Will data centers rock the vote?

It's Election Day in the United States, and data centers have become a core issue in some of the country's most important midterm races. The Verge's Adi Robertson explains why people are uniting against data centers, why they've become a proxy for all kinds of other fights, and how this year's results might change the AI industry going forward. Further reading: Apple is all in on AI — its own and everyone else’s | The Verge OpenAI is quietly renaming data centers ‘compute campuses’ | The Verge GTA VI’s download will need up to 212GB of hard drive space | The Verge Midterm elections 2026: all the news The Verge's investigative series: The Center Will Not Hold The 2026 iPad Mini is a terrific tiny tablet — for a big price Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:47David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Loudoun County, Virginia. I'm your friend David Pierce in my basement down the street from Loudoun County, Virginia. And today on the show, we're talking about the elections. And specifically, to what extent are today's midterm elections in the United States about data centers? And what happens depending on who wins? But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026. Apple reported its earnings last night and revealed a couple of really interesting things about the state of the gadget world. Oh, and in case you're wondering, Apple continues to make absolutely unfathomable amounts of money. It appears the iPhone Duo is a proper hit. Raising prices doesn't seem to be causing any trouble for Apple, which seems like bad news for us.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  And Apple appears to be totally sold on the plan of being the hardware company for the AI revolution. Let Anthropic and OpenAI spend all the money training models. Apple seems very happy selling you increasingly expensive computers to run them. There's just one problem there. CEO John Tarnas said that what we're seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented. That's his words. And that he expects prices to go up even further than that in the next few months. No company on earth is better at managing that particular game than Apple. This is how wild the market is right now. Meanwhile, OpenAI may have found a new strategy for getting around the data center rage. Just call them something else. OpenAI just announced a new program aimed to make its data centers less taxing on local power grids.

• 3:14David Pierce?

  But hang on, they're not actually being called data centers at all anymore. They're being called compute campuses and compute facilities. Get ready for the soft rebrand of data centers, my friend. And don't be fooled by it for one second. And finally, we're a couple of weeks away from the launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. And good thing we still have time because Rockstar just said it might need 212 gigabytes of space on your console. Time to break up with, I guess, all of the other games on your console. You can read more about all this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, November 3rd. Obviously, there's a lot going on in the United States right now. But overwhelmingly, as we have come to this year's midterm elections, one issue has come up over and over and over in race after race and state after state, election after election,

• 3:59David Pierce?

  and it's data centers. Questions about how do we build them? Whether we allow them to be built at all? And what happens when they enter our communities? Addie Robertson and a bunch of folks on The Verge team have been covering this at length over the last year or so, really. And as it comes to this moment, I brought Addie on the show to see how this became a data center election and what happens next, no matter who wins. Let's get into it. Addie Robertson, welcome back to The Vergecast.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 4:27David Pierce?

  We're recording this on Monday, the day before the midterm elections in the United States. So I have brought you here to give your Nate Silver-style predictions for every single race. I'm just kidding. What I want to talk about, and again, I bring this up because it's important to understand that there are a lot of things we don't know, like who's going to win a lot of these races. I want to prognosticate a little bit at the end. But mostly, I want to just dig into a question I've been thinking about and trying to figure out a lot over the last several months, which is how, in fact, data centers became maybe the central issue of, but certainly it seems like the story of this year's midterm elections. So I guess, to what extent do you think these midterms

• 5:12David Pierce?

  in the United States are actually about data centers? It's obviously a thing we talk about, but we are set up in prime to talk about this a lot. There's a lot going on in the world. Do you think this is, in some real way, an election about data centers?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I think in some ways, we're not going to know that until afterward. But I honestly, like, I know that I should not say this as we are The Verge. We are the technology site. I think mostly, no. Like, I think that in large part, when you look at polls, if you ask people, what are their top issues? There's sort of broadly economic issues. There's Iran. There are a lot of things that people say before data centers. The thing that we do know is that people, when they are asked about data centers and AI, are like, no, actually, that thing is important, though. And I don't like that this is happening. So I don't think these are the data center elections, but it does seem like they're happening while data centers are prominent and people feel strongly about them.

• 6:03David Pierce?

  Well, and the thing that I struggle with is I think all of those things are really connected, right? Like, I was, I was reading over a lot of our coverage and a lot of what folks have been saying. And we have a lot of, you know, records from town hall meetings and stuff. And all this stuff is just so tied up in people's minds and has been for some time. And, and my sort of running theory about data centers has always been that data centers are just a literal giant thing onto which we can project a lot of things. And these are fears about energy prices and their fears about the environment and their fears about the incursion of big tech into all of our lives. And so data centers are just this sort of perfect totem of everything going on in the world that is scary, AI and otherwise. So maybe, maybe it's, it's easy to just take this mess

• 6:48David Pierce?

  of everything that is going on that we talk about and shove it into this big giant box that they're trying to build in my backyard. And then we can fight about that instead of everything else. Am I massively overreaching here?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  I think it's that. And I think we have said this on earlier podcasts and people have written about it. But it's also that it's something that you can stop. Like, I think that there was a massive tech clash several years ago. And I think the thing people found out is if you're going up against a website and that website is very hard to regulate and you can go and pull their CEOs into Congress and yell, but like, Congress probably isn't going to do anything about it. And it's very hard for them to do anything about it. But it turns out a data center is a physical thing. It takes a lot of work to make it get built. And you can do a lot to stop it from getting built. And I think there's this sense that people have agency here in a way that they don't in a lot of areas.

• 7:43David Pierce?

  That's really interesting. That makes a lot of sense. It is, it is physical and understandable in a way that so much about technology is not. And even, you know, you've been on the show many times, being like, what are we supposed to do about privacy? And you're right, in this case, the answer is just don't build the data center. We can just not build it. And that is, that is an actual answer to a problem that tech does not often give us.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  And also, there's just, there's actual regulatory guidelines. There's actual things, like, there's permits that have to be gotten. There is like, meetings you can show up at and you can complain to your local elected officials. And I think that just doesn't exist if, like, you're mad at Sam Altman or OpenAI as sort of a business.

• 8:22David Pierce?

  Totally. So, okay, so we've been tracking a bunch of races and particularly how data centers have become central to these races. As you think about them, are you sort of looking at state by state and election by election and saying, okay, we have kind of different data center problems in each of these? Or can you look across the country and see kind of the same fight about data centers happening everywhere?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  If anybody who's read our data center coverage knows that there are a lot of really particular issues in particular states. Like, if you're in Arizona, there's this massive water issue. If you're in, say, Virginia, there's an example of data centers actually in past years turning out really well. But I think when you look at sort of the aggregate, what you see is, first of all, very few people are really working hard to defend wholesale data centers. Like, even the people who are for them tend to be like, okay, well, yes, these things can have benefits, but it should be up to you. And also, look at this bill I passed to make sure that they pay their own electrical bills. I think that there's sort of...

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Splits between states where there's will for just a wholesale moratorium versus places where it does seem like there are existing data centers, there's existing infrastructure, people are maybe a little bit more ambivalent, but it feels like overall there's this nationwide backlash. I think there's particularly a sense that like these things are happening in rural parts of the country that are often not the wealthiest parts of the country and that there's not really that much benefit and they're being sort of, they're having this thing pushed on them that you wouldn't push into somewhere that was richer or denser.

• 9:59David Pierce?

