The Vergecast - Apple's best product ever

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

We love a ranking here on The Vergecast, and it’s time for the hardest one yet: David and Nilay compare notes on the 50 best products Apple has ever made, and see how their answers stack up to the many, many voters on The Verge this week. Before that, though, it’s time for a bit of AI news — surprise, it’s enterprise software! — and the comeback of the Hype Desk. After all that, and after the rankings, we do a round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, talk about the fediverse, and repurpose our old iMacs. Vote for The Vergecast in the Webby Awards! A vote for The Vergecast is a vote that Brendan Carr is a dummy, that buttons are good, and that party speakers rule the world. Voting is open until April 16.  ⁠https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/shows/technology⁠ Further reading: ⁠OpenAI’s big numbers: $122 billion funding round, 900 million weekly ChatGPT users. ⁠ ⁠Why OpenAI killed Sora ⁠ ⁠I think Google is taking a couple digs at OpenAI about Sora. ⁠ ⁠Apple’s third-party Siri Extensions could lead to an AI App Store. ⁠ ⁠Microsoft’s new ‘superintelligence’ game plan is all about business⁠ ⁠OpenAI acquires TBPN | OpenAI⁠ ⁠Apple turns 50: celebrating five decades of the tech giant ⁠ ⁠Everything is iPhone now ⁠ ⁠Steve Jobs and the greatest run of products in tech history ⁠ ⁠How the invention of QuickTime changed computers forever ⁠ ⁠The triumphs and failures of Apple without Steve Jobs ⁠ ⁠The Apple product that really changed the industry: the MacBook Air ⁠ ⁠Apple at 50: a visual history ⁠ ⁠The origin story of Apple’s long-running relationship with Foxconn ⁠ ⁠Apple’s long, bitter App Store antitrust war ⁠ ⁠Snazzy Labs' iMac - Studio Display Mod Guide⁠ ⁠Flipboard Surf launches social websites combining Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and more⁠ ⁠These Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke ⁠ ⁠Today is the final day to save up to $150 on a PS5 before the price goes up ⁠ ⁠Sony temporarily suspends memory card sales due to shortages ⁠ ⁠The White House has an app now, and Trump wants you to report people to ICE on it ⁠ ⁠What’s inside the White House app? ⁠ 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

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in 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 Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Virgast, the flagship podcast of the Webby Awards. We are once again nominated for the Webby Award for Best Technology Podcasts.

Please vote for the Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neilie Patel is here. Hi, Eli. Can we win the awarder for the flagship podcast? Isn't that some self-dealing? I think that's like a separate award. It's like the lifetime achievement where they're just like they're going to invent a new one where they're just like you win podcasts.

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

We have a sort of unusual show that we're going to do today. Most of what we're going to spend our time doing today is talking about our rankings of the best Apple products ever. So lots and lots of people have been on our site all week ranking Apple products. We made a lot of fun of Travis for trying to explain how the ranking system worked, where you pit two things against each other, and it would make this live. It's a chess system-based. ranking. It's a whole thing. It worked awesome. You did. We ended up getting 1.6 million votes. And the best part of this is neither you nor I

knows how it turned out. You didn't peek at the rankings, did you? The one thing I do know is that there was a bot attack attempting to push iTunes to number one. Which is so funny. Graham on our team, shout out to Graham, who did truly heroic work to make this happen, was like emotionally broken by the attempt to automate iTunes to the top of the list. Why iTunes? I do. I do. I do. want to say shout out to the person who obviously vibe coded a bot attack to push iTunes to number one, but we caught you. Yeah. You didn't get really something. That's the

one thing I know is that iTunes is not number one, even though someone tried very hard to make iTunes number one. Yeah. But anyway, so we're going to spend a much time on that at the end of the show. We also have a new segment that we've been talking about in piloting for a while. Very excited to get that on the show. We have

a little bit of housekeeping that we just need to do here right up top, and then we're going to talk about some news. The two bits of housekeeping are, one, again, vote for us in the Webby Awards. Voting is live for like just shy of two more weeks as you're hearing this. I think you can only vote for us once. So just go do it now. Take your iTunes spot.

I didn't even finish the sentence. Yeah. Just take your iTunes spot. That's all I said. If you know how to vibe code a thing that will make us win all of the awards, including the ones we're not nominated for. The Grammys. I will take them.

So yeah, go vote. We'll put the link in the show notes. The thing number two, and I'm actually more excited. excited about this is you and I and the Vergecast as a whole, we're hosting a movie night at the end of April. And I say hosting in the loosest possible way. We've just spent a lot of time, like, looking for reasons to hang out with Vergecast people. Like, every time we do one of these lives things at CES and elsewhere, the fun is just all being together to do stuff. And we're just going to come up with more ways to do that. So if you're going to be in New York on Monday,

April 27th, we're going to be at the IFC Center at 7 p.m. watching sneakers. It's going to be awesome. Sneakers, by the way, you and I, without talking, independently had sneakers as our number one movie choice for this whole thing. It is the only movie you can logically start with. I'm so excited. We're going to get to pump up the volume, but we all need to have a big conversation about how woke we are in 2026 so that we can evaluate, pump up the volume on its own merits from the 90s. We have a lot of trust to build before we get to pump up the volume.

You can read, yeah. I would, I will remind everyone the editorial ethos of The Verge is still the final scene from that movie where the FCC chases Christian Slater around in a little Jeep.

You see what we do every week. You see exactly what I want to have happened. I'm just saying it's a movie from a different time. That movie walked so that Brendan Carr could run. We have to build ourselves up as a community to watch

pump up the volume together. That's all I'm saying. That feels right. So yeah, Monday, April 27th, 7 p.m. If you're hearing this on Friday, April 3rd, we're doing a pre-sale for Verge subscribers only. You can go to the site. If you're logged in, you'll be able to see our post

with the information about how to buy tickets. It'll open up to everybody starting on Monday, but we wanted to give subscribers first dibs. I think it's going to be very fun, and I think this is a thing we're going to get to do a lot. I'm very excited about it. I think we're going to have a blast. I'm just excited to watch sneakers again.

Same. I've seen that movie in a minute, and I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. Okay. All of that aside. I think the one bit of news we need to talk about before we get into all of our Apple stuff is kind of on the theme of what is AI and who is it for that we've been talking about over the last several weeks. We've gotten a lot of feedback from people who both agree and

disagree with many of our assessments about what AI is good for. I would say none of them have convinced me that we are wrong about whether the people do in fact yearn for automation. But the big news, really since we recorded this podcast last, I think is mostly around Open AI. So two things have happened. Open AI killed Sora, its video generation app, for what turned out to be sort of fascinating reasons. Open AI also raised a ton of money. They raised $122 billion, which is just an astonishing amount of money. They also quoted some really big numbers.

They said they had 900 million weekly chat GPT users, which is one of those numbers that just feels wrong to me for reasons I can't quite describe. I don't, I'm, I'm sure they're not lying, but boy, is that a big number. Um, there's just a lot happening in this space, right? Microsoft launched a bunch of stuff and sort of announced an even more aggressive pivot towards business AI. It just feels like this idea of the whole AI industry retrenching to we make enterprise software is happening faster and faster. Is that, is that what you're sensing to? Yes. Can I just read you the Microsoft quote? So Hayden interviewed Mustafa Suleiman, who is Microsoft CEO of AI, but then they restructured as Microsoft has wanted to do.

And now he is officially tasked with superintelligence at Microsoft. Okay. And then I am hereby officially tasking you with super intelligence. This is like they hired OpenAI hired Fiji Simo from meta to be the CEO of applications, and they made her the CEO of AGI. And it's like, sure. Sure. Cool. I'm the Pope of the Verge.

Like, whatever you want, man. Anyway, so Hayden interviews Mustafa about all this stuff. It's a great interview. Hayden did a great job. And Mustafa says superintelligence has always really been my focus. And then here's his quote. Super intelligence is really about, are these models capable of delivering product value

for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world-class language models? Now, I don't, you know, Mustafa Sliam's a smart guy. He's built more AI stuff than I ever will. I just think that if you were to ask most people what they thought superintelligence was, they would not say,

oh, are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us deliver world-cost language models? They would say, it's alive. And there's just a pretty vast chasm between enterprise value and it's alive. Yeah. There's something just in that quote that I think tells you everything about the AI industry as it exists right now.

And I actually think that particular bit of cognitive dissonance is about to be really hard for the AI industry to go through. Because what they've been promising for all of this time and what they've been saying and the way that they've branded it, the fact that they're calling it artificial general intelligence and calling it super intelligence. And we've made these like deliberately consumer friendly names about how great all of this stuff is that if you're Musafas Suleiman, you can't say less than super intelligence. Do you know what I mean? Like you can't, you don't get to walk that back as you pivot to business. Right. Because it'll make it sound like you have accomplished less than you thought.

So your stock price will go down. Right. So you've like, they've now set this bar so unbelievably mainstream and high that they have. to pretend that's still what they're doing while they're pivoting to enterprise software. And I want to be super clear that deciding that all of the money in AI is actually in building SaaS products and business-to-business software is good and correct, right? Like this is obviously the truth, right? And I think this is why the SORA news from last week is part of this to me. Hayden on our team also did a bunch of research on that and

reported this out and basically found that within OpenAI, There is a finite amount of compute available, and they looked at SORA and said SORA doesn't have that many users and is losing a ton of money, but we think it's cool and cultural and zeitgeisty. Over here, we have this thing that is like coding an enterprise, which is obviously where all of the money is, why aren't we putting all of our resources against that? And Fiji Zima looked at that and went, well, yeah, we're going to give the resources to the thing that has the potential to make us money. That is a good and correct business decision.

Like, that is the right thing to do. The problem is that is up against what all of these companies have spent three years talking about, which is that we are going to reinvent creativity and we're going to enable everyone to be beautiful artists and everything is going to be great. And now it's like we're automating Excel. Yeah. That's great. Like to be so clear, it's so good that Excel is going to get better because of this technology. It is just so completely different than the thing that they have been promising this would be that they're about to crash into that.

dissonance over and over for a while here. Yeah, I mean, I think every small business owner I know who has poked at AI and agents is super excited about it. Yeah. I can do my expenses faster. Is a real thing AI is going to do for us? And that's going to be great. Yeah.

