A review of the iPhone 16, with a little help from AI

The iPhone 16 is great. But it’s great in pretty much exactly the ways you’d expect it to be great — gone, it seems, are the days of big new ideas about these slabs of glass we all use all day. And that’s basically okay! But it does make you wonder: could you just train an AI to tell you everything you need to know about the new iPhone?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we find out. Joanna Stern, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and a forever friend of The Verge, comes on the show to tell us about her adventures building the Joannabot, an AI chatbot that knows a lot about iPhones and basically nothing about anything else. We ask Joannabot some questions; we take some of your questions and present them to the Joannabot (and a few to the real Joanna). The iPhone 16 may not have much AI yet, but there’s plenty of AI about the iPhone. And as it turns out, the Joannabot thinks you’re pretty great.

After that, we talk about some of the other gadget news of the week, most notably the new Snap Spectacles. We dissect the hardware, the software, the use cases, and the strategy, and try to figure out whether these fifth-generation AR glasses are a step in the right direction or just a weird-looking computer on your face.

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

And on Snap’s Spectacles:

And in the YouTube lightning round:

And in the other lightning round: