650: Softest Panel in the World

It's time for episode 650 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. Clockwise four people, four tech topics, thirty minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where, no joke, we're really only ever 30 minutes long. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet. I'm my dear pal, my good friend. You know him, you love him. It's Dan, the man Morin. How you doing, Dan?

Hello, Micah. Happy six hundred and fifty episodes on this momentous day. I know some people are talking about some other anniversary that's happening today, but this one is clearly six hundred and fifty is bigger than fifty, right? It's just Yeah. Six hundred more even. Wow. Exactly. Uh joining today, uh, to my left is the clockwise OC. Emeritus is not.

It is of course Jason Snell. Hello, Jason. Hello, Micah. It's great to be here. It's hard to believe that you and I have been doing clockwise for six hundred and fifty episodes. I mean, added together, I guess. Right. With our powers combined. Uh and to my left this week, it's been a while since he appeared on this fabulous round table. My former boss over at Macworld recently of Tom's Guide and a uh a f freelance.

Editor for Hire at this point, putting out his shingle. It's Philip Michaels. Welcome back, Phil. Hey Dan, thanks for having me and thanks for coming on my show. W Oh no, not again.

Yes, it is another triumphant return of I guess we can call this the Six Colors Pundit Showdown, the Clockwise Pundit Showdown. I don't know. We didn't work it out ahead of time. Anyhow, I'm Uh uh stealing uh uh Dan and Micah's show today because I'm a terrible person and it's April Fools, so why not why not uh throw things into uh utter chaos? Um, in case you don't remember and why would you, it's been ten years since we've done this.

Um, this is a show generously borrowed from the uh uh format for Fighting Talk, a BBC podcast. where uh I ask questions, these folks will provide answers, I award points, we declare a winner. That's how it works. Let's meet our contestants. They've already been introduced, but we're gonna introduce them again. Uh, first up, he is an author.

That uh uh writes books such as All Souls Lost, The Nove Incident, Bayern Agenda. He's a Jeopardy champion. You can read him on sixcolors.com, you can read him a whole bunch of places, ladies and gentlemen. It's Dan Moore. Yeah, this is good. I love a good Beatles intro. It's good to be here, although Phil, if you keep stealing my show, we're gonna have to disinvite you.

Well that that's alright. Um from one uh Jeopardy champ uh champion to a uh Jeopardy participant, uh he is the proprietor of Six Colors. He is my former boss. And uh you can read him in such diverse places as The Verge, as the Wall Street Journal, cause he fancy it's Jason Snell. Hi James. Thank you, Phil. Uh that's the song they played as I left the Jeopardy stage. Don't dream it, it's over, but it actually is over. That that guy is still champion, yes. That guy recorded.

Still playing, folks. You may play forever. And our final participant, last but not least, he is a clockwise co-host, though you wouldn't know that from this episode. Uh stand at attention, Ten Hut. Ha ha ha! Oh Micah, are you awake? Some people even know me as Micah Sarge. But you did get the rank correct. Well, I apologize. That's gonna be a uh point off to me.

Oh good. We've already started with Phil at a deficit. That's the way I like to do this. Phil at a deficit. I might I might finish last. Almost certainly we'll finish last. Uh uh uh uh uh Micah, have you been on Jeopardy? Um it it's it's no. Point for you because uh you know, I don't like these show off eggheads. Anyhow, now that I've shown you how the uh the the you've heard the point sound effect, um I will award points. I Two points. Awesome. Or three points.

And if I disagree with the answer, you can lose a point. So why don't we get things started with our first question of the day? And it's all about this.

50th anniversary, what a reflection. And what do you think is Apple's biggest contribution in the last 50 years? Oh my God. You know, you can focus on the product moment. Reinventing music, reinventing the smartphone, bringing the uh creative arts to the table, the creative graphics, saving people's lives with the watch.

So Apple was founded fifty years ago on April 1st, 1976. Let's start off with the big question: what's the most significant product Apple's released in that time? Let's start with you, Dan. Uh I think there are any number of things you could throw out here. You could throw out the original Macintosh or the I mean the iPhone obviously is the biggest thing, but I think that if you look at Apple has done over the past 50 years. For me, it's Mac OS X. It's been 25 years.

Since mac OS X came out, it has been the underpinning of everything that they have made since then. It reinvented that classic mac OS. And it's made every single product functional and the kind of thing that we've come to expect from Apple. These this amazing user interface. This attention to detail. We're just gonna look over that whole liquid glass thing that's happening. But you know, other than that, I think that Mac OS X is the definitive product of Apple's fifty years.

