This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Severance. Pachinko. Silo. Ted Lasso. Over the past couple of years, a number of Apple TV shows have become hits with audiences and critics alike. And yet, compared to the size of other subscription services, Apple TV still barely makes a dent.

In Nielsen’s most recent The Gauge report, Apple’s service failed once again to make the top 10 list of most-used streaming services, suggesting that its audience is smaller than not just that of Netflix and Disney Plus, but also Tubi, HBO Max, and The Roku Channel.

New data released by subscription insights startup Antenna last week suggests that this may not be a contradiction at all: Engagement with Apple’s video services is heavily driven by a few anchor shows, according to Antenna’s new State of Subscriptions report, whereas Netflix viewing is spread out much more across a wider range of titles.

The report estimates that 32 percent of what the company classifies as heavy viewers watched the Apple TV show Shrinking in March of this year, while 31 percent watched the action series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. On Netflix, only War Machine was watched by 25 percent of heavy viewers, while all other titles remained below the 20-percent mark.

“Big scripted hits anchor heavy viewership on Apple TV,” the report notes. “Netflix Heavy Viewers spread across the slate, signaling breadth of engagement rather than concentration.”

A few tentpole titles that get people hooked and become cultural moments: That’s a model premium cable networks like FX, HBO, and Showtime relied on for decades. It’s also something a number of video subscription services briefly tried to replicate in the streaming age as they aimed to compete with Netflix.

When HBO Max first launched in 2020, it was all about extending the HBO brand and curation approach into streaming. Then, WarnerMedia merged with Discovery, which brought a bunch of reality TV shows to the service, muddying the value proposition. The service was even briefly rebanded as Max to attract a broader audience, but Warner Bros. Discovery reneged on that change last year.

Likewise, Disney tried to give its streaming operations more of a premium TV network feel when it launched the FX on Hulu brand with great fanfare in early 2020. Cashing in on the success of the cable network, FX on Hulu was supposed to not just host shows that had previously aired on cable, but also FX-branded Hulu originals. However, it turned out that establishing a premium brand within a service that had a little bit of everything was easier said than done. The company has since phased out the “FX on Hulu” branding and simply uses FX as a content category alongside others, like ABC, Hotstar, and Freeform.

Which raises the question: If being the HBO of streaming didn’t work for HBO, can it work for Apple TV?

“Super-serving against a niche audience you understand really well is a business model,” says Paul Pastor, the chief business officer of Quickplay, which builds streaming apps and infrastructure for media companies like MSG and Gray Media. “They’re doing that extremely well with their shows,” he adds.

Some of the engagement differences between Apple TV and Netflix can be explained by catalog size. Apple TV currently offers subscribers access to around 220 shows, according to JustWatch, while Netflix’s catalog contains around 3,300 shows.

However, Pastor also believes that Netflix is a lot more proactive about surfacing lesser-known gems to its audience. “They really figured out the formula of how to manage that through their recommendations and personalization engines,” he argues. “They’re fundamentally focused on their tech platform.” (Pastor’s company is pitching AI-powered personalization solutions to streaming service operators.)

Pastor acknowledges that Apple does have a few key advantages that allow the company to stick to an HBO-like model for its streaming service.

For one thing, Apple does have a different business model than much of its competition. Apple TV is the only major streaming service that doesn’t have an ad-supported tier yet, and Apple as a company has a huge devices business that allows it to pursue different priorities. This includes using Apple TV as an entry point to then resell other services.

Case in point: If you turn on your Apple TV or browse the Apple TV app on your iPhone, you may find those tentpole Apple TV shows, but also third-party content from services like Hulu, HBO Max, or Prime Video. And when you subscribe to those services through Apple devices, the company grows its already massive services business.

“At the end of the day, Apple is also an aggregator,” Pastor says. “That might be the best business model for them.”

