2025 year in review

24:46Yeah. No way. What do I mean by it's not a super – A gadget of the year. Two seconds ago, you were like, here's this robot that's weird that I love. But I'm not buying. I mean, I did put a preorder down for that robot, but like that's my job. A gadget that has improved my life. I can't think of much else this year that I tested or got. I did test the Matic robot vacuum, which I love. Oh, that's a good one. That's been living with me like for most of the year. That's a great robot. Talk about that in the book. But like this, I'm just practical, practical purchase. I bought an iPhone. It was a great purchase.

25:21I'm happy with it. Neil, I tell me you have a less boring answer than that. There's no way. I don't know. For someone who is like, I saw a guy manually control a robot to go to iPhone 17 Pro. There's something about you doing all this AI coverage, Shrena, that has made you crave stability. Oh, yes. I say that. The best gadget is the one that isn't dangerous in very specific ways. It's not trying to kill me or sleep with me at any time. I think we are underestimating how going from a giant phone to a smaller phone has just, like, been great for my life. Yeah. I mean, look, you're allowed to have your opinions.

26:02I don't drop it on my face when I'm sleeping. Like, you know? Okay, my answer is, I mean, it's not out yet, but I kind of want to say the steam machine. Oh, here we go with the steam machine. Well, I just, like, I— Wait, this is a bet. This episode is coming out on December 9th, and this is a bet that this thing is going to be out by December 31st? Well, no, I don't know. Like, I don't think so. Okay. But if I had to, like, I mean, maybe this is just recency bias, but if I had to, like, look at a thing and be like, well, that will change the market it's in. There's that one. There's other stuff, like, you know, I want to say the meta display glasses for some reason, just because it's the first of its category, like self-contained display AR-ish glasses.

26:52The problem is that they're not very good. They're not good. Yeah, I mean, like, I've tested those and been wearing them, and I wear Meta glasses, honestly, most of the year. But, like, that wasn't, like, incremental improvements from last year. Man, not really. You just picked the iPhone 17 Pro. Right. But, like, that's the thing I had. The incremental improvement was they added a battery to it. But I now have a smaller phone. I have an iPhone Pro, not a Max, that has better battery life. I hear what you're saying. And the regular Ray-Ban glasses didn't get better. They're slightly better, but I don't need to go out and buy them.

27:32It's like an iPhone 16 to iPhone 17. No, I don't mean the regular glasses. I mean the display glasses. But I have been wearing the display glasses, and they're not great. They are not great. This is what I'm saying. this is why I'm torn by it very specifically. Yeah. Because I'm drawn, when you're at Gadget of the Year, I'm drawn to category changers. Yeah, I hear you. I think the Steam Machine will be a category changer. I think the meta display glasses will be a category changer. I agree. Or something like them will be. So we should have two different categories. We should have category changer gadget of the year, and we should have gadget of the year.

28:06No. No. Because I bought a slightly better iPhone is not a gadget of the year. It just isn't. And I realize I'm saying this also. I had two. What do you think the most sold gadget of the year was? The iPhone. But like that means it almost shouldn't count. Like the category should be iPhone of the year. Every year it's just it's just last year's iPhone, but cheaper. We should almost rule it out. Like, of course, like it's the one that everyone has. It changed the most lines. I don't know. I tested so much stuff this year, and this is the one that I just feel is... If you were like, gun to your head, pick a phone to be Gadget of the Year, I would pick the Pixel Fold over the iPhone.

28:51Right? Like, here's the thing that's the closest to the next version of phones. So we should have, then it should be boring-ass Gadget of the Year. iPhone of the Year. What a fun superlative. In high school, Joanna, I'm going to give you most boring but fine of the year every year in high school. Honestly, I think that was. If you open my yearbook, that's me. You never really think about her, but she's great. You know what I mean? Unremarkable of the year. Yeah, yeah. That's when you open my yearbook, there's a picture of me under that. Yeah. All right, David, what's your first? Everybody's like, oh, right, Joanna.

29:22I remember her. Mine, I had two. And I've given Joanna a lot of crap here, and both of mine actually slightly fall into this category. One was the M4 Mac Mini, which I think is just like the best deal in the history of computers. It came out this spring. I have one. I love it to pieces. It is just in terms of like, this is the first thing in a very long time that unseated the MacBook Air is just like the default computer I tell people to buy. I also tell a lot of people to buy the M4 MacBook Air, which I also have and is also great. But that was the one that I love the way that you love the iPhone 17, Joanna.

