The Slate Truck is a whole new kind of car

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Tech News, Technology

4.4 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sometimes you want more tech in your life — and sometimes you want a lot less. This episode is all about less. First, Tim Stevens joins the show to talk about his story about the Slate Truck, an ultra-minimal electric vehicle that has almost no features to speak of and yet still promises to reinvent the way we think about cars. After that, Casey Johnston tells us about her journey in managing her screen time. She has tips for how to get the most problematic apps of your phone, is a big proponent of a factory reset, and has seen first-hand what happens when you look at your devices just a little less. Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]!) about whether there's a MacBook Air equivalent in the Windows world. The answer surprised us, and it might surprise you too. Further reading: The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen Is this the antidote to America’s truck bloat problem? From TechCrunch: Inside the EV startup secretly backed by Jeff Bezos Around the Next Bend on Substack Slate is the American truck scene's Ctrl+Alt+Del moment From She's a Beast: The DIY Dumbphone Method Casey's book: A Physical Education Framework Laptop 13 (2025) review: getting better with age Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of trucks that have no stereos and no paint and like no features of any kind.
0:11.3	And I still want it very, very, very badly. I'm your friend David Pierce. And right now I'm doing some headphone testing. So I have a blue set of AirPods Max that frankly I just hadn't used AirPods Max in a while, so I picked up a pair.
0:24.1	Don't tell anybody, but I have every intention for turning these to the Apple Store, but just wanted to try them out for a while.
0:29.3	And then I got these.
0:30.7	They're called the Picking F5s, and they are just the most incredible, blatant AirPods Max knockoff you've ever seen in your entire life.
0:41.5	I am fascinated by these things.
0:43.3	The AirPods Max are $500.
0:45.4	These are like $50.
0:48.0	And I'm going to have a lot more to say about these because I actually think there's a really interesting story behind these headphones and the TikTok shop and the way that we buy and find electronics now.
0:58.4	But I will tell you, these sound a lot better than a tenth as good as the AirPods Max.
1:03.6	More on that to come.
1:04.6	Anyway, on this show, we're going to do two things today.
1:07.5	First, we are going to talk about the Slate truck, which launched last week. It is one of
1:12.8	the most interesting new vehicles we've seen in a very long time. Tim Stevens wrote about it for us.
1:17.6	He's going to come on the show. We're going to talk about it. After that, I'm going to talk to
1:21.3	Casey Johnston, who writes a newsletter called She's a Beast, about how to use my phone less.
1:26.1	I have been on this slow journey to try and
1:29.5	downgrade my screen time a little bit, not because I think phones are inherently bad and that
1:34.2	looking at screens is inherently bad, but just because I find myself like picking up my phone
1:39.1	to look at TikTok while I walk to the bathroom six feet away. And that just doesn't seem quite right.
1:45.8	So Casey has some really interesting ideas. We're going to talk about all of that. We also have a really fun hotline
1:48.9	question about laptops that caused a sort of small existential crisis among a bunch of us. Lots to get to.
	...

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