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Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all in one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores and custom apps with with simple prompts. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com vergecast to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Use promo code Vergecast for an extra 20% off. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible use, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's acid compliant, enterprise ready and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building@mongodb.com build.
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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Webby Awards. We are once again nominated for the Webby Award for best technology podcast. Please vote for the vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hi Nilay.
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B
Can we win the award for the flagship podcast? Isn't that some self dealing?
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A
I think that's like a separate award. It's like the lifetime achievement where they're just like, they're gonna invent a new one where they're just like you win podcasts. That's what I would like to do. I would like to win podcasts eventually.
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Yeah, we're the best podcast.
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Yeah, but yeah, go vote for us. Otherwise Nilay will be sad. It's very important. Um, we have a sort of unusual show that we're going to do today. Um, most of what we're going to spend Our time doing today is talking about our rankings of the best Apple products ever. So lots and lots of people have been on our site all week ranking Apple products. Um, we made a lot of fun of Travis for trying to explain how the ranking system worked where you pit two things against each other and it would make this live. It's a chess system based ranking. It's a whole thing. It worked awesome.
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It did.
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We ended up getting 1.6 million votes. And the best part of this is neither you nor I knows how it turned out. Have you. You didn't peek at the rankings, did you?
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The one thing I do know is that there was a bot attack attempting to push itunes to number one, which is so funny.
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Graham on our team. Shout out to Graham, who did truly heroic work to make this happen, was like, emotionally broken by the attempt to automate itunes to the top of the list. Why itunes?
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I do want to say shout out to the person who obviously vibe coded a bot attack to push itunes to number one, but we caught you.
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Yeah. You didn't get it.
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The one thing I know is that itunes is not number one, even though someone tried very hard to make iTunes number one.
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Yeah. But anyway, so we're going to spend a bunch of time on that at the end of the show. We also have a new segment that we've been talking about and piloting for a while. Very excited to get that on the show. Um, we have a little bit of housekeeping that we just need to do here. Right up top. And then we're gonna talk about some news. Um, the two bits of housekeeping are one. Again, vote for us in the Webby awards. Voting is live for, like, just shy of two more weeks. As you're hearing this, um, I think you can only vote for us once. So just go do it now and then take your itunes bot.
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I'm. I didn't. I didn't even finish the sentence. Yeah, just take your itunes spot. That's all I said.
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You know how to vibe code a thing that will make us win all of the awards, including the ones we're
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not nominated for Grammys.
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A
I will take them. So, yeah, go vote. We'll put the link in the show notes. The thing number two, and I'm actually more excited about this is you and I and the vergecast as a whole. We're hosting a movie night at the end of April, and I say hosting in the loosest possible way. We've just spent a lot of time, like, looking for reasons to hang out with Vergecast people. Like every time we do one of these live things at CES and elsewhere, the fun is just all being together to do stuff. And we're just gonna come up with more ways to do that. So if you're gonna be in New York on Monday, April 27, we're gonna be at the IFC center at 7pm watching Sneakers. It's gonna be awesome. Sneakers. By the way, you and I, without talking independently, had Sneakers as our number one movie choice. Number one for this whole thing.
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It is the only movie you can logically start with.
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I'm so excited we're gonna get to
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Pump up the Volume, but we all need to have a big conversation about how how woke we are in 2026 so that we can evaluate Pump up the Volume on its own merits from the 90s.
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We have a lot of trust to build before we get to Pump up the volume.
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You can read. Yeah. I will remind everyone the editorial ethos of the Verge is still the final scene from that movie where the FCC chases Christian Slater around in a little jeep. You see what we do every week. You see exactly what I want to have happen. I'm just saying it's a movie from a different time.
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That movie walked so that Brendon Carr could watch.
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We have to build ourselves up as a community to watching Pump up the Volume together.
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That feels right. So yeah. Monday, April 27, 7pm if you're hearing this on Friday, April 3, we're doing a pre sale for Verge subscribers only. You can go to the Go to the site. If you're logged in, you'll be able to see our post with the information about how to buy tickets. It'll open up to everybody starting on Monday, but we wanted to give subscribers first dibs. I think it's going to be very fun, and I think this is a thing we're going to get to do a lot. I'm very excited about it. I think we're going to have a blast.
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I'm just excited to watch Sneakers again.
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I haven't seen that movie in a minute and I'm pretty excited about it.
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Yeah.
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Okay. All of that aside, I think the one bit of news we need to talk about before we get into all of our Apple stuff is kind of on the theme of what is AI and who is it for? That we've been talking about over the last several weeks. We've gotten a lot of feedback from people who both agree and disagree with many of our assessments about what AI is good for. I would say none of them have convinced me that we are wrong about whether the people do in fact yearn for automation. But the big news, really, since we recorded this podcast last, I think, is mostly around OpenAI. So two things have happened. OpenAI killed Sora, its video generation app, for what turned out to be sort of fascinating reasons. OpenAI also raised a ton of money. They raised $122 billion, which is just an astonishing amount of money. They also quoted some really big numbers. They said they have 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, which is one of those numbers that just feels wrong to me for reasons I can't quite describe. I don't, I, I'm, I'm sure they're not lying, but, boy, is that a big number. Um, there's just a lot happening in this space. Right. Microsoft launched a bunch of stuff and sort of announced an even more aggressive pivot towards business AI. It just feels like this idea of the whole AI industry retrenching to we make enterprise software is happening faster and faster. Is that, is that what you're sensing too?
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B
Yes. Can I just read you the Microsoft quote? So Hayden interviewed Mustafa Suleiman, who is Microsoft CEO of AI. But then they restructured as Microsoft is want to do, and now he is officially tasked with superintelligence at Microsoft. Okay.
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And then, Eli, I am hereby officially tasking you with super intelligence.
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This is like they hired OpenAI hired Fiji Simo from Meta to be the CEO of applications, and they made her the CEO of AGI. And it's like, sure, sure. Cool. I'm the pope of the Verge. Like, what do you. Whatever you want, man. Anyway, so Hayden interviews Mustafa about all this stuff. It's a great interview. Hayden did a great job. And Mustafa says, super intelligence has always really been my focus. And then here's his quote. Super intelligence is really about, are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world class language models? Now, I don't. You know, Mustafa Suleiman's a smart guy. He's. He's built more AI stuff than I ever will. I just think that if you were to ask most people what they thought superintelligence was, they would not say, oh, it's. Are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world class language models? They would say it's alive. And there's just a pretty vast chasm between enterprise value and it's alive. Yeah, there's something just in that quote that I think tells you everything. About the AI industry as it exists right now.
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And I actually think that particular bit of cognitive dissonance is about to be really hard for the AI industry to go through. Because what they've been promising for all of this time and what they've been saying and the way that they've branded it, like the fact that they're calling it artificial general intelligence and calling it super intelligence and we've made these like deliberately consumer friendly names about how great all of this stuff is that if you're Mustafa Suleiman, you can't say less than superintelligence. Do you know what I mean? Like, you can't, you don't get to walk that back as you pivot to business, right? Because it'll, it'll make it sound like you have, you have accomplished less than you thought. So your stock price will go down, right? So you've, like, you've, they've now set this bar so unbelievably mainstream and high that they have to pretend that's still what they're doing while they're pivoting to enterprise software. And I want to be super clear that deciding that all of the money in AI is actually in building SaaS products and business to business software is good and correct. Right. Like this, it is obviously the truth. Right? And I think this is why the, the Sora news from last week is part of this. To me, Hayden on our team also did a bunch of research on that and reported this out and basically found that within OpenAI there is a finite amount of compute available. And they looked at Sora and said Sora doesn't have that many users and is losing a ton of money. But we think it's cool and cultural and zeitgeisty. Over here we have this thing that is like coding and enterprise, which is obviously where all of the money is. Why aren't we putting all of our resources against that? And Fujizima looked at that and went, well, yeah, we're gonna, we're going to give the resources to the thing that has the potential to make us money. That is a good and correct business decision. Like that is the right thing to do. The problem is that is up against what all of these companies have spent three years talking about, which is that we are going to reinvent creativity and we're going to enable everyone to be beautiful artists and everything is going to be great. And now it's like we're, we're automating Excel. Yeah, that's great. Like, like to be so clear, it's so good that Excel is going to get better because of this technology. It is just so completely different than the thing that they have been promising this would be that they're about to crash into that dissonance over and over for a while here.
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Yeah. I mean, I think every small business owner I know who has poked at AI and agents is super excited about it.
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Yeah, I can do my expenses faster. Is a, is a real thing AI is going to do for us and that's going to be great.
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B
Yeah. And it's not, it really just isn't like the generation of slop. Like there's, there's whatever that is, which is bad. And, and then there's I can automate business logic, which is basically what software does at businesses. And now, now I can do that with like natural language commands at a computer. Great. Like I, I think that's cool. It is roughly the same as being like, everyone in the world must consider SAP at all times because it has first strike capabilities. And it's like, I don't, I don't think that that's going to go well like that, that there are no great consumer products, which we keep saying over and over again. And the only great consumer product that could exist probably looks something like AGI. Right. We have this all seeing, all knowing robot in your house that does stuff for you and so you keep making that promise and then instead what you actually have is a bunch of enterprise software that is really cool and interesting in that context.
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Yes.
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But that has nothing to do with the way people live their lives today.
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Yeah. It's like if, if you go back to the first computing revolution, right. And there's this moment where spreadsheets happen and, and spreadsheet software was this huge advancement in how we thought about what computers could do and it became this like, I mean it was an automation tool in a very real way. It would be like if a bunch of people had run around at the early days of spreadsheets and been like, I have made God. It's like, no, you made spreadsheets. And now what we're making is better spreadsheets, like maybe orders of magnitude better spreadsheets.
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I will say that at least in the spreadsheet community, a dominant sort of frame of thinking is can your God defeat my spreadsheet? And the answer is often no.
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It has been no for a long time.
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It's pretty often no, actually. No one can take Excel. It can't be done. Most businesses run in Excel. But you see this, you see this gap we keep talking about it that the money is in enterprise, the product market fit is an enterprise. The consumer products keep hitting the rocks in like very obvious ways. And then OpenAI, after this big pivot and all of this talk about cutting down on side quests and killing. Sora bought tbpn, which, if you're listening to this, you don't know. I'm actually quite frankly surprised. They're pretty ubiquitous. TVPN is the TechPro podcast network. It's a three hour live stream on.
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Technically it's not anymore, by the way. I just. Now it is, it's just tbpn. It's like MTV is no longer music television.
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Oh, not espn.
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They have, they have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now.
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Yeah, that's what it started as.
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It was the Tech Brothers Podcast network.
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B
Yeah, but it's just a, you know, three hour livestream. They have a lot of guests on there. A lot of CEOs go on there to hype up their investments. They are part of Founders fund. Like they're VCs with a three hour livestream and they do a good job. It is Pat McAfee for VCs. Like, I don't know how to describe this. And AI and OpenAI bought it like today, just before we came on air. And it's like, didn't you just talk about how you're not doing side quests and you're not going to chase all these things and do all this nonsense? And the reason that they bought it and they put out a press release and I'm reading it and it's utterly fascinating. It says, we're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift. And the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes with a responsibility to help create a space for a real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with the builders and people using the technology at the center. That's exactly what TVPN has built. So first of all, the mission is to bring AGI to the world and you're going to buy a podcast. They're saying they're going to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team, that their comms and marketing ideas for OpenAI have really impressed them. They're going to be part of the policy group and run strategy. It's like, oh, you're going to turn this thing into branded content for OpenAI. Now they're saying it will remain independent. But the history of companies trying to run media like this is necessarily that it's a Side quest, like running media is noisy. You have people talking all day and there will be. OpenAI will be held accountable for what they say. Also, all of TBN's distribution is on X and somewhat notably X is owned by Elon Musk, who is currently suing Sam Altman over the very existence of OpenAI. That trial's about to go. This is noise.
