Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of weird ideas about smartphones.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here reading this book, Apple, the first 50 years

by David Pogue. I got an advanced copy of it, not to brag, but it is exactly what you think

it is. It is an epic, like, 600-page tome all about the first 50 years of Apple. It's fascinating.

There's so much in here that I didn't know. Like, I have covered Apple so much as a product

company, but understanding what was going on inside of the company, in particular the ways

in which Steve Jobs was both

unbelievably good at his job and managed to drive absolutely everybody insane all of the time.

It's just fascinating. There's so much interesting sort of internal machination drama in this

story. It's very good. And even if you are somebody who knows a lot about Apple, as I like to think

that I am, this book is worth a read. It's the 50th anniversary of Apple starting next week. We're going to have a bunch of Apple coverage. Lots to do. Very excited about it. I got to finish this book in part so that I can do all of that coverage. Anyway, today on the broadcast, most of the show is going to be my conversation with Allison Johnson, our senior

reviewer, about my phone journey. I've mentioned this a few times, but I've spent the last

several months trying like every phone I could get my hands on. I've tried flip phones and

foldable phones. I tried a phone with the keyboard. I just tried to go and see if there is

something better than the phone everybody just defaults to, right?

I've had an iPhone for forever and was like, well, maybe it's time to see if it is worth the work to go get a different phone.

I've had a lot of thoughts. I have done a lot of testing. I've done a lot of phone switching.

And I just needed somebody to bounce some ideas off of. So I grabbed Allison, and we're going to talk through where we are in the phone world right now. Also, we have a really fun hotline question about AI and vibe coding and how to think about what these tools can actually do for us. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I promised myself that every time I sit down to read this book, I'm going to read a chapter without getting distracted by TikTok.

And so far, it's not going great.

But I'm going to keep trying.

This is the Vergecast.

We'll be right back.

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