Today Vergecast Features and What to Know

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of anti-reflective display coatings. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show, we're taking your questions about I actually don't know what. Travis Larchuk, our producer, is going to come on and he's going to ask me some of the questions we've been getting on the Vergecast hotline. We're going to get into all of them. He has promised me I'm going to love at least one of them. I'm very excited about it. All that's coming in just a sec. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. Disney is thinking about some pretty big changes to its streaming strategy. On

its earnings call, Josh Diamaro, the new CEO, said that the Disney Plus app will soon get games, merchandise, and other experiences, whatever that means. Basically, it seems like Disney Plus is going to become the Disney Everything app. Disney's even partnering with Tik Tok to turn the vertical video feed into, I guess, Disney talk, whatever that looks like. Demar also said that Disney is looking into adding a free adup supported tier to Disney Plus and said it in such a way that it's very clear that is in fact coming and probably very soon. Right now the streaming wars in general are just a race to become YouTube before YouTube

can swallow the entertainment industry whole. It's wild out there. SpaceX also just reported earnings for the first time ever and it's doing I don't know fine. SpaceX wants you to think that it's a space and AI company, but right now it's mostly making money renting compute to other AI companies. But the big news was Gwyn Shotwell, the company's president and actual leader, saying SpaceX is planning to build a terrestrial mobile network in addition to its satellite systems. In part, the plan seems to be to connect all of its existing Starlink antennas and build a network that way. Starlink evidently has its sight set on taking quote quite a few customers from T-Mobile, AT, and

Verizon. We'll see. And finally, a preemptive RIP to Google Assistant, which is officially being removed from Android devices starting on September 4th. This isn't at all surprising. Google has been allin on Gemini for a while now, but I think Assistant is actually still the best way to do some simple phone tasks, and now it is all LLMs all the time, apparently forever. You can read more about all this at the verge.com. That is 90 seconds on the verge for Wednesday, August 5th. All right, let's get to some of your questions. As a reminder, the best way to ask us questions about anything and

everything, we love all of your weirdest possible questions. You can email vergecastverge.com. You can call the hotline 866verge11. We're going to do more and more of these all the time. Travis Larchuk, our producer, who is here, just wants to do the hotline all the time. All the time, every show. I love this. Uh, you have a bunch of questions. Uh, I am going to do my best to answer them. Let's get into it. All right, our audience is very interested in that sick light phone that you talked about.

Everyone is interested in this. It is extremely sick. Uh our first voicemail is from WY and he has some thoughts on how uh phones like this could be successful in the long run. Hey David, this is Wy. I just listened to the podcast with the light phone flip and I've had a light phone and no keys and every other flip phone that's basically new and you ask what is the thing that needs to happen in order for these things to work basically and in my opinion the thing that needs to happen is open development and leverage the power of the very passionate community that is willing to do development for them and approve and don't approve based

on purely philosophical lines. I think in my opinion that would be the game changer that allows these things to take off. Okay, Wy, I say this with love. I can hear from your voicemail that you are reckoning with the exact same thing that everyone does in this space, which is who decides. This is the problem with all of this, right? like you can make a phone that does a certain number of things and if you the developer limit that phone to a certain number of things that is at least a very clear principle right you say here is the phone it does the things that it does not do

other things the end you can either like it or you can not the minute you open it up to any more than that everything gets weird and messy and complicated because you say either I David Pierce the CEO of Flip Incorporated ated ambiter of what belongs on this device that you've actually already paid a bunch of money for and in theory could make a very compelling case that is yours to do with as you please. Like Travis, do you remember that thing going around with the Light Phone 3 where a bunch of people started putting full Android on it? Like the Light 3 is running on Android, so people were just hacking it to run actual honest to god Android.

