The Verge has published its annual summer "in" and "out" list, a tradition in which the outlet's staff collectively sorts the technology landscape into what deserves enthusiasm and what has worn out its welcome. The exercise, which the publication has run for several years now, captures a moment-in-time snapshot of sentiment inside one of the industry's more closely watched editorial rooms.
To understand why this kind of list lands with more weight than the average roundup, it helps to understand what The Verge has become. Since its founding it has occupied a particular position in technology media — neither purely a consumer product reviewer nor a straight news wire, but something closer to a cultural interpreter of the industry. When its staff collectively signals that something is passé or newly exciting, that signal travels quickly through the technology and media communities that treat the outlet as a bellwether. The list is editorial opinion dressed lightly as fun, but its effect is anything but trivial.
The broader backdrop here is one the outlet itself names: an internet increasingly saturated with AI-generated content and algorithmic curation that flattens taste and homogenizes what people see. In that environment, a curated human judgment call — even a playful one — carries a kind of scarcity value it would not have had five years ago. The irony is pointed. The very forces that make a list like this feel refreshing are the same forces that have reshaped the technology industry the list is commenting on.
The "in" and "out" format itself has a long cultural history well outside technology journalism, most famously associated with fashion and celebrity coverage. Its migration into tech commentary is a meaningful data point on its own. The technology industry spent much of the 2010s presenting itself as immune to fashion cycles, as a meritocracy where things succeeded because they worked rather than because they were trending. That self-image has largely collapsed. The industry now moves in recognizable hype cycles — cryptocurrency, the metaverse, generative AI — that look less like rational adoption curves and more like the seasonal trends the format was originally designed to track. Using an "in" and "out" list to cover technology is, in this sense, an implicit argument that the two worlds have converged.
For the companies and products that find themselves on the wrong side of the list, the consequences are probably modest in any direct commercial sense. A single outlet's editorial verdict does not move sales figures. But technology products live and die in part by the enthusiasm of early adopters, developers, and the press, and The Verge's readership skews heavily toward exactly those groups. Being coded as "out" in a widely circulated piece shapes how those readers talk about a product in the months that follow. Reputational gravity is real, even when it is hard to measure.
The more significant consequence may be for the broader practice of technology criticism itself. Lists like this one represent a mode of coverage that resists the AI-assisted content production the outlet is implicitly pushing back against. They require editorial voice, internal disagreement, and a willingness to make calls that cannot be easily A/B tested or optimized for engagement in the way that algorithmically generated content can be. The Verge publishing this annually is, among other things, a small institutional argument for that kind of journalism — a demonstration that human editorial judgment produces something audiences find worth reading.
The timing matters too. Summer has historically been a quieter news period for consumer technology, falling between the spring product cycles and the autumn hardware announcements that tend to dominate the calendar. Publishing a list in this window is shrewd editorial strategy: it generates conversation at a moment when there is less hard news competing for attention, and it gives readers a framework for thinking about the industry that will color how they receive the product announcements arriving in the fall.
What to watch for next is whether the specific designations on this year's list — which The Verge has not detailed in the summary available — prove prescient or simply capture a mood that passes quickly. Past editions of the list have occasionally named things as "out" that subsequently rebounded, and flagged things as "in" that faded before the season ended. That track record, whatever it is, is part of the point. The value is less in whether the calls prove correct than in what the choices reveal about where informed, opinionated observers inside technology media think the culture stands right now. That is a harder thing to fake than it looks, and in the current media environment, harder things to fake are worth paying attention to.
