Amazon has been trying to make virtual assistants happen for more than a decade. Alexa is, by many definitions, wildly successful, but it has so far failed to become the kind of omnipresent, omnipotent helper the company imagines. (It has also, by all accounts, failed to become a compelling business for Amazon.) This week, though, Amazon launched the most ambitious version of Alexa yet, with new technology underneath and some big new ideas about how you might interact with AI.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what’s next for Alexa. David Imel — who you might know as the co-host of the Waveform podcast — joins the show to help us figure out what to make of Alexa Plus, and the whole idea that large language models can make virtual assistants both more useful and more accessible. Amazon’s description of Alexa Plus makes a lot of sense, and sounds pretty compelling, but we have reservations both about the user experience and about Amazon’s ability to actually pull this off.

After that, we dive into a busy week of gadget news, beginning with one of the more unusual camera launches we’ve seen in a while. We also talk about the iPhone 16E, and the ne …

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There was a time, not so long ago, when people wouldn’t shut up about a revolution in automobiles. No matter where you looked, you’d find someone telling you about how self-driving, all-electric vehicles would change the way we think about car ownership, lead to a total reinvention of how cities work, change the economy, and fix climate change forever. All by roughly 2020.

Obviously things didn’t quite turn out the way the EV and robotaxi boosters hoped. On this episode of The Vergecast, we dig into why. The Verge’s Andy Hawkins joins to explain why the momentum continues to turn against the EV revolution — but why carmakers simply can’t give up the fight, or risk losing it before it even really starts. He also tells us why robotaxis are suddenly cool again, as Uber and Lyft resume their plans to automate ride-sharing everywhere.

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After that, we pivot to the fediverse. Evan Prodromou, the research director at the Social Web Foundation and one of the people overseeing the ActivityPub protocol, catches us up on all things social. We talk through the rise of Bluesky, what’s going on with Threads, …

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On the one hand, Apple’s latest iPhone is a huge victory. The iPhone 16E comes with most of what you’d want from a smartphone — a modern processor, a good camera, nice design — for hundreds of dollars less than you’d typically spend on a brand-new device. On the other hand, it’s a bit odd that this thing exists at all. It’s missing a couple of the best things about the iPhone ecosystem — MagSafe, multiple cameras — and if you’re already spending $600 on a phone, it’s not clear that another $200 is a particularly huge deal. So why does the 16E exist? And who is it for?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we try and figure it out. With Nilay on vacation, David is joined by The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes and Allison Johnson to go through all the ins and outs of Apple’s latest smartphone. We talk about the trades Apple made to bring the price down, the ones it maybe should have made instead, and just how big a deal the new C1 modem might turn out to be.

After that, the three co-hosts talk about the other gadget news of the week. We marvel over the Oppo Find N5, a lovely foldable smartphone that none of us will ever own. We pour one out for the Humane AI Pin, …

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Meta is clearly all in on AI, and for good reason. With models like Llama, products like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and a monetization plan like Facebook ads, it’s one of the companies best positioned to make AI really work. But it wasn’t that long ago that Meta was making a different, just as huge bet on the metaverse. It’s right there in the company name! So what does Meta really want to be when it grows up?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by digging into exactly that question. The Verge’s Alex Heath joins to discuss everything from smart glasses sales numbers to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to bring back “OG Facebook.” We also talk about a recent memo from CTO Andrew Bosworth that suggested 2025 will be the year the metaverse either takes off or falls apart. As all this is happening, of course, Zuckerberg is rapidly changing his company’s political stances and more forcefully declaring his own values. Meta never seems to stop changing, but this change feels bigger than most.

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After that, we pivot to another company in the midst of even bigger change. The Verge’s Chris Welch takes us through the last year at Sonos, in which the company launched a pretty good pair of headphones — and a new app so disastrously bad it overshadowed everything else Sonos shipped. Now there’s a new management team, another new product line coming, and lots of questions left as to whether Sonos can win back the fans it built over years and lost in a matter of weeks.