It seems like it defeats the purpose a little bit, but okay. A lot of people would agree with you. So this became a whole thing because there were a bunch of people who were like, "You are destroying the thing that this is supposed to be. Why on earth would you buy this phone to run all of this stuff?" And then there were a bunch of people who were just like, "Screw you. I paid $700 for this phone. It is mine to do with as I please." Both of those things are good and true things. And uh I've been talking to a bunch of people about this and the two different courses of action that I've really found are um Commodore, which is

making a flip phone. They sort of bought and rebooted the brand. There's really fascinating Commodore thing happening with like retro tech. They're making a flip phone and their idea is actually almost exactly what WY said is that anybody's going to be able to make apps, but they're only going to be able to be listed on the app store if they are approved by Commodore. and that sets up the CEO of Commodore, this guy Christian, as like the lord and savior of flip phones. He is the arbiter of truth and whether that gets to be good. And I think to some extent that is a perfectly good and valid opinion, right? He's like, we're selling this phone. We're selling a belief system and

a value system with this phone and I will be the one in control of that value system. Um, Light Phone has gone very much the other way. Uh, they opened up the development kit. going to have some curation and things in their own store as you like go to the website to download stuff to do on your phone. If somebody wants to make a Facebook app, light is not going to promote the Facebook app. But if you want to make a Facebook app and run it on your light flip, Kai Tang would tell you that is your right and it is your phone. And if you want to completely destroy the whole value system and belief system behind this phone in the name of getting Facebook and Instagram on your phone,

knock yourself out. So I think in line with the thing that all these flip phones have been dealing with for forever, which is what can these do before they become a problem? Like everybody agrees you shouldn't be able to have Instagram on a minimalist phone. That is simple. Should you be able to have WhatsApp? Should you be able to have Snapchat, which is both a social media platform and like straightforwardly a text messaging replacement? Nobody knows exactly where that line is. And now the question is who gets to be the one to be the keeper of that line. And I think I probably heir on the side of you should be able to do whatever you want. If you want to get a phone and then use Clawude to build some weird apps that run and

violate the whole premise and Light would hate you for it, I earnestly believe that is your right as the person who just spent a bunch of money on this phone. Um, but different people will land in different places on this and I think it's going to be one of the big questions in this era going forward of these devices. All right. And then our next one, this question I believe is David Pierce bait. This is right up your alley. This is going straight for your heart, David. Wait, can I guess? Sure. It's about It's going to be about one of two things. It's either going to be about uh which notetaking/to-do list app this person should use or it's going to

be about inc screens. Hey David, this is Eddie. I just listened to the episode with uh Kai from the Light Phone Slip. I was just curious how uh how do these minimalist phone designers how do they decide between like e- in LCD OLED in screen? Like it to me it seems like you would want e in for just terrible screen and screen time restrictions basically. But I don't know. I think this new one has an LCD. I might be wrong. Um but yeah, how do they make those decisions and what are the pros and cons? My personal brand is immaculate. Travis. Yeah. Before you answer, I had this moment when you were like, I'm going to guess where I felt like I was on the newlywed game and I was like, oh, do I know David as well as I think I do.

Yeah. So, I'm glad that you and everyone else pretty much have me pegged at this point. Um, okay. This is a really good one. Um, and as America's foremost expert in the books, Palma, uh, I feel very qualified to answer this. So the trade-off here is actually relatively straightforward, which is that e- in lasts a lot longer. It's much easier on the eyes, and it sucks. And I mean sucks as a compliment in this sense, right? It is actively unpleasant to do things like scroll tick tock on any ink screen. So even something like the books palma or all of these other devices that are more full-fledged Android devices, they do the thing they intend to do not by making it impossible but just by making it terrible. Like if you want to put Tik

Tok on your books, Palma, you can. And as I said before, I believe that is you're right. If knock yourself out, that's weird, but go get it. Um but no one does. And that because it doesn't work and you wouldn't like it and you would have a bad time. Um, EIN screens are more complicated than you'd think. They're they're all essentially run by a single company. The whole E in ecosystem is a strange thing that we should probably get into at some point on this show, but it's it's actually probably in many ways easier to get your hands on an LCD or an OLED screen than it is an e- in screen. But that is neither here nor there. So, the pros for e- in are [snorts]

