Prioritizing Functionality Over Aesthetics in Product Design

We've talked many times on The Vergecast about the dream of the perfect charger. We call it The God Cable, and imagine it would charge everything, at full optimized speed, no matter what you plug in. Well, one company tried to make it – sort of. TwelveSouth founder Andrew Green joins the show to talk about how his company developed its newest product, the PowerCord, and why actually the God Cable might be both impossible and a bad idea. After that, The Verge's Tina Nguyen joins the show to talk about her experience at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, the rise of $TRUMP, and how crypto and the government became so intertwined. Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about AI agents, and the tasks we should (and shouldn't) offload to our chatbots.

Further reading:

• The TwelveSouth PowerCord
• The Vergecast USB-C Holiday Spec-tacular
• Everything you need to know about switching to USB-C
• How a crypto bro shorted $TRUMP coin — and scored a dinner with the President
• Presidential seals, $100,000 watches, and a Marriott afterparty
• Trump’s media company says it’s buying $2.5 billion in Bitcoin
• The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act will soon ramp up in Congress.
• Crypto funds seized by the government may go into a ‘digital Fort Knox’
• Google’s future is Google googling
• OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you




Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.




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