Jeffrey Bowers | The Verge

It wasn’t all bad: our favorite things from summer 2016

2016-09-01T12:03:24-04:00

The summer of 2016 will not be remembered fondly.

From the first of May to the final days of August, news anchors struggled to keep their heads above water as the world flooded with problems: international absurdity and domestic tragedy, a nauseating presidential election and a ceaseless sprinkling of celebrity deaths. The only thing hotter than the suffocating heat wave was the scorched earth takes of righteous pundits. Within a day, social media would cycle through phases of a little brother on a long road trip: being irritating, insufferable, exhausting, and snarky.

But what about the good times? On September 1st, we look back and recognize the summer wasn’t all bad. In fact, there was plenty of goodness to be enjoyed, tiny reliefs from a world on fire. What about being with family and friends? What about cutting pizza with scissors? What about that dude from Mr. Robot‘s identical twin brother?

To say goodbye to summer with love in our hearts, we’ve collected our favorite things from this difficult season.

This video, Lizzie Plaugic

Nearly all the joy I’ve experienced this summer can be traced to a single video, and it’s one I can’t really summarize in words. I could describe it with a facial expression, maybe, but you can’t see my face right now. Something about it hits right on the “good stuff” part of the internet. If you get it, you get it, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. I can’t tell you why this is good.

I can list some things that are good that also happen to appear in this video, which was created by Tumblr user daftqunk. 1) Rami Malek, brooding protagonist of USA’s Mr. Robot and a man with a mouth deserving of its own Renaissance painting. 2) Rami Malek’s twin, who is both a surprise and a joy and delightfully shy about the Tonight Show cameras glaring at him. 3) A man who rubs his face in disbelief and perhaps arousal, mimicking all our reactions to seeing two hot people who also happen to look similar at the same time. 4) A club remix of Fun’s “We Are Young” (the song’s original version is so dull that it’s not only inoffensive but ineffectual as anything but background noise.)

Even if it doesn’t quite make sense for you, even if it doesn’t quite click, there’s one remaining measure of its universal quality: if you watch it once, you’ll have to watch it again. This is the video equivalent of the Salt and Vinegar potato chip, and I would like a whole bag please.

My blue park blanket that folds into a bag, Ashley Carman

My mom bought me a blue park blanket that folds into a bag for my birthday this year. That was in May. It’s September now, and when I think about this past summer, my blue park blanket that folds into a bag comes to mind.

I don’t use the blanket for anything extraordinary; it’s simply a blanket I bring to parks because it’s easy to carry in its bag form. I use it for picnics and public sleeping. The first time I brought it out with me, I ate an acai bowl and finished a crossword on it. For some reason, a swarm of flies hovered over me the entire day and followed me around the park. I tried to relocate multiple times but was eventually forced to go home because of the flies. It was easy to escape, what with the blanket becoming a bag at a moment’s notice.

When I unwrapped the park blanket that folds into a bag, with my mom standing next to me, I wasn’t thrilled, really. I was sort of like, Wow okay mom thanks but what is this? But sometimes you realize your mom knows what’s up and that she is well aware of your needs before you are. Love you, Mom.

Cutting pizza with scissors, Ale Potenza

I waited a half hour in the hot and muggy summer night for a seat at Franny’s. The pizzeria, right outside Prospect Park, smelt of crunchy dough, and almost tricked me into believing I was back in Italy where I was born and where I lived most of my life before moving to New York.

The yeasty air reminded me of my old home, but what happened next transported me there: our pizza was served with scissors. Big scissors with black, plastic handles. That’s exactly how we cut pizza in my family in Italy, but I hadn’t seen it in the states. Scissors are the superior tool for cutting through layers of mozzarella, prosciutto, and arugula. They create a perfect slice, filled with ingredients, while also giving you a weirdly rewarding feeling, like creating an arts and crafts project for your growling stomach.

In New York, I’ve come to learn it’s always the small, seemingly insignificant things that we can find that feeling of being home away from home.

Of course, I recommend you give scissors a try for your next pizza. I’m not sure whether slicing pizzas with scissors is an Italian thing, or just something we do in my family. I’ve never seen it done in restaurants, other than at Franny’s. But believe me, you won’t regret this. Throw away those round pizza cutters that never get through the crust. Stow away the knife and fork. Bring scissors to the pizza party. Start your own, new tradition.

Chance the Rapper’s “3” baseball cap, Kaitlyn Tiffany

I ordered my Coloring Book hat from my phone, in the waiting room of a gynecologist office. I had been waiting for over an hour past my appointment time and feeling like there’s no greater injustice in this world than having a vagina and being forced to care for it. I deserved a hat, I decided arbitrarily. That’s the first thing they should teach you about being a woman: no one is going to compensate you for it, so you should develop an eagerness to compensate yourself.

It was a long, difficult summer for me for a lot of reasons, and my Coloring Book hat served me more consistently than most friends. Even really good friends can’t be in physical contact with your person at any hour of the day or night!

I used it to cover my face while I cried cinematically on a Red Hook pier. I used it to keep my hair out of my eyes while I ran laps around Prospect Heights, trying to milk as many endorphins out of a daily workout regimen as possible. I wore it to remind myself, obviously, of Chance the Rapper’s third mixtape: Coloring Book. It’s a mixtape that is equal parts uncontainable joy and quiet mourning. I wore it to project to the barista at Starbucks and the teens on the street and the older, confident ladies in my spin class that there is at least one thing in this world I really, really like.

I highly recommend a hat this summer, especially a hat inscribed with a thing you like. My one and only gripe is, from the running, crying, and living, my hat now smells terrible. Does anyone have experience with washing hats?

Big pink wigs and alien sexuality, Tasha Robinson

This summer, the always unpredictable floodgates of Cartoon Network’s terrific show Steven Universe reopened, and the fandom suddenly got a big new pool of episodes in which to swim. This show makes me happy all on its own, because it’s such a wonderful, unique experience: it mixes joy, science-fiction drama, kid-show absurdity, and an intensely particular and specific worldview all in the same pastel-colored package. Steven Universe is deeply emotional about the relationships between space aliens who are also immortal sentient female gemstones, often involved in passionate relationships with each other, while locked in a state of unending war. It’s one of the most emotionally mature TV shows out there, even though it frequently features superheroes whaling on or screaming at one another.

But I get just as much joy from watching the show’s passionate, creative fandom engage with the show. There’s a lot of tremendous fan art coming out of the SU community, and the show’s devotion to breaking the usual gender / skin-tone / body-type molds for superhero protagonists has given cosplayers a lot to work with. Lately I’ve just been hanging out in Google Image Search, looking at pictures of the show’s huge queen-figure Rose Quartz, and all the ways cosplayers portray her, which usually involves giant pink wigs, poofy white dresses, and great big attitude.

And on top of that, for a show about magical gem-girls and the sweet, nurturing half-gem boy they adopt, Steven Universe is surprisingly sophisticated about rape, consent, and abusive relationships. And it’s set off endless online conversations about how to recognize and deal with abusers, and what a healthy relationship looks like. I don’t agree with a lot of stances being taken around the show, but wow, do I love the fact that the young people who need to have these conversations are having them. The only thing better than a smart, sweet piece of well-crafted entertainment is one that sparks things even bigger and better than itself.

The color yellow, Andrew Marino

My favorite thing of this summer has to be the color yellow. The earliest memory I have for this fondness: it’s early June and I’m slouching through midtown Manhattan, immunized from countless daily commutes to the thrill of Times Square. What catches my eye is a mannequin. Posed in a Gap window display, the bald plastic body wears bermuda shorts, a light tee, and a yellow hat.

not enough yellow on the internet
— andrew marino (@andrumarino) June 28, 2016

A yellow hat! I hadn’t seen one in the wild since I bought my fifth grade wardrobe at Old Navy. The yellow pops through the hubbub, like a kernel of buttery popcorn. And it hits me: I don’t see yellow nearly enough.

Since that moment, I’ve wanted more yellow in my life. I changed my avatar on Twitter to have a yellow background. I changed my phone wallpaper to my new favorite color, too. Then my watchface. My tablet. I considered getting a yellow Chromebook, but didn’t because I’m a grown-up and I can’t buy a computer just because it’s yellow. Or can I? When Pokémon Go hit, I picked Team Instinct for only one reason, clearly. I started eating more bananas. Did I want ketchup or mustard on my hot dog? The answer was obvious. I work in front of a computer screen, and yet I couldn’t think of a website or app that I use featuring the color yellow, and so I finally gave Snapchat a chance, adding it’s yellow logo to my smartphone.

And I bought that hat.

As I await the start of fall, the trees will turn yellow and continue my obsession. But once leaf-peeping is over, it’ll all be brown and I’ll have to move on. I think preserving yellow for the summer is the right thing to do. Next year, I can be nostalgic for yellow, the color of summer 2016 that took me back, through a hat, to the fifth grade.

The dab, Dami Lee

Like all performance art, “the dab” lives and dies in the craft of its performer. After dabbing went mainstream in 2015, the body motion was co-opted by awkward bosses, thirsty brand mascots, and confused parents. Which is to say it died. But this summer, the move has been resuscitated with a new batch of magnificent dabbers.

Cue my Summer of Dabs™, starting with the adorable contestants of the Scripps spelling bee, dabbing up a storm in May, and ending with these reptiles and amphibians joining in on the dance craze in July.

Michael Katz, my SB Nation colleague and fellow appreciator of animals accidentally dabbing, informed me that the song in this Vine is “Shooting Stars” by the Bag Raiders. I wonder if the members of the Bag Raiders ever imagined they would one day play a crucial role in such a precious meme, and in my personal journey of expanding my skillsets.

Inspired by the perfect pairing of this hilarious song with a potent fade transition, I knew Photoshop wasn’t going to be enough to recreate a Vine of this magnitude. I downloaded Premiere, ready to set the song to a clip of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton dabbing with the same visuals. I was immediately overwhelmed by the confusing interface. In way over my head, I silently admitted a temporary defeat. Now Premiere looms on my ever-growing list of things I will learn how to do someday. Though I have a history of briefly being inspired by a thing, then quickly losing interest in said thing (in high school I bought a $1 guitar on eBay with $27 shipping to learn to play a Green Day song. I learned three power chords, then called it quits), I really mean it this time! You can expect to see a Vine with masterful cinematography from me sometime this fall.

Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife, Chris Plante

I savored books in high school. I credit my English teacher, Mrs. Hitman, who defied the mandatory curriculum. While other students read Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, our class feasted on Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Sawako Ariyoshi. The latter wrote The Twilight Years, a novella that introduced me, a teenage boy in a Missouri suburb, to a young Japanese woman who showed me a template for emotional strength and endurance by caring for her absent husband and senile father-in-law. That book was a syringe of empathy injected directly into my self-centered, entitled 15-year-old male heart.

Years later, while living as a writer in New York City, I began to feel socially obligated to keep up with trendy literary fiction. Sometimes I enjoyed what I read, but most of the time, large books felt like a treadmill I could eventually conquer in 45-minute jogs. “Read” became a recurring appointment on my Google Calendar.

I finally fell back in love with fiction this summer, when I thought, midway through the latest anxiety-dump from Don DeLillo, to search for Sawako Ariyoshi’s other books on Amazon. With a click, I ordered the first result: The Doctor’s Wife. Like The Twilight Years, the novella is a fly-on-the-wall view of a young woman’s role in a marriage complicated by a particularly difficult parent. It is so many other things, too: a history of early Japanese medicine, a lyrical chronicle of a quietly beautiful life, and a guttural scream against erasing women and crediting their accomplishments to men.

I cherish this book, but more so, I am grateful for how it’s rekindled my love of reading. I’ve returned to the book-a-week pace of my teenage years. Some of those books are unquestionably trendy — The Underground Railroad has Oprah’s seal of approval — but I also make time to read things that aren’t on the unwritten required-reading list. Mrs. Hitman taught me that lesson 15 years ago, but I’ve only learned it now.

Bachelor in Purgatory: season three, episode 1

2016-08-03T14:26:08-04:00

Bachelor in Paradise is a television show in which the discarded men and women from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette come to a place called “Paradise” (technically a resort in Mexico) for a second (or sometimes third, and occasionally fourth) shot at love. Each week, they pair off in a game of sexy musical chairs. Throughout the season, the surplus human beings are granted blissful reentry to the real world, and two more men or women are added to the cast as tribute. Who knows how long this could last. Probably forever. We’ll stick around for as long as it takes, because we need to know if love is real and we need to know what two dozen hot people will do to find it. We need to know if a game show about love in Paradise is more game or show or love… or Paradise or purgatory.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: Welcome to Paradise, a real place. Anytime you think Paradise might not be a real place, someone will say “We’re in Paradise!!!” to remind you that actually it is a place — one within the reach of anyone granted a television crew and a primetime network slot. In Paradise, the rules are simple — get drunk, make out, cry, and, if you feel like it, fall in love. Actually, the rules are laughably complex and malleable, but who cares when you’re three piña coladas deep on a Tuesday night.

Host Chris Harrison welcomes us back to Paradise for a third season of the ABC television program Bachelor in Paradise by proclaiming with glee, “They’re all here for love. Who will find it? Who will leave here brokenhearted? We’ll just have to wait and see!”

And wait we will. The theme of the first episode of Bachelor in Paradise is waiting. “I don’t know about all these birds dude,” says Nick (Kaitlyn’s season). “Something bad is gonna happen.”

“He’s coming!” says a bird.

Lizzie Plaugic: Birds are an ominous sign, as we’ve learned from horror movies like The Crow, The Birds, and Birdemic: Shock and Terror. It’s nice to see Bachelor in Paradise taking some cues from classic cinema. Speaking of classic cinema, the relationships forming in Paradise already seem to be living up to the romantic ideals of old Hollywood: beautiful, straight, and white. Specifically I’m talking about Chad and Lace.

KT: The relationship between Chad (JoJo’s season) and Lace (Ben’s season) lasts only two hours (in both TV time and real-world time, which is one millisecond in Purgatory time). It was teed up exquisitely by the increasingly nihilistic producers of the shows in The Bachelor stable. Lace dismissed herself from Ben’s season after a series of embarrassing drunk meltdowns, and explained that she needed some time to work on herself and her issues with drinking. In the opening of Bachelor in Paradise she pulls a bottle of red wine out of the trash. Chad was dismissed from JoJo’s season for making physical threats on his fellow contestants and burning through too many deli meat platters. In his Bachelor in Paradise entrance, Chris Harrison gives him a slap on the back and basically says “be good, and please go for Lace.”

“i didn’t rip his head off and shove it down his throat”

Of course Chad proceeds to make out with Lace hard, then calls her a bitch, and something much worse that gets the extended bleep. He then compliments himself for abstaining from murdering Evan (JoJo’s season): “I didn’t rip his head off and shove it down his own throat, so that’s good.” I had to agree with him! It was good he didn’t kill someone! Then he tells Lace that he will tie her to a railroad track and make sure she smells like “peppermint.” I’ll let that hang in the air for moment.

Throughout all this, everyone forgets to flirt with each other because they’re watching Chad and Lace and charting their positions like they’re two highly unpredictable tropical storms. Also, they refer to them as tropical storms.

LP: Chad loves murder, but he also loves cuddling. He is what one might call a Renaissance Man. At one point he asks Daniel (a Canadian, Jojo’s season), “Why are you being so unmurder-y?”. Lace also made up a word last night: “genuous,” which I’m assuming is a portmanteau of “genuine” and “generous.” Sometimes love is so powerful it hijacks our very language, bending words to match its needs.

Things seemed to be working for them in the beginning — Chad loves a woman he can hold under water and casually chat about violence with! But joking about murder gets a lot more uncomfortable once you’re so drunk you can’t say words. And Chad’s vibe got less slapstick and more threatening as the night went on. His lowest point came when he mocked Sarah (Sean Lowe’s season) for having one arm, and referring to her as Army McArmenson. So the next morning, while Chad’s eyes are still puffy from his hangover, Chris Harrison puts on his business time face and asks Chad to leave Paradise.

chris harrison says it’s time for chad to ‘leave’ paradise 😉

KT: It’s hard to describe the surreality of the episode’s climactic scene between Chris Harrison and Chad. After Chris Harrison expresses his dismay at Chad’s behavior, Chad retorts, “You don’t watch the show, you’re in a hotel room a thousand miles away! Go drink your mimosas!” It’s not too hard to remember that Bachelor in Paradise is a carefully constructed performance, but it’s a lot easier when Chad is shouting it in your face.

He’s calling out Harrison specifically — taking down the figurehead of the Bachelor franchise. When Harrison confronts Chad in front of the entire cast, he asks him if it’s “really the time to be glib.” It’s an interesting question both because there really is no “time” per se in Paradise, and because Chad was already kicked off The Bachelorette for threatening people with violence but Chris Harrison chose to glibly welcome him back to Paradise earlier this very day. The game is all too obvious — pretend you think Chad will behave, knowing that he won’t, send him home out of “respect” for the women he just cursed and shoved into tiki bar walls, and then drown in ratings. Oh, and Chad is back next week, “breaking onto” a television set that has security guards. Someone gave him water balloons!

LP: Something Chris Harrison said to Chad stuck with me: “We all came here to be in Paradise, and in a matter of one night you made it into Hell.” That seems like an unfair assessment to me, because Bachelor in Paradise is neither heaven nor hell. It’s a purgatory: an empty, stagnant place with a high population turnover. The only way out is to perform the motions of dating on national television, which sometimes allows you to briefly escape the purgatory, and head to paradise. If you’re left without a mate, you’re cast off, a useless single being.

PURGATORY: Chad

KT: In one of the final shots, Chad runs up the beach, kicking off his flip flops and yelling, “there’s a lot of crabs everywhere. Why are there crabs everywhere? Fuck you crabs!” Chad had too many wits about him to be in Paradise — you’re not supposed to notice that the sun is too bright, the drinks are too sweet, the birds are talking out loud in human sentences, or that there are adorable ghost crabs literally everywhere. You’re supposed to cling to this in-between world full of hot people with all you’ve got. You’re supposed to believe that love will save you, as it may or may not save us all!

PARADISE: Jubilee and Jared

LP: Jubilee (Ben’s season) got the only date card this episode, and she gave it to Jared (Kaitlyn’s season). They technically never left the resort (they’re stuck here, remember?) but the producers did set up a little date, the theme of which was “pinatas and a clown.” Jared and Jubilee sat at a table surrounded by pinatas and discussed Lord of the Rings. Then a clown came out of nowhere, Jubilee screamed, and the clown thrust his pelvis back and forth — perhaps the worst visual in all of Bachelor history. Still, what matters is Jubilee and Jared found at least one shared interest and managed to escape purgatory for the night — even if it meant dealing with a lewd circus employee.

We’ll be doing this every Wednesday until someone finds love or the Bachelor in Paradise production team finds the outer limit of this resort’s hot bod capacity. This show will be airing every Monday and Tuesday at 8PM on ABC.

The Verge summer movie guide: blockbusters, comedies, and brand experiments

2016-05-27T12:04:00-04:00

Summer 2016 is upon us, and with it comes some of the year’s biggest movies. As always, the hottest months of the year bring some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters and friendliest family fare any moviegoer is ready to spend their hard-earned cash on. That also means a heavy dollop of teaser trailers, TV spots, and online content to go gaga over until the movie you’re most looking forward to seeing hits theaters.

Are you feeling a little overwhelmed? Not sure which CG-heavy explosion-fest to get excited about first? Fear not, True Believer. We’ve selected some of the biggest movies coming out this summer right here so you can get your calendar in order. Get ready.

May

Captain America: Civil War

(May 5th) The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been building up to this for roughly 27 films now. Most of the film series’ favorite superheroes, plus new additions Black Panther and Spider-Man, are fighting each other. Specifically, they’re fighting over whether they should ask for the UN’s permission to fight other people. There’s a lot going on in this action-palooza, including symbolic thoughts on current politics. But mostly it’s a special-effects thrill ride of watching superpowered people whale on each other, while cracking the wry jokes and exhibiting the humanity and flaws that make them more worthwhile to watch than the other set of superheroes who just whaled on each other. — Tasha Robinson

Review: Captain America: Civil War is a satisfying clash of ideas and fists
High-Rise

(May 13th) Tom Hiddleston (Loki from The Avengers and other MCU films, but not Civil War) stars as the world’s strangest conformist in this cold, chilly, beautifully shot class-struggle story about the inhabitants of an apartment complex that descends into chaos and savagery. There’s some deep ugliness on display in this story, which works more on a symbolic level than a narrative one. But director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field In England) achieves a mesmerizing and unusual balance between splattery violence and arthouse sophistication. — Tasha Robinson

Review: In J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, the metaphor eats the story and Tom Hiddleston eats the metaphor
The Lobster

(May 13th) Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos makes deeply strange movies, and his latest, The Lobster, certainly belongs on that list: it’s a dystopian comedy where single people are remanded to a hotel, where they must fall in love within 45 days, or be turned into animals. Colin Farrell stars as one such unlucky person, looking for romance in a hurry. Ecstatically received during its festival run, The Lobster is reportedly offbeat, hilarious, and kind of terrifying, especially for single people. The Wes Anderson-sized cast of familiar names (Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Léa Seydoux, Olivia Colman) is also a draw, but mostly it’s about the question of whether this is the movie where Colin Farrell becomes a lobster. — Tasha Robinson

Review: The Lobster draws out an illogical world to its most logical ends
The Angry Birds Movie

(May 20th) No one’s really sure how we got here, but it’s 2016 and we’re about to have an Angry Birds movie. You remember Angry Birds, right? That game you kind of stopped playing somewhere around 2012? Yeah, that one. Anyway, Rovio Games managed to get a star-studded cast featuring Jason Sudeikis, Kate McKinnon, and Bill Hader to voice an assortment of birds and pigs vying for a piece of paradise. For the sake of the talent involved, we hope this movie winds up being at least passable. — Kwame Opam
Neighbors 2

(May 20th) The sequel to 2014’s Neighbors is almost here, which means Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, and Rose Byrne are back to playing people who live next door to each other. This time, instead of battling Zac’s frat house, the trio team up against a sorority that’s decreasing the value of their home by sole force of its physical proximity. As the film’s trailer points out, no one is safe from the lure of Efron’s chiseled abs — and that goes for the audience, too. — Lizzie Plaugic
The Nice Guys

(May 20th) Here’s a movie whose title is probably supposed to be tongue in cheek, because I don’t think you would sincerely name a movie this if you were in the business of naming movies. A bumbling private detective (Ryan Gosling) and a hit man (Russell Crowe) team up to investigate a missing woman. The Nice Guys looks like a buddy comedy Austin Powers but with more guns — an unsurprising choice given that it’s directed by Shane Black, who wrote several of the Lethal Weapon movies. It should be worth a watch for anyone who wants to see Ryan Gosling look like he bathed in a bottle of ‘70s aftershave. — Lizzie Plaugic

Review: Shane Black falls short of his first chatty crime comedy
X-Men: Apocalypse

(May 27th) The next chapter in the never-ending saga of mutants vs. the humans who fear them is on the way. X-Men Apocalypse, the ninth overall X-Men film, takes us back to the 1980s, where a new crop of mutants is coming into its own. Director Bryan Singer is promising the most explosive X-movie yet with this film, and judging from the trailers alone — featuring title villain Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) wreaking havoc with his Four Horseman in tow — he might be right. It doesn’t hurt that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is due to make an appearance, either. — Kwame Opam

Review: X-Men: Apocalypse has a bad case of Batman v Superman disease
Alice Through The Looking Glass

(May 27th) Remember back in 2010, when Tim Burton directed a garish Technicolor version of Alice In Wonderland starring Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and a whole bunch of other people (Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Anne Hathaway, Michael Sheen, and so on) as headache-inducing, distorted CGI monstrosities? Well, they’re all back for another acid-trip adventure in this sequel, produced by Burton and directed by James Bobin, who also helmed The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted. Once again, the Mad Hatter is in trouble and Alice has to look baffled and vaguely pinched while saving him, this time from the villainous Time, played by Sacha Baron Cohen. — Tasha Robinson

June

TMNT: Out of the Shadows

(June 3rd) We may have never asked for it, but Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is getting a sequel. Thing is, if you turn your brain off, it looks kind of fun. Here, the turtles, with some help from April O’Neil (Megan Fox) and newcomer Casey Jones (Stephen Amell), face off against TV show mainstays Bebop and Rocksteady, with the notion that maybe (just maybe) they can become human if they expose themselves to enough ooze. Rest assured they’ll still be turtles at the end of the day, but expect plenty of explosions. — Kwame Opam
Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping

(June 3rd) Andy Samberg’s upcoming music mockumentary looks like a slapstick version of VH1’s Behind the Music. Samberg plays Cooper, a white rapper who decides he can reverse his careening career by returning to his boy-band glory days. Celebrity cameos include: Questlove, Usher, Carrie Underwood, Sarah Silverman, and Adam Levine’s hologram. What more could you want from a movie that’s basically an extended version of a Lonely Island music video? — Lizzie Plaugic

Warcraft

(June 10th) James Cameron keeps claiming he’s making a whole bunch more Avatar sequels, but the initial Warcraft trailers made it look like Blizzard Entertainment beat him to the punch, with an only-slightly-different fantasy CGI story about noble savages fighting selfish humanity in a wild landscape. Subsequent trailers make the story look more like John Carter, with the humans and the noble, be-tusked green guys teaming up to fight an evil force. Either way, this film spinoff of the monumentally popular World Of Warcraft MMORPG has been promised for a decade now, and it’s meant to launch a massive new film franchise. It remains to be seen whether it’ll join Avatar on the vaporware-sequels pile. One cause for hope: Moon director Duncan Jones co-wrote and directed, so it’s just possible this will be more than a game-fans-only project. — Tasha Robinson
The Conjuring 2

(June 10th) When director James Wan jumped into the blockbuster big leagues with Furious 7, it seemed like he was leaving his horror roots behind. That alone would make his return with another story pulled from the “real-life” case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren notable. But footage of the film that screened at CinemaCon was moody, tense, and terrifying, exhibiting all of the trademarks that have made Wan a genre master — and turning The Conjuring 2 into one of our most anticipated horror films this year. — Bryan Bishop
Now You See Me 2

(June 10th) Back in 2013, Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, and a lot of Morgan Freeman gravitas turned the magician caper flick Now You See Me into a surprise hit. Three years later, it’s time for the inevitable sequel, only this time the character played by Isla Fisher has been swapped out for a new addition to the team played by Masters of Sex star Lizzy Caplan. There’s something about stealing some newfangled computer gizmo that looks like it’s pulled straight out of Sneakers, but don’t worry about it. Just expect magic! CG card tricks! Daniel Radcliffe! And Jesse Eisenberg’s scalp recovering from Batman v Superman. — Bryan Bishop
Finding Dory

(June 17th) Pixar’s been relying on sequels quite a bit lately — to varying degrees of success — and when I heard a sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo was on the way, I wasn’t exactly enthused. Then I had the chance to see the first 27 minutes of the film during the CinemaCon trade show last month. By the time I’d mopped my eyes dry and stopped laughing, my expectations had turned around entirely. Director Andrew Stanton appears to have dedicated himself to the same kind of emotional storytelling he executed so well with Wall-E and Finding Nemo, leaving the missteps of John Carter far behind. — Bryan Bishop
Independence Day: Resurgence

(June 24th) Independence Day is one the biggest blockbusters to come out of the ‘90s. It had insane special effects, bravura performances from Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, and one of the best, most quotable speeches ever uttered by a fictional American president. It might be the quintessential summer popcorn flick. Its sequel lacks Will Smith, but with the alien threat returning from the first movie in much larger numbers, this movie could very well raise the bar in terms of over-the-top summer action. Because honestly, you can’t go wrong with Jeff Goldblum. — Kwame Opam

July

The BFG

(July 1st) The title stands for “The Big Friendly Giant,” not the other obvious thing, and the story’s based on one of the many whimsical children’s books by Roald Dahl, author of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and James And The Giant Peach. But the look and feel of the film are all director Steven Spielberg, who appears to have slapped on the wonder and astonishment with a trowel. Spielberg hasn’t made a live-action kids’ movie since 1991’s Hook, one of those films beloved by people who were the right age for it when it came out, and otherwise largely loathed. This looks like it may fall into that category, but Dahl’s source material is strange and memorable, so we’ll see. — Tasha Robinson
Cell

(July 8th) John Cusack has gone from lovesick kid to record-store owner to dog-lover, and now, in Cell, he’s playing a man singlehandedly fighting the war against the cellphone apocalypse. What is a cellphone apocalypse?, you might ask. It’s when a mystery cell signal starts taking over the minds of anyone unlucky enough to glob their dumb face onto a cellphone at the wrong time. Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, Cell promises to be the dreary logical conclusion of overwrought tech paranoia. Plus zombies. — Lizzie Plaugic
The Secret Life of Pets

(July 8th) The concept of The Secret Life of Pets, from the same production company that made Despicable Me and Minions, is basically Toy Story, except pets. What kind of wild adventures does your terrier get into while you’re out plugging away at your office job? A fairly solid cast including Louis CK, Ellie Kemper, Jenny Slate, and Kevin Hart add some more appeal if the idea of watching cute animated animals on screen isn’t enough to sell you on it. — Lizzie Plaugic
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

(July 8th) Mike and Dave are two guys (Zac Efron and Adam Devine) who need wedding dates. Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza play two women who become their wedding dates. That’s the premise of this entire movie, and it seems to be inspired by a real-life pair of dudes who tried to find wedding dates via a Craigslist ad. Is Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates a Wedding Crashers for a new generation? Or will it exist in its own genre of terrible matrimony movie? Only one way to find out! — Lizzie Plaugic

Ghostbusters

(July 15th) The new Ghostbusters might be one of the most scrutinized summer movies of the year. Not only is it reviving a classic series, it’s doing so with a female cast at the fore. A certain hateful corner of nerddom is concerned that director Paul Feig messed with a beloved franchise in the name of being PC, but the rest of us are excited to see what Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig can do with their proton packs. — Kwame Opam
Star Trek Beyond

(July 22nd) The Star Trek franchise is in need of a boost. After 2009’s Star Trek successfully launched a new timeline for the series, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness managed to disappoint by leaning too heavily into fan service at the expense of storytelling. Beyond, from Fast & Furious director Justin Lin, has a chance to right the course as Capt. James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) and crew must face a new enemy. The fact that Simon Pegg wrote the screenplay gives us hope that this effort will be a step in the right direction. — Kwame Opam
Jason Bourne

(July 29th) It’s often a producer’s job to hype the movies they’ve made, so when Frank Marshall took the stage at CinemaCon to say the new Jason Bourne had the best chase sequence in the series, I was a little skeptical. Then the above trailer was released, and, well, okay. I can admit it when a bunch of cars getting totaled on the Vegas Strip proves me wrong. Matt Damon returns, as does longtime series director Paul Greengrass and newcomer Alicia Vikander — because that’s what you do in between winning an Oscar and becoming the new Lara Croft. — Bryan Bishop

