Were we too nice to the Steam Machine?

Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of VRAM. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, we are taking your questions about the Steam Machine. We published our Steam Machine review a couple of weeks ago. Sean Hollister got, a lot of feedback from all of you. He came on the show. We talked about it. We also got a lot of feedback. Questions about whether the Steam Machine is any good, whether it's worth the price, whether the fact that it's valve is valuable. So we're gonna dig into a bunch of your questions and try to make sense of the Steam Machine once and for all. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. I'm Jake Kastronakis, and this is ninety seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, 07/15/2026. Big changes are coming to the Google Play Store in The US. Google will start distributing rival app stores inside its own Android marketplace, and those app stores will get access to every app that's inside Google's own stores too. It's a wild shakeup that could meaningfully alter the app store landscape. Google was ordered to make this change after losing a lawsuit to Epic in 2023. Google tried to avoid making the changes through a settlement, but as of last night, that settlement is dead. That means rival app stores can show up as soon as next Wednesday, July 22. Will companies actually take advantage of this and launch their own app stores? It's hard to say. But this is the most open the app store ecosystem has been on Android in a long time. And you can bet Epic will take its shot. Next up, OpenAI seems to be trying to change the narrative after Apple sued it last week for allegedly stealing hardware secrets. First, a scoop in Bloomberg, sourced to some leaky people in OpenAI's world, revealed details of the AI company's first hardware product, a smart speaker with a built in battery so you can move it around your house. The speaker could be announced later this year, but it isn't expected to ship until 2027. Meanwhile, OpenAI provided emails to NBC News trying to prove that it didn't ignore Apple's legal demands like Apple claimed. The AI company seems to be blaming Apple's lawyers for a confusing email thread that mixed up different people with the last names Wang and Chang. Does any of this really change the story? I'm waiting for the actual legal response. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Home Depot's giant 12 foot skeleton can talk now. There's a new version where you can use an app to talk through its robotic mouth. It costs $379 and totally sounds like a deal. You can read more at theverge.com. That's ninety seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, 07/15/2026. 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 …