Nilay Patel Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.

“Apple's money is Candy Crush on the iPhone. It just has been for years. Every button you push on your iPhone, if it connects to some transaction on the internet that isn't physical goods, Apple takes 30%. … That is under some pressure. It's under the pressure of people being bored with phones, … of AI agents that might just use Linux in the cloud on your behalf. … And then there's the literal pressure of governments around the world trying to break open the app store.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

Context

David Pierce asked whether Apple's touchscreen Mac is lazy or the start of a bigger plan. Patel argues Apple's app-store business model is being squeezed from several directions, which is why it is throwing out so many ideas to see which stick.

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Transcript

The Vergecast Around 06:51 into the episode

Nilay Patel

Lately, I've been traveling with MacBook Neo, which is a perfect airplane computer. And my only complaint about it is the keyboard doesn't light up. And I'm going to solve that problem by buying a three-year-old. For $28

David Pierce

…first gesture at something bigger that actually maybe there is someday going to be some giant plan about touchscreen Max. But right now they're just starting small and giving people something relatively simple and straightforward to deal with. Do you fall on one side or the other of that debate?

Nilay Patel

…goods, Apple takes 30%. And maybe sometimes it's 20%. I realize it's different in every country in the world. But you understand that. There's a lot of money. There's an Apple tax and Apple collects it. That is under some pressure, right? It's under the pressure of people being bored with phones. It's under some pressure of, I don't know, social media regulation. It's under some pressure of AI agents that might just use Linux in the cloud on your behalf. Something is happening, right? One platform may or may not give way to another. Then there is the literal pressure of governments around the world trying to break open the app store or whatever else might happen. And then I do think that there's just boredom. Like all of the big advancements are happening in desktop clients on desktop computers. And phones are great, but I've seen so many people…

David Pierce

Yeah.

Nilay Patel

And then they will see how they all kind of reconcile. But at some point, the thing that is truly under the most pressure is the iPad, right? Like the iPad cannot withstand the iPhone eating it from the bottom and the Mac eating it from the top. True. And I'm dying to know what happens there.

David Pierce

We almost played for, I think, the third week in a row, a game called Should This Have Been an iPad?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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