August

Suicide Squad
(August 5th) So Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a bit of a critical failure for Warner Bros. No big deal! The DC Extended Universe is off to the races, and the next film out of the gate will be Suicide Squad. The film, directed by Training Day screenwriter David Ayer, will see supervillains like Deadshot (Will Smith) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) team up against a greater evil. (Jared Leto’s Joker is never too far behind.) But unlike Zack Snyder’s grim and gritty take on superheroics, this movie looks like it could be a lot of fun. Here’s hoping those reshoots went well. — Kwame Opam
Pete’s Dragon

(August 12th) The latest entry in Disney’s “brand deposit” remakes of its own library (after Maleficent, Cinderella, and Jungle Book), Pete’s Dragon is the first one that feels like a risk, because it’s remaking something that was never deeply beloved in the first place. 1977’s live-action / animation hybrid Pete’s Dragon, based on an unpublished short story, came at an awkward time for the company, and it’s an amiable, cutesy, yet often sloppy mess. The remake looks like it’s keeping the live-action / CGI idea, and otherwise completely revising the story about a boy and his protective dragon companion. — Tasha Robinson
Sausage Party

(August 12th) What is the fate of a stick of meat? This is the existential question at the core of Sausage Party, a movie about several edibles who suddenly realize they’re at the end of the processed food chain, destined to became the sludge inside a human’s stomach. Seth Rogen voices Frank, a bold young hot dog determined to right this wrong, or at least warn other foods of their bleak future. Probably the only movie this summer in which you can hear animated bits of dead animals say the F-word because they’re afraid of dying. — Lizzie Plaugic
Ben-Hur

(August 19th) I chatted with director Timur Bekmambetov when he was in the thick of shooting his new version of Ben-Hur, and he described the experience at the time as “Chariots. Endless chariots.” Given the amount of time that was clearly spent on shooting those key sequences, it’s easy to understand why. Jack Huston stars in the title role, alongside Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell, and Rodrigo Santoro. There are also some truly brutal-looking races, and chariots. Endless chariots. — Bryan Bishop
Kubo and the Two Strings

(August 19th) Laika, the animation studio behind the Oscar-nominated films Coraline and ParaNorman, is back with their latest stop-motion epic, Kubo and the Two Strings — and it looks as gorgeous as anything the studio has done so far. Described as a swashbuckling adventure set in medieval Japan, the movie stars Irish actor Art Parkinson as the young Kubo, who must go on a quest with the help of colorful characters like Monkey (Charlize Theron) and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey). This might be the sleeper hit of the season. — Kwame Opam

Credits

Developer Yuri Victor
Layout Ross Miller

The 9 most important things from Google’s Nexus event

2015-09-29T14:43:53-04:00

There weren’t many surprises in Google’s event today — everything from detailed phone specs to news of a Spotify Chromecast deal leaked in the past few weeks. But the company announced a hard date for its Android Marshmallow release, and it offered some much-needed hardware refreshes, including two new Nexus phones, an updated Chromecast, and an all-new Chromecast for streaming music. There wasn’t a lot of experimentation here — with a few exceptions, like a new fingerprint sensor for the Nexus line — but that also means we got a lot of welcome news about Google’s more practical products.

The Nexus 6P: Google’s ‘most premium phone’

As expected, the Huawei-produced Nexus 6P has several hardware upgrades from last year’s Nexus 6 — Google is calling it its “most premium phone yet.” The metal-bodied 6P is 7.3mm thick, backed by a new fingerprint sensor called the Nexus Imprint. It now uses a USB Type-C port; while getting new cables might be an inconvenience, Google claims it can charge the device twice as quickly as an iPhone 6 Plus.

The 6P is equipped with an 8-megapixel front-facing camera and a 12.3-megapixel Sony sensor on the back, which can take 4K video and slow-motion shots. It will be available in frost white, aluminum, and graphite, and pricing will begin at $499. Preorders open today in the US, UK, Ireland, and Japan, and Google will be working with third-party retailers outside the US. The actual phones, meanwhile, will ship in late October.

The Nexus 5X: an affordable alternative

The Nexus 5X is the successor to Google and LG’s Nexus 5, which quietly ended its life earlier this year. It’s a slightly larger device, with a 5.2-inch screen and a fractionally bigger battery, and the design language has been updated for a new generation of phones. Like its companion, the Nexus 6P, the 5X has a fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone, and it uses the new USB-C connection instead of the standard Micro USB. As Motorola did with the new Moto X line earlier this year, Google is heavily promoting the phone’s camera, but the handset itself is a relatively modest affair — it’s positioned as the Nexus line’s “affordable” option, starting at a distinctly budget-friendly $379. Like the 6P, it’s available for preorder today in the US, UK, Ireland, Korea, and Japan, with a shipping date of October.

Android Marshmallow comes next week

The newest version of Android, Android 6.0 Marshmallow, will begin rolling out to users next week. We learned about most of Marshmallow’s features earlier this year — it aims to make notifications more consistent and search functions more intuitive, while improving battery life and giving users more fine-grained privacy controls. The most prominent feature is probably Now on Tap, which integrates Google searches and voice interaction into individual apps. As usual, Nexus users will get the Marshmallow updates right away, while carriers and other smartphone brands will make their own tweaks and roll it out further down the line.

More options for Project Fi

Google’s Project Fi wireless network — which combines major cell networks and Wi-Fi — offers very reasonable $20 monthly text and calling plans, with an extra $10 for each GB of data per month. But so far, it only works if you’re on one phone: the Nexus 6. Now, we’re learning that the Nexus 5X and 6P both support the network. That’s still an extremely limited catalog, but it’s the first time Project Fi users have had any choice at all.

A new Chromecast, still $35

The Chromecast, a little stick that lets users stream just about anything to a TV, has gotten an update. The new Chromecast 2 supports 5GHz Wi-Fi, making it significantly faster. Three different antennas, as opposed to the original Chromecast’s one, are optimized for Wi-Fi streaming. Stylistically, the Chromecast looks different too: it’s now a small disc with a bendable HDMI arm that allows it to hang further away from your TV than the previous Chromecast. It comes in three colors: red, yellow, and black. Like the first Chromecast, it will cost $35. Some new features will roll out next year, but the Chromecast itself will be available today in 17 countries.

More Chromecast apps and features

The Chromecast app got a refresh today, too. The biggest new feature is a universal voice search tool, but a new “Fast Play” function will cache videos Google thinks you’ll want to watch, and the “What’s On” section will surface popular content from platforms like YouTube and Netflix. There are also some new apps. Chromecast will add Showtime beginning today, and it’ll support Sling TV, NBA, and NHL in the next few weeks. Spotify, a long-obvious choice for streaming, is also joining the party.

Chromecast Audio: cast your music

Chromecast Audio is, unsurprisingly, a music-focused counterpart to the Chromecast. Instead of connecting to a TV, it plugs into your speakers using a 3.5mm audio port. Users can connect and send music to it using Google Play Music, Pandora, and the newly announced Spotify — controlling it from a phone lock screen and Android smartwatch — or they can directly mirror audio from Android or a Chrome tab. (It also looks like a cute little vinyl record.) The Chromecast Audio costs $35, just like the original Chromecast, and it’s available starting today in 17 countries.

Family music, family photos

Google wants you to know that it is really, truly, definitely a family company, for families. Google Play Music will roll out a new family plan later this year, providing access for up to six different people for $14.99 per month. Later this year, Google Photos will make it easier to share albums with friends and family, and anyone shared on the album will be able to add their own photos to it. Within a week, Google Photos will also get Chromecast support, and users will be able to (privately) label people in their photos using their real names or weird nicknames. It’s rolling out to the web and iOS soon as well.

The Pixel C: Google makes its own Surface tablet

In its last news of the day, Google announced the Pixel C: a new 10.2-inch tablet with a very Surface-like detachable keyboard. The Pixel C, equipped with an Nvidia X1 processor and 3GB of RAM, inductively charges the keyboard, which can be slapped onto the back of the tablet when it’s not in use. The last device to bear the name “Pixel” was Google’s premium Chromebook laptop, but this tablet will run Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It will also cost a considerably cheaper $499, while the keyboard will sell for $149, slightly less than the detachable keyboard that Apple announced a few weeks ago. Google promises the Pixel C will be available in time for the holidays.

What’s next

We won’t be waiting long for the products announced at Google’s event — they’re coming out between today and next month, with some additional features set to go live later in the year. So for now, it’s back to checking on Google’s self-driving cars, quantum computing project, and virtual reality classrooms.

Correction: The 6P has an 8-megapixel camera, not a 5-megapixel one as previously stated.

The 10 most important things from Apple’s iPhone 6S event

2015-09-09T16:20:42-04:00

Apple events can usually be referenced based on the one flagship they focus on: the iPad event, the iPhone event, the Apple Music event. That doesn’t work quite as well with today’s news-packed event. The company officially delivered on two long-overdue rumors: it refreshed the Apple TV, and it unveiled a giant, almost laptop-like iPad. The iPad Pro is a 12.9-inch behemoth with a matching stylus and keyboard, seemingly designed to fill the same market Microsoft is going after with the Surface. The Apple TV set-top box is back with a new remote and deep Siri integration. Both have a new ecosystem of apps, including productivity tools and games. And both are coming out later this fall: the TV in October, the iPad in November.

But the biggest news for most people will probably be the regular iPhone updates: the 6S and larger 6S Plus. While the design looks a lot like the last-generation iPhone 6, it’s been redesigned with better specs and a more complex “3D touch” interface. Before you start learning the approximately 300 new synonyms for “tap” that will become common in the coming months, take a look at the rest of the news below.

A novelty-sized iPad

The new iPad Pro has the biggest screen on an iOS device (and a bigger screen than some OS X devices.) At 12.9 inches, it can support a full-sized virtual keyboard, and will be the first iPad to feature an optional physical keyboard and stylus. The Pro will have an A9X memory chip, making it 1.8x faster than the A8X chip that’s in the iPad Air 2, and Apple claims it’s faster than 80 percent of portable PCs (i.e. laptops) shipped in the past six months. The iPad Pro’s new four-speaker audio setup will also rebalance itself based on how you hold it. The 10-hour battery life and 5.6 million pixels will also help it compete with traditional laptops — or other tablet and keyboard combinations.

Update: Read the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus review.

