This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
The Govee smart lamp brightened up my room, and then my life
25 Apr 2026, 1:30 pm by Sheena Vasani
I knew things were not quite right when I had to throw a towel over a broken Ikea lamp to block out its light. How did I get here? I cover fancy and capable tech for a living, and yet, it took me two years to get rid of a pair of old, broken Ikea lamps in my bedroom. Then I got some floor lamps from Govee that changed everything.
Those Ikea lamps were around for two years after I moved from Orange County to Los Angeles. Soon after that move, my mom’s Parkinson’s disease – a neurodegenerative condition with no cure – progressed quickly, my mental health took a hit, and most of my own to-do list quietly slid to the back burner as she lost mob …
Xbox’s weirdest studio is on a roll
25 Apr 2026, 1:00 pm by Andrew Webster
For a while there, it seemed like Double Fine might be struggling under the Microsoft corporate umbrella. The game studio led by Tim Schafer is beloved for offbeat titles like Brütal Legend and Broken Age, but after being acquired by Microsoft in 2019, its only new release for years was a long-awaited sequel to Psychonauts. Of late, though, Double Fine is on something of a roll. Last year the studio released the wonderfully strange Keeper, a game about a sentient lighthouse. This week, it launched Kiln, a multiplayer brawler with adorable spirits and a whole lot of pottery. It’s yet another oddball delight that could only come out of Double …
The most exciting laptop I’ve seen in forever
25 Apr 2026, 12:00 pm by David Pierce
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 125, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me cereal recommendations, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about NASA seamstresses and friction and Muskism and scooters, highlighting the heck out of Jeff VanderMeer’s terrific new short story, listening to the Dissect podcast’s new season about Daft Punk, giving Firefox another run as my go-to browser, having my mind blown by amazing music video directors, and nodding along to John Oliver on prediction markets. I’ve also been dealing wit …
Sho Miyake answers life’s greatest questions
25 Apr 2026, 12:00 pm by Robyn Kanner
Acclaimed Japanese director Sho Miyake has arrived in the States. He’s brought with him two feature films: Small, Slow But Steady and Two Seasons, Two Strangers, a pair of naturalistic portraits that deal with the uneasy human desire to relate to other people. Seclusion and unease are bedrocks to Miyake’s growing filmography. “I like these characters that have a sense of discomfort that slowly starts to distance them from society,” he tells The Verge.
I first saw Small, Slow But Steady at New Directors/New Films (lowkey one of the better film festivals New York has to offer). It’s an affectionate story of a deaf boxer, Keiko (Yukino Kishii), …
The US gets the worst phones
25 Apr 2026, 11:00 am by Dominic Preston
Apple and Samsung dominate the US phone market, and they’ve done so for years. Together with Google, they’ve shaped our sense of what a smartphone is and what it can do, pushing the boundaries of mobile photography, software, and processing power. But over the last few years, they’ve sat back, content to iterate rather than innovate – and in the interim, China’s tech giants have plowed ahead. Now a gulf is growing between the phones on sale in the US and those available in the rest of the world. US phone buyers are missing out.
Some of the blame for that gap lies with Apple. Where it goes, the market follows, and in recent years it’s gone s …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
