Vergecast

First we run through the greatest hits of the Code Conference (including Linda Yaccarino’s interview, which was ... something!). Then we catch up on all the news from Meta Connect, how Hollywood is approaching AI and data going forward, the Logitech racing chair of Nilay’s dreams, and much more. It’s The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of publishing late today.

This week I bought a DVD, for journalism. Because with Netflix’s disc-delivery service coming to an end, we wanted to know: what’s next for physical movies and TV? We asked Redbox’s owner that very question. Then we talked about streaming metrics, why they matter, and whether they actually mean anything at all.

Amazon and Microsoft both had big device launches this week — and both were actually big AI launches. What’s next for gadgets, when AI seems to be the present and future of everything? Do you still need a laptop with a plinth? (Spoiler alert: yes. You do.)

Still on the fence about which iPhone to buy, the 15 or 15 Plus the 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max? Can’t decide if it’s time to double-tap your way to a Watch upgrade? Wondering what the difference is between a homescreen widget and a lockscreen widget and whatever happens in the Dynamic Island and a Live Activity? Well, us too. So that’s all we did on The Vergecast today. We even figured some stuff out.

Sorry this week’s episode is a little late! But it’s a good one — we definitively did not solve the Thread mystery, but we have some ideas. And we don’t exactly know what a general search engine is, either, but we have some thoughts on what’s been happening in the biggest antitrust trial in two decades. It’s The Vergecast!

You might have missed that this week was Apple’s fall iPhone launch event, but fortunately for you we were on the ground in Cupertino for it and recorded a Vergecast to go over all the announcements. Join Nilay Patel, Allison Johnson, Victoria Song, and Dan Seifert as they discuss the event, the announcements, and their impressions of everything Apple announced.

Is the iPhone 15 going to blow your mind with its incredible new features? Probably not. But it might have a new port, a new material, and even a new name. And you better believe it’s going to have a Dynamic Island. Plus we have Chrome news, GoPro news, Sonos news, Disney news, and much more. Start working on your new YouTube face, friends!

It’s the last week before Labor Day in the US, which means it’s also the last week before Gadget Season begins again in earnest. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Google, it seems like everybody’s got a product launch in the next six weeks. Today on the show we preview a bit of what’s to come, and dig into all the best stuff coming out of IFA this year. It’s the year of wireless charging, y’all!

Many people know the Internet Archive through the Wayback Machine, one of the most important web history repositories in existence. But its broader archival initiatives have left it facing legal challenges from the publishing and music industries. On today’s Vergecast I broke down the status of the suits and what they could mean for the future of digital preservation... and while we’re at it, what’s copyright really meant for, anyway?

We just don’t really understand why you’d make a pair of $200 headphones without Bluetooth. But we absolutely understand why you’d want a 57-inch Samsung monitor.

We’re super excited to see all the awesome throwback computer setups from our Vergecast listeners! Here are some of the cool submissions we’ve received in response to Nilay’s call on last week’s episode. Thanks for sharing!

Can you make a top-notch PC out of a block of wood? Maybe more to the point, would you want to? And can Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or anyone anywhere, build a true super app? Today on the show we accidentally investigate the biggest and smallest visions of computing, all in one place.

On the last episode of The Vergecast, Nilay put out a request for photos of your childhood computer rooms and while we’ve already received a bunch of submissions from listeners, we need more.

It’s all a lot of screens on this episode, really. Screens in suitcases next to pools. Screens that look like sunflowers. Screens for scrolling, screens for tapping, screens that show everyone yelling at each other while you try to watch football. It’s The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the hutch your family computer used to be in.

College football conferences: super confusing, ultimately made up, and surprisingly important to the future of entertainment. Oh, and if you haven’t seen The YouTube Effect yet, this podcast will still make total sense, but you should add it to your watch list for sure.

And at the very least can we make the prices less confusing? We discuss why the numbers keep going up, plus why Apple should and shouldn’t buy Disney. Then we make sense of the backlash to Zoom’s AI policies, dig into Slack’s redesign, and spend a lot of time talking about fart apps. Because to get to the future, you gotta start with fart apps.

Coming to you today with an episode from Land of The Giants, which this season is all about Tesla. (It’s a very good season, you’re not too far behind, you can catch up wherever you find your fine podcasts!) This one just felt particularly Vergecast-y to us: it’s the story of how Musk took over at Tesla, and reshaped the company in his image. We are the flagship podcast of corporate in-fighting, after all.