Apple invited Microsoft and Adobe up to demonstrate iPad Pro-focused versions of their iOS apps — Adobe Photoshop Fix is a new app that lets you quickly retouch photos using the stylus, while PowerPoint will now convert stylus ink into objects that you can use in your slides. The tablet is being positioned as a professional tool, with a price to match. The 32GB edition will cost you $799, while the 128GB will be $949, and LTE support bumps up the 128GB to $1079. The iPad Pro will be available in November in silver, gold, and space grey versions.

Styluses are hip again

Steve Jobs may have famously trashed styluses when the original iPad came out, but times have changed. The $99 Apple Pencil is a dedicated iPad Pro stylus that will allow for precision drawing and can be used simultaneously with a finger. Granted, Apple is jumping into a market that’s been filled by third-party designers for years, so anyone who absolutely needed a stylus for the smaller, existing iPads probably already has one. The same goes for the other new iPad Pro peripheral: a $169 woven “smart keyboard” case that looks a lot like Microsoft’s surface keyboards. Even if they’re not new concepts, this is the first time Apple has made its own versions of these accessories, positioning them as an integral part of the product. They’ll be out in November, along with the iPad Pro.

A very mini iPad refresh

While the iPad Pro brought a huge refresh to the iPad today, the iPad mini news was a little… smaller. The refreshed iPad mini 4, a new 7.9-inch tablet with the “power of the iPad Air 2,” will cost $399, and the iPad mini 2 will see a price reduction to $269. The iPad Air didn’t see an update today, but the original Air will cost $399 while the Air 2 will cost $499.

Finally, a new Apple TV

The long overdue Apple TV is here, and it’ll run a separate OS, called… tvOS. As expected, the new Apple TV will have a Universal Search feature that lets you search across apps like iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu, and it will feature Siri in a big way. Similar to other set-top boxes, voice search will be the primary way to navigate. You can manually fast-forward by sliding your finger forward on the touchpad, but also do a quick 15 second rewind by asking Siri, “what did she say?”

The Apple TV will double as a gaming console — including games like the new Guitar Hero that were previously only available on consoles — and the UI has also been refreshed, featuring a new white background and redesigned apps. The new Apple TV is also far more powerful — it features a 64-bit A8 processor and can support Bluetooth 4.0. The new Apple TV will launch in October, at $149 for the 32GB version, and $199 for 64GB.

Siri in a remote

Apple’s humble TV remote has gotten a major makeover. The new device is a combination of traditional media remote, glass trackpad, motion controller, and Siri invocation tool. This Siri integration lets users do things like get movie recommendations and look up sports scores or the weather while watching TV. Turned sideways, it’s also a rudimentary gaming pad. It’s a little reminiscent of, among other things, Amazon’s FireTV remote — which had different hardware features but a similar blend of traditional media controls, search options, and gaming controls.

Apple Music (and more) on the big screen

Today, Apple doubled down on its prediction that apps are the future of television. The fourth-generation Apple TV finally has an Apple Music app, a feature that’s been noticeably absent since the service launched in June. It will function in the same way as its iOS and Mac counterparts, letting users make playlists, create music libraries, and listen to Beats 1 radio. The TV will also have its own App Store, where users can find versions of iTunes TV, iTunes Movies, and Apple Music, all designed specifically for the Apple TV.

In addition to Apple TV standards like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, the new TV will also include games like Disney Infinity and Guitar Hero, a Major League Baseball streaming app that lets users watch two games at once, and apps for AirBnB and Zillow, if you really want to hunt for an apartment through your television. A Gilt app will let users shop directly from the comfort of their couches, fulfilling the dreams of many 1960s futurists. A developer beta of the new tvOS will also let developers create their own apps for the TV.

The newer, rosier iPhone 6S

Today’s event was always about introducing new iPhones, and Apple didn’t disappoint. The new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will be built from a new, custom aluminium alloy, and will be available in silver, gold, space grey, and rose gold. As expected, they will have Force Touch, which can detect where you’re pressing on the screen and how hard. The 6S will have the same 4.7 inch display screen as the iPhone 6, and the 6S Plus will retain its 5.5 inch screen. But both will come with new glass displays built of Ion-X, the same display on the Apple Watch Sport. The upgraded iPhones both have a new A9 chip built in, 70 percent faster than the A8 at CPU tasks, and 90 percent faster with graphics. You’ll also see a new 12-megapixel rear iSight camera, capable of shooting video in 4K, and a 5 megapixel front-facing camera with Retina Flash that’s supposedly 3x brighter than regular flash.

But despite all the new storage-heavy features, entry-level iPhones will still start at 16GB. Apple is also maintaining its traditional pricing tiers: $199 to $399 for the 6S, and $299 to $499 for the 6S Plus depending on storage, while on a two-year contract. For those who don’t want to be tied to a contract, Apple is also introducing two new payment options. You can either pay for the 6S in installments of $27 per month, or lease an iPhone for $32 per month, which lets you trade in your phone for a new one every year. Preorders for the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus start September 12th, and general availability will follow on September 25th. The latest version of iOS, however, is coming sooner than that: iOS 9 will be released in a little under a week, on September 16th.

‘Force Touch’ is now thankfully ‘3D Touch’

As expected, Apple brought 3D Touch to the new iPhones today. The feature is similar to the Watch’s simpler Force Touch, which allows users to clear all notifications with one press. 3D Touch, however, means the iPhone screen can distinguish between multiple levels of pressure. 3D Touch will require users to learn at least two new gestures: “peek” and “pop,” which will make app browsing more direct. “Peek” will let users preview information, and “Pop” will take them inside it.

The hope is that 3D Touch will let iPhone users dip in and out of different apps without losing their place or forgetting what they were originally doing. In the Mail app, a light touch will let users preview an email, and a stronger press will let them read it. WeChat, Instagram, and Facebook are among the third-party apps set to integrate 3D Touch into their functions.

Apple has its own tiny version of Vines

Apple is making iPhone images a little more dynamic with the introduction of a new feature called Live Photos. Before and after the camera shutter closes, Live Photos will capture a second and a half of footage, so when you view the image later it plays like a short video clip. HTC tried this with its Zoe feature on the M7 a few years back, but Apple says users will be able to post Live Photos to Facebook. Live Photos will be supported across all Apple products.

Don’t forget about the Apple Watch!

The Apple Watch got slightly more useful and better-looking today with the announcement of several new apps and bands. The most notable new bands were designed by luxury brand Hermès, whose three custom brown leather straps include a double-wrapped band that fits with a custom, slightly elongated watch face.

Also announced were several new pastel-colored bands for the Apple Watch Sport, and a red band created in collaboration with Bono’s HIV/AIDS charity Product Red. The aluminum Sport will be offered in gold, rose gold, and anodized aluminum finishes. New native apps for the Watch include Facebook Messenger and GoPro, plus a medical app called Airstrip that lets users measure their vitals in real time. And the Watch’s latest operating software, Watch OS 2, will launch on September 16th.

What’s next

Today’s Apple event neatly wrapped up a lot of loose ends — we finally have the upgraded Apple TV that we’ve been expecting since 2011, the new iPhones came with the requisite spec updates and some cool new features, and if you’ve been dreaming of a gigantic iPad, well you’ve got that too. We’re still waiting for iOS 9 and Watch OS 2, both of which are slated to be released on September 16th, but if you’re waiting to upgrade your Mac to El Capitan, you’re going to have to hold on until September 30th.

Oh, and if you heard some rumors about a big-name musical guest possibly releasing a new album around the event? That didn’t happen. The only musical appearance was by One Republic, which used the event to apologize for getting so much play at Whole Foods stores.

Verge Video: iPad Pro hands on | Check out The Verge on YouTube

Drake vs. Meek Mill: a roundtable on the summer’s best beef

2015-07-29T16:18:21-04:00

The spat between rappers Drake and Meek Mill is entering its second week, and it’s starting to get ugly. Here’s the shortest possible recap, just in case you haven’t been following every twist and turn: Meek Mill accused Drake of using a ghostwriter for “R.I.C.O.,” a track they recorded together for Meek’s new album Dreams Worth More Than Money. Drake stayed silent until Saturday night, when he released three new tracks during his OVO Sound radio show on Beats 1. One of them was “Charged Up,” a diss track aimed at Meek. Meek called the song “baby lotion soft.” He was supposed to premiere a rebuttal on New York’s Hot 97 Monday night, but the evening came and went without a new track. Drake took the opportunity to go on the offensive and released another new track, “Back to Back,” on SoundCloud early Wednesday morning. That’s where we are now.

This may end up being nothing more than a fun summer diversion, but it feels like it’s gobbling up every spare molecule in the world of music right now. And since so many of us at The Verge are passionate and invested in the outcome of Drizzygate, we’ve decided to hash this beef out at the roundtable.

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Drake shouldn’t have bothered

Jamieson Cox: Say you’re a famous basketball player. You’re not just famous, you’re fantastic — it wouldn’t be a stretch to call you one of the best players of your generation. You can shoot, pass, and handle the ball; your defense isn’t bad. You get voted into the All-Star Game every year, and you’re beloved by fans. It’s hard to dispute your all-around basketball excellence.

Children dunk on their siblings in his honor

Let’s say you have an acquaintance. Your acquaintance’s stats are much worse. He’s a rotation player, but a few steps below stardom, and you helped him gain his footing in the league when you played on the same team for a while. Your acquaintance has one specific skill that stands out: he might be the best dunker in the league. There isn’t anyone who can match his ferocity or ruthlessness — there’s even a popular series of Vines in which adorable children dunk on their helpless siblings, and it was created in his honor.

You wake up one morning and learn something troubling: your acquaintance has taken to Twitter to talk smack about you. He’s talking about your creativity on the court. He’s telling people you haven’t come up with a single original move, and that you have someone working with you in the gym who invents your every flashy dribble, layup, and dunk. In short, he’s saying you’re a fraud. And to cap everything off, he challenges you to a dunk contest. If you want to prove to everyone that your former friend’s allegations are false, this is the place you’d do it.

The benefits of participating in the contest are obvious. If you win, no one’s going to question your creativity again, and rising to the occasion will be considered a display of cojones on your part. But if you lose — and there’s a decent chance you lose, because you’re going against one of the best dunkers in the world — it’s going to linger for a long time. You could be inducted into the Hall of Fame one day, but a permanent record of your embarrassment will remain on YouTube: that one time you were challenged and ended up with your ass kicked.