I think fairly straightforward in how you use the product, right? The cons are that sometimes you want things that suck on an e- in screen. And I think the one that comes up over and over with these companies is the camera. Um, you can't use a camera properly with an e- in screen. It doesn't refresh fast enough. It doesn't show enough fidelity. It won't properly show you what's in focus. Uh, even books which ships a camera, they're like, "This is a document scanner." Like, don't even try to take pictures with this thing. It will roughly capture the thing you are trying to do and that will solve your

problem relatively fine. Uh the reason light started using non-eink screens light started making e- in phones way back in the day for all of the reasons I just described. But they realized okay the number one thing people require on their primary device is a camera. Like if you were to make a list of features people want on their phone I think you'd get to camera before you'd get to phone. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So, like you just have to have a camera and then the minute you have a camera and you want to use it for anything at all, you need a better display than what you get on an e- in screen. You just can't do the thing on e- in that you need to do the

camera. So, now you're stuck with like, okay, do we do a bunch of weird tricks to an OLED screen to make it look more einky? And we're starting to see this from a lot of companies like TCL is doing some really interesting stuff in this space with Nextpaper. Uh there are a lot of ideas about how you can change the color of the backlight. There's this really interesting company called Daylight that basically just like took all the blue out of an LCD and made it feel much warmer and a little different and change the reflectivity. So, there's a lot of stuff you can do on an LCD to make it more e- inky, which is where most of these companies are landing, right? Like even on the light phone, it's it is a black and white

experience until you open up the camera and then all of a sudden it's a full color camera because a black and white camera would suck and no one wants that. So, I think the trade here is basically e- in solves kind of all of your problems but one, but the one turns out to be maybe the single most important feature of most of these devices. So, I think anyone who's going to use a phone or try to make something that you can use as a phone is going to ultimately land on the side of how can we minimalize an e-inkify, an LCD or an OLED rather than just go pure E in until there maybe there's some magical e- in revolution new technology to come. Um, Travis, you're shaking your head. And that is also how I feel.

I don't know whose priority that is right now. No one's. Yeah. But yeah, I think that the trade-off is tricky and I think most of these phone makers are actually landing on the right side by landing on non-ENC screens. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Imagine you just found out your sales team is at risk of missing quota. No need to panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce into a meeting ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount trajectory, and monthly revenue to quota by region. In seconds, you can see exactly what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Question

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Sign up for exclusive access today. All right, David, I don't know how much longer we have you before you go on leave, so I just need to run this by you before you're out. This is some more David Pierce bait. [snorts] It is not about to-do lists, though. Oh, well then I'm not interested. This is from someone named Travis, but it's not me. I promise. We love a Travis here on this show. Question, friends. I've been very interested in your coverage of the fetaverse h or lack thereof. We're so back. But I'm wondering why it's only about social media. There's such a splintering of messaging platforms, especially in

the work context. What once was established norms in email has turned to client and team conversations with important documents across email, Slack, Ghat, WhatsApp. The beauty of email is any email client can email any other. Are there efforts to federate messaging? You send it from wherever you want and I receive it however I want to receive it. It seems like a far more pressing problem. Yours in Activity Pub, Travis, this is my kind of thing. Okay. I just want to very I just want to very briefly tell you about a company called Matrix that I find absolutely fascinating and have done a bunch of

reporting on and think is sort of an underrated most important company in tech right now. I really earnestly believe this. So, Matrix is exactly the Fedverse for messaging. Like, imagine I have a Slack instance and you have a Slack instance and they actually have nothing to do with each other, right? They are completely separated. We each run our own on premises. Like you can run Matrix on a network on a Navy ship. It's like a real thing that they do. It is a completely distinct thing. But also, I can message your Matrix from my matrix. like the it turns into cross-platform messaging right next to and integrated with like team messaging that is incredibly well put together and encrypted and all the