All right, Jason, can you top that? Uh well we'll see. I there are a lot of potential answers. The Apple two is obviously the engine that created the company.

first place, the iMac G three saved it later, which was, you know, very important. The iPhone is the most successful tech product ever. That's why I'm gonna go with a Newton. Um, as David Po Pogue points out in his book uh Apple the first fifty years, the Newton led to Apple investing in ARM, which not only made them enough money to buy next later, but

All of Apple Silicon, which is based on ARM and they have a perpetual license for ARM, so it's the rare, brilliant John Scully move. But yeah, the Newton kind of backs in there as being very important. Well, you you defend. By the end of that answer, I was a little bit dubious. When you're mocked in a Doonesbury comic, I'm not sure that you're the most significant product, but we'll move on to uh to to Micah.

Yeah, now I see what you mean about eggheads, sort of like listing five or six things that they get points on. You get it. Oh yeah, I'll have to figure this out as I'll have to figure this out as I go along. I'm gonna say it's the app store. Because listen, the iPhone.

It's fine, but it's just a phone unless you have the app store. The app store is what turned it into a platform, created entire industries. There's some billionaire somewhere sitting on an island just made just there because of Candy Crush. Uh there's an app for that into a phrase that people understand mm almost wherever you go.

And of course, it has fundamentally changed how software is distributed and monetized. Uber, Instagram, TikTok, they exist because of the app store. So that's what made the iPhone matter beyond just being a cool.

Very well. Let's move on to our next question. Everyone knows about jobs and was, but few people remember Apple's third founder, Ronald Wayne. What's your pick for the greatest forgotten person of technology? Micah, let's start with you. Ooh, I get to go first. Well, I was originally going to say Tony Fidel, but I think people I think people here know him enough and so I'm gonna go with Dennis Richie. Uh created the C programming language, also created Unix, which is at the heart of

computing. They all trace their lineage back to Unix. So I think with that, uh it Oh, the other thing that I forgot to say, he died in October of 2011, which was the same week as Steve Jobs, but ain't nobody talking about Richie. So I

All right, big big big points. Uh Dan Morin, how about you? Yeah, yeah, there are a couple people who will come to mind here. I think some of them better known than others, like uh you know, Nikola Tesla at one point would have been the one of the great forgotten people, except Jerk took his name and turned it into something not great. Um, I also wanted to throw out Vannevar Bush, the former dean at MIT, who basically invented what was called the

Which was like the idea of the like hypertext before hypertext ever existed. But if you have to pick one person, there's basically nobody in technology I feel that like also has you know, uh this kind of career in film. I'm gonna pick Hedy Lamar.

who not only was a successful film star, but helped invent a radio guidance system that basically led to the progenitors for Wi-Fi, uh, and Bluetooth and all this wireless technology we rely on today. I mean somebody with a A star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a a storied tech history, that's kind of incredible and deserves to be remembered. All right. And Jason. Yeah, I my first instinct here, and I d again, they're these people who are kind of like moderately

Known, but uh not to the extent that they should be. Like Doug Engelbart, who did the mother of all demos and invented the mouse and got basically nothing for it. Um we gave him an Eddie Award at one point just sort of as a like you should probably have some statues in your house. Uh Avi Tavanian uh who came over from next and basically

Did the impossible to integrate Next Step and Mac OS into Mac OS ten, which is the foundation for everything Apple is doing. That's my Apple angle. But I'm gonna go with somebody that not a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people have heard of, Dan Bricklin, who created Vizical. Back in the early eighties.

You could buy a personal computer. It was fun. Kids could do ten print, I'm awesome, twenty print go to ten. But like there was no reason to buy a computer with money until Dan Bricklin wrote Visical. Literally invented the spreadsheet and sold tens of thousands of Apple IIs, thereby keeping Apple in business.

off the entire uh practical business computing revolution. That's why you invite a guy who's uh reviewed uh books for the Wall Street Journal on your podcast I go. All right, next question.

Open AI! You see, it's not all about Apple today. OpenAI! Plugged uh plugged the pull, pulled the plug on Sora last week. Uh what over hype technology product do you hope will be joining Sora in the great cornfield in the sky? Jason, let's start off. Look, I feel like when you h when you sent us these questions that there was like a dazzling AI like hovering in the sky saying what aspect of AI will be the thing that I most hope will go to the cornfield?