And it's not, it really just isn't like the generation of slop. Like there's whatever that is, which is bad. And then there's, I can automate business logic, which is basically what software does at businesses. And now, now I can do that with, by, natural language commands at a computer. Great. I think that's cool.

It is roughly the same as being like, everyone in the world must consider SAP at all times because it has first strike capabilities. And it's like, I don't think that that's going to go well. Like, that there are no great consumer products, which we keep saying over and over again. And the only great consumer product that could exist probably looks something like AGI, right?

We have this all-seeing, all-knowing robot in your house that does stuff for you. And so you keep making that promise. And then instead what you actually have is a bunch of enterprise software that is really cool and interesting in that context. Yes. But that has nothing to do with the way people live their lives today. Yeah, it's like if you go back to the first computing revolution, right, then there's this moment where spreadsheets happen. And spreadsheet software was this huge advancement in how we thought about what computers could do.

And it became this like, I mean, it was an automation tool in a very real way. It would be like if a bunch of people had run around at the early days. of spreadsheets and Ben like, I have made God. It's like, no, you made spreadsheets. And now what we're making is better spreadsheet. Like, maybe orders of magnitude better spreadsheets. I will say that at least in the spreadsheet community, a dominant sort of frame of thinking is,

can your God defeat my spreadsheet? And the answer is often no. It has been no for a long time. It's pretty often no, actually. Like, no one can take Excel. It can't be done. Most businesses run in Excel. But you see this.

Like, you see this gap. We keep talking about it. That the money is in enterprise. The product market fit is an enterprise. The consumer products keep hitting the rocks in, like, very obvious ways. And then OpenAI, after this big pivot, and all of the stock about cutting that on side quests and killing SORA, bought TBPN, which if you're listening to this, you don't know, I'm actually quite frankly surprised. they're pretty ubiquitous. TBN is the TechPro Podcast Network.

It's a three-hour live stream on X. Technically, it's not anymore, by the way. I just learned it now. It is just TBPN. It's like MTV is no longer music television. Oh, nice ESPN. They have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now.

Yeah. That's what it'd start as. It was the Tech Brothers Podcast Network, yeah. But it's just a three-hour live stream. They have a lot of guests on there. A lot of CEOs gone there to hype up their investments. They are part of Founders Fund. Like, they're VCs with a three-hour live stream.

They do a good job. It is Pat McAfee for VCs. I don't know how to describe this. And AI. And Open AI bought it like today, just before we came on air. And it's like, didn't you just talk about how you're not doing side quests? And you're not going to chase all these things and do all this nonsense? And the reason that they bought it and they put a press release and I'm reading it and

is utterly fascinating. It says, we're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift. And the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes with responsibility to help create a space for a real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with the builders and people using the technology

of the center, that's exactly what TBPN has built. So first of all, the mission is to bring AGI to the world. And you're going to buy a podcast. They're saying they're going to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team,

that their comms and marketing ideas for Open AI have really impressed them. They're going to be part of the policy group and run strategy. It's like, oh, you're going to turn this thing into branded content for OpenAI. Now, they're saying it will remain independent. But the history of companies trying to run media like this is necessarily that it's a

side quest. Like, yes. Running media is noisy. You have people talking all day and there will be, open AI will be held accountable for what they say. Also, all of TBN's distribution is on X. And somewhat notably, X is owned by Elon Musk, who is currently suing Sam Altman over the very existence of Open AI. That trial is about to go. This is, noise. And who is extremely happy to turn the knobs on the algorithm to favor and disfavor what he does and does not like? Absolutely.

So I just, I, I, you can think of what you want of TBPN and they've, I think they're pretty honest that they're pretty biased. They read the ads, you know? I actually have a lot of like empathy and admiration for what TBPN. They are crystal clear on what they're doing. Yeah. I always

say I like people who are honest. They're honest. It's right there out in the open. But now you're part of a company that's going to have ideas about what you should do and say, especially if you're directly integrated in the marketing of the company, which appears that they will be. And you're hosted on a platform where the owner of that platform hates your CEO, which just hates him. And like, we're about to get to court. That's a lot of noise for opening eye. After they killed SORA and they put out the code red and talked about pivoting enterprise and focusing on codex, they're going to

buy a lot of attention and a lot of distraction. And I think the reason they're doing it is because the gap in coverage is so big. Yeah. Right? The people in the polls, there's another poll just this week. 55% of people do not think AI is going well. Right?

The people don't want data centers built. There's all kinds of polling showing that. And it's because there's product, market, fit, and enterprise, and the consumer products aren't good. And they all think this is a marketing problem. They think this is a communications problem. And I'm telling you it is a product problem.

And buying a show that you think does a good job of communicating how great AI is, is not going to convince a bunch of people who don't see great products. It just won't. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I do think I am increasingly convinced that the, that marketing problem is not in bad faith or disingenuous. Like, I think, I think a lot of people in this industry are so incredibly convinced that AI is going to be the future of literally everything, that they can't believe other people don't see it. Right. Like, this is the San Francisco versus New York thing you keep threatening to do that we really need. need to do. Like, the feeling coming out of that industry is like, you, how do you not see this? Like,

it's so obvious. It is so ubiquitous. It is so everywhere. It's going to change everything. Like, AI that can send eye messages for you is going to literally change everything about your life for the better. And I like, I say that jokingly because I don't buy most of that argument. But I think the people who espouse that argument really believe it. And I think you only do this if you're open AI. Like, you don't do this cynically, right? Like, this is, this is like, This is our opportunity to reframe this conversation, not to make us more money, but because this thing is so important, we need to make sure everybody sees it. Yeah. It's just weird.

I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own products. I mean, yes. And free chat chit, 900 million people have used free chat chit. They know what they think. They know what they think of that product. You can't put John and Jory have great haircuts, man.

They do. They're terrific. Like, I'm jealous of them. Yeah. I mean, these are, they're handsome, well-dressed, well-spoken, very smart people.

You can't tell people that they're not having the experiences that they're having with these products. You just can't overcome it. You can't say, I promise you Sam Altman's ideas about universal basic income

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

You have to ship the products that work. And I really thought Open AI, you know, shutting down SORA and pivoting to Codex and saying we were going to focus was evidence they understood that. And then you just had this other thing where it's like, I actually don't know. Like, it seems like they want to be loved. and the way you are loved is by shipping great products. Like, it is, that's the whole verge. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

We run a reviews program for a reason. The evaluation comes from the products. It doesn't come from us saying that, like, you're great, you know? I do think it's possible to look at this actually as right in line with the pivot to business. That actually, if you look at the audience for something like TBPN, like Mike Isaac at the New York Times are a great profile of them a while ago. And he called it something to the effect of. Sports Center for the LinkedIn crowd.

Oh, sure. Which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right. And it's like if you're if you're open AI, what you need is a way to communicate clearly and cleanly, essentially to all of the other companies in Silicon Valley, right? Like that's where all of these companies start. If you are a startup in Silicon Valley making business software, your first customers for a very long time are other startups in Silicon Valley, mostly making products for other business customers. Like this is the cycle forever and ever and ever and ever. So if you look at TBPN is basically like a very sexy B2B podcast, which again is like, I think fairly straightforwardly kind of what they're trying to be, then this makes a certain kind of sense.

It's just a very out there way of trying to accomplish that goal. We just went through all this. We're going to focus. We're shutting down all this stuff. And there's just nothing noisier than media. which is what everyone discovers. It is absolutely the noisiest thing you can do. Ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company

that might have some conflicts with the way that you run your own company. A media companies whose incentives are all shaped by going viral on X. Yeah. It's weird times. So what do you make of this giant funding round? So Open Air raise $122 billion, mostly from its existing investors, Amazon, Nvidia, a soft bank Microsoft, a bunch of individual investors.

This is all under the, you know, huge looming IPO for both open AI and potentially Anthropic, both coming this year. There's just a ton of money brewing right now. And Open AI is sort of flexing, A, this huge amount of money and, B, this 900 million weekly chat GPT users as like it's trying very much to use this to remind the world that it is the Goliath in this space. What do you make of all of this right now? I mean, I think that listed investors is a bunch of big companies that are reliant on this technology or reliant on Open AI being successful because they've already invested a bunch of money into this company and spent a bunch of money.

And in the case of InVIDIA, that the money's coming right back to them in a variety of ways. So that's confusing. Again, my thesis on Open AI is that they do not end the year anywhere close to the same kind of company that they started the year as. and it feels like that is getting borne out. They have to start making real money on the free version of ChatGBT, which means competing with Google in a real way. Google is not easy to compete with.

I think OpenAid their ad pilot, they ran it for six weeks. They made like $16 million, which I keep annualizing to $100 million. And it's like, it sort of works that way, but it doesn't work that way at all. You can't be like, in six weeks, we made this much money.

So in 52, we would definitely make this much money. Like, I wish it worked that way, but it absolutely doesn't. Advertising in particular is very cyclical. So who knows, but they have to go compete with Google for real. Google's obviously not going to just lose market share. They're going to compete back really hard. They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like their deal with Apple.

Remember, Apple intelligence launched for the big open AI thing. Yeah. That all feels like it's falling by the wayside, and Apple's going to be way more open to all kinds of other models in Siri. Apple has a bigger deal with Google now. Like, Open-Ais, sort of on its own, right? Their Microsoft relationship has been cut off. So they've got to go compete with Anthropic

in the enterprise for agented coding tools, which seems like a big business for both of those companies. And then they have to compete with Google, the greatest business in the history of technology and potentially business itself. Good luck. Like, I just don't, this much money might not be enough, especially if you don't have the focus.

And especially if you're now run by a bunch of ad people and business people and not core technologists, many of whom have left to go to Anthropic. Yep. Yeah, I think the theory that Open AI is going to look very different seems more and more obvious to me all the time. And I think, like, Google had, did a very funny announcement about the new Google VO thing, which is basically Google's version of SORA, it's its own video generation model.

and basically what Google is able to do is just not worry about the money and compute that it costs to run a video model. Right? Like, because it makes all of the money from search ads, like Google can just afford to lose money in a way that Open AI can't. Like, nobody is making money on AI. There is no money in AI right now.

