THE CRUNCH
Gadget season is in full swing, and this week's Vergecast steps back to ask what all the new hardware actually has in common. Whether it is Microsoft launching a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet or Apple pushing hard into the smart home, the episode argues the strategy looks strikingly similar: these companies believe AI assistants and agents are the future of computing, and they are building devices that put them front and centre.
Hosts David and Nilay dig into the new devices to work out whether any of them has the right take on AI, and whether the idea that the AI should run the computer even makes sense in the first place. It is a discussion piece rather than a verdict on any single product, but it frames the season's launches as one shared bet rather than a set of separate bets.
There is recent precedent for that bet. In September, The Decoder reported that Meta's Muse agent gives every user a free cloud computer running Ubuntu Linux, complete with a monitoring process for sensitive actions, and drew over 500,000 users in its first week. That launch was framed as Meta betting on product reach over model power, a data point in the same argument about how central AI should be to the computing experience.