This episode is for all the samboys out there, y’all. We get into some reader emails (thanks as always for sending, and keep ‘em coming, vergecast@theverge.com or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11), talk about YouTube’s world takeover plans, dissect BeastBurger, and get into the weeds on plow planes. And we barely talk about X at all, for once.

Be honest: would you let Worldcoin scan your irises in exchange for... something? Glory, I guess? Alex Heath would, so of course we had to talk about that. Plus we dig into how Samsung makes the folds and the flips work, and how it happened that the games on your phone ended up in arcades everywhere. Happy Vergecast!

We’ve been really enjoying answering a question from The Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11) every week, but we get too many good voicemails to only do one every Wednesday. So on today’s episode, we answered a whole bunch with the Verge staff. Listen for answers about iPhones and Pixels, Threads and Instagram, Macs and Windows, audio codecs, security cameras, and more.

Yes, singular. You know why.

Lots of gadgets this week! We talk headphones and laptops, chatbots and other chatbots, and get way in the weeds on both copyright law and Tree Law. Which are both very important.

We all decided after recording this episode that we probably should have said more nice things about the classic TiVo remote, which was a true thing of beauty. But we all have our favorites! Plus, don’t miss Nothing CEO Carl Pei talking about phones, glasses, and the hopefully-very-exciting future of gadgets.

Mainly the Nothing 2, because have you seen how pretty that primarily black and white UI is? It’s practically E Ink! Besides geeking out on gadgets we also talked about what FTC’s loss in the Microsoft case means for gaming, and for the FTC’s big to fix antitrust laws. It was an extremely Vergecasty Vergecast.

Other than totally crushing my battery, and a weird keyboard bug in iOS 17, Apple’s new betas have been pretty solid! We dug into what we’re seeing in them so far, then had a long philosophical debate about LLMs and GPTs, before clearing our calendars for the games of the summer. But mostly this episode is about my deep loathing of the Wimbledon AI commentary. It’s The Vergecast!

Is Instagram Threads going to become the fastest-growing app of all time? Sure looks like it. Will Meta care about it long-term, will it ever launch in the EU, will Threads ever actually embrace the fediverse? Who knows. Are ads coming to Threads? You betcha.

We talked a lot on this episode about what it means when the web is overrun by AI — the news sites, the social networks, the search engines, everything. It’s robots all the way down, y’all. Then we talked Macs, AirPods, Call of Duty, and much more. Alex may have brought up Plex a few times.

The FTC’s trial against Microsoft continues to rage, as do the fights in Congress over how best to protect kids online. Meanwhile, is the Pixel Fold the foldable we’ve been waiting for? And can the Razr be the coolest phone on the planet again? All that, and a lot of feelings about IP ratings, on this episode of The Vergecast.

If you haven’t read Josh Dzieza’s story on the grueling, extremely human work required to make AI systems work, you really should. And then you should catch up on all The Verge’s Smart Home Week coverage, because we have some big ideas about garage door openers on this podcast.

Reddit needs to make money. That’s fair! It’s a company! Companies that don’t make money stop being companies! But Reddit is also more dependent on the good will of its users than most companies — and is at odds with some of those users as we speak. Can Reddit the company and Reddit the community both survive? That’s the question of the week.

The Reddit blackout rages on, so we spent some time with Apollo developer Christian Selig figuring out why. Plus, is Threads the future of Instagram? And is a 15-inch MacBook Air the one we’ve all been waiting for?

If you didn’t catch the recent podcast bonus episode pitting the Vergecast crew against Waveform in a round of tech trivia, it’s a great Friday afternoon listen.

It’s the mid-2000’s again, apparently, because widgets are back and everybody’s bumping their phones to share contact information. So we spent the show debating which of Apple’s new-old ideas might stick around this time — plus where the new set of crypto scandals might lead the industry.

David, Nilay, and Dan hopped into a studio in Cupertino so we could talk about their impressions of the Vision Pro, and then, the WVFRM crew stopped by for a deeply fun and chaotic lightning round. But stay tuned, because this is just the first of many Vergecasts this week.

Meta’s got a new headset. Apple’s almost certainly got a new headset. Can I interest you in a headset? What do you look for in a headset? When I say “headset,” what do you think of? What’s it gonna take to get you into a headset today?

Next week, we’re pretty sure Apple’s going to launch a headset. But this week, we’re interested in the early days of the company — we have two stories, one about a huge success and one about a huge failure, both of which help explain why Apple is the company it is today.

An AI that helps you use your computer? What a concept! Also, do you think Max is doomed, or is it the streaming service to beat? Everything old is new again this week.