The Vergecast - Apple at 50: the good and the bad

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

It's Apple 50 week, so we've got an Apple-filled podcast. First, longtime Apple journalist Jason Snell joins the show to talk about the state of the company as a hardware maker, a software maker, a force for good in the world, and more. Then, blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash explains why he's worried about the rise of video podcasts, and the role Apple could play to make it better. Finally, The Verge's Allison Johnson helps answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!) about swapping your phone for a watch. And a tablet. And some other things. Further reading: Rank the 50 best Apple Products⁠ ⁠Apple in 2025: The Six Colors report card⁠ ⁠Apple turns 50: celebrating five decades of the tech giant⁠ ⁠Apple II Forever!⁠ “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Why Apple’s move to video could endanger podcasting's greatest power Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of video podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here with the Verges Apple products ranker. If you haven't tried this yet, the verge.com slash Apple 50. It gives you a whole system for ranking the 50 best products Apple has ever made. And boy, is it complicated. A lot of them are very easy. A lot of times you end up with two sort of inconsequential things that it's hard to figure out how to put them in order. And then you run into, like, is the original Macintosh, one of the most,

most influential computers ever. It started the GUI. It was a big reason the mouse became really popular. More important than the iMac G3, the first thing that Steve Jobs made when he came back that effectively in so many ways saved Apple. Which of those is a better product? I don't know. I have sat here for hours trying to split hairs on decisions like this and it is slowly making me lose my mind. But this is what we're doing here. It's the 50th anniversary of Apple this week. Go do the rancor. We're going to come back on. Friday's show and Neely and I are going to both unveil our own rankings and

debate whether all of you got it right. Right now, there is some true chaos happening and some people are very angry about it. And I just want you to know that if you, like Neelai and like John Gruber, think that the Apple extended keyboard two deserves more shine, it's up to you to go in and

fix it. Anyway, we're going to talk about Apple on this show today, but from kind of a different perspective. Basically, we're going to do two things. Jason Snell, our friend from Six Colors and the Upgrade podcast and Macworld is going to come on the show and give us kind of a state of Apple. Company is 50 years old. He has been aware of and covering this company for as long as anybody, and he's just going to try to figure out where is Apple right now compared to its history.

It's a complicated question in a bunch of ways. We're going to dig into it. Then Anil Dash is going to come on the show. He's another person who has been paying attention to Apple and been in this space for a very long time. And he's going to talk to us about some stuff he's been writing recently about podcasts and specifically the ways in which he thinks video podcasts have the potential to change podcasts forever. Then we have a hotline question about the Apple Watch. It's a very Appley day.

It's a very Appley week. We got a lot of stuff come and go to the site for all of our Apple 50 coverage. It's a lot of fun. There's a lot to dig into about this company right now and in the past and going forward and we tried to get into a lot of it. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I'm sitting here between the Apple Watch that I think is the best and the

iPhone that I think is the best. And I don't know how to choose. So I'm going to stare into the middle distance for a while and then we'll be right back. This is the Vergecast. See in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports. and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes,

game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated.

The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on a day, explain it to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. I made a decision. I went with the Apple Watch series three, which is the time the Apple Watch really became great. I think that's a cool moment for the Apple Watch. Interesting one, the rankings do not agree with my choice on that one. But whatever, here we are. Anyway, let's get into it.

So Jason Snell on his website, Six Colors.com, does this thing every year where he pulls a bunch of smart people about all of their feelings about Apple. And they do a report card. They give actual letter grades. Everybody has feedback on the different kinds of products and the different software and sort of Apple's place in the world. So I asked Jason to come on and do that, but in a broader sense. Apple at 50 sort of compared to itself over time. How is this company doing compared to what Apple has been in the past in a bunch of different ways? Jason was game. It's a really fun conversation. Let's get into it. Jason Snell. Welcome to the version. Thank you. It's great to be here. So, okay, to talk about Apple, we're doing a lot of historical

stuff about Apple and combing over the last 50 years for all of this. And I think what I want to try to do with you in as brisk a manner as we can, this is a huge task, is I want to talk about the state of Apple kind of broadly right now. And to do that, I want to just ruthlessly steal a concept from you that I like very much, which is the report card. You do this thing every year on six colors called the report card where you pull a bunch of very smart people on their feelings about a bunch of different things going on inside of Apple. Specific products, sort of where Apple stands in a bunch of different ways.

And I think that thing is incredibly useful. And so I want to just do a sort of big picture Apple report card in a bunch of ways. And I think the easiest place to start, and the one I want to start with, is Apple the hardware maker. How would you grade Apple as a hardware company right now as opposed to kind of its 50-year arc. They are killing it on hardware. I think that Apple's hardware has never been better.

I think even if you did a kind of like saber metrics, baseball prospectus kind of like value over the market in the 80s or the 90s or whatever, try to normalize everything, I think you'd still have to say it. Like they, all their hardware is incredible. Like the fact that they make their own, they design their own chips, they don't fab them, right? TSM does that.

But they make their own chips. That's been a huge advantage for them. It really has taken the Mac places it's never been before. The Mac sells better than it ever has in its 40-year history, and I wonder if the MacBook Neo is going to actually do something even beyond that. And that product can't exist without Apple's chip design, because that's raised the bar. It used to be the cheapest Mac was barely good enough to use.

And for the last few years, the MacBook Air has been far more than barely good enough to you. Like the original MacBook Air was still plenty good enough to use. use. And that's all down to their chip design. Also, you know, the Mac hardware, the quality, the story's about the MacBook Neo now. A lot of it is like, oh, wow, can you imagine a laptop at Apple quality being $599? It's like, yeah, I mean, they know how to use aluminum. Their phone design is very impressive. The iPads, like iPad Pro with the tandem OLED display, like they're making some incredible hardware across the line, not just the chips, but the whole package. I think that they're working at a very high level they're executing.

Yeah, it's fascinating because I think I led with this one because I think I agree with you that this is the most unassailable success story on the list, right? Like, it is just across the board a remarkable hardware manufacturer right now. And it's sort of fascinating in that it's so many things that have all come together at about the same time, right? Like the chip manufacturing is like a multiple decade investment inside of Apple. there was a weird time where they went down a bunch of bad design roads with like the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar and just tried to have a lot of weird ideas about how things should work and really undid a lot of that in really good ways and got back to just making great things that people like and the stuff with the networking chips and like all of these things across the board even some of the display technology like all of this stuff really in the last like two years even has just materialized into like everything is firing on all cylinders at exactly the same time and that is it's just kind of paralleled in this space.

Yeah, I think you could probably trace the iPhone. I think Apple lost its way on the Mac in part because I think they took their eye off the ball. They were thinking that the Mac was a legacy product. And that's fair. iPad was the future. And so they just kind of let it spin away. And then they had to steer out of the skid there. On the iPhone side, I think they've been going from strength to strength for a long time now.

But you're right. The act of putting the Mac back on the priority list and putting it on the rails and putting it with Apple Silicon has, solved, I think, their greatest weakness right now. And that is, I think some of it is a consequence to give Tim Cook a little bit of credit, especially if you read that amazing book, Apple and China,

part of the secret sauce of Apple over the last 15 years really has been manufacturing. The fact that they are using a process where if they want to make a product that is made a certain way or does a certain thing, they basically invent the process to make it.

And most tech companies, there are a who do this in some areas, like Samsung's a good example, I think, because they have so much display skill and they're making their own chips and stuff like that. I get it. But like Apple is very rare in sort of saying, we're going to just make what we want, where most of the industry for most stuff, they are using established techniques, established parts. And Apple, you know, I think that this goes back to the efficiency of Tim Cook. Like, they want to be really great at manufacturing parts and then whole items and then putting the software on them. And I think from that, this emerges their ability to build software or build hardware at this

level. Yeah, totally agree. All right. Second category, slightly bleaker, let's say. Apple is a software maker. Yeah. I mean, look, we can score this on degree of difficulty a little bit because one of the things that Apple does that nobody else is trying.

Again, I keep coming back to this and thinking about Apple at 50. I keep thinking about how Apple just plays a game that nobody plays. When I started covering Apple in the 90s, when they were really teetering, everybody had an idea of what Apple should do, and they were all, be more like Microsoft or be more like Dell. And they've never been, I mean, they've always been the whole unit that they build. But with, so with software, they've got all these OSs, right? And the truth is, it's all kind of one base OS and then there are little variants on it. But like, who else is shipping a phone OS and a desktop OS? and a tablet OS and a TVOS and a watch OS.

