New year, new Switch, new Severance

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 67, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy Switch week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)...

Jan 19, 2025 - 21:01

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 67, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy Switch week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been watching Black Doves and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, reading about Lorne Michaels and rodeos and Ben Shapiro, restarting Twin Peaks in honor of David Lynch, wading nervously into Lemon8 and RedNote, catching up on old episodes of Working It Out, and watching altogether too many Balatro strategy videos.

I also have for you my most anticipated gadget of the year, the new season of Severance, an incredibly cool tech design exhibit to explore, a nifty new AI productivity tool, and much more. This week has been wild, with the potential TikTok ban and the upcoming US inauguration and seemingly 40,000 other things happening — but we’ve got some great ways to decompress. Let’s dive in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / cooking / building / cutting into small pieces this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

Installer

/ A weekly newsletter by David Pierce designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.

The Drop

The Nintendo Switch 2. Nintendo is launching this thing in a typically odd, typically Nintendo-y way — so all we’ve really seen of the new device is a two-minute video with some details and vibes. But I’ve seen enough. This is the Switch successor I was hoping for.Severance season 2. I just rewatched the first season and loved it even more the second time. One of my favorite shows in years, and by all accounts, the second season is worth the wait. I’d put the first season up against any season of anything, so that’s high praise.The Nokia Design Archive. A bunch of researchers spent several years putting together a massive, interconnected history of Nokia’s design work — from its wacky phone concepts to its biggest ideas about the future of everything. You could spend weeks digging around in there.An Update on Our Family. As a still new-ish dad, I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of my personal and family life to share online. This story is, like, the opposite: what if you created a personal and family life just to share it online? It’s a wild ride.Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. While you’re waiting on the new Switch, here’s a new game for the old one. I love Donkey Kong the way a lot of people love Zelda and Mario, so the idea of an updated, upgraded, super-challenging side-scroller is exactly up my alley.“The Science of the Matrix with Laurence Fishburne.” A somewhat unexpected episode of Neil Degrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast, but oh BOY was it fun to listen to Morpheus himself talk through red pills, the absence of spoons, and The Matrix’s deepest thoughts about everything.Raycast Focus. Raycast has become the first app I install on a new Mac, and I use it for everything. Love this new feature, which can block specific apps or websites — and uses a countdown timer to help keep you focused. SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night. Another one for the SNL 50th-anniversary content machine: a four-part NBC doc about some of the biggest moments in the show’s history. It’s an officially sanctioned thing, so don’t expect fireworks, but it’s a fun dive into the archives.ChatGPT Tasks. A super basic feature so far, and pretty buggy — it invented a dentist appointment that I didn’t have? — but I’m really intrigued by the combination of a to-do list app and chatbot. I have it sending me a new oatmeal recipe and workout idea every morning, and it’s a pretty cool system.

Screen share

It is an unintentional tradition at The Verge that new people always seem to start in incredibly chaotic situations. Often, it’ll be a writer’s first day on, like, the day of the iPhone launch, or they’ll be 15 minutes out of HR orientation and Elon Musk will suddenly buy Twitter. For Todd Haselton, our new deputy editor for reviews and commerce, the chaos was CES. Todd started at the beginning of this year and was immediately inundated with 90,000 stories about weird gadgets nobody’s ever heard of. Welcome to the team!

I like to ask new Verge staffers to share their homescreen with us to see what we can learn about them by how they use their phone. You can fake it at work, but you can’t fake your phone, you know? Here’s Todd’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 16 Pro Max. I’ve been using the biggest iPhone for years. I also have an old Galaxy Z Fold 3 that I’ve been thinking about upgrading to another folding phone.

The wallpaper: It’s a picture of me at my graduation from Lehigh University with my grandfather and my uncle, who also went to Lehigh. They’re my role models. It’s a reminder to myself to work hard and to be thankful for what I have. (My twin brother is cut off in this shot. Sorry, bro.)

My lockscreen background is a rotating picture of my family.

The apps: Photos, Calendar, GroupMe, Xbox Cloud Gaming, ChatGPT, Gmail, The Verge, Messages, Phone, Safari, Camera.

