Apple's best product ever

No, not at all. I mean, the street is my safe space. You mean, you're all right?

“Yes, exactly. The street is the street that's just a bit different.”

The street is the job or the house. The street is just a bit different. I don't feel like the street is a street. The street is a bit different. Safe. With the street.

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Welcome to the first cast, the flagship podcast of the Webby Awards.

We are once again nominated for the Webby Awards with Best Technology podcast. Please vote for the first cast. I'm a friend David Pierce. New lab tell us here. Pennyline.

Can we win the award for the flagship podcast? Is that some self-dealing? I think that's like a separate award. It's like this lifetime achievement, where they're just like they're going to invent a new one, where they're just like you win podcasts.

That's what I would like to do. I would like to win podcasts eventually. Yeah, where the best podcast. Yeah, but yeah, go vote for us. Otherwise, Neil, I will be sad. It's very important.

We have a sort of unusual show that we're going to do today. Most of what we're going to spend our time doing today is talking about our rankings of the best Apple products ever. So lots and lots of people have been on our site all week ranking Apple products. 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. You did.

We ended up getting 1.6 million votes.

And the best part of this is neither you nor I knows how it turned out.

“Have you, you didn't peek at the rankings, did you?”

The one thing I do know is that there was a bought 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. [laughs]

Why iTunes? I do want to say shout out to the person who obviously vibe-coded a bought attack to push iTunes to number one. But we caught you. Yeah. It's the one thing I know is that iTunes is not number one.

Even though someone tried very hard to make iTunes number one. Yeah. But anyway, so we're going to spend a much time on that. At the end of the show, we also have a new segment that we've been talking about in piloting for a while. Very excited to get that on the show.

We have a little bit of housekeeping that we just need to do here right up top. And then we're going to talk about some news. The two bits of housekeeping are one. Again, vote for us in the Webby Awards. Voting is live for like just shy of two more weeks as you're hearing this.

I think you can only vote for us once. So just go do it now. And then take your iTunes bot. [laughs] I didn't even finish the sentence.

Yeah. Just take your iTunes bot. That's awesome. 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.

So yeah, go vote. We'll put the link in the show notes. The thing number two, and I'm actually more excited about this, is you and I and the Vergecast as a whole. We're hosting a movie night at the end of April. And I say hosting in the loosest possible way.

We've just spent a lot of time looking for reasons to hang out with Vergecast people. Like every time we do one of these live things at CES and elsewhere, the fun is just all being together to do stuff. And we're just going to come up with more ways to do that. So if you're going to be in New York on Monday, April 27th, we're going to be at the IFC Center at 7 PM watching sneakers. It's going to be awesome.

Snickers, by the way, you and I, without talking independently had sneakers as our number one movie.

It is the only movie you can logically start with. I'm so excited. We're going to get to pump up the volume, but we all need to have a big conversation about how, how woke we are in 2026. So that we can evaluate pump up the volume on its own merits from the 90s. We have a lot of trust to build before we get to pump up the volume.

You can read, I, yeah, I would, I will mind everyone. The editorial ethos of the Verge is still the final scene from that movie. Where the FCC traces Christian Slater around in a little Jeep. You see what we do here for a week. So you see exactly what I want to have happened. I'm just saying it's a movie from a different time.

That movie walked so that Brendan Carter could have. We have to build ourselves up as a community to watching pump up the volume together. That's awesome. So yeah, Monday, April 27th, 7 PM. If you're hearing this on Friday, April 3rd, we're doing a pre-sale for Verge subscribers only.

You can go to the, go to the site. If you're logged in, you'll be able to see our post with information about how to buy tickets.

It'll open up to everybody starting on Monday, but we wanted to give subscribers first steps.

I think it's going to be very fun.

“And I think this is a thing we're going to get to do a lot.”

I'm very excited about it. I'm just excited to watch sneakers again. Stay in my room. Let's see that movie in a minute. And I'm pretty excited about it.

Yeah. Okay. All of that aside. I think the one bit of news we need to talk about before we get into all of our Apple stuff is kind of on the theme of what is AI and who is it for that we've been talking about. Over the last several weeks.

We've gotten a lot of feedback from people who both agree and disagree with many of our assessments about what AI is good for. I would say none of them have convinced me that we are wrong about whether the people do in fact you're in for automation. But the big news, really since we recorded this podcast last, I think is mostly around OpenAI. So two things have happened.

OpenAI killed Sora. It's video generation app. For what started out to be sort of fascinating reasons. OpenAI also raised a ton of money.

They raised $122 billion which is just a astonishing amount of money.

They also quoted some really big numbers. They said they had 900 million weekly chat GPT users, which is one of those numbers that just feels wrong to me for reasons I can't quite describe. I don't, I'm sure they're not lying. But boy is that a big number.

“And there's just a lot happening in this space, right?”

Microsoft launched a bunch of stuff and sort of announced an even more aggressive pivot towards business AI. It just feels like this idea of the whole AI industry retrenching to we make enterprise software is happening faster and faster. Is that what you're sensing too? Yes. Can I just read you the Microsoft quote?

So Hayden interviewed Mustafa Silliman, who is Microsoft CEO of AI. But then they restructured as Microsoft has want to do. And now he is officially tasked with super intelligence that Microsoft. Okay. And then you hear by officially asking you with super intelligence.

This is like they hired OpenAI hired Fiji Simo from Mehta to be the CEO of applications. And they made her the CEO of AGI. And he's like, sure, sure. Cool. I'm the pope of the verge.

Like whatever you want. Anyway, so Hayden interviews Mustafa about all this stuff. It's great interview Hayden and great job.

And Mustafa says super intelligence is always really been my focus.

And then here's his quote. Super intelligence is really about are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world class language models. Now I don't, you know, Mustafa Silliman's smart guy. 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 alive. And there's just a pretty vast chasm between enterprise value in its alive. Yeah.

“There's something just in that quote that I think tells you everything about the AI industry as it exists right now.”

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 in the way that they've branded it like the fact that they're calling it. Artificial general intelligence, 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 Silliman, 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 software.

You know, it's just a SaaS product and business business software is good and correct. Right. Like this, it is obviously the truth. Right. And I think this is why the, the Sora news from last week is part of this to me.

Hayden on our team also did a bunch of research on that and reported this out and basically found that within open AI, there is a finite amount of compute available.

And they looked at Sora and said, Sora doesn't have that many users and is losing a ton of money, but we think it's cool and cultural insight guys. Over here, we have this thing that is like coding and enterprise, which is obviously where all of the money is, why aren't we putting all of our resources against that and fidgety seem to look to that and let, well, yeah, we're going to, we're going to give the resources to the thing that has the potential to make us money. That is a good and correct business decision. Like that is the right thing to do. The problem is that is up against what all of these companies have spent three years talking about, which is that we are going to reinvent creativity and we're going to enable everyone to be beautiful artists and everything is going to be great.

Now it's like we're, we're automating Excel. Yeah, that's great. Like to be so clear, it's so good that Excel is going to get better because of this technology. It is just so completely different than the thing that they have been promising this would be that they're about to crash into that dissonance over and over for a while here.

“Yeah, I think every small business owner I know who has poked it AI and agents is super excited about it.”

Yeah, I can do my expenses faster is a, is a real thing AI is going to do for us and that's going to be great. Yeah, and it's not, it really just isn't like the generation of Slop. Like there's, there's whatever that is, which is bad.

And then there's, I can automate business logic, which is basically what software does it businesses and now now I can do that with, by natural language commands at a computer.

Great, like 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. It's like, I don't, I don't think that that's going to go well. So, like, that there are no great consumer products for keeps saying over and over again, and the only great consumer product that could exist probably looks something like a GI right, we have this all seeing all knowing robot in your house that does stuff for you. And so you keep making that promise and then instead we actually have is a bunch of enterprise software that is really cool and interesting in that context.

But that is nothing to do with the way people will live their lives today. Yeah, it's like if you go back to the first computing revolution, right, then there's this moment where spreadsheets happen and spreadsheets offer was this huge advancement in how we thought about what computers could do and it became this like, I mean it was automation tool in a very real way.

“It would be like if a bunch of people had run around at the early days of spreadsheets and been like, I have made God.”

It's like, no, you mean spreadsheets and now what we're making is better spreadsheet like maybe orders of magnitude better spreadsheets. I will say that at least in the spreadsheet community.

A dominant sort of frame of thinking is can your God defeat my spreadsheet and the answer is often no.

It has been no for a long time. It's like, it's pretty often no actually like no no one can take it. So 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 in enterprise, the product market fit isn't enterprise. The consumer products keep hitting the rocks in like very obvious ways. And then open AI after this big pivot.

