The Vergecast

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 ahead Nvidia is compared to its competition. Competition is a general theme in this week’s episode...

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 to know about the two launches. We’ve also got two fresh segments this this week...

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 Magic Leap’s creator edition headset...

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 rumors, and the Windows 10 S life Dieter has been living...

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 dedicated to that device, which exceeded expectations. And we’ve got another week of Elon Musk...

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 that claim the processors may throttle performance due to cooling issues...

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 Surface devices...

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 bring you two new rotating segments on the show...

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 and Time Warner merger...