The Vergecast - Apple's expensive Mac Pro, gadgets of the decade, and Twitter's project Bluesky

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Stories this week: Apple’s most expensive Mac Pro costs $52,599 Apple’s most expensive Pro Display XDR requires a special, Apple-made cloth to clean it You can now buy Apple's new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR … The Mac Pro's optional wheels cost $400 Logitech made a bespoke $200 magnetic 4K webcam for … Apple will reportedly release an iPhone without any ports in 2021 Lightroom finally adds direct photo import on iOS The Apple TV remote is so bad that a Swiss TV company developed a normal replacement Rewound is a new app that turns your iPhone into an iPod The Verge’s gadgets of the decade Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its ... A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past Twitter will now let you post iOS Live Photos as GIFs Twitter is bringing back labels for US election candidates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about the new Mac Pro. We talk about our gadgets of the decade and what Twitter is doing by thinking about decentralizing itself. That's Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data 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 news. 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. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the holiday season. Can we get some like jingo bell sounds? No. Andrew said no. He didn't say yes.

Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. I'm back. It's been several weeks since I've been on the show, I think. Welcome back. How many weeks? 100 weeks. Deeter is here.

Hi, Deeter. I have been here the whole time. Deeter works hard. Deeter's diligent Deeter is here. That's so true. It's like a garbage pale kid name. Paul Miller is here. Hello.

I don't have a nickname. I'm sorry. Pretty pretty Paul. I'll come up with your children's book quality nickname soon. It is both a quiet week to use. We're cruising into the end of the year, but a lot of things happened this week. Yeah. And we published our list.

of 100 gadgets of the decade, which just in full transparency was designed to make people argue about 100 gadgets, which is what else are we here for? So we're going to talk about that. We've got to talk about the Mac Pro. I want to start by congratulating our friend Keras Swisher. Recode Decode was awarded podcast of the year by Adweek, which is incredible. So you're going to check out Rico Decode. I also want to say, Zoe Schiffer's amazing away story continues to have twists and turns.

You've probably seen it. I think you mentioned on the show last week. Steph Corey, the CEO of O'A, was removed. There's a new CEO, the dude from Lulu Lemon. There's more twists and turns coming. We're going to have Zoe on the interview show on Tuesday. So we're not going to talk about it now. I just want to congratulate her over that story.

Stay tuned on Tuesday. She'll be back with more. There's more to come. It's going to be fun. It was a really fun interview. So if you haven't read yet, go read Zoe's Away story. It is a phenomenon. And we'll talk to her about it on Tuesday.

Okay. Apple Incorporated. Small purveyor of computers. Apropos of nothing, unrelated to anything we're about to talk about, I need a raise. Does somebody want a new computer? I need a raise that is approximately as much as a Tesla Model 3. So Apple, just a quick history lesson.

Okay. These two guys named Steve were in a garage, and they're like, we should make a computer, and it would go on your desk. Yeah. And one of the steves thought it should be, like, beautiful. And the other Steve was like, what if it had ports? It's true. What if had card slots and ports? This is true.

This is the genesis of Apple. Apple. And they had fights and fights and they one time, one one, one Steve got fired, and the other Steve is now like their mascot. And he says things on Twitter. And then Apple is like, well, just don't listen to him. Anyway, that's the story of the Steve's. Now there are AirPods. I don't know. There's some stuff happened. Now there's AirPods. Inside of Apple, the debate over whether things should be totally beautiful and have no ports or are we modular and powerful for people who actually want to use them. It's in the DNA at a company. That's what I'm saying. From the beginning. From the first day. They're like arguing about card slots. Yeah. The wrong people won for a long time. Very long time.

Like too long. So Apple's big strategy was that they would just make slow Macintoshes with bad keyboards and everyone would use an iPad and that would be the future. And then you'd be in their walled garden and it would be fine. The reality is people have to do work on their computers. Can we back up? How firmly do you? I mean, I know it's a joke conspiracy theory.

But like there's some percentage of you that actually believes that they made the Mac laptops bad to force people to use iPads. And I just want to know what percent knows that it's a joke, but believes it anyway. The percentage went up way higher when they put out the MacBook Air everybody wanted. Yeah. When they tried to kill the MacBook Air by putting out the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and they're like, but we'll still sell this crappy air. And then they were surprised that people continued to buy the MacBook Air, despite it being the crappiest laptop than they offered. Not that it was a crappy laptop, just in their lineup, the worst one, but people liked the balance of things that it was.

And that surprised them that, I would say my belief that they wanted people to buy iPads instead of entry-level Mac laptops, and it didn't break their way, that went higher. That's what I would say to you. Okay. But they learned. They have learned. They figured it out, we think. So they put out with a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a functional keyboard,

remember a functional touchbar, functional keyboard. and then this Mac Pro with like all the slots and RAM do-hickies that you could want. Yeah, the USBA port on the inside. Yeah. And now everybody's happy. The end. That's Verchast, everybody. So the news, if you haven't heard, is, you know, it was already announced.

We already got to look at it. People have been talking about it. We knew it was coming for years. But now it's on sale. You can go buy one. And that meant a few things. Number one, it meant that some influencers and other sort of pros that Apple really likes have had them for a while and have talked about some of their impressions. Profluensers.

Pro fluencers. It also means that anyone is free to go and spec out their Dream Mac Pro. And, yeah, it costs a lot of money, as you might expect. And there have been many a joke made about the money that it costs. So the spec goes from $6,000 to like $52,000 and change. Plus monitors. Plus monitors. Plus wheels.

Plus wheels. The wheels are included at 52,000. At 52K, K, we throw in the wheels. We'll do the clear coat protector, the underbody treatment, the whole thing. I want to go back to this pro fluencer thing because it's not that it doesn't make, it makes perfect sense that this is how Apple would roll it out. But it's also worth noting that as of this Vergecast, I cannot find a single legitimate benchmark of this computer. Apple did not give people who professionally care about the speed of computers a chance to look at this before it was officially out. Let me sand the rough edge off of that a little bit because I think the YouTubers care professionally about the speed of their computers.

They did not give reviewers this computer, like professional media reviewers, this computer. We didn't get one. Joanna didn't get one. Tom's hardware didn't get one. Ars Technic didn't get one. Like a non-tech didn't get one. The people who do it that way, our way, the traditional sort of media reviewer way, did not get these computers. YouTubers got these computers.

And I just, for the record, I think everybody knows this. I really like Marquettes. We've done a lot of stuff with him. I really like John Morrison. I like I Justine. They're in our ecosystem. We see them at events. We like them.

Their videos are fun to watch. Go watch them. And actually, can I even add to that? The videos that they made with the Mac Pro are very good. There are just a, there's the beginnings of some benchmarks, but they do. did the responsible thing and didn't act like they knew more than they knew when the embargo time came up for them to be able to post their videos. Yeah.

They talked about what they were able to truthfully say about what they knew about this computer, which involved a lot like, here's how it looks, here's how I feel about this. I was able to do these very small speed tests in the time that I had in order to do the thing. So in that sense, that's great. Like the videos are very good. You should absolutely go watch them. I'm happy they're successful. I'm happy they compete with us in some dimensions.

They don't want some other dimensions. Are they reviewers like we are reviewers? I think they would be the first to say they do not do the things that we do. That's fine. We all exist in ecosystem together. The thing we would have done is test a bunch of software that Apple hadn't already shown us worked really well. Right. And that's the thing that's missing.

That's the thing you're talking about, Paul. There's like benchmarks out there. I think a lot of people are very interested to see how Adobe Premiere operates on this computer. And we don't know the answer yet. A lot of people are not going to buy one until Avid certifies it. Right. And that could be a while. It could be a long time, but that's a major piece of software for pros.