Like, it's very important to remember there are two nickels to be made in AI right now. All of these companies are losing money at like record rates. It's just that Google made $100 billion last quarter and Anthropic and Open AI didn't. And when Google wants to shut down things that aren't, you know, core to its business,

it's like, have you heard of Calico Labs, the contact lens that might detect diseases? It's like, what? You were doing what? Yeah. And like, I don't even know if that's still running. They have that scale. Google is structured into alphabet

to allow things to try to succeed outside of the core Google business, things inside the core Google business like AI, they are extremely willing to subsidize even more. So again, I think OpenAI has found itself, it's gone from Darling

to sort of independent. They're not tied to the big companies the way they were in the past or supported by the big companies the way they were in the past. Most notably, I think Microsoft and Apple, and they're up against competing with Google, which I think is just going to be

incredibly challenging. Yep. By the way, I haven't even mentioned, they brought on a bunch of Apple designers and Johnny Ive to try to compete with the iPhone. Good luck. Like, to pay off all this investment, they have made enormous promises. And if the answer is we can automate Excel, that might be a big business, but it's certainly not a big enough business to pay back on the promises that they've been making for a very long time. Right.

I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business. And I think, like, it's worth saying very clearly that I think you and I are actually on the same page of, like, what this is going to do for business and for the way. And I mean business very broadly. Like, you and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful, valuable ways to get work done. That's awesome and exciting and cool and interesting. And we should cover a lot of that. That is so different from digital Jesus. And it is so different from this, like, mass consumer.

live your life inside of these chatbots tools that we've been promised, that it's just like we have to figure out how to pull those things apart from each other. I really just come back to if you have software brain, you think that the computer is alive. And a lot of people have software brain. Yeah. Like they're like, I see the world as a series of databases that I can link and interconnect and make use of.

And that might be right. Like that might be a good way to describe reality. But it actually isn't. It's an incomplete description of reality. And you can't actually extrapolate. Like, now I can send my agent to go scrape databases for me to I have made God. Yeah. There's something about software brain.

We really should do New York versus California because what I mean is that people in California have absolute software brain. And people are in New York are like, yeah, I live in a city with other people in it. This is how we finally start our podcast beef with hard fork. This is it. This is how we do it. I mean, I love them both very much. I do, too. It's great.

We need more enemies. We're always saying this. Casey was just Sun Decoder. We need more enemies, Neelai. All right, let's pivot now to a new segment. We've been talking about this internally for a while. We've been trying to figure out what it is for a while. I'm very excited to finally get to bring this to the Burgecast.

It's called The Hyped Desk, and it features two of our friends. Welcome back to the show, both of you, Ross Miller, Ashley Asketa. Welcome back. Yay! I don't have an air horn. If I did, I'd hit it. I'm the closest you're going to get to that. I mean, I already have that kind of, like, cackle.

So it's just, I'll be your sound effect for hype, basically. A fun fact you should both know is that we have steadfastly refused to give Nelai a soundboard for many, many years now. And it will not happen. I was in that reviews closet today, and I saw a stream deck, and I thought, I can make this happen for myself. But it's better because I have Ross and Ashley now, my human air horns. Happy to be of a service. Human Airhorn. That's what I want to be remembered as. That's beautiful. So before we get into this segment,

Nelai, this is kind of your baby. And this is something you've been thinking about for a long time. And we've been planning for a long time going way back into Vergecast lore. Do you want to explain what the hype desk is before we get into it? Yeah. So if you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that we've had many iterations of the hype desk in the past. And the early iterations were like, what if we just had cool kids in the corner? and we never quite knew why, but it was fun. And then that ran its course. And if you've been listening to us recently,

you know that we talk a lot about the creator economy, like the YouTube podcast economy, and how all of that requires a pretty uncomfortable smashing of editorial and ads. All the creators have to do the brand deals. They have to read the ads. David and I send each other other podcast hosts reading the ads in very odd ways all the time. You will also know that what we sell here is our ethics policy. And David and are way too precious.

to read the ads. But there's like a, the reality is we need an on-staff influencer to come and do the money. And I have always thought that no one would ever want to be our on-staff influencers because you have to deal with me, but you don't get the fun of being in the newsroom. And then Ross was like, well, I used to work here. I never want to be in that newsroom again. And I was like, well, this is perfect. So I'm very excited that Ross and actually are going to be here.

We're going to hang out with them, you know, once a week for a few weeks, see if we like it. And right now we're unsponsored for flavor. But the idea here is you can't buy me and David, but you can buy these two. I would encourage it. Please, we are for sale. Capitalism, baby. We're just going to see how that goes. It's our little solution to the creator economy problem. Also, I just, I love these two. I'm excited to talk to you every week. But this is our solution is to have people who are not in our newsroom, come join the show, do cool stuff, tell us about adventures, and then, you know, make some money. I like it.

I like it. To keep the journalism going to keep the journalism going, which I don't want to do. No. I'm a recovering journalist. I quit that years ago. I want to be so clear about how church and state separate, like how strict Nile is about church and state being separate. We are literally 15 feet apart in the same room.

I don't want you anywhere near me for us. You sit over there. We're going to get you a real desk. So glad to say, yeah, there is no actual hype desk right now. It's just a height chair. The idea here is basically you two are our friends who are going to go out in the world and bring us cool stuff every week. What have you brought us this week? Oh, thank you for asking.

Well, first things first, this is an Ashley's specialty. Both of us have hard time staying focused. So Ashley bought me a Pomodoro timer. It's really cute little one from Amazon. It looks like a chumby. Do you remember the chumby? I do. The thing gives me real chumbie vibe.

that you're holding. I need a timer. And so I tried one of these little cuby guys, and I hate the noise it makes. It makes me upset. It's like a high-pitched beeping sound, and it's like nails on a chalkboard. And so I was like, where are the timers for small children that would better suit me? And fortunately, I in fact found exactly what I was looking for, which is this, again, this is like totally unsponsored. I just found it. And it's, it has like, this one has a rainbow on it. And Rosses has a robot. And when you just turn the little thing to start up the timer to whatever time you want up to 99 minutes. And then it has little lights on the outside that go away as it counts down. And then it sings you a little song.

And honestly, like to make me drink water and get up out of my chair all day and not be like shrimping over my keyboard, very nice. Like very nice thing. The Pomadour is a system. It's not just like a pasta sauce, right? It's like a whole system of energy time. Yeah, the whole system of like, you know, 45 minutes on. and I need to do. Like, Ross and I are both ADHD, so we need help.

We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do, neurotypicals can do. I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time. I am, because if I don't, we will take over the whole Vergecast. And no one will be happy about this. Because we want to keep coming back. So we're going to be very tight about this segment, as much as we can be. Yeah.

Or we'll hear a really cute sound. Tight 10. Tight 10. Yeah. Ashley, where did you find this thing? This screams TikTok shop to me. I have to tell you. Not the TikTok job. I just found it on Amazon. I was scrolling through Amazon and looking for timers. And I just kept trying different search phrases, like a maniac, like Riker, Googling. It was like timer child music. MP3 upload timer. Like I just didn't want the little BPQ, but it's just terrible. And I don't like it. So I found this one. And I was like, this seems like exactly what I'm looking for. It's very simple. It's like very close to being sort of like an analog.

of timer. It's not like a smart thing. You don't have to connect it to your phone. I like all of those things. I just want it to do what I want it to do and nothing else. And so this was the, it was a little solution. I want to say it was like under 20 books. So it's a, it's really nice. Yeah, they were like 15. Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of this segment. All right. Moving on. This is not what we actually came to talk about. This was just meant to like help us stay on track. Ross's timer cracking the whip here. Good Lord. Here we go. So two, two two hype things we were talking about. Well, one big one was Pax East.

Now, Pax's Penny Arcade Expo. It's been around since, I want to say, 2004. It's one of the longest running gaming fan conventions. There's currently four of them every year. And given a time like E3 is not here, GDC and Dias are all very industry-focused. Like, it's one of the few places where you can just be a video game nerd and really come and celebrate your fandom. And Ashley, you just went to Pax East in Boston. Yeah, went to Pax East.

Had a lot of fun. Did you see in the games that stuck out? out, like, what's a title that you were like, ooh? I got to play the new Pokemon Champions, which was really neat. That's that, like, they kind of just remade Pokemon Stadium. And it was really fun. It was just like, it seems like a nice little bite-sized game that you can just kind of play on the go, like, it's real quick, like, oh, I just want to get some battles in against

some other people. That was awesome. I love hearing that Pokemon had a good game. Pokemon's having a moment right now because I know Pocopia also came out. It's like an Animal Crossing, but the whole conceit feels very Lovecraftian. You play a shape-shifting Pokemon that turns itself human. because all the humans have disappeared, and the Pokemon are just sad about no humans.

So they just rebuild civilization. The ditto transforms into a person. I have a hat from packs. This is my ditto hat. I feel like I already know how this is going to go off there else every week. Every week. Every week. Never, trust me.

You're going to, you come to the hype desk for a show. I'm here for it. But yeah, you're a weird little ditto who, like, is like, oh, I think I remember what my human trainer looked like, and then they turn into this weird little abomination of a child that has a ditto face. And it's horrific and also delightful. It's good stuff.

All right, so things we've learned. A, if you sponsor the hype desk, Ashley will wear a hat of your choosing. I will wear the dumbest hat imaginable. We've just discovered this. This is useful information. Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I just did it.

All right, that's the hype desk, everybody. Thank you so much to Ross and Ashley. you guys are going to be here with us every week for the next couple of months. You're going to bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored. Some of it will be unsponsored. It's going to be great. We're very excited to have you guys here.

This is going to be awesome. Thank you both. Bye. Bye. I love you both. We are going to take a break. And then, Nilai, you and I are going to rank some Apple products. You ready for this?

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We're back. So this week was Apple's 50th anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. Neilie, you wrote about the iPhone. I wrote about the generational heater that Steve Jobs went on when he came back to Apple. Jason Snell wrote a couple of great pieces,

including one that I know he feels very passionate about about the Apple too. We wrote about antitrust. We wrote about the MacBook Air. Amelia, our photographer, did an incredible visual history. Neil, have you looked at that?