The best business model for now, that is. If the company were to embrace advertising for Apple TV, like it has been rumored for some time, it may embrace a more Netflix-like model with a broader catalog, more personalization, and less of a focus on tentpole titles. Not only do advertisers demand scale, but an ad-supported tier would also fundamentally change the incentive structure for Apple. Right now, the company makes money with monthly fees, no matter how much each subscriber watches. With an ad-supported tier, every additional ad break shown generates extra revenue.

Until that happens, Apple TV may just be the next best thing we have to HBO. Sorry, HBO Max.

The RAMageddon crisis has got Microsoft rethinking its Xbox console hardware business. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox strategy chief Matthew Ball have both revealed this week that Microsoft is reevaluating plans for its next-generation Project Helix console and exploring “radically different” console business models in the meantime.

“We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping, and we are very cognizant of the ways in which we need to change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it’s flexible,” said Ball in an interview with The Game Business earlier this week.

Microsoft’s former Xbox president Sarah Bond described its next-gen Xbox console as “a very premium, very high-end curated experience” back in October, before the industry-wide constraints on memory and storage really started to hit. Sharma is now looking at ways to navigate the RAMageddon crisis, with a focus on affordability for current and next-gen Xbox consoles.

“On hardware, we are in a crisis right now, the entire industry is,” said Sharma in an interview with Fortune. While the costs of memory and storage keep rising, Xbox is looking at different ways to combat the underlying price pressures. “We must think about other ways to think about the cost construction of a console. We must think about how we create different plans, so more people can participate in the console,” says Sharma. “We must think about partnerships that will allow us to have better distribution and reach.”

Microsoft is now looking at new business models for consoles, and “what is needed for console rather than just the most premium, high-performance console in the world,” according to Sharma. “I think we’ve reached a point where it will be hard to imagine that mass audiences can afford thousands of dollars to spend on a console generation, and so I think we will start to see radically different business models that we never expected start to come into orbit later this year.”

Microsoft has many options, particularly if it’s weighing up more partnerships. In the past, the company has bundled Xbox hardware with Game Pass subscriptions, creating an easier way for gamers to finance the cost of a new console over a 24-month period. Xbox All Access was quietly discontinued last year, after many retailers pulled out of the program. It’s possible Microsoft could launch something similar, if it’s prepared to subsidize Xbox hardware further to tempt consumers into subscriptions.

Sharma also teased that Microsoft is preparing to “do more this summer” with Xbox Game Pass “to create more flexible offerings” for the subscription service. One of Sharma’s first big Xbox changes was cutting the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate in April. Microsoft also partnered with Discord last month to bundle a free Xbox Game Pass “starter edition” with Nitro subscriptions.

Microsoft could also focus on more ad-supported options for Xbox. The company has been working on a free Xbox Cloud Gaming option for well over a year now and previously confirmed it was in testing in October. While this will help Microsoft attract consumers who don’t want to purchase increasingly expensive game consoles, it’s not “radically different” from what exists today.

Radically different would be something like Telly, a startup that offers you a free TV in exchange for watching ads. Radically different could also hint at Microsoft allowing others to make Xbox consoles. Microsoft has already been exploring this with its Xbox-branded handhelds with Asus, and the next Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, could go a step further. Microsoft has previously hinted it will be some kind of hybrid of a console and a PC, and if other PC OEMs are able to create Xbox-branded devices based on AMD’s new chips, it may well help with affordability.

Both Sharma and Ball have also hinted that the next Xbox also needs to be more flexible. “I think that we have to think very differently about storage and memory going forward,” says Sharma. “We will have to apply new techniques, so that we can compress that. We will have to empower customers to have very flexible storage offerings. We will have to empower new types of games, so they can fit on device, and so there’s going to be a lot of innovation. This will take years, not days, not weeks, but we’ll go through it together with the community.”

Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like Microsoft is looking at making sure Project Helix owners will be able to extend storage without expensive proprietary solutions like the Xbox expansion cards found on the Xbox Series S / X. Sony opted for standard M.2 SSD expandable storage support on the PS5, and while it wasn’t as friendly to use as simply slotting in an Xbox expansion card, it was a lot less expensive for PS5 owners.