And maybe this isn't a fair comparison, but the way I kind of see it, there's this thing that happens with video games where sometimes the video games just so good that they don't give it to reviewers. And sometimes there's a video game that's so bad that they definitely don't give it to reviewers because they'll get the day one sales before the really bad news hits. And I don't think there's like some super bad news waiting with the Mac Pro. But what I think the news that is waiting that will probably happen in a week is like,

hey, we built this Hackintosh with off-the-shelf parts, and it costs a quarter of the Mac Pro, and it beats it on 95% of the benchmarks. And I don't know that for certain, but I'm guessing Apple doesn't want that to be the very first headline for Mac Pro. And so it makes total sense that that is not currently the very first headline. But for me, that's the most important. important thing about this computer is that Apple did manage to make a very powerful computer,

but they didn't make the most powerful computer in the world, and they made a computer that is way more expensive than it necessarily needs to be, and it defines pro as someone with $6,000, where I would define pro as someone with $1,000. And I think it's a mindset that really frustrates me about Apple, and I just feel like this style of rollout, again, It's such a minor issue, but it speaks loudly to me in those tones. So here's what I think is going on. I can't speak for Apple, but here's what I think it's going on in their head. I think they know that there are a bunch of people that would not understand the right context in which to test this machine.

Right. They're like, oh, they'd run a benchmark, not know what it means, publish it, they get the bad headlines. They believe that this is a different kind of pro machine than the other pro machines. Like, pro means two different things to Apple now, right? and this pro is like full on, I work at a movie studio or I, you know, I work at a big music label kind of pro. And that's different than, you know, I just want a nice computer. So I'm going to buy the MacBook Pro because it says pro and that makes me feel good, right? And so I think that they genuinely wanted to just make sure that people would, who understood the context of what kind of pro machine this is were in the first wave of people to like say anything publicly about it.

outside the company. Do I fully agree with that decision? I mean, you can guess what my answer is. It's like, there are people that you could trust to like get the right context right. So, right. So look, Joanna is one of our founders. She went my closest friends. I was like, did you get a Mac pro? And she's like, what would I even do with that? So like, yeah, like maybe the average Wall Street Journal, the average Wall Street Journal reader is like using his iPad in first class, right? He's like, like, he's fine. But the point of the machine is like Apple stepping confidently back into the context of, we do make some of the fastest computers in the world. The content that you want to watch on the movie screen or play it on Apple Music,

like those pros are using our machines to the best possible work that can exist. The apps are coded on it. The video games are made on. Like, that's the promise they're trying to make with the computer. That's a promise they failed with the previous Mac Pro to keep. It's a promise that their hardware, I mean, that last Mac Pro is 2013. So like for seven years, they've been out of that game, right? And as the MacBook Pro, how many times we talked about the process of refresh cycle and Intel and Walt, like, they've just been out of the game.

They've been slow, and this is their big. We're back. Donald Trump's in Texas at the factory, which he thinks is new and fine. We're just going to run out that slide. But like, it's a moment. And so they're capturing the moment. And I think the difference here is they rolled out what I would call like influencer. marketing, right, not reviews. And I, that doesn't mean I don't think that Marquez will eventually

publish a review. I think he absolutely will. But this first wave was a bunch of unboxing videos and like, look at how fast it runs Apple software. But pros use a lot of not Apple software and a lot of software that is slow to turn the corner to new kinds of hardware and new ways of working. With the last MacPro, the software never actually turned the corner. It never actually got there and made the most use of that machine. We gave the last, the 2013 MacBook Pro, we're looking at that review. We gave it like an eight. And we were like, it'll do great when everyone figures out these graphics cards. And like, we were as wrong as anybody. So I think there's like a real danger here. The other thing, I think, is that which one do you review?

That is actually really hard because there's so many different ways to configure this, right? You can configure it for audio or video or photo. And they all are actually wildly different machines. Yeah. And so we're going to, we're going to get one. By hook or by crook, we're going to get one. We're leading towards Crook right now. Yeah. I know how to get one by crook. That seems like the wrong choice. If you know how to get one by hook, please let me know because that would be hilarious. But we're going to get one. We're going to review it. And one of the questions we've been having is like which one? How do we configure it? What do we configure it for? I think we've probably talked about this on their show. Like our video team uses creative card. That's where we live. So like do we spec the $2,000 after burner card that will never be used just so we can test? I think that is actually another huge problem. for a review cycle in this machine. It is very hard to tell you where price performance lands

if you just send people the $52,000 one, and everyone's like, it's very fast. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. Right. And that's becoming a very interesting thing kind of across all computers right now. There are video cards that are good for different workloads. There are CPUs that are good for vastly different.

I mean, storage, you just want fast storage, but, you know, there's always that tradeoff between speed and size. You know, there are a lot of tradeoffs with computers. And so, yeah, and within the Mac Pro, yeah, I could definitely see a whole bunch of different specs for very different use cases. So here's my question. Of the, like, the true pros that we are, like, talking about here, how many of them? What percentage are just looking at the base $6,000 spec, and be like, yep, that's what I need. That fits my needs exactly.

I don't need to upgrade. And maybe I'll upgrade down the line. But like, what percentage of people aren't specking this thing up from the jump to something over $10,000? I have to believe that's the largest percentage because all of those people want a $2,000 Mac Pro and they can't. And so now they have to, what is it called, refinance their home. So they have a Mac Pro. So I asked the person in charge of technology at Vox Media Studios to spec one out. Like he would give to one of our company's Netflix production.

or PBS production, there's a Hulu deal floating around box media for Eater. TV shows are made in this building, is what I'm telling you. We have a post-production studio downstairs. So I asked Marillo Silva, who runs that operation, hey, spec out of Mac Pro, what did you get? He came back at $11,800, which is not the most. So that's a 3.2 gigahertz, 16-core XonW, 96 gigs of RAM, the single Radion Provega 2 with 32 gigs of memory, a terabyte SSD, and obviously the magic mouse too. How could you not?

And he's like, we don't do anything that would use more coarse than that. He's like, that's what I buy. I asked Grayson, our motion graphics person, you basically pick the same computer. He's like, I want cooler graphics cards. So he's put down two graphics cards. And he added the Afterrunner card because he's curious about it. And that got him to 17K, I think.

So at least in the video world where we live, and this is, like, we make YouTube videos, and sometimes we publish them in 4K, so there's that side. And then the TV production that happens at our company, you're looking at 12 to 17, I would say. Above that, I think you have more specialized workflows,

you're moving more data, you're doing more stuff. But at least in our zone, it seems like that's the number. I think a lot of people are buying those $6,000 ones just to chain the processors together. They don't really need the storage, whatever, but they just need lots of cores in Iraq, and that's what they're going to do. I'm sensing a vibe of outrage coming from you, Paul, because you brought it up a handful of times.

I personally am not mad that Apple makes a computer that in order to do what it's designed to do cost somewhere between $12,000 and $17,000. The question is, should you be mad about the fact that they don't make that $2,000 computer? That's what I'm mad about. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. I do think it's probably overpriced for what you get. And like you just mentioned, Eli, like people would like to be able to put. but zion processors in server racks to do Mac workloads, but they can't because Apple doesn't make that for them.

But yeah, I'm not, it's not like this is horrible, but when Apple sat down two years ago and admitted that it had done a bad job for getting to make professional desktop computers, I assumed that they knew that there is a large, I don't know, maybe I'm the crazy one, but I feel like there's a large segment of people who get desktops that are around $1,000 to $2,000 that are super effective

and do really great work with them. And Apple doesn't believe that that should exist for some reason. Well, they make the IMac. Right. The IMac fills that hole for them. Badly. Poorly.

In my opinion. Mac Mini with the Zion. That's what you're looking for. I mean, the Mac Mini is no slouch right anymore. They fix that thing up a bit. And I think all you need to do is put Zions in Iraq. Like, first of all, why are you running all of macOS Catalina with like Siri support and sidecar? Like, that makes no sense.