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And who is extremely happy to turn the knobs on the algorithm to favor and disfavor what he does and does not like.
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B
Absolutely. So I just, I, I, I, you can think of what you want of TVPN and they, I think they're pretty honest, that they're pretty biased. They read the ads.
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A
You know, I actually have a lot of like empathy and, and admiration for what tvpn. They are crystal clear on what they're doing.
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B
Yeah, I, I always say I like people who are honest. They're honest. It's right there out in the open. But now you're part of a company that's going to have ideas about what you should do and say, especially if you're directly integrated in the marketing of the company, which it appears that they will be. And you're hosted on a platform where the owner of that platform hates your CEO, that just hates him. And like you're about to go to court. That's a lot of noise for OpenAI. After they killed Sora and they put out the code red and they talked about pivoting enterprise and focusing on Codex, they're going to buy a lot of attention and a lot of distraction. And I think the reason they're doing it is because the gap in coverage is so big.
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A
Yeah, right.
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B
The people in the polls. There's another poll just this week. 55% of people do not think AI is going well. Right. The people don't want data centers built. There's all kinds of polling showing that. And it's because there's product market fit in enterprise and the consumer products aren't good. And they all think this is a marketing problem. They think this is a communications problem. And I'm telling you it is a product problem. And buying a show that you think does a good job of communicating how great AI is is not going to convince a bunch of people who don't see great products. It just won't.
- [17:40]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I agree and I, I do think I am increasingly convinced that the, that marketing problem is not in bad faith or disingenuous. Like, I think, I think a lot of people in this industry are so incredibly convinced that AI is going to be the future of literally everything that they can't believe. Other people don't see it. Right. Like, this is the, the San Francisco versus New York thing you, you keep threatening to do that we really need to do. Like, the feeling coming out of that industry is like, you, how, how do you not see this? Like, it's so obvious. It is so ubiquitous, it is so everywhere. It's going to change everything. Like AI that can send imessages for you is going to literally change everything about your life for the better. And I, like, I, I say that jokingly because I don't by most of that argument, but I think the people who espouse that argument really believe it. And I think you only do this if you're OpenAI. Like, you don't do this cynically. Right. Like, this is, this is, like, this is our opportunity to reframe this conversation. Not to make us more money, but because this thing is, is so important. We need to make sure everybody sees it.
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B
Yeah. It's just weird. I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own products.
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A
I mean, yes, in chat.
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B
Free ChatGPT. 900 million people have used free ChatGPT. They know what they think. They know what they think of that product. You can't put John Jordy have great haircuts fan.
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A
They do.
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B
They're terrific. Like, I'm jealous jackets too. Yeah. I mean, these are, they're handsome, well dressed, well spoken, very smart people. You can't tell people that they're not having the experiences that they're having with these products. You just can't overcome it. You can't say, I promise you, Sam Altman's ideas about Universal Basic Income are going to work out. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is like, here's some weird ads that you don't like. Like, there's some collision coming for the consumer products and the reality of how this industry is perceived that you can't market or communicate your way through.
- [19:43]
A
Yeah.
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B
You have to ship the products that work. And I really thought OpenAI, you know, shutting down Sora and pivoting to Codex and saying they were going to focus was evidence. They understood that. And then you just had this other thing where it's like, I actually don't know, like, it seems like they want to be loved. And the way you are loved is by shipping great products like it is. That's the whole verge. Like, I don't know what to tell you. We run a reviews program for a reason. The evaluation comes from the products. It doesn't come from us saying that like you're great.
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A
You know, I do think it's possible to look at this actually as right in line with the pivot to business that actually if you look at the audience for something like tbpn, like Mike Isaac at the New York Times wrote a great profile of them a while ago and he called it something to the effect of SportsCenter for the LinkedIn crowd.
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B
Oh sure.
- [20:33]
A
Which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right. And it's like if you're, if you're OpenAI, what you need is a way to communicate clearly and cleanly essentially to all of the other companies in Silicon Valley. Right. Like that's where all of these companies start. If you are a startup in Silicon Valley making business software, your first customers for a very long time are other startups in Silicon Valley mostly making products for other business customers. Like this is, this is the cycle forever and ever and ever. So if you look at TBPN is basically like a, a very sexy B2B podcast, which again is like I think fairly straightforwardly kind of what they're trying to be, then this makes a certain kind of sense. It's just a very out there way of trying to accomplish that goal.
- [21:24]
B
We just went through all this, we're going to focus, we're shutting down all this stuff and there's just nothing noisier
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A
than media, which is what everyone discovers.
- [21:33]
B
Like it is absolutely the noisiest thing you can do.
- [21:36]
A
Ask, ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company that might have some conflicts with the way
- [21:43]
B
media companies whose incentives are all shaped by going viral on X. Right?
- [21:50]
A
Yeah, it's, it's weird times. So what do you, what do you make of this giant funding route? So Open Air raised $122 billion mostly from its existing investors. Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, Microsoft, bunch of individual investors. This is all under the, you know, huge looming IPO for both OpenAI and potentially anthropic both coming this year. There's just a ton of money brewing right now and OpenAI is, is sort of flexing A, this huge amount of money and b this 900 million weekly chatgpt users as like it's trying to very much to use this to remind the world that it is the Goliath in this space. What do you make of all of this right now?
- [22:30]
B
I mean, I think that list of investors is a bunch of big companies that are reliant on this Technology or reliant on OpenAI being successful because they've already invested a bunch of money into this company and spent a bunch of money. And you know in the case of Nvidia, that the money's coming right back to them in a variety of ways. So that's confusing. Again, my thesis on OpenAI is that they do not end the year anywhere close to the same kind of company that they started the year as. And it feels like that is getting borne out. They have to start making real money on the free version of ChatGPT, which means competing with Google in a real way. Google is not easy to compete with. I think OpenAI, their ad pilot, they ran it for six weeks, they made like $16 million, which I keep annualizing to a hundred million dollars. And it's like, it sort of works that way, but it doesn't work that way at all. You can't be like, in six weeks we made this much money, so in 52 we would definitely make this much money. Like, I wish it worked that way, but it absolutely doesn't. Advertising in particular is very cyclical, so who knows? But they have to go compete with Google for real. Google's obviously not going to just lose market share. They're going to compete back really hard. They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like their deal with Apple, remember Apple Intelligence launched with a big OpenAI thing that all feels like it's falling by the wayside. And Apple's gonna be way more open to all kinds of other models. In Siri, Apple has a bigger deal with Google now. Like, OpenAI is sort of on its own. Right. Their Microsoft relationship has been cut off, so they've got to go compete with Anthropic in the enterprise for agentic coding tools, which seems like a big business for both of those companies. And then they have to compete with Google, the greatest business in the history of technology and potentially business itself. Good luck. Like, I. I just don't. This much money might not be enough, especially if you don't have the focus and especially if you're now run by a bunch of ad people and business people and not core technologists, many of whom have left to go to Anthropic.
- [24:34]
A
Yep. Yeah. I think the, the theory that OpenAI is going to look very different seems more and more obvious to me all the time. And I think like, Google had a. Did a very funny announcement about the new Google VO thing, which is basically Google's version of Sora. It's its own video generation model. And basically what Google is able to do is just not worry about the money and compute that it costs to run a video model. Right. Like, because it makes all of the money from search ads. Like, Google can just afford to lose money in a way that OpenAI can't. Like, nobody is making money on AI. There is no money in AI right now. Like, it's, it's very important to remember there is no, there aren't two nickels to be made in AI right now. All of these companies are losing money at like record rates. It's just that Google made a hundred billion dollars last quarter and Anthropic and OpenAI didn't.
- [25:33]
B
And when Google wants to shut down things that aren't, you know, core to its business, it's like, have you heard of Calico Labs, the contact lens that might detect diseases? It's like what you were doing. What?
- [25:44]
A
Yeah.
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B
And like, I don't even know if that's still running or not. Like that they're, they have that scale. They. Google is structured into Alphabet to allow things to try to succeed outside of the core Google business. Things inside the core Google business, like AI, they are extremely willing to subsidize even more. So there I. Again, I think OpenAI has found itself. It's gone from darling to sort of independent. They're not tied to the big companies the way they were in the past or supported by the big companies the way they were in the past. Most notably I think Microsoft and Apple. And they're up against competing with Google, which I think is just going to be incredibly challenging.
- [26:23]
A
Yep.
- [26:23]
B
By the way, I haven't even mentioned they brought on a bunch of Apple designers. And Jony, I've to try to compete with the iPhone. Good. Good luck. Like, I don't, I don't know. Like they, they. To pay off all this investment, they have made enormous promises. And if the answer is we can automate Excel, that might be a big business, but it's certainly not a big enough business to. To pay back the promises that they've been making for a very long time.
- [26:50]
A
Right. I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business. And I think, like, it's worth saying very clearly that I think you and I are actually on the same page of like, what this is going to do for business and for the way, and I mean business very broadly. Like, you and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful, valuable ways to get work done. That's awesome and exciting and cool and interesting and we should cover a lot of that. That is so different from digital Jesus. And it is so different from this, like, mass consumer live your life inside of these chatbots tools that we've been prom that it's just like we have to figure out how to pull those things apart from each other.
- [27:30]
B
I really just come back to if you have software brain, you think that the computer is alive and a lot of people have software brain.
- [27:39]
A
Yeah.
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B
Like, they're like, I see the world as a series of databases that I can link and interconnect and make use of. And that might be right. Like, that might be a good way to describe reality, but it actually isn't. It's an incomplete description of reality. And you can actually extrapolate. Like, now I can send my agent to go scrape databases for me to. I have made God. Yeah, there's something about software brain. We really should do New York versus California. Because what I mean is that people in California have absolute software brain, and people are in New York are like, yeah, I live in a city with other people in it.
- [28:16]
A
This is how we finally start our podcast, Beef with Hard Fork. This is it. This is how we do it.
- [28:22]
B
I mean, I love them both very much.
- [28:24]
A
I know. I do too. It's great. We need more enemies. We're always saying this.
- [28:29]
B
Casey was just sun decoder.
- [28:31]
A
We need more enemies, Nilak. All right, let's pivot now to a new segment. We've been talking about this internally for a while. We've been trying to figure out what it is for a while. I'm very excited to finally get to bring this to the Vergecast. It's called the Hype Desk and it features two of our friends. Welcome back to the show, both of you. Ross Miller, Ashley Esqueta. Welcome back.
- [28:52]
D
Yay. I don't have an air horn. If I did, I'd hit it.
- [28:57]
A
I'm the closest you're going to get to that. I mean, I already have that kind of, like, cackle. So it's just. I'll be your sound effect for Hype, basically. A fun fact you should both know is that we have steadfastly refused to give Nilay a soundboard for many, many, many years now and will not happen.
- [29:13]
B
I was in that reviews closet today and I saw a stream deck and I thought, I can make this happen for myself, but it's better because I have Ross and Ashley now. My. My human air horns.
- [29:21]
A
Happy to be of a service.
- [29:21]
D
Human air horn. That's. I. That's what I want to be remembered as.
- [29:25]
A
That's beautiful. So before we get into this segment, Neil, this is kind of your. Your baby and you. This is something you've been thinking about for a long time, and we've been planning for a long time going way back into Vergecast lore. Do you want to explain what the Hype desk is before we get into it?