And like, it's a super ambitious thing that they're doing. But when we talked about the butterfly keyboard, right, it feels like we're in the butterfly keyboard era of Apple Software right now. Where they're like kind of lost their way. I think personally, I ascribe some of that to the fact that after Steve Jobs died, they desperately wanted to hold on to Johnny Ive because they wanted to show that the whole place wasn't going to hell. And as a result, they gave Johnny Ive and all of his lieutenants way too much power.

And I think that the whole design and user interaction, you know, philosophy at Apple got completely out of balance. And so, you know, for people who don't know, like, the really, the Mac users who really, really care are deeply offended by the liquid glass design that came out last year. I think it's just a symptom of a larger disease, which is. that they've been kind of not thinking about these things in terms of usability, how people use them every day and thinking more about how they look. And I think maybe if you're mostly focused on the iPhone, as they should be, because it's their biggest product by far, that you're thinking about that super broad market and that you need to dazzle them.

But even then, I feel like they kind of just have lost their way. And even some of the hardware stuff from the 2010s that you might scratch your head at, like the touch bar, Like, if you really break that down, they came up with this idea for an OLED touchscreen on the laptop and thought it might be interesting. But if you look at what happened to it, on the software side, they literally, they shipped the software that made it operate and never updated it the entire time it was on. Every OS update would come out and they'd be like, what, what's the touch bar? We don't even know. So I think even then there was a real disconnect between the hardware and the software side. And they're living it down right now, I think.

Well, and part of the reason I reacted the way I did to the butter. keyboard comparison is that it does feel like the same thing is happening right now in which a group of people has decided that some pursuit of aesthetic perfection is what matters. Like liquid glass is beautiful. In a very certain specific way, it is really lovely and the way the animations work are really nice and it is technically very impressive in the way that like the 12 inch MacBook was really thin, right? And it turns out that has very little to do with.

the actual experience of living with these products. I can take it further, too, because the 12-inch, look, the butterfly keyboard for people who don't remember, I would suppress that memory if I could. It's for the best. Yeah. Is that they designed this super low travel keyboard for this super small laptop that they made, the retina MacBook, which was underpowered and it never really went anywhere. They're trying to replace the MacBook Air.

It didn't really work. And it was one of their failures of the 2010s. But the big mistake with that butterfly keyboard is once they designed it, to fit in this teeny tiny laptop. They're like, great, we made a new keyboard. Let's put it everywhere. Let's shove it in every product. Even if the other products didn't need a low travel ultra compact keyboard,

all they needed was the keyboard that people liked. They're like, no, we're going to shove it in there too. And liquid glass is kind of like that, where I can see places in Apple's product line where something like that, especially on the iPhone, where I think it is sort of the best at what it does. But they shoved it everywhere again. They just decided we're going to put this on all our platforms. And when I was reviewing MacOS Tahoe, and I'm not down on Tahoe like a lot of my colleagues are,

but like I feel like Mac users dodged a bullet with Tahoe because Apple did such a slapdash job of putting liquid glass on it, that it's kind of like if they had really tried hard, I think it would have been way worse. But that's why it reminds me the Butterfly keyboard is. It's a little bit like what it, this was not a great idea, but why is it everywhere? Totally. Yeah, I remember seeing it for the first time and be like, oh, for the Vision Pro, this makes perfect. sense. If you live in an augmented reality world and you have things that are actually digital and physical in one, liquid glass makes perfect sense. And I completely understand why

none of my other devices are that thing. Like why I put this on my laptop and my phone? What are we doing here? But it doesn't sound like you're long-term pessimistic about software here. I'm open about it because if you would ask me in 2018 how I felt about the state of Apple's hardware side, especially on the Mac, I would have said I'm really concerned that they've lost the plot, right? And they turned it around. I do have some hope that we've hit rock bottom and we're coming back up the other side. What distresses me is when Alan Dye, who was their head of software design, was poached by meta. The reporting suggests that the executives were taken aback and were upset because they had liked what they had, what he had sold them. And that bothers me,

because I think that was probably, just from the, as an outside observer, it sounds a little bit like he had them under his spell. And it's like, you know, then again, I don't know for a fact. And sometimes when senior people leave, they leave because they're not as appreciated as they think they deserve to be. That does happen sometimes. And it's possible. He was like, you don't love me as much as you should. I'm out of here.

I'm going to go to Mark Zuckerberg. He seems to love me. Totally. But, you know, they've got a new head of design. And they've got a bunch of executive turnover on a broad scale. And you have been in this business long enough. You've seen this too. Sometimes, even if somebody's a great manager, like the act of having new people in charge,

even if they were there before in a lieutenant role, they're going to do things differently. And it's an opportunity to turn the page on stuff. And so having the new head of design come from, he's well liked across the company in the design group, but also in the engineering group in terms of the software designers, who I get the distinct impression did not like Alan Die. The fact that he can turn the page and not necessarily like, he's not going to throw everything in the garbage can, but like it gives him a chance to say,

let's do things a little differently here. I think that's something Apple kind of desperately needs right now. So I'm going to be optimistic about it, but I would also say we've seen no evidence other than people moving around. But I would like to think that they hit rock bottom with this now. That's fair. Okay, and this is actually a good segue into my third category, which is Apple the design innovator. And I think, like, this is going back over the 50 years of Apple, there is a very consistent sense of Apple being somewhere between like a year and a generation ahead of most of its competitors in how things can and should look.

I mean, most of the computers sitting behind you are a testament to how far Apple was ahead of everybody in letting design lead its products. How do you feel like Apple's doing on that front right now? It's, I'd say it's a mixed bag. I think one of the challenges, well, first off, Apple is, and I think has been for a long time actually a pretty conservative company. They, like Samsung, for example, like, just will release products and like, we'll see what happens. Samsung has never met an idea. It won't ship. Yeah, they'll just, and Apple doesn't do that.

Generally, it doesn't do that. And so you don't see wild ideas from that. And sometimes when they feel like they've got it wired, like I think a great criticism that I've seen is that the Apple laptop look hasn't changed essentially, you know, really much at all since 2011, since the second generation MacBook Air came out. But if you ask somebody at Apple, they'd say, that's because we nailed it. And it's a pretty close to an ideal form. And so the challenge is if you could say, well, where's the innovation?

Look in the PC space. There are all these, you know, convertibles and you fold over the screen back. and all of that. And, you know, I'm pretty sure that they tried that stuff internally and they're like, meh, we don't like it. And they may not be wrong.

Like, they might have tried those things and it could have ended up like the touch bar. So I think the challenge with them is always, you know, can we ship this? And is it these days Apple's so huge too that the challenge is, can we ship this and will it sell in the millions? Because if it doesn't sell in the millions,

it's not worth their time. They have such an enormous audience now. And I think, I mean, honestly, I think that's the problem with the Vision Pro is, is, I would say, an amazing piece of hardware. It's one of the most amazing products that Apple has ever shipped. It's not ready for prime time. It feels very much like the early days of personal computers where it's like, what's it for? Nobody knows.

Let's just mess around with it, but isn't it cool? And like, but by the standards of modern Apple, it's just a failure because Apple doesn't do explorations of technology and they want to sell millions and millions of whatever it is they're selling. So I think the challenge for them right now is that I think they've got innovation in them, right? But like it is they are being

careful and conservative and I do wish they would experiment a little bit more than they do. I think that maybe too much stuff gets left in the lab. And I'll give you a great example. It was apparent to a lot of us that Apple should have been really embracing the smart home like 10 years ago.

And they just it sounds like maybe now they're trying to and that there are some products on the way that might actually enter that space. But it really felt like they could have done that 10, 15 years ago. The competition is still not very great in a lot of those categories. And why didn't they? And I think the answer is they were just real reluctant and too careful and didn't want to put in effort in something that might not give them, you know, sales in the millions.

And I think that's their biggest challenge. It's not the capabilities. We can see what they're capable of. I think it's more they're just a little too careful, a little too conservative. And honestly, a little too risk averse. Like, I think it would be okay if they released a bad product that was just a joke and that they said, never mind. And then they did it once. And, and I mean, maybe the iPhone error will be that.

Maybe they'll never do another iPhone air. But I'm really glad they did that product because it's so weird. It's really cool. I don't know if anybody wants to buy it. Yeah. But it is fun. And it's a product that shows Apple's strength at designing things, even if it doesn't get bought.