Because Apple makes it that way. Apple restricts the places, for instance, Xcode. If you want to build Apple software, you know, you need to use Xcode. But if you are building Apple software at the scale that requires you to put a bunch of servers in a rack to compile, a, hopefully you're putting that on your corporate business card because you're not like a single. loan ranger in the basement. So you're amortizing it over the cost of your business. You're doing all kinds of accounting stuff. And B, like, you're probably at the scale where the difference between $2,000 and $6,000 is not enormous to you, especially if it's as performant as Apple

says it is. Well, I mean, it's almost, I don't know how to say, reverse everything you said. Like, like right now, I contribute to an open source software project. And it does build across a whole bunch of platforms to test it all out. So it's a very, common use case for a lot of software, and it's happening on, and GitHub is doing it now, which is Microsoft. Microsoft is building thousands of software projects repeatedly every single day. And so it limits, it caps the amount of services they can offer people in a sense by gating Macintoshes behind such a high price point.

I mean, this whole debate aside, because I think we're going to. to have this debate for another five years because we're not going to get the $2,000 Mac out of them, desktop. Have you thought about a $2,000 iPad? Oh, man. The fact that the wheels cost $400 and the display, if you get the nanocoding on the display, you are not allowed to use anything other than the very special microfiber cloth that they provide because it might damage the nano finish on the XDR display is just like

Apple knows, right? Take the worst stereotypes that we have of Apple charging too much for stuff. And instead of trying to talk us out of it or whatever, they're like, nope, the stand costs $1,000. Don't touch the screen with a piece of paper or Kleenex. Don't, you know, don't buy a skateboard, buy $400 wheels, right? Like, they know. I have thoroughly enjoyed the cottage industry of people who are like, well, if you are a professional color grader, it doesn't matter because Pixar will just pay the money. And like, A, I'm 100% certain that's true.

It's probably true. But, like, it doesn't change the fact that most people react to a $1,000 monitor stand the same way, like, no matter who they are or where they're situated in life. Like, you can roll up to Bob Eiger, the CEO of Disney, and be like, this monitor's tank costs $1,000. And he'd be like, that's a lot of money. Like, that's just the first thing he would say, because it's just such an enormous amount of money.

Or if you'd be like, I don't know. I got it. From now on, instead of asking presidential candidates what the cost of a gallon of milk is, we should ask about how much a monitor stage should cost. Right, exactly. Pete, are you aware of the pro-display XDR? Because I have a question about the nanocoding for you, sir. Do you support single cloth cleaning only? That's great.

We're going to get Pete on the Vergecast, and we're only going to ask me about Mac hardware specs and maintenance. That's going to be great. I'm excited to get the display in our hands. I'm excited to get the, like I said, we're going to get the stuff. We're going to review it. My idea for reviewing it, like I said, we do have all these folks in our building who do things and make things. It's to let them at it a little bit and see what that's like. I think we can be a little bit more expansive with this review.

We got to get one. It's the holidays. I suspect we will not have a review of this thing until sometime next year. But I'm very excited about it. And Paul, just to counter what you're saying, I think it is very. very exciting for Apple to be in this market, to want to win in this market, to have a super high profile product that people have been waiting for a long time that I think that they know that it can't fail. The worst thing that could happen to Apple at this moment is the Mac Pro

doing badly, right? Not the worst. The worst thing is like the tariffs, that there's no trade deal and the tariffs go up and the iPhones cost under. That's the worst thing that could happen to them. But the worst thing that could happen with their rep, with developers, with designers, the video people, with all the people that are trying to court and keep on their team is that this product costs too much for what it can deliver, or it doesn't work, or it's a ridiculous cooling fan that was model electric car tires or whatever they said to popular mechanic is like, it's actually really loud and it like causes dogs to rush into your home. Like, those would all be catastrophic, right?

I don't think it's going to be that. And I actually, the more I think about the top end price, and I hear like, yes, you can build your own thing. That top end price is reasonable against the top end prices of other vendors who compete in the same space, right? It's not reasonable against you yourself building a thing, but it's reasonable against you're going to go to HP and they're going to spec you out at a Zeon server, and they're going to provide support and experience to you over the lifetime of that product. Like, that's what Apple will probably do for you if you spend $50,000 in the computer. They do have their pro workflow team. They do have all this experience next to it.

You can trust them. The thing is probably well engineered. the power supply probably is matched properly to the video cards. Like that little thing that you're buying extra probably costs more than the home-built one. The question is, is it better materially than the other commercial ones? I don't know the answer to that question. But I think it's great that Apple's in the space. I think it, how many times have we talked about this?

Like, it's wild that the app store is the moat for iOS and the iPhone and the iPad. And it's developers who are like, where's the computer to make the stuff on that I need? and they haven't provided that solution. Now they have. Are those people all still just going to my MacBook pros or else thing costs so much money. But I'm happy that they're in the zone. I'm happy that they made this object.

I'm very curious to get our hands on one. I also really want that display. Like, I'm a display nerd, and they made the craziest display. Like, yeah, give it to me. The joke on the Swift programming language subreddit was something like, I maxed out all the specs,

will this be enough to run X code? And someone said, yes, But you'll need to double the RAM if you want to run Chrome as well. That's pretty good. Can we talk about the Logitech $200 webcam for the display? It's so ugly. So display costs $5,000. The stand costs $1,000.

If you want a webcam, you got a little magnet and $200 webcam on top, which I love. I actually love the idea that this monitor doesn't have a webcam built into it. But I love more that Logitech, Deer Sweet Logitech, saw a market opportunity to put a $200 our magnetic webcam on top of this thing. Remember the, what was it called the eye cam? Was it called the eye cam? Oh, you're talking about eyesight. Eyesight. That thing was sick.

That thing was badass. It was badass because webcams at that time to run them for a long time. They generated a lot of heat. So it needed to be an aluminum tube with fins in the inside and holes in the outside. Yeah. Incredible. It's the cheese grater of Kim. It still looks beautiful.

Yeah. No, Apple's stuff from that period of time, the Steve Jobs plus Johnny Ive era, is the most beautiful stuff they've ever made. This thing is, but homage to that time. I agree with that. Yeah, that moment when the consumer stuff was all candy-colored plastic and the pro stuff was all stainless steel and they hadn't yet just sort of made everything the same.

Easily the most beautiful stuff. I think Walt just tweeted a picture of like his first eyebook or whatever, like the blue one, the clamshell blue Ibeck. That thing was great. It was so ridiculous and so underpowered and it had an 8x6 screen and like it was still great. There's some other Apple stuff to talk through. There's a rumor that they're going to put out a phone without any ports in 2021.

I just, I get, I can't, I don't. Come on. Here's what I got for you. I'm going to do it. I'm going to play this game with you. The iPhone does not need a data port. Agreed. Done, your honor.

We will be submitting our documents in full. When is the last time? I mean, Neelai, you're a maniac, so don't answer this because you never do this. But you're in your car. Just pull over. pick up your phone, look at it, and think to yourself, when was the last time I was doing this thing I'm doing right now, holding my phone, and I had it plugged in because I wanted to charge it whilst I used it. Oh, I did that all the time. Yeah.

Explain me how that works in a portless world. You clip a wireless battery on the battery. Well, you think that Mofi can't figure that out? And so you're going to carry around a giant wireless charging pad with you? I mean, I carry one around for my watch. I mean, that's just bonkers. A perfectly sized circular coil that goes on the back of the iPhone instead of a USB or a lightning connector.

Like, honestly, what is the difference? Okay. Well, so why don't just use pogo pins then? No, because then, well, I don't know. They got rid of Johnny Ives. So whoever's left will be very unhappy. Because you don't need them, because you don't need data transfer. Yeah, but you can do data transfer wireless, USB wireless at that close of connection, by the way.

But the charging speed is not great. And as soon as there's not a physical connection, you lose charging speed. Just picture this. Phil Schiller's on a stage. And he's like, look, every night I walk out of this circle and I walk towards my car. And I think to myself, it's a little chilly outside. That's why our new charger gets dangerously hot while it wirelessly charges your phone. No one of the issues ever thought of this before.

Other folks, they're playing it safe. Apple risks. Look, they can probably, look, they didn't do it right with air power. They can probably run it a little hotter than the standard, right? That's the thing they want to do with cheese, improve it. Right. I bet if they can get an efficient. I'm making this argument because I think this idea is horrible, but I need to practice.