  Maine seems like a good example of that, right? And we just had a good story about the fight that's been going on in Maine in the run up to this election with Susan Collins in particular. That's kind of the thing that you're talking about, right? Where there's a relatively rural place that is just, has been identified as desirable land for data centers by a bunch of very powerful and very rich tech interests of various kinds. And in a time not that long ago, it feels like this would have been an interesting thing where there was a group of people who were enthusiastically supportive of it, right? Like The Verge has covered this over the years in various ways where you go back to what Foxconn was trying to do in Wisconsin. There's always a group of people who are like, this is going to be the best thing ever. It's going to change everything. It's going

• 10:41David Pierce?

  to blow everybody's minds. Can't wait. Tax, revenue, jobs. This is like the thing we have always said about these kinds of build outs. It does seem like you're right, though, that even the people in a case like Maine who are ostensibly for it are sort of apologizing for being for it and backtracking. And even people who might have been enthusiastically for it a few years ago are now being much more careful. Like, there seems to be no winning in being very excited about data centers in Maine or elsewhere right now.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think partly there's the, okay, well, data center build outs have been going on for decades. Like, I'm from Southern Washington and like when I was just leaving for college, data centers were sort of getting built out in Eastern Oregon. And it was this big deal that, oh, all these new businesses are coming in. But it was not, people were not that angry. Partly, I think there's just a different scale now. Like hyperscale data centers are a different thing. They're really massive. And I think there's a sense that just these things aren't really giving you anything. They're giving you a thing where the CEO is just coming on to TV every day and saying this thing's going to take your job.

• 11:48David Pierce?

  Right. Or kill you. One of those.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yes, or kill you.

• 11:51David Pierce?

  Best case scenario, it takes your job. And then you go to places like Texas, right? Texas is, I think, the state I am most interested in, in this particular election, because Texas is a deeply red state, has been for a very long time, is now kind of the new data center capital of the US. I am proud to live very near the actual data center capital of the United States, which is Loudoun County, Virginia. But Texas is booming. And again, for all the reasons you were just talking about. It's a, it's a big place. There's a lot of available land. You can see why a lot of people would identify Texas as a place that would be friendly to the tech industry. It all makes sense. Texas has sort of united in backlash to data centers in such a way that all of the people who fiercely

• 12:33David Pierce?

  defended the idea 10 years ago are now like kind of trying to pretend that they were not interested in this idea. Are people able to distance themselves from this stuff? Like, are these gambits to say, oh, no, I was not that excited about it anyway, working for anybody?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I think that's a thing we're just really not going to know until after the election.

• 12:52David Pierce?

  It is kind of the question for a bunch of these.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  And I think unfortunately, it's also then going to become really difficult to say, okay, well, like, did these politicians lose because of data centers? Or did they lose also because they were Republicans in races that just got steadily worse and worse and worse for a number of reasons?

• 13:09David Pierce?

  There are a lot of things swirling right now. We have an incredibly unpopular president. We have an incredibly unpopular war in Iran. We have a lot going on that I think makes the plight of a Republican candidate hard. And only one of them is data centers. But one of them is definitely data centers, right? I think it's, there's no question that it's on the list of things being put in front of particularly Republican candidates right now. Is their favor for data centers now or in the past?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  It is. And it's also, they can't really have a united strategy because Trump is incredibly pro-data center.

• 13:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Just to make things even harder.

• 13:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 00

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• 17:11David Pierce?

  Okay, so, again, we're recording this on Monday. We won't know the election until Tuesday. We will have many more opportunities to talk about this. But a lot of the predictions over the last several weeks have been for a pretty huge Democratic swing, especially in a lot of these hotly contested states that we've been talking about. What happens here if those folks, more or less across the board, win their races?

• 17:33Speaker 03

  I think that even some of the people who have been critical of data centers are not going for a full-on moratorium. So I don't think we necessarily see, okay, across the entire US, suddenly data centers are stopped. I do think we see suddenly a lot more willingness to either pass moratoriums or to pass like very heavy restrictions. The sort of ideal case for a lot of people is, well, you have data centers, but these things have a lot of rules about, they cannot jack up the price of electricity, they have to use efficient water supplies, they have to, in some cases, have some kind of system in which they will pay dividends to the people of the state. Like, maybe that's the ideal path forward for them. I think that the complicated thing is that we're suddenly

• 18:18Speaker 03

  going to have a ton of AI company lobbying around Democrats. The like, AI companies and tech companies have just gone really, really hard for Republicans. Like Elon Musk is basically bankrolling Texas. And I think that there's going to be suddenly this shift where all of, if this happens, where all of these companies are suddenly going to be trying to like work out a path forward with Democrats in a way they haven't really been. And I think that's going to be the kind of next curve ball. And just to be clear, I'm not like convinced that the blue-waviest, blue wave situation will happen.

