With Copilot Plus, new and improved Windows PCs are here

Hi friends! Welcome to installer #43, your guide to the best and Border-most important thing in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I’m so excited you found us, and you can also read all the back issues on the website installer home page.)

This week I’ve been reading about memes It is telepathy It is John Lennon’s wristwatchattending Presumed innocent It is Ren Faire, testing Genspark for AI research, remaking my home screen with Dumbifyand experimenting with overnight oats in an attempt to make mornings less chaotic. (Turns out, peanut butter makes just about everything 20% ​​better.)

I’ve also got you covered with a new tech podcast, some useful new gadgets, a new calendar app, the game that will dominate your weekend, and more. Let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part installer are your ideas and tips. What are you doing now? What great apps/books/podcasts/shows/games/recipes/whatever else you’ve recently discovered and loved? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone who might like installertell them to sign up here.)

• The Asus VivoBook S 15. Copilot Plus PCs arrive. It’s been a strange launch, with all the complications of Recall, but we’re starting to get a sense of what this new era of Qualcomm-powered Windows devices can do. Until here, I’m quite optimisticbut I’m still waiting to see how the new Surfaces will develop.
• Elden Ring Shadow of Erdtree. The general vibe of this huge new DLC is basically “it’s Elden Ring, only somehow even more so.” Given how deep and big this game already was, and how many hours we’d already spent on it, that’s all you can ask for.
• Irritating the cancer. If all of Dropout Presents’ stand-up specials are as entertaining as this one from Hank Green, we’re in for a slew of new comedies. Green here is as funny and goofy as ever and extremely Hank Green. It’s a time you won’t regret.
• The Xreal Beam Pro. Such a fun and different idea about how smart glasses should work: instead of trying to build everything into the glasses, Xreal is putting all the intelligence and software into a separate, fairly inexpensive, smartphone-style device. I’m excited to test this one out.
• The plan backfired: the Vaping Wars. The story of Juul may forever be one of the strangest things to ever happen in Silicon Valley. This podcast delves into that story, along with the confusing social debate over vaping, the government’s struggle to keep up, and where things go from here.
• Arc for iPad. It’s still my favorite browser, finally available on almost all my devices. (Android when, Arc folks!?!) The app isn’t exactly optimized for the iPad – it’s missing some keyboard shortcuts and is really just a scaled-up version of the iPhone app – but it syncs and works well and I’ll definitely take advantage of it.
• Amie for Windows. Big week for cross-platform apps! Amie is one of my favorite calendar/to-do apps and has gotten a lot more sophisticated in recent months. If you’re the all-purpose type and appreciate charming design, give this one a try.
• The Logitech Keys-to-Go 2. I’ve had the original Keys-To-Go in my bag for a few years as a super lightweight and convenient way to get a few things done with my phone or iPad. It feels like a big upgrade: still light, still small, but with a better set of keys. $80 is a lot, but I suspect I’ll end up buying one.
• A feeling of rebellion. An incredibly well-produced and deeply reported podcast about some decades-old ideas about AI and how we can use and live with technology. The story here, about hippies and capitalists and the government and big business, is a kind of technology story, all wrapped up in 10 episodes. Loving it so far.
• Clipbud. Clipboard history is useful and nice, but having one place with all the text you frequently type – your shipping address, stock email replies, important links, all of it – is life-changing. The built-in text replacement and personal dictionary features (on iOS and Android, respectively) do a lot of this, and apps like Snippety They are mega powerful, but this new one is very pleasant to use.

I think Nick Quah introduced me to more great podcasts than anyone else in the world. Whether in the first days of Hot pod or in your 1.5x speed newsletter on Vulture (On the edgesister site here at Vox Media), he seems to have listened to every show all the time. Just this week, in fact, he wrote a fun story about how chat podcasts took over and named some the biggest names on Nova Rádio.

I asked Nick to share his home screen because a) I was curious what podcast app he used and b) I was hoping he would recommend a new show or two. I got my wish in both aspects! Here’s Nick’s home screen, plus some information about the apps he uses and why:

The telephone: Recently upgraded from my trusty old iPhone 12 to an iPhone 15. Seems fine so far; I’m no longer stressed about losing energy on long flights.

The wallpaper: My sweet boy Siobhan (aka Shooby).

The apps: Calendar, Photos, Clock, Weather, Google Maps, Tasks, Google Calendar, Gmail, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, Steam, Delta, Strava, Discord, Slack, Stocks, LastPass, Messages, Phone, Firefox, Pocket Casts.

