David Pierce

As part of its moves to comply with EU regulations Apple announced last week that it was opening up iOS to other browser engines — in theory meaning Chrome and Firefox could build better, more competitive browsers. Mozilla pretty quickly said it was “extremely disappointed,” and that Apple was trying its best to make the process awful for competitors. Now Google Chrome’s Parisa Tabriz says the same.

Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:

At one point during this episode, as we discuss our Vision Pro review — and the reaction we’ve seen from around the web — Nilay begins to debate how he’s scored every Apple product ever. It’s that kind of Vergecast, y’all. And then, as TikTok loses a key music partner and foists shopping on users everywhere, we wonder: is it time to call the top on TikTok?

The Vision Pro is not an easy thing to review, or explain, or score. But Nilay had to do all those things. So about 24 hours before the whole thing went live, we sat Nilay down in the studio to hash this thing out once and for all. What is the Vision Pro good at? What’s it for? Why is it so expensive? What’s the deal with the eyes? And most importantly... is it good?

In this episode, we get our first glimpse of Nilay’s fabulously lucrative “alternate app marketplace” idea, we have a lot of thoughts about whether Netflix is better than cable or is just cable again, and all expose ourselves as thoroughly un-knowledgeable about wrestling. But we do know all about Pokemon with guns.