The Vergecast

The Vergecast

The Vergecast is the flagship podcast from The Verge about small gadgets, Big Tech, and everything in between. Every Friday, hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce hang out and make sense of the week’s most important technology news. And every Tuesday, David leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives – and which ones you should bring into yours.

Episodes

December 28, 2025 71 mins
The iPhone 4 was one of the best iPhones ever — and definitely the most dramatic iPhone ever. It was lost in a bar in California, sold to Gizmodo, and published for the world to see months before its launch. The phone itself had a bunch of important new features, and one that spawned Antennagate. In this episode, David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and longtime tech columnist Walt Mossberg tell the whole story of the phone, its legacy, and ...
Mark as Played
The world runs on RAM, and RAM is harder than ever to get your hands on. What’s happening here? Every year, the Vergecast team spends the holiday season going deep on a single spec or technology, and this year it’s all about Random Access Memory. (No, that’s not a Daft Punk album.) Nilay, David, and Sean Hollister explain what RAM is, why it matters, how it became a precious commodity, and what it means for the future of chips arou...
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December 21, 2025 84 mins
Google didn't invent the concept of smart glasses, but it was one of the first companies to actually put them on people's faces. It was a revolution, and also a problem: Google made face computers extremely uncool, and its early user base was so off-putting they became collectively known as “Glassholes.” The Verge’s Victoria Song and Waveform’s David Imel break down why Glass failed — despite being shockingly right about the future...
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December 19, 2025 125 mins
Åhead of our last Friday episode of 2025, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr did The Vergecast an enormous favor: he went in front of Congress and said a bunch of wild things about regulation. So, of course, Nilay and David have to talk about them. For a really long time. After that, the hosts look at all the ways YouTube and Netflix are becoming more like one another, and then update the Go90 Scale of Doomed Streaming Services to round out...
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December 16, 2025 78 mins
Who's going to win the Super Bowl? What about the latest season of Survivor? Or the race to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve? Who will be Portugal's next president? How many times will Elon Musk tweet in the next week? On Polymarket, and other prediction markets, you can bet on all these things and more. Are we entering a world in which everything is gambling and gambling is everything? Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal joins the ...
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A year ago, David and Nilay sat down with Wall Street Journal senior tech columnist Joanna Stern to make a bunch of confident predictions about 2025. We got them... you know what, never mind. Let's look ahead to 2026! This year, we gather again to make increasingly bold bets about the year to come, including the future of a few of the world's biggest companies and whether we're finally going to get a foldable iPhone. Last year's pr...
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December 12, 2025 102 mins
Technically, the Netflix / Warner Bros. news is almost a week old, but what a week it has been! And so, after some follow-up on smart shades and CES, Nilay and David talk through all that’s at stake in the fight between Paramount and Netflix — and whether it’s even possible for someone to win this deal. After that, Charlie Harding, co-host of Switched on Pop and honorary Vergecast intern, explains how AI is taking over the country ...
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December 9, 2025 78 mins
Well, friends, it's been a year. And before we turn the page to 2026 and all the stories of 2025 begin to blur together, we decided to take stock of things. Nilay and David are joined by Wall Street Journal senior tech columnist Joanna Stern to debate the best products of the year, the biggest policy moves, the people who broke bad, the good AI things, the bad AI things, and much more. It's been a vibe-everything kind of year, and ...
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December 7, 2025 52 mins
AI models are very good at summarizing things, finding other things like those things, and helping you find those things again. But does that mean we should leave all the work of finding and understanding to those models? Sari Azout, the founder of an app called Sublime, doesn't think so. For this episode, the second in our two-part series about how developers are using AI and building models into their products, Azout explains how...
Mark as Played
December 5, 2025 96 mins
First things first: David and Nilay are both having some TV problems, and they need to talk it out. But then they get to the news of the week, including Samsung's new extra-foldy foldable phone, and a big change in the design departments at both Apple and Meta. What does it all say about the future of smart glasses? After that, the hosts talk through why Sam Altman declared a code red inside of OpenAI in order to redirect focus to ...