• 18:45David Pierce?

  Yes. And I want to get to that because I do think, I do think that is probably where we will land and I want to poke at that a little bit. But, but first, I want to go all the way the other way. Let's, let's assume the blue wave is dead, all the polls are wrong, everybody called it incorrectly, Republicans are sort of newly empowered and suddenly are no longer in an election year. Do you think we then get a giant wave of data centers?

• 19:09Speaker 03

  I think then it becomes a question of how much can local resistance keep up. I think that there's maybe a little bit of an open question of how much was that resistance fueled by the idea that you could get to the midterms and suddenly hold everyone who's been not listening to you accountable? And I imagine it's probably going to be demoralizing if that doesn't happen. But I think that there's not really any indication that the people who have just been fighting these things at a really hyper-local level are going to give up.

• 19:34David Pierce?

  But it does seem to me that we've now spent one whole election season litigating whether people want data centers. And the answer overwhelmingly is no, right? Like, every poll you find anywhere across, across ages, across demographics, across party lines, people do not want data centers in their communities. Like, period. And even the people who want it, want it sort of reluctantly and not enthusiastically. So we're sort of at a point now where it's like, okay, no matter who wins, no matter who's in charge, they're going to have to reckon with the idea that this is not what people want. Somehow, if these companies want to keep doing this, they're going to have to figure this out. What is the path forward there? Do we have any idea?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  I mean, there's indications, there's a sort of company saying, well, we want to try to figure out how to build abroad in places where, okay, if the US isn't open for business, we're going to try to get our data centers elsewhere.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  Real ship your trash to China vibes.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  I think that the volume of compute that all these companies need is so massive that that's still not going to really solve the issue for them in the US. I think that, I mean, the like ideal, good capitalism answer is they find a way to offer some kind of incentives that finally get communities on board, which, I mean, sure, if you, if you want to create a scenario where people actually feel like AI is, and the AI industry is doing something that's good for you, like, I'm all for that, that's good.

• 21:02David Pierce?

  Do you think that's possible, by the way? I mean, you see the occasional examples of this, like Meta talked a lot about the, the bonus that teachers got in one of the communities where it built a data center. But that, do we have evidence that that is even theoretically possible at scale to have these things be actual symbiotic relationships?

• 21:19Speaker 03

  I mean, I think the closest thing we have is Loudoun County. Like, I think, and that was pre-hyperscale AI data centers. I'm not saying that it absolutely couldn't happen. I do think that tech companies have really kind of forgotten what it's like to have to actually offer incentives for things. And maybe they will have to relearn that.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  Yep. Yeah, I, I think that is right. So what, when you say Loudoun County is the right example, just for, for folks who don't really know that story, what does that look like? What did they do right?

• 21:49Speaker 03

  They've basically created a system in which it's a massive tax base, that you have, you're able to cut taxes in other areas, you're able to fund services, you're able to create this situation where it's very, very clear. Also, I think property values rise, like, it just becomes this place where you're getting a lot of money out of these things. And you're sacrificing by having these things in your backyard. But it is at least a clear enough trade that some people there are happy with it.

• 22:18David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, the idea that tech companies would give something in order to get something is, is somehow brand new and unusual in our current generation. But maybe, maybe the idea of making less money in order to make it work with the community might work. What a concept. Who would have thunk? Do you think we're dealing with this as a referendum on AI in general? Like, again, in this election and elsewhere, I think a lot of people are expressing this sort of complicated fear of all things about AI. And you mentioned, you know, the CEOs who show up on TV and talk about how they're going to build a data center so that they can take your job. Are we litigating all of this all at once as we litigate data centers?

