharing. As the streaming landscape shifts focus to revenue rather than subscriber numbers, we could see other streamers follow a similar path.

Read More 

HBO

Director Muta’Ali’s MoviePass, MovieCrash is a thorough but circuitous breakdown of how executives’ obsession with exponential growth all but destroyed the company. To many, MoviePass was an overnight sensation whose too good to be true monthly cost was a sign of its potential to revolutionize the theater industry. The promise of being able to see as many newly released movies as you wanted for less than the price of a single normal ticket was intoxicating enough to convince much of the public that MoviePass had a game plan in place.
But there were a handful of people within the company who had long been sounding alarms about its unsustainable growth. MoviePass, MovieCrash — director Muta’Ali’s new HBO documentary — is a damning account of how MoviePass’ C-suite executives were dead set on ignoring all the warning signs leading up to its filing for bankruptcy in 2020. And while the film plays into some of the same wide-eyed mythmaking that ultimately doomed its disruptive subject, it lays bare how the chase for exponential profits can doom companies that seem to have everything going for them.
MoviePass, MovieCrash features interviews with a wide range of former employees, investors, and analysts who all speak candidly about how the company burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital while struggling to make its business model work. But the film opens with the origin story of Mitch Lowe, the founder of a regional video rental chain who hopscotched his way through the entertainment industry to Netflix in the late ’90s before becoming CEO of MoviePass in 2016.

As Lowe describes how his passion for film was sparked by a childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you can hear traces of a practiced boardroom showmanship meant to convey earnestness. But MoviePass, MovieCrash uses clips from the 1960 horror classic to foreshadow how, somewhat similar to Norman Bates, Lowe would one day become infamous for running a business into the ground while drowning in a mess of his own delusional making.
Before the documentary digs into what went wrong, though, it shifts focus to MoviePass’ halcyon days, when the company was making headlines for being a hot new player poised to revolutionize the theater experience. In its first act, as staffers recount their quest to secure more venture capital by hitting 100,000 subscribers, MoviePass, MovieCrash presents 2016 as the most pivotal moment in MoviePass’ history — so much so that it almost makes it seem as if that’s when the business began. But it isn’t until the film starts unpacking how that quest put MoviePass on a downward spiral that MoviePass, MovieCrash begins telling the far more interesting story of how two Black men — entrepreneur Stacy Spikes and investor Hamet Watt — co-founded the company in 2011.

In the news coverage of MoviePass’ rise and fall, Spikes’ and Watt’s roles at the company were often downplayed, while Lowe was trotted out as the company’s face. Initially, MoviePass, MovieCrash feels a bit like it is playing into the self-aggrandizing narrative Lowe presented as he made TV appearances assuring the public of MoviePass’ durability. But by leading with Lowe, MoviePass, MovieCrash sets Spikes and Watts up to clear the record about why they were ousted and to explain how MoviePass’ origins were shaped by the widespread refusal of the entertainment and tech industries to invest in and trust Black founders.
While the time the documentary spends with Lowe illustrates the resources white, male executives are given to move fast and break things, it uses Spikes and Watt to hammer home how much thought and care went into creating MoviePass before it was snatched away from them. Even though they come a bit later than they probably should, Spikes and Watt help MoviePass, MovieCrash highlight how differently things might have played out if the company’s long-term existence had been prioritized over a desire for ever-increasing growth and profit.
If you followed the news in real time (which wasn’t all that long ago), most of MoviePass, MovieCrash will ring familiar and remind you how loud the hype machine roared when splashy “innovative” tech startups could still afford to subsidize their offerings. But we’re now much more attuned to the reality that C-suite execs will obsess over the idea of numbers going up while simultaneously lighting piles of cash on fire. With that in mind, the downfall of MoviePass is in no way surprising. But the doc is detailed enough to make even an all too common business story into something worth watching.
MoviePass, MovieCrash hits HBO on May 29th.

HBO

Director Muta’Ali’s MoviePass, MovieCrash is a thorough but circuitous breakdown of how executives’ obsession with exponential growth all but destroyed the company.

To many, MoviePass was an overnight sensation whose too good to be true monthly cost was a sign of its potential to revolutionize the theater industry. The promise of being able to see as many newly released movies as you wanted for less than the price of a single normal ticket was intoxicating enough to convince much of the public that MoviePass had a game plan in place.

But there were a handful of people within the company who had long been sounding alarms about its unsustainable growth. MoviePass, MovieCrash — director Muta’Ali’s new HBO documentary — is a damning account of how MoviePass’ C-suite executives were dead set on ignoring all the warning signs leading up to its filing for bankruptcy in 2020. And while the film plays into some of the same wide-eyed mythmaking that ultimately doomed its disruptive subject, it lays bare how the chase for exponential profits can doom companies that seem to have everything going for them.

MoviePass, MovieCrash features interviews with a wide range of former employees, investors, and analysts who all speak candidly about how the company burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital while struggling to make its business model work. But the film opens with the origin story of Mitch Lowe, the founder of a regional video rental chain who hopscotched his way through the entertainment industry to Netflix in the late ’90s before becoming CEO of MoviePass in 2016.

As Lowe describes how his passion for film was sparked by a childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you can hear traces of a practiced boardroom showmanship meant to convey earnestness. But MoviePass, MovieCrash uses clips from the 1960 horror classic to foreshadow how, somewhat similar to Norman Bates, Lowe would one day become infamous for running a business into the ground while drowning in a mess of his own delusional making.

Before the documentary digs into what went wrong, though, it shifts focus to MoviePass’ halcyon days, when the company was making headlines for being a hot new player poised to revolutionize the theater experience. In its first act, as staffers recount their quest to secure more venture capital by hitting 100,000 subscribers, MoviePass, MovieCrash presents 2016 as the most pivotal moment in MoviePass’ history — so much so that it almost makes it seem as if that’s when the business began. But it isn’t until the film starts unpacking how that quest put MoviePass on a downward spiral that MoviePass, MovieCrash begins telling the far more interesting story of how two Black men — entrepreneur Stacy Spikes and investor Hamet Watt — co-founded the company in 2011.

In the news coverage of MoviePass’ rise and fall, Spikes’ and Watt’s roles at the company were often downplayed, while Lowe was trotted out as the company’s face. Initially, MoviePass, MovieCrash feels a bit like it is playing into the self-aggrandizing narrative Lowe presented as he made TV appearances assuring the public of MoviePass’ durability. But by leading with Lowe, MoviePass, MovieCrash sets Spikes and Watts up to clear the record about why they were ousted and to explain how MoviePass’ origins were shaped by the widespread refusal of the entertainment and tech industries to invest in and trust Black founders.

While the time the documentary spends with Lowe illustrates the resources white, male executives are given to move fast and break things, it uses Spikes and Watt to hammer home how much thought and care went into creating MoviePass before it was snatched away from them. Even though they come a bit later than they probably should, Spikes and Watt help MoviePass, MovieCrash highlight how differently things might have played out if the company’s long-term existence had been prioritized over a desire for ever-increasing growth and profit.

If you followed the news in real time (which wasn’t all that long ago), most of MoviePass, MovieCrash will ring familiar and remind you how loud the hype machine roared when splashy “innovative” tech startups could still afford to subsidize their offerings. But we’re now much more attuned to the reality that C-suite execs will obsess over the idea of numbers going up while simultaneously lighting piles of cash on fire. With that in mind, the downfall of MoviePass is in no way surprising. But the doc is detailed enough to make even an all too common business story into something worth watching.

MoviePass, MovieCrash hits HBO on May 29th.

Read More 

Illustration: The Verge

Apple will finally tell its own AI story at WWDC 2024, but it may not mean the sorts of showy features demoed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Instead, the event may see Apple rolling out basic AI features like transcribing voice memos or auto-generated emoji — and announcing a rumored partnership with OpenAI, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today.
Recent rumors have held that Apple will be allowing chatbots to integrate more deeply into its operating systems, and it seems that OpenAI is getting the first crack at that with ChatGPT. But Apple is still working on an agreement with Google to do the same with Gemini, according to Gurman. It’s also been rumored to be talking to Anthropic. (Those talks started before OpenAI’s ongoing Scarlett Johansson dust-up, but they underscore why Apple might want more than one iPhone chatbot deal.) Outside of whatever those potential partnerships will mean, Apple’s approach to AI will apparently focus on being practical.

One big, noticeable improvement Apple will reportedly announce could be a “smart recap” feature that Gurman mentions. This will apparently summarize missed texts, notifications, and other things like “web pages, news articles, documents, notes and other forms of media.” That might be particularly nice when it comes to dealing with iOS notifications, which can be overwhelming and difficult to tame. And if you squint, it vaguely echoes Microsoft’s recently-announced Recall feature that tracks what you do on your computer using AI and essentially makes your actions searchable.
The Voice Memo app could also get a big boost in AI-generated transcripts, Gurman writes. Selfishly, that will be key for referring to interview recordings, but it could also be handy for, say, students recording their lessons for later reference. Apple devices have similar features already, like auto-generated voicemail transcripts and system-wide captions for videos, audio, and conversations.
The company also reportedly plans to announce AI-powered improvements to on-device Spotlight search, internet searches with Safari, as well as writing suggestions for emails and texts. And the company may also use AI to retouch photos and generate emoji on the fly, based on what you’re texting — a type of feature that seems to consistently lead to trouble for these companies. (See Meta’s gun-toting Waluigi AI stickers or Google’s inappropriately racially diverse nazi pictures.)
Apple could showcase a better, more natural-sounding voice for Siri, based on Apple’s own large language models, as well as better Siri functionality on the Apple Watch. Where it can, Apple’s devices will do all of this stuff locally, but for complicated tasks, they’ll offload processing to Apple’s own M2 Ultra-based servers, Gurman writes. In general, he says devices “released in the last year or so” will gain most of the new on-device AI features.
Apart from AI features, the company may announce an iOS 18 feature to let users change their app icons to different colors, according to Gurman. Something similar is possible now, using the iOS Shortcuts app, but I’d sure welcome a more straightforward method. That’s in addition to the other upcoming rumored iPhone home screen change will finally let users put app icons wherever they’d like instead of iOS forcing a top-to-bottom, left-to-right arrangement. What’s next? Custom launchers?
Update May 26th, 2024, 11:38AM ET: Fleshed out some rumored features and added more context.

