The Apple Car crash

It appears we’re never going to get a ride in the Apple Car. After a decade of work, seemingly countless strategies, and a reported $10 billion invested, Apple appears to be out of the automotive business. Back in 2014, at the top of the self-driving hype cycle and when electric cars seemed poised to take over in no time, it seemed so simple. But it rarely works out the way you’d think.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we chat about the Apple Car era. What we knew, what we didn’t, why Apple wanted to build a car in the first place, why Jony Ive and Tim Cook took a fake car ride with a fake Siri guiding the way, and whether there might have been another harebrained project more worth Apple’s time and resources. (Here’s a hint: it’s a screen. Maybe the biggest one you have.)

After that, The Verge’s Lauren Feiner joins the show to talk about this week’s Supreme Court hearing in which two cases came together in a debate about free speech, content moderation, the First Amendment, and exactly how big a newspaper YouTube would be. Then, we all do a lightning round of tech news, talking AI diversity and AI pins and why all of TikTok is suddenly strangely quiet.

If you want to know more about the topics we discuss in this episode, here are a few links to get you started, beginning with the Apple Car:

• Apple’s electric car project is dead
• RIP to the Apple Car, we hardly knew ye
• From The New York Times: Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns

And the NetChoice cases:

• Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of online speech: all the news
• The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech
• Why Uber and Etsy came up so much in the Supreme Court’s social media arguments
• From The Washington Post: Here’s how much a YouTube newspaper would weigh, Justice Alito

And our lightning round picks:

• Lauren Feiner’s pick: Google CEO says Gemini AI diversity errors are ‘completely unacceptable’
• David Pierce’s pick: The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t
• Nilay Patel’s pick: Attention English majors: now you can add handwritten notes to Google Docs
• And Nilay’s other pick: TikTok is removing even more songs as music rights battle drags on