David Pierce

This year’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop really only needed to do one thing in order to be a success: work. After more than a decade of overpromising and underdelivering on all things Windows on Arm, Microsoft needed these new Qualcomm-powered devices to at least prove they could compete with the Intel- and AMD-powered chips on the market. So far, it looks like good news. On this episode of The Vergecast, we catch up with The Verge’s Tom Warren and Nathan Edwards while they’re mid-review on t…

The AI arms race continues apace: Anthropic is launching its newest model, called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it says can equal or better OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini across a wide variety of tasks. The new model is already available to Claude users on the web and on iOS, and Anthropic is making it available to developers as well. Claude 3.5 Sonnet will ultimately be the middle model in the lineup — Anthropic uses the name Haiku for its smallest model, Sonnet for the mainstream middle optio…

Elon Musk got paid. A lot. Now comes the interesting part: Musk has to make Tesla so big, so successful, and so valuable that the tens of billions he’s getting seem cheap by comparison. You might think selling cars is the way to get there, but you might be wrong about that. Musk and, by extension, Tesla seem far more interested in some much bigger, more ambitious, and decidedly more complicated ideas. On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins joins to discuss all the things T…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 42, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about Excel, reading about tin foil hats and the song “Smooth,” obsessing over Francis Ford Coppola’s note-taking system, watching Anyone But You, Hit Man, and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol because I had a bunch of plane rides, and deba…

So, Apple reportedly isn’t paying OpenAI to handle its users’ ChatGPT queries, and OpenAI isn’t paying Apple for its massive distribution. (A billion pockets, y’all!) If that’s the case, what do these two companies get out of their blockbuster partnership for all things iOS and AI? And can OpenAI and Apple actually afford to do this, economically and reputationally? It’s a strange pairing, but it’s coming to a device near you this fall. On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about Bloomberg’…

An elite handful of analysts, actuaries, and accountants have mastered Excel, arguably the most important software in the business world. So what do they do in Vegas? They open a spreadsheet.

There were almost two different WWDCs this year. First, Apple did its classic platform whiparound, detailing all the new ways you can add stuff to your homescreen, share stuff with your friends, watch stuff on your TV, calculate stuff on your tablet, and more. In a normal year, that would have been the show. We would have talked about app icons for 45 minutes and gone home. The second act of WWDC was the Apple Intelligence show, in which Apple began to unveil its AI strategy. We saw a lot of fe…

Five years after the Light Phone 2 launched, co-founder Kaiwei Tang says it’s selling better than ever. This is both extremely unusual for a phone and kind of the point of the thing: Tang, co-founder Joe Hollier, and their team built a phone that was designed to do very little and last practically forever. Their E Ink device became a hit among people looking for a way to get away from their smartphones for a bit, to “go light,” in the company’s parlance. The Light Phone 2 made calls, sent texts,…

The WWDC keynote may be over, but we still have lots of questions about the state and future of Apple Intelligence. And in a somewhat unusual move, Apple is here to answer some of them: Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, two of the executives in charge of all of Apple’s AI efforts, are taking the stage in the Steve Jobs Theater to talk about everything Apple announced on Monday. Federighi, of course, is Apple’s software chief, overseeing nearly all the platforms and features we saw at WWDC.…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 41, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gaming gadgets and silly spy movies, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about the tough times at Humane and how Suicide Squad flopped, watching the TikTok dancing cult documentary and Furiosa, swapping my crappy Roku for a slightly less crappy Apple TV, listening to a lot of WikiHole, mix…

When Apple first launched Siri in 2011 alongside the iPhone 4S, the company made a series of very compelling ads showing how you might use this newfangled voice assistant thing. In one, Zooey Deschanel asks her phone about delivering tomato soup; in another, John Malkovich asks for some existential life advice. There’s also one with Martin Scorsese shuffling his schedule from the back of a New York City taxi. They showed reminders, weather, alarms, and more. The point of the ads was that Siri wa…

Starting this fall, it appears Siri is going to be much more powerful. Whether this is good news or a harbinger of infinite technological frustration depends on how you feel about Siri, AI, virtual assistants, and the whole idea that your devices should be able to do stuff on your behalf. Either way, it seems virtually certain that at Apple’s WWDC event on Monday, we’re going to hear an awful lot about how Siri can make your life better. This year’s WWDC is actually an important one for Apple.…

Nothing CEO Carl Pei just published a video in which he makes two big claims: that smartphones are in fact the AI gadget of the future and that AI might change the way we use those phones. “People love their phones!” Pei says in the video. But “the user experience hasn’t really changed for a really long time.” Everything’s faster, prettier, and easier, he says, “but the fundamental experience hasn’t changed.” Pei now thinks that’s about to change. I should note that Pei does casually mention th…

Say this for Sonos: the company is remarkably consistent. It has spent decades building audio products that look and sound great... and are almost always initially hampered by some kind of weird software and usability issue. When Sonos stuff works, there’s nothing like it, but it doesn’t always seem to work. The Sonos Ace headphones fit perfectly in that lineage. In The Verge’s review, Chris Welch found them to be comfortable, attractive, well-made, great-sounding, and hampered by just a few t…

The algorithm that powers Google Search is one of the most important, most complicated, and least understood systems that rule the internet. As of this week, though, we understand it a little better. Thanks to a huge leak of API documentation, we got an unprecedented look at what Google cares about, how it ranks content, and how it thinks the internet should work. The leaked documentation is dense, and it doesn’t tell us everything about how Google ranks, but it does offer a set of signals we’ve…

Almost 12 years ago, Microsoft showed us the Surface for the first time. Back then, the company’s big bet was that the laptop market was ready for a shake-up, that it could radically change both the hardware and software of a Windows PC and make everything better. Windows 8 didn’t go so well, and neither did the early attempts at building Windows on top of Arm processors. The Surface, though, has turned into a pretty great device. Now, Microsoft is making a very different wager, this time on AI…

Almost 12 years ago, Microsoft showed us the Surface for the first time. Back then, the company’s big bet was that the laptop market was ready for a shake-up, that it could radically change both the hardware and software of a Windows PC and make everything better. Windows 8 didn’t go so well, and neither did the early attempts at building Windows on top of Arm processors. The Surface, though, has turned into a pretty great device. Now, Microsoft is making a very different wager, this time on AI…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 39, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for gadgets this week, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been writing about Surfaces and other tablets, chatting with some internet friends about the fall of Red Lobster, reading about Magic: The Gathering and the history of emoji, watching MoviePass, MovieCrash, weeding my patio with a literal flamethr…

Did you think Sky, the new and newly personable voice of ChatGPT, sounded like Samantha from Her? Not everyone did, but enough people noticed a distinct Scarlett Johansson...ness in the chatbot that it became a story. And then Johansson herself decided that Sky sounded a little too close to home, especially given that she’d turned down offers from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to play Sky herself. We still don’t know all the details of the timeline here, who knew what, what Altman did when Johansson sai…

There’s a new company in the race to make a less distracting, more minimalist, and generally sanity-saving kind of computer. It’s called Daylight Computer, and it’s launching its first device today: the DC1, a 10.5-inch tablet with some interesting ideas about gadget design. The DC1’s main hook is its display. Daylight calls it a “LivePaper” screen and says it looks like E Ink but is smooth and responsive like a traditional LCD. This is... not otherwise a thing that exists, at least not yet, an…