Apple's best product ever

What should we make of the Iran War ceasefire announcement and where do things go from here? If anything has surprised me over the last twenty-four hours, it's that Iran agreed to a ceasefire, and particularly that Iran agreed to a ceasefire after that outrageous message that President Trump I'm Jake Solomon. And I'm John Finer, and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast.

This week, we break down the latest news on Iran and share our net assessment of where things stand for the U.S. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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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. Neil I Patel is here. Hi Neli. Can we win the award for the flagship podcast? Isn't that some self dealing?

I think that's like a separate award. It's like the this lifetime achievement where they're just like they're gonna invent a new one where they're just like you you win podcasts. That's what I would like to do. I would like to win podcasts eventually. Yeah, we're the best podcast. Yeah. But yeah, go vote for us. Otherwise Neil I will be sad. Um, it's it's very important. Um

We have a sort of unusual show that we're gonna do today. Um, most of what we're gonna 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.

We ended up getting one point six 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? The one thing I do know is that there was a bot attack attempting to push iTunes to number one. Which is so funny. 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. What?

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. Yeah. That's the one thing I know is that iTunes is not number one, even though someone tried very hard to make iTunes number one.

Um but anyway, so we're gonna spend a bunch of time on that at the end of the show. Um 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 new.

Um the two bits of housekeeping are one, again, vote for us in the Webby Wards. 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. Your eye tunes bot. I'm I didn't I didn't even finish the sentence. Yeah. Just take your ice team spot. That's all I see. You know how to vibe code a thing that will make us win all of the awards, including the ones we're not nominated for. I will take them.

Um, so yeah, go vote. We'll put the link in the show notes. Um the thing number number two, and I'm I'm actually more excited about this is Uh you and I and the Verge cast as a whole, um, we're 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. Verge cast people.

Like the every time we do one of these live things at CES and elsewhere, the fun is just all being together to do stuff. And uh we're just gonna come up with more ways to do that. So if you're gonna be in New York on Monday, April 27th, we're gonna be at the IFC Center at 7 PM watching sneakers. It's gonna be awesome. Sneakers, by the way, you and I, without talking, independently, had sneakers as our number one movie for this whole thing. It is the only movie you can logically start.

I'm so excited. We're gonna get to pump up the volume, but we all need to have a big conversation about how how woke we are in twenty twenty six so that we can evaluate pump up the volume on its own merits from the nineties. We have a lot of trust to build before we get to bump up the I would I 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 here every week. You see exactly what I want to have happen. I'm just saying it's a movie from a different time. That movie walked so that Brendan Carr could We have we have to w we have to build ourselves up as a community to watching pump up the volume together. That's all right So yeah, Monday, April twenty seventh, seven PM. Um, if you're hearing this on Friday, April third, 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 you'll be able to see our post with uh information about how to buy tickets. It'll open up to everybody starting on Monday, but we wanted to give subscribers first. Yeah. Um, I think it's gonna be very fun and I think this is a thing we're gonna get to do a lot. Um I'm very excited about it. I think we're gonna have a lot. I'm just excited to watch sneakers again. I've seen the movie in a minute and I'm pretty excited about it.

All of that aside, um 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. Um 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.

Um, but the big news really since we recorded this podcast last, I think is mostly around open AI. So two things have happened. OpenAI killed Sora, its video generation app, um, for what turned out to be sort of fascinating reasons.

OpenAI also raised a ton of money. They raised a hundred and twenty two billion dollars, which is just an astonishing amount of money. Um they also quoted some really big numbers. They said they have nine hundred million weekly chat GPT users, which is one of those numbers that just feels wrong to me for reasons I can't quite

I don't I d 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 a 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?

Yes. Can I just read you the Microsoft quote? So Hayden interviewed Mustafa Sullivan, who Is Microsoft's CEO of AI, but then they restructured as Microsoft is wont to do, and now he is officially tasked with superintelligence at Microsoft. I am hereby officially tasking you with super intelligence. This is like they hired uh Open AI hired Fiji Simo from Meta to be the CEO of applications and they made her the CEO of AGI. And it's like, sure.

I'm the Pope of the Verge. Like what do you whatever you want, man? Anyway, so Hayden interviews uh Mustafa about all this stuff. It's a great interview. Hayden did a great job. And Mustafa says superintelligence has always really been my focus. And then here's his quote. Superintelligence 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 know.

You know, Mustafa Sleevan'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 super intelligence 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 a lie. 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? 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 super intelligence. 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. And and I wanna be super clear that deciding that all of the money in AI is actually in building SaaS products and business to business software.

good and correct, right? Like this di 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 uh on our team also did a bunch of research on that and reported this out and basically found that within open AI there is a 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 an enterprise, which is obviously where all of the money is. Why aren't we putting all of our resources against that? And Fijizima looked at that and went, Well, yeah, we're gonna We're gonna 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 we're going to enable everyone to be beautiful artists and everything is going to be great. And now it's like

we're automating Excel. Yeah. That's great. Like, like to be so clear, it's so good that Excel is gonna 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.

Yeah, I mean I think every small business owner I know who has poked at AI and agents is super excited about it. I can do my expenses faster is a is a real thing AI is going to do for us. And that's gonna be great. Yeah, and it's not it really just isn't like the generation of slop. Like there's what there's whatever that is which is bad, 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 gonna 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? Where you 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. Yes. But that has nothing to do with the way people live their lives today. 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. Um, 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 spreadsheet, like maybe orders of magnitude better spreadsheets. I will say that in 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. It has it has been no for a long time. It's like it's pretty often no, actually. Like no.

No one can take Excel. Like it can't be done. Most businesses run in Excel. But you see this. Like you see this gap. We keep talking about it, that the money is an enterprise, the the product market fit is an enterprise. The consumer products keep hitting the rock. In like very obvious way.

And then open AI, after this big pivot. And all of this talk about cutting down on side quests and killing Sora bought TBPS. Which if you're listening to this, you don't know, I'm actually quite frankly surprised there Pretty ubiquitous. TV Pen is the Tech Bro Podcast Network. It's a three hour live stream on the Technically it's not anymore, by the way. Is it now? It is it's just T B PN. It's like M T V is no longer music television. Oh nice.

They have they have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now. Yeah. What it starts. It was the Tech Brothers Podcast Network. But it's just a you know three hour live stream. 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.

They're VCs with a three-hour live stream and they do a good job. It is Pat McAfee for VCs. Like, I don't know how else 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

You're not gonna 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 is 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 of the center. That's exactly what TBPN is. So first of all, the mission is to bring AGI to the world. And you're gonna buy a podcast. They're saying they're gonna bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team.

That their comms and marketing ideas for open AI have really impressed them. They're gonna be part of the the policy group and run strategy. It's like, oh, you're gonna turn this thing into branded content for open AI. 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.