And all of this talk about cutting that on side quests and killing Sora, but TVP, which if you're listening to this, you know, I'm actually quite frankly surprised they're pretty ubiquitous. TVN is the tech pro podcast network. It's a three hour livestream on technically it's not anymore, by the way. I just learned it now. It is it's just TVP and it's like MTV is no longer music television.

Oh, no, it is. They have they have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now. Yeah.

“That's what it started as it was the tech pro this podcast network.”

Yeah, but it's just a three hour livestream. They have a lot of guests in there, a lot of CEOs going there to hype up their investments. They are part of founders fund like their VCs with a three hour livestream. And they do a good job. It is Pat McAfee for VCs, like I don't know how to describe this.

And AI in open AI 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 going to chase all these things and do all this nonsense. And the reason that they bought it and they put 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 AI 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, the center.

That's exactly what TVP and his bill. So first of all, the mission is to bring AI to the world.

They're saying they're going to 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 going to be part of the policy group and run strategy. It's like, oh, you're going to turn this thing into branded content for 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.

Like, yes, running media is noisy. You have people talking all day and there will be open AI will be held accountable for what they say. Also, all of TVN's distribution is on X. And somewhat notably X is owned by Elon Musk, who is currently suing Sam Altman over the very existence of open AI that trials 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, you can think of what you want of TVN. And they, I think they're pretty honest that they're pretty biased. They read the ads, you know. I actually have a lot of like empathy and admiration for what TVN did. They are crystal clear on what they're doing.

Yeah, I always say like people were honest, they're honest.

It's right there out in the open.

“But now you're part of a company that's going to have ideas on what you should do and say.”

Especially if you're directly integrated in the marketing of the company, which appears that they will be. And you're hosted on platform where the owner of that platform hates your CEO. Which just hates him. Yeah. And like he writes a good accord.

That's a lot of noise for open AI. After they killed Sora and they put out the code read and talked about pivoting and enterprise and focusing on code X. They're going to buy a lot of attention and a lot of distraction. And I think the reason they're doing it is because the gap in coverage is so big. Yeah. Right. The people in the poll. There's another poll just this week.

55% of people do not think AI is just going well. Right. The people don't want data centers built. There's all kinds of polling showing that. And it's because there's product market fit 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. It's not going to convince a bunch of people who don't see great products. It just won't. Yeah. I mean, I agree. And I do think I am increasingly convinced that the that marketing problem is not in bad faith or disingenuous.

“Like 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 San Francisco versus New York thing you keep threatening to do that we really need to do. Like the feeling coming out of that industry is like, how how do you not see this? Like it's so obvious. It is so ubiquitous. It is so everywhere. It's going to change everything. Like AI that can send eye messages for you is going to literally change everything about your life for the better. And I like I say that jokingly because I don't buy most of that argument.

But I think the people who espoused 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 so important we need to make sure everybody sees it. Yes, I just weird.

I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own products. I think yes.

And free chat should be tea 900 million people have used free chat should be tea. They know what they think.

They know what they think of that product. You can't put John Jordan have great haircuts, man. They do. The traffic. Yeah. They're handsome. Well dressed well. So I can very smart people. You can't tell people that they're not having the experiences that they're having with these products.

You just can't overcome it. You can't say, I promise you Sam Altman's ideas about universal basic income are going to work out. Meanwhile, chat should be tea is like here's some weird ads that you don't like. There's some collision coming for the consumer products and the reality of how this industry is perceived. You can't market or communicate your way through.

Yeah.

“You have to ship the products that work.”

And I really thought opening I, you know, shutting down Sora and pivoting to codex and saying they were going to focus. Was evidence that they understood that. And then you just have this other thing where it's like, I actually don't know. It seems like they want to be loved. And the way you were loved is by shipping great products.

That's the whole version. I don't know what to tell you. We run a reviews program for a reason. The evaluation comes from the products. It doesn't come from us saying that you're great.

That actually if you look at the audience for something like TBPN, like Mike Isaac at the New York Times are a great profile of them a while ago. And he called it something to the effect of sports center for the LinkedIn crowd. Oh, sure. Which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right. It's like, if you're, if they'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 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're like a TBPN is basically like a very sexy B to B podcast, which again is like, I think fairly straightforwardly kind of what they're trying to be, then this makes a certain kind of sense.

It's just a very out there way of trying to accomplish that goal. We just went through all this. We're going to focus. We're shutting out all this stuff. And there's just nothing noise here.

The media, which is whatever one discovers. It is absolutely the noisyest thing you can ask. Ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company that might have some conflicts with the media companies. Who's incentives are all shaped by going viral on X.

Yeah, it's weird times. So what do you make of this giant funding route?

There is $122 billion mostly from its existing investors, Amazon and

video shopping, Microsoft, a bunch of individual investors. This is all under the huge looming IPO for both OpenAI and potentially anthropic both coming this year. There's just a ton of money brewing right now. And OpenAI is sort of flexing a, this huge amount of money.

And be this 900 million weekly chat to B to users. As like, it's trying very much to use this to remind the world that it is the coliath in this space. What do you make of all of this right now?

“I mean, I think that listed investors is a bunch of big companies”

that are relying on a technology or relying on OpenAI being successful because they've already invested a bunch of money into this company and spent a bunch of money. And in the case of in video that the money's coming right back to them in a variety of ways.

So that's confusing. Again, my thesis on OpenAI is that they do not end the year anywhere close to the same kind of company that they started the year as. And it feels like that is getting born out. They have to start making real money on the free version

of chat should be T which means competing with Google in a real way. Yeah. Google is not easy to compete with. I think OpenAI, they're ad pilot. They ran it for six weeks.

They made like $16 million which I keep annualizing to $100 million.

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. 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 is obviously not going to just lose market share.

They're going to compete back really hard. They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like they're deal with Apple. Remember Apple intelligence launch for the big OpenAI thing. Yeah.

That all feels like it's falling by the wayside. And Apple's going to be way more open to all kinds of other models. In Siri, Apple has a bigger deal with Google now. Like, oh, but ask sort of on its own. Right.

Their Microsoft relationship has been cut off. So they've got to go compete with anthropic in the enterprise for Agented coding tools, which seems like a big business for both of those companies. And then they have to compete with Google. The greatest business in the history of technology and potentially business itself.

Good luck. Like, I 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 in business people

and not core technologists. Many of whom have left to go to anthropic. Yep. Yeah.

“I think the theory that OpenAI is going to look very different seems more and more obvious to me all the time.”

And I think Google had a did a very funny announcement about the new Google Vio thing, which is basically Google's version of Sora to its own video generation model. And basically what Google is able to do is just not worry about the money and compute that it costs to run a video model. Right? Like, because it makes all of the money from search ads, Google can just afford to lose money in a way that OpenAI can't.

There is no money in AI right now. Like, it's very important to remember. There are 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 in OpenAI didn't. And when Google wants to shut down things that aren't, you know, it's like, if you're in a calico labs, the contact lens that might detect diseases, it's like, what, you were doing what? Yeah.

And like, I don't even know if that's still running out. Like, they have that scale. Google is structured into alphabet to allow things to try to succeed outside of the core Google business. Things inside the core Google business like AI. They are extremely willing to subsidize even more.

“So, again, I think OpenAI has found itself.”

It's gone from darling to sort of independent. They're not tied to the big companies. The way they were in the past or supported. But the big companies the way they were in the past. Most notably, I think Microsoft and Apple.

And they're up against competing with Google, which I think is just going to be incredibly challenging. Yeah. By the way, I haven't even mentioned. They brought on a bunch of Apple designers and Johnny Ives to try to compete with the iPhone.

Good luck. Like, I don't know. Like, they had 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 on the promises that they've been making for a very long time. Right. I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business. And I think it's worth saying very clearly that I think you and I are actually on the same page of like, what this is going to do for business and for the way.

And I mean, business very broadly. You and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful, valuable ways to get work done. That's awesome. An 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 mass consumer. Live your life inside of these chatbot tools that we've been promised. That 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 brand. You think that the computer is alive.

And a lot of people are software brand. 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 actually isn't. It's an incomplete description of reality. And you can actually extrapolate like now I can send my agent to go scrape databases for me. To I have made God. Yeah. There's something that software brand.

We really should do New York versus California because what I mean is that people in California have absolute software brand. And people are in New York are like, yeah, I live in a city with other people in it. This is how we finally start our podcast beef with hard fork. This is it. This is how we do it.

I mean, I love them both very much. I know I do too. It's great. We need more enemies.

We're always saying this.

Okay. She was just under code. We need more enemies. All right. Let's let's pivot now to a new segment.

We've been talking about this internally for a while. We've been trying to figure out what it is for a while. I'm very excited to finally get to bring this to the first cast. It's called the hype desk and it features two of our friends. Welcome back to the show.

Both of you, Ross Miller. Ashley Skeda. Welcome back. Yay. Hey.

I don't have an air horn. If I did, I'd hit it. I'm the closest you're going to get to that. I mean, I already have that kind of like cackle. Yeah.

So it's just I'll be your sound effect for hype.

“A fun fact you should both know is that we have steadfastly refused to give Neil”

I a soundboard for many, many, many years now. And he will not happen. I was in that reviews cause it today. And I saw a stream deck and I thought, I can make this happen for myself. But it's better because I have Ross and Ashley now.

My human air horns. Happy to be of a service. Happy to be of a service. Human air horn. That's what I want to be remembered as.

That's beautiful. So before we get into this segment, Neil, this is kind of your baby. And 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 Castlore. Do you know what the hype desk is before we get into it?

Yeah. So if you're a long time Verge Castlore, you know, we've had many iterations of the hype desk in the past. Early iterations were like, what if we just had cool kids in the corner?

And we never quite knew why for it was fun.

And then that ran it's course. And if you've been listening to us recently, you know that we talk a lot about the creator economy, like the YouTube podcast economy, and how all of that requires a pretty uncomfortable smashing of editorial and ads. All the creators have to do the brand deals.

I have to read the ads. David, I send each other. The other podcast host reading the ads and very odd ways all the time.

But there's like 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, this is perfect. So I'm very excited that Ross is actually going to be here. We're going to hang out with him once a week for a few weeks.

See if we like it. And right now we're unsponsored for flavor. But the idea here is you can't buy me in David. But you can buy these two. I would encourage it.

Please, we are pleased. Dale, I was a baby. We're just going to see how that goes. 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. 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. Yeah. Make some money. I like it. I like it.

It's so good to keep the journalism going. Yeah. Make the money to keep the journalism going. Which I don't want to do. I know.

And I've got to be honest with you. I'm a recovering journalist. I quit that years ago. I want to be so clear about how church and state separate. We're clearly 15 feet apart in the same room.

I don't want you anywhere near Matt for us. We're going to get you a real desk. So glad to see. Yeah, there is no. It's a high chair right now.

The idea here is basically you two are our friends who are going to go out in the world and bring us cool stuff every week.

What have you brought us this week? Thank you for asking. Well, first things first. This is an actually specialty. Both of us have hard time staying focused.

So actually bought me a Pomodoro timers. Really cute. Well, one from Amazon. Looks like a chumbi. Do you remember the chumbi?

I do. I think it gives me real chumbi vibes. The earhole. I need a timer. And so I tried one of these little cuby guys.

And I hate the noise it makes. It makes me upset. It's like a high-pitched beeping sound. And I, it's like nails on a chalkboard.

“And so I was like, where are the timers for small children that we better suit me?”

And fortunately, I, in fact, found exactly what I was looking for, which is this. Again, it's like totally unsponsored. I just found it.

And it's um, it has like, this one has a rainbow on it.

And Ross is has a robot. And when you, you just turned the little thing to start up the timer to whatever time you want up to 99 minutes. And then it has little lights on the outside that 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 thing. So the Pomidor is a sister.

It's not just like a pasta sauce, right? It's like a whole system of like, you know, 45 minutes on. And then they do. Cause I had like, Ross and I are both ADHD. So we need help.

We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do. Neurotypicals can do. I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time. I am because I don't. I don't, we will take over the whole Vergecast 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 keep saying.

Tighten. Tighten. Yeah.

“Actually, where did you find this thing?”

This this screams TikTok shot to me. I have to tell you. Not a lot. Crane. Wild.

Not the TikTok shot. I just found it on Amazon. I was scrolling through Amazon and looking for timers. And I just kept trying different search like search phrases. It was like a maniac like riker googling.

It was like timer child music. MP3 upload timer. Like I just didn't want the little PPQ but it's just terrible and I don't like it. So I found this one and I was like this seems exactly what I'm looking for. It's very simple.

It's like very close to being sort of like an analog timer. It's not like a smart thing. You don't have to connect it to your phone. I like all of those things. I just want it to do what I want it to do and nothing else.

And so this was the it was a great little solution. I want to say it was like under 20 bucks. So it's so it's really nice. Yeah, they were like 15. Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of the segment.

All right. So moving on. This is not what we actually came to talk about. This is just meant to like help us stay on track. Ross is time or crack in the whip here.

Good lord. Here we go. So two two high things we talked about. Well, one big one was packs east. Now packs.

Pinear Kate Expo is been around since I want to say 2004. It's one of the longest running gaming fan conventions. There's currently four of them every year. And given in time, like E3 is not here. GDC and diastral 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 actually you just went to packs east and Boston. Yeah, went to packs east. 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.

Which is really neat.

“That's that like they kind of just remade Pokemon stadium.”

And it was really fun.

It was just like it seems like a nice little bite size game.

That you can just kind of play on the go. Like it's real quick. Like, oh, I just want to get some battles in against some other people. That was awesome. I love hearing that Pokemon.

How to go get Pokemon having a moment right now. Because I know Poco. Yeah, it also came out. It's like an animal crossing. But the whole conceit feels very lovecraftian.

You play a shape shifting Pokemon that turns us off human. Because all the humans have disappeared. And the Pokemon are just sad about no humans. So they just rebuild civilization. The dido transforms into a person.

I have a hat from pet packs. This is my do-hat. I feel like I already know how this is going to go off for house every week. Every week. Every week.

Never be trust me. You're going to, you come to the hype desk for a show. I'm here for it. But yeah, you're a weird little dido.

“Who's like, oh, I think I remember what my human trainer looked like.”

And then they turned into this like weird little abomination of a child. That has a dido face. And 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. Actually, we'll wear a hat of Georgia.

We've discovered this. This is this is useful information. Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I did it. I just did it.

All right. That's the hype desk everybody. Thank you so much. To Ross. And actually, you guys are going to be here with us every week for the next couple of months.

We're going to bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored. Some of it will be unsponsored. It's going to be great.

“We're very excited to have you guys here.”

This is going to be awesome. Thank you both. Bye. Bye. Love you both.

We are going to take a break. And then Neil, you and I are going to write some apple products. You ready for this? I'm going to be rough. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So this week was Apple's 50th anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. I mean, you wrote about the iPhone. I wrote about the generational heater that's

to you jobs went on when he came back to Apple. Jason Snow wrote a couple of great pieces, including one that I know he feels very passionate about about the Apple 2. We wrote about Anci Trust. We wrote about the MacBook Air.

Amelia, our photographer, did an incredible visual history. And you're like, have you looked at that? That's like, yeah, those photos are incredible. So much very good in the 50 years of Apple. The whole package is out.

But the main thing is we asked everybody to rank the top 50 Apple products. And they did so.

1.6 million votes, lots and lots and lots of input

and feelings about what this thing is. One, as you mentioned, very aggressive bot attack in favor of iTunes, which I am told be successfully mitigated. So what you and I are going to do here is we're going to go through the bottom 40 of the audience's reaction.

And essentially what we're going to do is, neither you nor I has seen this list. So we're just going to reveal the pick. And if we have any reactions, great, but we're just going to reveal from 50 to 11.

And then you and I both made our own top 10s. And so we're going to compare our top 10s against each other and against the overall ranking. And see how we feel. See who's right.

See what we need to fight about. Does sound good? It does. And I'm convinced that I'm correct in everyone else's wrong. Obviously.

The first time ever for you. This is great. All right. So let's just start at the bottom here. Number 50 on the list.

The worst of the best Apple products of all time.

Is the administrator too. But it's the worst of the best. It's just coming in at number 50. Right. This is silly.

Very good Apple products. But I will say, I think coming into this. We picked two printers to this list. And I would say there's a strong chance. The other printer will be number 49.

But I think we sort of knew. These would be down at the bottom.

“Even though I think you could argue there are very good and very important”

and very innovative products. They're printers. Yeah. I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see.

What's number 49? The laser writer too. Okay. It's super tough beat for the printers here. Yeah, I'm not surprised by this.

Are you surprised by this? I think I personally think the laser are too should be higher, but 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, I promise I wouldn't do this. But the laser editor too was Apple's business for a long time. Yeah.

They really like it. The Mac and the laser editor that kept that company afloat. All right. Number 48. The original cinema display.

Rough. That's a little lower than I would have thought. Again, I think the kids don't know, man. Yeah. They're out here buying cheap LCDs.

This thing was a sensation when it came out. It's true. All right. Number 47. The clip I punch shuffle.

Oh, that one kind of hurts my feelings. I don't actually think that's entirely wrong. But like, I loved that product. I get it. This is the 50 best.