Illustration: The Verge

Apple will finally tell its own AI story at WWDC 2024, but it may not mean the sorts of showy features demoed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Instead, the event may see Apple rolling out basic AI features like transcribing voice memos or auto-generated emoji — and announcing a rumored partnership with OpenAI, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today.

Recent rumors have held that Apple will be allowing chatbots to integrate more deeply into its operating systems, and it seems that OpenAI is getting the first crack at that with ChatGPT. But Apple is still working on an agreement with Google to do the same with Gemini, according to Gurman. It’s also been rumored to be talking to Anthropic. (Those talks started before OpenAI’s ongoing Scarlett Johansson dust-up, but they underscore why Apple might want more than one iPhone chatbot deal.) Outside of whatever those potential partnerships will mean, Apple’s approach to AI will apparently focus on being practical.

One big, noticeable improvement Apple will reportedly announce could be a “smart recap” feature that Gurman mentions. This will apparently summarize missed texts, notifications, and other things like “web pages, news articles, documents, notes and other forms of media.” That might be particularly nice when it comes to dealing with iOS notifications, which can be overwhelming and difficult to tame. And if you squint, it vaguely echoes Microsoft’s recently-announced Recall feature that tracks what you do on your computer using AI and essentially makes your actions searchable.

The Voice Memo app could also get a big boost in AI-generated transcripts, Gurman writes. Selfishly, that will be key for referring to interview recordings, but it could also be handy for, say, students recording their lessons for later reference. Apple devices have similar features already, like auto-generated voicemail transcripts and system-wide captions for videos, audio, and conversations.

The company also reportedly plans to announce AI-powered improvements to on-device Spotlight search, internet searches with Safari, as well as writing suggestions for emails and texts. And the company may also use AI to retouch photos and generate emoji on the fly, based on what you’re texting — a type of feature that seems to consistently lead to trouble for these companies. (See Meta’s gun-toting Waluigi AI stickers or Google’s inappropriately racially diverse nazi pictures.)

Apple could showcase a better, more natural-sounding voice for Siri, based on Apple’s own large language models, as well as better Siri functionality on the Apple Watch. Where it can, Apple’s devices will do all of this stuff locally, but for complicated tasks, they’ll offload processing to Apple’s own M2 Ultra-based servers, Gurman writes. In general, he says devices “released in the last year or so” will gain most of the new on-device AI features.

Apart from AI features, the company may announce an iOS 18 feature to let users change their app icons to different colors, according to Gurman. Something similar is possible now, using the iOS Shortcuts app, but I’d sure welcome a more straightforward method. That’s in addition to the other upcoming rumored iPhone home screen change will finally let users put app icons wherever they’d like instead of iOS forcing a top-to-bottom, left-to-right arrangement. What’s next? Custom launchers?

Update May 26th, 2024, 11:38AM ET: Fleshed out some rumored features and added more context.

Read More 

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

From the earliest pixelated games to the outrageously realistic experiences of today, flight simulators have always been pushing the boundaries of what can be visually recreated in a video game. It’s one thing to make space look good; it’s another thing entirely to faithfully recreate the cockpit of a 747 and the whole world around which it might fly.
On this episode of The Vergecast, the fourth and final installment of our series on the five senses of video games, we asked Polygon’s Charlie Hall to help us make sense of the current state of the art in flight simulation. Hall, who once spent more than four months in VR mapping the edge of the Milky Way galaxy in Elite: Dangerous, has more experience in a virtual cockpit than most. We wanted to know how the pros set up their simulators to get the most realistic experience and why it’s so complicated to make a virtual world look like the real one.

Hall makes the case that while VR and XR headsets hold a lot of promise for even more realistic experiences in the future, the best virtual cockpits of today are still made up of multi-monitor setups and power-hungry GPUs. That’s true whether you’re playing in your house or you’re running the official F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning simulators at the US Air Force. The best versions of these setups can be hard to believe… until you see it for yourself.
If you want to know more about the topics we cover in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

It’s time to build the cockpit of your dreams
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s most-needed feature is co-op
My first kill as a Star Citizen
If Microsoft Flight Simulator has you craving air combat, try this flight sim next

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

From the earliest pixelated games to the outrageously realistic experiences of today, flight simulators have always been pushing the boundaries of what can be visually recreated in a video game. It’s one thing to make space look good; it’s another thing entirely to faithfully recreate the cockpit of a 747 and the whole world around which it might fly.

On this episode of The Vergecast, the fourth and final installment of our series on the five senses of video games, we asked Polygon’s Charlie Hall to help us make sense of the current state of the art in flight simulation. Hall, who once spent more than four months in VR mapping the edge of the Milky Way galaxy in Elite: Dangerous, has more experience in a virtual cockpit than most. We wanted to know how the pros set up their simulators to get the most realistic experience and why it’s so complicated to make a virtual world look like the real one.

Hall makes the case that while VR and XR headsets hold a lot of promise for even more realistic experiences in the future, the best virtual cockpits of today are still made up of multi-monitor setups and power-hungry GPUs. That’s true whether you’re playing in your house or you’re running the official F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning simulators at the US Air Force. The best versions of these setups can be hard to believe… until you see it for yourself.

If you want to know more about the topics we cover in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

It’s time to build the cockpit of your dreams
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s most-needed feature is co-op
My first kill as a Star Citizen
If Microsoft Flight Simulator has you craving air combat, try this flight sim next

Read More 

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 39, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for gadgets this week, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been writing about Surfaces and other tablets, chatting with some internet friends about the fall of Red Lobster, reading about Magic: The Gathering and the history of emoji, watching MoviePass, MovieCrash, weeding my patio with a literal flamethrower, and for some reason, eating a lot of popcorn. Like, a lot of popcorn.
I also have for you a bunch of cool new gadgets, a new YouTube channel you’re going to love, a new-old Mario game, a clever new AI tool for Windows, lots and lots of fun new games, and a whole bunch more. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into this week? What should everyone be into? What is so awesome that everyone needs to know about it right this second or else? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Sonos Ace headphones. I’m generally very happy with my Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are kind of beaten up but still work great. Even for $450, though, the Ace look really nice — I dig the super-minimalist vibe, almost like they’re an early prototype the company shipped. Really curious to see the reviews on these.

The new Surface Pro. If you’re one of the “why can’t my iPad do more stuff” kinds of people, the device you want might not be an iPad. It might be the new $999 Surface Pro, which Microsoft promises has great performance and battery, comes in cool colors, and has a really nifty new keyboard attachment.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Another great reboot from Nintendo, which is remarkably good at sprucing up old Mario games and getting me hooked on them all over again. Like my colleague Andrew Webster wrote, the Switch is turning into a retro Mario RPG machine, and it’s awesome.

Howtown. I love a good “no mystery too small” show, which is why I’m a religious consumer of things like Search Engine and Underunderstood. This new YouTube channel, from two excellent creators, is an insta-subscribe for me. And they have some really fun guests lined up!

Microsoft Recall. One of the cooler AI apps I’ve seen — and maybe the best argument yet for why you need an “AI PC.” Sure, an app that tracks everything you do on your computer feels slightly creepy, but that’s kind of already how your computer works. This just makes it useful.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Fury Road is one of the coolest movies ever made, if you ask me, and by all accounts, Furiosa is a worthy — if slightly slower and less, uh, bonkers — follow-up. It’s also apparently the rare prequel that adds something to the first flick; guess which two movies I’ll be watching this weekend.

Stompers. I’m currently very into silly, chill, less-intense workout apps, and this is such a funny one. You compete with your friends to walk more, and when you’re winning, your friends get, like, virtual bananas to slow you down. Delightful!

Canva. Canva launched a big redesign this week (at least, if you can find a “secret portal”), which comes with a bunch of clever AI features and some new ways for your IT department to give Canva money. I don’t use Canva much personally, but the folks I know who do tend to love it. This should be good news.

Hellblade II. This game sounds genuinely terrifying — and there’s not much I love more than a game that makes me scream out loud. The sound design appears to be particularly intense, so if you need me this weekend, I’ll be holed up in the dark scaring myself half to death.

The Daylight DC1. Half of me rolls my eyes at anyone who’s like, “Gadgets are bad. Here’s a gadget to save you from gadgets.” And it’s $729! But I love the retro-future aesthetic here, I’m hopeful the screen tech works, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this thing for sure.

