Uncanny Valley: Why Tech is Powerful, But Who Is It Really For? A Tale Of Three Silicon Valley Hosts

There is a lot to cover and a lot to discuss. WIRED’s best Bay Area journalists, Michael Calore, Zo Schiffer, and Lauren Goode are the hosts of a new podcasts, “Uncanny Valley.” Together, Uncanny Valley’s hosts will untangle and explain the latest and greatest—or strangest—trends from within the tech industry and how they’re poised to shape society at large.

Expect informed and intelligent conversations, from three hosts who’ve got decades of experience covering Silicon Valley, its products, and its people, all from inside the Bay Area bubble. And this being WIRED, we’ll counterbalance that smart talk with a healthy dose of the weird stuff, too: Tech’s most powerful people aren’t just inventing the future, after all—they’re also trying to cheat death, one-up each other’s apocalypse bunkers, and build VC-backed cities from the ground up.

There is a correlation between the fact that the world’s richest person, Musk, is helping US presidential candidates while his company is buying more space with each satellite launch; and the fact that many Americans still use Facebook.

What Has Apple Done Recently? The Vergecast Revisited: Smart Garage Doors and the Big Week of Apple’s Mac Announcements

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

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. What can Apple do in the smart home if it really wants to make a big push into it? You need to watch the recent interview with Federighi.

We talk at the beginning of the show about some of the news from the week. We discuss how the just-launched search engine inside of ChatGPT is a statement about how we are using the internet now. We talk about how Big Tech makes money and how artificial intelligence can be used to make money.

We dig into garage doors and 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? We discuss power buttons, chip bumps, and why Macs are more important than ever.