It's just, 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 clip I bought shuffle is not winning. No question. Including number 46. Power book 500.

This is when you use this one. This one hurts me. This is every, they're wrong. The whippers knackers are wrong. They're wrong.

Okay. Number 45. The Apple TV second gen.

See, the power book belongs to deserve to go over the Apple TV 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 a recent CBS. No question. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Number 44. The power book 100 is boy. Real power book slander come in here.

This is just a CBS. Yeah. This is a, this is a young audience of people who, I think, 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 most people.”

Yeah. Even though there were a lot of good products in it. And we had Jason's now right in entire piece. Best time when we've come up with a minute between jobs. It's very good about Apple's weird 90s and the power books are in there.

Yeah. Yeah. And everybody just looks at that decade is like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece.

Everyone should agree with it. All right. Number 43. Quick time. This is, this is wrong.

I will spoil this. I have quick time in my top 10. Wow. Okay. In part because I spent a bunch of time working on a piece that we ran on the side

about the creation of Quick Time by, by a guy named John Buck. It's an excerpt or an adapted. It's an adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good. John Buck was on the team that invented Quick Time in the weird 90s at Apple.

I love that piece. Everyone should read it. It's great. Quick time is foundational. And P4 is Quick Time.

Yeah. And it makes a very compelling case that like Quick Time was the beginning of the idea that computers could be for creative tasks. It's a very important piece of technology. The kids don't know.

These days. This is my story. The kids don't know. It's a 42. Final cut pro.

So far is getting a rough beat here.

“I'm actually fine with Final Cut Pro being here.”

It's like again. This is the top 50. All of these are good. But there are a lot better things to Final Cut Pro. Number 41.

This is actually recently biased the other way. Right. Like a modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here. That's I think that's probably right. All right.

Number 41. Ooh. The Apple extended keyboard to John Groober is going to be here. That's furious about the John Groober. I think at one point.

If I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings.

And then John posted about it on daring firewall. Basically saying it was a travesty that it was so low. So he got it up to 41. It's rough. John, by the way, reasoning 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 extended keyboard to is the best keyboard of all time.

I will say, fun facts. According to the rankings, this Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are all exactly tied. In the right. Fascinating. All right.

Number 40. Garageband.

“Yeah, I think software is just getting a getting a software.”

Yeah, software is getting a rough beat. Especially again, this is modern Garageband. If you remember when Garageband came out, sensation. The idea that a digital audio workstation product would be an every single Mac that shipped for free was a revolution.

Uh-huh.

But so it goes was umbrella by Rihanna.

That's Garageband loops. This is how important that software was. So, and to this point. Number 39 iTunes. Rough.

This is nice. Despite the best efforts to make it number one is number 39. We defeated you hacker. 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 largely fine with it being here. 38. It's the Mac SE30.

This is one of the computers I have no context for. But you made a pretty strong case. It is a very important piece of hardware and 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 it is. There are there are apple old heads who will argue. This is one of Apple's best. Like if you sort of consider it in its era.

That this is one of Apple's best computers of all time. Best most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for the CPU inside. Oh, oh. Yeah.

Oh, I love an S.C.30. There we go. All right. Number 37. The Mac Plus.

This is really wrong. This is wrong. I don't know what we're doing here. 1980's apple is just getting wrecked here. No, I'm saying even in this list, the S.C.30 is clearly superior to the Mac Plus.

Oh, yeah. No question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings, which is very funny. Oh, there you go.

The two of them, just alone. They're both ahead of iTunes, but they are tied with each other. That's right. That feels somehow. That's definitely a lot of people being like, I don't know what either these things are.

I'm just going to click a button. All right. Number 36. The Black Mac book. I think this is right.

This feels like a tough beat for you personally. I loved that computer. It's like, as just the glowing apple logo, the look of the thing. It was just black, every else. I loved that computer.

But it's, this is probably the right place for it. Yeah. It was lovely. The Mac pack of the top 50. That's right.

I'm fine with it. 35. The power book G3. The, the, like, Steve Jobs come back power book. Yeah.

This feels right. It, it, this sort of, we're accelerating towards the, what you might call the midfield. Yeah. Yeah. I think this right.

Yeah. Number 35 is not the worst place to be of all time here. And number 34. There's 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 residency bias. Uh, we'll see how high some of those are. All right. Number 34. The iMac G5.

I want to honestly, was not expecting this to be this high. Really? It's, yeah. The slim unibody Mac is coming up like the classic. The G5 was an interstitial.

It was a little bit.

But this was the, the first time it just became a giant screen on a stand,

which is like, yeah. This is the first time we see the shape of the modern iMac. This is when Johnny, I booked you in the eyes and said, what if you'll just play had a chin? And the people said yes, John.

All right. Let's keep going. Number 33. The iBook G3. I struggled with this one.

I, I at one point put this in my top 10, but I had it in the top 10 because I think the demo, when it was launched,

And then it shrubs killer. Yeah. One of the all time great Apple moments.

“I think it's probably better than the product itself.”

Actually was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the quickly got replaced by the iBook G4, which presumably is much higher than this.

I mean, we'll, we'll see. All right. Number 32. The original iPad Touch. This feels right.

Oh, I had this so much, so much lower. Really? So much lower. I was like, click this at the bottom of the list. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Apple Watch series three.

The first great Apple Watch.

The one where Apple figured out what the Apple Watch was. This is right. Solid mid back. Yeah. It's hard.

It's hard for this to beat anything on this list. Yeah. I mean, we, we are getting pretty quickly into like legendary product territory. Oh, yeah. We're getting into, I mean, the number of screenshots I got from people.

“They're like, how do you expect you to make this choice?”

Like, we're headed there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Number 30.

The titanium power book G4, the title. Nealized favor. This is, you already know what my top 10 looks like. It's the titanium power of G4 10 times in a row. Yeah.

I think, I think this one, I'm, I'm going to say this once about right. This, this is your black MacBook. Right. Like, this is a computer you just love. This is the laptop.

With no reason to leave the laptop. You know, no bones about it. All right. Number 29. The iPad 2.

Okay. So I had, I, I flipped the original iPad and the iPad 2 because the iPad 2 came out

very quickly after the first iPad and was such a vastly better product.

Oh, yeah. It is actually when the iPad became the iPad. The original iPad was not all that good a product like on its own. But it's going to get a lot of love and it's going to be higher than this on the list. Because in that's wrong.

It is like the, the important one because it came first. And yes, that is wrong. All right. Number 28. The Intel Mac Mini.

I expected this to do far worse. You made fun of me for putting this on. I don't think this should be on this. And yet it came in number 28. I'll take it.

Just this for the Mac Mini. It's good stuff. All right. Number 27. The iPad Nano third gen.

This is the the squat iPod Nano with the video. Is this the first, we have a bunch of iPods on this list. And it's interesting that this is the first click-weely iPod that is appeared. This is, this is a fat one, right? Yeah.

Yeah. This was not a beloved iPod. No. It wasn't. It was like ubiquitous.

It was everywhere. But it was not. I don't think it was anyone's all-time favorite iPod. So this feels about right. All right.

Number 26. The the iBook G4 as you said. Yeah. This is where this belongs, right? Now we're in the top quarter.

So it's just that side of the top quarter. And this, this top 25 is going to be brutal. Yeah.

“I think, I think it gets very hard very quickly here.”

All right. Number 25. Halfway through the list. Yeah. I phone 10s.

So we got a bunch of questions from people. Why we make the 10s and not the 10s. Furious people. I would say. The exact same logic as the the iPad or the iPad too, right?

Like they, they fixed it on the next one. It's like made a cool product shipped to the better version of your later. Yeah. I was supposed to not have an iPhone 10. And the iPhone 10 was compromised in many ways.

The 10s actually was a good mainstream product. Yeah. And it was, it was everywhere for a long time. I remember getting to like the iPhone 13 and 14 reviews.

And there were a lot of people who were like, is it finally time to update my 10s?

Like people held in the iPhone a long time. Yeah. All right. So that's something 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 they're ready to really take off. Totally. All right. Number 24.

Hypercard. Tell you. This makes me so I honestly believe Hypercard was going to beat 50. And a bunch of people are going to be like, what the hell is this?

What is this weird thing you're saying about building blocks software? I don't care. They got it. The Hypercard stands came through. There was a lot of conversation on Hypercard.

At least on Blue Sky and Threads where I saw it. I love that. That's awesome. 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. Number 23. The Apple 1. The very, the computer that started it all is number 23 on the list.

I don't know, man. This is like the opposite of reasons he buys for, like, well, that had to have been important. It's like, no, that's what I'm right. I get it all. It means like 500 of them.

I mean, true.

