Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of Ray Tracing.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we're talking about the Steam Machine.

After months of waiting, the Virges Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console.

He's been testing it, he's been playing games, he's going to come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming.

I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam controller seems to be great.

I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years, and I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch 2.

It's probably time to upgrade. We're going to get into all of that in just a minute. But first, here's everything else happening at The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, June 22nd, 2026. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one.

There are new introspace channels you can watch, you can watch stories and reels,

and Instagram even says it's testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things

like live streaming on TVs.

The context here is that YouTube has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the

last few years, and Instagram wants

to do the same.

The other context here is that Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all so desperately copying

each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scroll-y video app,

and I find it exhausting.

The PhoneMaker Nothing canceled an upcoming device, which would have been a follow-up to the

CMF Phone Pro 2. Nothing's co-founder said that, quote, with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come. We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go

up, a whole class of these lower-priced gadgets, in particular cheap phones that billions

of people rely on, are just being priced out of existence.

And finally, all your vibe-coded projects might be a total security disaster.

All of mine, too, don't worry, and everyone else's.

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