things that you would want. Um so Matrix uh started essentially as a completely federated encrypted messaging platform and the reason by the way that this is a much harder problem for messaging than it is for social media is privacy. We just have completely different expectations about the privacy of our content when we're posting it publicly to a social network and when we're talking to our friends and maintaining privacy across different servers and different implementations and different companies and building a system that sort of exists in so many places but all adheres to the same very intense privacy policy is just really hard. And so this company Matrix has spent a long time

working through this. And the most fascinating thing about Matrix to me is that they have really struggled to get regular people to use it. They make an app called Element that is essentially just WhatsApp. Um it works very well. It's it's very fast. It's very simple. But they're they're having a hard time getting that adoption in part because people use, you know, WhatsApp. But they are all over like secure government implementations. like countries around the world are using matrix for important secure communication because the alternative is WhatsApp which is not as secure causes all kinds of problems is not nearly as manageable and administerable it's just a worse system so what they've done is they've rolled

this much more secure controllable ownable messaging platform called Matrix that has kind of percolated all over so uh matrix.org is specifically the answer to this question. I think it's really good technology. The people who run it are really smart and interesting and up to cool stuff. Um they just can't convince regular people to use it. And I think this is the most fascinating piece of this story to me. It's like if it had come along before everyone got entrenched in these worse platforms like Teams and Slack, I think Matrix would be essentially ubiquitous in the world right now. It's the same thing with messaging, right? Like we could do better messaging except that everybody

already uses iMessage and WhatsApp. They're not good. They're just the ones that we use. And getting people off of those things is very hard. But uh whether it's Matrix or something like it, I think it's coming. Something like this is going to make that mainstream turn and it's going to look extremely fedvery because that idea is the right one. All right. Uh we have some feedback from our uh episode where we talked about AI wearables. Okay. Hey, what's up y'all? This is Ben from Arlington, Virginia. I was listening to the episode where you ranked the different sort of uh AI wearables and it got me thinking when you ranked the pendant and necklace uh so low. Uh what

if we brought back kind of like the puka shell uh chokers from the late 90s, early 2000s because then people could kind of design the batteries or the different components into each one of those different like balls or shelves. Uh, and then we could bring it back as a fashion statement. All right. Love the show. Thanks. Bye. Before we get into this, I would like you to just briefly close your eyes and imagine early high school David. I had uh I had a ring on my right hand. Uh it wasn't like a thumb ring or a pinky ring. It was just like it was just a ring. Just wore a ring. Not really sure why in retrospect. Uh I had not one but two popped collars on my polar shirts. Uh, not again. It's very important if just one, you're

ridiculous. Two, legendary. Uh, and I did in fact have a pug shell necklace. I also had braces and had a giant gap between my two front teeth and I was styling. So, this is the David we're bringing back with this idea. Um, first of all, shout out to Northern Virginia. Go Nova. Um, this is a good idea. And Travis, I think you don't understand the extent to which this is also David Bait because modular gadgets are my jam and have been for forever. Um, but they don't work. That's that's just the problem. They don't work. We have been trying to do modular gadgets for a very long time. Designing them in such a way that each one of them works individually but also in concert with any number of other things just turns out to be essentially

impossible. We just can't do it. You can't make it work with phones without them being like hideous puzzle piece blocks that don't fit together well. There's so many awkward things with making that work just from a user perspective that they haven't really worked. And then you throw in the fact that there are all kinds of battery problems to solve with this. Like the idea that you could just stick a bunch of parts into a little puka and string a bunch of them together and make is such a lovely idea that I and I desperately want it to work. Uh, and in case you're wondering, Travis, the singular is puka. One puka to many

pukas, and that's that's your necklace. It uh it just doesn't work. Like, I actually think everybody would like this to be the answer that you could have a smart watch band that you would stick with, a mechanical watch that you like, you would have a smart pendant that could go on any number of things. Fitbit has been trying to do this like how do we accessorize your life with a Fitbit thing for forever. It just doesn't work. The battery doesn't work. You can't do battery and connectivity in a thing that's that small without causing like heat problems. And then you introduce a heat sink and all of a sudden the thing is too big. Like all of these things are

several physics miracles away from being actually possible to do. But the minute they become possible to do, everyone will do it because it is so transparently the right idea. Right? Like charm bracelets of technology is such a huge and cool and interesting idea that will percolate into every gadget that you have. Everybody wants to make accessories that do more stuff. Everybody wants to make lots of different kinds of gadgets that you can put together with all the functionality you want, nothing else. Like everybody wants this. It's more sustainable. It would be cheaper to make. It would be

cheaper to upgrade. Like this is just a good idea. But in anything smaller than a laptop like Framework has figured out how to do this in a way that I have found very impressive. Even that is like big and expensive and kind and a little bit clunky compared to what you'd get from another laptop. The idea of doing it at necklace size is just flatly scientifically not possible right now. But everybody wants this and I will buy the puka the minute it becomes available to me. All right, this is the last one. Okay, I'm ready. We got there is a new Galaxy Zfold 8 and it is passport shaped. A lot of excitement about it.

The reviews have been great. Dom liked the form factor. We've been surprised by it. Uh however, we received some feedback from people who are saying, "Wait a minute. I was on board this passport train a while ago." Uh and here's here's an email we got. This is from Al. tech media hypocrisy on the ZFold 8 form factor. I was listening to today's Vergecast episode about the Samsung Zfold 8, and it made me wonder, why is this wider form factor being praised as a game changer now when the original Pixel Fold launched with this exact same shape years ago? It feels hypocritical, almost as if tech reviewers and media outlets are suddenly warming up to this design now just to set a favorable precedent ahead of the upcoming foldable iPhone rumored

asterisk Ed Travis, right? Uh, first of all, it's a fabulous conspiracy theory. I really like the idea that a we would be doing that and b that we the tech media would have gotten together and made a plan. If I was getting secretly paid by Apple, I'd live in a much nicer apartment. I'll tell you that right now. So, I will say I was wrong about the passport size. Um and I think I was wrong for a couple of reasons. Um one is that it just took a while for the software to make any sense, right? Like even everybody's experience so far with the Fold 8 has been in a lot of ways this is the best of both worlds, right? Like it is a it's a pretty small screen that turns into a pretty big screen in a way that is kind of pocketable. Like

that's a huge victory. Software is kind of wacky. Some things fill the screen, some things don't. Some things have weird sidebars because they don't know what to do with the aspect ratio. There's a lot to work out here and there's a lot less to work out than there was when the Pixel Fold shipped with this, right? Uh, but I think increasingly the thing that seems to be true and the thing that I got wrong and I again I still have not held the Zula so I can't speak to this personally but almost every single person who has picked it up seems to have had the reaction, oh this is smaller than I thought. Uh, and Neil and I talked about this last week that

that is powerful, right? the idea that this becomes something that is easier to hold in my hand, easier to put away, easier to fit in my pocket, easier to fit in my purse, like whatever. Anything we can get back in terms of physical wieldability on our phones is a big deal. And I think I underrated the extent to which the passport form factor would be really nice when it was closed. I expected it to not be nice when it was closed and it seems to be nice when it was closed. Uh especially now that they're starting to figure out how to make the software work. So, I think that combination of it's actually a smaller

phone that opens up into a slightly bigger phone is more compelling than I realized. My argument against it for a long time was you've just given me a phone that opens up into a slightly bigger phone. Sure. Right. Like that doesn't do much for me. But a smaller phone that opens up into a slightly bigger phone actually is something. The other thing is just that all of these phones had so many other problems that Samsung has done a particularly good job of starting to solve. like the crease is going away, the durability problems are going away, the cameras are getting better. So, all of a sudden, the idea that you have to make a bunch of sacrifices just for the privilege of spending twice as much money on a