It is. It's good that this is lower than the Apple 2, which better come up much, much, much, much higher on this list. All right. Number 22.

The iPad Nano, second gen.

Okay. This is 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.”

It was slightly higher on our rankings than the first Apple computer ever. But here we are. All right. Number 21. The I'm actually four.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. I mean, this computer was not a success. No. I think the best looking computer Apple has ever made.

But everyone wanted the flat panel. Yeah. This is the, this is the, I knew this would happen. I'm, I'm, I'm as big of an I'm actually four sand 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 true. And yet I don't care. It rules.

I'm, I'm just, I'm looking at the list. I have of all 50. And I'm seeing the things that have not come up. And I'm preemptively angry about some of these things. They're going to beat the I'm actually four.

All right. Number 20. We're in the top 20 now. The original iPad mini. Not better than the I'm actually four.

But, but word of the, a sensation nonetheless. It was, I had one. I loved it.

“It was, I think, it was, yeah, I think it was my first iPod.”

It was when I went from like giant creative jukebox land to, I had a gold iPod mini. And I loved that thing to pieces. All right. Number 19.

Face time. I'm fine with FaceTime being here. I think you could argue this is like a smidge high. It's, it's way high. I had FaceTime on my list.

FaceTime was way to bottom. Really? Video calling, like Apple did it. They invented it. Yes.

It's all very important. But it, FaceTime as a product is not necessarily better than the other video called products. No. And it wasn't like, the concept of talking to people on video had been around. It was not like, Apple made it really easy, which was great.

But it did not like create the concept of video. Yeah. Yeah. It's, this feels a little high. That's right.

All right. Number 18. Power Mac G3. FaceTime. FaceTime.

FaceTime. FaceTime. FaceTime. FaceTime. FaceTime.

This was Apple's first desktop back.

So Steve Jobs comes back. Launched the iMac G3. And then they basically take the Bondi Blue look. Transparent everything and just shove it onto the power Mac. Fine.

Good computer. I would not have had it. This is a lot of people with a lot of memories. Yes. Right.

The whippersnappers are starting to lose now. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. This is like the computer a lot of our audience grew up within their house.

I suspect. All right. Number 17. Apple pay. Rough.

I had Apple pay way at the bottom. I can't give you credits for being like credit cards. I'm sorry. Yeah. I understand that it works well.

And I understand. It's a good product. I also had Apple pay pretty low.

“I think this is where we're getting to like.”

People who love the thing that currently exists in their pocket and are want to give it flowers. You know what I mean? Yeah. It did make me think we should have put the iPhone 17 in here just to see. How it would have done.

In terms of like, well, clearly it's the best one. It's the new one. It's so great. Maybe I should just do that. Part of me, which is we have done that.

But anyway, number 16. Air drop. That's preposterous. I'm sorry. This is ridiculous.

Face time. Apple paying. Air drop all in the top 20 is bananas. This is we don't. We need to understand where the people are saying to us, David.

They're saying. I'm here. Impurious and are high in mighty thrones. And the people are like, I'm there. I'm there.

I'm there. I've been so much the Google had to reverse engineer air drop and give it to Samson. This is making me feel older and older every single one of these people do. Because they're like, oh, I remember when I was five and air drop came out. I'm like, screw you.

I was 56 when air drop came out. All right. Nobody's trying to do it. I'm going to get out of here. Exactly.

All right. Let's do. Now we're in the top 15. It's certainly a wild here. We have a few more of these.

And then we're going to get to our list too. Number 15. The iPhone 5S. Many people would argue the best iPhone ever. Because many smart correct people with great taste.

And it's a very hard to have feelings about great products in this zone. I know it's true.

These are, it's like it is basically bangers all the way up to the top here.

Yeah. Although I will say just the thing the thing that is seared into my mind right now is that there are two pairs of air pods on this list. And we're at number 14. And we've hit meet the roof.

I know. I hate it already. All right. Number 14. Okay.

There we go. Good. All right. Fine. The original AirPods Pro.

Number 14. Sure. Thank God we've dispensed with this. Is that 20 spots too high? Sure is.

Here we are. Number 13. The Apple 2E. Sure. Respectable.

Respectable. It should be high. It's respectable. Sure. Everything in here is it's all it's all gravy from here.

I think. Number 12. The original AirPods. All right.

So we have finally dispensed with this bad idea of ranking these this high.

I will say I appreciate that the AirPods are meaningfully higher than the AirPods Pro. That feels correct to me. And I was very curious to know how that would shake out.

“I think the AirPods are more important than the AirPods Pro.”

And that makes me happy. Which do you have right? Are you an AirPods guy? AirPods. We've talked about it.

I think AirPods sound horrible. I think AirPods sounded horrible. AirPods are AirPods Pro are tolerable. What is your like day-to-day pair of headphones? It's the Sony's.

I think I have the Mark 4. Okay. They folded it and they didn't fold and now they fold again. And I have the last ones that folded. Got it.

Okay. Those are really great. All right. Number 11. The original iPad.

Way higher than the iPad to a clearly obviously better. Yes. This is wrong. This is wrong. I do think we're at like you and I spent a lot of time on the selection show debating

the difference between best and most important.

And I am getting the distinct sense that this ranker leans pretty hard towards most important. I saw a post. I think it was on blue sky. I was like if you just put original in the name, it's going to win.

And I was like, oh, we did that. That's a really interesting point. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. Okay.

We are now to the top 10. Which means you and I are also going to reveal our own picks. I'm now feeling a lot of feelings about my picks because boy do I disagree with this ranker leoman. But let's just do this.

So number 10. I would say I had quick time. Number 10 here.

“And I could make a long and impassioned argument for why quick time is so important.”

Which concludes with the fact that it is still an app on max. That is a thing everybody knows and uses according to our ranker. Which we should say, if you're watching this Travis or producer, vibe-coded, dis-ranker, and it's very impressive. It's not as impressive as what Graham did, but it's very impressive.

So that's what I had at 10. What does you have at 10? My 10. I'm like still, I'm, I've quoted my own little ranker to move things around. I've moved things in and out of the 10 spot.

I'm very confident my top nine. Oh, interesting. All right, well then. 10 spot is really hard. What do you have at 10 and 11 then?

Right now at 10 and 11. It's the M1 ship and the I book G3. And I think this has to be the M1 ship. Okay. That's, that's, that's my call.

Interesting. That's, I have the M1 ship. Higher. As we will, as we will get to the point. Because it's obviously in the top 10.

It is obviously in the top 10. But it's, as many people point out, it's not a product. It's just a thing that enable all the other products. But you got to, you got to put it in the list. I will say obviously belongs in the list.

There are a couple of those still to come in the top 10 here.

“Yeah, I, I think that's, I think this is fair.”

I, the M1 for me is like, it could go anywhere on this list. And I would like, we were talking about this before recorded. I had a pretty easy time making my top 10. Branking them. I found it's very difficult.

Yeah. And it sounds like you had the same experience. But with 11. It was 10, it was 10, 11. My top nine were like, there's nothing's moving.

Interesting. Okay. All right. What was the audience number 10? The iPod was click wheel.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I don't hate it. All right.

So now at number nine, I had the iPod was click wheel. 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 2E.

Uh, okay. 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 an apple alive. It kept an entire generation. It kept an apple alive. This, if you have a list without the, the 2E in particular,

in the top 10, I don't wish to do. Fair enough. All right. What are the audience have? The slim unibody eye Mac.

Interesting. Okay. That's a rough one. I don't know what we're doing. Are you, you think that's too low?

I think it's way too high. Oh, here's what else you can put in the top 10. You don't have the unibody eye Mac in your top 10. No. Okay.

Okay.

Well, that's, let's get some 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 going to go with it. I will, I will go with what I wrote before we started. I have the iPhone 4 here.

David. Come on, man. You have the iPhone 4.

“I think either one or two would be like this.”

And I'm very excited to get to that. Declined response. Uh, yeah. I don't listen. We've been doing this for a long time together.

Uh, what do you have at number eight? Okay. I have it number eight. The titanium power works you for. This is, this is your quick time.

Yeah. You are 22 spot higher than the consensus. Yeah. And I think you're right. So the laptop.

Everybody wants. At the end of the day.

You were like, can you, do you want, whatever garbage laptop you can have today

in 2026 or modernize. Typebook. Everyone's going to pick the titanium power which you for. I mean, you might not be wrong about that. All right.

What did the audience have at number eight? The wedge MacBook Air. Sure. 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, now I, now I'm, I'm feeling the new life. Shame already. I had the slim, unibody iMac here. I went back and forth on which iMac.

I should include.

“I had the iMac G4 in here for a long time because I think that.”

