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Chapter 1: What are Microsoft's main announcements at the Build conference?
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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.
It's called the Cash App Wand, and it's an NFC-enabled, star-topped wand that you can use to make on-the-go payments just by tapping. There's a big DIY trend here of people making things that are more fun to tap and pay with than a credit card or like your watch or your phone. I think it's incredibly charming. I love the Cash App is doing this.
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Chapter 2: How is Microsoft positioning itself in the AI landscape?
AI agentic wearables into people's lives in a way that is Microsofty. Doing it as an employee badge, genius, like perfect, correct answer. It's a thing tons of people are already wearing. It's a thing they have on all the time.
And if you can give it some of this sort of input ability, like there was a demo where it's a person standing over some kind of piece of paper pointing the camera at it that's on their badge and it's inputting that way. You can use it as a voice recorder. It can display information. Like again, thousands of caveats. This is just it's this is essentially like a science fiction concept video.
But that to me was one of the moments where I was like, this is the most complete thought from Microsoft about how a Microsoft led AI thing might work that I've seen yet. And there was just something about that that I found very compelling from Microsoft in particular that was like, oh, maybe this company gets what they're going for now.
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think the badge concept was super interesting. I think it's just, where does it go from there? They showed some other sort of vague devices, didn't they? That they obviously weren't focusing on, but I think it's... They tried this with Cortana. Do you remember?
They had thermostats, speakers, and obviously that was before we called that... That was machine learning back then, right? Now it's AI. But... Yeah, that didn't really go anywhere, and they kind of abandoned that. So I'm just like, that's why I'm so skeptical, because I've seen them try and do this so many times in the past.
But I think they have the right vision, but I worry that someone else will just do it.
It did seem to me that this build was, ironically for a developer conference, more developer focused than normal. And I think to some extent, this is what you were talking about at the beginning, like ordinarily they have lots of salespeople there and it's about sort of lots of people in lots of places. This felt very much like Microsoft recentering itself on developers.
They spent a lot of time talking about Linux and the terminal and developer tools. Am I overthinking what happens at a developer conference here? Or does this feel like Microsoft's actually refocusing its efforts on people who are this kind of developer that everybody is after in an AI world?
No, I think so. They've been trying to win back developers' trust and confidence. in Windows in particular for quite some time now. And obviously a lot of developers just use Mac OS or they might be on Linux as well. So they've been trying to get those people to sort of take Windows seriously for development. And they did the Windows subsystem for Linux many years ago.
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