James Bareham | The VergeThe Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.2025-10-17T17:40:33+00:00https://www.theverge.com/authors/james-bareham/rsshttps://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1James Bareham<![CDATA[Jony Ive made the entire tech world care about design]]>https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/29/19203188/jony-ive-influence-tech-design2019-06-29T13:00:00-04:002019-06-29T13:00:00-04:00
I love industrial design and have for as long as I can remember. As a child, I broke my dad’s Braun electric razor playing with the dial that raised and lowered the blades because the action was so cool and “clicky.” At school, I dreamed of being either a product designer or an architect.
Those dreams were dashed when I flunked technical drawing (I was off by over 4cm and the tolerance of the test was less than 0.5cm) and failed my physics and maths exams, both of which are somewhat vital to designing beautiful buildings that don’t fall down. So for the past 30 years my inner industrial designer has lived vicariously through the career of my contemporary (he’s only a few years younger than me) and fellow Brit, Sir Jony Ive.
Ive made being an industrial product designer “cool”. Stop anyone in the street and ask them to name a famous industrial designer and I would hazard a guess that, if they have an answer at all, it would be Jony Ive.
Yes, there are many other influential industrial designers. Yves Béhar and Dieter Rams — who was much admired by Steve Jobs and was the visionary behind so many of Braun’s products (including my dad’s broken electric razor) — both come to mind. So does Marc Newson, a contemporary of Jony’s and a partner in his new company LoveFrom. All are legendary in the design community but none have either the name recognition or influence on the level of Ive.
If they’ve heard of Ive, most people could tell you what his design aesthetic looks like
Not only has Ive designed some of the most iconic Apple products created over the past 30 years — the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone to name just a few — the success of these products has directly affected the lives of millions of people and changed how they view the importance of great industrial design as a result.
If you were to simply pose the question “if Jony Ive designed a [insert product here],” most people would be able to visualize exactly what that product would look like: minimal design, clean form, functional utility and a copious use of aluminum. That’s remarkable.
Furthermore, this appreciation of great product design has led to it becoming a core tenet of the commercial success of any tech product in today’s marketplace. I would argue that Microsoft’s remarkable resurgence with the Surface under Satya Nadella is at least partially a result of his willingness to embrace the importance of design over pure utility as a defining brand value of the company. That does not mean just copying Apple: the Surface Studio and Surface Pro are beautifully designed in their own right, and they are also uniquely Microsoft. The same could be said of the Pixelbook which is decidedly Google, or even the Galaxy S10 Plus which is unmistakably Samsung (the Bixby button is a dead give away).
And the rising value of great product design is not just confined to companies working in the sphere of consumer tech. Back in 2006, when I was photographing the interiors of Virgin America’s brand new planes, I remember just how often we compared the design language of the seats and lighting to Apple and Ive. Without Virgin America’s mood lighting or 50 channels of entertainment, I doubt JetBlue would have followed so closely, let alone American Airlines. The same can be said of cars. Look at the interior design of many cars in 2019 and I think that you can clearly see hints of Ive’s influence.
Of course I am not saying that Jony Ive is directly responsible for a better in-flight experience or a more imaginative and functional car dashboard. But I am saying that it’s a result of Ive’s unquestionable influence that many companies now see good design as a far more vital component to their success than they did 30 years ago.
Tech companies now see good design as a vital component to their success
Nor am I saying that everything that Ive has ever created has been wonderful. During his time at Apple he has produced some real lemons, too (the Newton, the Cube, the “trashcan” MacPro and iOS 7 immediately spring to mind). But that fallibility only makes me respect his greatest hits even more. At least he was trying something different and new.
But while the wider and real adoption of good industrial design practices has unquestionably benefited both consumers and design fans, perhaps rather ironically the one company that has suffered the most as a result has been Apple (though not financially). This may explain Ive’s departure.
As Buddy Pine says in the film The Incredibles, “if everyone is super, then no one is.” Thirty years ago, Jony Ive’s design aesthetic and partnership with Steve Jobs made Apple’s products stand head and shoulders above almost anything else available. They were truly revolutionary. The iMac was a joyous translucent blue, orange or magenta PC when every other computer manufacturer’s offering was a beige box; the iPod was gorgeously chunky with a practical, childlike simplicity of operation that put “a thousand songs in your pocket.” And as for that first iPhone. Well, let me just say that in terms of its design, I believe it is still the best iPhone by far.
Because everybody is focused on better design, it’s harder for Apple to distinguish its products
But in 2019, it is extremely difficult to continually maintain that level of game changing impact. It is very hard to lead from the front. Apple has found it challenging to encourage their user base to update to the relatively iterative new design of the iPhone X and XS. I’m not surprised it’s cautious of introducing something too revolutionary. Apple is caught in a trap of its own making: critics demand that Apple be the bold, brave brand we’ve come to expect but its users are only fine with that as long as everything works just the same. We are moving into a post hardware world where seamless functionality across multiple devices is vital and great design is regarded as a given.
For me personally, Apple’s products no longer define milestone moments in my life like they once did. Over the past few years those spots have been taken by products made by Google, Nintendo, and Sony. I have no doubt that the designers of all of them were influenced by Ive in one way shape or form, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the only Apple products I own today are an old Apple TV and the laptop I was provided by The Verge.
I have moved on from Apple and I am looking to new brands for design inspiration. Maybe Jony decided to do the same.
Photography by James Bareham / The Verge
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James BarehamAmelia Holowaty KralesMichele Doying<![CDATA[2018: A year in photographs on The Verge]]>https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/28/18146883/2018-the-verge-photography-a-year-in-pictures2025-10-17T13:35:49-04:002018-12-28T15:00:08-05:00
Last year, the introduction to 2017: A Year in Photographs began, “As 2017 finally draws to a close, we can all look back on a year that in many ways seems to have lasted 10.” If that statement was true of 2017, then it is doubly true of 2018. There has been so much news and information hitting us from all sides over this past year that, at times, it has seemed almost overwhelming. So much has occurred, it is hard to remember exactly what happened when.
Looking back over this past year, we were struck by how many photo shoots we thought we’d shot back in 2017 — and how many we’d completely forgotten about. We all remembered the big tent pole reviews like the iPhone XS, iPhone XR, or Pixel 3, but had no recollection of the portraits of Dessa or Mr. Lui’s building full of old CRT screens. Remember the Apple HomePod? That was shot in January 2018, but it feels like a lifetime ago.
2018 was the year we consolidated our creative approach to our tech reviews, our gift guides, and our various series. We worked hard on pushing ourselves creatively and refining our style, but we also made sure we were as consistent as possible. We shot many of our camera reviews on the same black background and used an identical layout for all of the lead images for our two gift guides — only the products and background colors changed. We also developed a tight shot list for our series “What’s in Your Bag.”
But striving for consistency didn’t stop us from being experimental. For example, Amelia Holowaty Krales used very creative lighting for her portraits of the artist Serpentwithfeet; Michele Doying spent hours cutting ones and zeros out of paper for her Facebook stop-motion animations; and Vlad Savov ditched his camera altogether and shot all his photos at the Geneva Motor Show on his Pixel 2XL.
We have selected the following photographs, not necessarily because we think they are the best of the past year’s bunch, but because they mean something to us personally. There are many more photos of gadgets and weird tech that didn’t make the cut, but we had to draw the line somewhere. And remember, if we missed an image that you particularly like, it is not necessarily because we didn’t think it was good enough — we may simply have forgotten that we took it! So please feel free to remind us. And once you’re finished here, please check out our review of the best illustrations that have appeared on The Verge in 2018.
The photographs below are arranged chronologically by the date they were first published. —James Bareham
It was really interesting to visit Danny Rozin’s studio and see his process. I have been following his work for a while, and The Verge has covered some of his mirrors in the past. It was exciting to see his new work, the biggest to date. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
APPLE AIRPODS
Every once in a while I’m able to schedule a “studio play day” to experiment with different concepts and gadgets without the pressure of having to get the work up on the site. On this day, I had spent most of my morning commute watching slow-motion videos of splashes, so I knew what shapes to cut the paper into in order to make them look as real as possible. In the studio, I wasn’t sure how the final animation would turn out, but watching the images come alive once I put the them together was the perfect way to start the year. —Michele Doying
In February 2018, the Circuit Breaker live show moved from Twitter to YouTube. Over the course of the 11-episode season, the core team of (left to right) Dami Lee, Nilay Patel, Ashley Carman, Chaim Gartenberg, Paul Miller, and Jake Kastrenakes covered an eclectic range of weird and wonderful gadgets, and were regularly joined by special guests — including many members of The Verge staff. Paul Miller also developed a knack for making strangely surreal special reports that aired during the course of each show. The final episode of Circuit Breaker Live streamed on April 17th, 2018. —James Bareham
Chi-Tien Lui has owned his building in the New York City neighborhood of Tribeca — where property values are some of the highest on the planet — since the 1990s. Almost every room (at least every room I saw) seemed to be filled to the ceiling with CRT screens and vintage video components. The rows upon rows of video monitors, screens, circuit boards and switches are the raw ingredients Mr. Lui uses to repair the aging CRTs still being used in video walls and installations by his clients, which include the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. There are few people left like Chi-Tien Lui, who have both years of experience working with CRTs and access to the spare parts. It is clear that CRTs are not just his business, they’re his passion, which is probably why he’s so good at fixing them. —James Bareham
The Google Clips camera was specifically designed with parents and parents of pets in mind. As I am the proud owner of Monty (left) and Georgie, two long-haired English cream dachshunds, our Clips review seemed an ideal opportunity to get them both back on camera for The Verge (their previous modeling assignment was for our Furbo video back in May of 2016). I hope Dan Seifert will take no offense at my opinion that they were the true stars of the Clips video. —James Bareham
The video team and I traveled to Nilay Patel’s house — which is chock-full of speakers and vintage audio equipment — to film our review of Apple’s HomePod. The HomePod is very Apple, by which I mean that it is beautifully made and works really well, but only if you are fully immersed in Apple’s ecosystem (which I am not). It sounds amazing, although I personally am never going to buy it. But the shortcomings of the HomePod aside, the winter light streaming into Nilay’s house made this one of the most beautiful product shoots of 2018. —James Bareham
For this shoot, Amelia Holowaty Krales used the pocket-sized Nebula Capsule to project images onto Paul Miller. The result were some seriously surreal portraits. —James Bareham
Box cutters (I am not a fan of X-Acto knives) were my go-to tool for carving these Mandarin characters out of paper. Although I printed a variety of sizes, due to time restraints I was only able to cut out the biggest set. Not wanting to make the growth of the characters a digital effect, I cut the smaller character sets into rectangles and removed the white paper in photoshop. After the shoot, The Verge’s design director William Joel used Adobe After Effects to apply a gray cast to the hands in order to give them a more sinister feel. I find it fascinating that we were able to use digital tools to maintain the integrity of the cutouts, while also enhancing them to bring this piece to the next level. —Michele Doying
The Model 3 is widely regarded as Tesla’s make-or-break model. To say that a lot is riding on this car is probably one of the greatest understatements of 2018. We got to drive one around the streets of downtown Manhattan for a few hours, where it certainly attracted a lot of attention from passersby. I personally found the Model 3 a bit of a letdown, especially when compared to Tesla’s Model S. The Model 3 seemed a little austere and basic in comparison, especially as the particular car we tested came with a number of additional options that drove the price well over $50K. —James Bareham
This shoot with the musician Dessa was one of my most experimental of the year. I photographed her in The Verge’s studio with a colorful lighting setup, and then used Photoshop to combine the portraits with a scan of her brain. —James Bareham
Ashley Carman and I were searching for a location to shoot pictures of her latest phone case — this particular model was by Marc Jacobs and covered in black suction cups. We met in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo and happened to walk by illustrator Yuko Shimizu’s double murals from 2013, which depict long octopus tentacles spelling out “yes.” It was a perfect spot. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I recently found my first iPod, the first-generation 5GB model with the moveable click wheel. After much trial and error, I finally managed to recharge it, and found a rather bizarre collection of music from 2002 as a result. Though some of my music choices were rather dubious and very dated, I found the actual experience of clicking through the tracks and playlists to be as fresh in 2018 as it was when I first used the iPod 16 years ago. Great design truly doesn’t age. —James Bareham
When Arkansas implemented an algorithm to calculate the hours allotted to residents requiring home health care aid, Tammy Dobbs was among those whose hours were cut — in her case significantly. Verge senior reporter Colin Lecher and I went to Arkansas to interview and photograph Arkansas Legal Aid attorney Kevin De Liban and a few of the families affected by the new algorithm. This was definitely one of the most important stories I photographed in 2018. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This year’s Geneva Motor Show was a big and, dare I say it, bold experiment for me. It’s the first professional assignment I’ve gone to without a dedicated camera of some sort — just myself and Google’s Pixel 2 XL. Admittedly, it wasn’t a huge risk to take when I knew my subjects would be innately photogenic cars sitting atop perfectly lit rotating platforms. But the adventure certainly demonstrated the incredible capability of modern mobile photography. —Vlad Savov
No offense to my colleagues, but I love Benicio Quinones’ tech reviews the best. I worked very closely with Tamara Warren, Benicio’s mom and The Verge‘s former transportation editor, but I particularly enjoyed shooting pictures for her son’s posts. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I photographed Brad Kim, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, in the company’s Brooklyn offices. The photos were taken to accompany Kaitlyn Tiffany’s profile of the organization on its 10th anniversary (Kaitlin is a former Verge staffer who is now with The Goods). Toward the end of our visit, I followed Kim outside while he walked his dogs. The resulting environmental portrait became one of my favorites from the entire shoot. It didn’t make it into the finished piece, so it’s nice to able to show it here. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Michele Doying’s stop-motion animation, created to mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Switch, is arguably one of the best she produced this year. It is such a simple concept and so well executed, I find myself watching it over and over. —James Bareham