- [29:40]
B
Yeah. So if you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that we've had many iterations of the Hype desk in the past. And the early iterations were like, what if we just had cool kids in the corner and we never quite knew why, but it was fun and then that ran its course. And if you've been listening to us recently, you know that we talk a lot about the creator economy, like the YouTube podcast Economy, and how all of that requires a pretty uncomfortable smashing of editorial and ads. All the creators have to do the brand deals, they have to read the ads. David and I send each other. Other podcast hosts reading the ads in very odd ways all the time. You will also know that what we sell here is our ethics policy. And Dave and I are way too precious to read the ads. But there's like a. The reality is we need an on staff influencer to come and do the money. And I've always thought that no one would ever want to be our on staff influencers because you have to deal with me. But you don't get the fun of being in the newsroom. And then Ross is like, well, I used to work here. I never want to be in that newsroom again. And I was like, oh, this is perfect. So I'm very excited that Ross and Ashley are going to be here. We're going to hang out with him once a week for a few weeks, see if we like it. And right now, we're unsponsored for flavor. But the idea here is you can't buy me and David, but you can buy these two.
- [30:59]
A
I would encourage it, please. We are for sale by Ros and baby.
- [31:05]
B
We're just gonna see how that goes. And it's our little solution to the creator economy problem. Also, I love these two. I'm excited to talk to you every week. But this is our solution is to have people who are not in our newsroom come join the show, do cool stuff, tell us about adventures, and then make some money.
- [31:24]
A
I like it. I like it.
- [31:25]
D
It's so good to be back to keep the journalism going. We make the money to keep the journalism going, Which I don't want to do.
- [31:32]
A
No.
- [31:32]
D
And I got to be honest, I'm a recovering Journalist. I quit that years ago.
- [31:36]
A
I want to be so clear about how church and state separate. Like, how strict Neal I is about church and state being separate. We are literally 15ft apart in the same room.
- [31:44]
B
I don't want you anywhere near me. Ross, you sit over there. We're going to get you a real desk.
- [31:48]
A
So glad to see.
- [31:49]
B
Yeah.
- [31:49]
A
Yes. There is no.
- [31:50]
D
It's a hype chair. Right now. It's just a hype chair.
- [31:53]
A
The idea here is basically you two are our friends who are going to go out in the world and bring us cool stuff every week. What have you brought us this week? Ooh. Thank you for asking. Well, first things first. This is an Ashley specialty. Both of us have hard time staying focused. So Ashley bought me a Pomodoro timer. It's a really cute little one from Amazon. It looks like a chumbee. Do you remember the chumbee? I do. Wow. The thing gives me real chumby vibes that you're holding.
- [32:19]
D
I need a timer. And so I tried one of these little cubey guys and I hate the noise it makes. It makes me upset. It's like a high pitched beeping sound. And I. It. It's like nails on a chalkboard. And so I was like, where are the timers for small children that would better suit me. And. And fortunately, I in fact found exactly what I was looking for, which is this again, this is, like, totally unsponsored. I just found it and it's. It has, like, this one has a rainbow on it and Ross's has a robot. And when you. You just turn the little thing to start up the timer to whatever time you want up to 99 minutes. And then it has little lights on the outside that go away as it counts down. And then it sings you a little song. And honestly, like, to make me drink water and get up out of my chair all day and not be, like, shrimping over my keyboard. Very nice. Like, very nice things.
- [33:11]
B
The Pomodoro is a system. It's not just like a pasta sauce. Right. It's like a whole system of ADHD.
- [33:15]
D
Yeah, the whole system of, like, you know, 45 minutes on. And then they do. I have, like, Ross and I are both adhd, so we need help. We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do, neurotypicals can do.
- [33:27]
B
I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time.
- [33:30]
A
I am. Because if I don't, we will take over the whole Verge cast and no one will be happy about this because we want to keep coming back. So we're going to be very tight about this segment as much as we can be.
- [33:39]
D
Yeah. Or we'll hear really comedy tight ten.
- [33:41]
A
Tight ten.
- [33:41]
B
Yeah.
- [33:42]
A
Ashley, where did you find this thing? This. This screams TikTok shop to me, I have to tell you.
- [33:47]
D
Not the crazy wild, not the TikTok job. I just found it on Amazon. I was scrolling through Amazon and looking for timers and I just kept trying different, like search phrases, like a maniac, like Riker Googling. It was like Timer, Child Music, MP3 Upload Timer. Like I just didn't want the little beepy cube. It's just terrible and I don't like it. So I found this one and I was like, this seems like exactly what I'm looking for. It's very simple. It's like very close to being sort of like an analog timer. It's not like a smart thing. You don't have to connect it to your phone. I like all of those things. I just want it to do what I want it to do and nothing else. And so this was the. It was a great little solution. I want to say. It was like under 20 books, so it's really nice.
- [34:30]
A
Yeah, I think it was like 15. Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of this segment. All right, moving on. This is not what we actually came to talk about. This was just meant to like, help us stay on track. Ross's timer cracking the whip here. Good lord, here we go. So two hype things we talked about. One big one was PAX East. Now PAX Penny Arcade Expo. It has been around since, I want to say, 2004. It's one of the longest running gaming fan conventions. There's currently four of them every year. And given a time like E3 is not here. GDC and Dice are all very industry focused. It's one of the few places where you can just be a video game nerd and really come and celebrate your fandom. And Ashley, you just went to PAX east in Boston.
- [35:10]
D
Yeah, went to Pax east, had a lot of fun.
- [35:13]
A
Did you see any games that stuck out? Like, what's a title that you were
- [35:16]
D
like, ooh, I got to play the new Pokemon Champions. Which was really neat. That's that like they kind of just remade Pokemon Stadium and it was really fun. It was just like, it seems like a nice little bite sized game that you can just kind of play on the go. Like, it's real quick. Like, oh, I just want to get some battles in against some other people. That was awesome.
- [35:32]
A
I love hearing that Pokemon had a good game. Pokemon's having a moment right now because I know Pocopia also came out. It's like an animal crossing, but the whole conceit feels very Lovecraftian. You play a shape shifting Pokemon that turns itself human because all the humans have disappeared and the Pokemon are just sad about no humans. So they just rebuild civilization.
- [35:52]
D
The Ditto transforms into a person. I have a hat from pax. This is my Ditto hat.
- [35:59]
B
I feel like I already know how this is going to go off the rails every week.
- [36:02]
D
Every week, every week. Never. Trust me, you're going to. You come to the Hype Desk for
- [36:08]
B
a show, I'm here for it.
- [36:10]
D
But yeah, you're a weird little Ditto who like is like, oh, I think I remember what my human trainer looked like. And then they turn into this like weird little abomination of a child that has a Ditto face. And it's horrific and also delightful.
- [36:22]
A
It's good stuff. All right, so things we've learned a. If you sponsor the Hype Desk, Ashley will wear a hat of your choosing.
- [36:29]
D
I will wear the dummy.
- [36:31]
A
We just discovered this. This is, this is useful information.
- [36:34]
D
Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I just did it. I just did it.
- [36:38]
A
All right, that's the Hype Desk, everybody. Thank you so much to Ross and Ashley.
- [36:43]
B
You guys are going to be here
- [36:44]
A
with us every week for the next couple of months. That's a crazy. You're going to bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored, some of it will be unsponsored. It's going to be great. We're very excited to have you guys here. This is going to be awesome. Thank you both. Bye Bye. Love you both. We are going to take a break and then, Nilay, you and I are going to rake some Apple products. You ready for this?
- [37:03]
B
It's gonna be rough.
- [37:03]
A
We'll be right back.
- [37:06]
C
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- [39:09]
D
One useful thing to share. I thought TikTok was just dances. Turns out it's where I learned how to save money, fix stuff, and get real tips. Short videos, real people. Download TikTok now.
- [39:26]
A
All right, we're back. So this week was Apple's 50th anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. Nilay, you wrote about the iPhone. I wrote about the, like, generational heater that Steve Jobs went on when he came back to Apple. Jason Snell wrote a couple of great pieces, including one that I know he feels very passionate about, about the Apple II. We wrote about antitrust. We wrote about the MacBook Air. Amelia, our photographer did an incredible visual history. Neil, have you looked at that? That's like, those photos are incredible. So much photo in the 50 years of Apple. That whole package is out. But the main thing is we asked everybody to rank the top 50 Apple products, and they did so. Tens of Thousands of people, 1.6 million votes, lots and lots and lots of input and feelings about what this thing is. And one, as you mentioned, very aggressive bot attack in favor of itunes, which I am told we successfully mitigated. So what you and I are going to do here is we're going to go through the, the bottom 40 of the audience's reaction. And essentially what we're going to do is neither you nor I have seen this list, so we're just going to reveal the pick and, and if we have any reactions, great. But we're just going to reveal from 50 to 11, and then you and I both made our own top tens. And so we're going to compare our top tens against each other and against the. The overall ranking and see how we feel, see who's right, see what we need to fight about. Does it sound good?
- [40:53]
B
It does. I'm. And I'm convinced that I'm correct and everyone else is wrong.
- [40:56]
A
Obviously, the first time ever for you. This is. This is great. Um, all right, so let's. Let's just start at the bottom here. Number 50 on the list. The. The worst of the best Apple products of all time is the ImageWriter 2.
- [41:12]
B
Well, it's the worst of the best. It's just coming in at number 50, right?
- [41:16]
A
It is. It. This is still a very good Apple product. But I will say, I think coming into this, we picked two printers for this list, and I would say there's a strong chance the other printer will be number 49. But I think we sort of knew these would be down at the bottom, even though I think you could argue they're very good and very important and very innovative products. They're printers.
- [41:35]
B
Yeah.
- [41:35]
A
I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see, what's number 49? The laser writer two.
- [41:40]
B
Okay.
- [41:44]
A
Super tough beat for the printers here. Yeah. I'm not surprised by this. Are you surprised by this?
- [41:50]
B
I think. I personally think the laser R2 should be higher, but I understand we have a young audience. They don't remember. They don't know.
- [41:58]
A
I think, instinctively, most people look at printers and are like, this can't possibly be any good. How dare you?
- [42:03]
B
The laser. I promised I wouldn't do this, but the LaserWriter 2 was Apple's business for a long time.
- [42:10]
A
Yeah, it really was the Mac and
- [42:12]
B
the laserwriter that kept that company afloat.
- [42:14]
A
All right, number 48, the original cinema display.
- [42:21]
B
Rough.
- [42:21]
A
That's a little lower than I would have thought.
- [42:24]
B
But again, it's like, I think the kids don't know, man. They're out here buying cheap LCDs. This thing was a sensation when it came out.
- [42:31]
A
It's true. All right, number 47. The clip. IPod shuffle. Oh, that one kind of hurts my feelings. I don't actually think that's entirely wrong. But, like, I loved. I loved that product.
- [42:43]
B
Again, it's. It's. This is the 50 best. It's just. It's. It's hard to go head to head. I mean, that's literally how we ranked them. Right. Head to head against Many other things on this list. The clip I bought shuffle is not winning.
- [42:55]
A
No question. Uh, including number 46, PowerBook 500. This is one you. You stand for.
- [43:02]
B
This one hurts me. I. This is every. They're wrong. The whippersnappers are wrong. They're wrong.
- [43:07]
A
Okay. Uh, number 45, the Apple TV second
- [43:12]
B
gen. See, the power belongs. Deserves to go over. The Apple TV second gen. Yeah, this is.
- [43:17]
A
This is the first one that I'm like. The Apple TV second gen should be in the bottom three.
- [43:20]
B
This is recency bias.
- [43:21]
A
No question.
- [43:22]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:23]
A
Uh, all right. Number 44, the PowerBook 100 series. Boy, real PowerBook slander coming here. This is just a young audience. Yeah. This is a. This is a young audience of people who. I think. I think a lot of people. And frankly, like, if I were not a professional journalist, my Apple experience would have started. And like, my. My Apple knowledge would have started with the iMac G3 and the Steve Jobs return. I think that whole era of. Is just sort of lost on most people.
