Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 86, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you've cleared your schedule for some Karting this weekend, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about privacy experts and spreadsheets and Dropout, watching Stick for fun and Mike and Molly for a wedding toast (long story), learning some sweet new Raycast tricks, talking into my phone with Wispr Flow, replaying Jon Bellion's new album, holding space for the next Wicked movie, and seeing if maybe the solution to my to-do list chaos is just a piece of paper. So far, it's working, and I hate it.

I also have for you a delightful new way to take pictures on your iPhone, the big new title for the Switch 2, a long interview with a Microsoft CEO, a fun way to soundtrack your pool parties, and much more. It's going to be a game-filled next few weeks, friends. Let's do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to want to know more about? What are you playing / watching / reading / listening to / plugging into your TV this week? Tell me everything: in …

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There's a running theory in tech circles that says, basically, AI is the new UI. Not long from now, some people argue, you simply won't need a homescreen full of app icons or a traditional web browser or really anything other than an interface to an AI assistant and agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. Is that the actual future, absurd AI boosterism, or something in between? Who knows! But the ranks of the AI believers seem to grow every day.

Apple, however, appears poised to go… a different way. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss some of the rumors surrounding WWDC, including the possibility of a huge redesign and a new naming scheme for all of Apple's software. It's all eminently reasonable, if slightly confusing. But is it a coat of paint on an old idea, when what Apple actually needs to do is ship the better Siri it has promised for so long? We have many thoughts. (Oh, and a party speaker update.)

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After the Apple talk, we turn to some of the other tech news of the week, including Nilay's Decoder interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Couple that with some new …

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 84, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I've been reading about Mubi and Around The Horn and millennial tech, moving all my journals to Diarly, trying out Matt D'Avella's workout routine, catching up on Clarkson's Farm, wishing desperately that Philly Justice was a real show, watching a lot of Helper Cars with my toddler, testing the Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones, dusting off my Fortnite skills, and enjoying this unbelievably deep dive into the first Star Wars movie.

I also have for you a new blockbuster movie, an old-new blockbuster mobile game, a new season of one of my all-time favorite shows, a cheap set-top box worth a look, and much more. Shockingly busy week! Let's dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you playing / reading / listening to / watching / plugging into things / poking with a stick this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here. Subscri …

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Views are the most visible metric on the internet. You can see, in more or less real time, how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.

But it’s all nonsense. Views are nothing. Views are lies.

You may not need me to remind you of this. We’ve known for years that view counts are meaningless, to the point that Facebook wound up getting sued for aggressively inflating view counts in an effort to convince people to make Facebook videos. Others have written thoughtfully about how stupid view counts are. But we still talk about view counts, view counts are still everywhere, so let’s talk once again about view counts.

A “view,” in reality, is not a universal metric. It’s not really anything. It is whatever a platform wants it to be, which usually has no actual correlation to whether someone actually encountered and experienced a piece of content. You can just make the views whatever you want! And if you don’t like the way the numbers look, make views something else!

Let’s just r …

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First things first, some exciting news: The Vergecast has been nominated for a Webby Award! This one means a lot to us, especially because it’s an award you get to vote on. We’d be so grateful if you’d go vote for us once, or 40 times, or however many times the site will allow. (Also, honestly, you should listen to some of the other nominees; all four are great shows. Just don’t vote for them.)

Now, as for this episode. This is a seriously Vergecast-y week, actually, in the sense that two of the year’s biggest news stories — the Nintendo Switch 2 and the Trump administration’s disastrous economic policy — are both unfolding simultaneously, and stand to affect one another in unusually direct ways. So in this episode, that’s what we talk about: the gadget we’re all eagerly awaiting, and the policy chaos that could change the way it works.

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First, we talk Switch. Nintendo’s Direct announcement this week brought a lot of new information about the company’s new console, and a peek at some of its most anticipated games. Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Richard Lawler dig into wha …

Read the full story at The Verge.