The Vergecast

If, after months of increasingly dire RAMageddon warnings, you just now find yourself in the market for a new laptop... we're here to help. In the latest installment of our "RAMageddon Survival Guide," laptop reviewer Antonio G. Di Benedetto joins David Imel to offer his recommendations.

Further reading:

Apple announces September iPhone launch event

Xbox announces disc-to-digital feature that digitizes your physical games

Xbox’s limited-edition green Series X is already sold out

Panic is passing Playdate tariff refunds on to customers

A RAMageddon guide to back-to-school laptop shopping

An okay laptop with 16GB of RAM is better than a nice laptop with 8GB, and this $520 HP OmniBook proves it

This is my new favorite laptop, but thanks to RAMageddon the price already went up by $800

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Two-hour usage limits, age verification, and a $17.1 billion payout: We're breaking down today's big settlement in Meta's kids online safety trial. Senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner and senior tech and policy editor Adi Robertson discuss how we got here, why Meta settled, and what this means for the ongoing conversation around teen mental health and social media.

Further reading:

Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement

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It can be hard enough to set up smart home tech in a house or an apartment, but what about a dorm room? Jennifer Pattison Tuohy recently tested out some smart home tech when she dropped off her son for his freshman year at Clemson. Jen reports back to David Imel on how the gadgets stood up to the challenges of college Wi-Fi and rules against hanging things on the wall.

Further reading:

Apple’s new M6 chip gets more cores and more AI compute

Apple’s new Mac Mini has fresh M6 and M5 Pro chip offerings — and higher prices

Apple launches new Mac Studios with its ‘most powerful chip ever’ — the M5 Ultra

Android is getting its own weird dots to cure car sickness

WhatsApp is making it easier to ignore spam calls

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Do you remember your first BlackBerry? Do you remember when that first BlackBerry launched? On this episode taped before David Pierce went on leave, producer Travis Larchuk leads David, Nilay, and The Verge’s Sean Hollister through a game of memory and history and a surprising amount of feelings tied to gadget launches.

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Smart phone cameras have been getting better and better at capturing flawless, true-to-life images. But is that what the people really want?David Imel joins Nilay Patel and Jake Kastrenakes to talk through the Pixel 11's Camera Looks. They're Google's nod to the trend of retro digital and analogue cameras, and alter how a photo is processed on the sensor level. At the same time, its super zoom is still hallucinating text and making stuff up.

Then it's a supersized Brendan Carr is a Dummy, with increasingly infuriating tales of how Brendan Carr is being a Dummy, culminating in the FCC's quest to make sure your internet connection remains slow.

Plus, we talk through the confounding AirPods camera leak, the Fairphone, and YouTube's new method for counting views.

Further reading:

Google is making the Pixel cameras better by making them worse

Revealed: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House and rightwing media

ABC sues the FCC over Trump and Carr’s campaign of threats

FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies

Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods appear in leaked video

Meta glasses are a workplace menace

Apple reportedly won’t launch AirPods with cameras until next year.

Fairphone’s latest repairable phone is going on sale in the US

YouTube is changing how it counts views to give the numbers a boost

YouTube is reportedly offering channels “millions of dollars” not to cross-post videos on Netflix.

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