- [43:53]
B
Yeah.
- [43:53]
A
Even though there were a lot of good products in it.
- [43:55]
B
And we had Jason Snell write an entire piece. Best headline we've come up in a minute between Jobs. It's very good about Apple's weird 90s. And the power books are in there.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah. And everybody just looks at that decade is like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece. Everybody should go read it. All right, number 43. Quick time.
- [44:14]
B
This is. This is wrong.
- [44:16]
A
I will spoil this. I have QuickTime in my top 10.
- [44:19]
B
Wow. Okay.
- [44:22]
A
In part because I spent a bunch of time working on a piece that we ran on the site about the creation of QuickTime by a guy named John Buck. It's an excerpt or an adapted. It's an adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good.
- [44:34]
B
John Buck was on the team that invented QuickTime in the weird 90s at Apple. I love that piece. Everyone should read it.
- [44:43]
A
It's great.
- [44:43]
B
QuickTime is foundational technology. MP4 is QuickTime.
- [44:46]
A
Yeah. And it. It makes a very compelling case that, like, QuickTime was the beginning of the idea that computers could be for creative tasks. It's a very important piece of technology. The kids don't know these days. This is my story so far. The kids don't know. All right, number 42, Final Cut Pro.
- [45:05]
B
Software's got. Software's getting a rough beat here.
- [45:08]
A
I'm actually fine with Final Cut Pro being here. It's like, again, this is the top 50. All of these Are good, but there are a lot better things in Final Cut Pro. Number 41.
- [45:15]
B
This is actually recency bias the other way. Right. Like the modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here.
- [45:21]
A
That's. I think that's probably right. All right, number 41. Ooh. The Apple Extended Keyboard 2. Jon Gruber is going to be very upset about this. Jon Gruber. I think at one point, if I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings. And. And then John posted about it on Daring Fireball, basically saying it was a travesty that it was so low. So he got it up to 41. Good job, John.
- [45:47]
B
It's rough. Uh, John, by the way, agrees with me. This. This is the best keyboard of all time.
- [45:53]
A
Not just Apple's best keyboard. The best keyboard of all time.
- [45:56]
B
A strong argument. Many people will make the strong argument. The Apple extending keyboard two is the best keyboard of all time.
- [46:04]
A
I will say, fun fact. According to the rankings, this Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are all exactly tied in the rankings. Fascinating. All right, number 40. GarageBand. Yeah, I think software is just getting. Getting us.
- [46:18]
B
Software's getting a rough beat. Especially again, this is modern GarageBand. If you remember when GarageBand came out sensation, the idea that a digital audio workstation product would be on every single Mac that shipped for free was a revolution. But Socos was umbrella by Rihanna. That's GarageBand Loops. This is. This is how important that software was.
- [46:38]
A
So. And to this point, number 39. ITunes.
- [46:41]
B
Rough ITunes.
- [46:44]
A
Despite the best efforts to make it. Number one is. Number 39.
- [46:47]
B
We defeated you hacker. It should be lower. Can we manually switch them just to punish bad behavior.
- [46:55]
A
I'm fine with itunes being here. Itunes is like great and terrible. So simultaneously that I'm largely fine with it being here.38 is the Mac SE30. This is one of those computers I have no context for, but you made a pretty strong case. Is a very important piece of hardware in Apple history.
- [47:14]
B
This is the best of that type of Mac. The little compact desk Mac, the black and white screen. I would argue this should be far higher. But I understand why. It's where it is.
- [47:25]
A
There are. There are Apple old heads who will argue this is one of Apple's best. Like if you sort of consider it in its era that this is one of Apple's best computers of all time.
- [47:34]
B
Best, most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for. For the. The CPU inside. Ooh. Ooh, yeah. Ooh, I love an SC30.
- [47:45]
A
There we go. All right. Number 37, the Mac Plus. This is really. This is all wrong.
- [47:52]
B
This is all wrong. I don't know what we're doing here.
- [47:54]
A
1980s Apple is just getting wrecked here.
- [47:57]
B
No, I'm saying even in this list, the SE30 is clearly superior to the Mac Plus.
- [48:02]
A
Oh, yeah, no question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings, which is very funny.
- [48:06]
B
Oh, there you go.
- [48:06]
A
Okay. The two of them just alone. They're both ahead of itunes, but they are tied with each other in the rankings.
- [48:11]
B
That's right.
- [48:12]
A
That feels somehow. That's definitely a lot of people being like, I don't know what either of these things are. I'm just going to click a button. Uh, all right. Number 36, the Black MacBook. Ugh. I think this is right.
- [48:25]
B
This feels like a tough beat for you.
- [48:26]
A
Personally, I loved that computer. It's like I as just a. The. The glowing Apple logo, the. The look of the thing. It was just black every. Oh, I love that computer. But it's. This is probably the right place for it. Yeah, it was lovely.
- [48:40]
B
But mid pack of the top 50. That's right. Yeah.
- [48:42]
A
I'm fine with it. 35, the PowerBook G3. The. The. The. Like Steve Jobs comeback PowerBook.
- [48:52]
B
Yeah, this feels right. It. The. It. The sort of. We're accelerating towards the. What you might call the midfield.
- [48:58]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's right. Yeah. Number 35 is not the. The worst place to be of all time here. Number 34.
- [49:04]
B
It beat some famous competitors. It beat all the software.
- [49:06]
A
It did. That's true. Yeah. We're. We're damn near the end of software here. Except a couple of very recent things that I think are going to prove your point about the recency bias. We'll see how high some of those are. All right. Number 34, the iMac G5.
- [49:22]
B
That feels. Honestly, was not expecting this to be this high, really. It's. The slim unibody Mac is coming up like the classic. The G5 was an interstitial.
- [49:33]
A
It was a little bit. But this was the first time it just became a giant screen on a stand, which is like. This is the first time we see the shape of the modern imac.
- [49:42]
B
This is when, Johnny, I looked you in the eyes and said, what if your display had a chin?
- [49:47]
A
And the people said, yes, Johnny. All right, let's keep going. Number 33, the iBook G3. I struggled with this one. I at one point put this in my top 10, but I had it in the top 10 because I think the demo when it was launched Where Steve Jobs waves the hula hoop over it to prove there are no wires. Yeah, one of the all time great Apple moments. I think it's probably better than the product itself actually was.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it quickly got replaced by the iBook G4, which presumably is much higher than this.
- [50:26]
A
I mean, we'll see. All right, number 32, the original iPod Touch. This feels right.
- [50:32]
B
Oh, I had this so much lower.
- [50:35]
A
Really.
- [50:35]
B
So much lower. I was like, put this at the bottom of the list.
- [50:38]
A
No way. You're wrong. The ipod touch was awesome. All right, number 31, the Apple Watch Series 3. The first great Apple Watch. The one where Apple figured out what the Apple Watch was.
- [50:49]
B
This is right. Solidly mid pack. It's hard for this to beat anything on this list.
- [50:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, we. We are getting pretty quickly into like legendary product territory here.
- [51:02]
B
Oh, yeah, we're getting into. I mean, the number of screenshots I got from people that are like, how do you expect you to make this choice? Like, we're headed there.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah, yeah. All right, number 30, the Titanium PowerBook G4. The Thai book, Nilai's favorite.
- [51:14]
B
This is. You already know what my top 10 looks like. It's the Titanium PowerBook G4 10 times in a row.
- [51:21]
A
Yeah, I think, I think this one. I'm gonna say this one's about right. This, this is your black MacBook. Right. Like, this is a computer you just love. This is the laptop with no reason to love this.
- [51:36]
B
No. No bones about it.
- [51:39]
A
All right, number 29, the iPad2. Okay, so I had. I. I flipped the original iPad and the iPad2 because the iPad2 came out very quickly after the first iPad and was such a v. Oh, yeah. That it is actually when the iPad became the iPad. The original iPad was not all that good a product, like, on its own, but it's going to get a lot of love and it's going to be higher than this on the list because.
- [52:09]
B
And that's wrong.
- [52:10]
A
It is like the. The important one because it came first. And yes, that is wrong. All right, number 28, the Intel Mac mini. I expected this to do far worse. You made fun of me for putting this on.
- [52:23]
B
I don't think this should be on this list at all.
- [52:25]
A
And yet it came in number 28. I'll take it justice for the Mac mini. It's good stuff. All right, number 27, the iPod Nano, third gen. This is the squat ipod nano with the video. Is this the first? We have a bunch of ipods on this list and it's Interesting that this is the first click wheelie ipod that has appeared.
- [52:48]
B
This is, this is the fat one, right?
- [52:50]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [52:51]
B
This, this was not a beloved ipod.
- [52:53]
A
No, it wasn't. It was, it was like ubiquitous. It was everywhere, but it was not. I don't think it was anyone's all time favorite ipod. Yeah. So this feels about right. All right, number 26, the. The iBook G4, as you said.
- [53:09]
B
Yeah. This is where this belongs right now. We're in, we're in the top quarter. So it's just outside the top quarter. And this, this top 25 is going to be brutal.
- [53:16]
A
Yeah, I think, I think it gets very hard very quickly here. All right, number 25. Halfway through the list, the iPhone XS. So we got a bunch of questions from people why we picked the Xs
- [53:26]
B
and not the X Furious people, I would say.
- [53:29]
A
And it's the exact same logic as the, the iPad or the iPad 2. Right. Like they, they, they fixed it on the next one. It's like made a cool product, shipped the better version a year later. Yeah.
- [53:42]
B
People did not have an iPhone X and the iPhone X was compromised in many ways. The XS actually was a good mainstream product.
- [53:49]
A
Yeah. And it was, it was everywhere for a long time. I remember getting to like the iPhone 13 and 14 reviews, and there were a lot of people who were like, is it finally time to update my Xs? Like, people held onto that phone a long time.
- [54:01]
B
Yeah.
- [54:02]
A
All right, so that's nothing.
- [54:04]
B
This is when they started doing smart HDR, which revolutionized photography. I mean, the Pixel 2 is right next to it. I understand. But this is when the race really took off.
- [54:11]
A
Totally. All right, number 24. HyperCard.
- [54:16]
B
Hell yeah.
- [54:17]
A
This makes me so. I, I honestly believed HyperCard was going to be 50. And a bunch of people are gonna be like, what the hell is this? What is, what is this weird thing you're saying about building block software? I don't care.
- [54:29]
B
They got it. The hypercard. The hypercard stands came through. There was a lot of conversation about hypercardo, at least on Blue sky and Threads where I saw it.
- [54:37]
A
I love that. That's awesome. Kids, if you don't know, go read about HyperCard. It was right about everything.
- [54:43]
B
Except they were right about everything.
- [54:45]
A
How to be good. Number 23. The apple won the very. The, the computer that started it all. Is number 23 on the list.
- [54:55]
B
I don't know, man. This is, this is like the opposite of recency bias, where you're like, well, that had to have been important. It's like, no, this isn't very good at all. They made like 500 of them.
- [55:03]
A
Them. I mean, true. Yeah, it is, it is. It's good that this is lower than the Apple ii, which better come up much, much, much higher on this list. All right, number 22, the iPod Nano, second gen. Okay. This is the, the tall, skinny nano before they made it short and fat. Sure, this is fine. I'm good at this. Being here. I think it's very funny that the second gen iPod Nano is slightly higher in our rankings than the first Apple computer ever, but here we are. All right, number 21, the iMac G4. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
- [55:38]
B
I mean, this computer was not a success. It's just.
- [55:41]
A
No, but it is the best looking computer Apple has ever made.
- [55:44]
B
But everyone wanted the flat panel. Yeah, this is the pro. This is the. I knew this would happen. I'm as big of an IMAXG for San as you can find. And you're like, oh. But the reality was no one wanted this computer and they quickly pivoted to the flat panel display.