And I think I've decided that the AI also rans that are spending huge amounts of money and wasting huge amounts of energy to never actually ship anything or that is going to be relevant. So like Elon Musk's XAI, it's never gonna happen, dude, and yet he keeps spending money on it. Meta's meta AI efforts, it's I mean, maybe they'll come up with a great ad system. Oh boy, change the world. That's great. But uh you know, y X AI, I just wanna say that since Elon is putting all his companies together

The the problem with your question is you talk about the cornfield in the sky. Literally the the uh the data centers Elon Musk is going to put in space. They're going to be in the great cornfield in the sky, so I look forward to that time. I don't think that's a problem with the question. I think that's oddly pressy. I would just like to note that I wrote my questions in B B edit, which has no uh AI component to it. So uh there you go. Uh uh uh uh

All right. I'm gonna go with crypto and I know those people out there. Those people out there that are going it has legitimate use cases. No the blockchain blocked the amount of energy, the amount of money. Human attention poured into what largely amounts to speculative gambling and scams. I mean, I suppose it is a good representation of humanity, but I would like to see it go to the great cornfield in the sky. Uh too many people burned by it, too many terrible people not burned by it.

Living on an island somewhere uh with their billions of dollars. So get out of here. All right, Dan, finish this off. All right. Uh first of all my question was is Elon Musk a technology product and can we send him to a great cornfield? Because that's But barring that, or his grok or whatever he wants to call it, I think there are plenty good examples. I mean Alexa Plus, w this whole ballyhood, like super smart version of Alexa, which

Uh Apple's attempt with image playground. Let's let's play it. off. Uh and then the meta raybans, which seem cool, but then I saw like a friend of mine had a video with like somebody live streamed him with his kids in the grocery store the other day. What are we doing? Like I don't even understand the point of that. But I think one thing, a phenomenon that needs to get moved is the prediction markets, your calci, your poly market.

haven't happened and sort of provides not only this sort of impediment, this incentive to be like Let's just bet on literally everything in the world, but also totally dissociates you from what's going on in real life and turns us all into weird, mindless people just betting on people's deaths. It's disturbing. It's messed up. Get it out of here. All right. Let's go to the scores.

Micah had jumped out to an early lead, but right now he's at fifteen points tied with Jason, who along with Dan at 16 points, realized the quickest way. to bash Elon Musk in my presence. So let's move on to our next question. And it is all about this.

I'm jumping ahead, by the way, to uh number five and asking you to name Apple's biggest flop in the last fifty years. Let's go with Micah. All right, I'm choosing the butterfly keyboard. And look, I I'm not Not being silly about this, if you think in terms of the sheer damage to Apple's reputation that it's done, paired with the number of customers it affected.

F arguably worse than the Newton, worse than the Pippin, worse than the hockey puck mouse, although some of us loved that, myself included. They were products you could just not buy. You couldn't buy them because the butterfly keyboard was on every single MacBook for years. Or rather, it's a product that you could you could avoid buying. This you could not avoid buying. Professionals who depended on their laptops had no alternative.

And it was a years-long forced experiment on Apple's most loyal users. Our trust was broken, Apple. As someone who owned a MacBook Air with a butterfly keyboard. I I feel that answer. Jason. You know, um, lot of lot of choices here. Um some of'em I you know, there there are failures and then there are flops. I feel like if something goes down and it doesn't do a belly flop, is it a failure? Like the Mac portable

was a failure. The G four cube was a failure, but what was a flop? And when I was writing um one of these Apple fifty stories that I'm I think I'm done now, uh one of the ones I just kept coming back to is the fact that The Apple II was so successful that Apple just kept trying to ship replacements for it and

Never worked. The none of the replacements worked until finally, eventually, with the sort of second and third generation max that got there, and the biggest of all of them, the one that made the biggest flop, the one that overheated to the point where Uh the number one service thing you did is drop it on a desk and that might reseat everything in it. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted uh an incompatible computer from Apple that wasn't the Apple two.

And to this day, do you see a lot of Apple products with the number three in the nim in the name? You do not, because the Apple III took a big belly flop and basically cast a Paul over Apple for years. And finally, Dan. Uh there as Jason said, plenty of things to choose from here. Apple seems to overextend itself a lot of times, so you have things like trying to make the Pippin a video game system that never You've got ping? I mean ping they tried to get in on the side.

Lisa, the Lisa, I mean, you know, maybe Fire. Uh it's litany of attempts to get next generation OS off the ground. Copeland, Gershwin, uh I don't know what other musicals they could throw in there, but there's plenty of options. The one I have to pick though, uh you know, Phil, I think this is near and dear to your heart. Apple deciding the best way to show your appreciation to loved ones cards.

Goodbye, Apple Cards. You will be missed, but not really. Yes, that there's a story there which we'll share off air.

