Overview of Apple's plot to crush OpenAI
This Vergecast episode centers on Apple’s new Siri beta, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI, and what that fight says about AI hardware, product design, and the future of consumer devices. The hosts also cover OnePlus’s retreat from Western phone markets, new Pixel colors, and a lightning round of tech/politics updates including Brendan Carr’s FCC behavior, X’s ongoing product backpedaling, and the latest AI hype from Google DeepMind.
Apple beta updates and the new Siri
The promise vs. the reality
- The hosts say Apple’s new Siri can do genuinely impressive multi-step, AI-powered tasks.
- But the basics are worse than before in some cases:
- reminders are less reliable
- Siri asks repeated clarification questions
- responses and follow-up listening are clunky
- The takeaway: Apple appears to be trading deterministic reliability for a much higher ceiling.
The bigger risk
- The hosts worry users will hit Siri’s limits without understanding where those limits are.
- Apple’s advantage may come from app integrations:
- if developers like Uber or Instagram can plug in cleanly, Siri AI becomes much more useful
- The episode’s main framing: AI assistants are now more powerful, but less predictable.
Apple vs. OpenAI: the trade secret lawsuit
What Apple is alleging
- Apple sued OpenAI, claiming former Apple employees took confidential information and trade secrets with them.
- The complaint names specific people and even adjacent companies tied to OpenAI’s hardware ambitions.
- The hosts emphasize this is only the first filing, so the full facts will emerge through discovery.
Why Apple chose trade secret law
- Apple can’t easily file a copyright or patent case here because:
- the alleged theft may not be code
- OpenAI hasn’t necessarily shipped infringing products yet
- Trade secret law fits Apple’s allegations about:
- manufacturing know-how
- product pipelines
- supplier information
- internal design processes
The broader pattern
- The hosts compare this to Apple’s earlier legal wars:
- copyright vs. Microsoft
- patents vs. Samsung and Android OEMs
- Their view: Apple is again using intellectual property law to push the boundaries of what it can protect.
Why this case matters
- OpenAI is seen as especially vulnerable because:
- it is in constant churn
- it has no settled consumer hardware business
- it depends heavily on future product promises
- The hosts think the suit may be less about a quick settlement and more about Apple flexing its cultural and legal power.
OpenAI’s rumored hardware play
What the device seems to be
- Reporting suggests OpenAI’s first big consumer device could be:
- screenless
- camera-equipped
- sensor-heavy
- home-focused
- battery-powered but probably docked most of the time
Why the hosts are skeptical
- They argue OpenAI would be building:
- a smart speaker
- a smart home platform
- an AI assistant ecosystem
- That is an enormous challenge, especially because:
- smart home integrations are fragile
- consumers won’t tolerate inconsistency
- OpenAI has not shown strong product instincts in consumer software
The core problem
- AI can demo brilliantly, but products have to work every day.
- The hosts think OpenAI may be trying to build a “phone-adjacent” device without the ecosystem advantage that phones already have.
Other gadget and phone news
Pixel colors look genuinely good
- The new Pixel color leaks got a rare thumbs-up.
- The hosts especially liked the pink/hibiscus and some of the green-blue tones.
- They joked that Google’s color naming remains ridiculous, but the phones themselves look appealing.
OnePlus is pulling back hard
- OnePlus is effectively retreating from the U.S. and European phone markets.
- The hosts see this as a sign that:
- the “flagship killer” strategy no longer works
- midrange Android is a brutal business
- carriers, Apple, and the mature smartphone ecosystem leave little room for new entrants
- Their broader point: the U.S. phone market is now so locked in that it’s extremely hard for a challenger to break through.
Lightning round
Brendan Carr is a dummy
- The hosts go hard on FCC Chair Brendan Carr after reporting showed he accepted expensive perks/tickets from Paramount while the company’s merger was under review.
- They call out:
- the appearance of corruption
- Carr’s push to loosen broadcast ownership caps
- his broader attempt to consolidate media under the banner of “competition”
- Their take: this is really about power and control, not local journalism or healthy competition.
X keeps rediscovering old Twitter truths
- X’s product team found that:
- removing mutual/follower-based relevance made the app worse
- over-optimizing for rage bait is bad
- The hosts mock this as the company slowly relearning lessons the old Twitter team already knew.
A new emoji: cracked face
- Unicode’s new “cracking face” emoji was highlighted as a potentially very useful all-purpose reaction:
- “everything is too much”
- “I am barely holding it together”
- a replacement for melting face or skull in many cases
Google DeepMind and “the foothills of the singularity”
- The hosts poke fun at Demis Hassabis’s AI rhetoric.
- They see phrases like “foothills of the singularity” as classic hype language.
- Their skepticism remains the same: LLMs are still brittle, hallucinate, and don’t obviously equal real intelligence.
Paramount-Skydance / Warner Bros. Discovery
- Paramount’s lawyer argued the merger is pro-competitive because media is in decline and the company needs scale to compete with Netflix, Disney, and Amazon.
- The hosts reject that logic as the same failed “buy more stuff to compete” theory that has been tried repeatedly in media.
Main takeaways
- Apple’s new Siri is more capable, but still frustrating and unreliable in basic use.
- The OpenAI lawsuit is as much about narrative, leverage, and cultural power as it is about law.
- AI hardware will live or die on ecosystem reliability, not flashy demos.
- The U.S. smartphone market is brutally mature, making new entrants very hard to sustain.
- A lot of the week’s tech and media news boils down to one theme: who controls the platform, the rules, and the attention economy.