The Competitive Mid-Range Smartphone Landscape

Starlink is in the White House, Siri is still bad, Pebble is back, up is down, everything is chaos. In this episode, Nilay and David start the show by running through some big gadget news, from a Siri-related shakeup at Apple to the new Google Pixel 9A. After that, The Verge's Lauren Feiner talks us through some of the latest in tech regulation: Trump's illegal firings at the FTC, the confusing state of the TikTok ban, OpenAI and Google arguing their case for free-for-all AI, and more. Finally, in the lightning round, Nilay and David talk about the latest Tesla recall, the hugely popular book about Meta, some exciting ActivityPub news, and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gently zinging Apple TV Plus.

Further reading:

• From Bloomberg: Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri
• The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year
• Europe is trying to get non-Apple smartwatches to work better with iPhones
• Google’s Pixel 9A gets a bigger screen and beefier water resistance
• Google briefly delays Pixel 9A release to investigate ‘component quality issue’ 
• Huawei’s new flip phone is weirdly wide
• Nvidia says ‘the age of generalist robotics is here’
• Nvidia’s cute ‘Digits’ AI desktop is coming this summer with a new name and a big brother
• Nvidia announces Blackwell Ultra GB300 and Vera Rubin, its next AI ‘superchips’

• Musk’s Starlink gets deployed at the White House
• Federal rural broadband program loses head
• Oracle is reportedly in the lead to save TikTok from US ban
• A”high-level” deal to save TikTok can probably happen by the April 5th deadline, Vance says.
• Democratic FTC commissioners say they were ‘illegally fired’ by Trump
• Fired FTC commissioner warns of the ‘corrupting influence of billionaires’
• Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will resign this spring
• WBEZ, 12 other public media stations under investigation 
• CTIA Announces Ajit Pai as New CEO and President
• OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t own
• Hundreds of celebrities warn against letting OpenAI and Google ‘freely exploit’ Hollywood
• Google Search charged with breaking EU antitrust rules
• DHS’s airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained
• Space science is under threat from the anti-DEI purge
• DOGE stranded USAID workers with laptops full of sensitive data
• They’re removing webpages about Black soldiers by adding ‘DEI’ to the URL.
• ‘Tesla Takedown’ protesters planning ‘biggest day of action’



• Tesla recalls more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after trim starts falling off
• From NYMag: Elon Musk Has Become Too Toxic for YouTube
• ‘Careless People’ debuts at the top of the NYT best sellers list.
• Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default
• Ghost connects its newsletters to the open web
• Netflix’s CEO talks Apple TV, Amazon, and the NFL

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

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