The, 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 13 years in their house. And I had to bully them into getting rid of it because it just didn't work anymore and they still didn't want to get rid of it.

Like, I just turned one into a monitor. I, I'm, I'm with you. I, I love these things. They're not in the top 10. Yeah.

Lightning round spoiler. That, we're coming back to that. Patel. Uh, what did you have at number seven? The iPad 2.

Okay. I, I, I, I have a thesis for my top 10. But yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll get to it. But my, yeah, the iPad 2 belongs solely in the middle of the top 10. And my, my in pain.

I, I think that's totally fair. Um, all right. What did the audience have? Number seven. Uh, the bond I blew, I'm acting.

I'm acting three. Sure. Sure. Not mad at it. Um, wow, boy.

I am, like, almost right in step with the audience because I had the bond I blew. I'm acting three at number six. Uh, like, I, we, we don't need to litigate why that thing mattered. And why it was great. And that is like, I, I had one of those in my eighth grade class in a way that was very important to me.

“Yeah, and, and that's like, I think that thing rules.”

Um, all right. What did you have in number six? This is where I put the original iPod. Oh, okay. This is where this goes.

I, I agree. I agree with everybody at the Americas. I just have it higher. But the iPod goes here. So my, my list is like the products that definitively changed the industry around it.

You think OG iPod over click wheel iPod? See, I, I debated this and picked click wheel iPod. I don't have another iPod in my top 10. No, this is, this is the only iPod in my top 10. 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, it makes you, are you meant, but I think by that time, the click wheel actually came out, I think, on the mini. I believe that's right.

So like, you're, we're just, you just got a pick and I, like, actually it was just the iPod. It was just Apple saying we're going to make a music player because we missed out on CD burning, and then like shipping and iPod and then relentless CD rating on it. Like the original iPod was a moment for Apple in a very real way.

You lost, that's totally fair. Bye-bye. All right, what was the worst sex from the audience? The iPhone 4. [laughs]

Sear rage from me. What are you doing? You people don't understand beauty. You don't understand grace? Come on.

Okay, the people like when they're phones connect to it in that word. Okay, like, all right. At number five, I had the original Macintosh, which go listen to the version history episode on the Macintosh. Lots of feedback about Mr. Macintosh from that episode.

This is like, I think you could rearrange my top five here in basically any order,

and I would feel fine with it. But to me, the original Macintosh belongs in the top five. No question. I don't know if my top ten and all. No?

No. Really? Fascinating. What did you have at number five? The Wedge Macbook Air.

Okay. The entire industry chased this product for to, to tell now. For forever. Okay. What does the audience have at number four?

Number five, sorry. Mac OS 10. It's good. It's good. The audience is redeeming itself.

Yeah, we're, we're, I'm feeling good about the audience top ten here. All right, so before we get to, well, let's, let's do number four. And then before we get to top three, we'll recap. So number four, I have the Wedge Macbook Air.

I'm, I'm right here with you.

like, world-shaping Apple products over over here.

Yeah. What did you have at number four? The, I'm actually three. The original I'm at. Okay.

That's the, yeah, the Barney Blue one. So that's, so, okay. And let's see what the audience had. The original iPod. Okay.

So so far, between us, like, if you, if you sort of close you and me together, we're actually, like, kind of in-step with. This is right. This is the broader right. Yeah, yeah, this makes sense.

Um, all right. Now, to our top three, uh, I had it number three. I had the M1 chip, uh, which, I think, I think, I interesting. According to the, the, the vibecoded rinker here, it's possible that the audience might have it even higher. Uh, we, we shall see.

“I think the M1 chip is like, it is, it is a turning point for Apple across products in a way that I think was really important and huge.”

And just put it, like, it no longer was just the best one. It was playing a different game than everybody else across a bunch of different products. What did you have at number three? The iPhone. The original iPhone?

Yeah. Okay. And I, I think I 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, and it's like, to me, it's like, I don't remember getting the M1 MacBook Air. And all of a sudden going, oh my god, I don't think about the battery life on my laptop anymore. And the, the shift that that suddenly was in my computing experience, just shot this thing. That the top of the list for me. Yeah.

No, I, I agree with that. I just, all the, it's like, I'm making this thing, she went to top 10 and top 5. Yeah. And my top 5 is like, these products change the world. And M1 is in the top 10, which is like, this was very important.

But Apple, and it's a moment with the M1, you know, the M1 came out in 2020. So right there, 2021. I will remember it because I, we were all at home. It was like the pandemic that reviewed it in my basement. The M1 Air, the M1 Pro Air view.

And I just remember thinking, like Apple is in such an iterative place right now, that they're not going to make another kind of product with this trip. They're going to make the best laptops. They're going to make some very interesting desktops. But the, the wild, left turn that you could make because you have this thing is not going to exist.

And indeed it's still less than because Apple doesn't make wild left turns anymore.

“And I think the top 5 is the whole industry has to make a wild buff turn right now because Apple made a wild buff turn.”

Yeah, I do also think you have picked 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 goes a long way when you're talking about like iconic tech products. Yeah. All right.

What did the audience have at number three? The original Mac and Tosh. Wow. So, you know, David is a nostalgia. That's like we're going to make, we're going to make an entire movie with Ben Affleck about sneakers.

Like, that's just nostalgia. I don't see the problem. It's a little hell of a lot of sneakers. All right. At number two, I had the original iPhone.

I think I think this very clearly had to be either like somewhere in the top three, Fred just because, again, it goes on the list of like it wasn't the best iPhone anyone had ever made, but it was so vastly better than what was out there. And you just can't mess with the legacy of the thing. Yeah.

“I think it's so funny that you're going to rank the iPhone four higher than the actual iPhone.”

iPhone four is number two. I love this for you. Everyone's face in the dragon, man. You can't really want this high. You know what I mean?

You can't.

You'll never feel it again.

Never again. There will never be another phone introduced that does with the iPhone four to the people. Go down several bars when you hold it in your hand. I'm just saying man. The original iPhone is great.

Very important, you know, there's the Steve bomber clip like whatever. I've been forking out in the whole industry is like we don't know how to make that. That is true. And it was it was one of the first phones that everybody who touched it just immediately. It was like oh my god.

This is great. Yeah. All right. What did the audience have at number two? The M1 chip.

Okay. That's the reasons he buys coming for. So this makes very clear that the overall ranking system had the original iPhone at number one, which I would have been absolutely shocked had that not been the case. Interesting.

Like it's just 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.

Like I I clearly don't agree that is number one, but it is perfectly fine that it's there. What is you have at number one? I've lost track of what you have not ranked yet.

Oh, the single most important Apple product.

We agree. There is no there's no Apple with that macOS. Yep. I love that we agree on this. This is actually really happy.

“MacOS 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 25 years of Apple software. It is it's what you said none of the rest of this happens. If OS 10 isn't. We're not even a little bit. Yeah.

I'm so I'm both annoyed and sort of like gleeful that we. This was the easiest one for me. I was never I never thought anything else. I agree. I started my list at the top with.

Yeah. OS 10. 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. Two, three, and four are all kind of clumps together. And then MacOS 10 iPhone 4 and the I'm actually three. The Bonnet blue I'm at are also all pretty clumps together. So in this ranking, MacOS 10 is like decidedly sort of third tier, which I find sort of fascinating.

Why do you think people miss this? I mean, there's one obvious reason. Not enough people have used MacOS 10 snow leopard. The single greatest software in system of call time.

“If we had just made this snow leopard, would you still make the number one?”

Yeah. Like to this day, companies are like, we're our next version of the operating system. We're doing a snow leopard. Like we're like, we're not going to do new features. We're just going to make it perfect.

And they never do it. They say they're going to do it. But Apple one time did it. They just stopped for one year. And they made it good.

And then it's been chaos. Yeah. I remember so many years of you resisting updating your laptop. Because you've just refused to get off of snow leopard. No, Snow leopard was early.

And I was stuck on like big sir. Like there was a little different. It was something with some other newer version that I stayed on for as long as I could. Like snow leopard was like 10.3 or something. It was like very old.

But I think what most people, they, 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 the list, right?

You can't really separate iOS from the iPhone. Right. So I think what most people see is the modern MacOS that they use on the computers they buy, which is really messy lately, particularly with liquid glass. 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 a messy piece of software. And so I think the history and the fact that it's the foundation for iOS and I've had OS and watch OS and TVOS is completely obscured.

But the reality is Apple does not exist without buying an X to that premium XC jobs without the foundation of OS 10.

And without being committed to that foundation. And like, you know, kind of like rebuilding it bit by bit over the years and to be way more cutting edge. Like no other company pulls that off. Like Microsoft certainly has not pulled that off with what it does.