- [56:03]
A
That. I mean, that's true. And yet I don't care. It rules. I'm looking at the list I have of all 50 and I'm seeing the things that have not come up and I'm preemptively angry about some of these things that are going to have beat the iMac G4. All right, number 20. We're in the top 20 now. The original ipod mini. Not better than the iMac G4, but worthy.
- [56:27]
B
A sensation nonetheless.
- [56:29]
A
It was. I had one. I loved it. It was, I think it was. I think it was my first ipod. It was when I went from like giant creative jukebox land to I had a gold ipod mini and I loved that thing to pieces. All right, number 19, FaceTime. I'm fine with FaceTime being here. I think you could argue this is like a smidge high.
- [56:53]
B
It's way high. I had FaceTime on my list. FaceTime was way at the bottom, really. Video calling like Apple did it. They invented it. Yes, that's all very important. But it. FaceTime as a product is not necessarily better than the other video calls products.
- [57:09]
A
No. And it wasn't like the concept of talking to people on video had been around. This was not like Apple made it really easy, which was great, but it did not like create the concept of video. Yeah, yeah. This feels a little high. All right, number 18, Power Mac G3. Fascinating. Shocked by this.
- [57:33]
B
Fascinating.
- [57:34]
A
This was Apple's first desktop back. So Steve Jobs Comes back, launches the iMac G3, and then they basically take the Bondi blue look, transparent everything and just shove it onto the power Mac. Fine. Good computer. I would not have had.
- [57:51]
B
This is a lot of people with a lot of memories.
- [57:53]
A
Yes. Right.
- [57:54]
B
The whippersnappers are starting to lose now.
- [57:57]
A
Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. This is like the computer a lot of our audience grew up with in their house, I suspect. All right, number 17, Apple Pay rough.
- [58:09]
B
I had Apple Pay way at the bottom. I can't give you credits for being like credit cards. I'm sorry. Yeah, I understand that it works well and, you know, I understand it's a good product.
- [58:19]
A
I also had Apple pay pretty low. I think this is where we're getting to, like, people who love the thing that currently exists in their pocket and are want to give it flowers, you know what I mean? It did make me think we should have put the iPhone 17 in here just to see how it would have done in terms of like, well, clearly it's the best one. It's the new one. It still works. It's still great. Maybe I should just do that. Part of me wishes we had done that. But at any rate, number 16, AirDrop. That's preposterous. I'm sorry. This is ridiculous. FaceTime, Apple Pay, and AirDrop all in the top 20 is bananas.
- [58:57]
B
This is. We don't. We need to understand what the people are saying to us, David. They're saying, we're here, imperious and our high and mighty thrones. And then people are like, I'm airdropping. I'm airdropping so much that Google had to reverse engineer airdrop and give it to Samsung.
- [59:12]
A
This is making me feel older and older. Every single one of these that we do because they're like, oh, I remember when I was five and airdrop came out, and I'm like, screw you. I was 56 when Airdrop came out.
- [59:24]
B
All right, I'm two and I'm going to get out of here.
- [59:26]
A
Exactly. All right, let's do. Now we're in the top 15. It's starting to get wild here. We have a few more of these and then we're going to get to our list too. Number 15, the iPhone 5s. Many people would argue the best iPhone ever, except me. Smart, correct people with great taste and extreme.
- [59:48]
B
It's like, it's very hard to have feelings about great products in this zone.
- [59:52]
A
I know, it's true.
- [59:53]
B
These are.
- [59:53]
A
It's like, it is basically bangers. All the Way up to the top here. Yeah. Although I will say just the thing, the thing that is seared into my mind right now is that there are two pairs of AirPods on this list and we're at number 14 and we've hit neither of them rough.
- [60:06]
B
I know.
- [60:06]
A
I don't. I hate it already. All right, number 14. Okay. There we go.
- [60:12]
B
Good.
- [60:12]
A
All right, fine. The original AirPods Pro. Number 14.
- [60:16]
B
Sure.
- [60:17]
A
Thank God we've dispensed with this. Is that 20 spots too high? Sure is. Here we are. Number 13, the Apple IIe.
- [60:28]
B
Respectable. Respectable. It should be higher, but it's respectable.
- [60:32]
A
Sure, Fine. Yeah. Everything in here is. It's all gravy from here, I think. Number 12. The original AirPods. All right, we have finally dispensed with this bad idea of ranking these this high. I will say I appreciate that the AirPods are meaningfully higher than the AirPods Pro. That feels correct to me and I was very curious to know how that would shake out. I think the AirPods are more important than the AirPods Pro, and that makes me happy. Which do you have? Are you an AirPods guy?
- [61:04]
B
AirPods. Have we ever talked about this? I think AirPods sound horrible and I think the EarPods sounded horrible. AirPods are. AirPods Pro are tolerable.
- [61:12]
A
What is your, like, day to day pair of headphones?
- [61:14]
B
It's the Sony's. I think I have the Mark 4.
- [61:16]
A
Okay.
- [61:16]
B
They folded and then they didn't fold and now they fold again and I have the last ones that folded.
- [61:21]
A
Got it. Okay. Those are really great. All right, number 11. The original iPad. Way higher than the iPad 2. A clearly, obviously better price.
- [61:31]
B
Yeah. This is wrong. This is.
- [61:32]
A
I do think we're at like, you and I spent a lot of time on the selection show debating the difference between best and most important. And I am getting the distinct sense that this ranker leans pretty hard towards most important.
- [61:48]
B
I saw a post, I think it was on Blue sky or some. I was like, if you just put original in the name, it's going to win. And I was like, oh, we did that.
- [61:54]
A
That's a really interesting point. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. Okay, we are now to the top 10, which means you and I are also going to reveal our own picks. I'm now. I'm now feeling a lot of feelings about my picks because, boy, do I disagree with this ranking in a lot of ways. But let's just do this. So number 10. I will just say I had QuickTime number 10 here and I could Make a long and impassioned argument for why QuickTime is so important, which concludes with the fact that it is still an app on Max. That is a thing everybody knows and uses according. According to our ranker, which we should say. Um, if you're watching this, Travis, our producer, Vibe coded this ranker. Um, and it's very impressive. It's not as impressive as what Graham did, but it's very impressive. Um, so I. That's what I had at 10. Nei. What did you have at 10?
- [62:47]
B
My. My. I'm like, still. I. I Vibe coded my own little ranker to. To move things around, and I have. I have moved things in and out of the ten spot. I. I'm very confident in my top nine.
- [62:57]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [62:58]
B
All right, well, then ten spot is really hard.
- [62:59]
A
What do you have a ten and eleven?
- [63:00]
B
Then right now at ten and eleven, it's the M1 chip and the iBook G3. And I think this has to be the M1 chip.
- [63:07]
A
Okay.
- [63:12]
B
That's my call.
- [63:13]
A
Interesting. I have the M1 chip higher as we will get. Super.
- [63:19]
B
Because it's obviously in the top 10.
- [63:21]
A
It is obviously in the top 10,
- [63:22]
B
but as many people point out, it's not a product. It's just a thing that enabled all the other products. But you got to put it in this list. I will say, obviously belongs in this list.
- [63:31]
A
There are a couple of those still to come in the top 10 here. Yeah, I. I think that's. I think this is fair. I. The. The M1 for me is like, it. It could go anywhere on this list. And I would like. We were talking about this before we recorded. I had a pretty easy time making my top 10. Ranking them I found very difficult.
- [63:51]
B
Yeah.
- [63:51]
A
And it sounds like you had the same experience, but with 11, it was 10. 11.
- [63:56]
B
My top nine were like, there's nothing's moving.
- [63:59]
A
Interesting. Okay. All right. What was the audience number 10? The iPod with Clickwheel. Interesting.
- [64:06]
B
Sure.
- [64:06]
A
Okay. Yeah. I don't hate it. All right, so now at number nine, I had the ipod with Clickwheel, which I think is like. It is the ipod. The ipod Classic. I had that one at number nine. What did you have at nine?
- [64:23]
B
The apple IIe.
- [64:24]
A
Oh, okay.
- [64:26]
B
And I feel great about this. This was, for years, Apple's most important computer. It defined the computing experiences of an entire generation.
- [64:33]
A
It kept Apple alive for an entire generation.
- [64:36]
B
Kept Apple alive. This. If you have a list without the 2e in particular in the top 10, I don't know what you're doing.
- [64:45]
A
Fair enough. All right. What did the audience have? The slim unibody imac. Interesting.
- [64:52]
B
Okay, that's a rough one. I don't know what we're doing. Are you.
- [64:56]
A
You think that's too low?
- [64:58]
B
I think it's way too high compared to what else you can put in the top 10.
- [65:02]
A
You don't have the unibody imac in your top 10?
- [65:04]
B
No.
- [65:05]
A
Okay. Okay. All right, well, let's get to number eight. I'm like, I'm staring at my list and I already don't like a bunch of them. I'm just. I'm gonna go with it. I will. I will go with what I wrote before we started. I have the iPhone 4 here.
- [65:20]
B
David, come on, man.
- [65:22]
A
You have the iPhone 4? I think either one or two would be my guess. And I'm very excited to get to that.
- [65:27]
B
Declined respons.
- [65:29]
A
Yeah, I don't. Listen, we've been doing this for a long time together. What do you have at number eight?
- [65:34]
B
What? I have at number eight, the Titanium PowerBook G4.
- [65:37]
A
This is. This is your quick time. Yeah. You are 22 spots higher than the consensus. And I think you're right.
- [65:42]
B
Still the laptop everybody wants at the end of the day, if you were like, can you. Do you want whatever garbage laptop you can have today in 2026 or a modernized tie book, everyone's going to pick the titanium powered G4.
- [65:56]
A
I mean, you might not be wrong about that. All right, what did the audience have at number eight? The Wedge MacBook Air. Wrong.
- [66:05]
B
Interesting.
- [66:06]
A
Too low. But only slightly too low. It's okay. Yeah, this is very interesting. All right, number seven. I had the. Now I. Now I'm feeling the Nilai shame already. I had the slim unibody imac here. I went back and forth on which imac I should include. I had the IMAC G4 in here for a long time because I think that the sunflower design is just one of the best, coolest things Apple ever made. But this is the best imac. Like this is the one where my in laws had one of these for 13 years in their house and I had to bully them into getting rid of it because it just didn't work anymore and they still didn't want to get rid of it.
- [66:44]
B
I just turned one into a monitor. I'm with you. I love these things. They're not in the top 10.
- [66:49]
A
Yeah, lightning round. Spoiler that one. We're coming back to that. Patel, what did you have at number seven?
- [66:54]
B
The iPad. Two.
- [66:55]
A
Okay.
- [66:58]
B
I have a CCI for my top 10. But, yeah, I'll get to it. But my. Yeah, the iPad2 belongs solidly in the middle of the top 10, in my feeling, in my opinion.
- [67:06]
A
I think that's totally fair. All right, what did the audience have? Number seven. Oh, the Bondi Blue iMac. The iMac G3.
- [67:14]
B
Sure, sure.
- [67:15]
A
Yeah. Not mad at it. Um, wow. Boy, I am, like, almost right in step with the audience because I had the Bondi Blue iMac G3 at number six. Uh, like, I, I, we. We don't need to litigate why that thing mattered and why it was great. And that is, like, I, I had one of those in my eighth grade class in a way that was very important to me. Yeah. And, and that's. I, I think that thing rules. Um, all right, what did you have at number six?
- [67:43]
B
This is where I put the, the original iPod.
- [67:46]
A
Oh, okay.
- [67:47]
B
This is where this goes. I, I agree. I agree with everybody at the imac. I just have it higher. But the ipod goes here. So my, my list is, like, the products that definitively change the industry around them.
- [67:58]
A
You think OG iPod over Clickwheel iPod? See, I, I debated this and picked Clickwheel iPod. I don't have another iPod in my top 10.
- [68:05]
B
No, this is, this is the only ipod in my top 10.
- [68:08]
A
And you picked the original instead of the click wheel, which is like the, when you think of, like, what is an ipod? It's the click wheel.
- [68:17]
B
Yeah. No, I make the argument, but I think by that time, the click wheel actually came out. I think, on the Mini. I believe that's right. So, like, you're, we're just in this. You just got to pick an ipod. And, like, actually, it was just the ipod. It was just Apple saying, we're going to make a music player because we missed out on CD burning and then, like, shipping an ipod and then relentlessly iterating on it. Like, the original ipod was a moment for Apple in a very real way.
- [68:40]
A
It was. That's totally fair. I buy it. All right, what was number six from the audience? The iPhone 4. Sheer rage from Neil.
- [68:52]
B
What are you doing? You people don't understand beauty. You don't understand grace. Come on.
- [68:58]
A
The people, like, when their phones connect to the network is what they like. All right. At number five, I had the original Macintosh, which. Go listen to the version history episode on the Macintosh. Lots of feedback about Mr. Macintosh from that episode. This is like, I think I. You could rearrange my top five here in basically any order, and I would feel fine with it. But to me, the original Macintosh belongs in the top five, no question.
- [69:28]
B
I don't have it in my top ten at all.
- [69:29]
A
No.
- [69:30]
B
Nope.
- [69:31]
A
Really Fascinating. What did you have at number five?
- [69:34]
B
The Wedge MacBook Air.
- [69:35]
A
Okay.
- [69:35]
B
The entire industry chased this product for. Till now. For 30 years.
- [69:40]
A
Forever. Yeah. Okay, what does the audience have at number four or number five? Sorry. Mac OS X.
- [69:49]
B
It's good, it's good. Their audience is redeeming itself.
- [69:52]
A
Yeah, I'm feeling good about the audience top ten here. Um, all right, so before we get to. Well, let's, let's do number four and then before we get to the top three, we'll recap. So number four, I have the wedge MacBook Air. I'm, I'm, I'm right here with you. Uh, that is like, again, we're, we're doing iconic, like world shaping Apple products over, over here. Uh, what did you have at number four?
- [70:17]
B
The iMac G3. Original iMac.
- [70:19]
A
Okay, that's the, yeah, the bond. A blue one. So that's so. Okay. And let's see what the audience had. The original ipod. Okay. So so far between us, like if you, if you sort of smush, you and me together, we're actually like kind of in step with.
- [70:37]
B
This is.
- [70:37]
D
Right.
- [70:37]
B
This is where you are. Yeah, yeah, this makes sense.
- [70:41]
A
All right, now to our top three. I had, at number three, I had the M1 chip, which I think, I think interesting. According to the, the vibe coded ranker here, it's possible that the audience might have it even higher. We. We shall see. I think the M1 chip is like, it is, it is a turning point for Apple across products in a way that I think was really important and huge. And just put it like it no longer was just the best one. It was playing a different game than everybody else across a bunch of different products. What did you have at number three?
- [71:18]
B
The iPhone. The original.
- [71:19]
A
The original iPhone.
- [71:21]
B
Yeah.
- [71:21]
A
Okay.
- [71:23]
B
And I think I had the M one way lower. Right. Like my feeling is it's in the top 10. But you know, Apple entered this weird period where everything was super iterative once they had the M1, you know, and
- [71:36]
A
it's like, yeah, to me, it's like I remember getting the M1 MacBook Air and all of a sudden going, oh my God, I don't think about the battery life on my laptop anymore. And the shift that, that suddenly was in my computing experience just shot this thing to the top of the list for me.
- [71:53]
B
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I just all the, it's like I making distinction between top 10 and top 5, you know, and my top 5 is like, these products change the world. And M1 is in the top 10, which is like, this was very important. But Apple in its moment in with the M1, you know, the M1 came out in 2020 somewhere there. 21. I remember it because we were all at home. It was like the pandemic. I reviewed it in my basement. The M1 air, the M1 Pro, I reviewed. And I just remember thinking, like, Apple is in such an iterative place right now that they're not going to make another kind of product with this chip. They're going to make the best laptops. They're going to make some very interesting desktops. But the wild left turn that you could make because you have this thing is not going to exist. And indeed it still doesn't, because Apple doesn't make wild left turns anymore. And I think the top five is the whole industry has to make a wild left turn right now because Apple made a wild left turn.
- [72:48]
A
Yeah. I do also think you have picked the Wedge MacBook Air, the Bondi blue imac, and the iPhone, which I think are three products most people could close their eyes and draw from memory, which. Which goes a long way when you're talking about, like, iconic tech products. Yeah. All right, what did the audience have at number three? The original Macintosh.
- [73:09]
B
Wow.
- [73:09]
A
So, you know, David, that's some nostalgia.
- [73:12]
B
That's like, we're gonna make a. We're gonna make an entire movie with Ben Affleck about sneakers. Like, that's just nostalgia.
- [73:18]
A
I don't see the problem. Sold a hell of a lot of sneakers. All right. At number two, I had the original iPhone, I think. I think this very clearly had to be either, like, somewhere in the top three just because, again, it goes on the list of, like, it wasn't the best iPhone anyone had ever made, but it was so vastly better than what was out there. And it. You just can't mess with the legacy of the thing. Just is what it is. I think it's so funny that you're going to rank the iPhone 4 higher than the original iPhone.
- [73:49]
B
The iPhone 4 is number two.
- [73:50]
A
I love this for you.
- [73:51]
B
Everyone's still chasing the dragon, man. Everybody wants this high. You know what I mean? You can't. You'll never feel it again ever again. There will never be another phone introduced that does what the iPhone40 to.
- [74:02]
A
People go down several bars when you hold it in your hand.
- [74:06]
B
I'm just saying, man, the original iPhone is great. It's very important. You know, there's the Steve Ballmer clip, like, whatever. The iPhone 4 came out, and the whole industry is like, we don't know how to make that.
- [74:17]
A
That is true. And it was. It was one of the first phones that everybody who touched it just immediately was like, oh, my God, this is great.
- [74:25]
B
Yeah.
- [74:25]
A
All right. What did the audience have at number two? The M1 chip. Okay.
- [74:32]
B
That's the recency bias coming through.
- [74:34]
A
So this. This makes very clear that the. The overall ranking system had the original iPhone at number one, which I would have been absolutely shocked had that not been the case.
- [74:46]
B
Interesting.
- [74:47]
A
Shocked. Like, it's just. It is the. It is the Apple product of. Of all time. Right? Like, kind of no matter who you are, it is the most important, most successful product in consumer electronics history. Like, I. I clearly don't agree that it's number one, but it is perfectly fine that it's there. What did you have at number one? I've lost track of what you have not ranked yet.
- [75:08]
B
Oh, Mac OS X, the single most important Apple product.
- [75:12]
A
We agree.
- [75:12]
B
There is no. There's no Apple without Mac OS X. Yep.
- [75:15]
A
I love that we agree on this. This actually makes me really happy. Uh, Mac OS X is a. The thing that came out of buying next, which is one of the most important Apple decisions of all time. It is the foundation of 25 years of Apple software. It is. It's what you said. None of the rest of this happens if OS10 isn't.
- [75:34]
B
Not even a little bit.
- [75:35]
A
Yeah, I'm so. I'm. I'm both annoyed and sort of, like, gleeful that we. We agree.
- [75:41]
B
This was the easiest one for me. I was never. I never thought anything else.
- [75:45]
A
I agree. I started my list at the top with OS X. Why do you think people don't see that? So the original iPhone in the rankings is number one with a bullet. It is way ahead of everything else. And then the M1 chip, the original Macintosh, and the original iPod, 2, 3, and 4 are all kind of clumped together. And then Mac OS X, iPhone4, and the iMac G3, the Bondi Blue imac, are also all pretty clumped together. Um, so in. In this ranking, Mac OS X is, like, decidedly sort of third tier, which I find sort of fascinating. Why do you think people miss this?
- [76:21]
B
I mean, there's one obvious reason. Not enough people have used Mac OS X. Snow Leopard, the single greatest operating system of all time.
- [76:27]
A
If I had. If we had just made this Snow Leopard, would you have still made it number one?
- [76:31]
B
Yes. Like, to this day, Companies are like, we're. We're. Our next version of the operating system. We're doing a Snow Leopard, like, where they're like, we're not going to do new features. We're just going to make it perfect. And they never do it. They say they're going to do it, but Apple one time did it. They just stopped for one year and they made it good. And then it's been chaos ever since.
- [76:52]
A
I remember so many years of you resisting updating your laptop because you just refused to get off of Snow Leopard.
- [77:00]
B
No, Snow Leopard was early. I was stuck on like Big Sur. Like, there's like a whole different. It was some other newer version that I stayed on for as long as I could. Like, Snow leopard was like 10.3 or something. It was like very old. But I think what most people, they see iOS and they don't realize that iOS began with Mac OS X. And you can't pull like Mac OS X was box software. You could buy it so we could put it on this list. Right. You can't really separate iOS from the iPhone.
- [77:28]
A
Right.
- [77:29]
B
So I think what most people see is the modern Mac OS that they use on the computers they buy, which is really messy lately, particularly the liquid glass. I don't use my MacBook Neo as much as I want to because I just don't like looking at it. It's bad. It's a messy piece of software. And so I think the history and the fact that it's the foundation for iOS and iPados and WatchOS and TVOS is completely obscured. But the reality is Apple does not exist without buying next, without bringing back Steve Jobs, without the foundation of OS X, and without being committed to that foundation in like, you know, kind of like rebuilding it bit by bit over the years. And to be way more cutting edge, like, no other company pulls that off. Like, Microsoft certainly has not pulled that off of Windows. So that's why it's. For me, it's number one. It's like you don't get literally any of these other products. But I think for the, like, the big audience, it is obscured that iOS is actually just Mac OS X. It began its life as Mac OS
- [78:32]
A
X. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair. I actually think everybody did fairly well here. There's not a lot of super insane stuff on our lists. Congrats to everybody.
- [78:42]
B
But we didn't pick the lists.
- [78:44]
A
Well, we did. That's true.
- [78:46]
B
If we had been like, you can type in polishing cloth, I think some
- [78:49]
A
weird stuff would have happened that would have. Yeah. Your furthest away from the norm was the iPad2, which you had 22 spots higher. I had QuickTime 33 spots higher than norm. And I think you and I both feel very strong.
- [79:02]
B
Everyone should go read that piece. It's very good.
- [79:04]
A
It's very good. I think you and I both feel very strongly that we're correct, so I feel good about it. That's it. This has been the Apple ranking process. You and I have poured all of our heart and Soul into ranking 50 Apple products. It's like, it was super fun to see it.
- [79:17]
B
We'll do it again in 50 years, you guys.
- [79:19]
A
Yeah, right.
- [79:20]
B
We're going to live forever. If you're a young person, send us your blood so we can live forever.
- [79:26]
A
Sure.
- [79:27]
B
Throw in that.
- [79:29]
A
Thank you to everybody who voted and was part of this. Go read all of our Apple 50 covers. There's a lot of great stuff out there. It was a fun week on the Internet in that sense, actually. That, like, our whole kind of tech universe spent a lot of time covering Apple and I learned a lot of new stuff about that company these last couple weeks. It's been very fun. We are going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do a lightning round. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored Jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply.
- [80:21]
B
So good, so good, so good.
- [80:23]
A
New spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores.
- [80:26]
D
Now get ready to save big with
- [80:28]
B
up to 60% off rag and bone,
- [80:31]
A
Marc Jacobs, free people and more.
