How the tech world is responding to tariff chaos
Newyork Central Post
2 min read
On The Vergecast: the ever-changing price of everything, Meta’s AI cheating, the TikTok ban, and Brendan Carr.
On The Vergecast: the ever-changing price of everything, Meta’s AI cheating, the TikTok ban, and Brendan Carr.
(If you’re reading this, please go vote for The Vergecast in the Webby Awards! Voting is open for roughly another week, and we’re up against some steep competition — it would mean the world to us if you’d pick us. Thank you so much!)
It’s important to keep saying that we still don’t know much about what’s going on with the Trump administration’s tariff policy. They’re on again, they’re off again. They’re a negotiating tactic! They’re a permanent policy don’t even ask! With China, the numbers are quickly becoming so large they’re basically pretend, and with many other countries the number whipsaws back and forth on a practically daily basis.
That is the chaos tech companies large and small are having to grapple with right now. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay, David, and The Verge’s Jake Kastrenakes talk about how they’re coping. (After a brief diversion in party speaker territory.) Huge corporations like Nintendo are delaying pre-orders and reassessing prices; smaller companies like Framework are stopping and starting and re-pricing all in the span of a few hours; startups like Tuneshine and Arduboy are wondering how they’re going to stay in business. It’s a mess out there, and it’s going to change the way you pay for things, and even change the things themselves.
After the tariff talk, the hosts pivot to another thoroughly chaotic industry: AI. This week, Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks, and we’re all totally shocked by that. We have some great new reporting on how bad things are in Siri-land, some new details on the Altman-Ive hardware project, and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke causing a stir online with some new AI-first company policy.
Finally, in the lightning round, we lead with another edition of America’s favorite (or maybe second-favorite, jury’s still out) podcast within a podcast: Brendan Carr is a Dummy. (Once you see the pin he’s wearing, you’ll understand why we talked about it for so long.) We also talk a bit about the TikTok ban, which both is and isn’t still happening, before ending with some talk of Instagram’s long-awaited iPad app and the happily excellent Google Pixel 9A.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on tariffs:
And in AI news:
And in the lightning round:
