The AI garage door mystery

You just left your house. As you peel out of the driveway and tear down the street in the coolest way possible, your garage door... well, what does it do? The answer’s probably nothing, and that feels like the wrong answer. The smart home was supposed to have fixed this by now.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we didn’t necessarily set out to talk about smart garage doors for as long as we did, but The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern joined the show with a lot of thoughts about Apple Intelligence, notification summaries, and how we all — and in particular, how Apple’s software leader Craig Federighi — manage their own houses. Given the reporting that Apple is gearing up for a big hardware push into the smart home, what does the company really think it can do here? (Make sure you watch Joanna’s recent interview with Federighi for more!)

At the beginning of the show, though, we talk about some of the week’s AI news. We discuss the just-launched search engine inside of ChatGPT, which may be a threat to Google but is definitely a statement about how we use the internet now. We also talk about this week’s Big Tech earnings, and what they taught us about how AI is actually being used — and how it makes money.

With Joanna, we dig into not just garage doors but also the rest of Apple’s big week of Mac announcements. After seeing the new Mac Mini, the new iMac, the new MacBook Pro, and some new accessories, a lot of people were left with the same question: they put the power button and charging port where? So we talk about power buttons, and chip bumps, and why the Mac Mini feels more important than ever.

If you want to know more on everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with AI:

And in Apple news:

And in the lightning round: