Vergecast

From last week’s Vergecast: there’s one small problem with this Bing AI response about The Verge’s history with Elon Musk and Elon Musk impersonators.

Bing has gotten smarter, Google had a not great announcement of its competitor, Bard, Elon’s Twitter reach is on the decline, and Bob Iger is restructuring Disney, again. It was a busy week and we covered it all on the Vergecast.

Nilay has access to Bing’s new AI powered search, so we took some of your prompts from Twitter on today’s show. The crew discuss whether this version of search will reshape the way we use the web, and whether or not this can beat Google.

We’re back in video form (audio feeds for your podcast app are here), and this time yes, I admit it — I was occasionally using Nvidia AI to enhance my eye contact with Nilay, Allison, and Monica.

Big show! Alex Cranz, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Chris Welch, and Nilay Patel discuss The Verge’s review of Apple’s new second-gen HomePod. How much actually changed?

But besides spending time talking about this new way to watch the Vergecast, we talk about the new M2 Pro and Max devices from Apple, the many existential threats Google faced this week, and Elon’s latest appearance in court.

I sat down with Charles Pulliam-Moore to talk the first two episodes of The Last of Us, but if you want to skip possible spoilers jump straight to 22:05 where I’m joined by Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code, to talk about the unique relationship between noncompetes and Silicon Valley. Finally we wrap the episode up answering your questions—including where all the USB-C only hubs are.

Alex Heath joins the show’s first segment to talk us through the latest update on Elon’s first few months at Twitter, and then we turn to Apple’s eventless hardware announcement, HomePod and all.

On the Vergecast we discuss the possibility of touchscreen Macs, and what it all really means for pressing confirmation buttons, zooming in on maps, or maybe using an iPad app or two.

With Nilay roaming the wilderness of upstate New York, I talked to Alex and Dan as we imagined the possibility of Macs with OLED screens that you can touch and tried to figure out what MicroLED would do for us.

I can’t stop thinking about that TV at CES that is not only wireless but also has a whole vacuum suction system on the back of it for mounting on a wall.

This podcast was recorded before Elon Musk’s Twitter ban extravaganza reached its peak, but we dug into the @ElonJets mess. From Apple, we’ll check out the report that it will allow outside app stores on iOS as well as the hole left by a missing M-series Mac Pro in its desktop lineup.

So Nilay, Charles, and I gathered to consider who will survive the next streaming age and who will end up on the 90 side of the Go90 Scale of Doomed Streaming Services.

This week on the Vergecast James Vincent joins us to explain ChatGPT and ponder a future where AI writes a lot of the web. Then Nilay has strong feelings about the FTC suing Microsoft, Richard has feelings about Apple’s surprise privacy moves, and I only bring up E Ink once.

On today’s Vergecast we talk a LOT about E Ink, but also about babies? Okay, we talk about US broadband too. Anyways, this is a fun episode and one of David’s last for the next couple of months. Give it a listen.

I said Bruno Mars mixes every album in an old Cadillac Escalade; it is actually a 2010 Cadillac CTS. Per Rolling Stone:

Okay, those weren’t the only topics!

We covered all that on the latest episode of The Vergecast, along with what Dall-E and other platforms will mean for copyright law, the difference between CMYK and RGB, and much more. AI art is coming, y’all!

It’s been a week, friends. Twitter is melting down before our eyes, Meta laid off 11,000 people, the crypto world is facing yet another scandal, and we couldn’t even record a whole podcast without a bunch of news breaking. Things are only getting wilder, too, so stick around.

Yeah, yeah, election day was yesterday. But it’s still Politics Season, right? So we spent an hour talking about how we get political news, the state and future of free speech in America, and all the ways the CHIPS and Science Act will change tech.

For $8 a month, Twitter will be... Twitter. Or it can be much worse for free! We debate whether the new Twitter Blue is worth the price, along with everything Elon Musk has done at the company, the official Matter launch, and much more.

Just kidding, nobody knows the future of Twitter, chaos reigns, buckle up everybody! But now that the deal is really done, we tried to figure out what’s happened already, what happens next, and what Elon’s Twitter might look like.

iPads: they’re complicated! We got into the weeds on which one you should buy, how you should use it, and why Apple seems so confused about its future. Also: what cryptozoologists think about cryptocurrency, and the surprising stuff they have in common.

Every week is Cybersecurity Week, y’all! We spent an hour answering your Vergecast Hotline questions (866-VERGE11, keep ‘em coming) on all things passwords, VPNs, baby security, and bad websites. We also accidentally learned too much about random number generators.

A lot of things happened this week! Apple released loads of new iPad and an Apple TV, Netflix talked more about its plans for ads and for cloud gaming, and Tesla had earnings. Richard Lawler joined us to talk about crypto too.

So much tech news this week! We dug into all of it, from Meta Connect to our Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch reviews to the never-ending slew of Microsoft announcements. And we all have strong feelings about the whole idea of “enterprise VR.”

We talked all about Meta Connect and the Quest, from Zuck’s thoughts on the Quest Pro to our impressions after using the device to the state and future of VR games. We also have a lot of feelings about what a “VR stylus” is actually good for.

Including some breaking, mid-podcast Elon news! It’s been a busy week, and we got into all of it. Including the deep, deep disappointment we all felt upon hearing Chris Pratt’s Mario voice.

We also spent some time wandering through the CEDIA conference, compared Kindles, expressed our deep love for remote controls, and perused the r/stadia subreddit. Stadia is dead, but here’s hoping the controller isn’t.