Rise of the Whoop dupes

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Whoop Doops. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, we're gonna talk about wearables. But not the kind of wearables we normally talk about, which traditionally have screens and are probably smartwatches and have more and more features all the time and are trying to replace your phone and all kinds of everything. There's this new thing happening though, where instead of all of that, we're getting devices like Whoop and new things from Fitbit and new things from Garmin that are pointed in a very different direction. They still have lots of technology. They still have lots of features. They still connect to your phone. But importantly, they don't have screens, and they seem to communicate something different about what we want from our wearables and how things are supposed to feel when we put them on our body. I asked the Verge's V song to come on and explain what's happening here, both technically and culturally, because I think there's a real shift happening here, and I think she might agree with me. We're gonna get to that in just a second. But first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is ninety seconds on the Verge for Monday, 08/03/2026. Movie fans, I have good news and bad news. The good news, Spider Man Brand New Day is great, and it's a huge hit. Actually, the second biggest opening weekend ever. And along with The Odyssey, it made this weekend the biggest weekend in box office history. Movies are so back, you guys. Now, the bad news. If you wanna see either of those movies in Max, good luck. As of this week, Spidey and Odysseus will be sharing IMAX locations around The US, which means that the already hard to get tickets will be even harder to get for both movies. Personally, I've given up, and I will just be streaming them via bootleg TikToks as the directors intended. Meanwhile, Truth Social just started selling access to a new API that gives paid subscribers early access to posts from influential accounts on the platform. And by that, I mean the only Truth Social account anyone is even aware of, President Trump. If you're thinking, gosh, that sounds like corruption, giving anyone who pays a huge amount to the Trump Organization access to obviously market moving information from an administration that basically governs by true social posts, all I'll say is that that is a very reasonable and very popular take away. Finally, Google leaks are coming fast and hot ahead of the Pixel launch scheduled for next week. It looks like the Pixel 11, unfortunately, will be more expensive than last year starting at $899, and some of the models will have less RAM than before. None of this is surprising given the incredible rising price of memory everywhere, but it continues to be a bummer. We also might have gotten our …