Does smart home tech work in a college dorm?

Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of sending your kids to college. I'm David Amell, another David filling in for David Pierce here and there while he's away. He's actually out contributing to society while I remain a childless cat man. Today on the show, we're talking to the Virgis senior smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, about something a lot of parents are dealing with right now, sending their kids to college. But, of course, Jen being Jen, she wanted to set her son's dorm room up with the same smart home stuff that he's been using for the last eighteen years. So I'm gonna be asking her how that went and what her recommendations are for other parents that are sending their kids to college and might wanna make it a little more intelligent than most dorm rooms are on a day to day basis. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. This is ninety seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, 08/25/2026. Today, Apple surprisingly dropped a bunch of new hardware on us, including a new Mac mini with the all new m six and m five pro chipsets and higher prices. The cheapest Mac mini now starts at $8.99 of $300 from the very well priced m four Mac mini, which started at just $5.99. And if you want the m five pro chip, that's gonna start at $16.99, almost double that price. The m six is Apple's first two nanometer chipset, and Apple says it should bring improvements in performance and power efficiency alongside a dual 16 core neural engine for AI workloads. Apple also dropped chipsets in its Mac Studio and says the m five Ultra is its most powerful chip ever. The m five Ultra starts at 96 gigabytes of RAM, and Apple's cleaning up to 4.3 times faster AI compute tasks. Alongside these upgrades, Apple also made one other pretty major announcement, a new polishing cloth. Starts at $9 instead of $19. It's pretty much the same thing, just cheaper. Android's getting a new motion assist feature, which uses moving dots in your screen to help avoid car sickness. Apple launched a similar feature in 2024, and the feature is gonna be rolling out to Android 17 devices in phases with some Pixel phones getting the feature first. And finally, WhatsApp users on on Android are now gonna see more information about callers that aren't in their contacts, like what country the number is calling from and if you have any groups in common. You can also now add passwords for two factor verification and multiple pass keys for both Android and iOS devices. You can read more at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, 08/25/2026. Fall is here, and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an iced …