But to make it like the iPhone, the fourth iPhone, like it's not even then not a huge gamble for them to do it. For sure. Well, I think the smart home is such an interesting one in particular because I was thinking about this question in terms of comparing it to when Steve Jobs first comes back in the late 90s. And there's that run where they do the IMAG3, the IMAG4, and the IMAG5. And there are three successive devices, each one a hit completely different.

They redesigned the thing three times in a row, which is just completely unheard of now. Like, if Apple just completely changed the shape of the iPhone every year, I don't know what would happen. But that is like unthinkable in the world in which we live now. And there's something, I think, really cool and really exciting about that. But also the thing that was happening at the time is we were getting this massive change in display technology that was making all this new stuff possible. We were getting flat screen. And so you look at, oh, flat screen displays, there's new stuff we can do. and then it starts to get bigger

and you're like, well, we have to change the design. And there's nothing in like the laptop field as far as I can tell unless you think touch is the thing. And I think Apple continues to not think touches the thing. But unless you think touches the thing,

there just hasn't been a thing pushing that saying there is a new technology we need to rebuild around. The smart home strikes me as potentially full of those things. There are new standards. There are new use cases. There are whole new kinds of devices

that no one has invented yet. And like if I hate doing that here's what Steve Jobs would do thing. But like it seems like it is ripe for lots of new ideas in the same way that personal computing was in the 90s as all these changes were happening. So I think where I would grade, I would not grade Apple down for not reinventing the MacBook every year. Because I think everybody else tried those ideas that you're talking about. And they largely sucked. And so I'm sure Apple tried them too. And we're like, this isn't good enough.

and it never saw the light of day. I mean, also the reason, like, we were saying earlier that the IMAG4 is in some ways Apple's most amazing design product with the chrome arm and all of that. Like, why did they go to the same design that they have to this day, which is just like the G5 IMac was just like a flat screen with a computer attached to the back? And the answer is you couldn't build an arm

that could hold up a bigger display. And displays were exploding in size. And there was a moment, literally when they introduced the G4, they're like, we could have just stuck a computer on a back of a display, but we didn't do it. And then a year later, they did it. And it's because they couldn't make a big display

and have an arm that could hold it up. So they just gave up. And like, sometimes you're right. Tech change drives it. I do agree. I think in the smart home space, there's a lot of opportunity. I do wonder, we talk about Apple Silicon.

And the MacBook Neo is one example of this. But that is the fact that they've got these chips that are so powerful that they control. You know, sometimes I wonder if that, is a forcing function as well. Like if you can put a more powerful chip in the studio display than you can put in the MacBook Neo, it does make you start to wonder,

is everything a Mac now? And they haven't gone there yet, but like so many of the products, Apple ships, from Apple TV to iPads to their displays, could run MacOS if they wanted it to. And I know why they don't, but like, I wonder at some point if you just say, I don't know, maybe it should.

Like maybe we should try that because, The chips are so powerful that, like, what can't they do? Let's give it a go. But smart home strikes me as one of those areas where I think that they were just too, they were playing it too safe. Yeah, I agree. All right, I have a couple more for you here. The next one, this is slightly wonky here, is Apple, the integrator.

The Apple has always promised that the more you buy into its ecosystem, the better it will be that all of its products work best together, that the sort of the walled garden is a beautiful, happy, lovely place to be. So I guess Apple, the walled garden. is probably the way to phrase this. How do you think that's going? I mean, business-wise, I think it's going pretty well for them. They're making a lot of money.

And I would say the iPhone, right? It's like half of their business. And if you really consider that most of the services revenue comes from iPhone customers, it's more than half of their business by quite a lot. I think that most of what they're doing is about leveraging the power of the, or the success of the iPhone. And in that way, I think they have been successful. I think building a streaming service, building a services bundle for your iPhone users.

And the MacBook Neo marketing is a great example of the power of this because you just do the math. There are so many iPhones out there. That means that a majority, a strong majority of iPhone users don't use a Mac. And so their whole strategy is if you're in our ecosystem, it's better, right? Like if you use all our services on your iPhone and you, then you tie it to the Mac and they all just kind of work together. They're selling younger users, right? The potential users who are in school or just out of school. And they're saying, this is like your iPhone.

But it's a computer too. And it does all the stuff your iPhone does. And it talks to your iPhone. And there's that iPhone. You can bring up your iPhone screen on it and use your iPhone while. And the notifications come over and the live activities come over. And like, that's their priority. And I can't argue with it because it's a huge opportunity for them to reach,

to convert iPhone users into Mac users. And the Neo just steps it up further. So on that level, you know, I think it's going pretty well for them as an integrator. You know, how the, how the customers feel about it, I don't know, right? Like, you're, I think the Waldgarden thing has always been a little overstated. There are lots of, I mean, like I use lots of Google services. and I'm all Apple hardware and like it's fine. It's really not that big a deal.

Other than the app store being completely locked, so I can't run other people's software on my iPhone and my iPad, it can be a little overstated. But I think it's been really successful for them. And it goes back again to that whole, let's integrate everything together approach, that like really is Apple's thing that they've been doing since the 70s when most tech companies stop doing it.

Now more companies are doing that, right? Like we say Google do kind of lock down more of the Play Store and things like that. But everybody else is doing it because they see how much money Apple is making and they want to be like Apple. It's not, you know, that's how it ends up being.

So I think it's just in their DNA. But I appreciate that they're trying to leverage it to sell other products off of their biggest product. I get why they're doing it. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think there is a world in which I would like Apple to think really differently

about how it handles software and the trust that people should have in there. But it is, that stuff is so ingrained in how Apple thinks that I think it's just sort of unreasonable to expect that company to change, especially when it's making money absolutely hand over fist on all of this stuff.

I think they overdo it, I think, which is an understanding. I think they overdo it in part because the Apple culture that Steve Jobs brought back was an underdog culture. I mean, Steve believed, I can tell you,

I worked at Macworld, which was part of IDG for more than a decade. IDG had Macworld Expo and Macworld magazine. Steve Jobs hated us because he felt like all we were doing was being built on the great products that he created and the brands he created.

He hated that we used the name Mac in our name. And it was a window into Steve Jobs' worldview because I really do believe strongly that Steve Jobs believed that Apple created value and that everybody else was generated, we're kind of like parasites generating their value off of the greatness of what Apple created. And, you know, I get, especially when you're an underdog, why that's your perspective,

we're making all this great stuff, and then people just take it and they go build whole businesses, but our business is failing. But the fact is, they're not now. Now it comes across like bullying and like rent seeking. And it's part of their corporate culture that I do feel like they need to say, I know Steve wanted it this way, but it's not who we are now. it's not the right thing for us to do from the position of power we have in the market.

And that's the, you know, there's a difference between saying we want to protect our users with this curated app store and saying, actually, you can't link to the web because the web is terrifying. I mean, we all know why they did that. It's like, we want to keep you in our ecosystem and take a cut of everything.

That goes back to that attitude that we create, and they've done it in court statements. You see them say it. Yeah. In court, they say, we create the value. You know, and then everybody else is just we're cutting them in on some of the value. Like, developers don't, because let's be honest,

third-party developers made the iPhone. Like, without that, there were no apps on the original iPhone. Without the App Store, the App Store is not a victory of Apple alone. It is a victory by Apple in that they modified iTunes, the iTunes interface for selling music hastily to sell software instead, which has caused all sorts of distortions in the app market that we have to live with now. But, like, if the third-party app developers hadn't been there, what is the iPhone but like an empty box?

So for them, anyway, I guess that's their biggest cultural issue right now is that they are so powerful, the things that used to look like survival instinct now just look like bullying. Yeah, I totally agree. All right. And so actually, this brings me to my last one, which is I wrote down two here. I wrote down Apple, the Force for Good in the World, which is a thing that it declares itself to be and has for many years.