Group project
Last week, I asked you to share your favorite minigames on the internet. Things you can play in a few minutes. Maybe you play once a day, maybe you play it 50 times in a row while you’re on the train to work. Did I ask for this because selfishly I’m sort of bored of Quordle and Name Drop and wanted new stuff to try? Partly! But I also suspected I’m not the only one who loves these games.
Oh boy, was I right. Thank you to everyone who responded! I got a ton of great suggestions, and I want to share as many of them as I can. First of all, here are the ones you recommended the most often:

Coffee Golf. A new five-hole golf course to play every day. (This was the most recommended game of the week, by a lot, and I can see why. I love it.)

Bandle. Guess the song, one instrument at a time.

Travle. Get from one place to another, one adjacent country at a time.

Connections. Find the four words that belong together.

Framed. Guess the movie, one screenshot at a time.

Wordle. Can’t forget the OG!

And here is a list, in no particular order but very slightly categorized, of some of the other great game recommendations I got. First up, there are the games that I’d describe as “Wordle, but not exactly:”

Worldle. Guess the country by its shape.

Summle. Put the numbers and operators in place to make math equations work.

Episode. Like Framed, but for TV shows.

CineQuote. Guess the movie, one line at a time.

Murdle. Solve a mystery with only a few clues.

Waffle. Rearrange the board until all the letters are in the right place.

Knotwords. Like sudoku meets a crossword puzzle.

Strands. A word search with a theme.

Queens / Pinpoint / Crossclimb. The three new daily games on LinkedIn, which are all pretty fun.

Housle. Guess the house price by the photo.

I heard about a bunch of Immaculate Grid games, which are a huge new category and are very fun:

Immaculate Grid. The original, I think? Guess the athlete, across lots of sports.

GeoGrid. Guess the country.

Cinematrix. Guess the movie.

And last but not least, there were the other games. Not all of them are daily, but I think they fit the “it’s a thing you can do a couple of minutes at a time,” so I’ll allow them:

Pedantle. Find words in a redacted page to figure out which Wikipedia entry it is.

Chrome’s Dino Game. Best use of a broken webpage ever.

Contexto. Try to guess the word just by guessing other words.

Football Bingo. Turns out, I don’t know soccer as well as I thought.

Untitled Game. It loads a blank webpage. You figure out what to do next.

Random battles on Pokemon Showdown.

Universal Paperclips. You make paperclips. And sell them. As many as you can. Forever.

Box Office Game. The game gives you a weekend and some numbers, you try to guess the most popular movies.

I now have about two-thirds of these games bookmarked in my browser, and I will be playing them all every day forever. I may never be productive again. Thanks again to everyone who shared their favorite games, and I hope you find something fun to play!

Screen share
David Imel is a man of many talents. He uses weird, old photography equipment to make truly gorgeous panoramic photos; he makes great videos going super duper deep into how we talk to each other online; he hosts podcasts and makes videos with the rest of the MKBHD crew.
I asked David to share his homescreen, both to see which of his cool photos he picked as a wallpaper and to snoop on whether he had any cool photography / podcasting apps I didn’t know about. Turns out, he’s pretty minimalist! Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The wallpaper: A picture I took in Ohio while chasing the eclipse on a Fujifilm GFX 100S II Frankenstein attached to my Chamonix 4×5 view camera.
The apps: Photos, Settings, Viewfinder, Fujifilm Camera Remote, Telegram, Gmail, Pocket Casts, Messages, Arc, Spotify.
Gotta be honest, I generally use the swipe down to search apps gesture every time I want to use an app. I don’t know if that makes me a psycho, but I only keep a few on the homescreen. The widgets are for my bedroom lights and blinds — all running on Matter. I get very little light in my apartment, so the blinds close at 9PM and open at 7AM to help me wake up, and I toggle the lights manually.
Viewfinder Preview. This is my favorite app for shooting film. I mostly use it for my 6:17 and 6:24 120 film cameras, but it’s amazing. You can emulate any film format and field of view, and you can take digital copies to both remember which image you shot and what your settings were. It’s also a light meter and has been super accurate.
Fujifilm Camera Remote. I use this to transfer photos from my X100 (my daily camera) to my phone. The new app (Fujfilmi XApp) never works for me for some reason, but the old app still works great.
Pocket Casts. This is probably the most-used app on my phone. I’ve used this app since like 2010 for podcasts, and since I bought it once for $7 way back in the day, I got grandfathered in for a lifetime pro tier once they added a subscription model. It’s a really fantastic podcast app, but I am aware that they hide a lot of features behind a subscription now, which kinda sucks.
Arc Search. David, I think you and I are probably both the biggest Arc fans on the internet. The browser is just so delightful, and the desktop app is absolutely incredible for research; segmenting out my work life / accounts / research projects, and spaces is great. I could talk forever about how much I love the actually useful AI features they have in the desktop app like tab renaming, download / file renaming, tidy tab sorting, etc., alongside pinned tabs, the ability to share folders, and more.
I also asked David to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Right now, I’m in the middle of getting a Hasselblad Flextight film scanner up and running. It’s the highest-quality scan you can get outside of a drum scan, but they’re so old, you have to use a super old Mac for it. My friend Willem Verbeeck made a video on it recently. A nice ex-professional photographer in California found out I’m into panoramic photography (especially my Fujifilm TX-1) and had a mask specifically made for it. It weighs 60 pounds.
I’m a big fan of Casey Newton and Kevin Roose’s Hard Fork podcast. It’s not exactly new, but I think they have a great dialogue, and considering they both cover similar things in their respective publications, the conversations are a great mix of funny, intelligent, and engaging.
I don’t watch a ton of movies, shows, or YouTube, but I’ve been going back through VSauce’s channel and watching his old videos just because I really like the style of WHY WHY WHY storytelling. Oldie, but very goodie. Also Gawx Art might be the best YouTuber on the platform right now, and this interview with him on Jack Conte’s Digital Spaghetti channel is freaking awesome.

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.
“I loved Jenny Nicholson’s YouTube essay about the demise of the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel experience. It’s long (four hours!), but she goes into every detail, from concept, to her own visit, to why it failed. Totally worth the time.” – Mike
“ReminderCal is a really awesome app that syncs iOS Reminders so they appear in iOS Calendar. I’ve set up Shortcut automations for it, and now it works like magic (even when using the app switcher!) and feels like Apple integrated it! Plus I’m absolutely loving Hit Me Hard and Soft. The whole album is Billie Eilish at her best, and I can’t get “Chihiro” out of my head!” – John
“Just saw someone mention SequoiaView, which is great, but WizTree is about 1 billion times faster. Hope it helps someone in a rush to clean up a disk…” – César
“I installed a Synology NAS in my home and set it up as a NAS (obviously) but also as a Plex server, which works really well! I can now watch my old DVDs and Blu-rays again using Plex, after importing them as MP4s, and it can also configure itself automatically to be accessible from outside my local network.” – Wenzel
“Bought a bike recently and am really enjoying viewing my Apple Watch metrics on my iPhone. Using the Peak Design case and bike mount.” – Hobie
“After a long day, my favorite way of winding down before sleeping is watching this YouTube channel, Virtual Japan, that makes videos walking around Tokyo and other cities of Japan in a beautiful 4K HDR. My favorite videos are this one from an Onsen town and this one from a rainy midnight in Kyoto. It’s one of the best ways of calming the mind and the body before sleeping.” – Guilherme
“Apparently this isn’t new, but I just heard about Hoopla this week! It’s an app that you can connect your local library card to and gain access to their library of digital content including streaming movies and TV shows! I’ve found several shows on there that are otherwise only available on a streaming service I don’t want to pay for, so it’s been a great find for me this week!” – Charles
“Probably not new, but I learned about PlayCover and have been using it to replay the GTA III / Vice City / San Andreas games on my MacBook using my Netflix subscription.” – Alex

Signing off
About this time of year, a lot of people start asking me (and everyone else I know who likes gadgets) which Bluetooth speaker to buy. It’s party and barbecue time, I guess! There are lots of good choices out there, but let me just save you a bunch of time: buy a UE Wonderboom. The whole Boom lineup is great, honestly, but this one’s plenty loud, it’s tiny, it lasts forever, it sounds great, it’s $100. You might be able to beat it on one of those things, but I’ve never found a better “awesome speaker in a tiny box” anywhere. When the weather’s good, mine goes everywhere with me. Maybe we can hang at the beach and sync ours up for some sweet stereo tunes. Hit me up.
See you next week!

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 39, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for gadgets this week, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been writing about Surfaces and other tablets, chatting with some internet friends about the fall of Red Lobster, reading about Magic: The Gathering and the history of emoji, watching MoviePass, MovieCrash, weeding my patio with a literal flamethrower, and for some reason, eating a lot of popcorn. Like, a lot of popcorn.

I also have for you a bunch of cool new gadgets, a new YouTube channel you’re going to love, a new-old Mario game, a clever new AI tool for Windows, lots and lots of fun new games, and a whole bunch more. Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into this week? What should everyone be into? What is so awesome that everyone needs to know about it right this second or else? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The Sonos Ace headphones. I’m generally very happy with my Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are kind of beaten up but still work great. Even for $450, though, the Ace look really nice — I dig the super-minimalist vibe, almost like they’re an early prototype the company shipped. Really curious to see the reviews on these.

The new Surface Pro. If you’re one of the “why can’t my iPad do more stuff” kinds of people, the device you want might not be an iPad. It might be the new $999 Surface Pro, which Microsoft promises has great performance and battery, comes in cool colors, and has a really nifty new keyboard attachment.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Another great reboot from Nintendo, which is remarkably good at sprucing up old Mario games and getting me hooked on them all over again. Like my colleague Andrew Webster wrote, the Switch is turning into a retro Mario RPG machine, and it’s awesome.