That's like... Yeah. Those photos are incredible. So much fun. It's very good. In the 50 years of Apple. That whole package is out. But the main thing

is we asked everybody to rank the top 50 Apple products. And they did so. Tens of thousands of people, 1.6 million votes, lots and lots and lots of input and feelings about what this thing is. And one, as you mentioned, very aggressive bot attack in favor of iTunes, which I am told we successfully mitigated. So what you and I are going to do here is we're going to go through the bottom 40 of the audience's reaction. And essentially what we're going to do is neither you nor I has seen this list. So we're just going to reveal the pick. And if we have any reactions, great. But we're just going to reveal from 50 to 11. And then you and I both made our

top tens. And so we're going to compare our top tens against each other and against the overall ranking and see how we feel, see who's right, see what we need to fight about. Does sound good? It does. And I'm convinced that I'm correct and everyone else is wrong, obviously. The first time ever for you. This is great. All right. So let's just start at the bottom here. number 50 on the list the worst of the best Apple products of all time is the image writer to Well it's the worst of the best

It's just coming in at number 50 Right It is this is still a very good Apple product But I will say I think coming into this we pick two printers for this list And I would say there's a strong chance The other printer will be number 49 But I think we sort of knew

these would be down at the bottom Even though I think you could argue They're very good and very important and very innovative products, they're printers. Yeah. I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see. What's number 49?

The Laser Writer 2. Rough. Super tough beat for the printers here. Yeah, I'm not surprised by this. Are you surprised by this? I personally think the Laser R2 should be higher, but I understand. We have a young audience.

They don't remember. They don't know. I think instinctively, most people look at printers and are like, this can't possibly be any good. How dare you? The laser, I promised I wouldn't do this,

but the LaserWiter 2 was Apple's business for a long time. Yeah, it really was. The Mac and the LaserWiter that kept that company afloat. All right, number 48, the original cinema display.

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

It's true. All right. Number 47. The clip iPod shuffle. Oh, that one kind of hurts my feelings. I don't actually think that's entirely wrong, but like I loved, I loved that product. Again, this is the 50 best.

It's just, it's hard to go head to head. I mean, that's literally how we rank them, right? Head to head against many other things on this list. The clip iPod shuffle is not winning. No question. Including number 46. Powerbook 500. This is when you stand for a little.

This one hurts me. me. They're wrong. The whippersnappers are wrong. They're wrong. Okay. Number 45? The Apple TV second gen. See, the PowerBook belongs. It deserves to go over the Apple TV second gen. Yeah, this is the first one that I'm like, the Apple TV second gen should be in the bottom three. This is recency bias. No question. Yeah. All right. Number 44. The Powerbook 100 says, boy, real Powerbook slander come in here. This is just a young audience. Yeah. This is a This is a young audience of people who I think, I think a lot of people.

And frankly, like, if I were not a professional journalist, my Apple experience would have started. And, like, my Apple knowledge would have started with the IMAG3 and the Steve Jobs return. I think that whole era is just sort of lost on most people. Yeah. Even though there were a lot of good products in it. And we had Jason Snell write an entire piece. Best timeline we've come from the minute between jobs. It's very good.

About Apple's weird 90s and the powerbooks are in there. Yeah. And everybody just looks at that decade is like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece. Everybody should go read it. All right. Number 43.

Quick time. This is wrong. I will spoil this. I have QuickTime in my top 10. Wow. Okay. In part because I spent a bunch of time working on a piece that we ran on the site about the creation of QuickTime by a guy named John Buck. It's an excerpt or an adapted.

It's an adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good. John Buckwick was on the team that invented QuickTime in the weird 90s at Apple. I love that piece. Everyone should read it. It's great. QuickTime is foundational technology. MP4 is QuickTime.

Yeah. And it makes a very compelling case that QuickTime was the beginning of the idea that computers could be for creative tasks. It's a very important piece of technology. The kids don't know these days. This is my story so far. The kids don't know. All right, number 42. Final Cut Pro.

Software's getting a rough beat here. I'm actually fine with the Final Cut Pro being here. It's like, again, this is the top 50. All of these are good, but there are a lot better things in Final Cut Pro. Number 41. This is actually recency bias the other way, right? Like the modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here. I think that's probably right.

All right, number 41. Oh, the Apple extended keyboard to John Gruber is going to be very upset about this. He's furious about this. John Gruber, I think at one point, if I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings, and then John posted about it on Daring Fireball, basically saying it was a travesty that it was so low. So he got it up to 41.

Great job, John. It's rough. John, by the way, agrees with me, this is the best keyboard of all time. Not just Apple's best keyboard, the best keyboard of all time. A strong argument. Many people will make the strong argument. the Apple extending keyboard, too, is the best keyboard of all time. I will say, fun fact.

According to the rankings, this Final Cut Pro and QuickTime are all exactly tied in the rankings. Fascinating. All right. Number 40. Garageband. Yeah, I think software is just getting a stuff. Software's getting a rough beat. Especially, again, this is modern garage band.

If you remember when GarageBain came out, it's sensation. The idea that a digital audio workstation product would be on every single Mac that shipped for free was a revolution. but so goes was by umbrella by Rihanna that's garage band loops this is how important that software was

so and to this point number 39 iTunes iTunes despite the best efforts to make it number one is number 39 we defeated you hacker it should be lower can we manually switch them

just to punish bad behavior I'm fine with iTunes being here iTunes is like great and terrible so simultaneously that I'm largely fine with it being here. 38 is the Mac SE 30. This is one of those computers I have no context for,

but you made a pretty strong case is a very important piece of hardware in Apple history. This is the best of that type of Mac, the little compact desk Mac, the black and white screen. I would argue this should be far higher, but I understand why it's where it is. There are Apple old heads who will argue this is one of Apple's best,

like if you sort of consider it in its era that this is one of Apple's best computers of all time. Best, most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for the CPU inside. Ooh, ooh. Oh, I love an SC30. There we go.

All right. Number 37. The Mac Plus. See, this is all wrong. This is all wrong. I don't know what we're doing here. 1980s Apple is just getting wrecked here. No, I'm saying even in this list,

the SE30 is clearly superior to the MAC Plus. Oh, yeah, no question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings, which is very funny. Oh, there you go. Okay. The two of them, just alone. They're both ahead of iTunes, but they are tied with each other in the rankings. That's right. That feels somehow... That's definitely a lot of

people being like, I don't know what either of these things are. I'm just going to click a button. All right, number 36. The Black MacBook. I think this is right. This feels like a tough beat for you personally. I loved that computer. It's like I as just a

The glowing Apple logo The look of the thing It was just black every us I love that computer But it's this is probably the right place for it Yeah it was lovely but mid pack of the top 50 That's right yeah I'm fine with it 35 The power book G3

The the like Steve Jobs comeback power book Yeah this feels right It's sort of we're accelerating towards the What you might call the midfield Yeah I think that's right. Yeah, number 35 is not the worst place to be of all time here. Number 34. It beat some famous competitors. It beat all the software.

It did. That's true. Yeah, we're damn near the end of software here, except a couple of very recent things that I think are going to prove your point about the residency bias. We'll see how high some of those are. All right, number 34. The IMAG5. That feels low. I honestly was not expecting this to be this high. Really? the slim unibody mac is coming up, like the classic. The G5 was an interstitial. It was a little bit, but this was the first time it just became a giant screen on a stand, which is like, this is the first time we see the shape of the modern iMac.

This is when Johnny I looked to you in the eyes and said, what if you'll display had a chin? And the people said, yes, John. All right, let's keep going. Number 33, the iBook G3. I struggled with this one. I at one point put this in my top 10, but I had it in the top 10

because I think the demo when it was launched where Steve Jobs waves the hula hoop over it to prove there are no wires. Phil Schiller jumps off in a second story balcony. Yeah.

One of the all-time great Apple moments. I think it's probably better than the product itself actually was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it quickly got replaced by the Ibook G4, which presumably is much higher.

than this. I mean, we'll see. All right, number 32. The original iPod Touch. This feels right. Oh, I had this so much lower. Really? So much lower. I was like, put this at the bottom of the list. No way. You're wrong. The iPod Touch was awesome. All right. Number 31. The Apple Watch series three, the first great Apple Watch, the one where Apple Watch figured out what the Apple Watch was. This is right. Solidly mid-pack. Yeah. No, you're right. It's hard for this to beat anything on this list. Yeah, I mean, we are getting pretty quickly into, like, legendary product territory. Oh, yeah. We're getting into, I mean, the number of screenshots I got from people that are like,

how do you expect you to make this choice? Like, we're headed there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Number 30. The titanium power book G4. The Thai book, Nilai's favorite.

This is, you already know what my top ten looks like. It's the titanium power of G4 ten times in a row. Yeah. I think, I think this one, I'm going to say this one's about right. this is your black MacBook, right? Like, this is a computer you just love... This is the laptop. With no reason to love it as much as you do.

It is the laptop, no bones about it. All right, number 29. The iPad 2. Okay, so I had, I flipped the original iPad and the iPad 2 because the iPad 2 came out very quickly after the first iPad and was such a vastly better product. Oh, yeah. That it is actually when the iPad.

iPad became the iPad. The original iPad was not all that good a product, like on its own. But it's going to get a lot of love and it's going to be higher than this on the list because... And that's wrong. It is like the important one because it came first. And yes, that is wrong. All right. Number 28. The Intel Mac Mini. I expected this to do far worse. You made fun of me for putting this on the list. I don't think this should be honest with saying. And yet it came in number 28. I'll take it. Justice for the Mac Mini. It's good stuff. All right. Number 27.

The iPod Nano. Third Gen. This is the squat iPod Nano with the video. Is this the first? We have a bunch of iPods on this list and it's interesting that this is the first click wheelie iPod that has appeared. This is a fat one right?

Yeah. Yeah. This was not a beloved iPhone. No, it wasn't. It was like ubiquitous. It was everywhere, but it was not, I don't think it was anyone's all-time favorite iPod. Yeah. So this feels about right. All right, number 26. The Ibook G4, as you said.

Yeah, this is where this belongs, right? Now we're in the top quarter. So it's just outside the top quarter, and this top 25 is going to be brutal. Yeah, I think it gets very hard, very quickly here. All right, number 25, halfway through the list. The iPhone 10S. So we got a bunch of questions from people why we picked the 10s and not the 10. Furious people, I would say.