I was already a fan of Morehshin Allahyari’s work when I contacted her to see if she’d be willing to be featured in our series Technographica. The timing was perfect — she was starting a new project. I was able to capture some of the stages of design and production, along with the final exhibition of Allahyari’s She Who Sees the Unknown series. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Now this was a fun day! Mariya Abdulkaf, our social media guru, reached out to see if I could shoot a stop-motion around the Oregon Trail game. After playing the first part to brainstorm ideas, I decided to create a tableau of scenes on a paper background while the screen showed our progress on the trail. Mariya helped me by cutting out the paper trees and water, while I focused my efforts on finishing the game as quickly as possible. I am glad my team refused to die until after encountering Chimney Rock, a mountain range, and a lightning storm (my favorite part). Those moments were all unexpected and required a lot of additional cutout work that left the photo studio floor strewn with paper scraps. But all these elements undoubtedly enhanced the final stop-motion. For those of you who are wondering how our determined team finally died in the game, they all expired in typical Oregon Trail fashion: measles, dysentery, and, in the case of Gunther, our fearless wagon leader, a fever. —Michele Doying
Car grilles and lots of them! The New York International Auto show was host to cars of all shapes and sizes, but I decided to focus on just the grilles for this photo essay. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I joined writer Lizzie Plaugic and Verge video directors Alix Diaconis and Becca Farsace on a visit to the women behind Wearable Media at New Inc. The New Museum’s incubator space is located right next door to the museum on Bowery, a street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The atmospheric former factory space was undoubtedly one of my favorite locations to shoot during this past year. Lizzie is photographed here wearing Wearable Media’s celestial sensing jumpsuit, Ceres. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I am going to come right out and say it: I love Nintendo Labo. It is one of my favorite pieces of tech from 2018 and is also one of the primary reasons I chose to buy a Switch. The fusion of folding cardboard and coding seems like such an odd idea until you actually start to play with it. Nintendo has made the process of building these cardboard games so seamless, straightforward, and fun it’s positively infectious. After all, how else are you going to play a meowing cat organ? And if you need further proof, watch Dami Lee use Labo to play “Rainbow Connection,” which also happens to be my favorite Verge video of 2018. —James Bareham
Facebook has rarely been out of the news this year, and most of that news has been very bad for the company. Casey Newton’s extensive coverage of Facebook on The Verge means that we need a lot of lead imagery made in advance, which is why Michele Doying created a number of stop-motion animations around the Facebook logo. This one is my personal favorite, not only because it’s so simple and effective, but because Michele put in so much work cutting out all of those paper ones and zeros by hand. —James Bareham
I think that this OLCP “$100 laptop” (widely referred to as the “green machine”) is the most futuristic yet old-fashioned-looking piece of tech I photographed this year. The green and white color scheme makes it look like it was built for Buzz Lightyear. —James Bareham
We shoot lots of photos of people wearing headphones every year. This shot of Verge reporter Shannon Liao wearing a pair of Anker Soundcore headphones was taken by Amelia Holowaty Krales in downtown New York City and has such a timeless quality to it that I think we’re going to be using this shot for years. —James Bareham
In 2018, we shot a lot of artists and creatives for our series “What’s in Your Bag,” and we have more planned for 2019. This shoot with The Knocks in their Chinatown studio in lower Manhattan was my first for the series. WIYB shoots are always fun, but most of the artists I photograph come to our studio. This shoot with The Knocks was especially interesting because this space meant so much to them — it was where much of their music has been recorded. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
GOOGLE ASSISTANT
2018 was arguably the year when voice assistants went truly mainstream. Michele Doying used colorful Play-Doh to create this stop-motion representation of the Google Assistant. —James Bareham
The future success of Uber is currently in the hands of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. In early May, Khosrowshahi sat down for an exclusive interview with Verge transportation reporter Andrew Hawkins at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles during the 2018 Elevate Summit. Los Angeles based photographer Philip Cheung joined Andy to shoot this wonderfully epic series of portraits. —James Bareham
I took many test shots in preparation for this portrait session with the amazing musician Serpentwithfeet. But my favorites were the experimental photographs I took toward the end of the session, the ones using slower shutter speeds and with fewer fill lights. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The scope of the shoots for our “What’s in Your Bag” series has grown over the course of the year and now regularly include stop-motion animation. Michele Doying’s shoot with Lakeith Stanfield shows how movement can add so much to a portrait. —James Bareham
In June, Ford announced that it bought the iconic (and long abandoned) Michigan Central Station in Detroit and had plans to turn this neglected building into a hub for Ford’s future development of autonomous vehicles. Michigan-based photographer Fabrizio Costantini shot an astonishing photo essay of the building, but perhaps the most impressive photos were those taken using a drone. —James Bareham
Photographer Alex Welsh shot these eerily beautiful photographs of the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, for our long-form feature. Today, the lake, which once attracted more visitors than Yosemite, is drying up and threatens local communities with clouds of toxic dust. —James Bareham
Verge deputy editor Liz Lopatto is the proud owner of one of The Boring Company’s “Not a Flamethrower.” The “flamethrower” (which I insist is really a glorified bunsen burner) has little practical use, so Liz decided to use it for cooking. Verge video director and photographer Vjeran Pavic documented her experiments in extreme cooking from a safe distance. —James Bareham
Bram has been driving Radio Flyer’s Star Wars Landspeeder around all summer, and I knew I wanted to shoot some pictures of him driving in it. The afternoon doing this was a ton of fun, and I particularly like the profile image (and the gif!). —Andrew Liptak
As I mentioned in my introduction, striving for consistency in our photographs has been a big goal in 2018. Perhaps nothing demonstrates how a consistent approach can benefit a subject better than our camera reviews. Where possible, we used the same black background and matched both the lighting and composition on each camera review, making them look distinctly Verge. Amelia Holowaty Krales shot the four examples above. —James Bareham
One of the highlights of 2018 was this portrait shoot with Natalie Wynn, which I shot to accompany Katherine Cross’ story on the YouTube star. It was such a treat to spend the afternoon with her, and she was such a pro, completing four (!) different costume changes. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The launch of the VergeScience YouTube channel is one of the undoubted highlights of 2018. In a few short months, the channel has amassed over 600,000 followers and produced videos with millions of views. Verge Science producer William Poor shot this photograph of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on San Onofre State Beach about 60 miles north of San Diego. —James Bareham
The Verge and Curbed got together this year to build a real life Home of the Future in Austin, Texas. Along with the video crew and host Grant Imahara, I endured days of record-hot summer temperatures to shoot this ground-breaking (literally) series. —James Bareham
This first photograph was taken over Croatia. During the flight, I was mostly focused on recording video. But when this blue kayak started rowing through my frame I had to quickly switch to photo mode. Easily one of my favorite photos that I have taken with a drone to date.
The biggest challenge that comes from bringing a drone to Iceland is resisting the urge to fly it all the time. One reason is to save batteries; the other one is to appreciate the nature around you. I think this one was worth draining the batteries and it also gives me the perspective I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So, win win? —Vjeran Pavic
A. Human was an exhibit during New York Fashion Week showcasing possibilities in single-use, decorative prosthetic-like appliques that adhere to the wearer’s skin. It was a bizarre exhibition. The dimly lit space had theatrically lit pedestals where live models were displaying the decorative pieces alongside mannequins. The foot-skin boot was especially strange. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This shot of Michele Doying wearing the Anker Soundcore Liberty Lite wireless earbuds was my favorite in the shoot. It didn’t make it into the final review, so it’s a great excuse to drop it in here. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Verge Science motion graphics director Alex Parkin shot this behind-the-scenes photograph of Verge Science producer William Poor holding one of the domesticated foxes featured in the video. The video is one of Verge Science’s most successful, wracking up over 5,264,073 views to date. —James Bareham
The Apple Watch Series 4 is widely regarded as the smartwatch Apple finally got right. Vjeran Pavic got suitably technical with his photography for Dieter Bohn’s review. Vjeran used a light modifier as a background and plexiglass to create mirrored reflections and graphic shapes. Definitely one of our most impressive product shoots of the year —James Bareham
When it came to creating a lead image for our review of the very impressive Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL, we went back to a technique we first used for our review of the Galaxy S8 in 2017. The only difference was that instead of shooting the phone laying on an iMac screen as I had with the S8, the Pixel 3 was shot standing on the screen of a 4K TV. Verge design director William Joel once again created a stunning wallpaper design for the Pixel screen (you can find all of The Verge’swallpapers here) and Vjeran Pavic brought the plexiglass he used on his Apple Watch Series 4 shoot over from San Francisco. This lead image was the result of a real team effort. —James Bareham
As with Geneva, I shot the Paris auto exhibition entirely with the Pixel 2 XL, which boasts a camera that could only possibly be replaced by the Pixel 3 XL’s. The sheer convenience of having such a powerful camera built into my phone meant I probably shot a whole lot more cars in Paris than I would have done if I needed to reach into my backpack for a DSLR or mirrorless shooter. —Vlad Savov
On our way back from shooting some shots of Chaim Gartenberg wearing the new Fitbit Charge 3, we got caught in the rain and took shelter under cover of The Verge’s office building in downtown Manhattan. In a covered area on one side of the building are a bunch of these amazing bright red Herman Miller-designed chairs. I plopped the watch down into the middle of one of them and it created a very abstract background. A very unexpected win! —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I have described Amelia Holowaty Krales’ review photos of the iPhone XR as having an almost Instagram style. I think this photo of The Verge social video producerMariya Abdulkaftaking a selfie in a Brooklyn bar makes it clear why. —James Bareham
As a fan of Jess Glynne, this was definitely a highlight of 2018 for me. Jess has an amazing voice, a recent new album, and a few awesome things in her bag. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Fadil El Ghoul, aka R3HAB, is a boundless ball of energy and a delight to interview and photograph. He also carries an astonishing number of nutritional supplements in his bag. —James Bareham
Inspired, no doubt, by the success of his Apple Watch Series 4 photos, Vjeran Pavic once again turned to minimal reflections for his shoot of Google’s new Pixel Slate. —James Bareham
RED’s Hydrogen One phone holds the dubious record of being the lowest rated Verge review. Ever. However, I do appreciate how Red’s designers went outside the box a bit and included industrial elements not seen in other phones. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Chaim Gartenberg and I took advantage of an unseasonably warm November day to stick our hands in a water fountain not far from The Verge’s office in lower Manhattan. Look, ma, it’s waterproof! —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The Unagi is a high-end scooter designed for the discerning aficionado who doesn’t ever feel the need to stop suddenly. For an electric scooter that can cost up to $1,190, the brakes are shockingly bad. Transportation reporter Andrew Hawkins had the dubious task of putting the scooter through its paces. —James Bareham
The Verge photo team shot two different gift guides this year: the Back to School Gift Guide and our Holiday Gift Guide. We used exactly the same approach to photography for both. We worked with Michael Moore, The Verge’s reviews coordinator, to lay out the principle items from the guide in an isomorphic arrangement which would then be photographed by Amelia Holowaty Krales. She would then hand the set over to Michele Doying, who created stop-motion animations based on the lead image and other ideas for use on social media. This process worked so well we’re going to carry it into 2019 — we just have to pick some different background colors. —James Bareham
Our final selection of images from 2018 comes from The Verge’s visit to Tesla’s Gigafactory just east of Reno, Nevada, and its factory in Fremont, California. Reporter Sean O’Kane shot so many good photographs inside and around both facilities that we seriously considered running a second photo essay alongside the main feature. Verge video director Becca Farsace captured some incredible aerial footage of the Gigafactory nestled in the hills of the Nevada desert. This final feature and video were a fittingly epic way of closing out a very busy, and very intense, 2018.
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James Bareham<![CDATA[How the Nintendo Switch finally turned me into a gamer]]>https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/3/17073390/nintendo-switch-first-console-new-gamer2018-03-03T12:30:02-05:002018-03-03T12:30:02-05:00
I think the first time that I ever used a Nintendo game console was an SNES plugged into a TV parked on the sidewalk outside an electronics shop in Ginza, Tokyo in the spring of 1991. In fact, I think this may have been the first time I had ever used a video game console of any kind, period. Though I had played arcade games and was the proud owner of a Game Boy, I don’t remember ever playing on a proper console prior to that trip to Tokyo. If I had, it was literally a very forgettable experience.
Yet I vividly remember standing on that sidewalk and being enthralled by the most futuristic video game I had ever played: F-Zero. At the time, it seemed so fast and intense. Even though I grew increasingly frustrated by my constant crashing, I still remember how excited I was playing that game. It was like being on a day trip to the future.
27 years later, I have finally become the proud owner of my first ever game console: the Nintendo Switch. It’s a rather ironic choice as it’s also a handheld device. Or maybe, as Andrew Webster points out, the Switch is something altogether new. But I digress, I really don’t care about the correct definition; I’m just happy that I own my first console and I love it. Finally, at age 55, I can call myself a gamer.
Though the Switch is the first game console I have owned, it is not the first one I have played since that trip to Tokyo back in 1991. Over the years I’ve played on the SNES, PlayStation, Xbox and PC. I also bought several more hand-held devices including the Game Boy Color and Sony PSP before finally switching to mobile gaming on the iPad. Yet I was never once able to commit to buying a home gaming console of my own.