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December 2, 2025 74 mins
Apple makes a lot of gadgets. You've probably heard of some of them. Most of them are very good! Few companies in tech, or anywhere, can claim a track record as impressive and consistent as the folks in Cupertino. But only one Apple product can be the best Apple product. The Verge's Victoria Song and Allison Johnson join David to rank Apple's nine product categories — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirPods, AirTags, Ho...
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November 30, 2025 63 mins
Raycast is an unusual app with an unusual amount of access: it's a launcher and application platform that can directly interact with all the files and apps on your computer. Raycast didn't start as an AI-centric product, but Thomas Paul Mann, the company's co-founder and CEO, thinks AI is the key to making Raycast even better. For this episode, the first in our two-part miniseries about how developers are using and building AI, Man...
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November 25, 2025 70 mins
It's a holiday week for many of us, which means a lot of Turkey Trots and a lot of TV. We have something for both in this episode! First, Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and author of the new book, The Running Ground, joins the show to talk about his lifelong journey as a runner, and all the tech — from smartwatch to shoes to custom GPTs — he uses in training. After that, The Verge's John Higgins makes his first Vergecast ap...
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November 23, 2025 81 mins
Vine was the original short-form video platform, and pioneered so many of the ideas we now take for granted in reels and TikToks. It was a cultural engine whose executives clashed with the creators who made it famous, before everybody decamped for other platforms. Marina Galperina, Sarah Jeong and Mia Sato join David Pierce to revisit their favorite Vines and discuss the platform's lasting impact on creator culture. If you like ...
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November 21, 2025 93 mins
Like it or not, you may not be able to avoid the AI agents for long. David and Nilay discuss the ways Microsoft is pushing agents to practically every corner of Windows, and where Google plans to put Gemini 3 now that it's confident it makes the best model. After that, the hosts dig into the ruling in Meta's monopoly case, which has a lot to say about TikTok — and about the state and future of the internet. Finally, in the lightnin...
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November 18, 2025 64 mins
Enshittification. It's fun to say, hard to spell, and a useful descriptor of exactly how the internet has gone wrong. Cory Doctorow, the author and activist who coined the term a few years ago, recently published a book on the subject, called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. He was on Decoder a few weeks ago to explain what happened, and joins The Vergecast this week to help us figure out...
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November 16, 2025 73 mins
You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag. But plenty of people used LimeWire and other file sharing services to share music, movies and more. If Napster was the beginning of the piracy story, LimeWire may have been the final chapter. Nilay Patel and Sarah Jeong join David Pierce to chart the history of LimeWire and the legal cases that shaped U.S. copyright law and the lives of college students taxing the bandwidth of...
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November 14, 2025 100 mins
The console wars are back on. This week, Nilay Patel sits down with Jake Kastrenakes, Sean Hollister, and special guest Joanna Stern, senior columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to talk about Valve's return to the living room gaming race with the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame VR headset. Then, Joanna discusses her time putting the Neo robot to the test and seeing whether it's capable of loading a dishwasher. Fin...
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November 11, 2025 82 mins
David has a new house, and no idea what to do with it. So he taps The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy to help him make the place a lot smarter. Jen and David go room by room, figuring out how to improve everything from his lighting to his fridge to his front door. Some of the decisions are easy, like betting on Matter. Some are more complicated: what do you do when you have a split household between Android and iOS? Some are downri...
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November 9, 2025 82 mins
In 2014, the tech world was abuzz with the prospect of a phone made by Amazon. When the Fire Phone arrived, it was chock full of ideas — a "dynamic perspective" feature that created 3D illusions, an image-recognition feature called "Firefly," and many, many opportunities to buy Amazon products. Allison Johnson and Sean O’Kane join David Pierce to discuss why, unlike Amazon's successful e-readers, this device was a gigantic flop. I...
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