But there’s an alternative path. You can size up your acquaintance and his generally mediocre portfolio of skills, and you can tell him that you don’t need to dignify his challenge with a response. Let’s say that someone did help you come with your moves: who cares? You’re still the one who executed them, right? And they’re just one tiny part of your game, right? You’re one of the best players in the game with or without any kind of dunking panache, and agreeing to enter the contest is just validating your acquaintance. You have very little to gain and a lot more to lose, and dunking isn’t an integral part of your play style in the first place.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to enter the contest, or are you going to brush the challenge away like a beetle on your sleeve?

(Drake should’ve ignored this whole thing.)

Drake wins, but Meek matters

Kwame Opam: This shit is chess, it ain’t checkers. Meek started with the profound mistake of getting into his feelings and challenging Drake’s authenticity on Twitter. People went nuts. Drake responded to the whole thing like a PR professional, which is ultimately something he’s far better at. He waited for interest to reach a steady boil, and released “Charged Up” as if on a whim. The crowd cheered! He waited a little more, watched us all tweet up a storm when Meek failed to make a response on Hot 97, and released “Back to Back.” The crowd is beside themselves right now. If there was any doubt that Aubrey knows how to work an audience even in the heat of a beef, it should be squashed. Those were just jabs, though. Drake is dancing. Meek by now has no choice but to come out with fire and brimstone to undo some of the damage he’s taken. So he’ll almost certainly come out with haymakers, aiming squarely at Drake’s softness: the mall performances, the Madonna fiasco, and the fact that Nicki was never on his arm. And those blows will land, since Meek is a ferocious technical lyricist.

Drake Brought Meek’s Career to New Heights

But Drake isn’t stupid. The man’s ubiquitous for a reason. He gets compared to Kendrick for a reason. (I’m not saying those comparisons are valid. I’m just saying those are the kinds of conversations we have in 2015.) He probably knows Meek will tire himself out throwing punches. He also knows punches like that can’t truly harm him since he already owns up to being a singin’ ass rapper. In a market where Kanye long ago changed the landscape and someone like Future can sell records, Philly hardness isn’t enough to win beefs. It also takes savvy and knowing your enemy. So Drake will keep dancing. He’ll have to punch harder, yes, but he’s also better positioned to outlast Meek. And the killer move? All Drake has to say is Meek matters more now because of this beef. Drake brought your career to new heights, man. “Realness” didn’t. Good job!

If you don’t get better, you become irrelevant

But if Meek comes out blazing (and he really has no choice but to), it’s good for everyone. Drake will continue to be one of the biggest hip-hop acts in the world, but Meek Mill will also be a known commodity. We’ll forget this beef, but your friends might know his name when they might not have previously. That’s why people say beef is good for hip-hop. It forces everyone to be better or fall into irrelevance.

Meek was smart to start this

Lizzie Plaugic: I think when the supercontinent Pangea started breaking up, it probably seemed apocalyptic. Land masses were colliding! Coastlines were cracking! An entire planet was trying to subtly readjust its junk. But in the end, we got the Earth as we know it (or something).

On July 22nd, Philly rapper Meek Mill gave the Earth another gift. In the days that followed, the air felt lighter, a little more electric than usual. People started taking sides. We hunted down alleged ghostwriter Quentin Miller’s SoundCloud and mined it for anything that resembled a Drizzy flow. Drake released not one, but two comeback tracks. Elaborate conspiracies surfaced. Rick Ross messed up his mathematical symbols. We remembered past hip-hop beefs with nostalgia and reverence. Perhaps most importantly, we remembered Ja Rule.

Meek activated a dormant hip-hop beef volcano

Would it have been more mature of Drake to ignore the whole thing? Yeah. He’s the biggest name in rap right now, and a lot of people aren’t even sure who Meek Mill is. But I’m glad Drake didn’t ignore it. And I’m glad that Meek sent the tweet out into the world in the first place, because it became the rumble that activated a long-silent volcano of hip-hop beefs. Now, the world feels new. This, my friends, is our Pangea.

So I’m Team Meek. Because Meek’s original diss was the 140-character plate-shift for two pretty good Drake tracks, some decent jokes, and a GoFundMe to help Meek pay for a diss track (which has since been deleted). For the last seven days, we’ve had an entire little world of Drake and Meek, and it’s been beautiful. This is an internet fight that you can watch from the outside; a spectator sport for those of us who don’t like balls. Eventually, most of the world will forget about this fight, in the way that most of the world doesn’t think about plate tectonics on the daily. And if this Pangea analogy holds up, it leads to only one possible conclusion: Meek Mill is God, but Drake is Santa Claus.

Drake’s making Meek an example

Micah Singleton: Let’s be honest: Drake is the easiest target in hip-hop. He sings, he’s emotional, he’s been chasing Rihanna and Nicki for years to no avail — people have been itching to go at him since he left Canada. Drake’s main defense is that he knows his flaws and makes fun of them before anyone else can. He posts the memes and pokes fun at his DeGrassi past on SNL. So when Meek Mill came out with this ghostwriting claim, it became open season on Drake. And the only way to end hunting season is to take out the biggest hunter so viciously that everyone will know this Canadian forest is off-limits.

Drake couldn’t sit this one out. He couldn’t hide out in the YOLO Estate with 40 and Oliver. He had to respond. What I didn’t see coming was this type of response. Drake has eschewed the classic knockout diss track in favor of a Mayweather-esque “I’m going to jab you in the face until I win by decision” fighting style. “Charged Up” was the most relaxed diss record in history, if it was even a diss record. It was like a diss preamble. It was a direct shot at Meek’s rapping style, which is best described as yelling with purpose, while Drake sounded like he recorded the song in a library. It also carried a warning of what was to come: “I stay silent ‘cause we at war and I’m very patient / 6 God is watching, I just hope you’re prepared to face him.”

Drake didn’t even wait for meek to respond

The real flames from Drake came in “Back to Back,” which is just mean. Very, very mean. He didn’t even wait for Meek to respond with his own diss track. Drake just hit him again. Mean. Drake is up 2-0. Meek still hasn’t responded. And given his lackluster history of diss records (a history betraying his technical skill), it doesn’t look good for the Philly kid. At this point, there’s nothing left to say.

Sorry, Nicki.

Who cares? Nicki’s the one that matters

Kaitlyn Tiffany: The game of The Hills was built around Lauren Conrad. Her first mixtape, Laguna Beach, dropped before the turn of the decade, and her charismatic aloofness carried her through and out of the TV circuit and into a successful career as an author, designer, and lifestyle brand mogul. She taught us to love ourselves but only if we had style, she passed down everything she knew about the Fame Game, and we embraced her as the wise but flawed (turning down a Parisian internship for a boy with frosted tips?) LC, Queen of the Hills. She was a new kind of celebrity, and some people thought she was boring, but that was fucking nonsense. For a while, she loved a man named Brody Jenner, and said that they were the same person, which was obviously only about 40 percent true.

After LC was long gone from The Hills and its childish games, a bold newcomer made the ill-advised choice to step to her. The thinner, blonder, fiercer girl on the block was Kristen Cavallari, and there was something weirdly charming about the brazenness with which she sharpened her fangs. She swooped right in to stir shit up and to write a book with a slightly better title than any of LC’s books. She was about that money, and about Brody Jenner. She flirted, and oh, how Brody flirted back. LC said she was over it, but it’s hard to believe that people get over Brody Jenner.

Eventually the implied hostility between any two talented public personalities who do similar things as a career came to a head — Kristen Cavallari implied that LC was a “slutbag.” It was a roughly hewn diss, to say the least, but as Kristen so helpfully pointed out to LC (with the internet as an intermediary): “No one remembers the nice girl.” So LC listened and spun a near-perfect diss track that went something like, “If someone asked me to list three good things about you, I would say you are really good at losing baby weight.” At this point, nobody looked good.

In this metaphor, Brody is the only winner. He has not one, but two happy endings — seeing Kristen’s limo off to the airport, and then coming home to LC, who has been holding a victorious still-the-Queen grin in her pocket all this time. He’s the one who didn’t get down and dirty, the one who faked it all — the one who got away.

As Brody and Nicki Minaj know, sometimes it’s good to be stuck in the middle.

Verge Video: The art and tech of becoming a DJ

The hot new sound: a timeline of pop’s biggest producers

2015-06-18T14:11:40-04:00

Pop is a quick study. If there’s one hit with a catchy snare sound, by the end of the year there will be three more with the same feel, either by the same producer or some up-and-comer picking up a few tricks and running with them. Sounds travel fast, and a good one will often spread through a sizable chunk of the pop landscape over the course of a few years.Trace the sound back to its source and you find the producer, often a pretty famous one. A good producer can define a whole era of pop, whether it’s ushering in a new sound like teen pop or smuggling genres like trap or G-funk into the mainstream. You know the sounds even if you don’t know the names, subconsciously tying them to a certain era of pop. In honor of this week’s release of Giorgio Moroder’s Déjà Vu, an overdue comeback for one of pop’s most influential producers, we thought we’d take a look at 11 of the most influential pop sounds and the people behind them. We didn’t get everyone, but these are the names with the biggest hits and the longest shadows.

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Joe Meek: Studio Space Ghost (1962)

Essential album: I Hear a New World (1960)
Essential track: The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)
Known for work with: The Honeycombs, The Tornados, John Leyton

This is where the story starts, arguably the beginning of a producer having a sound at all. While The Beatles were still looking for a drummer, Joe Meek was pioneering techniques like overdubs, compression, and electronic processing that would become the building blocks of modern audio engineering. Instead of recreating or enhancing the live performance, Meek used those tools to create completely new sounds, whether it was the fuzzed-out futurism of 1962’s “Telstar” or the Pixies-predicting haunted house of “Johnny, Remember Me.” Meek was dead by the time those techniques reached the mainstream, but his ghost wandered the British pop charts for years to come.

Photo by Ray Avery/Redferns

Phil Spector: Wall of Sound (1963)

Essential album: Various artists, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963)
Essential track: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby” (1963)
Known for work with: The Ronettes, The Crystals, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen

There was music before Phil Spector, and then there was music after Phil Spector. Spector was among the first producers who recorded songs that were designed to be hits — songs that would sound huge and vibrant and would immediately catch your attention even over the era’s dull AM radios. It all came back to his (in)famous “wall of sound” production technique, which involved bringing a small orchestra’s worth of musicians into a room to record a track that was quite literally packed with sound. His approach marked a big change from the typical style of the era — which carefully separated instruments — but it introduced a catchy and danceable style that others were eager to emulate. That includes Beach Boys’ mastermind Brian Wilson, who fell in love with it and adapted Spector’s techniques.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Giorgio Moroder: Krautrock Disco (1977)

Essential album: From Here to Eternity (1977)
Essential track: Donna Summer, “I Feel Love” (1977)
Known for work with: Donna Summer, Blondie, Kenny Loggins

In the era of the laptop producer, it can be hard to remember just how strange computerized music sounded when it first broke through. Kraftwerk made the first splash, all motorik and computer dreams, but before Moroder, it was hard to imagine anyone actually dancing to it.