I own my first console and I love it
Why you may ask? Well the answer is simple: I was always slightly worried that I would spend too much time at home playing it. That wasn’t a problem with my handheld devices as I tended to only play them when I was traveling. The same can be said of the games I downloaded onto my iPad. But every time I played on a console I could feel myself getting sucked in. Like the One Ring to Rule Them All, consoles called out to me with their alluring offer of limitless gaming power. I long suspected that should I succumb to the temptation I would be lost forever.
So why now. And why the Nintendo Switch?
When I photographed the Switch for our review last year I was really impressed by the industrial design. I thought the Joy-Con controllers were genius and loved their vibrant colors. Even though I had never played a single roleplaying game in my life, I was intrigued by the beautiful fantasy world building of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, elements of which reminded me of Castle in the Sky. But most of all, I found the enthusiasm for the Switch emanating from people at The Verge and Polygon to be infectious. I was seriously tempted to finally plunge into gaming. But having owned several handheld devices before, I wondered that if I really wanted to commit I should bite the bullet and buy a PS4 or XBox (a gaming PC wasn’t even up for consideration as that is one slippery slope I have no intention of ever sliding down).
I decided to try the Sony PS4 first, mainly because Star Wars Battlefront II had just been released and I felt I deep visceral need to shoot blasters. Luckily, the folks at Polygon were happy to lend me their review unit and I bought myself a copy of the Battlefront game. The first time I played it on a 65-inch TV with full surround sound I was literally blown away (yes, I died a lot). For someone like me who hadn’t played any major console game for years, the resolution, sound design and sheer complexity of the gameplay was staggering. Walking through the forests of Endor or flying through the wreckage of the Death Star was like nothing I had ever experienced in a game before. The environments were so detailed they looked almost real. And that was a problem.
To be blunt, I found the constant killing and the twitching bodies a little disturbing. I was actually surprised by my reaction to it, especially as I am fully aware that Battlefront II is extremely tame compared to other first person shooters like Call of Duty. To be very clear: I’m not judging here. I just realized that first person shooter games with this level of realism are really not my cup of tea. After a solid weekend of playing Battlefront II my enthusiasm for both the game and the console was significantly dented. I gave the PlayStation back to the Polygon team and wondered whether modern gaming was really for me after all.
Then two things happened which made me change my mind and buy the Nintendo Switch. Firstly, a large number of The Verge staff brought their Switches with them to CES this year. One evening in the hotel bar, I watched as Dieter Bohn demoed his technique for taking down some mega baddie in Zelda (no idea which one as I’ve only just recently got off the damn plateau) and later challenge Tom Warren to a race in Mario Kart 8. These games were not only beautifully designed, they looked like so much fun.
There’s a profound need for joy and fun in gaming
But the clincher for the deal was the announcement of Nintendo Labo. I was so impressed by the sheer creativity and imagination that went into designing this cardboard concept. The fact that Nintendo, a 100-year-old company ― that started out life making playing cards before pivoting to making video games ― is still looking for new ways to encourage children (and maybe adults) to “play” in the real world really impressed me. Even though I am unlikely to buy the cardboard piano, I absolutely love the fact that it exists. Labo seems so utterly positive, imaginative, whimsical, and fun. And as I think that there’s a profound need for joy and fun in gaming I was sold. Watching the Labo video for the first time I decided there and then to buy my own Nintendo Switch.
The experience of playing it has been beyond all my expectations. As I have so little experience of modern gaming, I have been consistently taken aback by the sheer breadth of imagination employed not just in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Mario Kart 8, but more significantly in a game that took me completely by surprise: Splatoon 2.
The premise of Splatoon 2 is just bonkers. I thought people were kidding when they first explained that the game revolves around humanoid squid characters using outlandish weapons to fling brightly colored ink at each other in various outrageous hipster urban playground settings. I mean, who comes up with this stuff? Yet playing Splatoon 2 is intoxicating. The gameplay seems astonishingly sophisticated, and the creative thought that has gone into the design and art direction of the characters and sets is off the charts. My one complaint is it needs some more music. I am constantly humming the track from the loading screen and it is getting a little monotonous. But nevertheless, if that is the one price I have to pay to play then so be it.
What has become abundantly clear to me is that I all of the games I have played so far have been deeply considered by their designers. They are like endless Pixar movies filled to overflowing with moments of wonder and wild imagination (I’m still trying to get my head around the toaster oven in Splatoon 2 and failing dismally).
I also now understand why my memory of playing F-Zero on an SNES is still so vivid after 27 years: the game triggered my own imagination. It didn’t matter that the eight-bit graphics were clunky and simple, they made me believe I was racing awesome electric-powered hovercraft in the future.
Which also indirectly explains why I waited so long to buy a gaming console of my own. Yes, I was afraid that I would spend too much time gaming and not enough time practicing the creative skills I needed for my work. But I think a greater reason was that I forgot about the joy of playing a simple 16Bit game like F-Zero. Instead, I was under the mistaken belief that game technology needed to become more sophisticated before I could commit. Every time I played a game I found myself imagining how much better the graphics would be on the next games console to come out. So I waited. But when I played Star Wars Battlefront II on the PS4 I realized that to all intents and purposes this is pretty much as real as it is going to get and I actually didn’t like it at all. Though incredibly impressive, the experience ultimately felt hollow. And it was certainly far, far away from whimsical fun.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild doesn’t look remotely real, but it is incredibly evocative of an alternate reality. Playing the game requires my own imagination to suspend my disbelief. And I think that is what I have been looking for in gaming ever since I first experienced the thrill and excitement of playing F-Zero all those years ago. I don’t want soulless hyper-reality; I want to have fun and play creative games that continue to trigger my own imagination as an integral part of the process.
Playing the Nintendo Switch is like having imagination on tap.
Photography by James Bareham / The Verge
Update, March 3rd, 4:35PM:A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the author played F-Zero on the NES; it should be the SNES.
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James Bareham<![CDATA[My original iPod is a time capsule from 2002]]>https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/18/16992972/ipod-original-vintage-throwback-mp3-2000s2018-02-18T10:00:02-05:002018-02-18T10:00:02-05:00
I bought my first iPod back in 2001. I didn’t buy it just because I was a massive Apple fan or an early adopter; I bought it because I traveled a lot for work and spent hours of my life in trains, planes, and hotel rooms.
At the time I was living in my home city of London. I had working space in photo studios just off Camden High Street in North London, an area with a vibrant live music scene still enjoying the tail end of its post-Britpop cultural high and a large number of venues such as Underworld, Barfly, and The Dublin Castle. Camden was the perfect place for me as a significant part of my work was photographing actors, writers, artists, theatre productions, and of course, musicians. Though I certainly couldn’t claim to be working in the London music scene, I was certainly on the edge of it. And I listened to alot of music, especially when I traveled.
Back in the early 2000s, your options for entertainment while traveling were somewhat limited. Watching pretty much anything other than CNN or VH1 in a hotel room was expensive, and the only airlines that had sophisticated in-flight entertainment systems tended to reserve them almost exclusively for their longer international routes. So whenever I traveled, especially around Europe, I carried my own entertainment with me.
From the late ‘90s through to the early ‘00s, I was regularly journeying between Europe and the US to shoot commercial work. On these trips, I would take along my trusty Sony MD Walkman MZ-R50 MiniDisk (MD) player. I bought it soon after it came out in 1998, mainly to reduce the weight of my carry-on bag which was getting out of control thanks to the huge case of CDs I’d been lugging around the world since the early ‘90s. The only downside of the MiniDisk player was that I had to do the work of transferring the music from my CDs onto the MiniDisks themselves. That novelty soon wore off and I came to regard the making of “mixtape” MiniDisks as a complete chore. I never seemed to remember to label them correctly, which resulted in finding the same tracks on different disks and realize I was missing the ones I actually wanted. When I heard about the launch of the brand new Apple iPod and its “1000 songs in your pocket,” I absolutely knew that this was going to be the device for me.
My first iPod was the smaller 5GB model (it also came with 10GB of storage) with a movable scroll wheel, a tiny 2-inch black and white backlit LCD display, an open Firewire 400 port and 10 hours of battery life. With the possible exception of the first iPhone, I still consider the original iPod to be the most perfect Apple product ever made. In 2018, a 5GB music player with no internet connectivity may seem laughable, but back in 2001, it was nirvana. Though I subsequently bought the second, third, and fifth generation iPods, none of them came even remotely close to delivering the utter joy I experienced the first time I used my original iPod.
I recently decided to charge it up and find out what gems from my musical past were hidden on its tiny hard drive. But, it turned out that powering up this 17-year-old device wasn’t quite as straightforward as I thought.
Though I had kept my iPod collection safe and sound, the same cannot be said of my old FireWire 400 and 800 cables. I threw them all out years ago as there seemed to be no rational reason to keep them. Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Fortunately, Vox Studios managed to find a FireWire 400 to FireWire 800 cable. I plugged one end into the iPod and connected the other to my Mac Pro by adding a FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt dongle. It didn’t work. Shortly after plugging it in, the iPod’s black and white screen flickered a few times before the sick iPod icon appeared making it clear to me that this hacked approach was a complete non-starter.
My second attempt was much more successful. The Verge staff photographer Amelia Holowaty Krales managed to find a FireWire 400 cable at home and I used that to connect the iPod directly to the FireWire 400 port in the back of my original Mac Mini. After leaving it charging up overnight I returned the following morning to a working first-generation iPod. Finally, it was time to scroll through my music playlists for the first time since creating them in 2002.
There are a total of 789 songs and 21 playlists taking up 4.6GB on my old iPod. Some of those songs are still featured in my Google Play playlists to this day: David Bowie, Dixie Chicks, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, Marvin Gaye, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Radiohead, The Strokes, and U2 to name just a few. Others occasionally pop up when I am feeling particularly nostalgic: Abba (#notsorry), Crash Test Dummies, Fleetwood Mac, Alanis Morissette, Supertramp, Red Hot Chili Peppers, early Dire Straits, and some of Mark Knopfler’s solo albums (as a guitarist, I still think he is one of the very best).
Other singers and bands in the “Browse” section that took me right back to London circa 2002: Kylie Minogue (she was ― and I suspect still is ― a British National Treasure despite the fact that she is Australian); Jamiroquai (a British dance/funk outfit whose lead singer was a collector of sick Lambos and Ferraris); Dido (“Thank You” was on continuous rotation in 1999); Moby; Madonna (I think Ray of Light produced by William Orbit is still one of the best recorded albums I have ever heard); Robbie Williams (in an attempt to distance himself from Take That, he went off to record a collection of big band classics by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin for his album Swing When You’re Winning which was surprisingly good ); and Norah Jones, whose album Come Away with Me was colossal in the UK back in 2002.
I also came across music and artists which made me wonder what on earth I was thinking of when I loaded their tracks into iTunes. If I could talk to my 2002 self, I would sit him down and explain that Limp Bizkit’s album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water is an abomination and not at all funny (my London music buddies and I thought it was hilarious at the time). I would also ask myself why Pink’s Missundaztood has a playlist all its own because I have no memory of ever listening to this album even once. But perhaps my most vexed question would concern the fact that Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot is on my iPod. It’s not that I hate it (it is kind of fun), but I was completely flummoxed that my 2002 self would have ever shelled out hard earned cash for a Sir Mix-a-Lot album. (It turns out that I didn’t; I bought the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack album and Baby Got Back is one of the featured tracks.)
Rudimentary backlighting was free.
In fact, I bought a lot of soundtrack albums in 2002. A few of the more notable ones are Dumb and Dumber (which feature a number of great tracks including “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” by The Crash Test Dummies, “Crash” by The Primitives, and the bonkers“Bear Song”by Green Jelly); Moulin Rouge (made relevant again, thanks to figure skaters at the 2018 Winter Olympics); The Matrix (still a classic); Godzilla (featuring “Come with Me” by Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page); and of course, Charlie’s Angels from 2000, which, in addition to the aforementioned “Baby Got Back” also feature some great tracks by Destiny’s Child, Tavares, Apollo 440 and Fatboy Slim.
The reason, dear reader, that I am the proud owner of so many soundtrack albums is because the iTunes store didn’t launch until April 28th, 2003. That meant that in 2002 the only way of getting any music onto an iPod was by uploading CDs into iTunes on a Mac. New CDs were pretty expensive in the UK at the time (about $18–$25 in today’s money) but film soundtrack albums tended to be a little cheaper and often featured hits by a wide variety of artists. The only downside was that some of those albums also included tracks by Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Scrolling through my newly recharged iPod in 2018 and laughing at some of the song choices I had made back in 2002, I was also struck by how badly I had organized the playlists. They are not really organized at all. Some songs are featured two or three times in the same playlists, or in two or three different playlists (I clearly carried this bad habit over from my MiniDisk days). Other playlists aren’t playlists at all: they’re entire albums like Pink’s Missundaztood I mentioned earlier, or “Röyksopp 2” (I have no idea what the “2” refers to) which only contains the band’s album Melody A.M. “Eminem” is just The Marshall Mathers LP.
And it is not only the organization (or lack thereof) of my playlists that leaves a lot to be desired, the naming is a little erratic too. For example, putting Limp Bizkit in “Hip Hop / Rap” is an unintended insult to the entire genre, and the playlist “Nice” features so many tracks by Crowded House and Norah Jones that it should have probably been labeled “Slightly Bland.”
But a few titles are still totally on point 16 years later: “‘70s – ‘80s ‘TASTIC” (which contains tracks by Abba (#reallynotsorry), the Bee Gees, Supertramp, and Fleetwood Mac, etc.) is a nod to Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s characters “Smashie and Nicey” from Harry Enfield’s Television Programme. Enfield and Whitehouse’s catchphrases were the staple diet of my photo crew’s banter from the late ‘90’s right through until 2005, the year I emigrated to America.
