The AI is in the computer

“People will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff.” That was Sam Altman on a podcast this week, defending the idea that society should accept some bad outcomes from AI because the benefits will be so much larger. The quote became a minor firestorm, but for the hosts of The Vergecast, it crystallized a deeper problem: the AI industry can’t seem to articulate what the good stuff actually is. That tension — between ambitious hardware launches, agentic promises, and the messy reality of how people actually use computers — runs through nearly every gadget announcement this week.

Amazon’s bet on a post-app future

Amazon announced a new line of tablets, phasing out the Fire brand in favor of “Alexa tablets.” The hardware is a clear step up: a nanomatte display baked into the glass rather than applied as a film, better keyboards and styluses, and prices starting at $229 for the 8-inch model and $549 for the top-end 12-inch version. But the strategic shift is more important than the specs. Amazon is abandoning its own app store and shipping these tablets with the full Google Play Store. The logic, as the hosts reconstruct it, is that apps are a solved problem — Amazon can’t beat Google there, so it shouldn’t try. Instead, the company is betting everything on Alexa Plus as the primary interface. The tablet becomes a vessel for an agentic assistant that can handle sho