slightly bigger internal screen, that trade is getting easier to make. I still don't think in good conscience I could tell anyone to make it because it's still twice the price. But it still at this point is like getting to the point where okay, it's now as good as your other phones. And it has this other thing it can do, which is get smaller and bigger at the same time. And that smaller and bigger thing is what I missed. But I think the real thing that has happened is Samsung fixed a bunch of problems. It fixed a bunch of software problems. They're starting to figure out what this thing should be usable for. Like, for some reason, I keep going back to the moment in the launch event where she opens up the

screen and on the one side is the Tik Tok video and on the other side is the comments. That was like the first sort of visceral, oh, this is awesome reaction I've ever had to a foldable phone. Um, and I'm sure Samsung didn't invent that idea, but it was the first time that I've been like, oh, I can now do something different by opening up my phone. And it's not just use two apps side by side, which I think is a tiny feature for hardly anybody. It's I can actually meaningfully change the experience of using my phone just by opening it up. I think that's very cool. Um, I think it took us a while to catch up to the idea that there is stuff you can do on either side of this equation.

I think it took the phone makers a while to get here. Uh, I'm very curious to see if Apple has actually figured out a the form factor itself. Like it's going to be very funny, frankly, if there's a big messy crease in the middle of the iPhone Ultra or whatever it ends up being called. Uh, and Samsung can just sit back and be like, "Yeah, we fixed that, you clowns." Uh, I sort of hope that's the case. But, uh, it'll be interesting to see also if Apple has a bunch of new ideas about how to make the software work. I wouldn't say I'm massively optimistic. I think the existence of the iPad suggests that Apple has not yet figured out what you're supposed to do with a screen that size, but we'll see.

And that's it for today's Hotline Show. Wait, no, wrong. I have one more to throw you. you didn't get to this, but I just want to give a quick shout out to David who emailed us about uh the same show talking about the ZFold 8 to point out that the exact device being created now is Theodore Twambli's phone in the movie Her uh the little the little like makeup case that opens up to become his phone. This is just what we're doing now. And I think that's so funny because her is the most interesting movie in tech right now in like a very real way because everybody in tech watched that movie somehow didn't realize it was like horrible and dystopian and started trying to make Samantha and this is just literally what

we were doing now. Um but if you look around that movie I really encourage everybody to go watch this movie again because it's fabulous. Uh there's so many interesting ideas about devices in that movie and the way that he like picks up hardware and how hardware and software interact. And this device that he's talking about, the little makeup case, like he his AI assistant will say like, "I need to show you something." And he'll pull it out and look at it. And this is like there's so many good interaction ideas and hardware ideas in that movie, including foldable phones. Um but everybody should stop trying to make us fall in love with our AI assistants. steal all the other ideas

from that movie, including like the pants that Wen Phoenix wears the whole time. Leave Samantha alone. That's all I have to say. That did make me think that maybe this whole time any movie with an AI plotline should have had like subtext subtitles where it's just like parenthesis. This is bad. Yeah. Right. Don't do this. Yeah. It's like satire needs to be like this is satire, just so you know. All right. All right. Thank you, sir. Thank you, David. All right. That's it for the show. Thank you again to Travis for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. Special thanks, by the way, to everybody who sends us questions all

the time about everything. 866 Verge11 is the hotline. Vergecast.com is the email. We want to hear everything, especially things I'm wrong about. We love hearing things that I'm wrong about. And a secret to getting on the show is make fun of me in particular, and Travis will almost always demand that we put it in the show. That's just a little fun fact for all of you. If you want to support everything that we're doing, the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge.com/subscribe gets you all of our podcasts adfree, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of my feelings about een and flipones and everything else. Thank you in advance.

The verge.com/subscribe. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefir, and Travis Larch. We will see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.