When I traveled “across the pond” to New York and a new life in America in January 2005, I brought with me my collection of early iPods. Of course, by 2005, I no longer needed to load my CDs into iTunes. I could instead buy single songs for 99 cents a pop and save myself the price of an entire album. My fifth-gen iPod had a 60GB hard drive, a bigger screen and enough space to hold many thousands of songs. But it, too, would be consigned to a dark drawer in my desk when I bought my first iPhone in summer 2007.
Though my Apple music devices changed over time, growing slimmer and more powerful with every iteration, much of the music on them remained the same. Seventeen years is a long time in both the worlds of music and technology, but not everything dates in the same way. Though today I am listening to a lot of new music from the likes of Adele, Alabama Shakes, Kaki King, Lana Del Ray, Philip Glass, Michael Kiwanuka, Chvrches, and Gary Clark Jr., looking back through the playlists on my first and oldest iPod I was struck by the fact that some of the music from 2001 and 2002 seemed far more dated than some of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.
As I mentioned earlier, most of the music and the artists from that period are still in my playlists: Abba is as vibrant and fun as the day it was written (#notatallsorrysojustdealwithit); Rush may have retired from playing live and recording new material, but I am still listening to their enormous back catalog; Radiohead continue to make angst the most powerfully powerful creative force in the universe; Oasis and Blur (both of whom are surprisingly missing from my iPod, but I was definitely listening to them back in 2002) are a link to my London past; and David Bowie’s final album Blackstar proved that the world is a less interesting place since his untimely death in January 2016.
But can the same be said of the first generation iPod? Does it still hold up 17 years later? I think it does. Despite its insanely thick body, small black and white screen, lack of connectivity, tiny 5GB of storage, and the fact that it has less computational power than most basic smartwatches in 2018, it still just works. This small, heavy but beautifully crafted piece of industrial design does exactly what it was designed to do back in 2001: select and play music. Everybody I handed the iPod to in The Verge office couldn’t help but smile as they spun the scroll wheel and listened to the clicks while they navigated the playlists or just played the game “Brick” (designed by Steve Wozniak).
As for me, the moment I plugged my headphones into my freshly charged iPod and listened to music that had lain dormant for the past 16 years, it was like being transported back in time. Nothing had changed. The music sounded as good as it did back then. Some tracks even sounded better on my old iPod than they do on my Google Pixel 2 XL. My iPod may be scratched and dented but it still looks cool as hell and is a joy to use, even if it is just for a short while before its ancient battery gives out. And at least it has a headphone jack.
Photography by James Bareham / The Verge
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James Bareham<![CDATA[Night into daytime: behind the scenes at CES through the lenses of Verge staff]]>https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/13/16885928/ces-2018-behind-the-scenes-photos2018-01-13T15:30:02-05:002018-01-13T15:30:02-05:00
CES 2018 may not officially end until tomorrow (January 14th) but The Verge team has already packed our bags and left the warmth of Las Vegas for home. But as we unplugged our Ethernet cables, tried to find the many missing lens caps, and wondered what on earth we were going to do with what looked like a hundred bottles of water that had somehow accumulated in the fridge, we also took the time to pool some of our favorite behind-the-scenes photos taken during what has turned out to be a very eventful CES.
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Amelia Holowaty KralesJames Bareham<![CDATA[2017: A year in photographs on The Verge]]>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/31/16826732/pictures-gadgets-apple-portraits-computers-cars2025-10-17T13:40:33-04:002017-12-31T09:00:02-05:00
As 2017 finally draws to a close, we can all look back on a year that in many ways seems to have lasted 10. And we thought a lot happened last year. 2017 has been very interesting and emotional. Again.
When it comes to the photography on The Verge, 2017 was the year of “more.” Not only have we taken and published more original photographs than ever before, more people at The Verge have been taking them. More of our writers and reporters are now regularly shooting their own photos to accompany their stories, and I hope even more will pick up their cameras and phones in 2018.
While the range of subjects and the shear volume of gadgets we photographed increased exponentially, we also created a number of new photographic formats during 2017: We photographed cars as gadgets for ScreenDrive; arranged items neatly for What’s in Your Bag; shot artists and their art for Technographica; and created isometric patterns with gadgets for Guidebook and our Back-to-School and Holiday Gift Guides.
This past year also saw a dramatic increase in the amount of original content we created for our social media channels (particularly Instagram Stories) and a far greater use of movement in the imagery, particularly the use of stop motion animation.
So once again it is time to select our favorite photos from this past year, including many from a growing number of our regular freelancers. As we have so many photographs to choose from, making a final selection has been incredibly hard and no doubt we have missed out many that should have been included. But after all, there’s only so many photos of smartphones, laptops, headphones and iPhone cases you can reasonably fit in to one single post, especially when you factor in the need to leave room for a photo of cuddly pillow with a wagging tail.
The photographs below are arranged chronologically by the date they were first published. —James Bareham
JANUARY
CES LAS VEGAS: 2017
2017 was my first Consumer Electronics Show. I think that it’s safe to say that it was a little different from what I had imagined. Because among the usual collection of bizarre gadgets like connected underwear, I was lucky enough to photograph the most ridiculously over-the-top $40,000 turntable and $100,000 pair of diamond encrusted headphones. Who says technology is getting cheaper every year? —James Bareham
In New York City, the Second Avenue subway line was like a myth passed down through generations. First proposed almost a century ago, I think few people ever thought it was going to be completed. But on New Years Day, 2017, I rode the first train to go south from 96th street and Second Avenue with hundreds of other excited strangers. I caught this quiet moment after that initial ride. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Wireless earbuds seem like old news at this point, but a month after Apple’s AirPods were first released we were all pretty jazzed to try them out. This shot was the lede image for a Racked/Verge collaboration that asked the question “Are AirPods fashionable?” I photographed each of the contributors in a style inspired by Apple’s early iPod ads. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The historic Women’s March brought millions of people onto the streets in cities across the world. The Verge had folks on the ground in a handful of US cities and we compiled their photos into a group photo essay. I took this shot while standing on the overpass that cuts across 42nd Street and over Grand Central. The crowd stretched east for as far as the eye can see. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The shoot with the Leica M10 was the first a number of still-life shoots of cameras in 2017. All of them were shot on the same black seamless background with identical lighting. The intent was to give the reader a simple way to compare and contrast the different models, as well as give both Amelia and I a good excuse to shoot some moody pictures of cool cameras. —James Bareham
London-based motorsports photographer Patrick Gosling travelled to the Bugatti factory in Molsheim, in the Alsace region of France, to shoot an exclusive portfolio of beautiful behind-the-scenes photographs of the $2.6 million Chiron. Even when it is in pieces, the Chiron still looks like a work of art. But then again, with that price tag, maybe it should be. —James Bareham
Vjeran Pavic, who is based out of The Verge’s San Francisco office, has had a very busy 2017 working both as a video director and a photographer — often on the same shoot. I chose this series of Vjeran’s photos because of his subtle use of different color papers to create a graphic background for this Samsung Chromebook. So simple, and yet so effective. —James Bareham
This one-of-a-kind car was quite a spectacle and fun to photograph, especially up close. Its 41,999 RGB LED lights on 2,460 strips were mesmerizing. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Reporter Sean O’Kane and I chose what seemed like the snowiest moment to shoot this electric skateboard. Though it was freezing cold, the swirling movement of the snow added some real movement to the image. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
There’s nothing I love shooting more than events. I spent years shooting concerts before coming to The Verge, but I love anything with time and space constraints. Put me in a studio with endless lights and backgrounds and cameras and choices and I flounder. But drop me in the middle of a 2.5-mile race track on NASCAR’s biggest weekend of the year, when I also have to be doing reporting for the story I’m writing? I’ll take that kind of challenge every day.
Part of the fun in shooting something like the Daytona 500 is the sheer access you get as an accredited photographer. You can lean out over the wall on the pit road, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the photojournalists in victory lane, or wander in search of the best spot to capture The Big Wreck. I tried to capture little bits of all of this to pepper in around the photos and words that served the story I wrote about NASCAR’s push into the future. What I wouldn’t give to go back. —Sean O’Kane
Senior Editor Vlad Savov is the man to speak to if you want to know about headphones. After all, he has reviewed most of them. Vlad has also taken some quite stunning product photos of a wide variety of headphones this year, as well as more than a few self-portraits wearing them. This self-portrait is by far my favorite: the lighting, styling, expression and haircut lend this photo the look of a film still from George Lucas’s THX 1138 —James Bareham
Organized by the same group behind the Women’s March, A Day Without A Woman was held on International Women’s Day and encouraged women to abstain from work (if possible) and protest. This image was taken at the southeast corner of Central Park on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan where speakers addressed the crowd prior to the march setting off. The woman in red in the center of this image held her pose as long as I was standing there. This photo is one of my favorites from that day. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
In addition to headphones, Vlad Savov’s other passion in life is exotic super cars — which is somewhat ironic as he doesn’t drive. Vlad went to cover this year’s Geneva Motorshow and managed to come back with photos of a wide variety of motoring exotica including the Pagani Zonta Roadster,Bentley XP 12 Speed 6e, Renault Trezor and McLaren 720s among many others. —James Bareham
Being on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time was really interesting, especially as I was there to witness the IPO of SNAP, a tech company The Verge has covered closely since its earliest days.—Amelia Holowaty Krales
The Samsung Galaxy launch, or “Unbox” in March was quite a spectacle. At the close of the presentation, Samsung employees, bathed in blue light, paraded through the audience holding the new S8 aloft. Later, during the hands-on portion of the event after the presentation, a very dapper gentleman in a sparkly suit tried on a set of VR glasses. I had to get a snap. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
For our review of the S8, I wanted to find a way to shoot the Samsung phones in a way that emphasized the huge, almost edgeless screen. It struck me that the solution was to shoot the phones on an even bigger screen: an iMac 5K screen to be precise. Verge Art Director William Joel created the stunning wallpaper art work for both the iMac and S8 screens, and it turned out so well that Will created wallpapers for every subsequent major smartphone review we undertook this year. —James Bareham
PHONE CASES: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BUNNY
No one can track down a bizarre smartphone case quite like Reporter Ashley Carman. In 2017 she reviewed cases covered in fake Lego and pompoms, as well as a fluffy bunny and a rubber duck. For each of Ashley’s lighthearted reviews I found a different patterned background to shoot against. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
When Verge Weekend Editor Andrew Liptak paid a visit to the office, he brought along a Shore Trooper costume from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that he made himself. So we ordered pizza. Yup, that happened. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
When it came to lighting actor Naveen Andrews, star of The English Patient, LOST, and the Netflix series Sense8, I started with the set up I use for shooting The Verge staff portraits and then kept adding more lights and more color gels until it looked suitably dramatic. I felt Naveen deserved no less. —James Bareham
Photographing purely functional technology in an interesting way is always a challenge. But Anker’s products were particularly tricky: they are basically black boxes with ports. Not a lot to work with. So shooting them with strong lighting to create long shadows and give them the appearance of floating seemed a little different from the norm. —James Bareham
When Deputy Science Editor Alessandra Potenza set off to Hawaii to visit a seed bank storing some of the rarest seeds on earth, she also took a camera with her and came back with this very impressive photo essay. —James Bareham
My trip to Pandora: The World of Avatar was one of my highlights of 2017, not least because it was such an unexpected surprise. I confess that when I made the trip to Disney World to attend the opening of this new attraction, I went with more than a small dose of cynicism. But as soon as entered the park I was taken aback by the breadth of imagination and astonishing attention to detail that had gone into the creation of this attraction. Mind you, it certainly helped that I could ride the incredible Flight of Passage four times without queuing for hours on end. —James Bareham
When the incomparable Walt Mossberg announced his retirement earlier this year, we knew that we needed to mark the occasion in a significant way. And what better way of celebrating Walt’s illustrious career than by letting him guide us through his remarkable collection of gadgets. —James Bareham
I have chosen this picture purely because it is just one of the many photographs I have taken of Executive Editor Dieter Bohn typing with purpose. —James Bareham
It was a hard day at the office when I was tasked with photographing a ScreenDrive with Ashley Carman driving the beautiful $400,000 Rolls-Royce Dawn. This image didn’t make it in the original post but it’s one of my favorites from that afternoon. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Because of Polaroid nostalgia, instant cameras will always have a place in my heart. Sean O’Kane wrote the review of the Fuji Instax and I got to play with it for an afternoon. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Eero CEO Nick Weaver swung by The Verge office to tell Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about his plans for WiFi and making our homes smarter. His visit also gave me the chance to shoot a very candid and simple portrait. —James Bareham
Verge producer Sarah Bishop became Hermione Granger for a day for our visit to The New York Academy of Medicine’s rare book collection. We were given the chance to see the original books that are part of the digital collection, From Basilisks to Bezoars: The Surprising History of Harry Potter’s Magical World, released to mark the 20 year anniversary of JK Rowling’s original Harry Potter novels. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
There are two truly unbelievable things about Formula E’s first race in New York City. One is how amazing it is that the all-electric racing series, launched in 2014, is even still around; starting a racing series is hard, starting one with new technologies that not everyone is on board with is a totally different kind of challenge. The second, though, is that the series pulled off a race in New York City. That’s something major motorsports like Formula One and IndyCar were never able to make happen over the last few decades, and yet here was the upstart EV racing series putting on a double-header race weekend on the streets of Brooklyn in just its third year.