- [80:33]
B
How did I not know Rack has Adidas?
- [80:35]
A
Cause there's always something new.
- [80:36]
D
Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at
- [80:43]
A
your favorite Rack store for free.
- [80:45]
D
Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack K Pop Demon
- [80:51]
A
Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a big battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?
- [80:59]
B
It's not a battle.
- [81:00]
A
So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [81:04]
C
It is an honor to share.
- [81:06]
A
No, it's our honor.
- [81:08]
C
It is our larger honor.
- [81:09]
A
No, really, stop.
- [81:11]
B
You can really feel the respect in this battle.
- [81:15]
A
Pick a meal to pick a side and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, unsponsored for flavor. I feel like I gotta get a little longer every time I do that. Nilai, should. Should we begin where we always do?
- [81:33]
B
Yeah.
- [81:34]
A
It's time. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, which has developed some new competition that I'm not feeling great about, but America's favorite. Did you hear me? Podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. What do you do this week? Ne.
- [81:57]
B
I love.
- [81:58]
A
I forgot to say, we didn't get any new theme music submissions this week. Please keep the new theme music coming, and until then, we will continue to play the Gregorian chant.
- [82:08]
B
I love that everyone's favorite is the Gregorian chant. Like, we've had some really good ones, but if we were to a ranker, I know Gregorian chant would hit number one.
- [82:16]
A
It is the original iPhone of Brenda Car as a dummy.
- [82:18]
B
It's very good theme music. All right, Brendan. This week, I mean, he just did the dumbest possible thing, which is he went to cpac, the, you know, the big conservative conference. There's a lot of tension at cpac. There's like a New York Times piece about the young people at CPAC being like, what are these boomers talking about all the time? So CPAC was weird, but Brandon got on stage, and then he did the thing you're not supposed to do when you're America's speech police. He proudly said how much speech he's been policing. We just had the clip. Let's just listen to it.
- [82:51]
A
And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded, NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from msnbc. Sleepy eyes. Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well. This sucks, man. It's one thing when you know that's the goal. It's another when he just gleefully sits on stage and tells you out loud, that has been the plan all along,
- [83:22]
B
especially because what he usually does is he's like, I'm just enforcing the law. You know, I'm making sure everyone's fair. And then he gets on stage and he's like, look at all this speech that I've curtailed. Look at all these People who are not on the air anymore. That's not the role of the federal government. Government speech regulations are bad, as I continue to say in the face of remarkable opposition. Everyone loves the government speech regulation lately. So that's bad. It is just very dumb. Like, I mean, like, tactically dumb. Because if you're the speech police, you move quietly, right? You're not. You're supposed to quietly influence what people see, think and hear. You're not supposed to get on stage and be like, look at how good I am at affecting the speech. If there's one thing Americans hate, it is censorship. They do not like it.
- [84:07]
A
That's kind of like our whole thing in a lot of ways.
- [84:09]
B
It's the first one. It is the First Amendment. We put it right at the top of the list. So anyway, this is just Brendan being tactically stupid. The actually stupid thing that happened this week because of Brendan and how corrupt his FCC is is Nextar and Tegna, the two big companies that own all the TV stations, are trying to merge. And they had to tell a court this week that they couldn't follow a temporary restraining order because they'd already merged. So this is just, like, the funniest possible set of facts. So nexstar and Tegna are two big TV companies. They own a bunch of stations. We talked about this show last week. There's a statutory cap on how many stations you can own in a given market. It's 39%. Brendan says, I can change it by fiat because I'm Brendan Carr and I can do whatever I want with that process.
- [84:56]
A
This is the one he just waived, right? He was like, no, you're good. The rules don't apply. Go forth.
- [85:01]
B
They don't apply. We approve your merger. So nexstar and Tecna rush into merging the prop. Like, the day after, like, they got their corrupt opinion from Brendan and they rush into closing their deal.
- [85:11]
A
Does that just mean, like, everybody. Everybody just, like, got new Outlook instances and they're like, well, now we're merged.
- [85:17]
B
Well, this. This is.
- [85:18]
A
We're all in Slack together now, right?
- [85:20]
B
So they sign their paperwork. The problem is, like, not everyone agrees with Brendan. Not everyone agrees this is the right thing to do. Most importantly, DirecTV, which is actually their competitor, right? Like, they. They sell their channels to DirecTV. DirecTV distributes their channels. There's a lot of market power for these companies to have. They should be competitive with DirecTV so they can. DirecTV has different rate negotiations. So DirecTV is sued along with a bunch of other companies to Block this merger. So Brendan goes through his corrupt process and says, I waive this rule that would've blocked this merger anyway. They rush to close, and then, like, the next day, a court grants a temporary restraining order in favor of DirecTV, saying, no, you have to let this lawsuit play out before you can merge. And these companies are like, no, no, no, no. We thought we already got Brendan's corrupt approval. We can't abide by your restraining order because we've already merged. I'll just read you a quote. We hereby notify the court that defendants cannot implement certain provisions of the TRO as written, the temporary restraining order as written because of actions already completed at closing and legal obligations that cannot be reversed. Whoops. We already merged. It's ridiculous. The temporary restraining order creates immediate operational harm to Tegna, nextar, regulatory conflicts in a governance vacuum. Because they already merged. They're claiming that these two huge companies have already merged and they can't possibly hold off on the merger. And the only reason they had already merged is because Brendan waived the rule. So this is just pure chaos now for some of the biggest media companies that control the most TV stations in the country because Brendan's process was so
- [86:55]
A
corrupt and ridiculous and he gave himself a bunch of unilateral powers. It appears he doesn't actually have.
- [87:02]
B
Yep. Upon closing, nextstar and techno took many typical steps that may not have been apparent to the court. It is particularly difficult to freeze integration that has already taken place. What integration? Your deal closed yesterday.
- [87:13]
A
This really sounds like we started uploading our Microsoft OneDrive to their Microsoft OneDrive and we can't stop it now.
- [87:21]
B
Yeah, pretty much. Or we knew we'd paid Brendan so much under the table that we knew we were gonna have this approval. We'd already started, and we didn't expect this lawsuit to get in our way. So Brandon is just causing chaos because if he had just done the process the correct way, these companies would not be in the situation. But because he's so corrupt, everyone's getting confused and they think his corruption is actually the point, when in fact, there are other processes that still operate in this country, which is nominally still governed by laws. So you have Brandon on the one hand saying, look at all this speech that I shut down using my corrupt process. And on the other hand, you have these companies who are falling for his corruption and getting themselves on call the of trouble. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show.
- [88:00]
A
I can't decide if it makes it better or worse that he sucks at his job.
- [88:05]
B
I'm starting to get notes. You know, we have reporters in D.C. and I'm starting to get notes from people who are telling them that they want like a four hour supercut of Brendan Carr as a dummy that they can just play on loop because people in D.C. hate him so much. Brendan, I'm happy to come on the show. We can make that super cut together using the power of AI, which you also seek to regulate. Or you can just listen to yourself talk at CPAC and explain to me why that is appropriate. I would love to hear your explanation for why you think that's appropriate anywhere, anytime, on any show. As you know, Brennan Carr's dummy is not federated and it can be a podcast within any podcast.
- [88:40]
A
The B, C, I, A D C U is growing. Yeah.
- [88:45]
B
Anyway, that's been Brent Carson dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.
- [88:49]
A
It's good stuff. All right. My first lightning round item is also like kind of on a slant, like a little bit of Verge news. I think it is not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention to the show that you and I are both big believers in the Fediverse, the open social web. This idea that instead of everything being platforms that social, the social web should work like the Internet does. You and I have both spent a lot of time over the last couple of years with Mike McHugh, who is the CEO of Flipboard, who is like, I mean, just the zealot of all zealots when it comes to the social web. Um, Flipboard just launched this app called Surf, which has been in beta for a long time. I'm sure we've talked about it on the show before. I think you and I have both been beta testing it for a long time. Surf is basically, it's a mix of sort of social network and feed reader and like algorithmic content delivery system. It's, it's very cool. The app has a lot of like little sort of niggling things to work out, which I think are really interesting and point to a lot of the stuff about the social web. Stuff loads slowly for one, because it has to come from a lot, lot of places. But I think this app is very cool. And if you want to understand why the social web is interesting, it's the best example of that that I've seen actually. And it's, it's basically instead of taking a bunch of posts that are accessible to anyone, like I, I sort of explained the Fediverse to people as just like a giant database of stuff. It's posts, it's links, it's videos, it's just stuff. And you can choose to write to that database of stuff or read from that database of stuff any way that you want. And until now, everybody has chosen to do things that look and feel like Twitter. Right. And that's why Blue sky looks like Twitter. Not because it is like technologically like Twitter, but because that is an experience that people like. This is a completely different skin on top of that whole idea. Right. It says what if instead of being sort of a fast moving timeline of social posts, it was very like content first and community first. And it has a lot of really interesting ideas about how you can go find stuff to watch and read and listen to and whatever the Verge news of this is that we, and I think you in particular, have spent a bunch of time standing up a bunch of surf pages for various Verge things, including this podcast, the vergecast. So there is. There is a vergecast feed and page on Surf with you and me and a bunch of other folks putting stuff in. It has all the latest episodes. It has posts from people who are on and around the show. It is designed to be a sort of open web community space for the vergecast. And we have one for decoder too. We have one for version history. We have one for the Verge. I'm very excited about this and I get the sense you're very excited about this too.
- [91:32]
B
Yeah. I think these kinds of products are the first evidence that the OpenSocial web can be more than a bunch of Twitters.
- [91:40]
A
Yes.
- [91:41]
B
And if you remember, there was a period where building a new Twitter client was like the cutting edge of interface design because you got to, you know, a bunch of app designers and really smart people got to spend all of their time, like, inventing new interface paradigms and what you could do with that kind of stuff without having to worry about how do I get 10 million people to sign up and tweet? Like, Twitter was like, we've got that covered. User API, build a cool app. And then they shut that all down for a lot of reasons. But, like, big ideas came out of that moment of experimenting, pull the refresh came out of people building Twitter clients. Yep. Because they didn't have to worry about getting users and building a big network. That's what the OpenSocial web is. Right. It's a big network of people all posting stuff. And some of that stuff looks like TikToks and some of it looks like tweets and some of it looks like newsletters. And you can just Build different kinds of apps on top of that that show you that stuff in different ways. And Surf, I think, is the first app that kind of brings it all together. I think there's, like, a lot of ways you could use those tools. You know, we're in it. Like, the Verge is in it, but Wired is in it and Rolling Stone is in it. Like, a bunch of media companies are seeing, like, oh, this is a way for us to bring together everything we publish in one place. I think that's really neat. I'm just hopeful that there's vastly more experimentation there. Instead of ever being like, are Threads or Blue sky ever going to have the juice? Like, it's not the point. Like, I don't. I don't know how to say it. Like, the point is to not remake Twitter. Twitter wasn't good. It was a bad company. It lost a bunch of money and then it was taken over by a madman. That. That should not be the outcome you're chasing. The outcome you should be chasing is, like, there's a big Internet of people sharing stuff and a lot of tools to help build communities around it. So I'm just excited that Surf is like a little proof point along the way.
- [93:26]
A
Yeah, I agree. And I think, yeah, it's surf social. We'll put a bunch of the Verge stuff in the show notes too. People can go post to it. You. It's a good way to, like, I think for us, it's going to be a really cool way to engage with people. Right. Like, we have the email, we have the hotline, but I think this is going to be an even sort of lower barrier for people to clear, to just post things that we can see.
- [93:50]
B
You have a. You have a line in your, in your. In your news post where you're like, it's a big bet on hashtags, It's a big bet on hashtags. Big bet on hashtag decoder, Hashtag vercast. We will see it now.