Finally, on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!), we answer a question about business cards. Because it may be 2025, but business cards refuse to die. And so we need something to do with them.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

• Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta employees to ‘buckle up’ in internal meeting
• Meta says this is the make or break year for the metaverse
• Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses sold more than 1 million units last year
• Meta’s AR / VR hardware roadmap through 2027
• Meta CTO says the company is working to ‘catch’ leakers
• Zuck wants to bring the “OG Facebook” back.
• The Sonos app fiasco: how a great audio brand nearly ruined its reputation
• Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after disastrous app launch
• Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees
• Sonos Arc Ultra review: don’t call it a comeback (yet)
• Sonos Ace review: was it worth it?
• After a bruising year, Sonos readies its next big thing: a streaming box
• Adobe Scan

It’s hard to think of a time when a single figure has been so central to seemingly everything in the way that Elon Musk is right now. Musk is overseeing and overhauling the federal government, while bending it toward his own financial gain. He’s also ubiquitous in the artificial intelligence world, where this week he offered to buy part of OpenAI, adding more pressure and chaos to an already complicated company in an already complicated spot.

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On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about Elon Musk. (For what it’s worth: we hear those of you who would like us to talk less about Musk on the show. Frankly, we’d also like to talk less about Musk on the show! And we’re working on ways to do that. But what’s happening with DOGE in particular is so urgent and important and central to all the things The Verge cares about that we feel we have to keep talking about it. We want outlets too, though, and we’ll find them together.) We talk about the latest with DOGE, look through some deeply silly government websites, and dig into all the ways the Trump administration is using boring government inform …

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Over the last few weeks, OpenAI has done the previously unthinkable: it has consistently shipped interesting new user-facing products. First there was Tasks, a way to engage ChatGPT in helping you get things done. Then there was Operator, a way for the chatbot to actually do things for you. And finally there was “deep research,” an extremely imperfect but still very interesting tool for generating deep dives.

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For now, Operator and deep research are both gated behind ChatGPT’s most expensive subscription, the $200-a-month Pro tier. (Tasks is available on the $20 Plus plan.) So on this episode of The Vergecast, we paid up and got to testing. The Verge’s Kylie Robison joins the show to talk about her experience with the shiniest things about ChatGPT – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the really, really, impossibly slow.

After that, The Verge’s Liz Lopatto joins us for an update on Elon Musk and the DOGE takeover of the US government. Liz explains where things stand now, why this is all such a big deal, and where this crisis is really headed. Musk has long assumed, often correctly, that the rules si …

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Elon Musk and the team at the Department of Government Efficiency figured out one thing really fast: if you control the computers, you control everything. And so Musk and his merry band of engineers have spent the last week or so parading into various US government agencies and taking control of their systems. There’s so much about what’s really happening here — who has what access, when anyone will try and stop them, whether this small group really will successfully shut down agencies and convince thousands of federal employees to leave their jobs — that we don’t know. But however it shakes out, the X-ification of the US government is not a good thing.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we start by trying to, if not make sense of things, at least try and explain them. Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Richard Lawler talk about why DOGE is operating the way it is, how it has been able to so quickly assume so much control over the government, and what might come next.

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After that, the hosts pivot to talking about tariffs, which are at least slightly less complicated and confusing. But only slightly! We …

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After almost exactly 18 years, you could make the argument that the tech industry has finally finished what the iPhone started. It’s not that there’s no innovation left in phones, or that there aren’t other big ideas to be had about the devices we carry around, but the specific thing the first iPhone was — a candy bar-shaped slab of glass in your pocket — might have reached its final form. Maybe there’s another reason that Samsung’s Galaxy S25 lineup looks so familiar, and why it appears this year’s other flagship devices will too. But maybe it’s just that there’s not much left to do here.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Allison Johnson tells us all about her experiences with the S25 Ultra, supposedly the most interesting and experimental device in Samsung’s lineup, and why she’s a bit underwhelmed despite the fact that the Ultra remains an excellent phone.

We also discuss the phones left to launch this year, and whether this might finally be the year a new phone shape — flipping, or folding, or maybe tri-folding? — hits the big time. We have some theories, and a lot of hope, but are mostly planning for another year of the same o …

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The DeepSeek story contains multitudes. It’s a story about the stock market, whether there’s an AI bubble, and how important Nvidia has become to so many people’s financial future. It’s also a story about China, export controls, and American AI dominance. And then, somewhere in there, there’s a story about technology: about how a startup managed to build cheaper, more efficient AI models with few of the capital and technological advantages its competitors have.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about all these angles and a few more, because DeepSeek is the story of the moment on so many levels. Nilay and David discuss whether companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should be nervous, why reasoning models are such a big deal, and whether all this extra training and advancement actually adds up to much of anything at all. (Nilay has a long comparison to Bluetooth, in case that helps you guess where we land.)

After that, we go through our email inbox (vergecast@theverge.com) and the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), and talk about some of your responses to last week’s question about how people use AI. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in and called! There a …

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