David, are you sure you wanted me to do this? It might be the most boring homescreen you’ve ever published. It’s almost the default.

GroupMe is for staying in touch with my college friends and also where my town’s volunteer fire department keeps in touch. I haven’t been as active as I’d like to be since the summer. Xbox Cloud Gaming is there because I always tell myself I’m going to have all this free time for gaming on the go. But I don’t.

The photo frame widget rotates pictures of trips I’ve taken and family members. This is a shot from my brother’s wedding in Santa Monica.

Just in case people think it’s rigged: the Verge icon was there before I started. I’ve been reading since the site was started, and I subscribed before I joined.

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

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. I just started it so don’t ask me what it’s about. I spend most nights reading on a Kindle Paperwhite. If you’re looking for other recommendations, though, some other books I just finished and enjoyed: Trust by Hernan Diaz, Stoner by John Williams, and The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.I mostly game on Friday nights with my college friends from about 9PM to 11PM. (We’re all dads now, so… early bedtimes.) It’s a ritual we started during the pandemic, and it’s a good and totally mindless way for us to stay in touch. Gamers are gonna hate, but right now, it’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with the Nuketown map on repeat. Just a classic map.I’ve been really into the McDonald’s two-cheeseburger meal. It’s a little restaurant nearby with good prices, and the burgers are solid. I get it DoorDashed. Starting a new job is always a little stressful (in a good way!), and this is my stress food I guess. The Dasher is waiting for my order right now.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“Unhinged, a delightfully simple mood tracker app that doubles as a micro-journal. I’ve always struggled to stick with journaling, but this makes it effortless (it takes just 15 seconds) to capture my thoughts and details about my day.” – Austin

“Sakamoto Days on Netflix. It’s an anime about the best hit man in the world who retired and settled down with a family. Extremely tropey, I know. Mostly just watching to see this cutie kick ass.” – Ryan

“Trying to get better at Dutch, and downloaded the excellent Mochi app. Like Anki but so much better in every way.” – Hannes

“I just discovered Stremio and I have a profound feeling it will change my life forever. Okay, at least the way I consume media. With all the price hikes and many services not available in the Netherlands, this seems like a great alternative.” – Jasper

“MacDroid. I always back up my full-resolution photos to an external hard drive every few months in addition to Google Photos, but damn is it a pain to do that on the Mac. Tried MacDroid today and instantly signed up for a lifetime subscription. So much time and stress saved!” – Josh

“Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Xbox. It’s the best Indiana Jones thing made in decades. I’m shocked at how much fun it is to explore and how they hit the tone perfectly. And wow did the voice actor nail young Harrison Ford. It’s almost eerie.” – DSquiz

“I started reading One Piece from the beginning last year after watching the Netflix show — it’s very fun, it’s lighthearted, the art’s great, and the characters are all lovable and easy to latch on to.” – Luis

“Got back into Apple Arcade JUST to play Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! A solitaire horse racing game developed by Game Freak (the Pokemon people), originally for 3DS, even though it looks SO mobile. It is amazingly fun and I cannot stop playing.” – Uli

“The amazing Safari extension Keyword Search! It allows you to run custom web searches by adding a keyword or letter, so adding ‘wiki’ or ‘yt’ will search those respective sites instead of your default search engine.” – JME

“Have you tried News Tower yet? Total blast.” – Dave

Signing off

The Australian Open is happening right now, which means it’s the part of the tennis calendar where I wake up in the morning and it’s 6AM and somehow half the matches are already over and something really exciting is inevitably happening. It’s delightful. The tennis has been great, but the real story of this year’s tournament is the YouTube channel.

For complicated rights reasons, the organization behind the Open is streaming the matches on YouTube, but not like you’d think: everything is live-animated and everyone looks like Wii Sports characters. It’s deeply bizarre and extremely hokey, but against all odds, it totally works? The Guardian has a good story on how it works and why it’s necessary. I always thought these “alternative broadcasts” were just silliness, but I think there might be something here. Next year: real tennis, but make it Mario Tennis. I’ll be there.

See you next week!