And then there's Apple, the super cool brand that people love. And I'm actually realizing as we're talking, I think those two things are very tied up together. So I think I want to just put it together as like Apple, Apple, the company, Apple the brand at this moment. And I think my read on it is that this is maybe as complicated an answer as it has ever been in Apple's history. But I'm curious how you think about it right now. I mean, it's a really mixed bag. I think Apple is a brand, I think is still really powerful because I think at the end of the day, all of us analyze. this stuff a lot. But for people out there who just are buying these products, it's, does Apple

make cool products? Do I love my Apple product? Really, it's like, do I love my iPhone? I think the answer is still yes. I think that Apple, like, people buy the hardware and they really love it and like, and they use it, and it does what they want. And the Apple brand still stands for something. But the most important thing it stands for is you buy the products and you like them and they're good. And I think they still do that. It is probably, if you were just to like, to have somebody make a list of companies that make great gadgets, I feel like the only company I could think of having approval rate as high as Apple might be like Nintendo. Nintendo, yeah. That's the only one I can think of. Yeah. I think, so we can get caught up in the other stuff and lose sight of what I think is the most

important part that, that, because it's so obvious and yet also, you know, we care about so many other things when we analyze this closely. I think your point, and this does come out of the Six Colors Report Card, where I asked this question about Apple, like, as a participant in the world, and they brought this on themselves, right? They always talk about how they've got values, and they're going to do carbon neutral 2030, and that they, Tim Cook is, you know, talking about Martin Luther King Holiday and all of these things. And, I mean, the truth is that it's kind of rough times for that now. Like, they, they still, I believe, that there are people at Apple who still believe all those things,

but they also live in a world where the president of the United States is opposed to a lot of those things. And so they just, in the end, look, I'll put it this way. I started covering Apple as a company in 1993. I went from being a fan to being a journalist. And I learned, and 90s Apple was kind of bad in so many different ways. I learned very quickly, like, all of the scales were lifted from my eyes about, like, this is just another company.

They're kind of a mess. A lot of these people will tell you things that aren't true. Their PR people are kind of bad. What I've discovered in the last five years is that so many people in my sphere, whether it's people in our audiences or even people doing the work, kind of didn't quite have that awakening that I did right away. And always sort of thought, like, well, Apple is special. They say they're different.

They are special. And I think a lot of people, and I'm not saying that this is, that they did anything wrong or that they're dumb or anything like that, because I understand why it happened this way. There is this special story about Apple. And it's easy to lose sight of the fact that they are a voracious, publicly traded, profit-driven corporation. And when it was going good and it was going good for a really long time, we didn't have to think about that because they're making hay while the sun shines.

And it's only been the last few years, although I would say it's, it's, It started with criticisms about them, working with the Chinese government, being in China, questions about the factories, questions about like participating in China and taking features out of the iPhone in China and replacing them with things that were approved by the Chinese government. That was the start of it. But now we've seen it especially with them jousting with the European Commission and most especially working with Donald Trump. And I feel like in some ways, other than the scale, it actually is the same. company. It's just that now push has come to shove. And in the end, no matter what they talk about their values, and I do believe they hold to those values, they're still talking about carbon 2030. They're opening, you know, their academy, manufacturing academy in Detroit that they opened,

I am sure would have been talked about in context of diversity four years ago. But now it's talked about in terms of USA manufacturing prowess. And that's just the political tea leaves, right? But the bottom line is they could have made a decision to say, you know what, we think Trump sucks. And we're going to tell them so. And we don't care what the tariffs are. We'll fight it in court. And it'll really hurt our bottom line, but we're going to do it because that's what's right. And we've always stood for what's right.

And the fact was that they looked at it. And they were like, but no, we make so much money from the iPhone. So let's not do that. And I can see why people would be surprised, but I wasn't surprised. Because in the end, it's just a company, it's just a corporation. it's got shareholders and a board and a CEO who's compensated based on stock performance. And like, so I think that's just the danger to keep in mind is, and that's not just Apple. It's literally any brand you love.

This is why I would never get a brand logo tattooed on my body, right? Because it's like, I just, I'm sorry, corporations aren't people, but they can still disappoint you. Yes. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the, the, only struggle I have with that explanation, all of which I think is true, is that Apple more than most companies would like you to believe none of those things apply to Apple, right? And it is, it is the line the company has sold for so many years that it is not just a company, that it is a set of values, that it is a belief system that, like people, people love Apple in ways that go

even beyond like a lifestyle brand because there is a belief that as a company, it stands for something. And I think the unfortunate realization that a lot of people have come to is that actually no company stands for anything other than being a company. I mean, my counter would be among the companies, among the giant corporations. Does Apple seem to have more of a culture, more of a focus on the customer and the product quality than other giant corporations? I think the answer is yes. Yeah. But what we saw, it's almost perfectly targeted, is in the end, do you go to the inauguration, do you go to the Oval Office and create a trophy to give to the president of the United States in exchange for not hurting your iPhone sales? And they, I mean, my theory is there was a moment when Trump flew to Saudi Arabia to meet MBS.

and Tim Cook was like, I can't do it. I can't meet the guy who, you know, ordered Jamal Khashoggi's assassination. I can't do it. And the whole trip, Trump just talked about how Tim Apple wasn't there. Yeah. And I think there was a moment where they're like, all right, I guess we got to go all in.

And I'm not trying to excuse it. I'm just saying that's a decision they made and they made it for money. And so, yeah, I think as a corporation, as a corporation, I think that they've got some pretty good values, which is why their brand equity is so high and why we like their products. But they are still a corporation. They still are. And every, unless you're a public benefit corporation or a nonprofit or something, like in the end where the rubber meets the road, sorry for all of these cliches, they're going to choose shareholder value and profit.

They just are. They're built. That's how they're built. That's how they're managed. And if the people in charge, people with their hands on the wheel won't do that, they will be replaced. Yep. Yeah. It is ultimately you end up being mad at capitalism.

And I think that is a perfectly fair thing to be, but that is you can't really. at the end of the road lay capitalism at the feet of Apple. Yeah, I mean, you could be mad at Tim Cook for making these decisions, but in the end, I think the question is, what's the boogeyman behind it all? And the fact is, it is a giant profit-seeking capitalist system. And that's it. Agreed.

So speaking of that, last one, let's look forward. This is not a report card. There's just a thing I'm curious about your thoughts on before we go. It is seeming increasingly likely that John Turnus is the next CEO of Apple. It seems increasingly likely that that's going to happen sometime in the relatively near future. John Turnus currently runs all of Apple's hardware stuff has been a rising start Apple for a long time. Do you have good or bad feelings

about the hypothetical Turnus era of Apple going forward? I have good feelings for a couple reasons. One is, as we detailed earlier, they've actually been killing it on the hardware side and the guy in charge of hardware. I don't know if you saw it in the report card, several people made the exact same joke, which is, hey, hardware's doing pretty good,

maybe that guy should be CEO. And I think, I mean, it's never that simple, and the CEO's job is to be the CEO of the whole company, but I do think they all come with their perspectives. Jobs had his, Cook has his, and you see that he views the world from a term of operations efficiency. John Ternis, seeing the world from the products, being a product guy with his hands on the products, I think not every Apple CEO needs to be a product person, but it's been a while since we had one, and having one again is probably good for Apple. I think what I said before also about, like, whenever

there's a new boss and there's a new leadership structure. It is also an opportunity to revisit everything you do. Like, everybody talks about Tim Cook, you know, and his great relationship with Steve Jobs, all true. But the fact is, day one when Tim Cook was CEO, he reestablished like all of their, all their donation matching and stuff. Like, because Steve just didn't care. And Tim was like, well, that's wrong.

We should do that. And like, so that's part of it, too, is I think it's just healthy that a lot of these execs that because they've been so. successful for so long. These people have been there for forever. And Ternus has been there a long time, but he's in his early 50s. It's not quite the same. I think a lot of people have stuck around. They love it. They've got a lot of money. They're type A personalities. But like, we're going to get that turnover. We're starting to see it. And I think that's super healthy for Apple right now because I do think they need to look at where they are versus where they were when Tim Cook took over.

It's a very different place. The company is vastly larger than they were then. There's more money. their more products. And so part of it is, Turner seems really sharp and having the hardware guy in charge for a while seems like a good idea. But also it's just like, I think they need change.

I think that it's been really static because they've been, a classic line, the football coach, John Madden used to say, winning is a great deodorant, right? All of the problems in your locker room

go away if you just keep winning. Apple's been winning for so long now that they can't really tell what stinks. And it would be nice to have somebody else who can come in and say, hey, everybody, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of stinks that I want to take care of now that I'm taken over. So I choose to be optimistic. Also, the iPhone is such a successful product. It's possible that something will

dethrone the smartphone in the next couple of decades. I'm not sure I believe that, but that's an annuity that allows them a lot of room to maneuver. I agree. And I have to say, a thing I think I am going to look back on my career about is that I was going to, I'm going to be wrong about how long it took to upend the smartphone. I have really come around to the idea that maybe the smartphone is going to be the thing for a very long time. I mean, it's not bad to have a supercomputer with a fast internet connection and a nice screen that you carry in your pocket, even if everything is mediated by AI. You're going to kind of want a central, some sort of central unit I can carry around. What could that be? I know. What an idea. All right. Jason, thank you.

so much for doing this. I know there's a lot of Apple 50 stuff going on, but I'm glad to glad to have you here to talk about. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really had a great time. All right. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about podcasts. Be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one.

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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So if you don't know Anil Dash, Anil has been around in the tech industry for a long time. He's been a blogger for a long time. He ran blogging companies for a long time. He ran a company called Glitch for a long time. He's one of those people who has just thought about the web

more than most people. He has built businesses on it. He has blogged about it. He just thinks about the web. And he has written in particular about podcasts, which are a very webby technology in ways that I think we'll get into in this conversation.

But he also wrote something very recently about Apple podcasts. And in particular, the way that Apple Podcasts is integrating video podcasts, which, by the way, I know a lot of you want, and we're thinking about it.

It turns out there are a bunch of reasons this is complicated, both technically, just like literally the provider we use to upload podcasts, but also the way that our business works for video podcasts. It turns out it's more complicated

than I realized, which I assumed would just be upload the video or everything will be fine. Turns out it doesn't work that way. And part of the reason it doesn't work that way is a lot of the stuff that Danielle is worried about. And he has written about how he's worried at video podcasts

and in particular, actually, the way Apple is doing it, has the potential to change the openness and excitingness of the podcast ecosystem for good. We wound up having a really fun conversation about what the web is and how platforms work and whether we can have all the things that we want all at the same time. Here's that conversation. I think you enjoy it.

Neil Dash, welcome to the first. Vergecast. Thank you so much for having me. I want to start with a blog post you wrote, I think, in 2024, about the phrase wherever you find your podcasts. And I just want you to explain, you do a good job of explaining in that post why that phrase is sort of a meaningful way of understanding the internet. I'll put the link in the show notes. Everybody should read the blog post, but can you just sort of summarize why you think that phrase is important? Because I think it sets up a lot of where we are now in a really useful way. Yeah, sure. It's a subtle thing. So at the end of every you know, podcasts you listen to, they say, go, go listen to us on whatever app you want.

And the thing that's easy to miss is that what it means is that you have a choice. And the reason you have a choice is because podcasts are based on an open standard. And this is different from almost everything else that we do because they're all proprietary, right? So when you watch somebody on, you know, on YouTube or TikTok, you're locked in. And you can't say, I'm going to watch that TikTok that I love on some other app. And, you know, podcasts were created, you know, more than 20 years ago just around this Open Standard RSS. And that was an intentional choice. It was a sort of very deliberate technical choice where people were saying at that time it started with text, just I'm going to subscribe to a feed in text.

And then it sort of evolved into including audio and then eventually video. And that opportunity of like wherever you want to listen to this, whatever app you want to use, still being true like 20 plus. years later is kind of shocking that they haven't stamped it out, although, of course, many have tried over the years. Yeah. And so I think that was something that I wanted to capture because I think even people who have like top-tier podcasts may not know that that was something that was like this radical choice and that had been preserved.

And then a lot of things fall out of that, right? So one of the reasons that, for example, podcasts don't have like surveillance-based advertising in them, that everybody has to say. hey, put in the sponsor code for buying a mattress or, you know, getting a website or whatever the things are that it's sponsors is because there isn't a tracking code because they're not tied to a specific platform. So then like all of a sudden, there's other things that are like the tropes of podcasts that you hear come from that and kind of the weird characteristics of podcasts. But that really good thing about that is you can take your ball and go home. So if you have a podcast

and you are like, I don't like, you know, the partnership that I have or the platform that I had it on or whatever, you can take that feed and you can take your audio clips and you can go somewhere else. And so anyway, it's just something that I think it's still, you know, it's a subtle thing technically, but culturally it's so huge. And we can imagine what if like a YouTuber could just take their videos and go to, you know, some other platform? Like, how different would the whole internet be? I think the fact that you could.

name another platform is about to become very important in this conversation as we talk about video. But I was thinking about why podcasting in particular has endured this way. And it strikes me as either podcasting was so early that it was set up on this infrastructure that became eventually fairly hard to change. Right. Like you said, it started on RSS, which is like a foundational early internet technology. It's the reason RSS readers grew up. Like the way that feeds work on the internet has been a remarkably stable thing for a very long time. The flip side is also that nobody made any money on podcasts for a really long time. And part of me wonders if maybe that's the reason, that actually we sort of skipped podcasts and started doing video.

And so everybody figured out how to make money doing video and then kind of went, oh, podcasts. What if we did podcasts? And so maybe if what we're seeing now is the sort of inevitable path toward all of this stuff being run out of standards and into platforms, it's just that it took so long because everybody did it with the video first. Yeah, explicitly saw. Is it one of those things or the other thing? Yeah, the reason that podcast didn't get captured was they were a loser. And I mean, really.

And so rude, but fair. I mean, you know, having had a front row seat to it, what had happened was at first, everybody got excited. And, you know, so it was like a classic like nerd battle, like one of those like, you know, VHS versus or, you know, beta kind of things where everybody was like there's going to be a format war. we're going to choose what's the best spec and all that kind of stuff. And so everybody rushed in when the iPod was ascendant. And this is why they got named podcast, like after the iPod. And of course, the geeks were like, why are you tying it to Apple's format? All this kinds of things.

And then everybody realized there's no money in this initially. And like a little bit of trivia was one of the players in the early sort of goal rush around podcasting was called Odeo, which Ev Williams has started and tried to make a a directory or, you know, a marketplace for podcasts and failed, and that company pivoted to become Twitter. That's how sort of definitively the podcasting market had not had any way of making money. And so they pivoted into not making money with Twitter, right? So I was going to say, deciding that there's more money in Twitter is like the most damning thing you could ever say about podcasts. Right, exactly. Like that's, that's how little money there is in podcast.

But actually, you know, sort of jokes aside was that they sort of set the tone. of people being like, man, that is radioactive. Like, don't go over there. That's something where you are going to, if that guy can't make money here, nobody can't. And then around the same time as, as Odeo was pivoting, Apple had added podcasting to iTunes. And people are like, man, that's a category killer too. Like, if they bundled it in, you're not going to compete with the guys who made the, you know, the platform who made the actual, you know, the iPod that everybody's got.

And so it just seemed like they had, you know, kind of, you know, killed it before. been taken off in terms of revenues. And it wasn't really until, you know, serial comes out and has that sort of moment of, like, podcasts are back, which is like the better part of a decade later, that people are like, oh, that thing's still around. Like, it still works. And that's when, you know, the format returns. Totally.

So, and then, you know, sort of next to that, you have the growth of video, which from the beginning is sort of relentlessly platform. And I have, this is going to be sort of the last old head internet guy question I have for you, at least for a minute here. But I think going back to sort of the technical underpinnings of all this, right? We built so much of podcasting on RSS, this open technology that like you say, is just a feed you can make, right? Like you say at one point in your blog post that one of the beautiful things about podcasting is you can just put a bunch of MP3s on your website and other people can go listen to them in their podcast app. And there is something hugely powerful and rare about that fact that literally no one else is in control. I can give you a link to a thing and you can listen to it anywhere you want.

That is like, I foundationally believe that is how the internet is supposed to work. And video has never, ever, ever, ever been like that. No. Why not? It's hard. It's hard. To sort of the early days of this, right? And there is a sort of immediate like YouTube takes off and becomes the thing.

But did we not do video RSS for like technical and bandwidth reasons? Why has there never even been this race to begin with with video? So it's really hard. I mean, the short answer is video is really, really hard, right? So, you know, I will go full old-handed. I've heard it. But, you know, 25 years ago, I was in the music biz doing promo for music videos online. And the challenge we had was at that time, pre- YouTube, you had.

multiple formats. You had real player, Windows Media player, QuickTime player. And, you know, so you had multiple formats. People had to have a player on their device. You had to output it in all those different formats. And of course, you would have a clip that was like 10 seconds long. It took an hour to download or whatever it was, right? So terrible experience all around. And, you know, you could imagine things would get faster. You could imagine that the quality would go up. You couldn't imagine that Apple would ever let you put it in a format that would also work on real player that would also work on Windows player, right? So there's this whole thing around like standardization where there's no incentives to ever have things that or operate, right? And video in particular was a thing

that was so controlled by big media, right? Like this is the, you know, the, whether it's the movie studios or the record labels, they're like, this is bread and butter. We know this content's really, really valuable. Whereas like some dude talking into a mic and making an MP3, it's not music. It's just talking. Like that, that, you know, if you squint, it kind of resembles talk radio, but it doesn't even have a name as a format yet. And so nobody had any reason to be proprietary about it and try to grab it, you know, because it wasn't called talk radio. It was called podcasting. And so they didn't have any sense of like, we got to own that.