Running media is noisy. You you have people talking all day, and there will be OpenAI will be held accountable for what they say. Also, all of TVN's 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. And who is extremely happy to turn the knobs on the algorithm to favor and disfavor what he does and does not like.

Absolutely. So I just I I I you can think of what you want of T VPN and they I think they're pretty honest that they're pretty biased. They read the ads, you know. Um I Actually, have a lot of like empathy and and admiration for what T VPN they are crystal clear on what they're doing. 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 gonna 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. And like you're about to go to court. That's a lot of noise for Open AI. After they killed Sora and they put out the code red and they talked about pivoting enterprise and focusing on codec.

they're gonna 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.

Yeah. Right. The people in the polls. There's another poll just this week. Fifty five percent of people do not think AI is is going. 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. 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 gonna 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 buy 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 open AI, 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

Mm-hmm. We need to make sure everybody sees it. Yeah, I just weird. I I I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own problems. In chat free chat GPT, nine hundred million people have used free chat GPT. They know what they think. They they know what they think of that product. You you can't John and Jordy have great haircuts fan. They do. They're terrific. Like I'm

Yeah, they're I mean these are they're handsome, well dressed, well spoken, very smart people. You can't tell people That they're ha not having the experiences that they're having with these problems. You you just can't overcome it. You can't say, I promise you Sam Altman's ideas about universal basic income are gonna work out.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is like, here's some weird ads that you don't like. Like there's there's some collision coming for the consumer products and the the reality of how this industry is perceived that you can't market or communicate your way through. Yeah.

You have to ship the products that work. And I really thought OpenAI, you know, shutting down Sora and go pivoting to Codex and saying they were gonna focus was evidence they they understood that. And then you just had this other thing where it's like, I actually don't know. Like It it 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 sell you like 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, you know. I do think it's possible to look at this actually as uh 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 or a great profile of them a while ago, that he called it something to the effect of sports center for the LinkedIn crowd.

Which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right. And it's like what if you're if you're open AI, 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 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 like a T BPN 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

We just went through all this, we're gonna focus, we're shutting down all this stuff, and there's just nothing noisier than media. Which is what everyone discovers. Absolutely the noisiest thing you can. Ask ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company that might have some uh conflicts with the way. Media companies whose incentives are all shaped by going viral on X.

It's it's weird times. So what do you what do you make of this giant funding route? So OpenAR raised a hundred and twenty two billion dollars, uh, mostly from its existing investors, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Microsoft, bunch of individual investors. Um

This is all under the 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 in OpenAI is is sort of flexing A, this huge amount of money, and B this 900 million weekly ChatGPT users as like it it's trying very much to use this to remind the world that it is the Goliath in this space. What do you make of all that?

Uh, I mean, I think that list of investors is a bunch of big companies that are reliant on this technology or reliant on open AI 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. That's confusing.

Uh again, my my thesis on open AI 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 ChatGBT, 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 sixty million dollars, 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.

Yeah. So who knows? But they have to go compete with Google for real. Google's obviously not gonna just lose market share. They're gonna compete back really hard. They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like their deal with Apple.

Remember Apple Intelligence launched for the big open AI thing. Yeah. That all feels like it's falling by the wayside. And Apple's gonna be way more open to all kinds of other models. Uh in Siri, Apple has a bigger deal with Google now. Like open AI is sort of on its own.

Right. Their 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

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. Yeah, I think the the theory that open AI is gonna look very different seems more and more obvious to me all the time. Um and I think like Google had a did a very funny uh

announcement about um 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. 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.

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? What it's like, what? You you were doing what? Yeah. 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 right 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 I again, I think open AI has found itself n it's gone from darling to sort of independent.

They're not tied to the big companies they were 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 incredible. Yep. By the way, I I haven't even mentioned they brought on a bunch of Apple designers and Johnny Ive to try to compete with the iPhone.

Good good luck. Like I don't I don't know what you like they they ha 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 pay back the promises that they've been making for a very

Right. I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business. And I think like it's it's worth saying very clearly that I think y you and I are actually on the same page of like what this is gonna do. for business and for the way and I I mean business very broadly. Like you and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful, valuable ways to get work done. Um 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 chat bots tools that we've been promised, that it is just like we have to figure out how to pull those things apart from each other. I really just come back to if you have software brain, you you think that the computer is alive. Br and like a a lot of people have software brain. Yeah.

Yeah, 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 that might be a good way to describe reality. But it it actually isn't. It it it's an incomplete description of reality. And you can't actually e 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. This is how we finally start our podcast beef with Hard Fork. Yeah. This is it. This is how we do it. I mean I I love them both very much.

I know, I do too. It's great. We need more enemies. We always we're always saying Casey was just Sunday. We need more enemies, D.

Uh all right, let's let's pivot now to a 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 Esqueda. Welcome back. Bye. I I don't have an air horn. If I did I'd hit it.

Closest you're gonna 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 Neeli a soundboard for many, many, many years now. That feels wild. 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 I have Ross and Ashley now, my my human air horse. Happy to be of a certain.

Human air horn. That's I that's what I want to be remembered as. It's beautiful. So before we get into this segment, Neely, 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 Verge Cast lore. Do you want to explain what the hypedesk is before we get into it?

Yeah. So if you're a longtime verse cast 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, the 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.

Dave 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 saw here is our ethics policy, and Dave and I are way too precious to read the ads. 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, Well, this is perfect. Ha ha ha. So I'm very excited that that Ross and Ashley are gonna be here. We're gonna hang out with him, you know, 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 in David. But you can buy these two.

Yeah. I would encourage Encourage it. We are free sale. Can I rub some baby? We're just we're just we're just gonna see how that goes. Uh and it's our it's our little solution to the creator economy problem. Also, I just I love these two. I'm excited to talk to you every week. Um, 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, you know. Make some money. I like it. And I...

Recovering journalist. I quit that years ago. I wanna be so clear about how church and state separate, like how strict Neil I is about church and state being separate. We are literally fifteen feet apart in the same room. I don't want you anywhere near me, Ross. You just sit over there. We're gonna get you a real desk. So glad to see yeah, yes, there is no It's a height chair right now.

Right. You you two are our friends who are gonna go out in the world and bring us cool stuff every week. Uh what have you brought us this week? Uh

Oh, thank you for asking. Well, first things first, this is an Ashley specialty. Um, both of us have a hard time staying focused. So Ashley bought me a Pomodoro timer. It's really cute little one for the first time. It looks like a chumby. Do you remember the chumby? I do. The thing gives me real chumby vibes that you're holding.