Okay, and it is all about this. So we've had two uh And a made for TV movie. The Jobs Gates rivalry. Pitch me a new film about Apple. What would it be about? And what would you call it? Dan, let's start. You know, I think some of my favorite movies about like real life events in recent years are grown out of uh the author Michael Lewis's works. I look at like the big short or the chronicling of clearly one of the best baseball teams of all time in Moneyball.

Uh and I think to myself, is there a a something we could do like this? Wow. Not a fan anymore. Okay. Uh but that idea of the sort of melding of like the comedy of real life as we dramatize events that are happening, I think could be set in sort of the executive office offices of Apple as it tries to come up with its big product post the iPhone. What are they gonna do next?

And they're trying all these things. They're trying the Apple Watch. They're trying to build a car. It's a little hapless. It feels a little dysfunctional at time. Nobody really knows who's got the vision, who's executing on this. You got strong personalities like Tim Cook. and Johnny Ive, uh, and even a little bit of Steve Jobs there at the beginning. Um, and they're all arguing over what's gonna be the next big thing. Uh and I would call it too many cooks. Awesome. Very good.

Very good. A long, a long journey, but we got there. Dan uh J Jason. Dan has already talked. Jason, you talk. I'll talk now. Uh this is a movie about the people behind Alt Store. I'm calling it in review. It is an underdog. app for the app store, but the real meat of the movie is when they decide they're going to launch an alternative to the app store in Europe, which requires them, and this is true. Riley and his partner have to go to Europe and live for months in Airbnbs to launch.

And they don't know when they're gonna be able to go home, which I think is gonna be amazing drama. They are fighting Apple, they are talking to the EU. Uh they really wanna come home. It feels like it's really uh there's a lot of dramatic potential, a lot of personal drama there.

And you know, in the end, not only do they win, but then uh as we know now, you can have a spinal tap like ending where they're they go to Japan and are big in Japan too,'cause they're doing that now. Uh so I think that would be a great human drama that is uh Apple themed, but Apple is the adversary. Alright, and uh finally.

I'm gonna choose a film I this is just me being selfish. I want a film about the Johnny Ive era. Uh the tension that exists between design and engineering. So like twenty twelve to twenty nineteen. Because you do have Ive and his team pushing for thinner, thinner, thinner devices. The butterfly keyboard, uh, the trash can Mac Pro, the removal of every port.

It is kind of a a story about what happens whenever we choose form over function, aesthetic philosophy, is it going to win over functionality? I'd call it thinner and lighter. I would love it. All right, let us go to the next question.

Once I find my button again, there it is. And Apple has introduced a lot of colorful products over the years. What's your pick for the best color of all time? Jason, let's start with you. Well, the um I like the Tangerine and the iMac and the iBook back in the day. Um I think that they've really uh uh taken that to a new level in the modern era. I also want to do a shout out for Platinum, which is

I know, I know, it's a light gray, not that exciting, but I just wanna point out when everybody else was making things in beige and the original Macintosh was in beige, there was a moment when Apple said, You know what? Light gray instead It says Apple to me, but the answer has to be after so many years in the wilderness. Cosmic orange on the iPhone seventeen. A color on an iPhone. Who would have thought about it? So for me it's cosmic orange. I've got one of those phones now.

I I'm I'm gonna treasure it. I fear that they'll n we'll never see it's like again, but we got our moment in the orange. So uh Micah, how about you? I can't remember th I I apologize to all the Australians out there if it's actually Bondi or Bondi. Okay, that's the real one. Uh so Bondi Blue Point for Jason. Fair, honestly. Uh when the iMac G three showed up in that translucent Bondi blue, you know, it was a statement about computers not needing to be those boring beige boxes.

and did, as far as I understand it, have an effect on how people designed electronics going forward, at least for a time, uh every Frankly, colorful Apple product, all of them, uh cosmic orange included, so I should get like five points or all the points of Jason have existed because Bondi Blue uh was the brave step they took in the first place. First color ever. We're we're giving you three there and then we're taking one away for advocating for points. Damn.

Uh you know, uh I think we all agree Apple's better when it actually leans into the color. No sky blue MacBook Air or Starlight or Midnight. I mean those are fine, but are they even really colours? I mean I like when Apple gets bold. I mean I've got I'm still rocking my series seven blue Apple watch. I love that.

But I was looking back over the history of all the colors. I'm not sure if flower power and Dal Blue Dalmatian really count as colors. That they were bold. You had that favorite dreams. The one that I liked the best. I didn't even remember this was a thing for a bit, but they made an iBook, the original G3 iBook. In a color called key lime, which is undisputably The most delicious colour.

And it was only apparently available on the online store. So I when I was researching this, I found all these references to it is the rarest of all the iBooks because they didn't make as many of them as others. So if you can get yourself a key lime eye book, apparently it's in hot demand. If I can humble brag here and it's not I was in France when they announced

key lime uh iBook at the Apple Expo. And when they announced that it was online, at the time, not a whole lot of online connectivity or eShopping in uh in Europe. And oh how the French booed and whistled back. Yes. Wow. Yes. Uh there there was there was much Gallic shrugging that day. So Uh moving on and our next question is all about this.

John Hodgman and Justin Long have revived their I'm a PC, I'm a Mac characters for a recent speed of advertisements, only this time it's to sell. A weight loss injection. the pain of the past should be revived. And what should it sell? Uh oh, I I should probably ask someone to talk. Hey! Micah, you talk.

All right, I'll do that. I think we need to bring back one of my favorite ads, the silhouette iPod ads. The first of all, incredibly versatile campaign because you can just have uh a billboard, but you can also have these wonderful advertisements. But this time it's because Apple really needs to get rid of its stock of the AirPods Macs. So

Those AirPods Macs, they'll stand out in those silhouette iPod ads. It will get people to go, Oh, these are cool. I should definitely own them. And then Folks who spend all of their time drinking smoothies at gyms with their headphones on will be wearing AirPods Macs in. So let's let's have it. Dan Morin.

You know, I also thought of the dancing silhouettes at first and I thought to myself having watched a bunch of ad supported streaming services recently that seem to think I am way, way older than I am. And seeing how happy people are when they're on those drugs to deal with their incontinence, that maybe that is the perfect place for the dancing silhouettes adds.

I also briefly consider as long as we're in a pharmaceutical vein that maybe think different and Zoloft could finally come to some sort of understanding and there would be a good idea. But the one that I want to bring back is the much maligned Lemmings Ad From Tony Scott from back in nineteen eighty five. And this time I want to use it to sell EVs so we can just show a whole line of gas cars just driving themselves off cliffs.

As they pay for ridiculous prices per gallon and all the EV owners can be happy that they uh, you know, don't have to pay for that. All right. And finally, Chase. Uh I I you know, I was a bit of a rascal. I thought about like the what if the Think Different ad was uh how Apple um recast its apology for all of its onerous app store practices to develop and said we're treating them gonna gonna treat them more fairly now, we've decided to think different.

Uh it'll never happen. It'll never happen. Um, like Dan, I thought is is there a way to to salvage the Lemmings ad? And my thought was it's a bunch of people with five hundred dollar PC laptops walking off the cliff because they don't buy a MacBook Neo. That seems Pretty good ad. And uh remember th those guys in the bunny suits when Apple went to beat Intel and then switched to Intel and all that? They make chips. They're guys, they're fun, they dance around in little suits.

Uh, and an ad boasting about Apple Silicon and its incredible power across all of Apple's platforms. Uh that might be a fun ad too. And I'm sure the uh Intel will let that IP go for a song. Well I mean a bunny suit is universal. It's uh just whatever TSM C d what does T S M C have some weird suit that like wear that then. I don't care.

Let's check the scores. We've got a two-way tie for first. Jason Snell and Dan Morin are at 28 points. Not that far behind. Micah Sargent at 25. Plenty of time to catch up with This question is

Today's game Sony. Yes, uh Sony is hiking up prices on the PlayStation, citing global economic pressures like tariffs and supply chain issues. What's one product that you'd pay any price for, Dan Morin? Oh, I'm so glad. I thought about a few things here. I honestly the Fisher Price piano that my kid has, but that thing is indestructible and will never die. He's literally stomped all over it.

It still works. So I'll never have to replace it. The thing I would pay any price for is the thing that's crucial to me every single day, and it's my Breville teamaker. Because if I did not have my T robot every day

I would just I don't know what I'd do. I've thought about that just the other day. I was like, what if this thing breaks? I was like, well, I don't care. It's coming from Australia or wherever. I would literally write you a blank check, Breville, to just deliver this thing to my door because I

Uh what am I gonna go back to doing? Like making tea one cup at a time like a jerk? No. No. I like my tea made for me by a robot. I am just imagining older generations listening to this and first being very confused by the format. And then uh going What about my T robot? Yes. What about your T robot? Jason.

Uh I mean I I love my Dan, by the way, my solution was I bought another one and it's in a box in my closet in case the first one breaks. Uh yeah, well, okay, that's fair. Um this I Phil, I thought this was the the hardest question of all of these because Any price is really hard. Um The the one I think in my life that is truly what I have done is I have an iPad Pro. I have an M5 iPad Pro with the keyboard. And like

Whoa, it's cost so much money. And is it super practical? Uh uh no. I mean the screen is gorgeous. I like it. I do work on it, but like I I paid a lot of money for a product that I mean it's pretty any price for the for the for an iPad Pro because I did. Um Realistically, being a smart shopper and not the dummy who buys the expensive iPad Pro like I am, I would say I would I would pay any price for a good professional Mac. It doesn't matter whether it's a Mac Studio or a Mac.

Whatever I'm using. I use my Mac at my desk every day. If I if a my if one died, if a bad man came and took one away from me, I would pay any price for another one because it's it's what I do. I have to have a Mac in front of me. to do my job. So yeah, that the Pro Mac. Yes, the plague of uh of bad men wandering into homes and taking away. Happens all the time. What are you talking about? I watched it. Do something, President Trump. There's so many bad men out there.

Deal with the bad men. Originally, I was going to say, along the lines of Dan, my espresso machine, I very much Like I need my panel in the world with its key robots and espresso machines. Okay, go on. This is even worse. I'm gonna get points reducted. I can already turn I can already tell. Because what I'm going to say no, now I feel like an idiot. Uh what I'm gonna say There we go. Is my eight-sleep cooling mattress pad? Listen, sleep effects. Every aspect of your life.

We spend so much of our life asleep and therefore we should sleep well. I love sleep science. And one of the things that we've learned is that people need to or for the best sleep that you can have and for your health, you should sleep in a room that is 67 degrees or cooler.

But many of us don't do that. I also sleep very warm. This is the thing that keeps me from waking up in a puddle regularly. And if I didn't have it, I would be a very, very sad person. So is it halftime? Is this the sponsor read? What happens? Yeah, it might as well. Oh my god. So that's that's my choice. And that's an extra point there for commerce. Let's go to our next question. And it is going to be about uh this guy.

Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of products? An awesome product in between a laptop and a smartphone? While the bar is pretty high, it's gotta be far better at doing some key things like these. And we think we got the good. So think we've done. Oh sorry, Steve. How dare you step on Steve? And you'll never be invited back to a keynote again. No, no, I'm I'm banned. Uh so after Steve Jobs, who whom that was, I hope everyone recognizes.

Who is the second most important person in Apple history? This is going to be the winner take all round, where I am awarding five points, but only to one of And uh let's see who that is. Jason. All right. Um I had a list here. I'm gonna not get any points from them now because point stacking is banned in this category, but I I am gonna mention Avi Tavanian again because uh imagine what he had to do to pull OS ten out of a group of Mac engineers that hated him.

Uh, but they had to save the company. Uh I'm gonna also not not nominate but mention Jean Louis Gasset. 'Cause um he's the one who actually took over after they kicked Steve out and got the Mac going under intense uh scrutiny under uh John Scully's era. But I I'm glad you picked me first because the truth is It's Steve Wozniak.

Without him working with Steve Jobs, Apple never happens. Apple is the fusion of hardware and software and creation of products. And the only reason that happened is that Steve Wozniak who is a a a mechanical engineering uh computer engineering genius did first the Apple motherboard and then the Apple Two and Jobs was the one who was like, you know, instead of selling circuit boards, what if we put these assemble these all in a product and sell it to the masses?

And you needed both of them. So I think I think there is no Apple without WAS working with jobs. In fact, I would go as so far as to say Waz isn't number two He's one A to Steve Jobs. Hmm. Very bold, very bold. Uh Micah, if you can raise yourself from your your cooling mattress pad and take a racing shot of espresso, uh why don't you give us your answer? Hold on, I'm sippin' okay, now I'm ready. Yeah. Um look, I I think it's an obvious choice perhaps, but I and I maybe it's boring.

But I do feel like Tim Cook is the second most por important person. I know there's a lot of negative energy at him right now, which is all fair, but the company Uh was in a place of uh what are we gonna do now when uh well w within some some bounds of like how is this going to go? How are we gonna keep being successful when Steve Jobs died? And Tim Cook was able to do that. Uh has kept it going, has turned it into the most valuable company on earth.

built-out services as a way to uh be a a sort of stalwart uh option whenever the iPhone has reached saturation, navigated supply chain nightmares, Apple Watch being as successful as it is. fought the FBI to make Apple the privacy first company that it is. And frankly, um has navigated some heavy, uh very tumultuous times uh and I think has done a good job of it.

uh from a personal level, I will never forget the day that I read Tim Cook's interview in the magazine and uh you know, he he came out and it was something that I needed at the time, so one a very important person in my life, uh just as much as Apple history. But I beg you not to make that part of the reason why you choose me for the five points. All right then. Uh damn.

All right. So there's some, you know, obvious contenders here. Michael mentioned Tim Cook. I th you know, Johnny Ive is another strong contender, his design language informed the entire like second half of Apple's history basically.

Um, you could go back to some classic folks like Bill Atkinson and Susan Kerr who kinda developed the look and feel a lot of what we think of as the Mac even today. But I think that Jobs' story has been cast so much with him as the hero coming back to save Apple, and I'll tell you As someone who writes narrative that for every hero story you need a villain.

You need a villain to make that hero who they are. So I'm picking Gil Emilio because without Gil Emilio there to basically say we gotta make this deal, we gotta get and and to get himself supplanted by Steve Jobs. I am not sure that anybody, you know, would remember where we are today. So he's he's my unlikely pick for the person who is important, set up the most important person at Apple and thus the future of Apple for the last several decades.

All right, so to briefly recap, we have Gil Emilio. I'm sorry that answer is nuts. Sorry. That's that's crazy talk. Or Hutzpah. Yeah, no, that's Frontier Gibberish. Thank you very much. participating. Uh so it comes down really between um Tim Cook and Waz. And um uh Micah uh well made the case for Tim Cook but it's it's it it's kinda it's Waz.

I never thought I'd see the day when Phil Michaels acknowledged Steve Wasty. Well what I did was I talked about laws in the I did that through gritted teeth. If the viewers could see me. I I I so wanted to give it to to someone else, but I I think uh Jason is correct.

And let's be even I was convinced. Yeah, so the Mac Pro Desktop, it's reached the end of the line. One of many Apple products to come and go the last fifty years. You can bring one product back. Dan Morin. Which one is it? Uh, I have a lot of fun ones that are gone, like the eleven inch MacBook Air, which I really loved, and the iPod Nano, which was a huge one for me. But like for me, the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart that I still think about often.

is the airport extreme. Yep. I've gone through so many different routers. Some of which may now be banned in the United States. Uh, and none of them have been as solid for my my home internet connection as the airport extreme. I'm still sad that Apple got out of the router business.

Uh, you know, even with like you know, they have the time machines and stuff with integrated backup, I think that stuff was ahead of its time and we still all need routers. That's the thing. Like we haven't gotten away from that.

as a technology. And it it shocks me sometimes that Apple has not come back and said, what if we just made a router that works and has all these great integrations with our stuff? Maybe this could be a really compelling consumer product. But I I am not holding my breath. I don't think it's going to happen. But that's what I All right. Micah? I still love the the iPod mini. Um I remember getting my first iPod.

This is a fantastic option. But the the one that I'm going to go with is the iPod Touch. Um, so for me having this device that w has no cellular connection, that just serves as sort of the everything else device, and most importantly has my music that I want to listen to on.

I just think it's delightful. I was really sad when I saw it go and I r I loved spotting them on uh older TV shows where not older, but older f from now, where they were pretending they were phones and you'd go, No, the iP the iPhone wasn't that thin at that point and you're just putting an iPod touch up to your ear.

Uh very, very fun to see those from time to time. But yeah, just uh uh no cellular connection iPhone. That's pretty much what it is, and I'd love to have it back. And finally, Jason. Um, so I I the struggle here is that you bring a product back, but time has moved on and so it makes it harder to to it would be like a modern version of it, perhaps. I I keep coming back to the fact that now that we have Apple Silicon in the max

There are Mac designs of the past that could maybe benefit from it. Like I love uh well, let's start with a a a Mac everybody hates, which is the trash can Mac Pro. I was thinking the other day, it actually might be pretty good at Apple Silicon. It was Designed for a Xeon processor, but as an Apple Silicon Mac, it's actually kinda fun and maybe that should be the future of the Mac Studio. Trash Cann Mac Studio, come at me. But here is my real real plug, which is

I love I love a small laptop. I love the twelve inch uh power book, I love the eleven inch MacBook Air. Uh the r the closest Apple has come in something that you could ship today and it would still be small and you'd be impressed by it is the Retina MacBook, the twelve inch retina MacBook, which at the time was using an underpowered O. Heated Intel processor. But as I think all of us have been saying since twenty twenty, since the M one first debuted.

that you know, the MacBook Neo is great, but it's the size of a MacBook Air. There is room with Apple Silicon for something like that tiny, thin, light, twelve inch retina MacBook. that they could use even literally the same design or pretty close to it as long as it had apple silicon in it. So that would be if I could use my powers, I would will another MacBook into the line and it would be a thin light retina Mac.

Alright, let's go to our final question and l not to say that there's a lot to play for, but one point separates um one of you from a spot in the final. So Personal computers! Phones, tablets, Apple has done it all, but what Will we be celebrating when I take over the clockwise podcast in twenty fifty one for Apple's seventy fifth anniversary? I believe we'll start recording that in a in a few moments, given how this one's run over. Um

Uh Micah, start us off. I'm gonna say that by twenty fifty-one, Apple will have made the personal health device that truly matters. It's not gonna just track your heart rate. So much more than that. All these meaningful diagnostics. I'm saying this is a device that by twenty fifty one

can look at your body processes and your your uh blood sugar levels and I don't know, smell your sweat and go, Hey, I think you should get checked for this or this this test should probably be done. It manages your chronic conditions in real time. Uh it it it's just the all-in-one device. It's the new iPhone moment, but this time it's all about health. Awesome. All right. Uh Dan Morris.

Well, I mean I think the first thing we'll be celebrating is that we're all still alive. That's great. That's good news. I'm glad we're all be here for the seventy fifth anniversary. I think we'll also be celebrating that the AIs have let us out to be on a podcast. That's really Maybe we'll even be celebrating that Apple finally came full circle and built a car at last. It's finally the thing that's happened.

But I think what I'm really looking forward to is I know people poo-poo it, but it's this idea of convergence. We've heard a lot about this foldable phone that's coming out maybe this fall. I'm picturing a future where you've got your phone, you unfold it, and you got an you an iPad and then you unfold it again and you've got yourself a laptop. Are you getting it? It's not three devices, it's one device, the one Apple device. Everywhere you go, and they'll call it the Apple origami.

Very good. Uh Jason, finish this off. You know, it all makes sense when you break it down mathematics. And so that's what I've tried to do here because this is really easy folks. It's really easy if you use maps. It's obviously IOS fifty two on the iPhone forty two running the A forty three processor and on the side some M thirty max. I mean who am I kidding here?

We're gonna be celebrating the survival of humanity if we're here in twenty five years, and if we aren't, find me and tell me you told me so. All right. Let us do one final check of the scoreboard. With 40 points, Jason Snell is the leader after our uh final round of questioning. Uh, coming in. For a spot?

In second and a spot in the finals. Dan Morin with thirty six, just missing out. Micah Sargent at thirty five. Hey, third place is uh is good. There we don't need to say how many actual pants are on the show. Yeah.

Three out of some interesting. Take it from me, third place is great on game shows. And uh that brings us up to our our final Yes, it's defend the indefensible. Here's how this round works. I am going to read Jason and Dan each their own statement. They have to defend it. It's not a very nice thing that I'm going to read to them, but they have to defend it like it is the most natural thing. They'll have uh twenty seconds.

And Jason, since you had the most points, would you like to go first or second? I think I'll go second. Alright. So Dan Morin, here is your Defend the Indefensible. Remember, you have to defend us. It's appropriate that Apple was founded on April Fool's Day as every one of their current products is a cruel joke. You start now.

You could not be more right. I mean the MacBooks have gotten too thin, they've gotten too light. I'm worried that I could drop one at any moment. They're so slick they fly right out of my hands. The iPhone, it's made of glass. Who thought that was a good idea? You drop it, it totally shatters. Uh I find that honestly the desk desktops are overpriced. Uh the laptops, again, too expensive.

Is there even another stuff in the lineup? The home pod, the Apple TV? These things haven't been updated in basically forever. And don't get me started on the Apple Watch. They're still fighting. Steve Jobs was telling you to stop. You've you've trashed his company enough. All right, Jason.

Tough bar to clear. It is. He filled he filled the brief. My my favorite episodes were when we had Chris Breen on and he could absolutely not defend the indefensible to see that. Too nice. Too nice a guy. Mm-hmm. So, Jason Snow, when I say I I mean you All this talk about the many products Apple has come up with during the time I've covered the company have made me realize one thing.

I've wasted my life. Oh my god. You know, Phil, let me tell you, let me take you back to the nineties, uh, when I had a choice. I uh they said, you know, this Apple thing isn't going anywhere. Windows N T is the future. And not a day goes by where I don't think if I had taken that job

at PC Computing Magazine, ridden all the way up the org chart to to the point where I would be the editor in chief of some PC magazine somewhere. Where would I be now? The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, someplace Like that's legitimate and not a guy sitting in his garage writing about these colorful computers. How sad. Well, it's a very tough decision to make. Um but given the fact that he had to trash his entire adult lifestyle.

Your winner is Jason Snow. I think that's appropriate on this Apple's fiftieth anniversary. However I regret it, the panelists did a terrific job today, Micah, even after I threw you off by mispronouncing your name and mocking your mattress. Uh thanks forever for for uh keeping the show warm for me for my uh periodic 10-year appearances. This has been the uh six colors slash clockwise uh uh uh pundit showdown, and you know