Watch, headphones, phone: Which AI gadget is best?
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Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Single Day Battery Life. I'm your friend, David Pearce, and today on the show, we're talking about AI gadgets. Not really any particular AI gadget, but really the shapes and sizes of AI gadgets. We have a lot of different products out there, all attempting to be the next idea about the kind of gadget that you might have. Maybe it's a necklace that you wear. Maybe it's a pin. Maybe it's a thing that goes in your pocket that isn't your phone, but looks kind of like your phone. So what we're going to do on the show is we're going to put all of those in a pot and we're going to rank them to see what is the best idea about AI gadgets. Not the best AI gadget, but the best idea about AI gadgets.
But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.
What shapes and categories of AI gadgets are we ranking?
This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, July 13th, 2026. Apple's public betas just dropped, which means you can now go test all of the various OS 27s for your many Apple devices. Public betas are usually stable enough to not, you know, completely destroy your device, but they are still betas, so proceed with caution until things actually ship this fall. But more than most years, I would give it a whirl. Siri AI is a huge improvement, and I like a bunch of the changes to Liquid Glass and all of the other UI stuff too. And maybe most importantly, they fixed the corner radii on the Mac. Our long national nightmare is finally over. Meanwhile, it's been a complicated few days at OpenAI. First, the CEO of Apps, Fiji Simo, left the company for health reasons, and then Apple sued OpenAI over what it called, quote, a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple.
Yeesh. The case names IO, which is Johnny Ive's hardware startup that OpenAI bought, and a couple of OpenAI executives. Apparently, more than 400 ex-Apple people now work at OpenAI, and Apple's allegation is that OpenAI basically built a system for those people to bring confidential information with them. This is a big accusation and presumably just the beginning of a very long legal process, but these companies were very close. ChatGPT was part of Siri. It's now very hard to imagine that happening ever again. And finally, The Verge's Victoria's Song reviewed the new Aura Ring 5, and it's good, but it's complicated. The ring is good, it's smaller, big deal, it has the same sensors, but it still requires a subscription, it's still expensive, and you can get all the features on the old one.
Really, it just depends on how that ring feels on your finger. You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds from The Verge for Monday, July 13th.
If you sit in the sun, you may just get burned. But some people are willing to take that chance. There is this certain degree of nihilism of like, oh, well, the world is bad anyway. Why wouldn't I just also get a tan? Tan maxing. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
This might sound like ancient history at this point, but there was a time when all lights did was turn on and turn off, dim if you're lucky. But then a group at Philips came along and discovered, what if all your lights could change colors? What if they could change colors in wild, completely impractical, and still very cool ways? And that is the story of Hue. This week on Version History, our chat show about old technology, we tell the story of Hue and how it's actually kind of about smartphones and kind of about lights. That's Version History, wherever you get podcasts. All right, let's talk AI gadgets. Joining me now, my rank friends. I think of you as my rank friends. The Verge is Allison Johnson.
Hi, Allison.
Hello.
And the Verge is Vi Song. Hi, Vi.
Hi.
We're here to get yelled at by the internet again. This is what we do from time to time. We put things in order and then everyone gets mad at us about the order in which we put those things.
Listen, the iPad does not rely.
I'm glad that Allison is leading the charge because I got some heat for starting that take.
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