David Pearce

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Windows subsystem for Linux.

I'm your friend David Pearce, and on today's show, we're going to talk about Microsoft Build.

Build is Microsoft's big annual developer conference where it launches a bunch of new stuff, but also tries to just explain itself to the world and what it cares most about and what it hopes that all of its customers care about for the year to come.

Big surprise, the answer this year was AI in every single imaginable way.

We're going to get into all of that in just a minute, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.

This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, June 4th, 2026.

Instagram's new Instagram Plus subscription is rolling out, and the idea is essentially for $4 a month, you can get custom app icons, you can get a custom font in your bio, lots of little aesthetic things like that.

But the big stuff is you can now keep your story up for 48 hours instead of 24.

You can give your story more priority in other people's feeds so that people see it.

And you get to watch other people's stories without them knowing.

I think a lot of people are going to pay $4 a month for just that one feature alone.

But the big idea here is Meta increasingly wants you to pay to get your content seen, even by the people who have said that they want to see it.

Feels kind of bleak, if I'm honest with you.

TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, said it's struggling to keep up with AI demand.

Its CEO, Cici Wei, said at a shareholder meeting that customer demand is so high and we can only support so much.

He said, we are doing our best to ensure TSMC does not become a bottleneck.

In a time where RAM is getting more expensive than ever, chips are harder than ever to find, and it is more expensive than it has ever been to buy gadgets,

This feels like bad news, especially because the CEO, Cici Wei, also said he'd like to raise prices and that it's going to be a long time to be fully up to speed on production in the US.

Not a great sign for the price of electronics.

In better news, Cash App made a magic wand for paying for stuff.