- [94:00]
A
Yeah. From now on, if you post decoder or hashtag vercast, we. We will see it. It'll be there on Surf. And if you do stupid things, we will moderate you out of existence, because that is power that we have.
- [94:12]
B
That's true.
- [94:13]
A
What's your next one?
- [94:15]
B
My next one. I just have an update on my imac reclamation project.
- [94:19]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [94:19]
B
And I'll.
- [94:20]
A
Your weird thing from China arrived.
- [94:22]
B
My thing from China arrived. It's a little bored. I bought it from a company called Stone task. It's the R 1820. It's the newest one. It's hot. Um, so I opened the imac. I pulled out all of the guts. That was actually the hardest part. Uh, Jony, I've slim unibody imac very tightly packaged, like, brilliantly packaged device. Uh, so you rip out all the guts and you're left with just the display. And I, you know, wired it all together. Those connectors are very delicate. You have to be very careful. My daughter was furious because the closest, like, big flat surface to my office is her bed. So it was just like a splayed open imac on her bed. And she's like, get out of my room.
- [95:00]
A
You're like, not now, honey, Daddy's working.
- [95:02]
B
Yes. She came over from school. She's like, what are you doing? And I was like, I needed a flat surface.
- [95:06]
A
This is journalism.
- [95:08]
B
Got it all together. Other people have done a vastly better job of this than me. There's a snazzy Q video that everyone should watch. Like 3D printed port holders and everything. It's like, he did a beautiful job. I did not do a beautiful job. I just shoved the board in the back of the thing, ran the wires out, the RAM access panel in the back and plugged it in and my God, does it work and is it perfect? The imac panel without the imac software and display is a little greener than normal. So I have a color calibrator. So I color calibrated it and immediately ran into the reality that the software to control the backlight is like, not correct. And it's like, hard to explain. But if you use this thing called better Display to make the brightness keys on your Mac control the actual hardware brightness, it's mapped wrong. So about halfway through it hits 100% and then it restarts. And this is maddening. So you can get to 100%, which is all you really want. Yeah, but you can't have it that, you know, because I like to jam on the key. And so it like, remaps to like 30 and it goes back up to 100, which is crazy.
- [96:12]
A
Oh, that is amazing.
- [96:13]
B
So I email the company. I am now in possession of updated firmware file that can only be installed from Windows using a piece of software that I believe I'm going to have to pirate. All the instructions are on Chinese, so I'm just kind of on my own here. And the only way you can do it is you have to. I had to reach back into the imac and plug a DisplayPort cable into this board because the update takes place over DisplayPort which I've never heard of before in my life. But I'm assured that once I do this sketchy firmware update whose instructions are almost entirely in Chinese, that the brightness keys will work perfectly, and then the thing will be perfect. And I've never been happier in my entire life. Now, I'm aware that there is another company on Amazon called KTC that is selling basically the same panel refurbished as a display for, like, 550 bucks. And I've now spent $350 on a retrofit board in hours of my time. I don't know, man, but I'm having the time of my life, and it works perfectly. I've never been happy.
- [97:14]
A
It's got to feel a little like you're, you know, putting together IKEA furniture where you're like, yes, this was more work and money than it needed to be, but I have accomplished something.
- [97:25]
B
Yes. Let's go with yes. What it feels like is I didn't throw the thing away. Right? Like, I. My. You know that. That feeling where you throw away, like, a perfectly good display, like, it just crushes me, and, like, that's the. That's the kind of hoarder I am. Like everything else, I'll throw it away, but a perfectly good display, and, like, we should hold onto that. My wife is like, why? And I don't know the answer. So I didn't throw away a perfectly good display. And it looks beautiful. It's still. I was using some old Dell 4K display before, and, like, this thing is so much better.
- [97:54]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [97:54]
B
It's so much better. And I, you know, and I got to Lego. It wasn't hard. The hard part is actually just cutting the glue that holds the display on the case.
- [98:05]
A
I'm proud of you that you did this. It's like, there was. It took so long that I was like, there's no way he's ever gonna actually do this. It's good for you. That's awesome. You're getting back to your, like, repairing Mac days.
- [98:15]
B
I'm pulling. Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna yank. I need a Windows computer with a native DisplayPort. So I'm, like, digging through the reviews closet when we're done with the podcast.
- [98:26]
A
Oh, boy.
- [98:26]
B
So I can update the firmware and make the brightness bump.
- [98:28]
A
That'll be a computer that's super fun to use.
- [98:30]
B
Yeah. Really excited about it.
- [98:31]
A
Yeah. All right. My next one is just a thing I feel sort of obligated to keep, like, harping on, which is price increases largely due to the RAM and Memory shortage. But also it's just wild out there. Folks like, the price of gas is going up, there's a helium shortage. Just the world is a mess and it is making electronics more expensive. And I think the effects of that are getting worse very quickly. There were a bunch of them this week. Sony stopped selling memory cards because there were shortages. The PS5 went up $150 in price. The PS5, famously not a new console, now $150 more expensive. But the one I really want to point out is Raspberry PI. The like, cheap, low end computer that people do lots of interesting things with upped the price of the 16 gig Raspberry PI 5 by a hundred dollars. They took a thing that was $120 and raised the price by $100. Just to give you a sense of what memory costs, that is it. They raised prices kind of across the board. And Eben Upton, who is the CEO of this organization, wrote a blog post explaining the price hikes and sort of what it means. And there's two really fascinating pieces of this blog post that I just, I just want to point out because I think they're really interesting. One he writes, in this environment, it's well worth right. Sizing both your memory and your overall computer rather than going for something with more headroom than your application actually needs. That is a lot of words to say. Buy less computer.
- [100:09]
B
Yep.
- [100:10]
A
Which is, which is fast like that. You never ever hear that from anybody. And especially with something as cheap as the Raspberry PI, it's always like, buy the most of it. Right. Like it's all pretty cheap. Give yourself some headroom. Give yourself room to work. Get more ram, get more memory. Like a piece of advice that you and I have given to many, many people over the years is that you should always get more RAM and more storage first. That those are the two things you will run into the fastest. And that is where you should invest all of your money. And it was just, it was so shocking to me to see somebody for perfectly correct economic reasons say the opposite of like, you can probably get away with less ram. Like, this is the world we've come to.
- [100:47]
B
Yeah, it's not great.
- [100:48]
A
On the other side, this is the end of the blog post. He says, we've said a number of times now that memory prices won't remain at their current high, very high level indefinitely. I'm gonna bet there's no way he knows that to be true. The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases. And until they do we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can. Like this is Raspberry PI. This is not some like money gouging, profit hungry organization desperate to find ways to nickel and dime you. This is Raspberry PI. And it is very clear that this is like they're not raising prices $100 because they think they can get more money out of you. This is brutal, brutal economic times in this industry. And he's basically just throwing his hands up being like well it can't be this bad forever. But we don't know how long it's going to be this bad. And this is where everybody has landed is it's not a thing you can just weather. It's not a cost you can find another way to make up for on some other piece of it. There are a very small number of companies that are going to be able to even continue to make things at this scale that they want to be. And the rest of them are either going to have to charge vastly more, make many fewer products or go out of business or some combination of those things. And like it is just getting uglier across so many different vectors so fast. It's just wild out there.
- [102:08]
B
Eben was on decoder in 2022 during the chip shortage and people were furious at him about raspberry PI cost increases. Uh, you can go listen to the episode. He is a very sincere person. Like this is an academic project to you know there's a foundation. I, you know, I love an org chart on decoder. Like this is not a profit hungry thing. This is, we want to give lots of people lots of computers. Um, yeah, this sucks.
- [102:32]
A
It's bad. And it really is, it like every, every time you turn around it gets worse and, and there is a new reason to be worried about it.
- [102:41]
B
I will say I pulled, I pulled the ram out of this old imac and I was going to throw it away and I was like wait, I can make some coin here. See it's on ebay if you're Interested in some 2019 so DIMMs search them up.
- [102:50]
A
I mean you, you joke but somebody building a data center is gonna, is gonna buy that from you right now.
- [102:54]
B
I want my old non ECC ram from an imac.
- [102:57]
A
Yeah, but it's like, I mean did you see the, the story about how they're, they're having trouble shipping EVs because they can't get through the the straight that is being so heavily militarized in Iran. It's like it's everywhere you turn. It's like the end result of all of this is no one is ever getting new gadgets ever again. That's the main outcome.
- [103:16]
B
That's finally how we will convince Americans that globalization is actually pretty good. It was like the Pax Americana, but also there were some sick gadgets along the way.
- [103:25]
A
Yeah, that's about it. Do you have another one, or are we done here?
- [103:28]
B
No. I'm still puzzled about the recency bias in the Apple ranking. I need to go star at the window for a while.
- [103:35]
A
That's fair. Nilay's gonna go hug his slim, unibody imac, and it's gonna be gutted by
- [103:40]
B
the way that last pull to get the motherboard out of the chin. I was like, oh, Johnny would be so mad at me. I'm just like, get out of there. It was not. You know, when you have to pull something a little bit harder than you want to, but you know it's the right thing to do. There's about 10 minutes of that and taking apart in imac.
- [103:55]
A
Yeah. My last one is just a psa, which is don't download the White House app. We don't need to talk about that. Just don't download the White House app. If you want to know why, Google it. It's all right there. Bad times out there. All right, we should get out of here. Thank you again to everybody who participated in all the Apple 50 stuff. The Raker turned out super fun. That whole project has been incredibly fun. Our team did really great work. It was a lot to keep that thing up and running. So shout out again to Graham, who did a ton of work to make that thing happen. Everybody did super cool work. And to all of the people who sent us your most complicated choices, just know that we feel you. Uh, there were a lot that were like, I original iPhone versus original Macintosh. And people are like, what do I do with this?
- [104:34]
B
It's rough out there.
- [104:35]
A
Like, yeah, I feel you. It was hard times. All right. We should get out of here. Nilay, it's been a pleasure. We did the Hype Desk. Hype Desk is here.
- [104:42]
B
We did it. Let us know how you feel about the Hype Desk.
- [104:44]
A
Yeah. Call the Vergecast hotline. 866-version-11. Send us an email vergecasthe verge.com. tell us what you think we got wrong in our rankings. Yell at us about what the youths got wrong in their rankings. We want to hear all of it. Tell us what you think about the hype desk. We're going to keep figuring out what that thing is, so we want to hear all of your feedback. Vote for us in the Webbies. Come to the movie night at the end of April. Lot going on in Vergecast world. It's good times out here. This show is part of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast network. Today's episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. Nilay, what's on decoder next week?
- [105:16]
B
It's the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins.
- [105:18]
A
Oh, that'll be fun.
- [105:19]
B
We talked about about data centers in space as one. I'm just letting you know that that's where we begin.
- [105:26]
A
I am. I have gone from thinking all of that is ridiculous to it being the thing I think about the most in like data centers in space is my Roman Empire right now.
- [105:35]
B
For reasons I'll just give you a little preview. He straight up was like no small talk.
- [105:41]
A
Amazing. I love it. Version History this weekend is the Amazon Echo. Very fun episode. It involves a lot of me being very upset at how young I look. In the Verge's review of the Amazon Echo from like 12 years.
- [105:56]
B
That's over a decade ago.
- [105:57]
A
Yeah, yeah, it was a time. All right. Thank you as always. We'll see you next time. Nilay Rock and roll. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci. Hey business owners. The NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready. Everpass is the only authorized commercial platform for NFL Sunday ticket, delivering every live out of market regular season Sunday afternoon game. Lock in the best offer now with up to 40% off saving up to $2,500 for the first time. You can pay over nine months. Get up to six free devices and a free bar kit. Sign up by April 27th. Visit everpass.com Limited time offer terms apply.