And it's the, exact same logic as the iPad or the iPad too, right? Like, they, they fixed it on the next one. It's like made a cool product, shipped the better version a year later. Yeah, most people did not have an iPhone 10. And the iPhone 10 was compromised in many ways. The 10S actually was a good mainstream product. Yeah, and it was everywhere for a long time.

I remember getting to like the iPhone 13 and 14 reviews, and there were a lot of people who were like, is it finally time to update my 10S? Like, people held on that phone a long time. Yeah. All right. So that's number 25. This is when they started doing smart HDR, which revolutionized photography. I mean, the pixel two is right next to it.

I understand, but this is when the race really took off. Totally. All right. Number 24. HyperCard. Hell yeah. This makes me so. I honestly believed HyperCard was going to be 50.

And a bunch of people are going to be like, what the hell is this? What is this weird thing you're saying about building block software? I don't care. They got it. The HyperCard stands came through. There was a lot of conversation about HyperCard, at least on Blue Sky and Threads where I saw it.

I love that. That's awesome. Kids, if you don't know, go read about HyperCard. It was right about everything, except... They were right about everything. How to be good. Number 23. The Apple won.

The computer that started it all is number 23 on the list. I don't know, man. This is like the opposite of recency bias You're like, well, that had to have been important. And it's like, no, that's not very good at all. They made like 500 of them. I mean, true.

Yeah, it is, it is, it's good that this is lower than the Apple 2, which better come up much, much, much higher on this list. All right, number 22. The iPod Nano, second gen. Okay, this is the tall, skinny nano before they made it short and fat. This is fine. I'm good at this being here. I think it's very funny that the second gen iPod Nano is slightly higher in our rankings than the first Apple computer ever. but here we are.

All right. Number 21. The IMAG4 wrong. Sure. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I mean, this computer was not a success. No, but it is the best-looking computer Apple has ever made.

But everyone wanted the flat panel. Yeah. This is the problem. I knew this would happen. I'm as big of an IMAG-4 stand as you can find. And you're like, oh, but the reality was no one wanted. at this computer. And they quickly pivoted to the flat panel display.

I mean, that's true. And yet, I don't care. It rules. I'm looking at the list I have of all 50, and I'm seeing the things that have not come up, and I'm preemptively angry about some of these things that are going to have beat the IMAG4. All right, number 20.

We're in the top 20 now. The original iPod Mini, not better than the IMAG4, but worthy. A sensation nonetheless. It was. I had one. I loved it. It was, I think it was, I think it was my first iPod. It was when I went from like, giant creative jukebox land to I had a gold iPod mini and I loved that thing to pieces. All right. Number 19. FaceTime. I'm fine with FaceTime being here. I think you could argue this is like a smidge high. It's way high. I had FaceTime on my list. FaceTime was way at the bottom. Really? video calling Apple did it

they invented it yes it's all very important but it FaceTime as a product is not necessarily better than the other video calls products no and it wasn't like the concept of talking to people on video

had been around this was not like Apple made it really easy which was great but it did not like create the concept of video yeah yeah it's this feels a little high that's right number 18 Power Mac G3

shocked by this. Fascinating. This was Apple's first desktop back. So Steve Jobs comes back, launches the iMac G3 and then they basically take the Bondi blue look transparent, everything, and just shove it onto the Power Mac.

Fine, good computer. I would not have had any idea of this. This is a lot of people with a lot of memories. Yes. The whippersnappers are starting to lose. now. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, this is like the computer, a lot of our audience grew up with in their house,

I suspect. All right, number 17. Apple Pay. Rough. I had Apple Pay way at the bottom. I can't give you credits for being like credit cards. I'm sorry. Yeah.

I understand that it works well. And I understand. It's a good product. I also had Apple Pay pretty low. I think this is where we're getting to like people who love the thing that currently exists in their pocket and are want to give it flowers. You know what I mean? It did make me think we should have put the iPhone 17 in here just to see how it would have done in terms of like, well, clearly it's the best one. It's the new one. It still works. It's still great.

Maybe I should just do that. Part of me wishes we had done that. But at any rate, number 16, AirDrop. That's preposterous. I'm sorry. This is ridiculous. FaceTime Apple Pay and AirDrop all in the top 20 is bananas. us. This is, we don't, we need to understand what the people are saying to us, David. They're saying, I'm here imperious and our high and mighty thrones. And the people are like, I'm air dropping. I'm air dropping so much that Google had to reverse engineer air drop and give it to

Samsung. This is making me feel older and older every single one of these that we do. Because they're like, oh, I remember when I was five and AirDrop came out. And I'm like, screw you. I was 56 when AirDrop came out. All right. I'm going to get my image writer too, and I'm going to get out of here. Exactly.

All right, let's do, now we're in the top 15. It's starting to get wild here. We have a few more of these, and then we're going to get to our list, too. Number 15, the iPhone 5S. Many people would argue the best iPhone ever. Except me. Many smart, correct people with great taste and extreme intelligence. It's very hard to have feelings about great products in this zone.

I know, it's true. It's like, it is basically bangers all the way up to the top. here. Yeah. Although I will say, just the thing, the thing that is seared into my mind right now

is that there are two pairs of AirPods on this list and we're at number 14 and we've hit neither of them. Rough, I know. I don't, I hate it already. All right, number 14. Okay, there we go.

Good. All right. Fine. The original AirPods Pro, number 14, sure. Thank God we've dispensed with this. Is that 20 spots too high?

Sure is. Here we are. Number 13. The Apple 2E. respectable respectable it should be higher but it's respectable sure fine

yeah everything in here is it's all gravy from here I think number 12 the original AirPods all right so we have finally dispensed with this bad idea of ranking these this high

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

are more important than the AirPods Pro, and that makes me happy. Which do you have? Are you an AirPods guy? AirPods. Do we ever talk to this? I think AirPods AirPods sound horrible. I think Earpods sounded horrible. AirPods Pro are tolerable. What is your like day-to-day pair of headphones? It's the Sony's. I think I have the Mark 4. Okay. They folded and they didn't fold and now they fold again. And I have the last ones that folded. Got it. Okay. Those are

really great. All right. Number 11. The original iPad. way higher than the iPad too, a clearly, obviously better product. Yeah, this is wrong. I do think we're at, like, you and I spent a lot of time on the selection show debating the difference between best and most important,

and I am getting the distinct sense that this ranker leans pretty hard towards most important. I saw a post, I think it was on Blue Sky, or something was like, if you just put original in the name, it's going to win. And I was like, oh, we did that.

That's a really interesting point. Yeah. that's a really interesting point. Okay, we are now to the top 10, which means you and I are also going to reveal our own picks. I'm now feeling a lot of feelings about my picks because, boy, do I disagree with this ranking in a lot of ways. But let's just do this.

So, number 10, I will just say I had QuickTime, number 10 here. And I could make a long and impassioned argument for why QuickTime is so important, which concludes with the fact that It is still an app on Macs that is a thing everybody knows and uses according to our rancor, which we should say, if you're watching this, Travis, our producer, vibe-coded this rancor, and it's very impressive.

It's not as impressive as what Graham did, but it's very impressive. So that's what I had at 10. Neil, what does you have at 10? I'm like still, I vibe-coded my own little rancor to move things around, and I've moved things in and out of the 10 spot. I'm very confident in my top nine. Oh, interesting. The 10 spot is really hard. What do you have at 10 and 11 then?

Right now at 10 and 11, it's the M1 ship and the Ibook G3. And I think this has to be the M1 ship. Okay. That's my call. Interesting. I have the M1 chip higher as we will get to be very sure here. It's obviously in the top 10. It is obviously in the top 10.

But it's, as many people point out, it's not a product. It's just a thing that enabled all the other products. but you got to put it in this list. I will say. It obviously belongs in this list. There are a couple of those still to come in the top 10 here. Yeah, I think this is fair. The M1 for me is like it could go anywhere on this list.

And I would like, we were talking about this before we recorded. I had a pretty easy time making my top 10. Ranking them, I found very difficult. Yeah. And it sounds like you had the same experience, but with 11. It was 10.11. My top nine were like, there's nothing's moving. Interesting.

Okay. All right. What was the audience number 10? The iPod with Clickwheel. Interesting. Sure. Okay. Yeah, I don't hate it.

All right. So now at number nine, I had the iPod with Clickwheel, which I think is like, it is the the iPod, the iPod classic. I had that one at number nine. What did you have at nine? The Apple 2E. Oh, okay. And I feel great about that.

This was for years, Apple's most important computer. It defined the computing experiences of an entire generation. It kept Apple alive for an entire generation. Kept Apple alive. If you have a list without the 2E in particular, in the top 10, I don't know what you're doing. Fair enough. All right, what do the audience have? The slim unibody iMac.

Interesting. Okay. That's a rough one. I don't know what we're doing. Are you, you think that's too low? I think it's way too high. Compared to what else you can put in the top 10? You don't have the Unobody IMac in your top 10?

No. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, let's get to number eight. I'm like, I'm staring at my list and I already don't like a bunch of them. I'm just, I'm going to go with it. I will go with what I wrote before we started.

I have the iPhone 4 here. David. Come on, man. You have the iPhone 4, I think, either one or. two would be my guess. And I'm very excited to get to that. Declined response to this time. Yeah. I don't, listen, we've been doing this for a long time together. What do you have at number eight? No, I have number eight. The titanium power book G4. This is, this is your quick time. Yeah, you are 22 spots higher than the consensus. And I think you're right. This is still the laptop

everybody wants. At the end of the day, if you were like, can you, do you want whatever garbage laptop you can have today in 2026 or modernized tiebook? Everyone's going to the titanium power with G4. I mean, you might not be wrong about that. All right, what did the audience have at number eight? The Wedge MacBook Air. Sure. Wrong.

Interesting. Too low, but only slightly too low. It's okay. Yeah, this is very interesting. All right, number seven, I had the, now I'm feeling the NELI shame already. I had the slim unibody iMac here.

Ooh. I went back and forth on which IMac I should include. I had the IMAG4 in here for a long time because I think that the sunflower design is just one of the best coolest things Apple ever made. But this is the best IMac. Like, this is the one where my in-laws had one of these for 13 years in their house

and I had to bully them into getting rid of it because it just didn't work anymore and they still didn't want to get rid of it. I just turned one into a monitor. I'm with you. I love these things. They're not in the top time. Yeah.