Need a timer. And so I tried one of these little QB 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

Uh again, this is like totally unsponsored. I just found it and it's um 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 ninety-nine minutes. And then it has little lights on the outside that k 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. The p the pomodore is a system. It's not just a like a pasta sauce, right? It's like a whole system of management. The whole system of like, you know, forty five minutes on and then it do ca I have like w Ross and I are both ADHD, so we we need help. We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do, neurotypicals can do.

I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time. 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. Yeah. Or we'll hear really cheap. Type ten. This f this screams TikTok shop to me, I have to tell you.

Not the tick cra wild, not the tick tock chop. I just found it on Amazon. I I was scrolling through Amazon and looking for timers. And I just kept trying different search like search phrases, like a maniac, like Riker Googling. It was like timer child uh music. Uh MP three 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 wanna say it was like under twenty bucks. So it's a it's really nice. Yeah, they were like... Fifteen. Um

Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of this segment. All right. Moving on. This was just meant to like help us stay on track. Loss is timer cracking the whip here. Good lord. Here we go. Um

Um, so the two two hype things we talked about. Well, 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. Um and given a time like E3 is not here, GDC and Dice are all very industry focused, like 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. Yeah, went to PAX East, um, had had a lot of fun. Did you see any games that stuck out? Like what's what's a title that you were like

I got to play the new Pokemon Champions, which was really neat. That's that like uh they kind of just remade Pokemon Stadium and uh 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 was real quick like, oh, I just want to get some battles in against some other people. That was awesome. I love hearing that Pokemon had a good game. It's like an Animal Crossing, but the whole conceit feels very Lovecraftian.

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 civil civilization. The ditto transforms into a person. I have a hat from pac packs. This is my ditto. Ha ha ha. I feel like I already know how this is gonna go off or else every week. Every week. Every week. Never be trust me. You're gonna you're ever you come to the hype desk for a show. I I'm here for it.

Um but yeah, do you 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 um it's horrific and also delightful. It's good stuff. All right. So things we've learned. Um A, if you sponsor the hype desk, Ashley will wear a hat of your future. I will wear that. Um just discovered this. This is this is useful information.

Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I just did it I just did it. All right, that's the hype desk everybody. Thank you so much to Ross and Ashley. You guys are gonna be here with us every week for the next couple of months. That's a great thing. You're gonna bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored, some of it will be unsponsored. It's gonna be great. We're very excited to have you guys here. This is gonna be awesome. Thank you both. Bye. Bye. Love you both.

We are gonna take a break and then Neelai, you and I are gonna rank some Apple products. You ready? We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Every business has its impact, and with AI changing the landscape, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Whether you're starting a side hustle or building the next big thing, Hostinger lets you go live in minutes, not weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website,

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Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the curiosity shop. That's a place for listening, wondering. Thinking, feeling and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. We almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

All right, we're back. So this week was Apple's fiftieth anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. Neilai, you wrote about the iPhone. I wrote about the 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. Uh 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.

In the 50 years of Apple. Um, that whole package is out. But the 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 gonna do here. Is we're gonna go through

the the bottom forty of the audience's reaction. And essentially what we're gonna do is neither you nor I have seen this list. Um so we're just gonna reveal the pick and and if we have any reactions, great. But we're just gonna reveal from fifty to eleven. And then you and I both made our own top ten. And so we're gonna 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?

It does. I'm and I'm convinced that I'm correct and ev everyone else is wrong, obviously. First time ever for you. This is this is great. Um all right, so let's let's just start at the bottom here. Uh number fifty on the list. The the worst of the best apple products of all time. Is the image writer to Well it's the worst of the best. It's just coming in at number fifty.

It right. 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 forty nine. 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. Yeah. I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see, what's number forty nine?

Super tough beat for the printers here. Um yeah, I'm not surprised by this. Are you surprised by this? I I think that I I personally think the laser R2 should be higher, but I I understand. We have a young audience. They don't they don't remember. They don't know. I think instinctively most people look at printers and are like, This can't possibly be any good. How dare you? The laser uh I I promised I wouldn't do this, but the laser rider two was Apple's business for a long time.

Yeah. The Mac and the Laser Rider that kept that company afloat. The original cinema display? That's a little lower than I I again I think I think the kids don't know, man. Yeah. They're they're they're out here buying cheap L C Ds. This thing was a sensation when it came out. True. All right, number forty seven. 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.

Again, it's it's this is the fifty best. It's just It's it's hard to go head to head. I mean, that's literally literally how we rank them, right? Head to head against many other things on this list. The the clip by Bud Shuffle is not winning. No question. Uh including number forty six. Powerbook five hundred. This is one you you stand for. This this one hurts me. Yeah. Uh number forty five. The Apple T V, second gen.

Yeah the Powerbook belongs to deserves to go over the Apple T V second gen. Yeah. This is this is the first one that I'm like the Apple TV second gen should be in the bottom three. This is recency bias, no question. Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right, number forty four. The Powerbook One Hundred 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 is just sort of lost on mobile. Yeah. Even though there were a lot of good products in it.

We had Jason Snell write an entire piece, best sideline move competent in the minute, between jobs. It's very good. About Apple's weird nineties and the the power books are in there. Yeah. And everybody just looks at that decade as like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece. Everybody should go read it. Um, all right, number 43. Quick time. This is wrong. I will spoil this. I have quick time in my top ten. Wow.

Okay. Uh in part because I spent a bunch of time working on a a piece that we ran on the site about the creation of QuickTime by by a guy named John Buck. It's it's an excerpt or an adapted it's an adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good. Uh John Buckwright was on the team that invented QuickTime in the weird nineties at Apple. I love that piece. Everyone should read it. It's great. Quick time is foundational technology. MP four is QuickTime.

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. Uh the kids don't know these days. The kids don't know. All right, number forty two. Final Cut Pro. Software's getting Software's getting a rough beat here.

I'm actually fine with Final Cut Pro being here. It's like again, this is the top fifty. All of these are good, but there are a lot better things than Final Cut Pro. Number four This is actually recency bias the other way. Right? Like the modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here. I that's I think that's probably right. Uh all right, number forty one. The Apple extended keyboard too, John Gruber is going to be very upset about this. Yeah.

John Gruber, I think at one point, uh, if I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings. 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 forty one. Ciao, John. It's rough. Uh John by the way agrees with me. This this is the best keyboard of all time. Not just Apple's best keyboard, the best keyboard of all time. A strong argument. Many people will make the strong argument.

The Apple XI keyboard two is the best keyboard of all time. I will say, fun fact, according to the rankings, this, Final Cut Pro, and QuickTime are all exactly tied. In the right.

Fascinating. Um all right, number forty. Garage band. Yeah, I think software's just getting a getting a tough. It's not hard to get a rough beat. Especially again, this is modern garage band. If you remember when garage band came out, sensation. The idea that a digital audio workstation product would be on every single Mac that shipped. For free. Yeah. Was a revolution. Uh but so goes. Mm. By the umbrella by Rihanna, that's garage band loops. This is this is how important that's off.

So and to this point, number thirty nine, iTunes. Despite the best efforts to make it number one, is number thirty nine on the first time. Ha ha. It should be lower. Can we manually switch them just to punish bad behavior? I'm fine with iTunes being here. iTunes is like great and terrible so simultaneously that I'm I'm largely fine with it being here. Uh 38.

The Mac SE thirty. This is one of those computers I have no context for, but you m made a pretty strong case is a very important piece of hardware in Apple. 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 There are there are Apple old heads who will argue this is one of Apple's best Like i if you sort of consider it in its era that this is one of Apple's best computers of all time. Best, most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for for the for the the CPU inside. Ooh. Ooh. Ha ha. Oh, I love an SC-30. There we go. All right. Uh number thirty seven. The Mac Plus. This is really

This is all wrong. I don't know what we're doing here. 1980s Apple is just getting wrecked here. No, I'm saying even in this list the S E thirty is clearly superior to the Oh yeah, no question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings, which is very funny. Uh the two of them just alone. They're they're both ahead of iTunes, but they are tied with each other in the That's right.

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 gonna click a button. Uh all right, number thirty six. the black macbook I think this is right. This feels like a tough beat for you 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 loved that computer. But it's this is probably the right place. Yeah.

Mid pack of the top fifty. That's right. Yeah. I'm fine with it. Uh thirty five. The PowerBook G3. The the the like m Steve Jobs comeback Powerbook. Yeah, this feels right. It the it the sort of we're accelerating towards the what you might call the midfield. Yeah. No, I think that's right. Yeah. Number thirty five is not the the worst place to be of all time here. It beat some famous competitors. It beat all the software. 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. Uh, we'll see how high some of those are. All right, number 34. The iMac G5 I I w honestly was not expecting this to be this high. Really? It's uh yeah yeah the slim unibody Mac is coming up, like the classic. The G five was an interstition.

It was a little bit, but this was the 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 eye. This is when Johnny I looked you in the eyes and said, What if your display had a chin? Uh Uh all right, let's keep going. Number thirty three. The iBook G3.

I struggled with this one. I I at one point put this in my top ten, but I had it in the top ten because I think the demo when it was launched where Steve Jobs waves the hula hoop over it to prove there are no wires. Second story balcony. Yeah. one of the all time great Apple moments. Uh I think it's probably better than the product itself actually was. Yeah, I mean it it quickly got replaced by the iBook G four, which w presumably is much higher than this.

I mean we'll we'll see. Um all right, number thirty two. The original iPod touch. This feels right. Oh I have this what's so much lower. So much lower. I was like, put this at the bottom of the list. No way. You're wrong. The iPod touch was awesome. All right, number thirty one. The Apple Watch Series Three, the first great Apple Watch, the one where Apple figured out what the Apple Watch was. This is right. Solidly mid pack. It's hard for this to beat anything on this.

Yeah, I mean we we are getting pretty quickly into like legendary product territory here. Yeah, we're getting into I mean the number of screenshots I got from people they're like, How do you expect me to make this choice? Like we're headed there. Yeah. Yeah. Um all right, number thirty. The Titanium Powerbook G4, the TIE Book, Neeli's favorite. This is you already know what my top ten looks like. It's the titanium power boogie four ten times in a row.

Yeah. Uh I think I think this one I I'm 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. No bones about it. Ha ha. All right, number twenty nine. Okay, so I had

I I flipped the original iPad and the iPad two because the iPad two came out very quickly after the first iPad and was such a vastly better product. Oh yeah. That it is actually when the iPad became the iPad. Uh the original iPad was not all that good a product, like on its own. Um, but it's gonna get a lot of love and it's gonna be higher than this on the list because And that's wrong.

It is like the the important one because it came first. And yes, that is wrong. Um all right, number twenty-eight.

The Intel Mac Mini. Uh I expected this to do far worse. Yeah. You made fun of me for putting this on. I don't think this should be on this list at all. Yeah. And yet it came in number twenty eight. I'll take it. Justice for the Mac Mini. It's good stuff. All right, number twenty seven. The iPod Nano, third gen. This is the the squat iPod Nano with the video. Uh

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. This is this is a fat one, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is this was not a beloved eye. 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. Uh so this feels about right. All right, number 26. the iBook G4, as you said.

Yeah, this is where this belongs, right? Now we're in the we're in the top quarter. So it's just outside the top quarter. And this this top 25 is going to be brutal. It yeah, I think I think it it gets very hard very quickly here. All right, number twenty five, halfway through the list. So we got a bunch of questions from people why we picked the ten S and not the Ten. Furious people, I would say.

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. Most people did not have an iPhone ten and the iPhone ten was it compromised in many ways. The Tennis actually was a good mainstream

Yeah. And it was it was everywhere for a long time. I remember getting to like the iPhone thirteen and fourteen reviews and there were a lot of people who were like, Is it finally time to uh update my 10 S? Like people held on to that phone a long time. Yeah. 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. Totally. All right. Number twenty four. Hypercard. Hell yeah.

makes me so I I honestly believed hyper card was gonna be fifty 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? Yeah. I don't care. They got it. The hyper cards meet the hypercard stands came through. There was a lot of conversation about hypercarta, at least on Blue Sky and Threads where I saw it.

I love that. That's awesome. Uh kids, if you don't know, go read about HyperCard. It was right about everything except. They were right about everything. How to be good. Uh number twenty three. The Apple won. The very the the computer that started it all is number twenty-three on the list. I don't know, man. This is this is like the opposite of recency bias. We're like, well, that had to have been important. It's like, no, this one were very good at all. They made like five hundred.

I mean, true. Uh yeah, it is it is it's good that this is lower than the Apple two, which better come up much, much, much higher on this list. Uh all right, number twenty two. The iPod Nano, second gen. Okay. This is the the tall, skinny nano before they made it short and fat. 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 on our rankings than the first Apple computer ever. Uh, but here we are. Uh all right, number 21.

The iMac G4! Wrong! I mean this computer was not a success. It's just But it is the best looking computer Apple has ever made. Everyone wanted the flat panel. Uh yeah. This is the pro this is the the I I knew this would happen. I'm I'm a I'm as big of an I'm actually forcedan 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. I mean that's a good one. Real.

And yet I don't care. Uh it rules. Uh I'm I'm just I'm looking at the list I have of all fifty and I'm seeing the things that have not come up and I'm preemptively angry about some of these things that are gonna have beat the iMac G4. Uh all right, number twenty, we're in the top twenty now.

The original iPod Mini not better than the IMAC G four, but but worthy A sensation nonetheless. It was. I had one. I loved it. It was I think it was e 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. Um All right, number nineteen. Face time. I'm fine with FaceTime here. I think you could argue this is like a smidge high.

It's a s it's way high. I I had FaceTime on my list FaceTime was way at the bottom. Really? Video calling ex like Apple did it and they invented it. FaceTime as a product is not necessarily better than the other video calls. No. And it wasn't like the the concept of talking to people on video had b 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. Uh yeah, it's this feels a little high. That's right.

Um all right, number eighteen. Power Mac G three. Fashion. Fascinating. desktop back. So Steve Jobs comes back, launches the iMac G three and then they basically take the Bondi Blue look transparent everything and just shove it onto the Power Mac. Uh fine. Good computer. I would not have to do that. This is a lot of people with a lot of memory. Yes. Right. Whippersnappers are starting to lose now.

Yeah, I think that's right. Uh yeah, this is like the computer a lot of our audience grew up with in their house, I suspect. Um, number 17. Apple P I had Apple Play way at the bottom of this. I I can't I can't give you credits for being like credit cards. I'm sorry. Sorry. I understand that it works well and I you know it's uh I I I understand it's a good product. I also had Apple paid 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 w wanna give it flowers. You know what I mean? It did make me think we should have put the iPhone seventeen 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 sixteen.

Airdrop, that's preposterous. I'm sorry. This is ridiculous. FaceTime, Apple Pay, and Airdrop all in the top twenty is bananas. I d this this this is w we don't we need to understand what the people are saying to us. They're not going to be able to do that. are imperious and are at high and mighty thrones and the people are like, I'm airdropping. I'm airdropping so much that Google had to reverse engineer airdrop and give it to Samsung.

This is making me feel older and older every single one of these things. Yeah. They're because they're like, oh, I remember when I was five and airdrop came out. And I'm like, screw you, I was fifty six when airdrop came out. Image Rider 2 and I'm going to get out of here. Exactly. All right, let's do now we're in the top fifteen. It's starting to get wild here. We have a few more of these and then we're gonna get to our list too. Uh number fifteen.

The iPhone 5s. Many people would argue the best iPhone ever. people with great taste and extreme It's like it's very hard to have feelings about great products in this zone. I know, it's true. These are it's like it it is basically bangers all the way up to the top here. Yeah. Uh 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 fourteen and we've hit neither of them. Right. I know.

Don't I hate it already. Um, all right, number fourteen. Okay, there we go. Good. All right. Fine. The original AirPods Pro, number fourteen. Thank God we've dispensed with this. Is that twenty spots too high? Sure is. Here we are. Uh number thirteen. The Apple II E. Sure. Respectable. Respectable. It should be higher, but it's respectable. Sure. Fine. Yeah, everything in here is it's all it's all gravy from here, I think. Uh number twelve. The original AirPods. Yeah.

So we've we have finally dispensed with this bad idea of ranking these this high. I will say I appreciate that the AirPods are m 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? I I think AirPods sound horrible. And I I I think AirPods sounded horrible. AirPods are AirPods Pro are tolerable.

What is your like day to day pair of headphones? It's the Sonys. I think I have the Mark. Four. They folded and then they didn't fold and now they fold again. And I have the last ones that folded. Got it. Okay. Those are really great. Um all right, number eleven. The original iPad way higher than the iPad two, a clearly, obviously better product. This is wrong.

I I do think we're at uh 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. I saw a post, I think it was on Blue Sky or something was like, If you just put original in the name, it's gonna win and I was like, Oh, we did that. That's a really interesting thing.

That's a really interesting point. Okay, we are now to the top ten. Uh, which means w 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. Yes. Um but let's just do this. Number ten, uh I will just say I had quick time.

Number ten here. Um And I 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 Macs that is a thing everybody knows and uses. uh 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, Neila. What did you have at 10? My my t I'm like still I mean I vibe coded my own little ranker to to move things around and I've I have moved things in and out of the 10th spot. I I'm very confident in my top nine. Oh interesting. The ten spot is really hard. What do you have a ten and eleven then? Right now at ten and eleven, it's a it's a it's the M1 ship and the iBook G3, and I think this has to be the M1 ship. Okay. That's that's that's that's my call.

Interesting. That's low I have the M one chip uh higher as we will as we will get to Because it it's obviously in the top ten in the He's obviously in the top ten. But it's as many people point out, it's not a product. It's just a thing that enabled all the other products, but you gotta you gotta put it in this list. It obviously belongs in this list. There are a couple of those still to come in the top ten here. Um yeah, I I think that's I think this is fair. Um I The the M one 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 ten. Ranking them I found very difficult. Yeah. Um, and it sounds like you had the same experience, but with no eleven. It w it was ten it was ten and eleven. My top nine were like there's nothing's moving. Interesting. Okay. Um, all right. What was the audience number ten? The iPod with click wheel. Interesting. Sure. Okay. Yeah, I don't hate it.

Um, all right, so now at number nine, I had the iPod with ClickWheel, uh, which I think is like it is the the iPod, the iPod classic. Uh, I had that one at number nine. What did you have at nine? The apple to eat. Oh, okay. I feel and I feel great about this. This was for years Apple's most important computer. It defined the computing experiences of an entire generation. It kept Apple alive for an entire generation.

Th this i if you have a list for that, the the two E in particular in the top ten, I I don't know what you're doing. Fair enough. Um all right. What do the audience have? The slim unibody I'm at. Okay. That's a r that's a rough one. I don't know, I don't know what we're doing. Are you y you you think that's too low? I think it's way too high. Compared to what else you can put in the top ten? You don't have the unibody iMac in your top ten. No. 拜拜

Um, all right. Well that's let's get to number eight. Um 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. And David. Come on, man. You have the iPhone for I think either one or two would be my guess. And I'm very excited to get to that. Yeah. Uh yeah. I don't listen. We've been doing this for a long time together. What do you have at number eight?

No, I have a number eight. The titanium powerbook G4. This is this is your quick time. Yeah, you are twenty two spots higher than the consensus. And I think you're right. At the end of the day. If you were like can you do you want whatever garbage laptop you can have today in twenty twenty six or a modernized TIE book, everyone's gonna pick the Titanium Power G4. I mean you you might not be wrong about that. Um all right, what did the audience have at number eight? The Wedge MacBook Air

Raw. Interesting. Too low, but only slightly too low. It's okay. Um The yeah, this is very interesting. Um, all right, number seven. Uh I had the uh now I now I'm I'm feeling the knee life shame already. I had the Slim Unibody IMAC here. Uh 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 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 my in laws had one of these for thirteen 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. Like I just turned one into a monitor. I'm I'm I'm with you. I I love these things. They're not in the top ten. Yeah. Lightning round spoiler. That one. We're coming back to that, Patel. Uh what did you have at number seven?

I I thesis for my top ten. But yeah, I'll I'll I'll get to it. But my yeah, the iPad two belongs solidly in the middle of the top ten in my field in my opinion. I I think that's totally fair. Um, all right, what did the audience have? Number seven. Uh, the Bondi Blue IMAC, the iMac G three. Sure. Sure. Not mad at it. Um wow boy, I am like almost right in step with the audience because I had the Bonday Blue iMac G three. At number six. Bye.

Like I I we d 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? This is where I put the the original iPod. This is where this goes. So my my list is like the products that definitively change the industry.

You think you OG iPod over clickwheel iPod? See, I I debated this and picked Clickwheel iPod. I don't have another iPod in my. Yeah, this is this is the only iPod in my top ten. 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. Yeah, no, I make the argument, but I I think by that time the click wheel actually came out, I think, on the mini. I believe that's a good idea.

Right. So like you're we're just in this you just gotta pick an eye and like Actually it was just the iPod. It was just Apple saying we're gonna 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 It was. That's totally fair. I buy it. Uh all right, what was number six from the audience? The iPhone 4. Ha ha ha. Sheer rage from the Eli. You doing.

You people don't understand beauty. You don't understand Grace? Come on. That's true. That's what they like. All right. At number five, I had the original Macintosh. Uh, which go listen to the version history episode on the Macintosh. Uh, lots of feedback about Mr. Macintosh from that episode. Um This is like uh I think I you could rearrange my top five here in basically any order and I would feel fine with it. Um, but to me the original Macintosh belongs in the top five, no question.

I don't have it in my top ten at all. No. Really? Fascinating. What did you have at number five? The wedge MacBook Air. Yeah. The entire industry chased this product for to to till now, for thirty years. Yeah. Uh okay. Uh what does the audience have at number four or number five, sorry. Mac OS ten It's good. It's good. Their audience is redeeming itself.

Yeah, we're we're the I'm feeling good about the the audience top ten here. Um all right, so before we get to Well let's let's do number four and then we'll before we get to the top three, we'll recap. Um so at 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? The IMAX G three, original iMac. OK

That's the yeah, the Bonde Blue one. So that's so okay. Uh and let's see what the audience had. The original iPod. Okay. So so far you between us, like if you if you sort of smush you and me together, we're actually like kind of in step with Right. This is exactly what you are. Yeah. This makes sense. Um, all right. Now to our top three. Uh I had it number three. I had the M1 chip. Which I think

I think uh interesting. According to the the vibe coded ranker here, it's possible that the audience might have it even higher. Uh we we shall see. I think the M one 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 products. What did you have at number three?

And I I I think I have the M1 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? 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. And the the the shift that that suddenly was in my computing experience just shot this thing to the top.

Yeah, no, I I agree with that. I just all the uh m it's like I making a distinction between top ten and top five. Yeah. And my top five is like these products change the world. And M one is in the top ten, which is like this was very important But Apple in its moment in with the M one, you know, the M one came out in twenty twenty, somewhere there, twenty one. Um

I will rem I remember it because I we were all at home. It was like the pandemic. I reviewed it in my basement. Um the M1 Air or the M1 Pro I reviewed. And I just remember thinking, like Apple is in such an iterative place right now that they're not gonna make another kind of process. 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 be.

And indeed it still doesn't because Apple doesn't make wild buff turns anymore. And I think the top five is the whole industry has to make a wild buff turn right now because Apple Yeah. I do also think you have picked uh the Wedge MacBook Air, the Bondi Blue i Mac 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. Um, all right, what did the audience have at number three? The original Macintosh? Wow. So you know, David. 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.

I don't see the problem. Sold a hell of a lot of sneakers. Uh all right. At number two, I had the original iPhone. I think uh I I I think this very clearly had to be either like somewhere in the top three Fred just because yeah, 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 you just can't mess with the I think it's so good. funny thing.

You're gonna rank the iPhone four higher than the original iPhone. Yeah, iPhone four is number two. I love this for you. Everyone. Chasing the dragon, man. You can't 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 iPhone forwarded to people. go down several bars when you hold it in your hand. I'm just saying. Man.

Like the original iPhone is great, it's a very important. You know, there's the Steve Bomber clip, like whatever. The iPhone 4 came out, and the whole industry is like, we don't know how to make that. And it was it was one of the first phones that everybody who touched it just immediately was like, Oh my god Yeah. Um all right, what did the audience have at number two? The M one chip. Okay. That that's the recency bias coming through.

So this this makes very clear that uh the the overall ranking system had the original iPhone at number one, which I would have been absolutely shocked had that not been Like it's just it is the it is the Apple product of of all time, right? Like no kind of no matter who you are, it is the most important, most successful product in consumer electronics history. I I I clearly don't agree that it's number one, but it is.

Perfectly fine that it's there. Uh what do you have at number one? I've lost track of what you have not ranked yet.

Oh, Mac OSN. The single most important Apple product. Yeah. There is no there's no Apple without Mac. Yep. I love that we agree on this. This actually makes me really happy. Uh mac OS 10 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 twenty-five years of Apple software. It is I it's it's what you said. None of the rest of this happens if OS ten isn't

Not even a little bit. Yeah. I'm so I'm I'm both annoyed and sort of like gleeful that we we This was the easiest one for me. I I agree. I started my list at the top with OS ten. Um 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 clumps together. And then Mac OS 10, iPhone 4, and the iMac G3, the Bonnet Blue i Mac are also all pretty clumps. Um so i 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 that? Of I mean uh there's one obvious reason. Not enough people have used macOS Ten Snow Leopard, the single greatest operating system of all time.

If I had if we had just made this snow leopard, would you have still made it number one? Yes. Like to this day, companies are like, we're gonna we're our next version of the operating system. We're doing a snow leopard. Like where they're like, we're not gonna do new features, we're just gonna make it perfect, and they never do it. They say they're gonna 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.

I remember so many years of you resisting updating your laptop because you just refused to get off of snow. No, Snell Leopard was early. I was stuck on like Big Cert. Like there were there's a couple different newer version that I stayed on for as long as I could. Like Snell Leopard was like ten point

something. It was like very old. Um but I well I think what most people they they see iOS and they don't realize that iOS began with macOS 10. And you can't pull like macOS 10 was box software. You could buy it. So we could put it on this list. You can't really separate iOS from the iPhone. Right. 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.

Um, I don't use my MacBook Neo as much as I want to because I just don't like looking at it. Like it's bad. It's it's a messy piece of software. And so I think the history and the the fact that it's the foundation for iOS and iPad OS and Watch OS and TB OS is completely obscure. But the reality is Apple does not exist without buying next, without bringing back Steve Jobs, without the foundation of OS ten and without being committed to that foundation in like, you know, kind of like

Rebuilding it bit by bit over the years in to be way more cutting edge. Like no other company pulls that off. Like Microsoft certainly has not pulled it off. Um, 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 the like the big audience, it is obscured that iOS is actually just mac OS 10. Right. Where it's began its life as Mac OS.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. Uh I actually think everybody did fairly well here. There's not a lot of super insane stuff on our lists. Congrats to everybody. Pick the list. Well we did, that's true. But like the if we've been like you can type in polishing cloth, I I think some weird stuff would be.

That would have. Uh yeah, you're your furthest away from the norm was the iPad two, which you had twenty two spots higher. I had Quick Time thirty-three spots higher than than norm. And I think you and I both feel very Everyone should go read that piece. It's very good. It's very good. Uh I I think you and I both feel very strongly that we're correct, so I feel good about it. Uh that's it. This has been the Apple ranking process. You and I have poured

All of our heart and soul into ranking fifty Apple products. It's it's like I'm it was super fun to see this app. Fifty years, you guys. Yeah, right. We're gonna live forever. If you're a young person, send us your blood so we can live forever. Ha ha. Sure. Uh throwing that out there. Yeah. 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.

Uh 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 of weeks. It's been very fun. Um we are gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back. How is Trump's psychology having an impact on the Great Power conflict? There were folks who for years could never imagine the US

carrying out limited strikes on Iran, right? If you go back to the 12 day war, he dropped those bunker busters, right? And you had presidents through multiple administrations who never would have gone to full scale war with Iran, and here they are. And this week, CNN's chief national security analyst, Jim Shudo, joins me to discuss the Iran War, our fraying alliances. And the rise of Russia and China. The episode is out now. Search and follow stay tuned with Pret wherever you get your podcasts.

When you think of a phone, not a smartphone, but like a telephone, you certainly think of one particular device. This boxy thing that sat on your desk, it has a bunch of buttons on it, it has a handset that you pick up, it has a braided cable. You're thinking of a phone called the Western Electric Phone. And for the It was absolutely everywhere in America. It was essentially illegal. To have it in your house if you had a fun.

This week on Virgin History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Western Electric Fire. and how it fell apart. All that on Persian history on YouTube and wherever you get.

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. Neela, should should we begin where we always do? Yeah. 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, Neelai? Ha ha ha

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 change. Yeah. I love that everyone's favorite is the Gregorian Chant. Like we've had some really good ones, but uh if we were due to a ranker, I know Gregorian Chant would hit number one. Unc is the original iPhone of Brendan Cartis's. Very good.

All right. Uh Brendan this week uh I mean he just did the the dumbest possible thing, uh, 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. Uh, but Brennan 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. And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded, NPR defunded, Joy Reed 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 gonna have new ownership of Yeah. This sucks, man.

Yeah. It's like like you 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. 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. Right. 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 are bad, as I I continue to say in the face of uh remarkable opposition. Everyone loves the government speech regulation lately. Uh so that's bad. It is just very dumb. Like I I I mean like tactically done.

Cause 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. Have if there's one thing Americans hate, it is censorship. I do not like it. That's kind of like our whole thing in a lot of ways. It's the first one. It is the first amendment.

We 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 NextTar 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 uh like facts.

Nexar and Tegna are two big TV companies. They own a bunch of stations. We talked about it a show last week. There's a statutory cap on how many stations you can own in a given market. It's thirty nine percent. Brendan says I can change it by fiat because I'm Brendan Carr and I can do whatever I want with that process. This is the one he just waved, right? He was like, No, you're good. The rules don't apply. Go forth.

They don't apply. We approve your merger. So Next Star and Tegda rush into merging the prop like the day after, like they got their corrupt opinion from Brendan and they rush into closing their deal. Does that just mean like everybody everybody just like got new Outlook instances and they're like, Well now we're murdered Well this is what we're doing.

Right. So th 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, Direct TV, which is actually their competitor, right? Like

They they they sell their channels to Direct TV, DirecTV distributes their channels. There's a lot of market power for these companies to have. They should be competitive with Direct TV so they can Direct TV has different rate negotiations. So Direct TV 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 have 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, and 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 com in the country because Brendan's process was so corrupt and ridiculous. And he gave himself a bunch of unilateral powers, it appears he doesn't actually have.

Yep. Upon closing next door and techno took many typical steps that may not have been apparent to the court. It is particularly different difficult to freeze integration that is already taking place. What? Integration. Your deal closed yesterday. This really sounds like we started uploading our Microsoft OneDrive to their Microsoft OneDrive and we can't stop it now.

Yeah, pretty much. Or or we cor we knew we paid Brendan so much under the table that we knew we were gonna get this approval we'd already started and we didn't expect this lawsuit to get in her way. So the Brendan 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 law.

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 set you have these companies who are falling for his corruption and getting themselves on call. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show. And I can't decide if it makes it better or worse that he sucks at his job.

I'm starting to get notes, you know, we have reporters in DC and I'm starting to get notes from people who are telling them that they want like a four hour supercut of Brennan Carr as a dummy that they can just play on loop'cause people in DC 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. Um, or you can just listen to yourself talk at CPAC and explain to me why that is appropriate.

I would love to hear your ex explanation for why you think that's appropriate. Uh anywhere, anytime, on any show. As as you know, Brennan Carr's Dummy is not federated, and it can be a podcast within any podcast. The B C I A D C U is growing. Yeah. Anyway, that's been Brandon Crossadami, America's favorite podcast.

It's good stuff. All right. Uh my first lightning round item is also like kind of i uh 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 this show that you and I are both big believers in the Fediverse. Yeah. Uh, the open social web, this idea that instead of everything being platforms,

that social the social web should work like the internet does. Um 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. Um, 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. Uh it's it's very cool. Um the app has a lot of like

little sort of niggling things to work out, which I think are really interesting and to point to a lot of the stuff about the social web. Stuff loads slowly for one, because it has to come from a 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 explain 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 and listen to and whatever. Um The verge news of this is that uh 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. Um, 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, it is designed to be a sort of open web community space. for the Verge cast. And uh we have one for decoder too, we have one for Virgin History, we have one for the Verge.

I'm very excited about this and I get the sense you're very excited about this. Yeah, I I think these kinds of products are the f first evidence that the open social web can be more than a bunch of Twitters. Yes. And y if you remember, there was a period where building a new Twitter client was like the cutting edge of interface. Because you got to you know, a bunch of app designers and 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. And then they shut that all down for a lot of reasons, but like big ideas came out of that moment of experimentation. Pull the refresh. people building Twitter clients. Yep. Because they didn't have to worry about getting users and building a big net.