Howtown. I love a good “no mystery too small” show, which is why I’m a religious consumer of things like Search Engine and Underunderstood. This new YouTube channel, from two excellent creators, is an insta-subscribe for me. And they have some really fun guests lined up!

Microsoft Recall. One of the cooler AI apps I’ve seen — and maybe the best argument yet for why you need an “AI PC.” Sure, an app that tracks everything you do on your computer feels slightly creepy, but that’s kind of already how your computer works. This just makes it useful.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Fury Road is one of the coolest movies ever made, if you ask me, and by all accounts, Furiosa is a worthy — if slightly slower and less, uh, bonkers — follow-up. It’s also apparently the rare prequel that adds something to the first flick; guess which two movies I’ll be watching this weekend.

Stompers. I’m currently very into silly, chill, less-intense workout apps, and this is such a funny one. You compete with your friends to walk more, and when you’re winning, your friends get, like, virtual bananas to slow you down. Delightful!

Canva. Canva launched a big redesign this week (at least, if you can find a “secret portal”), which comes with a bunch of clever AI features and some new ways for your IT department to give Canva money. I don’t use Canva much personally, but the folks I know who do tend to love it. This should be good news.

Hellblade II. This game sounds genuinely terrifying — and there’s not much I love more than a game that makes me scream out loud. The sound design appears to be particularly intense, so if you need me this weekend, I’ll be holed up in the dark scaring myself half to death.

The Daylight DC1. Half of me rolls my eyes at anyone who’s like, “Gadgets are bad. Here’s a gadget to save you from gadgets.” And it’s $729! But I love the retro-future aesthetic here, I’m hopeful the screen tech works, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this thing for sure.

Group project

Last week, I asked you to share your favorite minigames on the internet. Things you can play in a few minutes. Maybe you play once a day, maybe you play it 50 times in a row while you’re on the train to work. Did I ask for this because selfishly I’m sort of bored of Quordle and Name Drop and wanted new stuff to try? Partly! But I also suspected I’m not the only one who loves these games.

Oh boy, was I right. Thank you to everyone who responded! I got a ton of great suggestions, and I want to share as many of them as I can. First of all, here are the ones you recommended the most often:

Coffee Golf. A new five-hole golf course to play every day. (This was the most recommended game of the week, by a lot, and I can see why. I love it.)

Bandle. Guess the song, one instrument at a time.

Travle. Get from one place to another, one adjacent country at a time.

Connections. Find the four words that belong together.

Framed. Guess the movie, one screenshot at a time.

Wordle. Can’t forget the OG!

And here is a list, in no particular order but very slightly categorized, of some of the other great game recommendations I got. First up, there are the games that I’d describe as “Wordle, but not exactly:”

Worldle. Guess the country by its shape.

Summle. Put the numbers and operators in place to make math equations work.

Episode. Like Framed, but for TV shows.

CineQuote. Guess the movie, one line at a time.

Murdle. Solve a mystery with only a few clues.

Waffle. Rearrange the board until all the letters are in the right place.

Knotwords. Like sudoku meets a crossword puzzle.

Strands. A word search with a theme.

Queens / Pinpoint / Crossclimb. The three new daily games on LinkedIn, which are all pretty fun.

Housle. Guess the house price by the photo.

I heard about a bunch of Immaculate Grid games, which are a huge new category and are very fun:

Immaculate Grid. The original, I think? Guess the athlete, across lots of sports.

GeoGrid. Guess the country.

Cinematrix. Guess the movie.

And last but not least, there were the other games. Not all of them are daily, but I think they fit the “it’s a thing you can do a couple of minutes at a time,” so I’ll allow them:

Pedantle. Find words in a redacted page to figure out which Wikipedia entry it is.

Chrome’s Dino Game. Best use of a broken webpage ever.

Contexto. Try to guess the word just by guessing other words.

Football Bingo. Turns out, I don’t know soccer as well as I thought.

Untitled Game. It loads a blank webpage. You figure out what to do next.

Random battles on Pokemon Showdown.

Universal Paperclips. You make paperclips. And sell them. As many as you can. Forever.

Box Office Game. The game gives you a weekend and some numbers, you try to guess the most popular movies.

I now have about two-thirds of these games bookmarked in my browser, and I will be playing them all every day forever. I may never be productive again. Thanks again to everyone who shared their favorite games, and I hope you find something fun to play!

Screen share

David Imel is a man of many talents. He uses weird, old photography equipment to make truly gorgeous panoramic photos; he makes great videos going super duper deep into how we talk to each other online; he hosts podcasts and makes videos with the rest of the MKBHD crew.

I asked David to share his homescreen, both to see which of his cool photos he picked as a wallpaper and to snoop on whether he had any cool photography / podcasting apps I didn’t know about. Turns out, he’s pretty minimalist! Here’s David’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The wallpaper: A picture I took in Ohio while chasing the eclipse on a Fujifilm GFX 100S II Frankenstein attached to my Chamonix 4×5 view camera.

The apps: Photos, Settings, Viewfinder, Fujifilm Camera Remote, Telegram, Gmail, Pocket Casts, Messages, Arc, Spotify.

Gotta be honest, I generally use the swipe down to search apps gesture every time I want to use an app. I don’t know if that makes me a psycho, but I only keep a few on the homescreen. The widgets are for my bedroom lights and blinds — all running on Matter. I get very little light in my apartment, so the blinds close at 9PM and open at 7AM to help me wake up, and I toggle the lights manually.

Viewfinder Preview. This is my favorite app for shooting film. I mostly use it for my 6:17 and 6:24 120 film cameras, but it’s amazing. You can emulate any film format and field of view, and you can take digital copies to both remember which image you shot and what your settings were. It’s also a light meter and has been super accurate.

Fujifilm Camera Remote. I use this to transfer photos from my X100 (my daily camera) to my phone. The new app (Fujfilmi XApp) never works for me for some reason, but the old app still works great.

Pocket Casts. This is probably the most-used app on my phone. I’ve used this app since like 2010 for podcasts, and since I bought it once for $7 way back in the day, I got grandfathered in for a lifetime pro tier once they added a subscription model. It’s a really fantastic podcast app, but I am aware that they hide a lot of features behind a subscription now, which kinda sucks.

Arc Search. David, I think you and I are probably both the biggest Arc fans on the internet. The browser is just so delightful, and the desktop app is absolutely incredible for research; segmenting out my work life / accounts / research projects, and spaces is great. I could talk forever about how much I love the actually useful AI features they have in the desktop app like tab renaming, download / file renaming, tidy tab sorting, etc., alongside pinned tabs, the ability to share folders, and more.

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

Right now, I’m in the middle of getting a Hasselblad Flextight film scanner up and running. It’s the highest-quality scan you can get outside of a drum scan, but they’re so old, you have to use a super old Mac for it. My friend Willem Verbeeck made a video on it recently. A nice ex-professional photographer in California found out I’m into panoramic photography (especially my Fujifilm TX-1) and had a mask specifically made for it. It weighs 60 pounds.
I’m a big fan of Casey Newton and Kevin Roose’s Hard Fork podcast. It’s not exactly new, but I think they have a great dialogue, and considering they both cover similar things in their respective publications, the conversations are a great mix of funny, intelligent, and engaging.
I don’t watch a ton of movies, shows, or YouTube, but I’ve been going back through VSauce’s channel and watching his old videos just because I really like the style of WHY WHY WHY storytelling. Oldie, but very goodie. Also Gawx Art might be the best YouTuber on the platform right now, and this interview with him on Jack Conte’s Digital Spaghetti channel is freaking awesome.

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.

“I loved Jenny Nicholson’s YouTube essay about the demise of the Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser hotel experience. It’s long (four hours!), but she goes into every detail, from concept, to her own visit, to why it failed. Totally worth the time.” – Mike

“ReminderCal is a really awesome app that syncs iOS Reminders so they appear in iOS Calendar. I’ve set up Shortcut automations for it, and now it works like magic (even when using the app switcher!) and feels like Apple integrated it! Plus I’m absolutely loving Hit Me Hard and Soft. The whole album is Billie Eilish at her best, and I can’t get “Chihiro” out of my head!” – John

“Just saw someone mention SequoiaView, which is great, but WizTree is about 1 billion times faster. Hope it helps someone in a rush to clean up a disk…” – César

“I installed a Synology NAS in my home and set it up as a NAS (obviously) but also as a Plex server, which works really well! I can now watch my old DVDs and Blu-rays again using Plex, after importing them as MP4s, and it can also configure itself automatically to be accessible from outside my local network.” – Wenzel

“Bought a bike recently and am really enjoying viewing my Apple Watch metrics on my iPhone. Using the Peak Design case and bike mount.” – Hobie

“After a long day, my favorite way of winding down before sleeping is watching this YouTube channel, Virtual Japan, that makes videos walking around Tokyo and other cities of Japan in a beautiful 4K HDR. My favorite videos are this one from an Onsen town and this one from a rainy midnight in Kyoto. It’s one of the best ways of calming the mind and the body before sleeping.” – Guilherme

“Apparently this isn’t new, but I just heard about Hoopla this week! It’s an app that you can connect your local library card to and gain access to their library of digital content including streaming movies and TV shows! I’ve found several shows on there that are otherwise only available on a streaming service I don’t want to pay for, so it’s been a great find for me this week!” – Charles

“Probably not new, but I learned about PlayCover and have been using it to replay the GTA III / Vice City / San Andreas games on my MacBook using my Netflix subscription.” – Alex

Signing off

About this time of year, a lot of people start asking me (and everyone else I know who likes gadgets) which Bluetooth speaker to buy. It’s party and barbecue time, I guess! There are lots of good choices out there, but let me just save you a bunch of time: buy a UE Wonderboom. The whole Boom lineup is great, honestly, but this one’s plenty loud, it’s tiny, it lasts forever, it sounds great, it’s $100. You might be able to beat it on one of those things, but I’ve never found a better “awesome speaker in a tiny box” anywhere. When the weather’s good, mine goes everywhere with me. Maybe we can hang at the beach and sync ours up for some sweet stereo tunes. Hit me up.