Lightning round, spoiler. We're coming back to that, Patel. What did you have at number seven? The iPad 2 Okay I have a thesis for my top 10 But yeah I'll get to it

But my Yeah the iPad 2 belongs solidly in the middle Of the top 10 in my opinion I think that's totally fair All right What did the audience have? Number 7

The Bondi Blue IMac The IMac G3 Sure Sure Yeah I'm not mad at it Wow boy I am like Almost right in step With the audience

Because I had the Bondi Blue IMac G3 at number six. We don't need to litigate why that thing mattered and why it was great. And that is like,

I had one of those in my eighth grade class in a way that was very important to me. Yeah. And that's, I think that thing rules. All right, what did you have at number six?

This is where I put the original iPod. Oh, okay. This is where this goes. I agree with everybody at the IMAC because I just have it higher. But the iPod goes here. So my list is like, the products that definitively change the industry around them.

You think OG iPod over Clickwheel iPod? See, I debated this and picked Clickwheel iPod. I don't have another iPod in my top 10. No, this is the only iPod in my top 10. And you picked the original instead of the click wheel, which is like the, when you think of like what is an iPod, it's the click wheel. Yeah, no, it would make the argument,

but I think by that time, the click wheel actually came out, I think, on the Mini. I believe that's right. So like you're, we're just in this. You just got to pick an iPod. Actually, it was just the iPod. It was just Apple saying, we're going to make a music player because we missed out on CD burning

and then, like, shipping an iPod and then relentlessly iterating on it. Like, the original iPod was a moment for Apple in a very real way. It was. That's totally fair. I buy it. All right. What was number six from the audience?

The iPhone 4. Shear rage from Eli. What are you doing? You people don't understand beauty. You don't understand grace? Come on. The people like when their phones connect to the network is what they like. All right.

At number five, I had the original Macintosh, which go listen to the version history episode on the Macintosh. Lots of feedback about Mr. McIntosh from that episode. This is like, I think you could rearrange my top five here in basically any order and I would feel fine with it. But to me, the original Macintosh belongs in the top five, no question. I don't have it in my top ten at all. No? No. Really?

Fascinating. What did you have at number five? The wedge MacBook Air. Okay. The entire industry chased this product for, to, till now, for 30 years. I was going to say forever. Yeah. Okay. What does the audience have at number four?

Or number five, sorry. Mac OS 10. That's good. It's good. The audience is redeeming itself. Yeah, we're, we're the, I'm feeling good about the audience top 10 here. All right. So before we get to.

Well, let's do number four. And then before we get this out three, we'll recap. So at number four, I have the Wedge MacBook Air. I'm right here with you. That is, like, again, we're doing iconic, like, world-shaping Apple products over and over here. What did you have at number four? The IMACG3, the original IMac. Okay.

That's the, yeah, the Bondi Blue one. So that's, so, okay. And let's see what the audience had. The original iPod. Okay. So so far, between us, like, if you sort of smush you and me together, we're actually, like, kind of in step with the broader ranker here. Yeah, this makes sense.

All right. Now, to our top three, I had it number three. I had the M1 chip. Which I think, I think, interesting. According to the vibe-coded rancor here, it's possible that the audience might have it even higher. We shall see. I think the M1 chip is like, it is a turning point for Apple across products in a way that I think was really important and huge. And just put it like, it no longer was just the best one.

It was playing a different game than everybody else across a bunch of different products. What did you have in number three? The iPhone. The original iPhone? Yeah. Okay. And I think I had the M1 way lower, right? Like my feeling is it's in the top 10, but...

you know, Apple entered this weird period where everything was super iterative once they had the M1, you know? And it's like, to me it's like, I remember getting the M1 MacBook Air and all of a sudden going, oh my God, I don't think about the battery life on my laptop anymore.

And the shift that that suddenly was in my computing experience just shot this thing to the top of the list for me. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I just, all the, it's like, I'm making this thing you're in top 10 and top five. You know? And my top five is like, these products change the world.

And M1 is in the top 10, which is like, this was very important. But Apple in its moment with the M1, you know, the M1 came on in 2020, somewhere there, 21. I remember it because we were all at home. It was like the pandemic. I reviewed it in my basement. The M1 error, the M1 Pro I reviewed. And I just remember thinking, like Apple is in such an iterative place right now that they're not going to make another.

kind of product with this chip. They're going to make the best laptops. They're going to make some very interesting desktops, but the wild left turn that you could make because you have this thing is not going to exist. And indeed, it's still doesn't make wild left turns anymore. And I think the top five is the whole industry has to make a wild buff turn right now because Apple made a wild buff turn.

Yeah. I do also think you have picked the wedge MacBook era, the Bondi Blue IMac, and the iPhone, which I think are three products most people could close their eyes and draw from memory. which goes a long way when you're talking about, like, iconic tech products. All right. What did the audience have at number three?

The original Macintosh. Wow. So, you know, David and the people. That's just some nostalgia. That's like we're going to make an entire movie with Ben Affleck about sneakers. Like, that's just nostalgia. I don't see the problem. It's a hell of a lot of sneakers. All right.

At number two, I had the original iPhone. I think this very clearly had to be either, like, somewhere in the top three. Fred, just because, again, it goes on the list of, like, it wasn't the best iPhone anyone had ever made, but it was so vastly better than what was out there. And it, you just can't mess with the legacy of the thing. Yeah. I think it's so funny that you're going to rank the iPhone 4 higher than the original iPhone. The iPhone 4 is number 2. I love this for you.

Everyone's still chasing the dragon, man. Everybody wants this high. You know what I mean? You can't. You'll never feel it again, ever again. There will never be another phone introduced. that does what the iPhone 4 did the people. Go down several bars when you hold it in your hand.

I'm just saying, man. The original iPhone is great is very important, you know, there's the Steve Bomber clip, like, whatever. The iPhone 4 came out and the whole industry is like, we don't know how to make that. That is true. And it was one of the first phones that everybody who touched it just immediately was like, oh my God, this is great.

Yeah. All right, what did the audience have at number two? The M1 chip. Okay. That's the first thing. recency bias coming through. So this makes very clear that the overall

ranking system had the original iPhone at number one, which I would have been absolutely shocked had that not been the case. Interesting. Shocked. Like it's just, it is the Apple product of all time, right? Like, no matter who you are, it is the most important,

most successful product in consumer electronics history. Like, I clearly don't agree that it's number one, but it is perfectly fine that it there. What does you have at number one? I've lost track of what you have not ranked yet. Oh, Mac OS10. The single most important Apple product. We agree. There is no there's no Apple without Mac OScent. Yep. I love that we agree on this. This actually makes me really happy. MacOS 10 is a, the thing that came out of buying next, which is one of the most important Apple decisions of all time. It is the

foundation of 25 years of Apple software. It is, it's what you said. None of the rest of this happens. if OS 10 isn't what it is. Not even a little bit. Yeah. I'm so, I'm, I'm both annoyed and sort of like gleeful that we, we agree up. This was the easiest one for me. I was never, I never thought anything else. I agree. I started my list at the top with OS10. Why do you think people don't see that? So the original iPhone in the rankings is number one with a bullet. It is way ahead of everything else. And then the M1 chip, the original Macintosh, and the original iPod, two, three, and four are all kind of clumped together. And then MacOS 10, iPhone 4, and the IMAG3, the Bondi Blue IMac are also all pretty clumped together. So in this ranking, MacOS 10 is like decidedly sort of third tier, which I find sort of fascinating. Why do you think people miss this? I mean, there's one obvious reason. Not enough people have used MacOS 10 Snow Leopard, the single greatest operating system of all time. If I hit, if we had just made this snow leopard, would you have still made it number one? Yes.

Like to this day, companies are like, we're our next version of the operating system. We're doing a snow leopard. Like, we're like, we're not going to do new features. We're just going to make it perfect. And they never do it. They say they're going to do it. But Apple one time did it.

They just stopped for one year. And they made it good. And then it's been chaos ever since. I remember so many years of you resisting, updating your laptop because you just refused to get off of Snow Leopard. No, Snow Leopard was. early. And I was stuck on like Big Sur. Like there were there's a whole different. Okay. It was some other newer version that I stayed on for those lines. I could like so

it was like 10.3 or something. It was like very old. But I, well, I think what most people, they, they see iOS and they don't realize that iOS began with Mac OS 10. And you can't pull, like MacOS 10 was box software. You could buy it. So we could put it on this list, right? You can't really separate iOS from the iPhone. Right. So I think what most people see is, the modern macOS that they use on the computers they buy, which is really messy lately, particularly the liquid glass. I don't use my MacBook Neo as much as I want to because I just don't like looking at it. Like, it's bad. It's a messy piece of software. And so I think the history and the fact that it's the foundation for iOS and I've had OS and watchOS and TVOS

is completely obscured. But the reality is Apple does not exist without buying that. without bringing back Steve Jobs, without the foundation of OS10, and without being committed to that foundation, and, like, you know, kind of like rebuilding it bit by bit over the years and to be way more cutting edge, like no other company pulls that off. Like, Microsoft certainly has not pulled that off with Windows.

So that's why, for me, it's number one. It's like you don't get literally any of these other products. But I think for the, like, the big audience, it is obscured that iOS is actually just Mac OS 10. Right. Or it began its life as Mac OS time. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair.

I actually think everybody did fairly well here. There's not a lot of super insane stuff on our lists. Congrats to everybody. But we didn't pick the lists. Well, we did. That's true. Like if we have been like, you can type in polishing cloth, right? I think some weird stuff would have happened.

That would have. Yeah, your furthest away from the norm was the iPad 2, which you had 22 spots higher. I had QuickTime 33 spots higher than that. and Norm. And I think you and I both feel very strongly. Everyone should go read that piece. It's very good. It's very good.

I think you and I both feel very strongly that we're correct, so I feel good about it. That's it. This has been the Apple ranking process. You and I have poured all of our heart and soul into ranking 50 Apple products. It's like, it was super fun to see this out there. We'll do it again in 50 years, you guys.

Yeah, right? We're going to live forever. If you're a young person, send us your blood so we can live forever. Sure. Throwing that out there. Thank you. to everybody who voted and was part of this, go read all of our Apple 50 covers.