So we had to be there. The field might not be full of Earnhardts or Hamiltons, and the races are far from the spectacle of something like the Daytona 500. But that makes it all the more interesting (and challenging) to shoot. Add in the cramped confines and scenic backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, and you wind up with an event I couldn’t stop myself from overshooting. —Sean O’Kane
Reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany traveled to Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center to cover Con of Thrones, the first-ever full-scale fan convention for HBO’s Game of Thrones, and came back with this wonderful set of candid photographs. —James Bareham
I sailed up the East River (and was momentarily stuck) in a garden floating on a barge with Alessandra Potenza for this story about Swale, part installation project, part community outreach. The organization aims to bring green spaces to urban communities to encourage foraging, picking and snacking —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I took this portrait of Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara (Lord March for short) back in the summer of 2016. I had returned to the Goodwood Festival of Speed (FOS) in England for the first time in almost 15 years. This portrait was published as part of my written preview of this year’s FOS, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary. In addition, the feature also included photographs I took during the original press preview at Goodwood House way back in 1993. In the 25 years since the FOS has now grown into one of the biggest and most important motoring events in the world. —James Bareham
I picked this awesome photo of Circuit Breaker Editor Jake Kastrenakes taken by Amelia because it is just so good. And, like the earlier shot of Vlad wearing headphones, it too looks like a still from the George Lucas’s film THX 1138 —James Bareham
I will use any excuse to get out to the beach, even on a cold day. I liked the idea of shooting a dreamy, contemplative moment, almost like a still from a film. The copper accented V-Moda headphones were a perfect fit. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Vjeran Pavic’s impressive set of photos of Andy Rubin’s much heralded Essential Phone look as though they were taken in a Star Wars Imperial base, lots of red and white light reflecting on shiny black surfaces. —James Bareham
2017 was the year of The Verge isometric still life shoot. What started with the lead image for Guidebook was developed and improved upon over the course of the year culminating in the image for our Holiday Gift Guide. This shot for our Back to School Guide was the first time I used Photoshop to drop the full image back onto the laptop screen to give the impression that it repeats endlessly. Very Interstellar. —James Bareham
Armed with a Canon 5D, an 80-200mm lens, a tripod and the all-important Solar Filter, Reporter Loren Grush headed for Nashville to chase the Eclipse and came back with this stunning photo. —James Bareham
While Loren Grush was setting up in Nashville, freelance photographer Luke Sharett was heading to Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Hopkinsville was going to be the point of the greatest eclipse on August 21st, 2017 and had been preparing for it for the past ten years. Luke’s photo essay perfectly captured this momentous day for this small rural town as it unfolded.
This shoot was the sequel to the Samsung S8 Review shoot in April. Once again, it featured some wonderful custom artwork by William Joel, but on this occasion we ditched the iMac in favor for an OLED TV screen in search of brighter colors and richer blacks. We found them. —James Bareham
Ben Popper and I traveled to the greater Cincinnati area to report on Groups, a start-up that is opening small clinics in rural America to address the opioid addiction epidemic. I was honored to meet and photograph people who were willing to share stories about their communities and their struggles with addiction. These are some of my favorite pictures from that series.
The top two images were taken in the Aurora, Indiana, at the Groups location during intake and a group session. “I have been here 90 days and I am ready to tell her today that I don’t need to come back,” Jan Karg told The Verge, “but I want to come back because I really enjoy this group. I really enjoy these people.”
Amanda Sampson (center), a founding member of Challenge to Change, leads a weekly substance abuse recovery group and allowed Ben and I to visit and listen in. Sampson has struggled with addiction herself and has since become a leader in the recovery community. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This year saw Apple release three new iPhones: the iPhone 8 and 8 plus, and then a month and a half later, the iPhone X. First up was the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. As both of these phones were largely an iteration of the iPhone 7, I decided to continue with the theme I started for last years shoot: cameras and lenses. But for the iPhone 8, I wanted to make the set up look a little more “real world.”—James Bareham
2017 has been a challenging year for Google, with both notable failures and real successes. Vjeran Pavic’s portrait of Google CEO, Sundar Pichai perfectly captures the weight of responsibilities on this man’s shoulders heading into the new year. —James Bareham
Screen issues not withstanding, one of the undoubted highlights for Google was the launch of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. Not only are they nicely designed phones, the camera is currently the one to beat. I shot the photos for our review in a photographic studio located across the East River in Industry City, Brooklyn. The studio was once a coffee roasting factory and had wonderful wooden floors complete with inset iron doors with decades of wear, which I thought was the perfect backdrop for two phones made of aluminum and glass. —James Bareham
Though most people will not use these headphones in a studio, I took the name literally and shot these cans in one of Vox Media’s podcast studios. According to Vlad, the wireless connection can be problematic when used with Android devices. But even though it seems that there are better headphones out there, I still thought the success of the shoot warranted the photo’s inclusion here. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This young singer-songwriter’s recent success in the algorithmic reality of Spotify’s playlists made her an ideal subject for The Verge. Walking around the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan chatting and photographing Samia for Kaitlyn Tiffany’s piece on her was a delight. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Tackling the tough questions of modern life, Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Carman discuss the implications of turning on read receipts; why and when to super like something; and admit it, you stalk people on Venmo, right? These brave women discussed all this and more in the new podcast, Why’d You Push That Button. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
I have spent the last few months describing the Circuit Breaker Live show (that has been airing weekly on Twitter) as “the Wayne’s World” of gadget shows. The studio set has the perfect “down in the basement” vibe and is the ideal location for (left to right) Chaim Gartenberg, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, Ashley Carmen and Jake Kastrenakes to go deep into the nerdy weeds of the latest gadgetry.
One of the more interesting attractions at this year’s New York Comic Con was a pop-up museum devoted to Andy Weir’s latest novel Artemis. The book is a crime thriller set on the moon, and his audiobook publisher set up an extensive exhibit about the fictional world. But the centerpiece was an installation by Luke Jerram, a 1:500,000 scale replica of the Moon. It’s an astonishing piece of art, and it’s probably the best look that I’ll ever get of our closest natural satellite.
While I took pictures of the installations, I happened to snap a picture of two guests silhouetted against the bright lunar surface. It made for a particularly breathtaking shot. — Andrew Liptak
I don’t think I have ever shot so many photographs for a single review during all my time at The Verge as I did for the iPhone X. Yet the best photo by far in this review is actually an infrared video still shot by Senior Video Director Phil Esposito. Phil perfectly captured the iPhone X’s facial recognition system lighting up Nilay’s face. It’s a remarkable shot. —James Bareham
Photographer Patrick Gosling joined TheVerge Transportation Editor Tamara Warren on a visit to the Aston Martin factory in Gaydon, Warwickshire, England. While Tamara interviewed Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer, Patrick went onto the factory floor to photograph just what goes into the making of a modern Aston Martin, a process that even in 2017 is still largely done by hand. —James Bareham
A few weeks after Patrick Gosling’s Aston Martin factory visit, his colleague Mike Dodd flew to Valencia in the south of Spain to spend some time shooting the utterly wonderful brand new Aston Martin Vantage. While the lime green color may not be to everyone’s taste, you can’t deny that it certainly makes the Vantage stand out from the white plaster walls of the open-air car studio. —James Bareham
I didn’t know much about the world of Instagram pet influencers until I went to Petcon along with News Editor Lizzie Plaugic, where we met some of these furry celebrities and their humans. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Kickstarter’s offices in Greenpoint, Brooklyn are beautiful. I photographed their rooms with vaulted ceilings; common areas made with reclaimed wood; and documented people typing in quiet nooks that they had made into their own alternative workspaces. Finally, I took some portraits of founder and chairman, Perry Chen in the library, a favorite spot in the building. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
Vox Media’s offices are located in the downtown Financial District at the tip of Manhattan, just a few short blocks from both the East and the Hudson Rivers. One late afternoon I convinced my coworker, Social Media Manager for Video Mariya Abdulkaf to model these Sony headphones for me. We went out just in time to catch the sunset over the Hudson. The late daylight was beautiful and perfect for this shot. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
2017 has been the year we fell in love with stop motion animation at The Verge and that is largely down to the work done by Post Production Specialist Michele Doying, who joined us in June to work as a retoucher. Her work on this year’s Holiday Gift Guide not only included animating the lede image above, but she also created a series of stop motion animations which ran as Instagram Stories. —James Bareham
Yes, this is the tail wagging pillow that you never knew you wanted. For some inexplicable reason, this shot of Dami Lee cuddling the Qoobo by Yukai Engineering is one my favorite photographs that I have taken this year. It’s The Verge at it’s Vergeiest. —James Bareham
Rummaging through my coworkers bags is now a thing I do and I have to say, it’s pretty fascinating. You learn a lot about people from what they carry around with them everyday. With this years revamp of the What’s in Your Bag? series we got to rummage a lot. For each WIYB shoot, we shot a main image; a series of shots breaking down the contents into groups (and including a separate set for Instagram Stories); and finally shoot stop motion animation. The bags and their contents above were kindly provided by Dani Deahl, Dieter Bohn, Natt Garun, and Chaim Gartenberg. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
People gathered in front of a 42nd Street Verizon store to protest the proposal to kill net neutrality. “I think it really is an attack on our freedom of speech” Diane Hoffman told The Verge. “I just [am] really afraid that if we lose net neutrality that’s gonna be another step down a very dark road.” —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This was a true Verge photo team collaboration. Shooting this lede image for Ben Popper’s Instagram hashtag feature followed a full day of prepping that included crafting our very own hashtags out of popsicle sticks, cardboard, felt and fur; borrowing accessories from our colleagues at Racked; and a surprisingly difficult search for sheet cake. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
This second season of The Verge’s video series Next Level has seen Lauren Goode meet one company distilling drinking water from the air and another creating hologram time capsules. But the finale of the season was for me perhaps the most interesting: How some companies are seeing Exoskeleton suits as the future of physical labor. This shot of Lauren Goode wearing one of the Exoskeleton suits taken by Vjeran Pavic not only perfectly summed up this specific episode, it almost sums up the entire series. —James Bareham
Earlier this year, I approached James Bareham with a thought: I wanted to showcase our books coverage in a different way. While science fiction and fantasy novels often come with great covers, it’s hard to snip out a segment of the artwork for an online post. We came up with a new solution: showcase the entire book as an object.
The result was a couple of different types of pictures. The monthly book list is topped with a selection of books stacked on the counter at one of my favorite bookstores, Bear Pond Books of Montpelier. Our book reviews often feature the book sitting on my notebook, along with some sort of knickknack that fits thematically with the story and a cup of tea. (Many people have asked me about the robot in the tea cup — it’s from Kikkerland). Other pictures have been specific shots of a book, or in other instances, a nice, thematic background for excerpts or interviews or longer lists of recommendations. The results are always fun to put together and shoot. — Andrew Liptak
This photo essay featuring Daniel Canogar’s series, Echo with words by Lizzie Plaugic, was many months in the making. It is the first “epidsode” of Technographica, a new series that looks at the intersection between technology and art. Daniel Canogar’s Echo installation is made up of five individual sculptures: warped steel frames with flexible, magnetic panels of LED lights attached to them. Those lights respond to algorithmic interpretations of environmental data. Lizzie and I visited the installed pieces at the Bitforms gallery in New York this fall. —Amelia Holowaty Krales
The McLaren 570S Spider is the most intoxicating, exhilarating, and frustrating car I have ever driven. But if you have to spend a weekend driving a $244,000 British supercar, then I suggest you take it to Connecticut in the fall. It was perfect. Oh and by the way, the stereo is awesome. —James Bareham
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James Bareham<![CDATA[ScreenDrive: The McLaren 570S Spider puts the England back in New England]]>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/29/16808000/screendrive-mclaren-570s-spider-puts-new-england2017-12-29T09:00:02-05:002017-12-29T09:00:02-05:00
Cars have become expensive rolling gadgets, full of screens, speakers, and sensors — but are they actually good gadgets? In our series, ScreenDrive, we review cars just like any other device, starting with the basics of what they’re like to use.
When you think of a McLaren supercar, the first words that probably pop into your head are “incredibly fast,” “very expensive,” “uniquely designed,” and possibly “silly doors.” I very much doubt that “sophisticated touchscreen interface” is on your list. And with good reason: you don’t buy a McLaren for the technology you can see and touch; you buy it for the technology you can’t.
If you’re fortunate enough to stumble upon $208,800 when you’re rummaging around down the back of the couch, you may want to consider purchasing the McLaren 570S Spider which, along with the 570S Coupé and the GT, is classed as one of the most reasonably(!) priced in the range. In supercar terms, it is almost a bargain.
0f course I don’t have a spare $200K+ to drop on a supercar and so I was a deliriously excited when McLaren offered to lend me a 570S Spider for a long weekend. Their only conditions were that I brought it back fully fueled and I didn’t drive it more than 300 miles. I didn’t see anything specific in the small print about taking it easy or not crashing it, but I rather took that as a given.
Once the paperwork was signed, I become the proud owner (albeit for only four days) of arguably one of the finest British sports supercars available today. Even though this is an entry level McLaren (the on-the-road cost of the model I drove was $244,370), the 570S is still ludicrously quick. The 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged V8 engine produces 562hp with 443 lb ft of torque, which is sent to the rear wheels via a seven-speed, seamless-shift gearbox propelling the car to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds and a top speed of 204 mph (196 mph with the roof down). Clearly “Entry level” is very much a relative term here.