Yeah. They're already behind what Android phones allow on wireless charging. Like, you can turn up the wattage on wireless charging for Android phones much higher than Apple currently allows. Not much higher, but like higher. Yeah, it's like 7.5 versus 10. Yeah. How fast is a 10 watt charger charge? A hell of a lot slower than the like 45 watt charger I can charge my iPhone with right now with a cable.

Like, come on. I'm just saying if you accept, and I sadly accept, that there's no need for data transfer to and from an iPhone anymore. I actually don't fully accept that because especially if you want to use your iPhone as like your computer, you want to plug stuff into it. Like, you can't plug a microphone into an iPhone without a cable. Have you heard about the iPad Pro? Yeah. There's a USBC port. That should be your laptop now, and that's who you are.

Okay. Look, you're right. I just don't think there's, like, a great lightning ecosystem out there that anybody gives a shit about. Okay. I mean, I think that there is for music. I think there is, there are a handful of shits given for music accessories that use lightning. Yeah, fair.

But those should be USBC. But there's going to be no port at all. What if the iPhone pro has USBC and then I, this is the comp, the great compromise is the iPhone pro gets USBC, but the iPhone loses all ports? Ooh. Would you make that trade to have a world where the iPhone pro has USBC? Ooh, maybe, maybe. Maybe I'd make that trade. But nobody would buy the iPhone without a cable, without a port.

They would just ship a cord with USBA at one end, almost certainly. and then like a little circle magnet thing on the other end. I think that little circle will be bigger than you want it to be. Like it needs to be like not quite coaster size but it needs to be fairly large

to get any kind of like wattage through it. Yeah, and it's just going to keep you and your loved one's warm. You don't really like it. We promise you. That's a rumor. I would say it's 50-50 shot. I just wanted to make the case

because it's fun to make the case. I'm just trying not to get prematurely mad in case it's not true. In other iOS port news, huh? Wow. Do you like my local news segue? Uh-huh. Lightroom, after all of this time,

yep, can now directly import a photo on the iPad. 2019, baby. It took just 45 years of people wondering what the hell was going on. One, I would say, spicy review video from us. One entire change to philosophy about the iPad from Apple. and then two more years from Adobe. But they got there, and you can now do it. I've done it.

I've imported a JPEG, my friends. How'd it feel? It was everything. It's also the most intensely revealing thing about how frustrating it has been to use an iPad this entire time. Yeah. Because you do it, you know, like, why is this a new cycle? This is just how it should have worked the whole time.

And then my last favorite one, there's a Swiss TV company. there. Yes. Instead of cable blocks, the ship's Apple TVs, which is great. It makes sense,

which I should do. But so many people were confused by the Apple TV remote that they worked with Apple to make their own remote with a D-pad that is big and has, like, buttons. And a power button?

A power button, volume, the whole thing. I want one real bad. I want one real bad. You need to start a daily newsletter, subscribe to commandline to verge.com slash newsletters because a reader has replied to me

and said, I'm going to Switzerland, and I'm going to go to one of these cable stores from the Swiss cable company and see if I can buy the remote. And if I can, do you want me to buy you one? And I said, yes, I will pay triple because I want one so bad. Every attempt to reinvent the remote control involves a retreat to adding a power button and a D-pad. Doesn't matter who you are.

It doesn't matter what you make. Doesn't matter if you pay Jennifer Aniston to make TV shows for you. Amazon included the power button, but they didn't include, I think, volume buttons for a while. And so they had to retreat and put those back on. Yeah. Well, I think the big thing for most of those companies, Roku didn't have power volume for a long time. And then they sort of like added them on the side of the remote to confuse people the most is all of these boxes used to be like the third box. And so I think there was an assumption that you would end up with the universal remote or something else along the way or you just like have five remotes because you needed five remotes because you had a cable box remote and that was doing volume power for you.

Now they're the primary box. and I don't think they have contended with that. And then reinventing navigation. I have an LGOLED TV that does the wavy mouse, which is fun to a point. Yeah. Do you actually use the wavy mouse? I try every time.

Really? Every time. It's been like two years you've had this thing. Yeah. And you pick it up and you're like, there's that mouse cursor. And you like, remember that CES where they told us about Beanbird, their helpful setup assistant that people would come to love it. Yeah.

They don't talk about Beanbird so much anymore. But it's like there and it works for some things and for things. And it's just like just the D-pad's fine. My Sony TV has a very slow D-pad situation. You're like, this is, you know what? This is what I deserve. I run Android on this TV and this is who I am. Do you want to talk about this remound app?

Wrap up this Apple situation? So there's a ReWound app that it accesses your music library and the interface just looks like an old-school iPod. but what's fascinating is when you go to install it from the app store, it asks you what kind of interface do you want? And it has like a really boring button interface, which is, you know, completely legal. And like, but if you want, you could like go on Twitter and search. And then if somebody happens to have used this hashtag,

you'll be able to download a PNG from Twitter and then use that as the skin on this music player. Like we're shipping Winamp in 2003. and if you do that, then you can make it look and act just like an iPod. And it is deeply fascinating to me that Apple let this thing, which is clearly designed, 100% designed to make you, give you a thing that feels like Apple's interface that it still obviously has like design patents on or something. And they just, they let it on the app store because it has this one, extra step of you got to go like download it download the skin from the internet yeah i think it's

probably because like phil shiller himself wanted it you think so yeah it's like well you got two things one it's nostalgic it's still streams apple music they're still paying artist you know 0.04 cents a stream or whatever apple music yeah right it's like that's fine it's not replacing your phone it's just another app on your phone there's not like some ipod business for them to save it makes everybody feel happy. And on top of it, extremely clever way around the rules. Again, in Apple's DNA,

I mean, this is like the company that started out making blue boxes together. So they're probably like a little, we love a little hacker spirit. No, they don't. No, they make a credit card with Goldman Sachs now. They fully do not love hacker spirit anymore. Do you give Apple credit for allowing someone

to cleverly circumvent their rules and not cracking down on them, or do you just be mad at Apple that is this difficult to? This is where we are with the platforms in our lives, with the monopolies of control America. We give them credit when they're like, we've looked the other way to do this very obvious thing that most people should be able to do. Having used the ReWound app for a day or so, I will say two things.

One, I don't think the physics on the scroll wheel are exactly right yet. It's like a little bit too slow when you try and go fast. Two, when you're on a long list of songs or artists, the scroll wheel is still far superior to swipe scrolling. Yeah. Wow. If you want to get down to the bottom of something big and long,

the wheel is way faster and more satisfying. So a scroll wheel is like a quarter turn or a half turn and you're at full speed where you've got kind of like a couple of up swipes to get to full speed on a traditional UI? But then you got to keep doing it. And so it's like it just feels swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, yeah, swipe.

Whereas with scroller, you just go, go, go, go. Now, there's obviously benefits to the touchscreen. I don't need to talk about this. But, like, you know, you get letters, you get things to pop up. You get, like, little scroll bars. Like, you can get a scroll bar that you can grab and drag to go fast. There's other ways to do it. But, man, they nailed the scroll wheel back in the day, and I miss it.

Yeah. Neen I remind you that when Apple introduced the Apple Watch, they were like, we've invented several ways to manipulate a computer in our time. And they're like, the mouse and keyboard. They were like the touch screen, multi-touch. And then they were like the scroll wheel. And they put them on the screen, and Timkook gazed upon them.

