David Pierce

Surely, you’ve heard Mariah Carey’s holiday smash hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” But have you heard about this other song? It’s also called “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and uh, it sounds a lot like Mariah Carey. We’re about to spend a long time litigating how that happened. On this episode of The Vergecast, with the help of Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding, we dig deep into the new lawsuit filed by the RIAA against two AI companies, Udio and Suno. Those two companies are alleged…

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…

There are really only three things you need to know about the Boox Palma. One: it’s about the size of a smartphone. Two: it runs Android, with the Play Store. Three: it has an E Ink screen. There are other specs and features I’ll get to, but that combination — smartphone, Android, E Ink — is the Palma’s whole reason for existence. In a couple of months of using the Palma, a $280 device that has been on sale since last fall, that combination has turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because it…

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,…