The future of the Kindle with Panos Panay

Amazon launched four new Kindles this week, maybe the biggest single launch day in the 17-year history of the company’s wildly successful e-reader. One of them even comes in color! It is very much not a coincidence that the launch happened roughly a year after Panos Panay joined the company. Panay, a longtime Microsoft executive who was for years in charge of all things Windows and Surface, is now leading the devices and services team at Amazon. His big task is Alexa and turning Amazon’s assistant into the AI platform of the future. That’s apparently coming soon. Maybe. But first: e-readers.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Panay joins the show to talk about how he decided to join Amazon, why people love their Kindles so much, the Scribe’s new note-taking features, that new color screen, and more. He also weighs in on the ongoing trend toward distraction-free gadgets and maybe gives us a hint or two about AI features to come.

But before we get to Panay, there’s lots of gadget news to talk about. First, we score our predictions about last week’s Tesla robotaxi event — nobody did very well, but Nilay probably won. Then we talk about Apple’s new iPad Mini, the new Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar, the very confusing new coalition trying to keep x86 chips alive, and Analogue’s upcoming and awesome-looking Nintendo 64 emulator. After all that, it’s Kindle time.

Finally, in the lightning round, we talk about the latest executive shake-up inside of Google, where AI is increasingly running the company. We also talk about former President Donald Trump’s relationships with big tech CEOs and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s big, beautiful plans for the AI future — if only he can raise the money to get there.

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

And on the new Kindles:

And in the lightning round: