Samsung’s thin, big, boring AI phones

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On The Vergecast: What happened at the latest Samsung Unpacked, what’s happening with the TikTok ban, and more.

By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Jan 24, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

A photo of the Galaxy S25 Edge from the side, plus an illustration of the Vergecast hosts.

Samsung’s new phones will almost certainly be the most popular Android phones of 2025. They’ll probably also be among the best Android phones of 2025. And yet the Unpacked event this week felt like one of the most boring phone launches... ever. Are we entering a new phase of the smartphone industry, in which companies basically just launch the same thing over and over? Wait a second: have we been in that phase for a while now?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what this year’s Samsung phones mean. The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins David and Nilay to talk about the vibes at Unpacked, where the thinner S25 Edge inspired raucous enthusiasm, and where Samsung tried to make the case that AI will make your phone better even if there’s not much new hardware to speak of. We also talk about the glimpse we got at the Project Moohan headset, Gemini’s increasing dominance over the future of virtual assistants, and more.

After that, we take a deep breath and wade into the first week of the new Trump administration. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner explains what’s going on with Stargate, and why a $500 billion AI data-center plan is being announced in the White House. We talk about The United States Digital Service going full DOGE, the controversy over Elon Musk’s salute, and the latest deeply confusing updates on the TikTok ban. TikTok is back! For now. Maybe not for long. But maybe for good? We’ve got 70 or so days to figure it out.

Finally, in the lightning round, David and Nilay talk through the reasons behind Netflix’s latest price hike, the Sensify standard that turns your lightbulbs into always-watching sensors, and more.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Samsung:

And on Trump and TikTok:

And in the lightning round:

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