The Vergecast

Ring began as a humble crowdfunded project called Doorbot — a Wi-Fi-enabled video doorbell that enabled two-way communication. In 2013, it was rejected on Shark Tank. This year, the company was acquired by Amazon for over $1 billion. Nilay sat down with Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff on this week’s Vergecast to talk about joining the Amazon family of brands, the future of security in smart homes, and how...

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul bring in experts to report on the top stories on the site this week. Reporter and host of Why’d You Push That Button Ashley Carman stops by the studio to explain the Bloomberg report detailing “Chinese spy chips” that may have been planted on servers from companies like Apple and Amazon. After that bizarre piece of news, senior editor Dan Seifert...

The Music Modernization Act has passed Congress and now sits on President Trump’s desk, awaiting his signature. The bill is years in the making, a much needed solution to the complicated collision of music streaming services, licensing issues, and copyright law. For this week’s interview episode of The Vergecast, Nilay sat down with Meredith Rose, Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge, a consumer adv...

This week, we saw the two founders of Instagram abruptly leave, so Casey Newton comes on the show to talk about all that drama and what it might mean for Facebook’s prized possession. Then, Dan Seifert joins us to talk about all of the cameras that were announced at Photokina this year, plus all the models that were announced before the show even started. Finally, Liz Lopatto comes on for an impro...

You may not have heard of Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) but you almost certainly have used it. The Google open-source project has been making waves since it launched in 2016 in an effort to make the mobile web faster to load and smoother to navigate. This week, Nilay sat down with Malte Ubl, creator and tech lead of AMP, to talk about the controversy of bifurcating the web, forming a techn...

This past week, Nilay reviewed the new iPhone XS and XS Max while Dieter reviewed the Apple Watch series 4. Paul, Dieter, and Nilay dedicate half the show to their review and whether it’s worth upgrading to the new model. Second half of the show, the crew tries to cover all of the insane amount of gadgets that Amazon announced this week, including a DVR for over-the-air channels. There’s a whole l...

Big car companies like Ford have broken themselves up to enter the market of self-driving cars and compete with Silicon Valley companies like Tesla and Uber. Ford Autonomous Vehicles hopes to become the go-to supplier of autonomous driving software, and have even set the ambitious goal of shipping a self-driving car without a steering wheel or pedals in the next few years. For this week’s intervie...

Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn attended the Apple event on Wednesday, and they were able to get their hands on the new iPhones and Apple Watch that were on display. After the event, they headed to our San Francisco studio to Skype with Paul Miller to record their first impressions, a summary of the event, and lay to rest some conspiracies. That’s all you really need to know before lis...

Anki, known for creating “robots that move you,” just finished a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their new home robot, Vector. Anki CEO Boris Sofman sat down with Nilay for this week’s interview episode of The Vergecast to talk about the new companion robot, why gendering the robots is important, and how to avoid the uncanny valley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, Russell, and Dieter dedicate half the show to The Verge’s monopoly week, which dives into the future of tech monopolies. They also discuss the social media hearings that happened on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. In the second half of the show, the crew updates us on what to expect for next week’s Apple event, from the mysterious third phone to the updated AirP...

Best known for coining the phrase “net neutrality” and his book The Master Switch, Tim Wu has a new book coming out in November called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. In it, he argues compellingly for a return to aggressive antitrust enforcement in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, saying that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other huge tech companies are a threat to democracy as t...

This week, The Verge has been at IFA 2018, Europe’s big tech event. There are a lot of new gadgets, so Nilay, Dieter, and Paul go through their favorites on The Vergecast. Also, Apple announced its September event this week, and immediately following the announcement, iPhone and Apple Watch leaks surfaced. The crew discusses. And, of course, we have our fan-favorite segments: Liz’s “This week in E...