And everyone was like, yep, those are the three things you invented. They were awesome. And then he was like, the digital crown. Then the industry continues to be silent and even attempting to clone the digital crown. Yeah. That's how you know they didn't get it. When literally no one,

there's not even like one bad Chinese smartwatch clone of the Apple Watch that like really tries to have a digital crown. There are some wear OS devices that have like a, crown that does some scrolling. They do feel like garbage. Like the digital crown does feel better. But I still prefer Samsung's bezel. So we're going to break for an ad and then we'll come back and have 30 minutes of digital

crown apologies from Dieterbone. It's going to be great. Here we go. No, we're going to talk with the gadget in a second. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder used by teams at companies like perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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So before we started the show, I was explaining to Paul how we ranked 100 gadgets for a decade. And by the way, all credit goes to Jake Casternakis, who is the editor of this project. He wrangled our entire staff to write little 200-word stories about gadgets. And more importantly, he wrangled our feelings about this because, like, so many of them. It was a lot. So here's how I'm going to be totally transparent with you. Here's how we ranked the gadget. We yelled at each other for five hours on one day, and then we yelled at each other with software for three hours the next day.

This is 100% true. So we had the list. The original list was far longer than 100. I think we were at like 135 or something. We pulled out a bunch of them that were like obviously not important. But we needed a big list. Then we kind of like subjectively did the top. 10, I would say.

We kind of knew, like, there has to be an iPhone in the top 10. We think the Tesla Model S belongs in the top 10. So we kind of know it belongs here. Then for the rest, it was me, Dieter, Dan, and Jake, we put all the gadgets in a list, and then we all quietly gave them scores from zero to nine, right? And then we summed the four, and that tiered them all into a thing. And then Dieter, I still don't believe that there was a simple. he somehow took the CSV out of that spreadsheet and put it into Asana.

I didn't even need the CSV. I just copied and pasted into Asana. You should make it sound more complicated. Okay. I waved an incantation. Software did its magic. And then, and this is what Asana is truly not designed to do. It has four people on four different computers move cards around.

Like Asana did not like this. So then we had tiers of each ten. argued about the cards. It took a long time. Let's talk about the most controversial decision we made. Well, so before you even get there, I do want to point out that there was a big debate, are these the best of the decade? Are these the most important? What are they? And we intentionally call it just gadgets of the decade because it's a little bit of a mix of those two things. But to me, the answer to what is this list? It's like, it's the list of like definitional gadgets. If you want to have a whole picture of what the hell happened in gadget world in the 2010s,

these are the ones you need to know. These are the ones that were either the most influential or just like the biggest moments. Like they define what gadgets were in the past 10 years. Yeah. So it's a little fuzzy, but fuzzy for a reason. They're the ones we think about. Like here's, you know, 100 years from now. Someone's like, give you a list of 100 gadgets.

It's this list. Keep that in mind, future generations. When you listen to this podcast. Pull over in your space mobile. That was a Jackabat feature. I got it. Thank you, Deeter. I appreciate you.

Paul has remained very silent. It's a quiet chuckle. Okay. So it was obvious. We're going to put the iPhone at the top spot. It was obvious to me that it should be the four. We didn't put the five there, even though the five at LT, but the four had all the features and the legal controversy associated with it and antenna gate.

And like a Steve Jobs moment. It's got to be the four. Well, it was the glass sandwich. That was the thing that sold me. on it. On this topic, I agree with as far as a pivotal moment for phone design. But

best iPhone is the five, right? The four is, I think, more beautiful than the five. We could do this for like five more. All right. Well, I'll just putting it out there. I think the five is more beautiful than the four. Yes. This was the argument that we had, right? Is it the four or the five in the spot,

whatever? The four and its associated controversies and the fact that it was like a Steve Jobs reveal and a Steve Jobs controversy. Yeah. You got to give it the top spot. Then I think the rest are pretty defensible. And then the one, if you look, it is very obvious the iPod is not,

it is very obviously the iPad is not the top 10. It is at number 11, and it is specifically the iPad air. Yeah. Not the first gen iPad. A lot of fights about this, actually. I think Dieter just had a crisis of conscience before he came on there. He was like, we should have put it higher. I absolutely think that we were correct to put the air.

specifically the air at 11. I think we probably put the original iPad way higher. I remain fine where it is, but I'm very confident that the error at 11 is correct. Here are my two, here's my argument. This whole thing is about making cases for gadgets to be in the, like, completely arbitrary places in the list. If there's a more verge activity, I don't know what it is.

The iPad is important conceptually. Things like iPads are everywhere. Right. Right? But we didn't want to put concepts. on this list, mostly. Yeah, there are some concepts on this, but they're more of the exception than the rule. But the iPad as a product, if you just look at what is the most influential iPad, what is

the one that iPad still look like the most, it's the iPad error, right? It's that one. It's the 329 base model iPad that they sell the most of is still basically the iPad air. Like, sometimes it gets thinner, sometimes it gets thicker. Sometimes the screen is laminated. Sometimes it's not, like, it's still the iPad air. Like, the basic thing of the iPad is still the iPad error. So that's the one that set the course for the iPad this decade.

The iPad Pro before the last generation was like an iPad error with a smart connector in a flippy case. Like that's the thing that made the iPad. Did the iPad have the impact, cultural impact of AirPods? I would like absolutely say no. Like the iPad is on a meme in that way. Like it's just outside the top 10 is my argument. It's like it's so close to knocking on the door.

But like it didn't do it. It never did the thing that Apple said it was going to do. For 10 years, they've been saying, this is the future of computing. And for 10 years, people are like, this is pretty good for my email, but I can't import a JPEG. Right? And so, like, now maybe it'll happen. Whereas with my AirPods, I get all sorts of things done. No, but AirPods are like everywhere.

They, like, exploded into the cultural consciousness. I was like, in 2047, what will matter more? when we look back upon this era, I think the iPad deserves be ranked higher than AirPods. And I think that it may be that I'm wrong and AirPods will continue to be as culturally important in five years as they are today.

I think AirPods are more culturally important today in this moment than the iPad. But I don't think that they will have the staying power in terms of their cultural importance that the iPad will have. So they got a big spike right now. But I think it's going to settle down, whereas the iPad is a slow and steady growth. On what timeline do you gauge importance?

And I would say for a list of the decade, it's just the decade. By the way, if you'd like a little window into what this was like for five hours. Nelai's also the editor-in-chief, and I'm just the executive editor. And so... No, we made cases. There were only... That's fair. That's fair.

And actually, I lost my biggest fight. Yeah. But hardcore renegade lost my biggest fight. I think the only one that I insisted that we do it the way we do it was shitbox Dell Chromebook. That was my idea. It was your idea, but I insisted that that be the title. I think that was the only, I didn't want to call it a shitbox, but you went for it.

And it's the one that's like the most popular entry in the list. Okay, so Paul, you've heard the two cases. Yeah. What do you think? I have a hard time ever saying, like, here's my definitive opinion about anything. Oh, wait, wait, can I explain one more thing? The pixel two is higher than it, right, at 10. And the reason why is because the entire computational photography moment that redefined how we think about phones taking photos happened with that phone.

Also, it was like it was the Google phone from it. Like it was the one where Google was like, we're in the game. They didn't obviously succeed at being in the game. But like, but I think that the technology in that has longer repercussions. Right. So the argument is like I wanted to keep it just out, right, based on Apple's promises versus delivery. and the Pixel 2 had this core technology that literally over the past three or four years has like changed how we think about photos. So that's the argument there.

Oh, in the service, sorry. I'm just thinking about all the tweets that came in me and it's all my brain. And why is the Surface Pro 3 is high? Two reasons. One, the service line effectively rescued Windows. Yep. That's like a pretty huge accomplishment. And two, more things including the iPad look like the Surface Pro 3.

than look like the iPad. Right? It's insistence on that form factor and the flippiness and the keyboard and the stuff, like the iPad became more like the Surface Pro 3 than the Surface Pro 3 became like the iPad. Yep, that's true.

Mostly because Microsoft doesn't know how to like software. Yeah, there's like reasons for everything. Yeah. So I wasn't in this whole conversation. So when I saw a list of the best gadgets or the gadgets of the decade, The thing that Ken popped into my mind is like, what felt the most futuristic and what did I not really expect in 2009? Okay.

