The Pixel 9 is great – and a problem

4 weeks ago 16

On The Vergecast: AI photos, Chick-fil-A’s foray into streaming, headphone screens, and more.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with implicit a decennary of acquisition covering user tech. Previously, astatine Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Aug 23, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

An representation of AI sparkles implicit a Vergecast illustration.

Google got a batch of things right with the Pixel 9 lineup. The hardware is lovely, the spot is fast, adjacent the immense camera bump benignant of has a mode astir it, you know? It’s a worthy Android flagship successful each way. It besides — and not to beryllium melodramatic present — feels a spot like a harbinger of doom.

The Pixel 9’s AI photography features, peculiarly the “Reimagine” tool that allows you to alteration your photos with conscionable a prompt, appears to beryllium a large and worrisome measurement toward a satellite successful which we won’t beryllium capable to spot photos of practically immoderate sort. These aren’t the AI-generated photos with excessively galore fingers and plentifulness of different tells; these conscionable look similar photos. They are photos! But they’re not real. And we’re not acceptable for what that means.

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, we speech astir the Pixel 9, and what’s present and what’s coming from AI cameras. After that, we speech done immoderate streaming news, including the anticipation of yet different wrinkle successful the Paramount acquisition saga and the arguable cancellation of The Acolyte. Then we get to the week’s genuinely large story: Chick-fil-A’s impending introduction into the streaming wars. We person immoderate guesses astir the company’s plans, and immoderate (we think) beauteous beardown contented ideas.

Finally, it’s clip for the lightning round, successful which we speech astir JBL’s caller headphone case and its adjacent larger screen, the never-ending catastrophe that is the caller Sonos app, and Amazon’s profoundly weird determination to cancel the main feature connected its integer photograph frame.

If you privation to cognize much astir everything we sermon successful this episode, present are immoderate links to get you started, opening with the Pixel 9:

And connected each things streaming:

And successful the lightning round:

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