• 23:00David Pierce?

  Like, are people getting their fears out and their feelings out about AI? And we're gonna have to figure out how AI can be a part of people's community in the same way that data centers are?

• 23:10Speaker 03

  I think to some extent, yes. I think in the absolute most basic sense, even when people are defending these, there's like a place in Lauren's piece about the midterms in general, where it's like, one person's like, data centers are good because they allow you to do things online. And I'm like, you know, it's interesting that that's, I think, maybe the only person you have here who's actually saying something that's good about what these things do.

• 23:31David Pierce?

  True.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  It's just that when feelings about this thing are this negative, it's hard to even defend why you should feel proud of having this in your community. And I think that's probably the most fundamental AI thing here. And then beyond that, yeah, there's just a massive amount of fear about what AI will do and across all kinds of things, much of it fueled by the companies themselves.

• 23:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. How, how sort of reasonable do you think that discussion has been through this midterm process? Because I know, you know, everybody talks about data center stuff, and there, there are huge fears about the environmental impact. And like you said, the water use in Arizona. And I think the, the debate about how responsible a citizen, a data center is in a community, rages chaotically and is full of misinformation about, right? How, how much water do they use? How much electricity do they use? What happens when they're off the grid? All this regulatory stuff. Do you feel like we're having the right conversations about what there's, what they can do and actually do do when a data center shows up in town?

• 24:34Speaker 03

  I think it's hard to say. I think in part because we just don't know yet. I think that part of it is just genuinely, there's not great research in a lot of ways on what happens when something like a hyperscaler comes to town. I think that we just genuinely don't know yet. So I think it's hard to have the discussion there.

• 24:53David Pierce?

  Also, hard to ask a community to be the first one. Be like, oh, you, you be the guinea pig for Kevin O'Leary's giant data center. And then we'll see. It's a tough ask.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  I think that then there are larger questions about, like, are we having the right conversations about what to be afraid of in AI in general? And that's like just a massively larger debate.

• 25:10David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. So we're going to spend the next couple of days watching election results. If I am a, if I am a data center person, I am a single issue voter. All I care about is what's going to happen with data centers. What should I be watching? What are you going to be watching as kind of the bellwether? What is the future of data centers elections here?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  I think Florida is probably a decent thing to watch, partly just because it seems really unlikely that it would flip to a Democrat, and data centers have been a massive issue there.

• 25:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, Florida's a good one. It's like, it's been redder and redder and redder and redder. And it would, it would take, it would be a big swing if Florida even got purple again.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  And obviously, lots of factors. But if for some reason that happened, I, I feel like that would be an interesting one.

• 25:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. What's, what's the fight been like in Florida about data centers?

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Fight there has been that the Republican candidate, Byron Donalds, has been branded Data Center Donalds. And there has been this entire fight about whether he is sort of pushing for Florida to become kind of open for business for data centers. And that it is, like you have said, sort of a microcosm of a lot of panics and fears about like, building and construction and like, industry in Florida.

• 26:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. I think that is an interesting one. And I know I keep coming back to this point, but it is just the thing I struggled the most to wrap my head around is, the idea of being open for business is a thing people in particularly rural parts of America have said for forever, right? That it's, this is, this is a thing lots of people say they want to bring the factories to their town. It's, it's a huge political win to make a deal with a big business in order to bring that big business to your town. You get to tout jobs, and you get to tout tax revenue. It seems like data centers, maybe it's just by virtue of the fact that data centers in particular, and, and all the stuff that they represent are so unpopular that you now become known as Data Center Donalds.

• 27:12David Pierce?