“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 big audience, it is obscured that iOS is actually just macOS 10. Right. It's began its life as macOS 10. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's fair. I actually think everybody did fairly well here. There's not a lot of super insane stuff on our lists. Congrats to everybody.

Well, we didn't pick the lists. Well, we did. That's true. Like, like, if we're been like, you can type in polishing cloth. I think some weird stuff would have happened.

Yeah, you're for this away from the norm was the iPad 2, which you had 22 spots higher. I had quick time 33 spots higher than norm. I think you and I both feel very strong. You got read that piece. It's very good.

It's very good. I think you and I both feel very strongly that we're correct. So I feel good about it. That's it. This is then the Apple Ranging process.

You and I have poured all of our heart and soul into ranking 50 Apple products. It's like, it was super fun to get out 50 years you guys. Yeah, right. We're going to live forever. If you're a young person, send us your blood so we can live forever.

That's sure. Throw them out there. Thank you to everybody who voted and was part of this. Go read all of our Apple 50 covers. There's a lot of great stuff out there.

It was a fun week on the internet in that sense. Actually, that like our whole kind of tech universe spent a lot of time covering Apple. And I learned a lot of new stuff about that company. These lots of people. It's been very fun.

We are going to take a break and then we're going to come back. And we're going to do a lightning round. We'll go right back. All right. We're back.

Time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. I feel like I got to get a little longer every time I do that. Meal I should.

Should we begin where we always do?

Yeah, it's time. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

But America's favorite. Did you hear me?

podcast within a podcast?

Friend and car is a dummy. What do you do this week, Neil? I. Friend and car. Tommy.

“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 recording and change. I love that everyone's favorite is the Gregorian chat. Like we've had some really good ones. But if we were to a ranker, I know Gregorian chant would hit number one.

It is the original iPhone of many cars. It's something very good. All right. Brendan this week. I mean, he just did the dumbest possible thing.

Which is he went to CPAC. The, you know, the big conservative conference. There's a lot of attention at CPAC. There's a New York Times piece about the young people at CPAC being like, "Where are these boomers talking about all the time?"

So CPAC was weird. But Brian 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 to clip. Listen to him. 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.

“He's leaving. CBS is under new ownership and soon enough.”

CNN has got new ownership as well. This sucks, man. Yes. Like you, it's one thing when you know that's the goal. It's another one he just gleefully sits on stage

and tells you out loud that has been the plan all along. Especially because what he usually does is he's like, I'm just enforcing the law. You know, I'm making sure everyone's fair. And then he gets on stage and he's like,

"Look at all this speech that I've curtailed." Look at all these people who are not on the air anymore. That's not the role of the federal government. Covent two tribulations are bad as I continue to say in the face of remarkable opposition.

Everyone loves the government. Covent two tribulations lately. So that's bad. It is just a very dumb. Like, I mean, like tactically dumb.

Because if you're the speech police, you move quietly. Right? You're not, you're supposed to quietly influence what people see thinking here. You're not supposed to get on stage and be like,

"Look at how good I am at affecting the speech. There's one thing Americans hate. It is censorship. They 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 put it right at the top of the list. So anyway, this is just Brendan being tactically stupid. The actual stupid thing that happened this week because a Brendan and how corrupt his FCC is is next start in Techno,

that two big companies that own all the TV stations are trying to merge. And they had to tell a court this week that they couldn't follow a temporary restraining order because they'd already merged.

So this is just like the funniest possible set of facts. So next are in Techno, are two big TV companies that own a bunch of stations. We talked about this for the last week. There's a statutory cap on how many stations

you can own in a given market. It's 39%. Brendan says I can change it by Fiat because I'm Brendan Carr and I can do whatever I want with that process.

This is the one he just waves. 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 are in Techno, 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 got new outlook instances

and they're like, well, now we're merged. Well, this is... Well, it's locked together now. Right. So they sign their paperwork.

The problem is not everyone agrees with Brendan,

not everyone agrees with the right thing to do. Most importantly, direct TV, which is actually they're a competitor. Right? Like they sell their channels to direct TV, direct TV, direct TV, 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 their companies to block this merger.

So Brendan goes through his corrupt process and says, I wave this rule that would block this merger anyway. They rush to close and then like the next day a court grants a temporary restraining order

in favor of direct TV saying, no,

“you have to let this lawsuit plan before he 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 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 in legal obligations that cannot be reversed.

Whoops, we already merged. It's ridiculous. The temporary restraining order creates immediate operational harm to take the next star, regulatory conflicts, and a governance vacuum

because they already merged. They're claiming that these two huge companies

hold off on the merger.

“And the only reason they had already merged”

is because Brendan waved the rule. So this is just pure chaos now for some of the biggest media companies that control the most TV stations in the country because Brendan's process was so corrupt and ridiculous.

And he gave himself a bunch of unilateral powers. It appears he doesn't actually have. Yep. Upon closing, next star and take a look. Many typical steps that may not have been

in parent to the court. It is particularly different. Difficult to freeze integration 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 we knew we paid Brendan so much under the table that we knew we were going to have this approval we already started.

“And we didn't expect this lawsuit to get our way.”

So 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 operate in this country, which is normally still governed by laws. So you have Brendan and one hand saying, look at all this speech

that I shut down using my corrupt process. And on the other hand, you have these companies who are falling for his corruption and getting themselves on the trouble.

As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show.

And it seems like it makes it better or worse that he sucks at his job. I'm starting to get notes. We have reporters in DC and I'm starting to get notes from people who are telling them that they want

to like a four hour super cut, a Brendan car is a dummy. They can just play a loop because 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 see to regulate.

Or you can just listen to yourself so I can see pack and explain to me why that is appropriate. I would love to hear your explanation for why you think that's appropriate. Anywhere, anytime, on any show,

as you know, Brendan car is a dummy is not federated and it can be a podcast within any podcast. It's good stuff.

My first lightning round item is also like kind of on a slant,

like a little bit of verge news. I think it is not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention to show that you and I are both big believers in the Fediverse. Yeah. The open social web, this idea that instead of everything being platforms,

the social web should work like the internet does. You and I have both spent a lot of time over the last couple of years with Mike McQ, who is the CEO of Flipboard, who is like, I mean, just the zealot of all zealots when it comes to the social web.

Flipboard just launched this app called Surf, which has been a beta for a long time. I'm sure we've talked about it on the show before. I think you and I have both been beta assessing it for a long time. Surf is basically it's a mix of sort of social network

and feed reader, and like algorithmic content delivery system. It's very cool. The app has a lot of like little sort of niggling things to work out, which I think are really interesting and are 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 basically instead of taking a bunch of posts

that are accessible to anyone. I sort of explained the Fediver's to people. It's 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 anyway 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, because it is like technologically like Twitter, but because that is an experience to the people like. This is a completely different skin on top of that whole idea, right?

It says what if instead of being sort of a fast moving timeline of social posts, it was very like content first and community first. And it has a lot of really interesting ideas about how you can go find stuff to watch and read and listen to and whatever. The verge news of this is that we, and I think you in particular,

have spent a bunch of times standing up a bunch of. Surf pages for various verge things, including this podcast, the verge cast. So there is there is a verge cast feed and page on surf with you and me and a bunch of other folks putting stuff in and 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 we have them pretty coders who we have them for version history, we have them for the verge. I'm very excited about this and I get the sense you're very excited about this too. Yeah, I think these kinds of products are the first evidence that the open social web

Yes.

“And if you remember there is a period where building a new Twitter client was like the cutting edge of interface design.”

Because you got to, you know, a bunch of app designers and really smart people got to spend all of their time like inventing new interface paradigms and what you could do with that kind of stuff.

Without having to worry about how do I get 10 million people to sign up in tweet.

Like Twitter was like we've got that cover user API build a cool app. And then they shut that all down for a lot of reasons. But like big ideas came out of that moment of experiment. Pulled a refresh came out of people building Twitter clients. Yep.

Because they didn't have to worry about getting users and building a big network. That's what the open social web is. 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 news letters. 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 version it but why it isn't it and rolling stone isn't it like a bunch of media companies are seeing like oh this is a way for us to bring together everything we publish in one place. I think that's really neat. I'm just hopeful that there's vastly more experimentation there instead of ever being like our threads or blue sky ever going to have the juice like it's not the point. Like I don't I don't have to say 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 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.”

I'm just excited that surf is like a little proof point along in the way.

Yeah I agree and I think yeah it's surf dot social. We'll put a bunch of the version stuff in the show notes to people can go post to it it's a good way to like I think for us it's going to be really cool way to engage with. People right like we have the email we have the hotline but I think this is going to be an even sort of lower. Barrier for people to clear to just post things that we can see you have a line in your in your news post really like it's a big bet on hashtags. Big bet on hashtags big bet on hashtag the code or hashtag we're just we will see it now.