So I think a big part was just the sense of you're encroaching on the most lucrative media in the world when you put up video. And so like that combination of like technically very hard and content wise, incredibly valuable. And so the thing that makes YouTube possible a couple of years later is Macromedia and later Adobe make Flash and Flash let's you stream videos. And that technically makes it possible, but it's still incredibly expensive. And so for the first three, four years of YouTube, the conventional wisdom is they will never make money. It's impossibly expensive. streaming video is so bandwidth intensive. They're just losing money hand over fist,

and they're going to have to be bought by Google in order to subsidize them because only Google can get bandwidth even close enough to save them. And it's funny too because there's a couple of points in the inflection of sort of the internet where people are like, that'll never work. So, okay, so all these things are sort of running directly at each other,

like literally right this minute. Right now. And I think all the technical problems you just described about video are solved, right? And I think to the extent that we just invented a completely different culture

around video, that culture is now coming for audio in a huge way. And it is coming for these open standards. And you wrote a thing, I think very recently, about Apple Podcasts in particular. And I'm curious why Apple Podcasts

in particular is alarming to you. Because what we've seen, right, like part of the reason I wanted to do this with you is I am deeply conflicted about video podcasts. Like we have spent a lot of time. We think a lot about YouTube for the Vergecast now in a way that both makes perfect sense to me.

And is also frankly kind of a bummer in a lot of cases. Like, because what YouTube wants from you is very different, I think, from what makes a great podcast in my world. And trying to smash those two things together has been really interesting but really hard. And then on the other side, we get emails from people constantly who are like, why isn't the video podcast on Spotify? And there's some interesting straightforward technical issues there. Like we use a hosting service called Megaphone that actually makes that really hard and largely doesn't work and it's all very stupid

even though it's on by Spotify. But you picked Apple Podcasts in particular and then the news here is recently Apple Podcasts decided that they're going to start supporting video podcast natively inside the thing. This is obviously a big deal because Apple Podcast is a big deal. But it seems like something about

the way Apple is doing this rubbed you the wrong way. What is it about that? Yeah. So without getting too nerdy, what happened? So the high level is just that Apple is seeing people watching more and more podcasts on YouTube

and obviously Netflix is trying to encroach and actually wholesale move podcasts to Netflix. And so because of that threat, Apple's saying we want people watching podcasts in the Apple Podcasts app. In doing so, what Apple has said, and they have good reasons for this technically, if they just said keep doing podcasts the way you always have, but put video files on your own servers,

that would be very hard. Technically, that would probably be a bad experience for people because your iPhone would be downloading some, you know, eight gigabyte or eight terabyte, you know, video file to your phone. And that would be pretty impossible. And also, I suppose it is still true that, like, Google can support bandwidth costs much more easily than I can. Yes, exactly.

Even to the extent that it is possible, it's still true, that it would cost a lot of money for someone to host their own pretty successful video podcast. That is still a real thing. Yes. And also, you know, tons of people subscribe to stuff that they don't watch. And so the idea of like, just in case I'm going to download this like, you know, 4K video for an hour that I may or may not watch or like, you know, that my kids got, not going to watch that, you know, that kid's podcast and it's just on my phone, taking up space or whatever. Like that stuff is based on assumptions for audio that are completely different for video. So, you know, reasonably Apple said we're going to change to a more streaming oriented spec for video podcasts. That's completely reasonable. The challenge is when they did that, they said you have to work with one of a limited set of providers, partners that we have worked with that we've selected if you want to do a video podcast.

Now, when they do that, what they've done is they picked a couple of winners. Like if you want to do a video podcast, you have to sign up for one of these folks. You have to pay them. You have to agree to their terms of service. You have to host your video with them. And I think there were like seven or eight of them. There wasn't a ton. It wasn't like 50 and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't one, but it was a very small number.

And also like, I don't know what their content standards are. I don't know what their costs are. What I do know is how that plays out. Like every time we've had that kind of situation in the past, a couple really clear patterns happen. First of all, they start to buy each other up. So you'll have two or three in a couple of years. The prices will go up. That's sort of classic, you know, insidification path.

Right. but also one or two of them will get bought out by Spotify. And you'll start to have them be like, well, why did their competitor buy this platform? Well, there's only one reason why, because they either want to shut them down or they want to make it so that your content appears on Spotify by default. And the sort of same market dynamics that we've seen play out in all the other closed markets will start to play out these infrastructure providers. Or you will get something like the cloud providers like Amazon or Google will start to say, oh, no, that's something we need to own and they'll jack up the prices, make it worse, use a proprietary video format. And this is one of the things where this is getting into the weeds, but like for many

years, Apple and Google and even Mozilla had these battles about like what video format should browser support. And users unbeknownst, like we're in the middle of spending years and years of a format war about video, which like users sort of suffered from. So that's the kind of thing we're like, we're on that path right now on podcasts. And the idea of like, all of a sudden a creator has to care about the technical specs of what video format they're giving to what user based on what phone they're on. And they're going to have to pay extra depending on which of their users is like on a Samsung versus on an iPhone. All that's coming like 100%. And the idea of like, well, we don't want you talking about this topic because we are hosting your video in this jurisdiction.

that's 100% coming. And I think Apple probably didn't really realize they're opening that Pandora's box. They were like, well, video's hard, we need a streaming provider, this is how people stream video. I think, you know, there's probably a generation of product managers there who were not even, you know, out of grade school when RSS was created, you know, reasonably. And so they don't know, you know, the power of open standards. And this is true for across the industry. Most of the product managers there, if they're, you know, like I said, they were in kindergarten. garden when we were working on this stuff. And so nobody ever told them, this is why open standards

matter. And it's hard to, you know, look up this super arcane technical knowledge. And so they're just like, well, we'll just make it work like everything else, not realizing that's how things got sort of captured and shouldified. And so I think they made what they thought was a reasonable decision because it's how everything else works. And I think if they don't change it, the risk is every video creator of podcasts is going to, in like 18 months, like very, very quickly, be stuck with, you know, not just much higher costs, but all of a sudden this whole set of constraints on the content they're creating, on the ways they can distribute. And so much of the magic of what made podcast amazing is going to be gone. And think about the fact that nobody spends all day long

complaining about the podcast algorithm is silencing me. I'm a martyr because Apple won't promote my podcast. They're, you know, they're just, you know, censoring all my content and they won't promote me. And the reason that they're not trying to game the refs and say, like, I need to get promoted by the Google podcast app is because there isn't an algorithm. It's just what you can do with your content. All that stuff. goes away if this stuff changes. Well, so, okay, let me just play devil's advocate here. And there's a bunch of things going on there.

I think the algorithm piece of it is, I think, to me, the most sort of morally complicated because the flip side of everything you just said, and I agree with everything you just said, but the flip side of everything you just said is most people's podcasts never get found by anybody. Yeah. And I think many people sort of behavior suggests that people are happier pulling the slot machine than leaving the casino. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. And you can feel about that however you want, and I think people are right to feel lots of ways about that. But the reason everybody goes on TikTok is like, well, this is the platform that gives me a real shot at being seen by somebody. And there's value in that. And then I wonder if I'm working on this project at Apple, even if I've been there since the beginning,

and I think a thing you say in your first piece from a couple of years ago is that Apple actually deserves a lot of credit for the way. that this stuff stayed open because it embraced RSS. And because Apple, which was at the time probably the company with the most juice to close the system if it wanted to explicitly decided not to. 100%. And embraced RSS and embraced open standards. And that was a powerful, important decision. Even the people who may have been there for that decision and are there making this one might have to look at this and say, okay, well, this is not the world we live in.

We don't have the juice to win this fight by ourselves. In fact, choosing a bunch of providers is better than most of the alternatives, which force you to pick Spotify specifically and force you to pick YouTube specifically and force you to play every individual platform game. At least what we can do is offer a bunch of providers and in theory instill some kind of competition. It's still impractical for people to do this for themselves. So even if we say RSS is the future, like that comes with its own cost. So if I'm trying to figure this out for Apple,

I'm kind of stuck at this position of like, what is the better option here? Yeah, their argument will be we're more open, right? We're still more open than the other things because we give you a choice of a bunch of different providers and if you don't like the choices the one makes, you've got these other ones. And I get it.