We're kicking off our secondary Vergecast episode of the week with an interview with Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith. In this wide-ranging interview , Smith expanded on why the company nearly shut down Gab.ai, the “free-speech” absolutist platform that’s become an alt-right favorite. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, Paul, Nilay, and Dieter start off the show with the news that Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple’s App Store fees, which leads into a larger discussion of (as Nilay calls it) “App Store chaos.” Paul seems pretty excited about “ray tracing” — a term that Nvidia is using for its upcoming graphics cards — so the crew explains what that means and how far a...

We’ve got a whirlwind of an episode this week on The Vergecast. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter bring back Silicon Valley Editor and host of Converge Casey Newton to discuss Twitter’s bad week and what the heck is going on with them. But before that, there’s a whole lot of other things that came up. We reviewed both the Galaxy Note 9 and Android 9 Pie this week, so Dieter runs through everything you need...

If you’ve been reading The Verge this week, then you know Samsung announced a few products. We got our hands on the Galaxy Note 9, the Galaxy Watch, and we even got to look at that Home speaker as well. That news is covered in a big chunk of The Vergecast this week, but there was also so much other stuff that happened. Adi Robertson was able to travel down to Plantation, Florida, to check out Magi...

In the thrilling conclusion to our three part epic miniseries, "Apple doesn't make the laptops we want," Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss how nothing really even matters because Apple is a phone company worth $1 trillion. Samsung, Amazon, and Tesla earnings are also discussed, along with Farhad Manjoo's "Frightful Five" thesis. Then, in "The Bezel Wars," our hosts discuss the Surface Go, iPad rumor...

After a week of speculation on whether the new MacBook Pro was throttling performance under heat, Apple released a software fix to address the problem. Dieter’s review for the laptop (post software fix) published on Wednesday so Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss what happened with the product and how it performs. Dieter also reviewed the new Lenovo Smart Display, so there's a chunk of the show dedic...

We’ve got a super stuffed episode of The Vergecast this week. First, the biggest news in tech right now is the European Commission’s ruling that Google has been unfairly using Android to push Google search on users, giving it an unfair advantage. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down and discuss the implications. In the second half of the show, Dieter discusses some of the new MacBook Pro benchmarks th...

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter discuss an Apple event they were invited to this week for Apple’s updated MacBook Pros. Along with Paul, they dive into how creatives are using these machines, and what these new specs are. Another laptop announcement from this week is Microsoft’s Surface Go. The crew runs through their demo with the computer and discuss how it compares to the other Sur...

The Vergecast starts off this week in a traditional fashion with a talk about dongles — Microsoft’s $80 USB-C dongle to be exact. But there’s a whole bunch of little things that also happened this week that Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss. We’ve got Apple acknowledging the problem with its MacBook keyboards, Google demoing Duplex, and Apple releasing the Mojave public beta. Also this week, we brin...

Instagram announced on Wednesday a standalone app called IGTV, a place for watching long-form vertical video. Casey and Ashely — who went to Instagram’s event that announced the app — talk with Nilay, Dieter, and Paul about their initial feelings about the platform and predict how it will fit into the social mediasphere. Also, Nilay Patel sits down with Kara Swisher to talk about the recent AT&T a...

In addition to our classic Nilay, Dieter, and Paul trio, we’ve added a few things this week. To give you the best coverage of E3, culture editor Laura Hudson gives us a quick rundown of the news from the expo to start off the show In the second half of the show, Nilay sits down with Sonos CEO Patrick Spence. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of other classic Vergecast — some gadget talk, Paul’s weekly s...

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and Nilay, Dieter, Jake, and Ashley are on top of it. Second half of the show, we’ve got Dieter’s exclusive look at the Sonos Beam, Microsoft buying GitHub, a new Fire TV thingy, and breaking news for Essential. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment (hosted by Jake Kastrenakes) “Hey look at this thing I jus...

The Vergecast is here once again to fulfill the weekly prophecy of illuminating tech news. This week, Dieter is at Recode’s Code Conference, but he still calls in to talk to Nilay, Natt, and Paul about what he saw and heard. Also, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is next week, so the crew runs through what to expect. There’s a whole lot in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “Embarras...