There's a lot of great stuff out there. It was a fun week on the internet in that sense, actually, that our whole kind of tech universe spent a lot of time covering Apple, and I learned a lot of new stuff about that company these last couple weeks. It's been very fun. We are going to take a break,

and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do a lighting round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking, usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation.

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For flavor. I feel like I got to get a little longer every time I do that. Nila, should we begin where we always do? Yeah, it's time. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, which has developed some new competition that I'm not feeling great about. But America's favorite, did you hear me, podcast within a podcast? Brendan Carr is a dummy. What do you do this week, Nelai? I forgot to say we didn't get any new theme music submissions this week. Please keep the new theme music coming.

And until then, we will continue to play the Gregorian chant. I love that everyone's favorite is the Gregorian chant. Like, we've had some really good ones. But if we were doing a ranker, I know Gregorian chant would hit number one. It is the original iPhone of Brinacarza's a dummy. Very good. All right. Brendan this week, I mean, he just did the dumbest possible thing, which is he went to CPAC,

the, you know, the big conservative conference. There's a lot of tension at CPAC. There's a New York Times piece about the young people at CPAC being like, what are these boomers talking about all the time? So, Seaback was weird. But Brian got on stage, and then he did the thing you're not supposed to do when you're America's speech police. He proudly said how much speech he's been policing.

We just had the clip. They just listen to him. And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid gone from MSNBC Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd gone

Jim Acosta gone John Dickerson gone Colbert is leaving CBS is under new ownership and soon enough CNN has got new ownership as well This sucks man It's like it's one thing

when you know that's the goal It's another when he just gleefully sits on stage And tells you out loud That has been the plan all along Especially because what he usually does He's like I'm just enforcing the law You know, I'm making sure everyone's fair. And then he gets on stage and he's like, look at all this speech that I've curtailed.

Right. Look at all these people who are not on the air anymore. That's not the role of the federal government. Government speech regulations are bad, as I continue to say in the face of remarkable opposition. Everyone loves the government's speech regulation lately. So that's bad. It is just very dumb. Like, I mean, like, tactically dumb.

Because if you're the speech police, you move quietly, right? You're not, you're supposed to quietly. influence what people see, think, and hear. You're not supposed to get on stage and be like, look at how good I am at affecting the speech. If there's one thing Americans hate, it is censorship. They do not like it. That's kind of like our whole thing in a lot of ways.

It's the first one. It is the First Amendment. We put it right at the top of the list. So, anyway, this is just Brendan being tactically stupid. The actually stupid thing that happened this week because of Brendan and how corrupt his FCC is is Nextstar and Tegna, that two big companies that own all the TV stations are trying to merge.

And they had to tell a court this week that they couldn't follow a temporary restraining order because they'd already merged. So this is just like the funniest possible set of, like, facts. So Nextar and Tegna are two big TV companies. They own a bunch of stations. We talked about this show last week. There's a statutory cap on how many stations you can own in a given market. It's 39%.

Brendan says I can change it by Fiat because I'm Brendan, and I can do whatever I want with that process. This is the one he just waived, right? He was like, no, you're good. The rules don't apply. The rules don't apply. We approve your merger. So NextTAR and TechD rush into merging. The problem, like the day after, like, they got their corrupt opinion from Brendan and they

rush into closing their deal. Does that just mean like everybody, everybody just like got new outlook instances? And they're like, well, now we're merged. Well, this is what's unclear. We're all in Slack together now. Right. So they sign their paperwork. The problem is, like, not everyone agrees with Brendan.

Not everyone agrees this is the right thing to do. Most importantly, Direct TV, which is actually their competitor, right? Like, they sell their channels to Direct TV, Distribute their channels. There's a lot of market power for these companies to have. They should be competitive with DirecTV so they can, Direct TV has different rate negotiations. So DirecTV has sued, along with a bunch of other companies, to block this merger. So Brendan goes through his corrupt process and says,

I waive this rule that would have blocked this merger anyway. They rush to close, and then, like, the next day a court grants a temporary responsibility. restraining order in favor of direct TV, saying, no, you have to let this lawsuit play out before he can merge. And these companies are like, no, no, no, no. We thought we already got Brendan's corrupt approval. We can't abide by your restraining order because we've already merged. I'll just read you a quote. We hereby notify the court that defendants cannot implement certain provisions of the TRO as written, the temporary restraining order as written, because of actions already completed at closing and legal obligations that cannot be reversed. whoops, we already merged. It's ridiculous.

The temporary restraining order creates immediate operational harm to Tegna and X-TAR regulatory conflicts in a governance vacuum because they already merged. They're claiming that these two huge companies have already merged and they can't possibly hold off on the merger. And the only reason they had already merged is because Brendan waived the rule. So this is just pure chaos now for some of the biggest media companies that control them most TV stations in the country.

because Brendan's process was so corrupt and ridiculous. And he gave himself a bunch of unilateral powers. It appears he doesn't actually have. Yep. Upon closing Nextdoor Integone, it took many typical steps that may not have been apparent to the court. It is particularly difficult to freeze integration that has already taken place. What integration?

Your deal closed yesterday. This really sounds like we started uploading our Microsoft OneDrive to their Microsoft OneDrive, and we can't stop it now. Yeah, pretty much. Or we knew we paid Brendan so much under the table that we knew we were granted this approval we already started and we didn't expect this lawsuit to get in our way. So Brendan is just causing chaos

because if you had just done the process the correct way, these companies would not be in the situation. But because he's so corrupt, everyone's getting confused and they think his corruption is actually the point when, in fact, there are other processes that still operate in this country, which is normally still governed by laws. So you have Brandon on one hand saying,

Look at all this speech that I shut down using my corrupt process. And on the other hand, you have these companies who are falling for his corruption and getting themselves all kinds of trouble. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show. I can't decide if it makes it better or worse that he sucks at his job. I'm starting to get notes. We have reporters in D.C., and I'm starting to get notes from people who are telling them that they want like a four-hour supercut of Brennan Carr as a dummy. They can just play on loop because people in D.C. hate him so much. Brendan, I'm happy to come on the show

We can make that super cut together Using the power of AI Which you also see it to regulate Or you can just listen to yourself Talk at CPAC And explain to me why that is appropriate I would love to hear your explanation For why you think that's appropriate

Anywhere, anytime on any show As you know, Brennan Carr's Dummy is not federated And it can be a podcast within any podcast The B-C-I-A-D-C-U is growing. Anyway, that's been Brian Carr's Dummy America's favorite podcast for the podcast.

It's good stuff. All right. My first lightning round item is also like kind of on a slant like a little bit of verge news.

I think it is not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention to show that you and I are both big believers in the Fediverse. Yeah.

The open social web, this idea that instead of everything being platforms that the social web should work like the internet does. You and I have both spent a lot of time

over the last couple of years with Mike McKeever Q, who is the CEO of Flipboard, who is like, I mean, just the zealot of all zealots when it comes to the social web. Flipboard just launched this app called Surf, which has been in beta for a long time. I'm sure we've talked about it on the show before. I think you and I have both been beta assessing it for a long time. Surf is basically, it's a mix of sort of social network and feed reader and, like, algorithmic

content delivery system. It's very cool. The app has a lot of, like, little sort of. niggling things to work out, which I think are really interesting and point to a lot of the stuff about the social web. Stuff loads slowly for one because it has to come from a lot of places. But I think this app is very cool. And if you want to understand why the social web is interesting, it's the best example of

that that I've seen, actually. And it's basically, instead of taking a bunch of posts that are accessible to anyone, like I sort of explain the Fedoverst of people is just like a giant database of stuff. It's posts, it's links, it's videos, it's just stuff. and you can choose to write to that database of stuff or read from that database of stuff any way that you want. And until now, everybody has chosen to do things that look and feel like Twitter, right?

And that's why Blue Sky looks like Twitter, not because it is like technologically like Twitter, but because that is an experience that people like. This is a completely different skin on top of that whole idea, right? It says, what if instead of being sort of a fast-moving timeline of social posts, it was very like content first and community. first, and it has a lot of really interesting ideas about how you can go find stuff to watch and read and listen to and whatever. The verge news of this is that we, and I think you in particular,

have spent a bunch of time standing up a bunch of surf pages for various verge things, including this podcast, the verge cast. So there is a verge cast feed and page on surf with you and me and a bunch of other folks putting stuff in. It has all the latest episodes. It has posts from people who are on and around the show. It is designed to be a sort of open web community space for the Vergecast. And we have on for Decoder or two. We have one for version history. We have them for The Verge.

I'm very excited about this. And I get the sense you're very excited about this, too. Yeah, I think these kinds of products are the first evidence that the open social web can be more than a bunch of Twitters. Yes. And if you remember, there was a period where building a new Twitter client was like the cutting edge interface design because you got to, you know, a bunch of app designers and really smart people got to spend all of their time, like, inventing new interface paradigms and what you could do with that kind of stuff without having to worry about how do I get 10 million people to signup and

tweet. Like Twitter was like, we've got that covered, use our API, build a cool app. And then they shut that all down for a lot of reasons. But like big ideas came out of that moment of experimentate. Pull the refresh came out of people building Twitter clients. Yep. Because they didn't have to worry about getting users and building a big network. That's what the open social web is, right? It's a big network of people all posting stuff. And some of that stuff looks like TikToks and some of it looks like tweets and some of it looks like newsletters. And you can just build different kinds of apps on top of that that show you that stuff in different ways. And Surf, I think, is the first app that kind of brings it all together. I think there's like a lot of ways you could use those tools. You know, we're in it.

like the verge is in it, but Wired is in it and Rolling Stone is in it. Like a bunch of media companies are seeing like, oh, this is a way for us to bring together everything we publish in one place. I think that's really neat. I'm just hopeful that there's vastly more experimentation there instead of ever being like, are threads or blue sky ever going to have the juice? Like, it's not the point. Like, I don't know how to say it. Like, the point is to not remake Twitter. Twitter wasn't good.

It was a bad company. It lost a bunch of money. And then it was taken over by a madman. that should not be the outcome you're chasing. The outcome you should be chasing is like there's a big internet of people sharing stuff and a lot of tools to help build communities around it. So I'm just excited that Surf is like a little proof point along the way.