See you next week!

Read More 

Bambu P1P vs. Creality K1C: an ‘easy’ 3D printer showdown. If you asked me to recommend an “easy” consumer 3D printer, I’d warn you first: despite countless innovations, you still can’t quite hit a button to reliably photocopy a 3D model. Buying a 3D printer is buying an entire hobby, one where — if you’re a lazy bum like me — many attempts will turn into worthless gobs of plastic.
But if you persisted, I’d tell you my one clear choice for lazy bums: the Bambu P1P.
What, a printer from the company that recalled its newest model and whose earlier ones once went rogue? Yep — because not only did Bambu handle those incidents with rapid apologies, investigations, transparency, and even refunds, the $599 Bambu P1P is also absolutely the easiest, most reliable 3D printer I’ve used.
It makes my stalwart old Ender 3 Pro look like a hunk of junk. It makes its closest competition, the $559 Creality K1C, feel like an inferior clone. I’ve spent months testing them side by side, and I’d personally pick the Bambu every time.
Don’t get me wrong: the K1C is the better choice for some tinkerers since its full enclosure, bed, and extra fan let you print higher temperature plastics like ABS as well as ones reinforced with glass or carbon fibers. (Bambu sells the $699 P1S for that.) And I did successfully use both the P1P and a pair of Creality K1 printers to produce dozens of objects over the past year, including pegboard mounts, figurines for my kids, and these badass unofficial Nerf blasters:

With either of these printers and a little knowledge of what’s easily 3D-printable, I can (sometimes) send an entire plate full of parts to these printers and expect them to all turn out.
But if you want fewer software and filament headaches, I would absolutely point you to Bambu. And I’d recommend you steer clear of the original Creality K1 entirely — I spent months struggling with issues that were instantly fixed when I swapped for the newer K1C model.

I took delivery of both the P1P and the original K1 last summer, and originally, I thought I’d be comparing both to the AnkerMake M5. They’re all part of a recent wave of printers promising a huge increase in speed and smarts.

One of my first prints on the Bambu P1P: the white side panels it’s worn ever since.

But the Bambu P1P and Creality K1 series stood out as the most affordable full-size, full-featured CoreXY printers that claim you can print right out of the box — with no need to bolt together a printer frame or even tighten belts. And while you can’t “just start printing the moment your K1 arrives,” as Creality puts it, both printers are mostly prebuilt, pretuned, and ready to go 20 or 30 minutes after you cut the packing tape. You remove a few safety pieces; attach their screens, power cables, and filament roll holders; connect to your home network for updates; and then press a button for automated setup.
Each will automatically level their bed so your prints literally get off on the right foot. They tune their motors with vibrations so intense, they shake the entire surface the printers are standing on. That’s intentional — because excess movement ruins prints, and printing quickly creates more movement, they teach themselves to avoid frequencies that rattle too hard. As I alluded to before, they both have CoreXY kinematics systems that provide an incredibly speedy, stable bead of plastic without needing to sling your model back and forth on a moving bed.

With a CoreXY printer, the head moves in two dimensions while the bed slowly lowers, keeping the model stable.

Bedslingers, like this Bambu A1 Mini, fling the model one direction and the print head another.

But the next step is where the Bambu P1 and Creality K1 printers begin to diverge. When it’s time to stick your fishing line of consumable plastic into a Creality printer, you have to thread the needle, pushing a sharp point of plastic into a tube and through the extruder so that the hot nozzle can melt and squirt it out one tiny bead at a time.
It’s the way many 3D printers have worked for years, but it leaves a lot of room for user error. It feels imprecise: you snip your filament at an angle to get a sharp point, then largely… shove until it feels right. Then you press a button and cross your fingers that the K1C’s motorized extruder will take it from there. Or manually shove it some more and hope the filament doesn’t break inside. Or you physically remove the filament tube, like I always did with my old Ender 3, so at least you can be sure you’re pushing straight down into the extruder without binding.

This Pikachu, made of silk PLA, came out pretty well on the K1C.

Here it is with supports removed.

It could be worse! With the original K1, the filament pathway was so jam-prone that the company wound up designing and shipping multiple replacement parts during the time I had the printer, and even then, I had some trouble. With the K1C’s completely redesigned nozzles, I’ve mostly been able to shove filament in without issue.
But Bambu sidesteps all of that: there’s no needlepoint with a Bambu printer at all! Press a few buttons, insert uncut, flat-ended filament until you feel it being pulled away from your hand, and then, in my experience, it does the rest itself. The Bambu printer also automatically cuts off the molten bit when you’re ejecting filament, producing a nice clean-cut end I can effortlessly rewind without dragging on the printer’s internal parts. And, every single print, the Bambu purges that leftover molten filament into what owners have affectionately dubbed the “poop chute.”

The tiny non-touch screen is one of the few weaknesses of the Bambu P1P. I’m getting used to it.

The upshot: it took months before I saw my Bambu P1P jam for the first time. I’ve even had good results at times pushing old, brittle filament into Bambu printers. With the K1 and even K1C, it’s far less foolproof, as Creality makes you shove it through a filament runout sensor and a tight bend in the tubing before the extruder can grab it. I’ve broken the filament a couple of times in the K1C and many times in the original K1.
And if you do have to get inside that extruder to fix or replace parts, Bambu makes it a breeze: its magnetic cover just lifts off, and $35 buys you a complete modular hotend with heatsink, fan, heating element, and thermistor all attached — just two screws and a few easy cable pulls to swap it.

Bambu’s magnetic cover pops off to reveal just two screws and two easy-pull connectors to remove the hotend.

To get inside Creality’s, you have to unscrew screws immediately underneath, and parallel to, the greased rails.

With Creality, there are five screws you have to remove at uncomfortable angles and a silicone sleeve that requires prying, and then you have to reach underneath to get at its tiny rear-facing connectors. You may even have to pull out a pair of pliers because the Creality assembly line inexplicably glues those connectors into place.
Mind you, you’re not going to be doing that every day or even every month: you generally only replace a nozzle if it wears out, gets badly jammed, or if you want to print at higher resolution for more detail or at lower resolution for more speed. For reference, I wound up replacing worn parts of my Ender 3 Pro’s hotend twice in three years after a series of messy jams.

Creality’s bed is a bit harder to clean and maintain… and whose idea was it to purge filament next to a fan intake?

The last reason I think Bambu is a better choice for beginners is the print bed surface itself: how easily parts adhere and detach and how easy it is to clean. The Creality K1 series ships with a smooth PEI build plate that’s theoretically better for high temperature materials and initially gave my parts an incredibly smooth face. But it can be a challenge to remove some parts unless you apply a coating of the included glue stick (the kind kids use to paste paper together), and it’s easy to add too little or too much. I wound up tearing a chunk out of my build plate after too thin a coating.
Also, without a “poop chute,” I always found the K1 and K1C dripping tiny unwanted beads of plastic that’d wind up embedded in the bottom of models unless I carefully cleaned the print bed before each use.

This should give you a good glimpse at the Bambu’s plate texture.

The P1P, meanwhile, ships with a textured PEI-covered stainless steel plate that’s almost never missed for me, no glue required. Generally, my parts are already loose by the time the bed cools. You can buy such a plate for Creality, too, though, and still be paying less than the P1P after you have both.
Not all of Creality’s K1C choices are worse for beginners! While its “AI camera” attaches to the printer at a slightly awkward angle, the timelapses it creates are much easier to monitor and download than the ones from Bambu’s camera. I appreciate the K1C’s simple twist-to-lock filament reel holder (Bambu uses screws), the USB port to load files (Bambu only gives you microSD), more reliable Wi-Fi, and of course, the large 4.3-inch color touchscreen. It’s so much easier to reprint a successful design or navigate a thumb drive when you can actually tap a picture of each design on a screen, instead of Up-Down-Left-Right navigating through Bambu’s small text-only interface.

Creality’s K1C comes with a USB port and anti-vibration feet.

I also like that the Creality comes with anti-vibration feet, although, out of the box, my Bambu prints had more stable lines and steady surface textures even without them. The Bambu P1P is also quieter and can completely turn off its fans when idle. I’ve often come back to the Creality K1C after a day away and found it humming loudly in my garage.
Both companies need to work on their software, but Creality’s is definitely worse. While I’m having no real major trouble with Creality’s own Creality Print desktop app for basic 3D prints in PLA and flexible TPU plastic, I had major issues printing firmer and / or transparent PETG. It’s also missing loads of features compared to rival slicer apps you’d use to prepare your models for printing. (A slicer turns a 3D shape into printable horizontal layers and spits out code that tells the printer how to form each one.)

I had a easier time making transparent green PETG appear transparent on the Bambu (left).

Another comparison between P1P (left) and K1C (right) with the silver PETG.