Yeah, well, as you can see, I’m pretty vanilla most of the time. All of the immediately accessible apps are things that I access with a certain frequency on any given day. Google Maps for navigation (and spying). To do to get my brain in order. TikTok and Instagram for something to do in the bathroom. I’ve been playing a lot more lately, so I’m constantly scouring Steam for deals. Strava, because I somehow became a great runner. I’ve also been looking at Delta a lot, working through a backlog of older JRPGs. And of course, Pocket Casts, which is my go-to for listening to podcasts.

I also asked Nick to share some things he enjoys now. Here’s what he sent back:

• I’m a big reviewer/replayer of things, and for some reason the summer is usually when I make my annual revisits. Right now I’m working my way Stop and catch fire for the sixth time. Wow, this show is so adorable. It’s the 10 year anniversary, you know?
• Like the rest of the universe right now, I’m apparently enjoying Chappell Roan. “Supernova Red Wine,” very good.
• Slowly making way Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Liberation in the City of Love, The Story of San Francisco in 2013, by David Talbot. I’m finding this quite remarkable.
• Following episodes of My perfect consoleSimon Parkin’s excellent interview, “Desert Island Discs, but for Video Games”, shows that it’s actually working as an entertaining historical record for the medium.

Here’s what installer community is this week. I want to know what you’re doing now too! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal – @davidpierce.11 ​​- with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more recommendations than can fit here, check out the answers to this post on Threads.

“This little camera. I’ve been thinking of ways to justify it because it’s really cute, but also the photos are surprisingly decent.” -Daulton

“Check out Idem. It is a Nostr server that exposes the Mastodon API to its clients. So the promise is that you would be able to use their great Mastodon app (Ivory, Ice Cubes) and add Nostr connection directly to it. It would be like an additional server in the same application where your main Mastodon account is.” –Adnan

“I’m slowly getting back into following Pokémon trading cards and I’ve become addicted to watching TheBulbaStore on Youtube. It’s super interesting to see a vendor’s point of view and the prices some cards cost now!” -Peter

“The Hawthorne and Horowitz Mysteries by Anthony Horowitz. He recently released the fifth in the series, Close to death. They all have tortured puns as titles (in this case, “close” is a British word for closed area). Furthermore, the books are metafiction in which Horowitz himself is the main character, talking about how he is writing the murder mystery series you are reading. However, they are some of the best contemporary murder mysteries I’ve read and do a wonderful job paying homage to Agatha Christie while playing with the genre.” -Kendrick

“I’m playing and watching chess! Chess is cool now! Lots of great ways to play, but Xadrez.com is probably best for beginners. And there is great content on YouTube about chess. Eric Rosen, Irina Krush, Levy RozmanIt is Hikaru Nakamura. Get well so I can teach my three-year-old niece to be a master one day.” -Ryan

“I’m really enjoying it”Jet Lag: the game” on YouTube. Imagine The amazing Race, but it’s actually good and unscripted. The hosts are friendly and the game has decent complexity. They are about to end the season in Australia and it has been difficult. -Developer

“I am currently reading Hell Divers II: Ghosts by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi about halo jumpers who dive into radioactive wastelands to collect supplies from mutated monsters, and yes, it’s as good as it sounds. –Jessé

“I’m obsessed with my new Klydoclock, a digital version of the classic analog clock. It features changing faces curated by artists and can even dial and play hourly if you want. Best of all: it has no other functions and is not connected to an app or your phone. Minimalism and elegance at its best.” – Jonathan

“I truly believe that a home server or NAS is useful and easily accessible to more people than currently have one. More people should have their own Plex Server, pi hole, self-hosted cloud storage, Minecraft serveror Self-hosted VPN. An old PC is all you need if you want to keep it simple. And if you don’t mind learning how to work with Linux, you can even use an old Android phone or a cheap Raspberry Pi clone.” – Voltaire

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I absolutely can’t get enough of watching/listening/reading about how people who are great at their thing do their thing. (Musician Kygo has a number of making-of videos This is always the first example I think of in this genre.) One of my recent favorites this is the video, with Zane Lowe interviewing Finneas and Billie Eilish about the making of Eilish’s latest album. They talk about process, fear, microphones, editing and more. I’ll almost certainly never make an album, or shoot a movie, or join the NBA, but hearing people talk about how they do it never gets old.