New tech season is here

Installer No. 143 opens with the fall gadget rush already underway, alongside iPhone Duo videos, the Tiny Awards nominees, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

“your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world”

iPhone 18 Pro, refined

No reinvention this year. The Pro gets a variable-aperture main lens, a better battery, a new chip, and new colors, including black.

“This is a refinement year for the Pro series”

Everything costs more

Pro starting prices climbed by $100, and older iPhones went up too. The battery improvements alone may still justify the jump.

“Their starting prices got a $100 bump”

AirPods 5 get serious

The open-ear AirPods now have better active noise cancellation, and the pricier model adds on-stem volume controls borrowed from the AirPods Pro.

“especially since they start at $129”

Meta wants an agent everywhere

Muse chats, searches the web on your behalf, and plugs into apps like Instagram and Gmail. It is free with usage limits that are hard to actually hit.

Fast, and often wrong

Muse impressed on speed and failed on accuracy. A day of casual use produced invented song lyrics, which is a bad look for a general-purpose assistant.

“it hallucinated a lot, including making up lyrics to a song my toddler loves”

Sony revives the XM4

A surprise second generation of the WH-1000XM4 arrives a year after the original was discontinued, with the same design, a retuned sound profile, and Bluetooth 6.

“They look the same, but have an updated sound profile and a bump up to Bluetooth 6.”

The tradeoff is battery

Noise cancelling runtime slips to 27 hours. At $299.99, roughly $150 under the XM6, that is an easy concession to make.

Hue syncs your TV

Philips Hue's Play Screen Sync is a camera that sits on the television and matches your Hue lights to what is on screen. It costs $119.99.

“Unnecessary? Yes. Awesome? Also yes.”

Dbrand goes minimal

The new MNML line drops the usual loud branding for solid colors across iPhone, Pixel, and Galaxy cases.

“I don't usually like Dbrand cases (or Dbrand's whole vibe, really), but I think these look nice.”

A power bank with coolant

Ugreen's $149.99 MagFlow Pro packs 10,000mAh, liquid cooling, and visible flowing coolant. Whether that helps charging is anyone's guess.

“Will that make much of a difference? I'm not sure, but I'd love to see it for myself.”

SB Nation previews The Verge

SB Nation's new app builds a home feed around the teams you follow plus live game chats. Nilay Patel worked on it, and The Verge's own app will borrow the approach.

“The Verge's forthcoming app will use the same ideas.”

Emma Roth's tidy dock

The Verge news writer runs a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, the last Note ever made, with a pelican-watching photo as wallpaper and only the essentials on screen.

“My homepage might be relatively bare, but it includes the essentials”

Chaos in the app drawer

One swipe past the home screen and the order collapses into Reddit, Slack, and Sam's Club sharing a page. The Samsung folder has not been opened in ages.

Zomboid, Yuka, a modded Vita

Roth is back on Project Zomboid, uses Yuka to scan food and beauty products for risky additives, and her modded PlayStation Vita now beats her Steam Deck.

“It's a PC game that's basically like a cross between a hardcore zombie game and The Sims”

What readers sent in

The community pitched Adults on Hulu, a stack of daily puzzle sites, Demon Copperhead, the Clicks Power Keyboard, and one very specific IKEA mod.

“IKEA made a Skyrim mod where Matt Berry voices a KALLAX shelf.”