You can use those rival slicers, but you may need to tune them for your printer yourself — some had even refused to support the K1 until Creality fulfilled obligations to open source its code. (It seems Creality has now done so.) OrcaSlicer is a popular third-party alternative that does have its own K1 profile, and it helped me print in PETG when Creality Print wouldn’t.
Creality’s mobile app, meanwhile, is gamified to the point that I want nothing to do with it. I just want a way to start and monitor prints, not earn points for printing trendy junk! I even had to turn off app notifications after I got bombarded with point earning opportunities each day, though it seems the company’s cut back on the notifications since launch.

The failed print I’m talking about: it’s for a wireless mouse.

But while Bambu’s slicer is great and its app doesn’t have the same annoyances, I’m not entirely sure I can trust the company’s cloud. One month after the company’s very good apology for its rogue printer incident, I had a similar issue. I went out to the garage one morning to find a model I’d printed directly from its cloud half-finished, stuck to my nozzle, with a second halfway printed copy of the model on the floor.
I’ve tried to print a few other models from its new MakerWorld, a place where you can supposedly find one-click prints validated to work on Bambu’s specific printers, no slicing or tweaks necessary, but one became a huge hunk of worthless plastic because it actually wasn’t validated. I guess I could always go with a private LAN-only connection to the printer instead of using the cloud.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see from here to an even easier 3D printing future. Bambu’s new A1 series printers now have completely tool-less hotend swaps — just pop the pieces off. The company’s working on new sensors that can detect when your filament tangles while it’s still on the roll, something that occasionally trips up every 3D printer I’ve yet used. I’ve also yet to see a 3D printer company ship their printers with a dry box to keep moisture out of their filament, but Creality does sell them separately, and it’s definitely something they could do to get us closer to that push-button, get-object future!
(I’m not saying you should buy an A1: I had more jams and lower-quality results with an A1 Mini than my P1P, the filament tangle detection still doesn’t work, and many things I print are too big for its bed. I haven’t gotten to test the full-size A1 since its recall.)

The biggest way 3D printers will earn trust, though, is if companies like Creality and Bambu stop shipping them before they’re ready. I can’t believe the terrible state the original Creality K1 first shipped in, and if you lurk in the right places on Reddit and Discord, you’ll hear veterans say that the Bambu P1P shipped with early issues, too. And I’ve read plenty of testimonials from Bambu customers who, like me with the Creality K1, were expected to open up their printers to fix broken things instead of sending them in for service. It’s a good reminder that these are hobbyist devices, not consumer products, even as these companies talk about democratizing 3D printing for everyone.
No matter which printer you’re eyeing, I strongly recommend steering clear of ones that have just launched. Wait for early adopters to iron things out! But if you’re itching to get printing, I’m pretty happy with the nearly two-year-old P1P.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Bambu P1P vs. Creality K1C: an ‘easy’ 3D printer showdown.

If you asked me to recommend an “easy” consumer 3D printer, I’d warn you first: despite countless innovations, you still can’t quite hit a button to reliably photocopy a 3D model. Buying a 3D printer is buying an entire hobby, one where — if you’re a lazy bum like me — many attempts will turn into worthless gobs of plastic.

But if you persisted, I’d tell you my one clear choice for lazy bums: the Bambu P1P.

What, a printer from the company that recalled its newest model and whose earlier ones once went rogue? Yep — because not only did Bambu handle those incidents with rapid apologies, investigations, transparency, and even refunds, the $599 Bambu P1P is also absolutely the easiest, most reliable 3D printer I’ve used.

It makes my stalwart old Ender 3 Pro look like a hunk of junk. It makes its closest competition, the $559 Creality K1C, feel like an inferior clone. I’ve spent months testing them side by side, and I’d personally pick the Bambu every time.

Don’t get me wrong: the K1C is the better choice for some tinkerers since its full enclosure, bed, and extra fan let you print higher temperature plastics like ABS as well as ones reinforced with glass or carbon fibers. (Bambu sells the $699 P1S for that.) And I did successfully use both the P1P and a pair of Creality K1 printers to produce dozens of objects over the past year, including pegboard mounts, figurines for my kids, and these badass unofficial Nerf blasters:

With either of these printers and a little knowledge of what’s easily 3D-printable, I can (sometimes) send an entire plate full of parts to these printers and expect them to all turn out.

But if you want fewer software and filament headaches, I would absolutely point you to Bambu. And I’d recommend you steer clear of the original Creality K1 entirely — I spent months struggling with issues that were instantly fixed when I swapped for the newer K1C model.

I took delivery of both the P1P and the original K1 last summer, and originally, I thought I’d be comparing both to the AnkerMake M5. They’re all part of a recent wave of printers promising a huge increase in speed and smarts.

But the Bambu P1P and Creality K1 series stood out as the most affordable full-size, full-featured CoreXY printers that claim you can print right out of the box — with no need to bolt together a printer frame or even tighten belts. And while you can’t “just start printing the moment your K1 arrives,” as Creality puts it, both printers are mostly prebuilt, pretuned, and ready to go 20 or 30 minutes after you cut the packing tape. You remove a few safety pieces; attach their screens, power cables, and filament roll holders; connect to your home network for updates; and then press a button for automated setup.

Each will automatically level their bed so your prints literally get off on the right foot. They tune their motors with vibrations so intense, they shake the entire surface the printers are standing on. That’s intentional — because excess movement ruins prints, and printing quickly creates more movement, they teach themselves to avoid frequencies that rattle too hard. As I alluded to before, they both have CoreXY kinematics systems that provide an incredibly speedy, stable bead of plastic without needing to sling your model back and forth on a moving bed.

But the next step is where the Bambu P1 and Creality K1 printers begin to diverge. When it’s time to stick your fishing line of consumable plastic into a Creality printer, you have to thread the needle, pushing a sharp point of plastic into a tube and through the extruder so that the hot nozzle can melt and squirt it out one tiny bead at a time.

It’s the way many 3D printers have worked for years, but it leaves a lot of room for user error. It feels imprecise: you snip your filament at an angle to get a sharp point, then largely… shove until it feels right. Then you press a button and cross your fingers that the K1C’s motorized extruder will take it from there. Or manually shove it some more and hope the filament doesn’t break inside. Or you physically remove the filament tube, like I always did with my old Ender 3, so at least you can be sure you’re pushing straight down into the extruder without binding.

It could be worse! With the original K1, the filament pathway was so jam-prone that the company wound up designing and shipping multiple replacement parts during the time I had the printer, and even then, I had some trouble. With the K1C’s completely redesigned nozzles, I’ve mostly been able to shove filament in without issue.

But Bambu sidesteps all of that: there’s no needlepoint with a Bambu printer at all! Press a few buttons, insert uncut, flat-ended filament until you feel it being pulled away from your hand, and then, in my experience, it does the rest itself. The Bambu printer also automatically cuts off the molten bit when you’re ejecting filament, producing a nice clean-cut end I can effortlessly rewind without dragging on the printer’s internal parts. And, every single print, the Bambu purges that leftover molten filament into what owners have affectionately dubbed the “poop chute.”

The upshot: it took months before I saw my Bambu P1P jam for the first time. I’ve even had good results at times pushing old, brittle filament into Bambu printers. With the K1 and even K1C, it’s far less foolproof, as Creality makes you shove it through a filament runout sensor and a tight bend in the tubing before the extruder can grab it. I’ve broken the filament a couple of times in the K1C and many times in the original K1.

And if you do have to get inside that extruder to fix or replace parts, Bambu makes it a breeze: its magnetic cover just lifts off, and $35 buys you a complete modular hotend with heatsink, fan, heating element, and thermistor all attached — just two screws and a few easy cable pulls to swap it.

With Creality, there are five screws you have to remove at uncomfortable angles and a silicone sleeve that requires prying, and then you have to reach underneath to get at its tiny rear-facing connectors. You may even have to pull out a pair of pliers because the Creality assembly line inexplicably glues those connectors into place.

Mind you, you’re not going to be doing that every day or even every month: you generally only replace a nozzle if it wears out, gets badly jammed, or if you want to print at higher resolution for more detail or at lower resolution for more speed. For reference, I wound up replacing worn parts of my Ender 3 Pro’s hotend twice in three years after a series of messy jams.

Creality’s bed is a bit harder to clean and maintain… and whose idea was it to purge filament next to a fan intake?

The last reason I think Bambu is a better choice for beginners is the print bed surface itself: how easily parts adhere and detach and how easy it is to clean. The Creality K1 series ships with a smooth PEI build plate that’s theoretically better for high temperature materials and initially gave my parts an incredibly smooth face. But it can be a challenge to remove some parts unless you apply a coating of the included glue stick (the kind kids use to paste paper together), and it’s easy to add too little or too much. I wound up tearing a chunk out of my build plate after too thin a coating.

Also, without a “poop chute,” I always found the K1 and K1C dripping tiny unwanted beads of plastic that’d wind up embedded in the bottom of models unless I carefully cleaned the print bed before each use.

The P1P, meanwhile, ships with a textured PEI-covered stainless steel plate that’s almost never missed for me, no glue required. Generally, my parts are already loose by the time the bed cools. You can buy such a plate for Creality, too, though, and still be paying less than the P1P after you have both.

Not all of Creality’s K1C choices are worse for beginners! While its “AI camera” attaches to the printer at a slightly awkward angle, the timelapses it creates are much easier to monitor and download than the ones from Bambu’s camera. I appreciate the K1C’s simple twist-to-lock filament reel holder (Bambu uses screws), the USB port to load files (Bambu only gives you microSD), more reliable Wi-Fi, and of course, the large 4.3-inch color touchscreen. It’s so much easier to reprint a successful design or navigate a thumb drive when you can actually tap a picture of each design on a screen, instead of Up-Down-Left-Right navigating through Bambu’s small text-only interface.