And I remember, I don't know, I might be completely contradicting myself of what I said back in the day. But I remember just not being sure what an iPad was good for. And that has been true for most of this decade. But this literally this year, and this might be recency bias, but like in the past couple of months, I've gotten very into iPad music. And like the way I've used the iPad most of the time I've had iPads is with physical keyboards. I even with my first iPad, I got that dock that you could, like it was a keyboard with the 30 pin connector or whatever and you dock your iPad into it.

It was awful. Yeah, I had that. But this is, this past couple of months is the first time I've started, I hold my iPad in one hand, no case on it, no keyboard on it, I walk around and I can create music. And it has, and also, it's really weird to me because it's mostly based on all of these, all this software that's really skeuomorphic, like all these like modeled synthesizers. Like they're skeuomorphic aesthetically and internally. It was one of the best technology feelings that I've had this decade. It just felt so good and so cool and so futuristic. And I didn't see it coming. I don't know that it's had,

yeah, as far as impact, like it's maybe hasn't had nearly as strong of an impact, obviously, it's something like the iPhone 4. But it's something that felt like the most wow gadget of the decade. It's my whatever, I don't know which iPad it is. The concept of the iPad. The iPad. The iPad pro that's 64 bit and fast enough to run like seven synthesizers on a bunch of effects at the same time. So I think what you're describing there, and I think the reason, again, that like you kick it to 11 and not 10, is I can tell you how a bunch of consumer behaviors changed around the phone. In fact, that is mostly what we talk about on this show is like consumer behaviors in the phone and how they interact. Like everything in the world changed around the phone. I can tell you how computational photography and HDR systems changed how people take photos.

I just tell you, like it did. We talk about that a lot, too. I can, for most of the items that are less, I can tell you how people's conception of a car changed around the Tesla Model S. Specifically, the Model S, not the Model 3, right? Like, the Model S came out as a phenomenon, and it was a status symbol, it's electric. The world sort of moved itself around it. I kind of cannot tell you that about the iPad.

I can tell you a lot of things that happened, right? But like this like universal change in behavior around the iPad is like it's still not quite there. It's like it's always been just out of reach. And I think I think it makes the iPad a little more Tesla than some of those other things because in a sense when the iPad works really well, it's like, oh, this is where the puck is going. Yeah.

It feels. And that's what you're describing with music. Yeah. Exactly. But I recognize that this is a very niche thing and hard. Like it makes me wish like, why isn't text that? more like iPad synthesis, you know? I don't have audio unit plug-ins for text or something.

All right. So we don't argue at every single spot and recapitulate our entire 10 hours of argument. Everybody pick one thing for the list that they, like, have a special feeling for. So I'll go first. Number 20, I think this is the exact right spot for it. The jewel. I think in terms of cultural influence, in terms of a technology product that literally is like a drug delivery vehicle.

Like, phones might, like, you know, hack our brains and the phone addiction is like the science is now or whatever. But, like, the science on nicotine addiction is very clear. And we made a gadget that delivers it. And it completely changed the way that a whole lot of people take in nicotine. And it became just especially in this moment right now, the rise of teen vaping and like the percent of high school seniors who have tried a vape in the last month is just shooting up, it's doubling year over year,

the jewel is at least a number 20 in terms of influence of gadgets this decade. Just going off of TikTok alone, I would say I've seen as many jokes and memes about Jules as I have about AirPods. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair.

AirPods also deliver nicotine directly into your brain. It's a little in fact, and I didn't want to say it until now. But it's out. No, that's pure misinformation. Please don't repeat that. Please do not tell your parents that information. They will definitely believe you. So I have two. Can I have two? Fine.

Well, it's one. Mine got knocked off. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they're the same one. So at 91, Nat, Garon put the Dyson supersonic in. And she rogue deleted mine, which is the Chromebook Pixel. Yeah, which everyone agreed with. Just like flatly everyone agreed with. So I think she was correct in the end.

The Dyson Super Sonic is a $400 hair dryer. It itself was a meme. A friend of the Verge, Holland-Rosner, who writes about food at the New Yorker. we wrote about this, but she tweeted during like a snowstorm that she was drying the skin of a chicken with a Dyson supersonic and became this like insane meme where she thought she was cooking the chicken with a hairdryer

and then we were, whatever. But like it's a hairdry that was a meme. It's also like re-engineered this product. It created this ripple effect. So Nat was correct. I made her make the case to me like I pushed her to make a very strong case. She made it a very strong case.

Fine. Everyone won. The Chromebook Pixel. Yeah. Is still one of my favorite products of this decade. I bought one for my mother. It is a $1,000 computer that just runs Chrome. Yep.

If there is a more, and it's beautiful, and it's well-engineered, and it looks cool as hell, and it has a beautiful screen, and that's a touchscreen, the whole thing. If there was a moment when, like, maybe the whole internet was going to go different, it was when Google made a $1,000 computer that just ran Chrome. When they're like, you don't need a laptop that can do other things. Yeah. You need a computer that's as powerful.

Like the one I bought my mom who's an I-7. It's ridiculous. It's insane. But you need a computer that's as powerful as any Windows or Mac laptop as well-engineered. It costs $1,000 and all it can do is run this web browser. Like that was just, it was like an inflection point in the entire industry that they thought that that would work.

It did not work. No. Just to be very clear. But they thought desktop computing will persist such that people will will succeed such that people will buy a $1,000 computer just runs Chrome. I got to tell you, I kind of wish it had worked. Maybe that's why I'm so fond of it. But that to me is like a moment that I could not,

I'm still not making a good enough case for it. It was the one I want on the list. I couldn't quite get it. But it's a thing I think about every day that we talk about whether or not social media apps with algorithmically determined feeds will just sort of destroy the web and everything we hold dear. Uh-huh. There was a time when just like a $1,000 computer I just ran a web browser was a good idea.

That's my story of the 2010s. We'll see what happens in the 2020s. Google used to do like these really proprietary wild plugins to support some of its services. And then it sort of slowly killed them off and then completely deprecated that. Was that pre or post Chromebook pixel? Pre, I think. Yeah. They all swirling around.

But yeah. They stopped doing that. The other one I just want to point out. we put in the list of confused people was the Toyota Camry. Here's why this was the decade where you could push a button on your phone and a Toyota Camry would appear. Yeah. That's remarkable.

Like, if you live in New York City, you can summon a Toyota Camry anytime you want. That was not possible for. Oh, you mean like Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft. And it became, it's the commodity engine of ride sharing. I get it. And it is like Uber and and Toyota have a partnership. And like I said, there's reasons

for it. But it is it is the hardware instantiation of Uber. Obviously there's drivers, like let's not forget them, but it is such a remarkable people did not have a relationship with a model of car in that way before.

That's why it's on the list. What's your favorite, Paul? I really, not my favorite gadget, but my just thing on this list, the connect has so much meaning for me. Oh, yeah. Especially because it was one of my biggest

most wrongs ever, where I doubted the PSS, for because it wouldn't have bundled motion controls and thought that because Microsoft was betting on guaranteed connect because obviously you don't get motion

controls unless every console ships with them right? I thought it was the future with the Xbox 1 that the Connect would be being bundled it would be a big deal and because it was so much higher fidelity than the Xbox

360 version And it was just, and it's still like, I have an Oculus and I hardly use it because it's just standing up and moving your arms is too much work when you're playing a video game. And I wish that wasn't true. I'm reading like a novel where this guy's an MMO, but the VR capsule, you just lay down. Like, that's what it should be. And so I love motion controls conceptually so much. I wrote a whole essay how, you know, like this idea of capturing a higher amount of bandwidth from the user. Instead, you know, if you think a mouse is just a click and, you know, movement on X, Y plane, you know.