  But like, it is, this is just, this used to be a winning issue for a small town mayor or governor of a rural state or whatever. Now, it's, it's a thing that you get branded with that follows you into elections. Do you think that's just about the fact that it's data centers and it's AI and it's hyperscale and it's what we're going through with the tech clash in general right now? Or is there some broader thing happening here that everybody is going to have to reckon with, not just AI companies?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  The storyline we've been following in Maine, a lot of this is about that, unlike a lot of things that you can put in your community, these things don't really bring that many jobs after the initial construction is done. This is sort of disputed, but I think the, there's the sense that you're not really actually getting as much out of it, even if it looks like sort of a factory or it looks like previous generations of manufacturing. It's just not the same business.

• 28:06David Pierce?

  What's the argument from the tech industry on that front?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  I mean, the argument for why these things are still worth it is, okay, well, they still bring a lot of indirect jobs that, first of all, there is the construction. But beyond that, I feel like the argument has been in a lot of cases, just, well, this thing is inevitably happening. It's going to happen no matter what. You just have to find a way to live with it.

• 28:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a tough argument. It's, it's a tough sell, especially when, like you said at the very beginning, people finally have a thing they can stop. That I think a lot of people, this is, again, my sort of galaxy brain theory about a lot of this, is I think a lot of people spend a lot of their time now looking at what tech in particular has done to them and feeling like it's all hopeless, and it has just happened to us without our permission, and here we are. This is how people feel about surveillance, right? We've talked about this before. There's this sense that everybody already has all of my data. My phone is listening to me, and there's nothing you can do about it except nihilism. But this is something you can stop. And, and people seem to be really, really on board with stopping the one thing they can stop.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15David Pierce?

  All right. Addie, thank you for picking each individual race. We'll put, we'll put your picks with specific election numbers and, and vote counts online, and we'll, we'll see how many you get right.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  I'll have the needle up tomorrow.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  Oh, God help us all. Uh, yeah, but you'll, you'll have to come back and we'll, we'll talk about how this all feels once the election results actually settle and we see where we are. But thank you for coming on. It's good to see you.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Great. Good to see you.

• 29:42Speaker 00

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• 32:30David Pierce?

  All right, before we go, I have one more thing to tell you about, which I can tell you about now that the embargo's up. I have just finished reviewing the new iPad Mini. I am an iPad Mini person. This is just a thing you should know about me. Every time I travel, my kid watches stuff on one of these when he goes to bed at night. The iPad Mini is a very important device in my life. This iPad Mini, there are really only a couple of things you need to know about it. One is that it's very good. It's an iPad. I mean, this is the thing about iPad reviews and has been a challenge for a very long time. You can't buy a bad iPad. Apple just figured this thing out a long time ago. So you're quibbling with features and you're quibbling with price. And all of this stuff gets tricky, but all of the iPads are good iPads. This is just where we are. A few things about this one.

• 33:12David Pierce?

  One is the new OLED screen looks great. It's brighter, it's more contrasty. I think the thing that you'll really notice is the dynamic range. Dark's get darker and bright's get brighter. So the whole thing just looks a little more immersive as you look at it. I have the old one here, too, and it's also great. Again, you can't buy a bad iPad, but the new one just has a little bit more of that sort of immersion in the display. The one I have also has the nano texture, which operates to make the screen more matte and gets rid of a lot of glare. And you can actually see it in action because the nano texture doesn't work on the outside. So you see some glare sort of coming towards your device, and then it just disappears. It's very cool.

• 33:54David Pierce?

  It works very well, but it does dull a little bit of what's great about OLED. It makes the screen a little more blurry seeming. It makes it a little less contrasty. It solves a problem and I think creates a little bit of another. It's also more expensive. I just don't think it's worth it for most people. So that's one thing. The other thing, and this is the thing everybody is up in arms about, is the refresh rate. The iPad Mini only goes up to 60 Hz instead of 120, like some other devices, including most recent iPhones.

• 34:23David Pierce?