Luckily, he had the tidal wave of disco on his side. Music was moving from concerts to clubs, while the emotional palette shifted from sex and violence to sex and nightlife. Moroder wasn’t a driving force for early disco, but he made the most of the turn once it happened, giving analog sounds the drama and sexuality of disco and turning a dance-pop resurgence into an electronic watershed. While 1977’s “I Feel Love” is still the masterpiece, less aggressively computerized singles like “Last Dance” are better for showing the fusion at work.

Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Quincy Jones: Imperial Pop (1982)

Essential album: Michael Jackson, Thriller (1982)
Essential track: Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (1982)
Known for work with: Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Lesley Gore

Thriller owned 1982, spawning single after single, growing and growing until it swallowed pop whole. This was a new kind of pop music, one built for mass-market radio and international appeal. String sections and synthesizers merged seamlessly with Eddie Van Halen and Vincent Price, breaking down the genre barriers that had kept many black artists off MTV and pop radio. Jackson was the star, undeniably, but Jones was behind most of the genre alchemy, coming off a decade of increasingly poppy jazz fusion. This was a sound that spanned every popular style of music, a platonic ideal of a hit record. Once the ’90s hit, Jackson would move on to Teddy Riley and New Jack Swing, a sound he’d stick with for the rest of his career — but his biggest and most beloved hits still belong to Quincy.

Photo by Virginia Turbett/Redferns

Nile Rodgers: Funk for the Funkless (1985)

Essential album: Madonna, Like A Virgin (1984)
Essential track: David Bowie, “Let’s Dance” (1983)
Known for work with: Madonna, Duran Duran, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Diana Ross

Nile Rodgers is responsible for some of the funkiest beats to ever reach the masses. After the death of disco, Rodgers took the genre’s finest element — funk — and helped it stay alive by infusing it into the music of some legendary artists. He turned David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” into an appropriately danceable hit, and he filled Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” with the kind of family-friendly funk that makes the masses go wild.

Rodgers’ work as a producer isn’t always quite as funky as the clear guitar and eminently danceable pop beats that go into his work with Chic — you have to wonder if that’s a matter of adapting to the audience — but he still treats artists with tunes that are far cooler than many deserve. And fortunately, he’s still doing the same thing today, most notably turning Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” into one of the most addictive songs of 2013.

PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images

Rick Rubin: The Reducer (1986)

Essential album: The Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill (1986)
Essential track: LL Cool J, “I Need A Beat” (1984)
Known for work with: The Beastie Boys, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, Jay Z, Adele

When Kanye West needed to clean up Yeezus just weeks away from its 2013 release date, he turned to Rick Rubin, a producer famous for helping artists hone in on — and strip down — their sound to its core elements. Rubin came around as hip-hop was evolving and still sounded, to his ears, like an out-of-sync mashup of rap and R&B. To fix that, Rubin decided to pull back the production to make his tracks feel more like something you’d hear alongside a DJ scratching in a club; add in a simple structure, and they quickly became as addictive as any pop track.

The formula worked, and Rubin’s “stripped-down” style — pulling out everything but the most necessary sounds and bringing strong vocals and beats to the forefront — went everywhere, even outside of hip-hop as Rubin’s range expanded. Rubin’s hands have been in an incredible amount of music since the ’80s, from LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer to Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, all bringing a different touch. But it’s not hard to trace the ideas running between them once you know what to look for.

Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Dr. Dre: G-Funk (1992)

Essential album: Dr. Dre, The Chronic (1992)
Essential track: 2Pac, “California Love” (1995)
Known for work with: NWA, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent

Who have guessed that Roger Troutman would show up on a #1 single in 1995 or, even less likely, that he would be singing the hook over a 20-year-old Joe Cocker sample? It’s a sign of how thoroughly Dr. Dre had rehabilitated ’70s and early ’80s funk, from 1992’s The Chronic through to the golden age of Death Row. Sampling was at the heart of the sound, but Dre layered the samples with reedy synths lines and vocal hooks into a smooth, sinister symphony, worlds away from the aggressive chops of Rick Rubin and Dre’s own work with NWA.

In some ways, it was a less sophisticated approach than East Coast icons like Prince Paul were taking — but Dre’s work hit bigger, and it’s easy to see why. Instead of trying to establish his artistry, Dre found a great hook and got out of the way. And unlike the East Coast sound collages, Dre’s was an easy sound to imitate. Soon Ice Cube and Biggie were building hits on top of Isley samples, and a generation of producers would start looking to old funk records as a source for easy hits… that is, until copyright claims caught up with them and hip-hop was forced to move on to an aesthetic with less legal baggage.

Photo by Paul A. Hebert/Getty Images

Max Martin: Big Teen (1999)

Essential album: Britney Spears, Oops!… I Did It Again (2000)
Essential track: The Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way” (1999)
Known for work with: Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, Pink, Katy Perry

At the turn of the 21st century, as sampling changed the pace of hip-hop, Max Martin made his production a hallmark of any good pop song. Martin is known for comping — a ridiculously tedious process wherein a producer will listen to every syllable of a vocal take and piece together the best ones. It’s an almost boringly precise method that favors perfection over anything else. The Swedish producer and songwriter branded almost every pop anthem of the late ‘90s and early ’00s with this style, and it meant that there was little room for imperfections. There was nothing funky or unusual about a Max Martin jam, and definitely nothing minimalist. Anything Martin touched was protected by a thick top coat of shiny gloss.

Here are some benchmarks of Big Teen: frosted tips, pleather pants, and silver halter tops, if you molded them into something musical. Vinyl scratches that make it sound like you’re inside a roller rink DJ booth. The wobbly, rippling synths, the tinny one-two dance beats, the percussion that comes in like a stampede. And those monster hooks that eventually defined the era; the kind that burned what otherwise would’ve been throwaway pop songs into the public consciousness for the next decade. Think N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears — anyone the late ‘90s consensus deemed swoonworthy.

Perfection is the name of Max Martin’s game, and you can see the effects of it in Katy Perry’s jitter-free boyfriend cuts or Adele’s shimmering ballads. It’s not too big a jump to imagine Max Martin helped solidify the idea of pop stars as flawless beings, and why we still like to think of a certain breed of musicians as poreless robots existing solely to entertain.

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

Kanye: Chipmunk Soul (2003)

Essential album: Kanye West, Late Registration (2005)
Essential track: Jay Z, “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” (2001)
Known for work with: Jay Z, Common, himself

At the start of 2004, Kanye West’s debut album The College Dropout entered a music landscape saturated with slick, sensual but tough party hits. The previous year’s No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was 50 Cent’s “In Da Club,” followed closely by R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix).” Britney Spears released her all-grown-up comeback album, In The Zone. In comparison, West’s LP was practically quirky. Pitch-shifted beats knocked against a gospel sensibility; “Jesus Walks” coupled together a Curtis Mayfield sample with an a capella choir; “All Falls Down” paired a Lauryn Hill throwback with an acoustic guitar strum. And Kanye produced the album himself (for the most part), which meant it was easy to catapult him to icon status — this whole thing was his own doing.

So his sound rippled. A slew of fairly nebulous up-and-comers like Kid Cudi, J Cole, and Childish Gambino copped Kanye’s sound, throwing their own idiosyncrasies into the mix. Even if Cudi might balk at the idea, “Day N Nite” wouldn’t have existed without West. Hip-hop purists hated Gambino’s Camp, but the Kanye influence on “Firefly” was so thick it sounded like a College Dropout b-side. Kanye’s staccato flow has something to do with his staying power, but West is not as good a rapper as he is a producer — one listen to Yeezus is proof of that. Production is where West’s strange ecclesiastic tics make sense, and where they can be easily replicated.

Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images

The Neptunes: The Space Age (2004)

Essential album: Justin Timberlake, Justified (2002)
Essential track: Snoop Dogg, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (2004)
Known for work with: Nelly, Clipse, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Kelis

At the same time Kanye’s pitch-shifted soul was spreading and dissipating, snares started getting very aggressive. On more and more hits, everything that wasn’t needed dropped out, leaving just a skeleton adorned by a few fluorescent synths. Year after year, hit after hit, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo brought an aggressively futurist sound into pop music, combining rap’s most minimal impulses with an oddball sonic sci-fi. After decades of rap production, it was genuinely like nothing anyone had ever heard.

Then there’s Justified, which applied the same aesthetic to one of the world’s biggest pop stars, and came away with a stranger version of the Quincy & Michael chemistry that had ruled the charts 20 years before. No one could replicate the Neptunes’ strangest impulses, so the lasting result was a shift toward harsher drum sounds and less of everything else. Melodies have made a bit of a recovery in the years since, but the needle has yet to swing all the way back.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images

DJ Mustard: The Minimalist Squelch (2011)

Essential album: YG, My Krazy Life (2014)
Essential track: Ty Dolla $ign, “Paranoid” (2013)
Known for work with: YG, Tyga, Trey Songz

Mustard on the beat. That’s what you’ll hear at the start of every song DJ Mustard produces, and it’s a lot of songs. The phrase is always a garbled, rapid-fire missive, but at this point — a few years after Dijon Isaiah McFarlane produced his first big hit, Tyga’s “Rack City,” in 2011 — everyone’s well aware of what he’s saying. DJ Mustard is huge, but his sound is small and strange (like a little pocket alien of rap). Just a few years after Timbaland started drowning songs in sad grey matter, and RedOne (who produced Lady Gaga’s breakout hit “Just Dance”) made glitter a necessary pop accessory, DJ Mustard went all in on a sound that can be summed up in a single onomatopoeia: The Squelch.