But analog input of your whole body could be so much more interesting. But it wasn't. Well, the Connect also was, you know, it was the fastest selling something, something ever when it first came out. And it had such a traditional. trajectory and doctors were using it and telemedicine and all this stuff was happening and it was like wow they they made a new thing this is going to be a part of our computing lives and like this first thing is really really interesting and clearly this is just going to keep on getting bigger and more important over time and then like three years in just right yeah okay one it did change robotics forever okay this sensor technology and making it a commodity did change robotics Two, Microsoft did a terrible job of coming up with games for it, and they didn't ever make a good Wii sports. And three, the thing I already said about standing up and moving around. By the way, the tech and the First Connect is now Face ID, right?

partially, yeah. So it got there. But it's like a classic example of like something is so big at one point in time that you just assume that it will persist. It will always be. Yeah. I just search for this. It's a 2009, so it doesn't count, but there's a New York Times review of Beatles rock band. Oh, yes.

Like the plastic rock band games. And it's so long. And it's like such a deep dive and how they make rock band. And it ends, like they interview McCartney and Ringo Star. And it ends with, in 10 years time, you'll be standing there and you will be Paul McCartney. You'll be a holographic case in one case you. And you will be Paul McCartney. It's like, no, that didn't happen at all.

Like Beatles Rockman did not portend that future at all. Like, I'm standing here in 2019, and I can tell you that no one is Paul McCartney except for acting Paul McCartney. Anyway. All right. Let's take a break. We'll come back. We've got to talk about this Twitter protocol thing. Support for this show comes from whatnot.

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That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. 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. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

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Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod.com. A.I. slash vergecast. And check out Claude pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Clod.a.ai slash verge cast. Paul Miller, every week. That's right. Our nation held together by the tenuous thread called web-awthon. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. So I discovered. If anything holds people together, it's web off. Weboth thin.

Web off thin. Which is like a shortened way to say web authentication. Yeah. Which is a new, I mean, 2018, but I'm just finding out about this like new standard for web authentication with uses public key cryptography. My newspeg for this is iOS 13.3 is going to support security keys. Yeah. It's there. It's out.

But Google doesn't support. Safari yet for Google Two Factor. And so a bunch of Safari stuff is it works. You can use it with some apps, but it's pointless to me now. Anyway, continue.

There's so much to learn about WebOthin. The idea would be that you could log into something and it would say, okay, just insert your security key and insert it. Or, you know, use your fingerprint or use Windows Hello or whatever.

You can log into things with just the security code or just the security key or just your fingerprint. or just your face or something like that. And what's cool about WebOthin is that it pertains an end of the password. So anyway, I think people should check it out. I only just heard about it.

It's really exciting. It doesn't just, it's obviously designed with security keys in mind, but I logged into something using my phone and my fingerprint the other day. And it was pretty magical that they don't have my email address. I don't have to remember a password. and I feel like that's the wave of the future. It's very exciting. And like all web standards, everyone's going to agree on it,

implement it really quickly, and everything will support it right away. Exactly. We're on the corner. There you go. There you go. All right. Dieter Bone.

In a surprise tweet storm, Jack Dorsey announced that he was forming an elite team called Blue Sky, five people, five people, to create a protocol upon which Twitter could be a mere client. Yes. I would say the reason I, I started this by saying Dieter Bone is because the web

people got very mad. Oh my God. And when I need to understand why the web people are mad, I turn to you, my friend, Dieter Bone. So I cannot speak for all web people. I did not invent the web

or the people that persist on it. So if you're not familiar, like basically Dorsey's whole thing is like, look, like there's SMTP for email, there's HGP for web pages, like, there should be like a standard. And the way people got mad because, one, of course there's a standard. There's like five.

What about Massadon? What about web pub sub hubbubababababab. And like all these other things that are out there. So how dare you just ignore all the work that we've been doing? You're just trying to create a thing that Twitter is secretly going to control anyway. And that's fair anger to have. But also, this thing is so far from being a thing that it's like, I'm not. saying don't prejudge it, but I'm saying don't prejudge it. I'm saying I find out what

they're due before anything happens, right? So that's one. I think some of that anger is premature, but I, and why is everybody actually angry? And I think it's because we never got closure from when Twitter first started screwing everything up. When Dick Costolo, the former CEO, came over from Google, Casey's made this point a couple of times, he's like, well, we got to make money. I make money off ads. That's why you hired me. And The way you make money on ads on a social network is you lock everything down so everyone has to come to your app and then you put ads on it. So that's what he did. And it just, it killed, he, they killed off the, you know, the third party APIs and the, you know, freedom to like download a whole bunch of data really easily.

And all the third party clients started to wither. But he didn't have the courage to just like kill it hard. It was like, we're going to shut it down in six months. And then maybe we won't. And then, well, no, we kind of are. and then, well, maybe some people, and, like, it was just this, like, slow bleeding out. If we had had the moment where they just cut everybody off,

we'd all have been angry, we might have all gone to use something else, but we would have had this furious moment. Instead, we just had this, like, slow petering out of anger, and we just continued to use Twitter because what the hell else are we going to do? And him saying, you know what, that was all a mistake, we're going to try again and do it the way that you all really wanted us to in the first place. It just reopens all of those wounds.

in a way that brings anger. And Dorsey's only gesture to this in the tweet storm was, quote, for a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path. And it's like, yeah, you did. So let me make the argument for shutting, for closing down the API and for doing it much harder.

Because at the time, it was correct. Like, I just want to say that flat out. It sucked, and I really liked my third-party Twitter clients. And it was like a design playground and like, whatever. The reason it was a design playground is because people could try new ways of interactions and new ways of displaying content. Yep. And a social network, which was like the hot, cool thing. And they would plug into Twitter, which is where everybody already was.

They didn't have to architect a social network, right? Right. And they also didn't have to, like, deal with, you know, Nazis and failure to, like, handle the Nazis. All of that was Twitter's problem. So Twitter had the cost of all the people, they had to keep their servers up, which they were not great at doing for a long time there. We knew about the Nazis, but they weren't like the only thing people talked about in terms of content moderation. We had not yet descended into total political chaos in Twitter. It was just like the place where all the cool kids were and you can build like a front end to the cool kids, right?

Yeah. Okay, that was neat. Twitter itself was a horrible business at that point in time. Yeah. They didn't have a business. It was not reasonable to expect that they would become like the monopoly provider of the president's deranged tweet. which is what they currently are. It was reasonable to expect that they would have competition,

that they would fail, that they, that other social networks would just eat them. Everyone thought Facebook would eat them. I'm just making the case. Google is maybe going to buy them per minute or we thought they would. Disney almost bought them. Like it was, who knew what was going to happen in Twitter?

The business model for most of these networks now is still introducing artificial scarcity through algorithmic display, right? And that is a long way of saying they mix up all the tweets and stick some ads in the middle. Right. That's like mostly how Twitter makes money. It's how Instagram makes money. It's how Facebook makes money. They take all the content in. They promise you the user. They will filter it for you and only show you the best, most relevant stuff. And in the middle, you're going to see the ads that are hyper-targeted to yours. Particular interest, sometimes so well that you believe that they're listening to you. That's the business model of social networks right now. Okay. Well, so they did it. They make a little bit of money. They don't make a lot of money. Still not a great business. So if you're Jack Dorsey, you're in the CEO, you spend half your time at Square. and then you're going to move to Africa sometime this year.

And you're like looking at your like sort of medium good public business, why wouldn't you be like, I'm not going to be Facebook. I'm not going to be Instagram. I'm not going to be YouTube where they've monetized artificial scarcity in this way. Why wouldn't you just like swerve the other direction and say, I don't have a business that can support an army of content moderators in every country in the world? I don't have a business that can reasonably deal with the president of the United States should be banned under our policy, but we had to create this other policy. Like, I don't have a business that can support new kinds of formats the way that Instagram could just roll out stories. Like, it's just people tweeting. That's still the thing that it is.

And they're going to roll out, and they rolled out like higher-res images yesterday and life. Like, they can sort of like add to it. But the main thing is still the main thing. It will always be the main thing. Why wouldn't you just go the other way? This is, I should have just put this on the website, but it was just in the newsletter. I think that Jack Dorsey's plan is sincere, but it's not serious. I believe him that he's trying to do this thing that actually makes sense conceptually.