Creality’s K1C comes with a USB port and anti-vibration feet.

I also like that the Creality comes with anti-vibration feet, although, out of the box, my Bambu prints had more stable lines and steady surface textures even without them. The Bambu P1P is also quieter and can completely turn off its fans when idle. I’ve often come back to the Creality K1C after a day away and found it humming loudly in my garage.

Both companies need to work on their software, but Creality’s is definitely worse. While I’m having no real major trouble with Creality’s own Creality Print desktop app for basic 3D prints in PLA and flexible TPU plastic, I had major issues printing firmer and / or transparent PETG. It’s also missing loads of features compared to rival slicer apps you’d use to prepare your models for printing. (A slicer turns a 3D shape into printable horizontal layers and spits out code that tells the printer how to form each one.)

I had a easier time making transparent green PETG appear transparent on the Bambu (left).

Another comparison between P1P (left) and K1C (right) with the silver PETG.

You can use those rival slicers, but you may need to tune them for your printer yourself — some had even refused to support the K1 until Creality fulfilled obligations to open source its code. (It seems Creality has now done so.) OrcaSlicer is a popular third-party alternative that does have its own K1 profile, and it helped me print in PETG when Creality Print wouldn’t.

Creality’s mobile app, meanwhile, is gamified to the point that I want nothing to do with it. I just want a way to start and monitor prints, not earn points for printing trendy junk! I even had to turn off app notifications after I got bombarded with point earning opportunities each day, though it seems the company’s cut back on the notifications since launch.

But while Bambu’s slicer is great and its app doesn’t have the same annoyances, I’m not entirely sure I can trust the company’s cloud. One month after the company’s very good apology for its rogue printer incident, I had a similar issue. I went out to the garage one morning to find a model I’d printed directly from its cloud half-finished, stuck to my nozzle, with a second halfway printed copy of the model on the floor.

I’ve tried to print a few other models from its new MakerWorld, a place where you can supposedly find one-click prints validated to work on Bambu’s specific printers, no slicing or tweaks necessary, but one became a huge hunk of worthless plastic because it actually wasn’t validated. I guess I could always go with a private LAN-only connection to the printer instead of using the cloud.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see from here to an even easier 3D printing future. Bambu’s new A1 series printers now have completely tool-less hotend swaps — just pop the pieces off. The company’s working on new sensors that can detect when your filament tangles while it’s still on the roll, something that occasionally trips up every 3D printer I’ve yet used. I’ve also yet to see a 3D printer company ship their printers with a dry box to keep moisture out of their filament, but Creality does sell them separately, and it’s definitely something they could do to get us closer to that push-button, get-object future!

(I’m not saying you should buy an A1: I had more jams and lower-quality results with an A1 Mini than my P1P, the filament tangle detection still doesn’t work, and many things I print are too big for its bed. I haven’t gotten to test the full-size A1 since its recall.)

The biggest way 3D printers will earn trust, though, is if companies like Creality and Bambu stop shipping them before they’re ready. I can’t believe the terrible state the original Creality K1 first shipped in, and if you lurk in the right places on Reddit and Discord, you’ll hear veterans say that the Bambu P1P shipped with early issues, too. And I’ve read plenty of testimonials from Bambu customers who, like me with the Creality K1, were expected to open up their printers to fix broken things instead of sending them in for service. It’s a good reminder that these are hobbyist devices, not consumer products, even as these companies talk about democratizing 3D printing for everyone.

No matter which printer you’re eyeing, I strongly recommend steering clear of ones that have just launched. Wait for early adopters to iron things out! But if you’re itching to get printing, I’m pretty happy with the nearly two-year-old P1P.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Read More 

Ventje’s eVentje.

The eVentje custom buildout is a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic VW Camper in Europe. Volkswagen’s ID Buzz now has a custom camper build-out that’s just as clever and charming as the electric microbus. It’s called eVentje, and it’s now available for general sale in Europe.
Designed and sold by Ventje, a small but rapidly growing company based in the Netherlands, the eVentje conversion is as good as it gets until VW finally releases a California edition of the ID Buzz — which is still a few years away at least. That long delay since European sales began in 2022 has made room for a burgeoning aftermarket for ID Buzz camper products, including the excellent and relatively inexpensive Ququq camping box I previously reviewed.
I first tested a Ventje camper built on top of a VW Transporter T5 cargo van in 2022, before living and working from an ID Buzz for a few weeks in 2023. In 2024, I finally got to test the union of the two for a weekend. And let me tell you, this is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ID Buzz has always been a showstopper when driving past onlookers — now, the show continues when the doors open to reveal that wonderfully adaptive Ventje interior.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Verge (@verge)

The overall design of the Ventje camper still relies on more than 100 magnets to keep all those wooden surfaces aligned and locked in place. There’s still a kitchen accessible from inside and out, a pop-top tent, and a multipurpose interior that converts from a lounge to a bed to a luxurious outside furniture set in minutes. Only now, things have been refined throughout with one big addition: a folding table and hidden stools to create an outside bar. Swoon.
The kitchen has seen several improvements that provide more adaptable prep surfaces — always a challenge in a small space — and smarter use of storage. Ventje also moved to not one but two induction cooktops thanks to the inclusion of a 2200W inverter and 2160Wh leisure battery that charges from the VW’s driving battery, a 350-watt solar panel, and a mini shore-power outlet located on the lower backside of the van.

There’s even a bar.

Ventje also makes it easier to keep all your own gear powered with eight USB sockets (4x USB-A, 4x USB-C), a 12V car jack, 3x wireless charging surfaces, and 3x 230V AC sockets for anyone looking to take advantage of their company’s hybrid office policy. There are also more lighting options including dimmable LED light strips and a closable sunroof in the pop-top tent.
VW’s poorly designed software still frustrates the otherwise exceptional driving experience, which remains rattle-free even with all of Ventje’s customizations. One would expect VW to eventually enable a camping mode on the ID Buzz, a feature already found on its existing California series campers. That would make heating and cooling the ID Buzz more intuitive when parked and allow owners to more easily disable the interior motion alarm when locking all the doors at night.
The eVentje can sleep four but is currently highway legal for only two people. It’s built around the regular-wheelbase ID Buzz, not the long-wheelbase model coming to Europe and the US (finally!) later this year. Nevertheless, my wife and I didn’t want for more space, even with the dog coming along on the trip.

The eVentje, like the ID Buzz, isn’t cheap, and soon, in Europe, it will have to compete with VW’s new PHEV “T7” California camper going on sale in June for what’s probably about the same price. But that model lacks the retrofuturistic appeal of the all-electric ID Buzz, and its interior is arguably less flexible — and definitely less fun — than Ventje’s warm custom design.
The modified eVentje ID Buzz starts at €95,000 (about $103,000) in Europe. An order placed today will ship in nine months to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Ventje says that it’s also planning to expand to the UK and US in time.
Importantly, Ventje is doing what VW hasn’t since first teasing the ID Buzz all the way back in 2017: deliver a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic Type 2 camper.
Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Ventje’s eVentje.

The eVentje custom buildout is a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic VW Camper in Europe.

Volkswagen’s ID Buzz now has a custom camper build-out that’s just as clever and charming as the electric microbus. It’s called eVentje, and it’s now available for general sale in Europe.

Designed and sold by Ventje, a small but rapidly growing company based in the Netherlands, the eVentje conversion is as good as it gets until VW finally releases a California edition of the ID Buzz — which is still a few years away at least. That long delay since European sales began in 2022 has made room for a burgeoning aftermarket for ID Buzz camper products, including the excellent and relatively inexpensive Ququq camping box I previously reviewed.

I first tested a Ventje camper built on top of a VW Transporter T5 cargo van in 2022, before living and working from an ID Buzz for a few weeks in 2023. In 2024, I finally got to test the union of the two for a weekend. And let me tell you, this is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The ID Buzz has always been a showstopper when driving past onlookers — now, the show continues when the doors open to reveal that wonderfully adaptive Ventje interior.

The overall design of the Ventje camper still relies on more than 100 magnets to keep all those wooden surfaces aligned and locked in place. There’s still a kitchen accessible from inside and out, a pop-top tent, and a multipurpose interior that converts from a lounge to a bed to a luxurious outside furniture set in minutes. Only now, things have been refined throughout with one big addition: a folding table and hidden stools to create an outside bar. Swoon.

The kitchen has seen several improvements that provide more adaptable prep surfaces — always a challenge in a small space — and smarter use of storage. Ventje also moved to not one but two induction cooktops thanks to the inclusion of a 2200W inverter and 2160Wh leisure battery that charges from the VW’s driving battery, a 350-watt solar panel, and a mini shore-power outlet located on the lower backside of the van.

Ventje also makes it easier to keep all your own gear powered with eight USB sockets (4x USB-A, 4x USB-C), a 12V car jack, 3x wireless charging surfaces, and 3x 230V AC sockets for anyone looking to take advantage of their company’s hybrid office policy. There are also more lighting options including dimmable LED light strips and a closable sunroof in the pop-top tent.

VW’s poorly designed software still frustrates the otherwise exceptional driving experience, which remains rattle-free even with all of Ventje’s customizations. One would expect VW to eventually enable a camping mode on the ID Buzz, a feature already found on its existing California series campers. That would make heating and cooling the ID Buzz more intuitive when parked and allow owners to more easily disable the interior motion alarm when locking all the doors at night.

