Your next laptop could be a foldable phone

February 17, 2026·1 hr 18 min·6 clips

Allison Johnson explains how a foldable phone replaced her laptop for daily tasks, defying expectations.

The cold open starts loose. David Pierce turns an intro about phones that also want to be laptops, tablets, and maybe smartwatches into a Mario Tennis detour. He loved the Nintendo 64 version. After the nostalgia, the point is pretty simple: the new Switch 2 game is good, but it has a lot going on. Progress got busy. That gives the excerpt its small running idea. New things can impress you and still feel like they are trying too hard. Then the show makes a sharp turn into sports. Jacob Feldman comes back for David's annual ritual of being annoyed by how hard sports are to watch. Feldman accepts the job. As sports streaming therapist, he is there to talk through why watching sports keeps feeling harder than it should. The Winter Olympics come first. Feldman is wearing a USA curling jacket, which David immediately treats as both bias and material. He has been watching anyway. The surprise is that Feldman thinks Olympics streaming is kind of great now, especially compared with years when the coverage seemed built to frustrate almost everyone. Instead of only three-hour nightly blocks, backstories, and events whose results were already known, the Peacock setup sounds closer to what specific fans actually want. Curling people can just watch curling. David tees up the old frustration, and Feldman answers as a fan and a sports business reporter. The mood stays cautious. Even when the product gets credit, the segment keeps poking at why sports became this complicated to watch in the first place. More is coming. David mentions a piece about the sports streaming wars, but this excerpt mostly captures the setup: irritation, therapy, and a little credit for something that finally works.

As heard by us

A sharp Vergecast episode on sports streaming, Olympic overload, and what happens when more choice actually helps.

The Vergecast is at its best here when a casual gaming tangent turns into a sharper question about how much modern entertainment asks viewers to manage.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You've queued up the Olympics on a streaming app and still somehow missed the event you wanted -- buried under backstories and spoiled results.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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