The 570S’s V8 engine and interior are cocooned by an extremely light and aerodynamically swoopy body which is unashamedly McLaren by design. Yet, the car looks much smaller and far less radical in real life than it does in photographs. It is compact, svelte and almost restrained — though the fact that the 570S I was driving was onyx black and not McLaren orange, mantis green, or lantana purple was probably a significant factor in not making me feel crushingly self conscious driving it.
INTERIOR
The interior is minimal and, in contrast with the car, feels much bigger than it looks. But getting in and out of it is a bit of a challenge. Once you have effortlessly raised the wonderfully balanced dihedral door, you are presented with the task of awkwardly sliding yourself into the form fitting driver’s seat. Fortunately this process requires far less contortion if you lower the roof first which may be one of the best reasons to choose the Spider over the Coupé. Roof up or down, there is also the option to engage the “comfort entry” which automatically pushes the driver’s seat back and pulls the flat-bottomed steering wheel into the dashboard making your life even easier.
Once seated, the interior seems to expand and wrap around you. Though fairly light on creature comforts and sophisticated infotainment systems, the interior of the 570S is heavy on bespoke dashboard tailoring with very functional and beautifully crafted instrumentation. The design is more Soho House than Claridges: minimalist, modern, cutting-edge British styling fusing alcantara, aluminium, and if you are prepared to spend an additional $6,680, carbon fiber. Eschewing even the merest whiff of mahogany veneer or slightest hint of shag pile carpeting, the result is remarkably understated and very “new” England.
DRIVING MODES: NORMAL
Nestled cosily between the driver and passenger seats is a center console which houses the main drive settings. Amongst the various controls is a big, bold engine start / stop button and two reassuringly chunky dials, both elegantly ringed in aluminium, that change the handling (H) and powertrain (P) from “normal” to “sport” or “track” respectively. During my long weekend with the 570S I found myself regularly switching between “normal” and “sport” depending on whether I simply needed to get from A to B (“normal”) or wanted to experience the thrill of driving this bonkers car as it was clearly intended (“sport”). It goes without saying that I left the “track” settings well alone.
I predictably selected “normal” for my first drive of the McLaren and headed out of New York City in Friday afternoon rush hour towards Connecticut. Because the car is so low to the ground, the surrounding traffic seemed to loom over me on all sides making me feel rather small and vulnerable. It doesn’t help that with the roof up the 570S seems to have a surfeit of blind spots making changing lanes less a traffic maneuver and more a leap of faith.
Things got marginally better once I was out of the city traffic and onto the open (ish) freeway. I pootled along at between 55 mph and 65 mph while the V8 burbled away gently (and surprisingly quietly) behind me at a very relaxed 1500-1700 revs ― which for this engine is barely a tick above a standstill. However, whenever I pushed the throttle even a smidgen to overtake, the car would wake from its stupor and I would find myself almost instantaneously traveling at speeds which require me at this point to plead the Fifth and move on.
My drive up to Connecticut gave me ample time to familiarize myself with the nicely designed climate control interface (it was an unseasonably cold Fall day) and fiddle with the electric seat controls to try to make myself more comfortable. That latter part was a big mistake. I would recommend that if you ever find yourself in the envious position of collecting a brand new 570S from your local McLaren dealer, I strongly suggest that you build in extra time for the customer service rep to “fit” you into the driver’s seat and lock the settings into the memory. Never touch the controls yourself. I cannot emphasize this enough. They are literally impossible to see; have to be navigated purely by touch; and are laid out in such a way as to defy all known laws of logic in this universe or any other.
By contrast to the maddeningly stupid controls for the seats, the optional Bowers & Wilkins 12 Speaker Audio System (which come with the “By McLaren Designer Interior” package, a mere snip at $3,110) was exquisite perfection. I selected calming wonderful music with powerful bass and soaring melody to help me escape my rage at the nonsensical seat controls and move on.
DRIVING MODES: SPORT
After an hour or so of freeway driving my initial nerves of unfamiliarity with the car had subsided somewhat. I began to become very comfortable and in fact, I found the car remarkably pliant and surprisingly easy to drive. But then again, I wasn’t really driving it.
Passing through the New England town of New Milford, I turned right onto the 69, a twisting, sweeping country road that heads east towards Roxbury and the rolling hills of Litchfield County. The sun was just starting to dip below the horizon when I switched the settings for powertrain and suspension from “normal” to “sport” and pushed the “active” button in the central control cluster. The amber ring light immediately lit up to warn me that I was now in control and responsible for my own actions… or at least as far as my gear shifts were concerned. Up to this point I’d been leaving those decisions to the car, which in turn had chosen to constantly shift the seven-speed box to keep the revs of the engine down to a very quiet minimum.
Once I had cleared the town limits, I checked the rear view mirrors, scanned the road ahead for approaching cars (the road was surprising devoid of traffic), and slowed the McLaren down to a crawl before burying the accelerator pedal into the floor. The 570S instantaneously leapt forward, the revs climbing insanely quickly. I tapped the right (+) paddle to change gear each time the rev counter hit 5000 rpm. The shifts were indeed almost seamless apart from the engine emitting a satisfactory “pap” from the optional sports exhaust ($4,090) to mark each change. After only three or four shifts I found myself traveling at …(speed redacted here, pleading the Fifth once again)… and so I firmly pressed on the brake pedal while simultaneously hitting the downshift (-) left paddle in the process.
It was like hitting a wall. The revs plummeted as rapidly as they had climbed and after what only seemed like a second or so, the carbon-ceramic brakes had brought the car down to around to a crawling 20mph — which felt practically the same as being stationary. I repeated this process over the next ten miles or so: checking for traffic, slowing to a crawl, then accelerating and decelerating hard. I gained in confidence with the car each time and really started to enjoy myself. Sometimes it was on a long straight; other times it was through sweeping s-curves which allowed me to take advantage of the astonishing amount of grip from the wide Pirelli P Zero Corsa tires, all of which were all fully up to temperature despite this cold, clear New England fall evening.
Finally being able to really drive the 570S was intoxicating, exhilarating, and innately frustrating. It was though the car was teasing me to go faster; tempting me to corner harder; and goading me to brake later. Because doing so just feels too easy, and so much fun. Driving the McLaren reminded me of riding my Ducati 748 motorcycle on a racetrack for the first time when the radical nature of a modern sports bike finally made complete sense. The same can be said of the 570S: it’s only when you speed up that the car finally starts to feel perfectly balanced, taut and fit for purpose. On a public road that feeling lasts just over three seconds before the risks outweigh the reward. Hence the frustration.
By the time I came to my hometown of Washington, CT, I was more than happy to put the car back into the “normal” mode, raise the front of the car’s suspension (so I could turn up my steep drive without scraping the front spoiler) and park the car up for the night.
DISPLAYS
As my time with the 570S was less about hooning around the Connecticut countryside and more about writing a ScreenDrive review, I spent the following morning familiarizing myself with the two main screens in the McLaren’s interior: the 10-inch Thin Film Transfer (TFT) main instrument cluster and the 7-inch IRIS touchscreen mounted in the center of the dash.
When it comes to the UI and UE of these two screens it’s as though there were two distinct design teams at work here. In full disclosure I have absolutely no evidence for this theory but it certainly looks that way to me. The graphic style of the 10-inch TFT instrument screen has more of an illustrated, almost skeuomorphic style: a photo quality picture of the McLaren appears in the center of the screen when it first turns on; there’s a liberal use of graduated as opposed to flat colors; the background is mock “carbon fiber”; and the icons for the main menu and sub-menus looked like they were created by an ex Blackberry graphic designer ― which made me pretty much hate them from the moment I first set eyes on them. By contrast, the icons and layout of the center mounted 7-inch IRIS touchscreen are simple, clean and reminiscent of 1970s info-graphics and looked as though they were lifted straight out of the game Alien Isolation.
10-INCH (TFT) MAIN INSTRUMENT CLUSTER
The main 10-inch TFT instrument cluster displays revs, gear selected, driving mode, oil and water temperature, odometer, fuel level, and a very useful quick glance visual reference diagram for temperatures: oil, water, engine, and most importantly on this unseasonably cold fall weekend, tires. If the tires in the diagram were blue (meaning they weren’t yet up to temperature), I took things very slowly until they were lit green for go.
In addition to the standard info, on the left side of the screen is the option for the driver to cycle through a number of menus and sub-menus by using a lever on the left side of the steering wheel mount. These menus access a plethora of different settings allowing the driver to tweak such things as the interior lighting levels (including the footwell lighting) or set up comfort entry. The lever moves up or down to navigate through menus; pull the lever towards you, enter the selected sub menu; push the lever away to go back; and click “OK” button on the end of the lever to save any selection. Or at least that I think that’s how it works. I found this particular UI to be rather inconsistent and I still hadn’t completely figured it out by the time I gave the car back on Monday.
But to be fair, I didn’t really try that hard. There was nothing here I really needed to change except for one, lone and very important feature which I found quite quickly: the option to raise and lower the front ride height to clear speed bumps — or in my case, to turn into my very steep drive — without damaging the front of the car.
The entrance to my drive is pretty precipitous and so raising the front ride height of the McLaren was a must. To do so I just had to slow the car down to under 35 miles an hour, push the left lever up and hold it in position. After a few seconds, an audible “bing” would sound and the front of the car would slowly rise almost to the same height as the front of my 2013 Audi Allroad. There is the option to manually lower the car back down to the normal driving height but I never bothered: the car would take care of this for me once it reached 35 mph which was pretty much two seconds after I set off.
Apart from this one very important feature, I decided that I was perfectly happy with the level of the footwell lighting and studiously ignored the rest of this interface for the entire time I had the car.
CENTER 7-INCH IRIS TOUCHSCREEN
The same cannot be said of the center console. I found this UI to be clear, functional and pretty self explanatory. The design of the graphics are bold and easy to read as long as it’s a dull day or the roof is up. On a sunny day with the roof down, the on-screen graphics are practically invisible.
When you can see the interface of the central console panel, it is simple and straightforward to use. The screen has settings for phone/music, navigation, and climate control. You can even read the 570S owner’s manual but what you can’t do is use Apple Carplay or Android Auto. There is also an option to use a web interface but this wasn’t active on my loaner car so I can’t speak to how good it is. But I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to sync my Pixel 2 XL to the car. Hands-free calling was crisp and the big, bold buttons on the screen made it really easy to answer handsfree calls while driving. One slight quibble while playing music from my Google Play account was that I had to select the playlist or album on my phone first, and then I could only pause, skip a track or go back using the McLaren’s touchscreen. I didn’t try any radio stations, but the touch slider on the screen to tune was a nice er… touch.
Below the touchscreen itself are nice, big, chunky shortcut buttons. On the left: back, settings, and navigation; on the right: climate, mute, and phone. And right bang in the center is the chunkiest button of them: the home button, complete with the McLaren logo etched on the front.
Apart from the issue of lack of visibility in sunshine and the dated look of the navigation maps (which seem to be running on Android Froyo), the design of both the hardware and software of the 7-inch IRIS touchscreen is really good. I love the bold simplicity and the way it meshed with the rest of the McLaren’s minimalist interior.
AUDIO
It may sound antithetical to rave about the sound system in a convertible supercar, but this is one optional extra I think is absolutely worth it. Both the design and sound quality of the Bowers & Wilkins 12 speaker audio system is wonderful. The elongated egg shaped tweeter mounted on the centre of the dash looks like something straight out of an industrial design museum, while the color of the large speakers in the doors is the only agreeable use of beige I think I have ever seen in my life. But it’s the sound that comes out of these speakers that made such an impact on me: deep resonate bass with clear, crisp midrange and (to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams describing Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’s PA system) “distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.” All of which is even more impressive considering I was streaming the music from my phone.
Driving along with the roof up on the freeway with all of the car set to “normal,” the McLaren 570S is remarkably quiet with hardly any discernible engine noise — even with the optional sports exhaust fitted. All of which makes enjoying a wonderful sound system not just an unexpected bonus, but one that also acts as a soothing balm for driving such a uncompromisingly powerful car at compromised speeds.
WRAP UP & CONCLUSIONS
Way back in 2000, I spent a few days with Mikka Hakkinen, the 1998 and 1999 Formula One World Champion, photographing him in and around his home in Monaco. At one point I was his passenger as he drove the two of us through the town in his Mercedes SL55AMG. I was expecting an exhilarating drive through the narrow streets worthy of the film Ronin, but was sorely disappointed. Mikka had other ideas. He would floor the accelerator as soon as any traffic light we were stopped at turned green but would then throttle off seconds later after the car had reached the speed limit. During the course of our drive he never once picked up any real speed or hurled the Merc around any fast corners. When I commented on his reaction, he told me that accelerating away from the traffic light was the only fun bit.
The same could be said of the McLaren 570S. Driving the car hard for a few moments can be truly, truly exhilarating. But when you’re driving public roads, you’re never going to experience anywhere near the limits of this cars potential, so why bother taking any risks? Better to just play a little.
I’m sure the same is true if you’re brave enough (and let’s face it, rich enough) to drive a 570S on a track. Even if you do manage to scare yourself rigid, the McLaren has in all likelihood barely noticed. Metaphorically speaking, it has its wheels up on the Chesterfield nonchalantly sipping a cup of tea. The car is so good it can indulge you by letting you try to find your limits all the while keeping one eye to make sure that you don’t do anything silly. Within minutes of getting into the 570S for the first time I was struck by the realization that the vast majority of the technology packed into this car isn’t there to entertain me: it is there to keep me safe.
The TL;DR is the McLaren 570S Spider is an incredibly well-designed and beautifully made piece of British automotive engineering. It is overflowing with cutting-edge racing technology making it breathtakingly fast and agile. And yes, it comes at a reasonable price at least as far as supercars are concerned.