There’s no quick fix for Microsoft’s Xbox console pricing, but it’s not an easy issue for the rest of the industry to navigate either. We’ve already seen PS5 sales plummet after price rises, and Valve also raised Steam Deck prices by more than $200 last month. All eyes are now on Valve’s pricing for its Steam Machine this summer, which could hint at the direction of Xbox and PlayStation pricing decisions.

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. This week, I’m investigating where it might have been built — and why it definitely wasn’t the US.

Almost a year after its announcement, the Trump phone has “launched.” A few journalists and YouTubers have received early samples of the phone, though there’s still little evidence that any regular buyers have gotten theirs. If and when anyone else gets it, they’ll discover an open secret: Just like Trump’s “God Bless the USA” bible, it’s not really made in the USA.

When Trump Mobile announced its phone in June 2025, there were a lot of red flags. It had a weird name: the “T1 Phone 8002 (gold version).” The spec sheet was incomprehensible, including a “5,000mAh long life camera.” (What?) There were multiple release dates, all of which it missed. And then there was the real whopper: The phone was supposedly “designed and built in the United States.”

The claim didn’t last long. Less than two weeks after the announcement, the Trump Mobile website was updated. All (well, almost all) the “made in the USA” claims were scrubbed. Now the Trump phone is “proudly American” and has “American hands behind every device,” whatever that means.

We have the Federal Trade Commission to thank. The FTC regulates marketing claims that a product is made in the USA, and the rules are stringent: “all significant processing” of the product must take place in the US, and “all or virtually all” components must be made in the US. With the overwhelming majority of phone components manufactured in China, India, and southeast Asia, that’s a problem.

Trump Mobile knows the rules. “There are certain things that you have to do in order to say ‘made in America,’” Don Hendrickson told me when I spoke to him and fellow executive Eric Thomas in February, claiming that they’d only ever said it was a “goal” to be made in America. When I pointed out that the company had explicitly claimed the phone was “made in the USA,” Thomas only admitted that “there might have been something put on the website.”

“If we’re going to build everything in America,” Thomas added, “it is going to cost more money.”

The company has largely stuck to its more careful phrasing since. When it announced last month that the phone would soon ship, CEO Pat O’Brien said only that the T1 is “proudly assembled in the US.” I was told by Thomas and Hendrickson that the phone goes through “final assembly” in Miami, though he wouldn’t say exactly what that meant. “It’s definitely more than slapping a cover on the phone,” Thomas said, estimating that the phones would arrive in Miami in “let’s say 10 parts.” Claims to be “assembled in the US” are also regulated by the FTC, but the bar is lower and less clear: Products must go through “principal assembly” in the US, and that assembly must be “substantial,” though the specifics are ill-defined. A “simple screwdriver assembly” isn’t enough to count, but that still leaves room for interpretation.

But if making phones in the US is the goal, why isn’t Trump Mobile doing it already? On this, everyone I speak to agrees: The US simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to build phones, in terms of equipment, engineering expertise, and the affordable labor required for manufacturing at scale. “Just the sheer volume of people that it takes is tremendous,” I’m told by Keith Cochran, who worked on the manufacturing of some iPhones while at Jabil, one of Apple’s suppliers. It’s a low-margin business, which doesn’t leave much room for manufacturers to absorb higher labor costs from US employees. “You’re being asked to build some of the hardest things in the world to build, with the most precision that you can imagine, at peanuts,” Cochran says.

Even if you solve the labor problem, right now there simply aren’t the facilities or the equipment in the US to build phones from scratch. That’s a stumbling block that even Hendrickson admits Trump Mobile ran into. “Some of the manufacturing equipment that’s required for the phone doesn’t exist in the US,” he told me in February. “No one has purchased it and brought it here.” There are US companies making components like touchscreens and batteries, Thomas adds, but mostly for bulky manufacturing equipment — “they don’t go down to the scale and the quality of a phone.” We’re still a long way from production shifting for flagship-quality chipsets, OLED displays, batteries, modems, camera sensors, and the myriad other complex components inside a modern phone.

