Touchscreens everywhere!
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 150, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy Halloween, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I was in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee on a family vacation. It was delightful (and the reason this week's Installer is a little short). I've also been reading about job hunting and 30 Rock and crypto detectives, testing the DuckDuckGo browser after a bunch of you told me to add it to the list, watching the adorable new Pixar short over and over, getting caught up on VisionQuest, playing with my new Pebble Index …
Here’s why you can’t shake those unhinged political texts
"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"
"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."
"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"
"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."
"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."
If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …
Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China with iOS 27.3
Apple will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3, the company announced on its Chinese newsroom website, as reported by MacRumors. The Apple Intelligence features will be available first in an iOS 27.3 beta that's set to launch on November 4th, with a full iOS 27.3 release scheduled for December.
This launch doesn't bring the new Siri AI to China. Instead, Apple is launching several of its earlier Apple Intelligence features like notification summaries, real-time translation, rewriting and proofreading tools, visual intelligence, and removing objects from photos. Apple also says it has worked with Ailbaba to add support for its Q …
Exclusive details about Akai’s MPC Sample Key
Akai teased its new MPC Sample Key on Instagram earlier this week, and said it plans to open-source its software so the modding community can hack it to their hearts' delight. While there's no word yet on when the device will launch or how much it will cost, The Verge has received exclusive images of the upcoming instrument that offer some details about its feature set.
While the Sample Key shares many of the same controls as the MPC Sample - including the three context-sensitive encoders, a large main encoder - it seems designed for pitched sample playback, rather than chopping up drums. In fact, the "chop" button from the MPC Sample is m …
Sam Altman says it’s better for RAM to be in a data center than on your desk
Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it's "terrible" to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI's impact on math, Altman said:
"A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.
But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybo …
The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually.
The shared "policy token" signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It will live within a website's robots.txt file, which has long signaled which web crawlers can and can't scrape a site - whether for search indexing, archiving, or …
Google’s satellite AI server transmits its first response to Earth
Google's AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space:
Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core. ✨
Google says it tried out other space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts as well. The test is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space. Google launched the satellite into orbit earlier this …
Starbucks wants to use AI to show you a ‘personalized digital menu’ at the drive-thru
Starbucks could eventually show you a personalized digital menu when you pull up to the drive-thru. During an earnings call on Thursday, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is going to explore "experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus, and make payment more effortless," as spotted earlier by More Perfect Union.
It sounds similar to the technology that Taco Bell is experimenting with, which could change the layout, content, and visuals on a digital menu board "on a car-by-car basis." McDonald's also recently showed off an AI-powered feature it's piloting at a handful of dri …
The delightfully messy state of Apple gadgets
The iPhone has more screens! The MacBook has a touchscreen! The HomeView does CarPlay apps! For the first time in a long time, Apple is in a period of unabashed gadget experimentation, and while the final results aren't always perfect, it's fun to watch the most successful product maker try some new things again. Even when, in this case, "trying" amounts to just slapping a touch panel on a lovely new MacBook Pro - just to see if you might use it.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate the merits of a touchscreen laptop, Nilay explains why he is absolutely positively going to buy the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, …
Rivian’s autonomy gamble faces its first real test
During an hourlong earnings call last night, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe spent less time talking about the production ramp of the all-important R2 SUV than he did hyping the company's still-unproven autonomous vehicle ambitions.
But the company faces a crucial test later this year, when it rolls out its point-to-point hands-free driving feature - first to its own employees for testing and validation in 2026, and later to customers in 2027. Following that, Rivian says it will launch its first robotaxi vehicles in partnership with Uber in 2028. In short, the next two years will determine whether Rivian will succeed or fail in its high-stakes ques …