But regardless, even if I could afford that still hefty “entry level” price tag of $244,370 to buy the exact McLaren I drove, I still don’t think I would. It is just too… well “too” everything: it is too damn quick and too insanely impractical to ever be enjoyable for more than a few exhilarating seconds out of too many hours of frustrating driving.
Which is a shame because those few seconds are really and truly something else.
Photography by James Bareham / The Verge
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James Bareham<![CDATA[Google’s 2017 gadget collection]]>https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/6/16426932/googles-2017-gadget-collection-photos2017-10-06T08:30:01-04:002017-10-06T08:30:01-04:00
About five years ago, a popular line was “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services,” and I think that’s reached an inflection point. The overall design of Android and Google’s web-based platforms seems to have jumped ahead leaps and bounds over the last few years. The adoption of Material Design moved Google from being famous for user-testing different shades of blue before before deciding which one to pick, to seemingly becoming happy for developers to choose any color or shade of blue they liked (as long as it was a blue plucked from the approved style guide).
This dictatorial approach has undoubtedly made a difference. Though it’s not to everyone’s taste, Google’s visual design language for software certainly fits together nicely, like digital Lego: it’s bright, clean, and playful.
But applying that same confident design language to actual materials has been a much heavier lift. Hardware is hard, and it’s a challenge made even harder by the fact that Google immediately lost its home field advantage on the web when it decided to make phones — a market dominated by Apple’s masterful design.
Though it’s certainly possible to find fault with the design of some of Apple’s products, it’s hard to argue that there is any company consistently better at manufacturing — at least in terms of product build quality and supply chain economics. If Google is going to be taken seriously as a hardware manufacturer, and have any chance of going head-to-head with Apple, it is not only going to have define a strong, concise design language for all of its products, it’s going to have to be able to reliably build, deliver, and support them, too.
On October 4th, Google unveiled its 2017 suite of products — the second-generation Pixel phones and Daydream View headset — along with some new additions: the Google Home Mini and Google Home Max speakers, the Pixel Buds headphones, the Clips camera, and the brand-new Pixelbook.
We spent some time with these new products to garner our first impressions prior to this week’s event. Not all were final versions of the designs that will ship, and not all were fully working models, but nevertheless, it gave us the opportunity to have a hands-on and assess the design of possibly the most important hardware products Google has released to date.
While it’s clear that Google may not yet be fully fluent in the language of hardware design, it has certainly developed a very impressive vocabulary. It is one infused with a sense of whimsy and fun that’s reminiscent of the early iMac designs. (That’s ironic when you consider the rather highbrow minimalism that permeates so many Apple products today.)
PIXEL 2 AND PIXEL 2 XL SMARTPHONES
I spent the entire photo shoot referring to the two color schemes of the Pixel 2 XL as “Stormtrooper” black and white, and “Vader” black. The intersection of the almost-matte aluminum with the high-gloss glass seems to come right out of the Star Wars design playbook. However, the addition of an orange power button to the black-and-white XL certainly adds a sense of whimsy to the overall design. As Dieter wrote, “It’s like a Stormtrooper who secretly wears crazy underpants.” Other than that, the design of these phones is clean, uncluttered, and inherently functional — some may even say boring — but this simplicity really appeals to me. It’s as if the phone fades into the background once you start using it, which I think is kind of the point.
PIXELBOOK
I still regularly use my original Chromebook Pixel. I really like the 3:2 aspect ratio of the screen; the sharp, squarish corners of the body; and the general industrial-like build quality. However, the abysmal battery life and ridiculous weight have meant this Chromebook was in dire need of an upgrade.
So here is the 2017 Pixelbook. It still has the same 3:2 aspect ratio screen, but the corners of the body are now a little more rounded, and the screen also folds flat to act as a tablet, which is a very welcome update. The brutish industrial aesthetic of the original Chromebook Pixel has been somewhat softened by the pale, blue-white glass, which is inlaid into the back of the screen, and an “advanced silicone” (which looks like glass) that flanks the glass trackpad, where it successfully acts as a palm rest. It ties the design of the Pixelbook to the new Pixel 2 and Pixel XL 2 phones. The only sore spot are the giant bezels around the screen, which are decidedly passé in 2017.
The jury’s out as to whether there’s a sizable market for a $1,000 Chromebook, but it’s certainly true that the Pixelbook is a beautiful piece of hardware. Some people may find that to be enough of a reason to buy one.
GOOGLE HOME MAX
The first thing that you should know about the Google Home Max is that it’s pretty big. The second thing you should know is that it’s fairly heavy. The third thing you should know is that it doesn’t seem to share much of its design aesthetic with the current Google Home… because it’s big and heavy. In fact, I think the Google Home Max is more reminiscent of the iconic Apple iPod Hi-Fi from 2006. Not so much because of how it looks (it doesn’t completely look like it), but more from its physical presence. The most understated part of the design is the magnetic pad that attaches to the bottom or the side of the speaker, depending on whether you prefer it standing upright (if you have two) or laying horizontal. The overall design is very simple and straightforward. I just hope it sounds good.
GOOGLE HOME MINI
The Google Home Mini is, as its name suggests, fairly diminutive and fits neatly into the average hand. The finish is tactile: the speaker cloth wraps around the top two-thirds of the device and gives it the appearance of a rather sophisticated pin cushion. The bottom of the speaker is similar to the same hard plastic used in the Home Max. Regardless of the color of the cloth (“chalk,” “charcoal,” or “coral”) all the bases came in the same coral finish. If I had to come up with one word to describe the design of the Home Mini, that word would be “friendly.”
GOOGLE CLIPS
The Clips camera is definitely cute — which I found somewhat ironic considering that there are some potentially creepy aspects to this new device. Nevertheless, there is something undeniably toy-like about the Clips design, almost as if it had been designed and developed by Playmobil. And I mean that as a compliment. The front is clean and white, and the back is green and almost minty fresh. The entire device fits snugly into its rubberized cover with a clip on the back to help the camera stand up or be clipped onto something, like clothing. Yup, creepy but cute.
PIXEL BUDS
I would suggest that, in purely aesthetic terms (they weren’t working production models when we photographed them), the Pixel Buds are possibly the weakest link in the new Google hardware lineup. Whereas the clean, toy-like design of the Clips makes it somewhat endearing, that same kind of approach doesn’t really work for the Buds. It makes them seem rather cheap, which at $159 they are most certainly not — especially when compared to Apple’s AirPods, which are the same price and a lot more sophisticated. I photographed the light blue / gray option. Maybe the dark blue or black versions will look slightly better in the light of day.
GOOGLE DAYDREAM VIEW
Like the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, this new Google Daydream View headset is just an updated version of the device introduced last year. From a design perspective, there are only a few cosmetic changes: the burgundy color option is now a salmon pink called “coral,” and the overall texture of the covering material is much smoother and slightly shiny and far less fluffy. Somewhat surprisingly, I think the Daydream View, which costs $99, has a rather more sophisticated feel than its price suggests.
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James Bareham<![CDATA[Multimillion-dollar Ferraris, Jaguars, Astons, and a fine cup of tea]]>https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/1/15906332/goodwood-festival-of-speed-classic-cars-ferrari-jaguar-aston-martin-racing2017-07-01T10:23:35-04:002017-07-01T10:23:35-04:00
The cast of cars and characters from the first Goodwood press day in 1993. Lord Charles March is by the front door of the house with his light blue AC 16/80 designed by his grandfather.
The Goodwood Estate is nestled in the rolling hills of the south downs near the town of Chichester in West Sussex, England. It is a staggeringly beautiful corner of the country, rich in history (Jane Austen’s house is in the nearby village of Chawton) and is renowned for the wonderful sweeping roads that have made the area a magnet for motoring enthusiasts for years, much to the annoyance of many of the locals. For those who really want to go fast, Goodwood has its very own motor racing circuit. Built on the ex-military airfield RAF Westhampnett (which was an active Battle of Britain air base during World War II) the circuit hosted many famous races until it was closed in 1966. It was finally re-opened in 1998 after a sustained campaign to overcome local opposition by the current owner of Goodwood House, Charles Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March and Kinrara. Or as he’s more commonly know, Lord March.
I personally know the Goodwood circuit quite well. I have driven cars and ridden motorcycles around the circuit during the many track days in which I survived largely without incident — a minor sojourn into the long grass on my motorbike trying to avoid a rider who dropped his bike on the apex of the notorious left hand corner St Marys counts as my only “off.”
I’m also rather familiar with Goodwood House’s front drive too — though that is hardly any grand claim to fame, so do a great many people. The drive is the central feature during the annual Festival of Speed which is currently in full swing this weekend. The FOS (a hill climb for classic and modern racing cars and motor bikes) has been held annually on the Goodwood Estate since 1993. During that time, it has become arguably one of the most important and prestigious motoring events in the world. But it didn’t start out that way.
In 1993, I was still living in the UK (where I was born) and freelancing as a sports photographer for the Sunday newspapers. On one typical overcast day in early spring, I was among a handful of journalists who’d been invited to Goodwood by Lord March to attend a small press preview for the first ever FOS that was scheduled for June of that year.
Lord March also invited a number of motoring enthusiasts he knew and asked them to bring their cars down for the day. Among the group were Tony Smith (manager of the rock band Genesis and seated on car 42 in the group shot) and Denis “Jenks” Jenkinson (standing center with motorbike no 112), the famed navigator for the racing legend Sir Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia, took some of us by surprise by bringing a very loud and rickety looking classic motorcycle on which he proceeded to ride up the hill at a rather alarming rate.
But for me, the highlight of that day wasn’t Goodwood House and its gorgeous grounds, the tea served from silver teapots down at the start line, nor even the wonderful lunch in a grand room of the house. It was swaying a little precariously in a cherry picker that raised me about 20 feet into the air so I could take a photograph of some of the rarest and most fabulous cars I had ever seen in my life. If the value of those cars was extraordinary back in 1993, they’re truly priceless today. A Ferrari 250 GTO, the same model as the one owned (and driven) by Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer (that sits in the bottom left of the group shot above), sold for a record $38,115,000 in 2012.
Back in 1993, there weren’t that many opportunities to see such a fabulous collection of iconic classic cars together in one place. Being invited to that press day was like being given access to a private view of an art exhibition featuring some of the most beautiful (and the loudest) racing cars ever made. I think it’s that kind of proximity that is the single most important factor behind the success of the FOS over the years. Having worked as a photographer at many different kinds of motor sport events (F1, rallying, Le Mans), I can personally attest to the fact that few come close to offering the kind of access found at Goodwood, with or without a photographer’s pass.
Returning to Goodwood in 2016 for the first time in well over 15 years, I have to admit I didn’t find the FOS quite as up close and personal as I remembered it, which is hardly surprising considering just how big it has become. The entire area around the estate is overrun by miles of car parks, connected by a network of metal “roads” to help prevent turning the grounds into a quagmire in the rain. In front of the house, there is an enormous, vertiginous sculpture (the design of which changes each year) while the lawn and fields beyond are full to bursting with manufacturers stands, rides, hospitality units overflowing with guests, and numerous grandstands running alongside the drive to seat those members of the public who are happy to pay a little extra for the privilege. It is like a small town randomly decides to de-camp to deepest West Sussex and bring its entire population with it.
There are a lot of people. Even when it rains (which isn’t often: Goodwood has a reputation for being rather lucky when it comes to avoiding the often inclement British summer weather) people still arrive en masse, complete with their wellies if they remembered them, or plastic bags if they did not. The very active paddock area is engulfed by a sea of motoring enthusiasts of all ages who gather around the rare and exotic (and occasionally downright bizarre) cars and bikes like ants around a discarded jam sandwich. When moving their vehicles down through the paddock, drivers have to gently part the waves of people before them. Crowds of spectators watch giant screens displaying the action while sitting on the lawn in front of the house, or get up close and personal with the concours condition classic cars the Style et Luxe display outside the old stables — where somewhat surprisingly, no one seems to mind small children pawing at near priceless vintage Rolls Royce or Hispano Suizas with ice cream covered fingers.
On an overcast day with brooding clouds before the start of last year’s festival, I sat down with Lord March in his office — full to the brim with motoring memorabilia — to have a chat about how much the event has changed over past 24 years. Considering how huge it has become (around 150,000 people attend each year), I wondered what he had expected the attendance to be like when he first planned that very first FOS back in 1993?
“We were told we’d get two and a half thousand people for that sort of event if we were lucky,” he told me, “We never knew how many we got actually because we couldn’t really give them tickets, and they all broke in through the fence anyway. We got about 25,000 people and we were, well, overrun.”
But it isn’t just the number of spectators that has grown considerably since 1993. The number of entrants has as well. Every year, the entry list only seems to get longer and encompass an even more eclectic range of cars and motorcycles: from the very earliest days of pre-war days of motoring; through the classic racing marques of the 50’s and 60’s; to the latest Formula One cars and car concepts for the future.
All in all, it’s a far cry from that informal intimacy of 1993. “Those people who came that first year were mostly people we knew, or friends of friends,” Lord March recalls. “It was a pretty relaxed affair. The highlight of the party was standing up and getting a bowl of rice on the Saturday night. And now we seat 1600 people and have an absolutely massive show!”