  Will people notice this is the question, right? And I think if you're a person who knows the difference between 60 and 120 Hz, you probably will. But there are ways you feel it, too, right? One thing I mention a lot when talking about this stuff is you can scroll a webpage and still read it while the text is moving at 120 Hz, right? Even as it's moving up the screen at a pretty good clip, it's still legible enough that you can still read each line of text. On 60, it just starts to get blurry as you scroll. That's just one little thing. If you use an Apple pencil, it's just going to feel smoother on 120 Hz. Gaming is obvious, right? More frames, more fun is the gaming way. But even on these little things, you might not think you're seeing it, but you will feel the difference between 60 and 120.

• 35:08David Pierce?

  Is it a deal breaker for something like this, which I think most people are going to use to like read books and watch Netflix? No, but it is a real downside. It's particularly a downside because this thing costs $699. This one in my hand, which is the highest spec one, which has cellular and it has 512 gigs of storage and it has the nano texture, is $1,249. You should not, I don't know how to be clear about this. You should not spend $1,250 on an iPad Mini. If you have $1,250 to spend, you can buy a better tablet, you can buy a better MacBook, you can buy a better thing than this for $1,250. That's a ridiculous price. Even $699 in context is a ridiculous price. The base iPad now starts at $449. You can get an iPad Air for $750.

• 35:53David Pierce?

  So moving this thing all the way up the line to the point where it's $50 cheaper than an iPad Air, which is a better, more powerful, more versatile device, is just wrong. It's just too expensive. I think this thing at $599, far more compelling. $699 is just too much to ask for a device like this to me. One other thing, and this is, I think, the thing that I like the most about this device, is that it's now IP67 rated, which means it has waterproofing and dustproofing. It's the highest possible number for dustproof. So they got rid of things like the speaker grills. The speaker now actually is inside the display and the sound comes straight out the front of the device. There's basically no way to get dust in this thing and you don't have to worry about that. And that's awesome.

• 36:36David Pierce?

  It's also waterproof enough that I wouldn't recommend like throwing it in water and leaving it there. But if something splashes on it or it falls in the bathtub because you're reading in the bathtub as people do from time to time, you don't have to worry about it. That is awesome. This thing is meant, I think, mostly for like pilots and people on oil rigs, people who use these things in sort of industrial ways. I've started calling this the field iPad because it is very much for sort of work use cases, not for people who like sit at their desks and write with the Apple pencil all day. That's what the other iPads are for. But having something that is a little more rugged like this, that you don't have to baby the same way and that I can cook with without worrying about getting flour all over it and destroying it, is great. Huge win.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  I hope that comes to all of the other iPads. The thing with the iPad Mini is always the same, which is that it's a very good iPad Mini. I think the last iPad Mini was maybe the worst one Apple has made. It was more expensive. It didn't come with very many upgrades. It was just kind of a blah tablet that Apple seemed to have forgotten about. This one's better. It has a better screen. It's actually thinner and lighter than before. It's a very good iPad Mini, but it is too expensive. And if you are a person who cares deeply about the screen, it's not for you. It makes it a tough sell. I think most people should probably not buy this. But I am an iPad Mini person. And if you are also an iPad Mini person, it's a very good iPad Mini. What do I do with that? How do I score this? I don't know. You tell me.

• 38:01David Pierce?

  I wrote a draft of this and I filed it with the score: I don't know you guys in all caps. So that's where we are. Anyway, that's it for the show. Thank you to all of you for watching and listening. And thank you to Addie for being here. If you have thoughts, feelings, questions about any of this, if you know the score I should have given the iPad Mini, which my review is on the site, by the way, you can go read it now, send us an email, [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Like I said, we'll be back with more on this election stuff after some of the dust has settled. I think this is a very consequential election for tech in a lot of ways. So we're going to have a lot to talk about. If you have questions, thoughts, feelings, email us, call the hotline, we love hearing from you. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything we're doing here at The Verge is to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe.

• 38:46David Pierce?

  It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our data center coverage, all of my feelings, the iPad Mini reviews, everything. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Starjack. See you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

• 39:09Speaker 05

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• 40:09Speaker 07

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