The eVentje can sleep four but is currently highway legal for only two people. It’s built around the regular-wheelbase ID Buzz, not the long-wheelbase model coming to Europe and the US (finally!) later this year. Nevertheless, my wife and I didn’t want for more space, even with the dog coming along on the trip.

The eVentje, like the ID Buzz, isn’t cheap, and soon, in Europe, it will have to compete with VW’s new PHEV “T7” California camper going on sale in June for what’s probably about the same price. But that model lacks the retrofuturistic appeal of the all-electric ID Buzz, and its interior is arguably less flexible — and definitely less fun — than Ventje’s warm custom design.

The modified eVentje ID Buzz starts at €95,000 (about $103,000) in Europe. An order placed today will ship in nine months to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Ventje says that it’s also planning to expand to the UK and US in time.

Importantly, Ventje is doing what VW hasn’t since first teasing the ID Buzz all the way back in 2017: deliver a worthy all-electric successor to the iconic Type 2 camper.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Read More 

Tap the waveform icon, circled above, to search with sound. | Screenshots: YouTube Music

The Android YouTube Music app is rolling out a feature that’s part Shazam and part your friend when you say, “hey what’s that song that goes…” right before you hum out a bar. The feature lets you hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of a song to figure out what it is.
If you have the new feature, you’ll see a new waveform icon next to the microphone icon that appears when you tap the search button in the upper right corner of the app. Tap this, and the app will start listening. It’s not too shabby, either! When I tested, it was able to identify actual recordings with what seemed like uncanny speed, making it a great replacement for Shazam.
As far as listening to me hum, it accurately picked out most of the songs I sang, whistled, and hummed at my phone, but there were some funny misses:

Screenshot: YouTube Music
To be fair, some Tom Waits songs make for good Halloween music.

This is not Tom Waits’ “Fumblin’ With the Blues.” Even a little bit.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

This song has a great string arrangement, though.

This was supposed to be “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants.

Screenshot: YouTube Music
Eh, I’ll take it.

I was whistling “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf here. At least Finnish hair metal throwback band Reckless Love is at least in the ballpark, kind of?
I can’t fault it too much for the misses. I was throwing songs at it that I’d guess most people wouldn’t pick out from a few seconds of humming. Overall, it works quickly, perhaps faster than the same feature that Google Assistant has had for years. Humming to search has reportedly been spotted in YouTube Music for iOS in recent months, too, though it doesn’t appear to have gone out widely there, yet.

Tap the waveform icon, circled above, to search with sound. | Screenshots: YouTube Music

The Android YouTube Music app is rolling out a feature that’s part Shazam and part your friend when you say, “hey what’s that song that goes…” right before you hum out a bar. The feature lets you hum, whistle, sing, or play a recording of a song to figure out what it is.

If you have the new feature, you’ll see a new waveform icon next to the microphone icon that appears when you tap the search button in the upper right corner of the app. Tap this, and the app will start listening. It’s not too shabby, either! When I tested, it was able to identify actual recordings with what seemed like uncanny speed, making it a great replacement for Shazam.

As far as listening to me hum, it accurately picked out most of the songs I sang, whistled, and hummed at my phone, but there were some funny misses:

Screenshot: YouTube Music
To be fair, some Tom Waits songs make for good Halloween music.

This is not Tom Waits’ “Fumblin’ With the Blues.” Even a little bit.

Screenshot: YouTube Music

This song has a great string arrangement, though.

This was supposed to be “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants.

Screenshot: YouTube Music
Eh, I’ll take it.

I was whistling “Bat Out of Hell” by Meat Loaf here. At least Finnish hair metal throwback band Reckless Love is at least in the ballpark, kind of?

I can’t fault it too much for the misses. I was throwing songs at it that I’d guess most people wouldn’t pick out from a few seconds of humming. Overall, it works quickly, perhaps faster than the same feature that Google Assistant has had for years. Humming to search has reportedly been spotted in YouTube Music for iOS in recent months, too, though it doesn’t appear to have gone out widely there, yet.

Read More 

Image: Bungie

A jury found on Friday that Phoenix Digital, which owns the cheat mod site AimJunkies, is guilty of violating Bungie copyrights when it created cheats for Destiny 2, reported Stephen Totilo, who has written about Bungie’s cheating lawsuits for Axios. The landmark decision may be the first time a jury has agreed that a cheat creator violated a gaming company’s copyrights.
Yesterday’s jury decision awarded Bungie (PDF) a tidy sum of $63,210. Bungie counsel James Barker said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is “committed to our players and will continue to protect them against cheats, including taking this and future cases all the way to trial.”
In 2021, Bungie sued AimJunkies and four defendants (here’s a PDF of the complaint), alleging, among other things, that they hacked Destiny 2 to copy the code used to make cheats. Some of Bungie’s complaints — like that AimJunkies violated a DMCA provision forbidding circumvention of copyright protection tech — went to arbitration and saw Bungie winning $4 million. AimJunkies appealed after the judge confirmed that award. That appeal is still in process, as Polygon wrote this week.

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer tells me his group will fight this, moving to dismiss the verdict and, if that fails, appeal.The dispute here is whether Bungie truly proved a copyright violation occurred.— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) May 25, 2024

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer will move to dismiss the jury’s verdict and appeal it if necessary, according to Totilo. However that shakes out, the verdict is significant, given that cheating lawsuits tend to conclude in other ways, like settlements. (For example, a judge shut down a Grand Theft Auto cheat distributor in 2018 following a Take-Two Interactive lawsuit, or when Bungie settled another cheating lawsuit in 2022 for $13.5 million.)
The win may only mean pocket change for Bungie, and it won’t likely put an end to online cheating, but it does put a jury on record about the legality of creating such cheats. That makes this more significant than the pocket-change-for-Bungie $63,000 award lets on.

Image: Bungie

A jury found on Friday that Phoenix Digital, which owns the cheat mod site AimJunkies, is guilty of violating Bungie copyrights when it created cheats for Destiny 2, reported Stephen Totilo, who has written about Bungie’s cheating lawsuits for Axios. The landmark decision may be the first time a jury has agreed that a cheat creator violated a gaming company’s copyrights.

Yesterday’s jury decision awarded Bungie (PDF) a tidy sum of $63,210. Bungie counsel James Barker said in a statement emailed to The Verge that the company is “committed to our players and will continue to protect them against cheats, including taking this and future cases all the way to trial.”

In 2021, Bungie sued AimJunkies and four defendants (here’s a PDF of the complaint), alleging, among other things, that they hacked Destiny 2 to copy the code used to make cheats. Some of Bungie’s complaints — like that AimJunkies violated a DMCA provision forbidding circumvention of copyright protection tech — went to arbitration and saw Bungie winning $4 million. AimJunkies appealed after the judge confirmed that award. That appeal is still in process, as Polygon wrote this week.

Phoenix Digital founder David Schaefer will move to dismiss the jury’s verdict and appeal it if necessary, according to Totilo. However that shakes out, the verdict is significant, given that cheating lawsuits tend to conclude in other ways, like settlements. (For example, a judge shut down a Grand Theft Auto cheat distributor in 2018 following a Take-Two Interactive lawsuit, or when Bungie settled another cheating lawsuit in 2022 for $13.5 million.)

The win may only mean pocket change for Bungie, and it won’t likely put an end to online cheating, but it does put a jury on record about the legality of creating such cheats. That makes this more significant than the pocket-change-for-Bungie $63,000 award lets on.

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve curated a collection of great gifts that should appease any dad, from tabletop games and tools to some of our favorite tech. It’s true that spending time with dear old dad on Father’s Day is probably the best gift you can give him, but I bet he wouldn’t say no to a Garmin or a fancy-schmancy set of tools come Sunday, June 16th. After all, who can resist the allure of the perfect kit?

If you’re stumped on what to give your dad (or any paternal figure) next month, we’ve assembled a medley of tried-and-true gift ideas, each of which comes with a big stamp of approval from a Verge staffer. Our father-friendly recs span the entire spectrum of tech, from plush noise-canceling headphones and ultra-portable wall chargers to an Android-based ebook reader that’s as small as your smartphone. We even have a few analog picks and suggestions for the dad who refuses to grow up because, let’s be honest, Lego sets have only gotten better over the last decade.
Feel free to use the filters below to jump between price points. And if you find yourself still seeking the perfect gift for your dad, husband, partner, grandpa, etc., be sure to peruse our full slate of gift guides.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We’ve curated a collection of great gifts that should appease any dad, from tabletop games and tools to some of our favorite tech.

It’s true that spending time with dear old dad on Father’s Day is probably the best gift you can give him, but I bet he wouldn’t say no to a Garmin or a fancy-schmancy set of tools come Sunday, June 16th. After all, who can resist the allure of the perfect kit?

If you’re stumped on what to give your dad (or any paternal figure) next month, we’ve assembled a medley of tried-and-true gift ideas, each of which comes with a big stamp of approval from a Verge staffer. Our father-friendly recs span the entire spectrum of tech, from plush noise-canceling headphones and ultra-portable wall chargers to an Android-based ebook reader that’s as small as your smartphone. We even have a few analog picks and suggestions for the dad who refuses to grow up because, let’s be honest, Lego sets have only gotten better over the last decade.

Feel free to use the filters below to jump between price points. And if you find yourself still seeking the perfect gift for your dad, husband, partner, grandpa, etc., be sure to peruse our full slate of gift guides.

Read More