Yeah, I agree. And I think, yeah, it's surf.com social. We'll put a bunch of the verge stuff in the show notes too. People can go post to it. It's a good way to, like, I think for us it's going to be a really cool way to engage with people, right? Like we have the email. We have the hotline. but I think this is going to be an even sort of lower barrier for people to clear

to just post things that we can see. You have a line in your news posts where you're like, it's a big bet on hashtags. It is. It's a big bet on hashtags. Hashtag decoder, hashtag verge cast. We will see it now. Yeah, from now on, if you post hashtag decoder or hashtag vergecast, we will see it. It'll be there on surf.

And if you do stupid things, we will moderate you out of existence. because that is power that we have. That's true. What's your next one? My next one, I just have an update on my IMAQ reclamation project. Oh, yeah. Your weird thing from China arrived. My thing from China arrived, it's a little bored.

I bought a firm company called Stone Task Agency R1820. It's the newest one. It's hot. So I opened the IMac. I pulled out all of the guts. That was actually the hardest part. Johnny Ive, slim, unibody-Immack, very tightly packaged. Like, brilliantly packaged.

device. So you rip out all the guts and you're left with just the display and I, you know, wired it all together. Those connectors are very delicate. You have to be very careful. My daughter was furious because the closest like big flat surface to my office is her bed. So it was just like a splayed open eye mac on her bed. And she's like, what? Get out of my room. You're like, not now, honey. Daddy's working. Yes. She came over from school. She's like, what are you doing? And I was like, I needed a flat surface. This is journalism. Got it all together. Other people have done a vastly better job of this to me. There's a snazy Q video that everyone should watch.

You like 3D printed, like port holders and everything. It's like he did a beautiful job. I did not be a beautiful job. I just shoved the board in the back of the thing, ran the wires at the RAM access panel in the back, and plugged it in. And my God, does it work? And is it perfect?

The IMAQ panel without the IMAX software and display is a little greener than normal. So I have a color calibrator. So I color calibrated it. and immediately ran into the reality that the software to control the backlight is like not correct. It's hard to explain, but if you use this thing called

better display to make the brightness keys on your Mac control the actual hardware brightness, it's mapped wrong. So about halfway through it hits 100%, and then it restarts. And this is maddening. So you can get to 100%,

which is all you really want. Yeah. But you can't have it that, you know, because I like to jam on the key. And so it remaps to like 30 and it goes back up to 100, which is crazy. Oh, that is interesting. So I email the company. I am now in possession of updated firmware file that can only be installed from Windows

using a piece of software that I believe I'm going to have to pirate. All the instructions are on Chinese, so I'm just kind of on my own here. And the only way you can do it is you have to reach back into the IMac and plug a display port case. into this board because the update takes place over display port, which I've never heard of before my life. But I'm assured that once I do this sketchy firmer update whose instructions are almost entirely in Chinese, that the brightness keys will work perfectly, and then the thing will be perfect. And I've never been happier in my entire life. Now, I'm aware that there is another company on Amazon called KTC that is selling basically the same panel

refurbished as a display for like $550. bucks and I've now spent $350 on a retrofit board and hours of my time. I don't know, man, but I'm having the time of my life and it works perfectly. I've never been happy. It's got to feel a little like you're putting together IKEA furniture where you're like, yes, this was more work and money that it needed to be, but I have accomplished something. Yes. Let's go with yes.

What it feels like is I didn't throw the thing away, right? Like, I, my, you know, that feeling where you throw away, like, a perfectly good display. Like, it just crushes me. And, like, that's the, that's the kind of hoarder I am. Like, everything else, let's throw it away. But a perfectly good display. I'm like, we should hold on to that. My office is, like, why?

And I don't know the answer. So I didn't throw away a perfectly good display. And it looks beautiful. It's still, I was using some old Dell 4K display before. And, like, this thing is so much better. Oh, yeah. It's so much better. And I, you know, and I got to Lego.

It wasn't hard. The hard part is actually just cutting the, the glue that holds the display on the case. I'm proud of you that you did this. It's like, it took so long that I was like, there's no way he's ever going to actually do this. Good for you. That's awesome. You're getting back to your like repairing Mac days.

I'm pulling. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to yank. I need a Windows computer with a native display port. And like digging through the reviews closet when we're done with the podcast. Oh boy. So I can update the firmware and make the brightness. That'll be a computer that's super fun to use. Yeah, I'm really excited about it.

Yeah. All right, my next one is just a thing I feel sort of obligated to keep, like, harping on, which is price increases, largely due to the RAM and memory shortage, but also it's just wild out there, folks. Like, the price of gas is going up. There's a helium shortage. Just the world is a mess, and it is making electronics more expensive. And I think the effects of that are getting worse very quickly. there were a bunch of them this week. Sony stopped selling memory cards because there were shortages. The PS5 went up $150 in price. The PS5 famously not a new console, now $150 more expensive.

But the one I really want to point out is Raspberry Pi, the cheap, low-end computer that people do lots of interesting things with, up to the price of the 16-gig Raspberry Pi 5 by $100. They took a thing that was $120 and raised the price by $100. Just to give you a sense of what memory costs, that is it.

They raised prices kind of across the board. And Ebben Upton, who is the CEO of this organization, wrote a blog post explaining the price hikes and sort of what it means. And there's two really fascinating pieces of this blog post that I just want to point out because I think they're really interesting. One, he writes, in this environment, it's, well worth right sizing both your memory and your overall compute rather than going for something with more headroom than your application actually needs. That is a lot of words to say,

buy less computer. Yep. Which is fast, like, that you never ever hear that from anybody. And especially as something as cheap as the Raspberry Pi, it's always like, buy the most of it, right? Like, it's all pretty cheap. Give yourself some headroom. Give yourself room to work. Get more RAM. Get more memory. Like, a piece of advice that you and I have given to many, many people over the years. is that you should always get more RAM and more storage first. That those are the two things you will run into the fastest, and that is where you should invest all of your money. And it was just, it was so shocking to me to see somebody,

for perfectly correct economic reasons, say the opposite of like, you can probably get away with less RAM. Like this is the world we've come to. Yeah, it's not great. On the other side, this is the end of the blog post. He says, we've said a number of times now that memory prices won't remain at their current very high level indefinitely. I'm going to bet there's no way he knows that to be true.

The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can. Like, this is Raspberry Pie. This is not some like money-gouging, profit-hungry organization desperate to find ways to nickel and dime you. This is raspberry pie. And it is very clear that this is like, they're not raising prices $100 because they think they can get more money out of you. This is brutal, brutal economic times in this industry. And he's basically just throwing his hands up being like, well, it can't be this bad forever,

but we don't know how long it's going to be this bad. And this is where everybody has landed is it's not a thing you can just weather. It's not a cost you can find another way to make up for on some other piece of it. There are a very small number of companies that are going to be able to even continue to make things at this scale that they want to be. and the rest of them are either going to have to charge vastly more, make many fewer products or go out of business, or some combination of those things. And like it is just getting uglier across so many different vectors so fast.

It's just wild out there. Evan was on Decoder in 2022 during the chip shortage and people were furious at him about Raspberry Pi costs and decreases. You can go listen to an episode. He is a very sincere person. Like this is an academic project to, you know, there's a foundation. I love an org chart on decoder. Like, this is not a profit-hungry thing.

This is, we want to give lots of people, lots of computers. Yeah, this sucks. It's bad. And it really is, like, every time you turn around, it gets worse. And there is a new reason to be worried about it. I will say, I pulled the RAM out of this old IMAC, and I was going to throw it away. And I was like, wait, I can make some coin here.

It's on eBay. If you're interested in some 2019 so dims, let's search them up. I mean, you joke, but somebody building a, Data Center is going to buy that from you right now. They want my old non-ECC RAM from an Iback. Yeah. But it's like, I mean, did you see the story about how they're having trouble shipping

EVs because they can't get through the straight that is being so heavily militarized in Iran? It's like, everywhere you turn, that's like the end result of all of this is no one is ever getting new gadgets ever again. That's the main outcome. That's finally how we will convince Americans of globalization is actually pretty good. It was like the Pax Americana, but also there were some. sick gadgets

yeah it's about it do you have another one or are we done here? No we I'm still puzzled about the recency bias in the Apple ranking I need to go start the window for a while it's fair Nelai's going to go hug his slim unibody eye mask which I've gutted

but that last pull to get the motherboard out of the chin I was like oh Johnny would be so bad I'm just like get out of there it was not you know when you have to pull something a little bit harder than you want to but you know it's the right thing to do there's about 10 minutes of that and taking apart on my Mac. Yeah.

My last one is just a PSA, which is don't download the White House app. We don't even talk about that. Just don't download the White House app. If you want to know why, Google it. It's all right there. Bad times out there. All right, we should get out of here.

Thank you again to everybody who participated in all the Apple 50 stuff. The Raker turned out super fun. That whole project has been incredibly fun. Our team did really great work. It was a lot to keep that thing up and running. So shout out again to Graham, who did a ton of work to make that thing happen.

everybody did super cool work and to all of the people who sent us your most complicated choices just know that we feel you. There were a lot that were like original iPhone versus original Macintosh and people are like, what do I do with this? It's rough out there.

Like yeah, I feel you. It was hard times. All right, we should get out of here. Nelai, it's been a pleasure. We did the hype desk. Hyped desk is here. We did it. Let us know how you feel about the hype desk. Yeah.

Call the Virgcast Hotline 866 version 11. Send us an email, Vergecats to the verge.com. Tell us what you think. we got wrong in our rankings, yell at us about what the youths got wrong in their rankings. We want to hear all of it. Tell us what you think about the hype desk. We're going to keep figuring out what that thing is. So we want to hear all of your feedback. Vote for us in the Webbies. Come to the movie night at the end of April.

A lot going on in Vergecast world. It's good times out here. This show is part of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Nelai, what's on Decoder next week? It's the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins. Oh, that'll be a fun one. We talked about data centers in space. As one does.

I just let you know that that's where we begin. I have gone from thinking all of that is ridiculous to it being the thing I think about the most. Data Centers in Space is my Roman Empire right now for reasons. I'll just give you a little preview. He straight up was like, no small talk. Amazing. I love it. Version history this weekend is the Amazon Echo.

Very fun episode. It involves a lot of them. me being very upset at how young I look in the Verges review of the Amazon Echo from like 12 years. That's over a decade ago. Yeah, it was a time. All right. Thank you. As always, we'll see you next time.

Eli, rock and roll.