I understand that argument and they will say it's not like, to your point, the sort of vertical integration that a YouTube has where you have to use their stack the whole way down. Like if you want to upload something, you've got to use their tools. I think there should be a sort of, you know, creator beware option with Apple. It's like if you're willing to take on the risk and the cost, you should be able to choose open the whole way down the stack. And I think part of that is because sort of more than ever, if, you know, how long until Brendan Carr decides to be a dummy with one of these providers of content. posting. So soon, Anil, so soon. You know what I mean? Like somebody just needs to explain to him. Did you know there's video over here? Right? And he's going to be like, I don't know what it is, but I know I want to poke my nose in it. People watch Jimmy Kimmel there. He'll be there. And sort of jokes aside, you know, like this is a thing that like, we're seeing consolidation amongst the people that provide video infrastructure outside of the YouTube world and the video world. So there used to be these providers that independent video services go to.

So like, you know, the indie providers like, I like, you know, drop out the comedy service or like Adam Savage has his tested service. And he's on YouTube, but like people, or like Martha Stewart, that's a good example. She's got her own video service. And if you make one of those standalone services, you go to providers like Vimeo or Bright Cove. There's all these little companies. And if I look at, you know, a Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel, whoever, when they go off the air and they say, I'm going to strike out on my own, what they would. probably do is try to do something like their own, you know, Daily Wire or their own Martha Stewart video or their own dropout comedy thing or whatever, right?

Sure. The question I have is like, how do they set up shop and have control over their own content and not be under the thumb of, you know, whether that's a government regulator or distribution algorithms or whatever it is and how many other platform choices they're going to have? Right now, that's the importance of podcast to me. Yeah. is that you can put out an audio podcast, and it is as close to being free in the way the Internet's supposed to be free,

you know, as you can be. And that starts to constrict with video, even though that's the format that people want. People want video. And there is this really old-fashioned. This is, I know if we're getting into old-head stuff, but there's this really old-fashioned idea we had on the Internet, like when it was first really taking off in the 90s,

of like the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. And this is this phrase people love to say, right? And I'm not an idealist about that era or the rhetoric of it. But I did love that conceptualization of this of like you have alternatives that you can route around platforms that are closed or platforms that are stopping your content for being distributed. And podcasting is still one of those things. So if, you know, if Brendan Carr is like, I don't want you to access that podcast, you can

take your ball and go home. You can go to another web host. And that would be true for video if Apple just slightly opened up. They could still have the default be all of their partners. But if they said we have one fallback that is you can still do it the old fashioned way. You can put a video file on your server if you're willing

to eat the cost and take the risk. Well, yeah, and I wonder, having seen this play out a bunch, if you see any reason for optimism here, because what I see happening, right, and go back to what video was. You talked about this, right? Like everybody decided kind of post serial, but especially a few years after serial, kind of the mid-20 teens, everybody decided there's money to be made here.

And then spent a bunch of money. Spotify spent all the money it had acquiring a bunch of podcasts and buying a bunch of podcast technology and buying a bunch of podcasting companies. And then you look around and you say, okay, we have to figure out how to make money off of this. And the simplest way to make money off of it is to close it off. And so they have they have made exclusive deals. And in funny ways, like, Joe Rogan is actually a really interesting example here that they made an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan where he left other platforms and his audience on podcasts was so unwilling to switch platforms that they undid that decision. Like what a giant win for the opening for the openness of podcasts. Yeah.

Incredibly important. But with video, it has become easier and easier and easier to close these things off, right? And we've had the debate on this show of like our Netflix podcast, even podcasts anymore because there are just Netflix shows. Yeah. Where one ends and the other begins, I think, is largely sort of immaterial, but is also the inexorable change that appears to be happening. And what I find myself wondering as we go through all of this is, is there even a better option? And if there is a better option, is there even a plausible path to that better option? The tide can turn at any time on any of these things.

This is technology. Nothing is ever settled, you know? Totally. Like the reason, you know, entails Andy Grove all of a sudden, like, stay paranoid was because these things are never. settled. And so that that lets me remain hopeful despite, you know, when things go wrong. But, but I think the reason that they're always able to close things up for a while is because, you know, platform strategy works and, you know, network strategy works. They're able to sort of say, like, people want to be where their friends are. People want to be where the good content is. We can

always use that as bait to bring you in. But I think a really good example is, is Rogan, right? You can spend you know, whatever it was, a quarter of a billion dollars. And people are like, yeah, but I have a habit. And I'm not changing apps and I'm not changing platforms and, you know, the hell with you. And I think that's like, can't underestimate laziness. Can't underestimate habit, you know, and ritual. And also just the attachment people have to like the way that they consume stuff is, is almost part of their identity. And, you know, if that's something you can tap into that sense of community and identity, you know, you can have something pretty powerful happen. So, you know, all that's to say,

I don't think it's impossible that we could keep things open. And in this case, like, I don't think it's impossible that we could convince Apple to say, make a fallback option that is open. I don't think that they have any economic incentive to just align with a couple of closed providers. I think they can say the default is you do this thing because that's how things work these days.

And then have a little fallback option where they're like, look, if you check a box and say, say, I know I'm taking on a risk and it might be more expensive. Okay, we'll let you do this thing, especially because these days they're getting beaten up left, right, and center in the EU about, you know, we've got to put a charger in the box or we've got to, you know, support USBC. I mean, God, they shipped a machine that was affordable and repairable. Like, anything's possible these days. You know, so, like, what a world. So, so, you know, I think that's it. It's like you have, culture change happens. I mean, again, regulators. Like, it's not impossible that regulators outside the

U.S. could say we want an open media option. And so I think that's the kind of stuff where like, I don't think, you know, we talk about the Fediverse. I don't think the Fediverse wins on the merits of its technical superiority. It's not technically superior. It's just, it's just better in some ways. But I think it's interesting that a lot of EU, you know, governments want to use Fediverse technologies. And so I think, you know, I think of Fediverse large, or it's like blue sky in addition to, you know, the Mastod and stuff and whatever. That stuff I see like a ton of, you know, a ton of developers are really interested in the technologies underlying like blue sky right now, like ATProtto.

That stuff, you're like plug that into video. I think just because it enables interesting technologies, people will build on it. So then you don't have to be like, hey, I'm convincing a normal user. Hey, you have to understand why this technology is good. We didn't win on podcasts being open because we told people they were open. It won when there started being good content. And importantly, that you could just get it anywhere, right? Like if if serial had only been in the NPR app, serial would have hit really differently.

Right. And I think there's like there's all these little turns to it that like I made a thing. You want to listen to it. Neither of us have to ask any other questions about any other technical underpinnings of anything. And our both of our goals are accomplishable. And that there's kind of nothing else on the internet that works that way anymore. But instead it was wherever you have your podcasts. Yeah, that is like the pure, beautiful thing about podcasts that it feels like it's going away and feels like it is untenable.

And I'm glad to hear you don't think either of those things has to be that way. You know, and I think the reason that it is possible again is nobody has that locus of power right now. Like things are shifting really quickly. I'm hoping that's enough. But, you know, it's got to be the combination of all those things. It's the right thing to do. it's an interesting technical problem. You enable a lot of opportunity.

And then somebody just has to make some really compelling content. And if you line all those things up, it's not impossible. So I like to hear it. All right, Anil, thank you for doing this. We're going to have you back. We got lots more to talk about it. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you being here.

All right, we've got to take one more break. And then we're going to do a question from the podcast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break, when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something.

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All right, we're back. Let's take a question for the Vergecast hotline. As always, the email is Vergecast at the verge.com. The number is 866 Verge 1-1. The Virgist Allison Johnson is here for this one. Hi, Allison. Hello. So every once in a while I get a question from people that is like,

I want to do a weird gadget thing. What do you think? And I feel like you are now the person that I have to. bring in to do weird gadget questions with me. Yeah. And this week we have one that is near and dear to both of our hearts, which is person who wants to use Apple Watch to run their whole life. Oh, I love it.

All right, let me just play the question, and then we can get into it. Hey, David. Hi, the verge. I've been listening to you sort of talk about your sort of ideal flip phone, which is sort of like the very small screen on the front and then a regular phone on the inside. And I'm like thinking to myself, boy, the form factor I would really enjoy as like, I guess a suite of technology products would be, I don't want a phone at all. The thing I want is like maybe the, an extra big Apple watch and like an iPad mini and they are cellularly connected and I don't want a phone.

