The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare

In many ways, Samsung’s new phones are fairly normal upgrades. The S26 lines come with some useful new things — particularly the Privacy Display on the S26 Ultra, which looks like an extremely cool bit of tech and a really useful new feature — and a lot of iterative year-over-year changes. The new camera features, on the other hand, are neither of those things. They’re something worse. Something scarier. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Vergecast-Tile-Large.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all] Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss the new phones, then dive into the ways in which the S26’s AI camera features seem to be clearly designed to change the whole idea of what happens when you try to take a picture. For that matter, it’s not even clear that what you’re taking is a “picture” anymore. We’ve been talking about the “What is a photo?” apocalypse for some time, and the S26 feels like a crossing of a line. All in the service of some cupcakes. After that, the hosts turn to the big shakeup inside the Xbox team. With Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond out, and Asha Sharma in, it’s time to wonder what happened to the Xbox, and whether Sharma or anyone can fix it. Microsoft’s gaming problems have been around for years and are the result of a string of bad bets and bad decisions. What would it take to get back on course, and is “back on course” even possible anymore? Finally, in the lightning round, we do another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, debate a truly astonishing chart, check in on OpenAI’s infrastructure spending, and decide once and for all whether Claude is alive. Or, at least, whether Anthropic thinks so. If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on the new Samsung devices: * Samsung Unpacked 2026: live updates from the Galaxy S26 announcement event * Samsung Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26 Plus hands-on: More of the same * I’m super impressed with the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s new Privacy Display * Google Gemini can book an Uber or order food for you with new agentic AI features * Google and Samsung just launched the AI features Apple couldn’t with Siri * If Big Tech cared about fighting AI slop, we wouldn’t be drowning in it And in Xbox news: * Xbox shakeup: Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are leaving Microsoft * Read Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of Xbox * Billions of dollars later and still nobody knows what an Xbox is * Xbox, watch TV: inside Microsoft’s audacious plan to take over the living room And in the lightning round: * From the FCC: Chairman Carr Announces Pledge America Campaign * OpenAI’s Stargate struggles. * From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: Advances in AI will boost productivity, living standards over time * Does Anthropic think Claude is alive? Define ‘alive’ * OpenAI’s first ChatGPT gadget could be a smart speaker with a camera