Is the Steam Machine worth the wait?

Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ray tracing. I'm your friend David Pearce. And today on the show, we're talking about the Steam machine. After months of waiting, The Verge's Sean Hollister finally got his hands on Valve's new living room game console. He's been testing it. He's been playing games. He's gonna come on and tell us all about how he feels and whether this is the next big thing in PC gaming. I'm very excited about it, if I'm being honest. The Steam controller seems to be great. I sort of accidentally built a big library of Steam games over the years, and, I do too much of my gaming right now on a Switch two. It's probably time to upgrade. We're gonna get into all of that in just a minute. But first, here's everything else happening at The Verge today. This is 90 on The Verge for Monday, 06/22/2026. Instagram just announced a bunch of new features specifically aimed at people who watch Instagram on their television, which I assume is currently no one. There are new interest based channels you can watch. You can watch stories and reels, and Instagram even says it's testing longer form content, episodic series, and even things like live streaming on TVs. The context here is that YouTube has been growing like crazy on bigger screens over the last few years, and Instagram wants to do the same. The other context here is that Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all so desperately copying each other's features that they're just rapidly becoming the exact same scrolly video app, and I find it exhausting. The Phone Maker Nothing canceled an upcoming device, which would have been a follow-up to the CMF Phone Pro two. Nothing's cofounder said that, quote, with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build a phone that feels like a genuine step forward at a price that makes sense for CMF. Yikes. This is bad news for CMF fans, sure, but it's also a sign of things to come. We've talked a lot about the rising price of gadgets over the years, but as prices go up, a whole class of these lower priced gadgets, in particular cheap phones that billions of people rely on, are just being priced out of existence. And finally, all your vibe coded projects might be a total security disaster. All of mine too. Don't worry. And everyone else's. Verge contributor, Yael Grauer, has the story of all the ways AI coding agents can screw up and all of the ways that can leave your data exposed. Cloud code is fun. Don't get me wrong. Just be careful out there. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on the verge for Monday, June 22. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise. But without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in …