There’s at least one company that seems to have managed making a phone in the US, but it costs $1,999. For the price of an iPhone 17 Pro Max with 2TB of storage, Purism’s Liberty Phone offers 4GB of RAM, a single 13–megapixel rear camera, and a 720p LCD screen. Patriotism can’t make a great phone, but it can run up a huge tab. You can see why Trump Mobile went in a different direction.

Trump Mobile won’t disclose where its $499 phone is made. The closest Hendrickson and Thomas would get was to say the phone and its components are sourced from “favored” or “friendly” nations, and that the goal was “to remove as much of this from China as possible.”

It’s not clear the company reached that goal. Based on its spec sheet and design, it looks increasingly likely that the T1 Phone is a tweaked version of 2024’s HTC U24 Pro. A few months ago HTC told me that the company “does not design or manufacture phones for third parties,” but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the U24 Pro itself was made by a third party — after all, HTC sold the bulk of its smartphone business to Google in 2017, and its phone manufacturing capability has been limited ever since.

HTC declined to comment on where the U24 Pro was manufactured, or who by. But while HTC itself is Taiwanese, some U24 Pro boxes have a “Made in China” label, and Taiwan’s National Communications Commission certification database lists Guangdong Yuanchang Electronics Co., Ltd. as the phone’s manufacturer — based, unsurprisingly, in Guangdong, China. If the HTC U24 Pro was made in China, and the T1 Phone is an adapted version of the U24 Pro, then, well… it makes you start to wonder if China counts as a “friendly nation” after all.

If you believe Trump Mobile — though at this point, I’m not sure why you would — there’s still hope for things to change. As recently as last month, CEO O’Brien said it aims to “become the first to release a phone with the majority of parts being built here in America” (let’s just set aside that Purism got there first, shall we?). Hendrickson and Thomas told me something similar, suggesting that a future version of the T1 could be “fully assembled” in the US, while a higher spec T1 Ultra might be wholly US-made.

The pair pitch Trump Mobile as a driving force pushing other manufacturers to bring production lines to the United States, including for battery, display, and camera components. They claimed to have US manufacturing partners ready to make components “within a year,” even including Qualcomm, which they told me is “willing to do a chip run in the Phoenix facility” for Trump Mobile. I’ve reached out to Qualcomm for comment.

Making a phone in the US to a reasonable price point might be possible one day. Trump Mobile’s “stepping stone process” might even be the right approach, according to Cochran. “I would start with just box build, which is the assembly of the phone, then you could add the [printed circuit board assembly] in and gradually start going through the food chain,” he tells me. It’s Trump Mobile’s timeline that doesn’t sound realistic.

“The progression is a decade,” he explains, with the end goal being a phone designed “from day one” to be built in a fully automated factory — the easiest way around the higher cost of labor. He claims that recent AI developments have “accelerated how fast you can program a factory of robots,” though cautions that building them is another question entirely.

Supply chain analyst Kevin O’Marah suggests the same 10-year timescale, agreeing that you’d have to “redesign the phone completely” to get there. He’s blunt about the prospects of anyone, Trump Mobile or otherwise, achieving the feat within a year: “None of this stuff happens in a year or two,” he says. “That’s impossible.”

Got inside information on Trump Mobile or the Trump phone? Reach out securely from a personal device to tips@theverge.com, or see our How to Tip Us page.

Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people’s homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions in the smart home. And it’s not alone.

At Google I/O this week, Google announced it’s expanding its Gemini for Home APIs to allow companies to integrate more of its Gemini-powered smart home features into their own apps. In a blog post, Google’s Ravi Akella, director of product management for the Home Platform, said this will enable “service providers and hardware manufacturers to build monetizable, proactive services that care for users and their homes.”

These features include those currently offered on its Google Home platform and Nest cameras, such as AI-generated text descriptions from cameras that tell you “a child is riding a bike on the lawn” rather than just “person detected,” and Ask Home, which lets you query your home with natural language, such as search your camera feeds to find when the UPS driver came by.