Yeah, the way we make money is off of running an algorithm and putting ads in it. We don't actually need to be the person that pulls in all the data. So we're just going to like do it. And then once we do it, we can like actually push even harder in moderation because there'll be other people that can like, you know, make the their whatevers. All of it like makes sense conceptually. But, you know, why don't you wait until you would like hire one of these five people? And the, the sincerity of it is actually part of the problem because their answer to that would be,

well, you know, we don't want to prejudge and we want every, we want the widest possible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, or you just really enjoy being Jack Dorsey public intellectual who has deep thoughts about how the internet works. That's, that's what he's really doing here. Along those lines, Jack Dorsey, not, I don't know, less than six. six months ago made a very similar announcement saying, we're going to start a thing called Square Crypto. It's going to be separate from Square. We're going to hire open source developers to work on Bitcoin, to make Bitcoin better. They don't have any, they're not beholden to Square's bottom line. And he was universally among the Bitcoin community, loved for it. So maybe he just thought

he'd have another like, oh, good one, you know. I don't know. But I like that, like, that, I forget, serious, not. Sincere, not serious. Sincere not serious. I think is a good, I just, it sounds like something that's totally not going to work. I'm sure he will find a few really great people. I can imagine that I do want to make it clear, because I feel like I saw it in his thread and the blue sky put it on their Twitter right away.

They are open to looking at existing open source solutions. The obvious one is activity pub, which, by the way, Massadon didn't. start with Mac activity pub. It added that in later. So I could see them adopting something that exists, but it is very hard to imagine. Like, is there any example of somebody making a very successful closed platform and then making it an open protocol? Like, I'm sure that this has happened. I've just nothing is coming to mind. Apple promised to do it with FaceTime and I message. And they never did it. But there was like a patent issue there. They never promised to it with my message. No, no, it was just FaceTime.

Oh, just FaceTime. And there's some weird patent issue that made them re-architect it. I'm sure listeners know, tell us. If there's ever been a super successful proprietary thing that turned into a public protocol, like actually let us know because I can't think it will not the top of my head. I mean, I was saying this on the show a while ago. Like, I like open source decentralized protocols. And I really am trying to get myself out of, or slowly weaned myself off of my dependency

on centralized platforms. because they're really capricious. And they also can like, they're kind of like becoming like the craft macaroni and cheese version of everything. Like the really cool, if you want to hear weird things or talk to your friends, like you're on Discord or you're on Telegram, you know,

you're in smaller groups or on weirder platforms. And then, because like places like YouTube, you know, there's all this uncertainty like, like, I review toys. So now apparently I'm a children.

channel, you know, a lot of the centralized platforms create a lot of uncertainty about your permanence and your privileges on that platform. So the YouTube thing, I don't love defending YouTube. It's not my favorite thing to do. But that specific thing that you're talking about, the uncertainty is created because YouTube has chosen to hide the responsibility from the people, right? So you sign up for YouTube and you expect, like, oh, I'm on this platform. It's paying me money. Everything must be on the up and up because it's a big company, right?

And so YouTube just, like, shirked its responsibility. Because if you are making stuff for kids on the Internet, you do have a set of responsibilities. Right? And, like, YouTube either needs to police those responsibilities or it needs to get out of the way and let you feel the consequences of your responsibility and be accountable for them. And they sort of, like, just put themselves in the middle. And they, like, took some of their responsibility or not all responsibility. enforce some of the rules and they changed a bunch of rules this week. And like, that is

the problem with centralization. It's not that they, it's that the big platforms bigger they get to be fully in control, they would have to do a lot more than they're doing. Or they just need to get completely out of the way and let you, provider of children's videos, be responsible for that thing. Well, that's why I said they end up like a craft macaroni and cheese. They, they need, at scale, they need to be able to do the exact same thing for everybody. And so inevitably, they have to shave off the rough edges and the weird edge cases. Yeah, I guess I buy it. I just think that the responsibilities of these platforms, let me put it this way.

Like, Zuckerberg goes in front of Congress where he makes his freedom of speech argument. And his thing is like, we have to be this big to secure the election. We have to be this big so the United States can compete with China. and his argument is like pure scale Facebook should get bigger is basically what he's saying it should be bigger and bigger and bigger

and we will solve the problem and we will have enough content moderators and we will have enough engineers on the Instagram team to make cool new experiences and we will have enough AI research and Libra teams to compete with

all of China that's his argument it's like very explicitly his argument I think Jack is like I can't get that big Like, yeah, I don't even want to be that big. It's too hard. Well, like, an ideal Twitter, you know, where people are making bespoke tools for using it, you know, like instead, like, a lot of people use block lists on Twitter.

But, you know, you could have an algorithm that's just, you could have your own algorithm that you pick that is designed to, like, help your mood, you know? Like, did you feel good at the end of today? Yes or no. Okay, well, we'll tweak some things, you know? Like, I, that's how I've started using social media more of just, like, I'll unfollow things if I just, you know, know, if I'm not feeling good. And so, like, the personalized tools would, I think, have a way better shot of than Facebook becoming the largest thing in the world, you know, solving the problems of social

media. So here's the problem for Twitter becoming it. The end state, if all goes well, the Blue Sky team, they figure it out, the Twitter protocol ends up on the blockchain and whatever. It all works. Seems unlikely, but let's say it all works. Isn't Twitter's product just the best Twitter client? Yeah.

At the end of all that, aren't they just making the best Twitter client that's the best monetized thing? Like there's an existential threat buried inside of this plan that Jack is not like gesturing it. Like there's a reason Gmail, the service and Gmail the client get tighter and tighter and there's weird Gmail features that are only Gmail features. Because that keeps people using Gmail. But like you can, no one else has built a business of like Gmail is not a business on the scale of. of Twitter. Right? Like,

it just isn't that thing. Gmail doesn't make any money. Yeah, it does. Consumer Gmail makes money. It's got ads. It's got ads, but like some ads and they don't target it against your email.

Right. But like, it's not business. It's not like a, I mean, Google doesn't tell us. But like, that's true.

We don't know. We don't know. But like, but Twitter is a public company like in the billions, right? So, but Neil, what you're saying is yes,

an argument against the business, Twitter doing this? but it's an argument for anybody in the world wanting to leave Twitter. If given the opportunity and the appropriate set of decentralized open source tools, you know, I think people would want to leave Twitter because the alternative is that Twitter can't let them go and has to lock them in and has to increase the shackles to keep them there. Even if you walk away from the lock and argument, Twitter just like got to hit scale and hit critical mass, before any of these other competitors.

And so Matt Panzerino over at TechCrunch actually had the best comment, I thought, which is this actually seems kind of interesting. Lots of people have tried this before, but they all basically failed because Twitter was there. And so what does it mean that Twitter itself is trying to do this thing? And we just don't know yet.

Yeah. I mean, I think the one answer is that we will never know. Yeah, I think that's a little like the answer. Okay, we've gone way over. I'm glad that we started with like a big silly computer, some wild gadgets, and we ended on like a bunch of web stuff. That's like the full range of nerd stuff

that people, I think, come to us for. Anyway, it's almost the end of the year. This is the decade we lost the headphone jack. Just hold that in your heart. If you were alive this decade, you know how the people call it the Oregon Trail generation? Like you experienced life before computers and after computers.

All of you experienced life with headphone jacks and now without. And you're going to tell you kids. I'm going to try to make it a meme by the end of year. It's not going to work, but I'm going to try. Go with me on this journey. That was the Vergecast. Again, no one responds.

On Tuesday, we're interviewing Zoe about her amazing away story. That was just a super fun conversation. Zoe, that story is great. Deeter's got a newsletter where he writes his thoughts about the web people. Yeah. It's at theverge.com slash newsletter. It's called Commandline currently, but it may not always be called Commandline. Ooh.

The new year brings changes. You can tweet at us. If you know an answer to the question of a private protocol, or API that turned into a successful public one. Let me know. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. The ears of backline.

Java. Java. No, that's going to the Supreme Court, my friend. That's the opposite thing happened. And that's it. We'll be back next week. See you then. Rock and roll.

Paul. Promal code. Paul.