But looking forward, there has to be only so many spectators and so many entries that the festival can fit in. Where does the FOS go from here? After all, the millennial generation seems to have a very different attitude to cars compared with those of mine. Interest in car ownership has decreased significantly while enthusiasm for car sharing and car hailing services are very much on the rise. Electric cars are gaining traction with the public and who knows, maybe hydrogen will be next? Even the wide world of motorsport seems to be suffering some kind of an existential crisis. The organizing bodies of both Formula 1 and NASCAR are looking for new ways to boost their declining viewing figures. Though there is some hope that Formula E and Robo Racing may offer a small respite, it is not going to be easy. There is clearly a need for the car manufacturers and racing organization bodies to have some strategic conversations about the future.
It turns out that some of those conversations are happening at Goodwood. Lord March has actively cultivated a central role for the festival by bringing together the various interested parties to ask and answer the billion dollar questions about what exactly is coming next in the rapidly evolving world of cars and transportation.
“We have this seminar this weekend called Nucleus,” he explained to me, “We have the major CEOs of the big manufacturers and a lot of guys from technology. We have guys from Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, big designers here. The idea is to try to use the FOS as a brainstorming platform to talk about mobility: what’s happening around the world; why kids aren’t driving; and how the manufacturers are responding.”
Project Nucleus seems like a very smart move. The fact that CEOs of major car manufacturing companies — as well as titans of technology — are seeing the FOS as increasingly important both in terms of future strategy and business opportunity will only strengthen the events continuing growth in terms of stature.
Lord March has not only managed to develop an entirely new stream of income for the Goodwood Estate, he has raised the status of the FOS to such a height that some of the relationships being formed here are shaping what we will, or maybe won’t, be driving in the very near future.
But despite this well deserved success, I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic for that grey morning in 1993, when I watched enthusiastic owners fire up their near-priceless classics and race them up the hill. I’m not nostalgic for those early years when it seemed that there was just a one or two straw bales separating me from some vintage racer being driven over the edge, but for how I used to feel about sports cars and motorbikes. Visiting the FOS in 2016 made me realize I just don’t feel the same.
Though I still appreciate classic racing cars, the truth is that I’m not the insatiable enthusiast I once was. I was incredible fortunate to be driven up the hill at last year’s FOS in a Ferrari 488GTB driven by an extraordinary driver. It was exhilarating. But even though there’s no denying that the car was a technological marvel, gorgeous beyond measure and beautifully made, I found myself thinking that I was glad I would never own one, regardless of whether I could afford the $245,000 asking price or not (I most absolutely, definitely can’t).
The reason is that I don’t like the kind of attention these kind of cars garner in the real world. They just scream “look at me” in a way would make me feel rather uncomfortable if I were sat in the driver’s seat.
These cars are simply not my cup of tea anymore. Instead, I’m fascinated by the potential for autonomous, driverless vehicles and the mass adoption of electric cars; I hanker after a Tesla, not a Testarossa. My interest in transportation is focused more upon the very real societal challenges that self-driving trucks and cars will bring rather than the exquisite lines of the latest sick Lambo. Had I been fortunate enough to attend this year’s FOS, I’m sure that I’d have spent most of my time ogling the new Roboracer which has a cool factor well below sub-zero and is featured in this year’s new FOS attraction: Future Labs.
Lord March on the other hand, seems far better than I am at balancing his passion for classic marques and the latest hypercars with his fascination for what the future may hold. Project Nucleus and Future Labs both show his commitment to ensuring that the FOS remains relevant to both the car manufacturing industry and the paying public.
But one of the things we may have more in common is a belief that it is possible to love a cheap car, even a bad car. When I asked Lord March what was the first-ever car he owned, he lit up and told me that it was “a Morgan Three Wheeler.” His parents gave their blessing to discourage him from buying a motorbike, “I bought it for £200 pounds in Middlehampton. It was absolutely dreadful, and far more dangerous than any motorbike, actually. But they are lovely things.” He told me how he drove it everywhere, despite the fact that it had no roof and that one of the wheels once fell off while he was driving.
I too have a love of cheap cars. I may have made my home in the US and become an American citizen, but I still love my quintessentially British 1991 Range Rover which has holes in the carpet, dents in the bodywork and no window in the back because the tailgate crumbled with rust and fell apart. Even though it is probably only worth $5,000, it’s definitely a classic, but not one that would pass muster at the Goodwood Festival of Speed I fear.
A kind thank you to everyone at Goodwood House who helped track down scans of my original photography from 1993 and 1995
Photography by James Bareham / The Verge
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Bryan BishopJames Bareham<![CDATA[Visiting Pandora: a photo tour of Disney’s new Avatar land]]>https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/2/15721206/disney-world-avatar-pandora-photo-tour-james-cameron2017-06-02T11:30:48-04:002017-06-02T11:30:48-04:00
This past weekend Disney officially opened up Pandora: The World of Avatar. We’ve already taken a lookat the rides, the landscape, and even some of the odd foodstuffs that can be found throughout the park — but Pandora is an immersive environment, and sometimes the best way to get a sense of what it’s like to visit is to just look at the glorious sights it has to show you.
Below, The Verge’s own Bryan Bishop and James Bareham take you on a guided photo tour of what it’s like to spend a day (and night) in Pandora.
Click images to enlarge.
Welcome to Pandora
James and I arrived just after 8AM at Disney’s Animal Kingdom park in Orlando. The first thing we noticed when we crossed the bridge into Pandora itself was this sign — a map of the “Valley of Mo’ara” that serves as the setting for the new land. Nearby, a massive plant known as a Flaska Reclinata spewed water and steam whenever visitors would touch its purple insides. Following the path further brought us past a community drum circle… and then those astounding floating mountains. —Bryan Bishop
THE FLOATING MOUNTAINS
Though I was decidedly underwhelmed by the plot when I first watched Avatar, I remember being utterly overwhelmed by the world that James Cameron had realized. For me, one of the most impressive scenes in the entire film was when Jake’s avatar joins the Na’vi in the vertiginous climb up the “Hallelujah Mountains,” the floating rocks that came to define the insanely otherworldly natural landscape of Pandora.
So I had some trepidation about the potential for disappointment in seeing the “real” floating rocks in Pandora: The World of Avatar for the first time. I even joked with Bryan that their initial impact may be more akin to the famous Stonehenge scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap, when the “enormous” iconic stone arch lowered onto the stage was actually smaller than the diminutive dancers gamely jigging around it.
Crossing the bridge and entering the park, I remember thinking that though the floating mountains were certainly big and definitely kind of impressive, maybe they were actually a letdown because they didn’t actually float. But as the day wore on, I found myself gazing up at the looming boulders and watching the vines sway in the breeze. I wondered just how in the hell the Walt Disney Imagineering team had made such an enormous structure hang in the air like… well, just like floating rocks. —James Bareham
PANDORA PLANT LIFE
After we finished gawking at those mountains, the next thing that caught our attention was the plant life. That massive pod near the entrance was just the beginning, because Pandora teems with vivid plants of all shapes and sizes. Purples, pinks, and blues contrasted sharply with the green foliage, while large, Alien-esque egg-shaped plants — known, unfortunately, as “vein pods” — littered the landscape
Tour guides from Alpha Centauri Expeditions, the company that is ostensibly behind the trips to Pandora, were nearby to educate us about various types of plant life, and fill us in on what had happened in the 100 years since the events chronicled in James Cameron’s 2009 film. Unfortunately, those tour guides were only part of the press event. Hopefully Disney sees fit to add them to the public experience as well. After all, the best way to believe you’re visiting an alien world is to talk to the people that live there. —Bryan Bishop
AVATAR: FLIGHT OF PASSAGE
My last visit to Disney World was in 1997. Back then, I found Space Mountain and Epcot a little bit tired and sad, like the members of a once-great rock n roll band that knew their glory days were behind them. Riding Flight of Passage last week, on the other hand, was like watching U2 play their biggest, loudest, and most impressive gig ever — just for me. It was quite something.
I feel extremely fortunate to have ridden Flight of Passage four times — two of them back-to-back — all of them without having to spend much time waiting in line. (It’s a long line.) The ride is so intoxicating that by the fourth go I was both addicted and overwhelmed by the knowledge that no matter how many times I rode it, I would never recapture the insanely euphoric feeling I’d experienced “flying” over the staggeringly real world of Pandora that first time.
And for any of you who are thinking of filming your Flight of Passage to post on YouTube: don’t. Do yourself a favor and put your phone away. You’ll thank me afterward.
But before you embark on this epic — and admittedly rather short — adventure, you’ll take a leisurely stroll (or more likely a slow, step-by-step shuffle) along the meandering path that leads up to the Flight of Passage ride itself. The view from the queue is pretty impressive — which is a good thing because, in all likelihood, you’re going to be looking at it for quite some time.
Once you make your way past the rocks and fauna, you’ll eventually enter a cave system (complete with Na’vi paintings on the roughly hewn walls); a dark passageway (full of bioluminescent plant life); and on through huge, rusty doors that open into the “labs” belonging to the Pandora Conservation Initiative, current home of the Avatar program. The lab is basically the ultimate film set: lovingly art directed with rich detail, down to lab coats on chairs and mugs on desks. The avatar in the tank is the main attraction, but I also loved the little “aliens” blobbing about in smaller tanks. Shame you can’t buy one in the gift store.
THE LAB IS JUST A RESPITE; IT’S NOT THE END
Just when you think you’re finally about to enter the ride, you instead enter a cavernous hall with a life-sized Banshee and a pair of Na’vi stenciled on the wall. You will enter the long, dark, industrial passageways (that will most likely be filled with people) that you must navigate before you finally get to experience the ride.
Like so much of Pandora: World of Avatar, all of the richly detailed scenery that we passed by on our long walk(s) to the Flight of Passage chamber made us realize just how insane Star Wars land will be. Just look at that picture above and tell me you don’t see a Rebel bunker. —James Bareham
Exit through the gift shop
The entire premise of visiting Pandora is that guests are on a tourist expedition, which provides a convenient in-game rationale for doing silly tourist things — including buying tons of branded gear in gift shops. Pandora’s main merch option is a store called Windtraders, and as we exited Flight of Passage, the line led us straight to its doors.
The variety of merchandise was actually quite impressive. There were T-shirts and flip-flops, but there were also Na’vi tails, hair braid extensions, and miniature Banshee puppets that could sit on your shoulder. Guests looking to blow $100 could also purchase their own floating, twirling chunk of “unobtanium.” (Yes, I considered buying it. Don’t judge.) —Bryan Bishop
The Na’vi River Journey
I should start here by admitting I made a massive mistake: I went on the Na’vi River Journey after riding Flight of Passage.
In retrospect, there was no way that this slow, serene, river cruise was going to live up to my expectations of what a ride through the bioluminescent nighttime jungle of Pandora would be like. And it didn’t.
Bryan’s view of the ride is a lot, er… fairer than mine. He makes a very good point about this being more of a traditional Disney ride than the cutting-edge 3D simulator that is Flight of Passage. Nevertheless, I found the Na’vi River Journey to be extremely disappointing: it seems small and claustrophobic, more like a ride through a cave with some fluorescent scenery (which it kind of is) than an epic exploratory journey through a deep, dark alien rain forest (which it most definitely is not).
Had I taken this ride before riding the Flight of Passage, I’m sure that my reaction would have been very different. I also feel that I am being slightly disingenuous about the obvious care and detail that has been put into the River Journey — particularly the animatronic Shaman of Songs which is creepily real. And I must also accept that I am hardly the target demographic. But having said all that, I still feel that the Na’vi River Journey could, and should, have been so much more. —James Bareham
The hidden creatures frolicking on the leaves are a nice touch.
Blue food & neon drinks
After trying both rides, it was time to eat, so we headed over to the Satu’li Canteen. Like most of the structures on Pandora, it was built in the ruins of a building left over from RDA — the mining company that Giovanni Ribisi worked for in Avatar. Aside from the blueberry cheesecake, the menu was pretty straightforward: build-it-yourself bowls and bao buns stuffed with either vegetable curry or cheeseburger filling. (They tasted just like cheeseburgers.) While the food was by no means evocative of an alien world, the set decoration was impressive, giving everything the sense of being part of the world and narrative — including the cabinets in the room where dishes could be stacked.
Afterward, we headed to a drink stand nearby called Pongu Pongu (Na’vi for “party party,” we were told). That’s where we tried the Night Blossom, a sugary-sweet instant brain freeze beverage that was actually quite tasty. That’s also where we spotted a giant mech walker that looked like it was pulled straight from the movie. (James was annoyed we couldn’t climb inside — and rightfully so.) —Bryan Bishop
Don’t disturb the creatures
A smaller bridge nearby took us to a pond, where several small creatures floated. These weren’t animatronic animals; instead they just sat there by the waterline, looking sufficiently odd and Pandora-y. Judging from a sign nearby that warned of their reaction to arm movements, it seems like there will eventually be some sort of interactivity from these critters, but during our visit they were dormant. To get a glimpse of any other animal activity — or to see the Na’vi themselves, for that matter — guests will have to visit Flight of Passage or the Na’vi River Journey. —Bryan Bishop
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PANDORA AFTER DARK
After revisiting both Flight of Passage and Na’vi River Journey a few more times, we headed back to our hotel room for a break. When we returned to the park a few hours later, the sun had set and the entire landscape was transformed.
In the film, Pandora becomes a glowing, bioluminescent landscape at night, and with the power of black lights and I don’t want to know how much glow paint, the physical park does the same thing. The transformation is awe-inspiring; words simply don’t cut it. Even our pictures have a tough time conveying what it’s like to be surrounded by this kind of exotic world on all sides.
If Pandora by day delivers the sense of being on a different planet, Pandora at night made us feel as if we were on a truly alien world. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and it’s one of the things I’m most excited about experiencing again when I return. —Bryan Bishop
All photography by James Bareham and Bryan Bishop / The Verge
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