This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
This coming-of-age adventure game made me feel a little too seen
24 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Jay Castello
There’s a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station‘s Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she’s recently moved to a place simply called “the City” from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she’s an avid writer. But these biographical details aren’t the important thing; it’s the way she’s painted by the game’s incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen. There are a lot of characters in media that are awkward or socially anxious, but few that are drawn with such piercing specificity.
The point-and-click game is minimalist in its mechanics. Consisting mostly of conversations, it’s broken up by a few puzzles, object in …
Get stuff done by yelling at your phone
24 Jan 2026, 1:00 pm by David Pierce
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about private garbage collectors and vintage watches and My Favorite Murder, watching The Running Man (which was not great) and Sinners (which was extremely great), giving my Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses another whirl, nostalgia-tripping my way through The Format’s new album, sitting in the audience for the first Star Search on Netflix, finally reading Dungeon Crawle …
Gemini with Personal Intelligence is awfully familiar
24 Jan 2026, 1:00 pm by Allison Johnson
By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple’s business. So last week’s news that it was enabling something called Personal Intelligence felt like a victory lap. Personal Intelligence allows Gemini to reference past conversations and access your data in other Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Photos, and search history, without you specifically prompting it to look in those sources. It’s entirely opt-in, and you choose which apps Gemini can access and which it can’t. It’s in beta and only available to people with AI Pro and Ultra subscrip …
The Loch Capsule dishwasher is small, fast, and efficient — it even sanitizes gadgets
24 Jan 2026, 8:00 am by Thomas Ricker
A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can’t live without. It’s one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one, and the appliance I thought I’d miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits.
Loch sent me its $459.99 / €459.99 countertop Capsule dishwasher to review in a tiny home on a remote beach and inside a van on a two-month roadtrip. It’s an excellent product that washes and dries two place settings quickly at bacteria-killing temperatures up to 75 degrees Celsius (167F) in as little as 20 minutes. It’ll even kill bacteria and neutralize viruses on your gadgets with a waterless blast of UV-C light. Hoo …
Chromebooks train schoolkids to be loyal customers, internal Google document suggests
24 Jan 2026, 1:21 am by Emma Roth
Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google’s plan to “onboard kids” into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem “leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime,” as reported earlier by NBC News.
The heavily-redacted documents, which surfaced earlier this week, are linked to a massive lawsuit filed by several school districts, families, and state attorneys general, accusing Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Snap of creating “addictive and dangerous” products that have harmed young users’ mental health. (Snap settled earl …
Leak: Nvidia is about to challenge ‘Intel Inside’ with as many as eight Arm laptops
24 Jan 2026, 1:09 am by Sean Hollister
Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It’s not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore. There are finally competent Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops running Windows, and – as soon as this spring – Nvidia will finally power Windows consumer laptops with Arm chips all by itself.
They won’t have an Nvidia graphics chip next to an Intel CPU, but rather an Nvidia N1 system-on-chip at the helm – and overnight, a Lenovo leak revealed that the company has built six laptops on the upcoming N1 and N1X processors, including a 15-inch gaming machine.
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End of today’s The Verge roundup.