We will see it now. Yeah from now on if you post hashtag decoder or hashtag verticals we will see it it'll be there on surf and if you do stupid things we will moderate you out of existence because that is power that we have it's true. What's your next one? My next one I just have an update on my iMac reclamation project. Oh yeah. Yeah. We're thinking from China arrived my thing from China arrived it's a little bored I bought a friend coming up stone task and see are 1820 it's the newest one it's hot.

So I opened the iMac I pulled out all the guts that was actually the hardest part. Johnny I've some anybody I'm a very tightly packaged. Like brilliantly packaged device. So you rip out all the guts and you're left with just a display and I you know why did all together. Those connectors are are very delicate actually very careful my daughter was furious because the closest like big flat surface to my office is her bed. So it was just like a split open eye Mac on her bed and she's like what would get out of my room.

You're like not now honey daddy's working. Yes. She's like what are you doing? And I was like I needed a flat surface this is journalism got it all together other people have done a vastly better job of this to me. There's a snazzy hue video that everyone should watch you like 3D printed like port holders and I mean it's like he did a beautiful job. I did not do a full job. I just shoved the board in the back of the thing ran the wires out the RAM access panel in the back and plugged it in and my god does it work and is it perfect.

The I Mac panel without the I Mac software in display is a little greener than normal so I have a color calibrator so color calibrated it and immediately ran into the reality that the software to control the backlight is like not correct. It's like hard to explain but if you use this thing called better display to make the brightness keys on your Mac control the actual hardware brightness it's mapped wrong so about halfway through it hits a hundred percent and then it restarts and this is maddening so you can get to a hundred percent which is all you really want yeah but you can't have it that you know because I like to jam on the key and so it like remaps to like 30 and it goes back up to a hundred which is crazy.

“So email the company I am now in possession of updated firmware file that can only be installed from windows using a piece of software that I believe I'm going to have to pirate all the instructions are on Chinese so I'm just going to on my own here.”

And the only way you can do it is you have to I did reach back into the I Mac and plug a plug a display port cable into this board because the update takes place over display port which I've never heard of before my life.

Now I'm aware that there is another company on Amazon called KTC that is selling basically the same panel refurbished is a display like 550 bucks and I've now spent 350 dollars on a retrofit board and hours of my time.

I don't know man but I'm having the time my life and it works perfectly I've never been happy.

“It's got to feel a little like you're you know putting together a key furniture where you're like yes this was more work and money that it needed to be but I have accomplished something.”

Yes let's go with yes. But what it feels like is I didn't throw the thing away. Like I might you know that that feeling rethrow way like a perfectly good display like it just crashes me and like that's the part that's the kind of hoarder I am like everything else let's throw it away but I perfectly good display like we should hold on to that my office like why and I don't know the answer. So I didn't throw away a perfectly good display and it looks beautiful it's still I was using some old Dell 4K display before and like this thing is so much better it's so much better and I you know and I got to Lego it wasn't hard the hard part is actually just cutting the.

The glue that holds this point in the case.

I'm I'm proud of you that you did this it's fake there was it's took so long that I was like there's no he's ever going to. It's good for you that's awesome. You're getting back to your like repairing back days I'm pulling yeah exactly I'm I'm going to. Yank I need to win this computer with a native display for some and like digging through the reviews closet when we're done. Yeah that's oh boy so you got to be a firmware and make the brightness that'll be a computer that's super fun to use yeah really excited about it yeah.

All right my next one is just a thing I feel sort of obligated to keep like a harping on which is price increases largely due to the RAM and memory shortage but also.

“It's just wild out there folks like the price of gas is going up there's a helium shortage just the world is a mess and it is making electronics more expensive and I think.”

The effects of that are getting worse very quickly there there were a bunch of them this week Sony stopped selling memory cards because there were shortages. The PS5 went up a hundred and fifty dollars in price the PS5 famously not a new console now a hundred and fifty dollars more expensive but the one I really want to point out is raspberry pie the like cheap low end computer the people do lots of interesting things with. And up to the price of the sixteen gig raspberry pie five by a hundred dollars they took a thing that was a hundred and twenty dollars and raise the price by a hundred dollars just to give you a sense of what memory costs that is it.

This price is kind of across the board and I've been up in who is the CEO of this organization wrote a blog post explaining the price hikes and sort of what it means and there's two really fascinating. pieces of this blog post that I just I just want to point out because I think they're really interesting one here it's 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. And I've worth to say buy less computer yeah which is which is fast like that you never ever hear that from anybody and especially something as cheap as the raspberry pie it's always like buy the most of it like it's all pretty cheap.

“Give yourself some headroom give yourself room to work get more RAM get more memory like a piece of advice that you and I have given to many many people over the years is that you should always.”

get more RAM and more storage first that those are the two things you will run into the fastest and that is where you should invest all of your money and it was just it was so shocking to me to see somebody for perfectly. Correct economic reasons say the opposite of like you can probably get away with less RAM like this is the world we've come to yeah secret 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 going to bet there's no way he knows that to be true the circumstances are which we find ourselves are challenging but in the future they will a bit 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 pie this is not some like money gouging profit hungry organization desperate to find ways to nickel and dime you this is raspberry pie. And 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 he's basically just throwing his hands up being like well it can't be this bad forever but we don't know how long it's going to be this bad.

And and this is where everybody has landed is it's not a thing you can just whether it's not a cost you can find another way to you know make up for on some other piece of it.

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 a clear across so many different factors so fast.”

It's just wild out there happen was on the code or in twenty twenty two during the chip shortage and people were furious at him about press rate by a cost in the crisis. You can listen to episode he is a very sincere person like this is an academic project to. You know there's a foundation you know I love and work trying to color like this is not a profit hungry thing this is we want to give lots of people lots of computers. Get a sucks. It's bad and it really is it like every every time you turn around.

It gets worse and and there is a new reason to be worried about it. I will say I pulled I pulled the ram out of this whole I'm acting I was going to throw away and I was like wait I can make some coin here. It's not even if you're interested in some twenty nineteen so dims. Search him up you joke but somebody building a data center is going to buy from you right now. You can't see the story about how they're having trouble shipping EVs because they can't get through the the straight that is being so heavily militarized in Iran.

It's like this is everywhere you turn that's like the end result of all of this is no one is ever getting new gadgets ever again. That's the main.

That's finally how we will convince Americans the globalization is actually pretty good.

There's like the packs of Americana but also there were some sick gadgets. Yeah, it's about it. Do you have another one or are we done here? No, we I'm still puzzled about the reacency bias in the Apple ranking. I need to go start the window for a while. It's fair and he lies going to go hug his slim unibody eye back.

But I feel that the last pull to get the motherboard out of the chin. I was like oh Johnny would be so mad.

“You could get out of there 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 not 10 minutes of that and taking part in our Mac. Yeah, my last one is just a PSA which is don't download the White House app. We don't even talk about that. I just don't download the White House app. If you want to know why Google it it's all right.

Very good. That times out there. All right, we should get out of here. Thank you again to everybody who participated in all the Apple 50 stuff. Super fun. 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. Everybody did super cool work and to all of the people who sent us your most complicated choices. Just know that we feel you. There were a lot that were like I original iPhone versus original Mac and Tosh and people like what do I do with this.

It's rough out there. Like yeah, I feel it was hard times. All right, we should get out of here. I mean, I spent a pleasure. We did the hype desk hype desk is here. We did it.

Let us know if you have the hype desk.

Yeah, call the first cast hotline.

It's six, six, first, one, one. Send us an email, first cast of the birds.com. Tell us what you think. We got wrong on our rankings. Y'all let us about what the youth's got wrong in their rankings.

We want to hear all of it. Tell us what you think about the hype desk. We're going to keep figuring out what that thing is. So we want to hear all of your feedback. Vote for us in the webbies.

Come to the movie night at the end of April. Walk going on in first cast 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 Larchock. Neil, what's on decoder next week? It's the CEO of Cisco. Chuck Robbins. Ooh, that'll be fun.

We talked about data centers in space. As one can just-- Let you know that's where we begin. I have gone from thinking all of that is ridiculous

“to it being the thing I think about the most.”

Like, data centers in space is my Roman Empire, right? I'll just give you a little preview. He straight up was like, no small talk. [LAUGHTER] I mean, I love it.

Version history this weekend is the Amazon Echo. Very fun episode. It involves a lot of me being very upset at how young I look in the Verges Review of the Amazon Echo. From--

Yeah, that's over a decade ago. Yeah, it was a time. All right. Thank you.

As always, we'll see you next time.

Rock and roll.