Google is also expanding access to its Home Brief feature, which summarizes what happened around your home at the end of each day, to third parties, and adding the ability to use natural language to create routines, such as “make my home look occupied when I’m not here.”

Companies like ADT and AT&T are already using Google’s Home APIs in their home security systems, and this expansion will allow third parties to put the Google Home Premium subscription and its related features into their own app and subscription services, according to Google.

So, now your ISP, wireless carrier, and home security provider could be selling you a smart home powered by Gemini AI and even build their own hardware to run it. Google also announced it’s allowing third parties to build smart speakers with Gemini built in, as well as security cameras that work with Gemini — something Walmart did with its Onn cameras last year.

The push toward subscription models is part of a wider shift in the smart home — the hope that AI’s new capabilities may finally provide a sustainable revenue stream for smart home companies.

But their revenue stream may become your subscription fatigue — and based on my experience with these new capabilities, there’s still a long way to go until they deliver real value. Today, it’s more like enhanced computer vision than genuine intelligence. And while more descriptive alerts can be useful, they can also be inaccurate. One AI-powered camera warned me of a brown bear in my backyard in coastal South Carolina. (It was my dog).

To really change the game for the smart home and become something worth paying for, AI needs to become proactive — understand context, and detect anomalies. Rather than you having to set up smart home routines to tell you when something happens, your home should understand what’s normal and flag what isn’t.

If your smart home can know that you left the gate open around the time you normally let the dog out into the yard, and alert you before the dog can escape, or detect that an elderly parent hasn’t moved around their home for a few hours and prompt you to check in, that could add real value. Ring has a new beta feature that works toward this: Unusual Event Alerts. It only notifies you about things it considers unusual — but this means there’s a risk it could miss something.

Reliably finding the anomalies and alerting you to them, rather than sending you an AI-generated essay about your home, is where real value lies. Google’s pitch promises “proactive services that care for users and their homes” — and while they may argue that filtering notifications using computer vision is proactive, that’s only part of the solution.

The rising costs of smart home ownership

Then there’s the other challenge. When and if AI in the smart home can deliver genuine value, I’m not convinced people will be willing to pay more for it. Subscription fatigue is real, and AI has already driven up the cost of smart home ownership. Amazon has started charging $20 a month for Alexa Plus if you don’t pay for Prime, and Google has put many Gemini for Home features behind a paywall.

Top-tier subscriptions from Ring, Google Nest, and camera company Arlo have risen sharply in recent years, all now boasting AI features. Ring’s has doubled from $100 in 2021 to $200 annually, and Google Nest’s has gone from $120 in 2021 to $200. Arlo’s yearly camera-only subscription rose from $117 in 2021 to $216 in 2025.

Of course, if you’re already paying for a home security monitoring plan (Ring’s $200 sub includes that), AI features can add value by solving a genuine pain point: filtering camera footage. The subscription increases are also due to higher costs for the companies. Many now offer 2k and 4k video — higher resolution is needed to process images more accurately — and running computer vision models isn’t cheap. But those higher costs don’t fully explain the price creep, and the question still remains: Are they worth it yet?

For years, companies have struggled to make money selling connected devices for the home. The intelligence boost promised by a new wave of AI techniques seemed like a life raft for the industry. But charging people more for features that haven’t yet proven their value isn’t the way to go.

That’s where Google’s bet that companies should use its AI tech to start charging you more seems premature. Add in that Google has a long history of abandoning developer platforms (see Works with Nest, Brillo, Weave, Android Things, Conversational Actions, I could go on), and any partner is betting twice: that the AI will get there and that Google will stick around long enough to see it through.

Meanwhile, backlash against features like Ring’s Search Party, which uses AI to search footage in the cloud, has opened people’s eyes to potential misuses and dangers of these technologies. As companies race to turn AI into that long-awaited business model, many consumers are turning away from pushing more of their data to the cloud, toward cameras and services that operate locally in their homes. An added benefit for consumers: Those don’t come with a monthly bill.