That's what the open social 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. Uh I think that's really neat. Uh I'm I'm just hopeful that there's

vastly more experimentation there instead of ever being like, our threads are blue sky ever gonna 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 I'm just excited that Surf is like a little proof point along the way.

I agree. And I think, yeah, it's uh surf dot social. Uh we'll put a bunch of the Virg stuff in the show notes too. People can go uh post to it. You it's a good way to Like I think for us it's gonna be a really cool way to engage with people, right? Like we have the email, we have the hotline, uh, but I think this is gonna be a an even sort of lower barrier for people to clear, so just post things that we can see.

You have a pr you have a line in your in your in your news post where you're like, it's a big bet on hashtags. Yes. It's a big bet on hashtags. But hashtag decoder, hashtag virchcast. Yeah, from now on, if you post hashtag decoder or hashtag verge cast, uh we we will see it. It'll be there on surf. Uh and if you do stupid things, we will moderate you out of existence because that is power that we have. That's true. Uh what's your next one?

Uh my next one I just have an update on on my iMac reclamation project. Oh yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. My thing from China arrived. It's a little board. I bought it from a company called Stone Task and C 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 Johnny Ive, some 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. Uh those connectors are are very delicate. You have to be very careful. My 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, What what get out of my room? Like um You're like, Not now, honey, daddy's working. Yes.

She came over from school, she's like, What are you doing? And I was like, I needed a flat surface. Journalism. Got it all together. Other people have done a vastly better job of this than me. Um, uh, there's a snazzy q video that everyone should watch. You like.

3D printed like uh 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 uh 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. Uh it's like hard to explain, but if you use a 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.

In this is maddening. So you can get to 100%, which is what all you really want. Yeah. But you can't have it that you know,'cause I like to jam on the key. And so it it like remaps to like thirty and it goes back up to a hundred, which is crazy. Oh, that is it. So I emailed the company. I am now in possession of an updated firmware file that can only be installed from Windows.

using a piece of software that I I believe I'm gonna have to pirate. All the instructions are on Chinese, so I'm just gonna on my own here. Uh and the only way you can do it is you have to I had to reach back into the IMAC and plug it like plug a display port cable into this board because the update takes place over display port, 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 a k uh uh another company on Amazon called KTC that is selling

Basically the same panel refurbished as a display for like five hundred and fifty bucks. And I've now spent three hundred and fifty dollars on a retrofit board in hours of my time. I dunno man, but I'm having the time of my life and it works perfectly. I've never been It's gotta feel a little like you're Yeah. 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 Yes. Let's go with yes. Ha ha ha.

But what it feels like is I didn't throw the thing away. Right. Like I my f you know, that that feeling where you throw away like a perfectly good display, like it just crushes me. And like that's the part that's the kind of hoarder I am. Like everything else, I'll just throw it away. But a perfectly good display, I'm like, we should hold on to it.

My wife is like, why? And I 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 four K display before and like this thing is so much better. Oh yeah. It's so much better. Uh and I, you know, and I got to Lego. It wasn't hard. The hard part is actually just cutting the the glue that holds the display.

I'm 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. Uh good for you. That's awesome. I'm pulling yeah, exactly. I'm I'm I'm gonna yank I need a Windows computer with a native display port. So I'm and like digging through the reviews closet when we're done with the podcast. Oh boy. That'll be a computer that's super fun to use. Yeah, I'm really excited about it.

Um all right, my next one is um just a thing I feel sort of obligated to keep like uh harping on, which is price increases, uh, largely due to the RAM and memory shortage, but also uh 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 um the effects of that are getting worse very quickly. Uh there were a bunch of them this week. Um Sony stopped selling memory cards.

Because there were shortages. Um the PS five went up one hundred and fifty dollars in price. The PS five famously not a new console, now a hundred and fifty dollars more expensive. But the one I really want to point out is uh Raspberry Pi, the the like cheap low end computer that people do lots of interesting things with. Um Up to the price of the sixteen gig Raspberry Pi five.

by a hundred dollars. They took a thing that was a hundred and twenty dollars and raised the price by a hundred dollars. Just to give you a sense of what memory costs. That is it. Um They raised prices kind of across the board and uh

Evan Upton, who is the the CEO of this organization, um 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, uh he writes, In this environment it's well worth right sizing both your memory and your overall compute rather than going for something with more headroom than your application actually needs. That is a a lot of words to say.

buy less computer. Yep. 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. a piece of advice 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. That's right.

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 th it is very clear that this is like they're not raising prices a hundred dollars because they think they can get more money out of you. This is

brutal, brutal economic times in this industry. And 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 gonna be this bad. And 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, you know, 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.

Yeah. Evan was on Decoder in 2022 during the chip shortage and people were furious at him about Press Ray Pi costs and increases. Uh you can go listen to an 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. It's bad. And it really is it like every to every time you turn around.

it gets worse. And and there is a new reason to be worried about it. It. I will say I pulled I pulled the RAM out of this old iMac and I was gonna throw it away. And I was like, Well, I can make some coin here. See it's on eBay. If you're interested in some twenty nineteen SODIMS. Let search them up. You you joke, but somebody building a data center is gonna is gonna buy that from you right now. On my old non ECC RAM from nine.

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 strait that is being so heavily militarized in Iran? That's like It's everywhere you turn. That's like the the end result of all of this is no one is ever getting new gadgets ever again. That's the main outcome.

Finally, how we will convince Americans that globalization is actually pretty good. Uh yeah, there's like the Pax Americana, but also there were some sick gadgets. Yeah, that's about it. Uh do you have another one? Are we done here? No. I've got it.

By the way, that last pull to get the motherboard out of the the chin, I was like, Oh, Johnny would be so mad at me. I was 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 ten minutes of that in taking it part.

Yeah. Uh my last one is just a PSA, which is don't download the White House app. We don't even 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. Uh that that whole project has been incredibly fun. Our team did really great work.

It was 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. Uh 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?

Like, yeah, I I feel you. It's hard times. All right. We should get out of here. Neil I, it's been a pleasure. We did the hype desk. Hype desk is here. We did it. Let us know if you want that. Yeah, call the VergeCast hotline, 866-Virge11. Send us an email, vergecast at the 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 gonna keep figuring out what that thing is, so we want to hear all of your feedback. Uh 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 Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Neil I, what's on Decoder next week? It's the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robinson. We talked about data centers and space.

Let me know that that's how that's how that's where we began. Um 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. I'll just give you a little preview. He straight up was like no small talk. Amazing. I love it. Uh version history this weekend is the Amazon Echo. Uh very fun episode.

It involves a lot of me being very upset um at how young I look in the Verges review of the Amazon Echo from like twelve years old. That's over a decade ago. Yeah, it was it was a time. Uh all right. Thank you as always. We'll see you next time.