DJ Mustard’s production — a weirder, abstract version of the low-riding G-funk synth line — swallows up almost every club hit today. You’d recognize it if you heard it: that static, squishy beat that sounds like a giant plodding through puddles in rubber rain boots. It’s the kind of sonic stepping stone that rappers love to skip verses on, because there’s almost nothing to it. You can hear it in Ty Dolla $ign’s “Paranoid,” or YG’s “My Nigga.” You can also hear it in dozens of other Mustard-free tracks, including, somewhat infamously, Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” — a song actually produced by The Invisible Men. Mustard wasn’t happy with the imitation, but Azalea isn’t the only one guilty of it. DJ Mustard created the blueprint for a certain type of slipshod Southern bounce, and there’s nothing producers love more than a blueprint for a hit.

The 9 biggest things from the Apple Watch and MacBook announcement

2015-03-09T15:42:31-04:00

After months of fanfare, Apple finally announced a date for its smartwatch: April 24th. The timepieces are one of the riskiest ventures Apple has made in years, and they’re going to play a big role in either making smartwatches the new smartphones or sending them back to the panels of Dick Tracy. They’re a push towards blending fashion and tech, with customizable bands; multiple models made of steel, aluminum, and gold; and price tags that range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. And they take Apple’s personal computing to new, sometimes slightly creepy levels. Or, as Tim Cook put it, “Apple Watch is the most personal device we have ever created. It’s not just with you, it’s on you.”

Update: Read our Apple Watch review.

Besides the watch, Apple also wrapped up a couple of other long-rumored announcements. While the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are still around, there’s a new 12-inch laptop known only as the MacBook. It’s absurdly thin and light, and it strips out pretty much everything that’s not a screen, trackpad, or keyboard. And there was a surprise announcement for, of all things, HBO: come next month, you’ll finally be able to watch Game of Thrones without a cable subscription. This wasn’t necessarily Apple’s biggest event, but it was one of the more satisfying ones — a chance for the company to finally show off some significantly new hardware.

The Apple Watch is coming next month

As we learned last year, the Apple Watch comes in three models: the Sport, the Apple Watch, and the Apple Watch Edition. The sport is the cheapest, starting at $349 for the 38 mm and $399 for the 42mm. Cases are made from anodized aluminum. The Apple Watch is stainless steel, starting at $549 for the 38mm and $599 for the 42mm, but going as high as $1,099 depending on the band. Finally, the Apple Watch Edition, the 18-karat gold version, starts at a whopping $10,000. Preorders begin on April 10th, and watches will be available on April 24th.
There are a bunch of new watch apps

Third-party developers have had access to WatchKit tools since November, and today Apple highlighted the ways watch-based apps would make interacting with real world easier — summoning a car using Uber, checking in for flights using Passbook, opening garage doors using Alarm.com. The first Apple Watch presentation highlighted health and fitness tracking, but Apple’s ambitions there have been scaled back somewhat. The version presented today can monitor the wearer’s activity levels and send a report at the end of the week. There were also some media apps, including Shazam and Instagram, though why you would browse Instagram on such a tiny screen is unclear.
The watch has an 18-hour battery, supposedly

Without a good battery, a smartwatch is nothing — they’re supposed to stay on your wrist, not in a dock. But Apple promises that this isn’t going to be an issue with the Apple Watch, because it’s supposed to have an 18-hour battery life. That’s a lot shorter than super-low-power products like the Pebble, and won’t necessarily outshine some Android Wear gear, but it’s not bad.
ResearchKit will let you become a medical test subject

Apple’s health and fitness system now includes ResearchKit, a framework created to advance medical research. The kit will include several apps targeted at different diseases, including Parkinson’s and breast cancer, essentially turning the iPhone into a diagnostic tool. Users will be able to complete tests and surveys to make it easier for researchers to recruit them for clinical trials. With permission from users, ResearchKit can access data measured by third-party apps about its users’ weight, blood pressure, and glucose levels. Some of this was already possible with HealthKit, but now Apple’s partners, like Oxford University and Mount Sinai Hospital, will have access to the data. Apple stressed that it will not have access to the data unless it is shared by the user. Five apps are available today, but ResearchKit will be released next month as an open source platform.
There’s a hyper-minimalist gold MacBook

After a few minor updates, the MacBook Air is getting a long-awaited refresh, and it’s a big one. The new, 2-pound, 12-inch Retina device is just called the MacBook, and as rumored beforehand, it’s about as stripped-down as a laptop can get. The body is now barely wider than the keyboard — which has also been redesigned with shallower keys — and there’s a new trackpad with haptic feedback and more gesture support. Virtually every port has been removed except a versatile USB-C connector and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. The fan is gone, and Apple promises nine hours of web browsing on a single charge. And did we mention it now comes in “space gray” and gold? Like a lot of Apple’s older products, the Air and MacBook Pro aren’t going away — they’re both getting a specs bump, and the updated models are available today. The MacBook, meanwhile, is coming out on April 10th for $1,299 and up.
One cable for everything

Apple’s new 12-inch MacBook will ditch several ports from its 13-inch MacBook Air in favor of a single USB Type-C connector. The USB Type-C, a small, reversible connection, started making its way onto phones and tablets this year. This input simplification doesn’t come as a surprise; we discovered in January that Apple had assigned 18 engineers to work on the USB Type-C. You’ll primarily need to use wireless connections to exchange files instead of plugging USB accessories or USB keys straight into the new laptop, though Apple is selling a special cable that splits into a separate charger and data ports.
HBO is cutting the cord and coming to Apple TV

Apple is helping HBO make a play for cord-cutters with HBO Now, a standalone streaming service announced today. HBO CEO Richard Plepler took the stage to describe the new service, launching in early April, with Apple as an exclusive partner. “All you need,” CEO Tim Cook said, “is a broadband connection and an Apple device.” HBO will also have a channel on Apple TV. It’s $14.99 a month, with early subscribers getting the first month free. Apple TV’s price fell to $69.
CarPlay is coming to more cars

Tim Cook touted CarPlay’s progress during the event today, saying that it would be coming to 40 new car models this year, and that “every major” manufacturer was now signed on. Though the level of commitment among carmakers may vary — Toyota hasn’t committed to a release timeline, for instance. CarPlay is competing with Google’s Android Auto, both of which make phone features easier to use while driving.
Luxury smartwatches have officially arrived

One of the big surprises is the price of the gold watch, the Apple Watch Edition, which starts at $10,000. Going into the event, $10,000 was at the very high end of guesses. It represents a serious move into the luxury market, and will be available in a “limited select retail stores” on a special designated table.

Jeffrey Bowers | The Verge

It wasn’t all bad: our favorite things from summer 2016

This video, Lizzie Plaugic

My blue park blanket that folds into a bag, Ashley Carman

Cutting pizza with scissors, Ale Potenza

Chance the Rapper’s “3” baseball cap, Kaitlyn Tiffany

Big pink wigs and alien sexuality, Tasha Robinson

The color yellow, Andrew Marino

The dab, Dami Lee

Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife, Chris Plante

Bachelor in Purgatory: season three, episode 1

The Verge summer movie guide: blockbusters, comedies, and brand experiments

May

Captain America: Civil War

High-Rise

The Lobster

The Angry Birds Movie

Neighbors 2

The Nice Guys

X-Men: Apocalypse

Alice Through The Looking Glass

June

TMNT: Out of the Shadows

Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping

Warcraft

The Conjuring 2

Now You See Me 2

Finding Dory

Independence Day: Resurgence

July

The BFG

Cell

The Secret Life of Pets

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

Ghostbusters

Star Trek Beyond

Jason Bourne

August

Suicide Squad

Pete’s Dragon

Sausage Party

Ben-Hur

Kubo and the Two Strings

Learn more

Credits

The 9 most important things from Google’s Nexus event

The Nexus 6P: Google’s ‘most premium phone’

The Nexus 5X: an affordable alternative

Android Marshmallow comes next week

More options for Project Fi

A new Chromecast, still $35

More Chromecast apps and features

Chromecast Audio: cast your music

Family music, family photos

The Pixel C: Google makes its own Surface tablet

What’s next

The 10 most important things from Apple’s iPhone 6S event

A novelty-sized iPad

Styluses are hip again

A very mini iPad refresh

Finally, a new Apple TV

Siri in a remote

Apple Music (and more) on the big screen

The newer, rosier iPhone 6S

‘Force Touch’ is now thankfully ‘3D Touch’

Apple has its own tiny version of Vines

Don’t forget about the Apple Watch!

What’s next

Drake vs. Meek Mill: a roundtable on the summer’s best beef

Drake shouldn’t have bothered

Drake wins, but Meek matters

Meek was smart to start this

Drake’s making Meek an example

Who cares? Nicki’s the one that matters

The hot new sound: a timeline of pop’s biggest producers

Joe Meek: Studio Space Ghost (1962)

Essential album: I Hear a New World (1960)Essential track: The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)Known for work with: The Honeycombs, The Tornados, John Leyton

Phil Spector: Wall of Sound (1963)

Essential album: Various artists, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963)Essential track: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby” (1963)Known for work with: The Ronettes, The Crystals, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen

Giorgio Moroder: Krautrock Disco (1977)

Essential album: I Hear a New World (1960)
Essential track: The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)
Known for work with: The Honeycombs, The Tornados, John Leyton

Essential album: Various artists, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963)
Essential track: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby” (1963)
Known for work with: The Ronettes, The Crystals, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen

Essential album: From Here to Eternity (1977)
Essential track: Donna Summer, “I Feel Love” (1977)
Known for work with: Donna Summer, Blondie, Kenny Loggins

Essential album: Michael Jackson, Thriller (1982)
Essential track: Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (1982)
Known for work with: Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Lesley Gore

Essential album: Madonna, Like A Virgin (1984)
Essential track: David Bowie, “Let’s Dance” (1983)
Known for work with: Madonna, Duran Duran, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Diana Ross

Essential album: The Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill (1986)
Essential track: LL Cool J, “I Need A Beat” (1984)
Known for work with: The Beastie Boys, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, Jay Z, Adele

Essential album: Dr. Dre, The Chronic (1992)
Essential track: 2Pac, “California Love” (1995)
Known for work with: NWA, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent

Essential album: Britney Spears, Oops!… I Did It Again (2000)
Essential track: The Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way” (1999)
Known for work with: Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, Pink, Katy Perry

Essential album: Kanye West, Late Registration (2005)
Essential track: Jay Z, “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” (2001)
Known for work with: Jay Z, Common, himself

Essential album: Justin Timberlake, Justified (2002)
Essential track: Snoop Dogg, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” (2004)
Known for work with: Nelly, Clipse, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Kelis

Essential album: YG, My Krazy Life (2014)
Essential track: Ty Dolla $ign, “Paranoid” (2013)
Known for work with: YG, Tyga, Trey Songz