I make so little phone calls that for the ones I do, I could very easily make them via my Apple watch, especially in conjunction with like an AirPods. And then like, you know, if I really want to like do reminders or look at a quick note or even get like TPS directions, I'm like the Apple watch is actually kind of opaque at this, at least enough for me to be like,

I could see myself being sort of like a weird watch. person. And then I want a nice, you know, big thing for looking at, you know, YouTube or reading articles or, you know, like a regular thing. But importantly, that device needs to be able to be taken outside onto, you know, a trainer, a subway or whatever. And I sort of feel like I'm boxed into this phone form factor. And even the lifestyle I want requires me to own an iPhone because of just how Apple watches work. I don't know. This is just a thing I was thinking about. I was like if I could just have like a little a little phone I could wear and then a big thing for me to look at the internet on while I'm outside, I think I would be very happy. Anyway, that's just my thought. Alison, I don't feel like I need to explain to you why. A, I love this question and B, I brought it to you. Tell me how this makes you feel. It makes me feel seen. deeply appreciate it. Yeah, I feel myself going on this ride along where I'm like, I have had all

of these thoughts, you know, in the same order. You're like, the Apple Watch does so much and it does so many of the like basic phone communication things I need it to. Like, why phone? Can I get rid of phone? And then you go through like, no, I want to look at YouTube on the train sometimes. I think this is why I have gravitated toward the book style foldable as opposed to the flip phone because the flip phones in particular, and I'm getting off on a tangent here, but I think the outer screen of a flip phone, there's a big Venn diagram with a wooden Apple watch or a smart watch. a smart watch will do. And if you have a smart watch, it makes the value proposition of the flip phone like a little bit smaller, I think.

So you go all the way to like, I have an iPad that I just pull out and use and do little games and stuff on the train. Yeah, I think I'm on board and I think all we need is the foldable eye. iPhone and we're off to the race is. Okay. So here's the problem. Okay. Is what you just described and what our caller also just described is a phone. I want a thing that does a bunch of stuff that also goes in my pocket and I can take it outside. That's called a phone.

We have that. Yes. And I think to me there is like there is something underneath this desire that you and I, and I think increasingly lots of other people share, right? That is like, I think what we want is phone and I think we have done fun. phone wrong. And I think I'm increasingly coming around to like maybe actually what we do is we need to completely tear down everything about the way that our phones work that maybe this thing is the correct device at the correct size that works the wrong way. And that actually that's the thing

we need to start thinking about. But at any case, in this point, my specific thing for you is you wrote a piece, I think, a little less than a year ago, where you actually tried to get rid of your phone and live the full Apple Watch lifestyle. What were the... the things that made that fall apart for you? Like what, what specifically about the Apple Watch didn't work in that for you? Um, it, you know, it worked like 75%, I would say. I was surprised that how, yeah, at how well I was able to kind of get around. But where I had trouble with it is, um, and maybe this is an indictment of like, uh, my mental state. But I use my phone to kind of like alleviate my anxiety around like, I'm on the bus and I'm like, oh, do I get off at this stop or that

stop? And the phone is always there to like just real, real quick check. I had moments of discomfort where I was like, I need to just pick one and like I need to pick this stop and live with the consequences. Stuff like that. I had trouble with like Uber was one that stuck out. And I don't, it's not that you need an Uber. I don't need an Uber. I don't need a. Uber very often, but I got into a situation where I did want to call an Uber, and it's not easy with an Apple Watch. I think you can, there's like a phone number you can call ahead and schedule in Uber, but not that kind of like real time, just get an Uber. So little edge cases like that, where I just had enough discomfort that I was like,

I would leave the house for, you know, go on a walk or go to the coffee shop with a book or something and feel like 100% fine with a cellular Apple Watch. But for like going full in, yeah, it just didn't quite work for me. And maybe it's my anxiety, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. I found the Apple Watch to be really useful for being Dillard. like solving my sort of what if an emergency happens problem, which is I think a thing we all

sort of lie to ourselves about our phone, right? And it's like, I felt this even when I started trying to charge my phone outside of my bedroom. It's like, well, what if somebody calls? And it's like, David, no one has ever called. Like, never ever in my life have I received a call at 2am that was important to me. Just has never happened. But you know, what if, right? And this is like, the Apple Watch solves that. That is like, if something needs to reach me, I have enough that it can, right? So I can go on a walk or leave the house or go to the coffee shop, knowing that if something catastrophic happens, I am reachable. And that is like a weird psychological problem that we should all probably get over, but is a real thing that happens. It is then that turn into,

like, I can accomplish everything I might need to accomplish that I just, I feel like, and I went and reread your Apple Watch piece this morning. And there's a bunch of that in there that is just like, there's all these little things that like I might need to do. And sometimes I need to do. I don't need to do every day, but sometimes I genuinely do need to. and I just can't. And like, Slack was one of the examples that you gave. And it's like sometimes it's great to not get Slack notifications while I'm out. Sometimes I need to.

And the phone is like a useful version of that thing. But here's my last question for you. And this is, you and I have argued about flip phones and fold phones many times. And a thing you just said I find very compelling about foldable phones, which is that maybe a foldable phone is big enough that it, like, it pushes into like iPad-ish. territory and lets the Apple Watch creep into the phone territory, that it's like if I can do 75% of my phone stuff with my Apple Watch and then I have this bigger device for when I need to do the other 25%, but then it also does tablet stuff, that could be very exciting. So is like,

is there a world in which Apple Watch and folding iPhone is kind of the right combination? I am so ready for that world. I like, I think it could be. I mean, The more I can leave my phone in my bag and not touch it is kind of a win. So you've got the Apple Watch for that. And then, yeah, when you do need it, you can take the thing out. Maybe you've got your little tiny folding keyboard and you can do little tablet things and write a blog on the inner screen. That's where I think, you know, the form factor of the book style foldable when they are super thin. light and it doesn't, it doesn't feel like you're paying a penalty for carrying it. You're like,

well, this is about the size and shape of a phone I was going to carry. Anyway, it just happens to unfold and be a tablet when you do that. But also, like, if two out of three things I need to do, I don't have to pull that phone out of my pocket for, that feels like a victory. It's a win. Yeah. The more jobs we can, like, fire our phone from, I think, or like kind of outsource to those the other devices or you've got your AirPods in and you tell Siri to text your husband you're on your way home and that kind of thing. Yeah. I think it's really fun to think about

we should find a way to graph this at some point that it's like, you know, we talk about this. Like you and I, I think, are both of the age where we have phone tasks and we have computer tasks. Yes. There's a set of things that I will not do on my phone. Oh, yeah. For no reason.

Like, I'll give you an example. I bought a treadmill this weekend. And I did all of the work to get that treadmill on my phone and then I went to my computer to buy it. I just can't. The idea of spending, it was like $1,000. The idea of spending $1,000 on my phone just feels preposterous. Can't do it.

Yeah, chaotic. But so if you think about it, like if you go through sort of the whole spectrum of tasks, right? And I think everybody solves them in very different ways. But I think for most people, it's like big swath of phone tasks, small to big swath of computer tasks. And it's like, what if actually you can cover most or all of that spectrum with a watch and a foldable phone? is, I think, a fascinating way of thinking about this. But we should figure out a way to, like, have people chart this spectrum for themselves because I feel like everybody would be different, and I find it totally fascinating.

Yeah, yeah. I want, like, a quiz or something, and you can get your animal or your style, you know, match to you. All right, Allison, thank you, as always. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Allison and Anil and Jason for being here. and thank you, as always, for watching and listening.

Like I said at the top, if you haven't yet done the Apple rankings, please go do so. It's super fun. You can do it on your phone. You can do it on your computer. Theverge.com slash Apple 50. It'll let you just rank forever. I think there's like over a thousand combinations of products

that makes you pick between. It is a delightful way to kill a couple of hours and also cause yourself several existential crises in the process. Go read all of our Apple 50 coverage, lots of fun stuff on the site. This whole thing has been really fun to put together because you can actually like tell a lot of story of the tech industry through 50 years of Apple coverage.

Really fun. Go check out all of it. The Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Neil and I'll be back on Friday to litigate the Apple 50 rankings. They close on Thursday. We will be here to debate whether you all got it right and to compare it to our own rankings. It's going to be a blast.

We've also got a lot of news to get to. It's going to be a big show on Friday. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.