30:01The other one I think is the Switch 2. And this is the one I'm actually more prepared to defend. because this was the rare thing I think that was it was hyped to death it kind of had no chance to live up to what everybody thought it might be everybody's waiting for it to be wild it turned out to just be like a much better version of this already like class-leading category changing thing Nintendo did seven years ago and it worked like it sold huge it has great games it is like coming into its own in a really great way even months after coming out like to me it just they just did the thing in a way that you don't often see sequels do so to me it was i like that i think yeah and uh you know i asked before like what's the most best-selling i mean they've we don't have total figures but they've sold a lot of those yeah it's gone it's gone very well from what we can tell and I also use mine all the time much to my entire family's chagrin but yeah I think Neil I if steam machines ship I like steam machines as a thesis I will just give you that but A we don't know what they cost and that's a real big piece of the equation here and the longer we go without knowing what they cost the more I worry about what they're going to cost and B they're probably not going to ship this year so it doesn't matter anyway yeah so I'm stuck with these stupid meta display glasses.

31:25I hate this answer. I picked the iPhone. Can I pick like matter light bulbs? Yes. Give me something. You can. You can pick what was the best gadget to you this year. That's such a different category. Well, we're changing the category name for this year. We're going to get to that. I have a bonus thing at the end for all of us. We'll get to that. We're not going to get to that. We're not. Real quick, let's take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to do more categories. Be right back. support for this show comes from atlassian if your team's idea of project tracking is let's say more vibes based jira can help it's ai powered project management that makes it easy for all teams to plan and track work jira pulls together all your ideas meeting notes and plans and breaks them down into clear organized work aligned to your team's goals and now with ai agents, Jira helps you work smarter by recommending the best next steps to take, flagging what needs attention, and quietly handles the repetitive stuff for you, so your team can focus on what matters most.

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32:49all right we're back more categories more superlatives for 2025 um let's just get to my favorite one to research all year which was the heel turn of the year uh who who broke bad in the best way in 2025? Neal, you go first. Wait, in the best way? In the most. Who broke the most bad in the most way? Do you have to be good first and then you go bad? Yes. Elon Musk, for instance, doesn't count because this happened before 2025. He heel turned before 2025. So he doesn't count. So they have to have done the heel turn this year. Is it like so bad it's cool or just bad? Let me give you my example. So my my heel turn of 2025 was Mark Benioff just absolutely out of nowhere on a private jet demanding that Donald Trump send the National Guard to San Francisco.

33:42Just just completely unprompted, goes fully wild to a reporter, makes everybody turn against him and then basically says, like, just kidding. That was a bad call. Never mind. And then tries to go back to being Mark Benioff. Unbelievable. Like just off the top rope heel turn for Mark Benioff. And I really admire that is the wrong word, but I really appreciate how hard he went after that one. So that's mine for 2025. All right. Mine is to come. It's a thing that they said that I suspect will cause absolute chaos. Mine is Neil Mullen, the CEO of YouTube, saying the future of YouTube is AI. Ooh. I don't know what that means.

34:28I don't know what that means. but I do know that if you ask Google VO or Nano Banana to generate a picture of a tech reviewer, it generates Marques Brownlee, which certainly suggests that Google is training its AI systems on YouTube. Not even like kind of Marques Brownlee. It's just Marques. Like a facsimile of Marques Brownlee. It's just Marques. Yeah, he's like, hey guys. It just happens. Hey guys, I just tested the iPhone 17 Pro. Yeah, exactly. In orange. It's the gadget of the year, everybody. It's the gadget of the year. ridiculous um that's it that's what i got i i just see that thing coming for the youtube economy it it will be the heel turn i think that's a good one joanna what'd you have i don't really have anything no no because i feel like it's got to be something like really evil versus just like turns bad and i don't feel like anything has been like super I could pick like all kinds of other stuff.

35:26I almost picked that just that photo at the dais at the Trump inauguration. I know. I was thinking about that too. Just that photo is your heel turn right there. Yeah. I had that later though for talking more about like the policy moves of the year. But I guess I could put that in here. Okay. All right. Well, we can go back to that. I think that is like an iconic image of a tech image of the year. Yes. All right. Next one is the worst new buzzword of the year. No, we're all going to pick the same thing. I don't think so. What did you pick? I would pick agentic. Okay. I had agentic first, but then I had a backup.

35:58What was your backup? So I exactly had agentic. It's vibe whatever. So vibe coding, vibe shopping, vibe raiders, whatever you want to put in. No. Okay. So I had vibe coding too, Joanna. And I think vibe as a whole is probably a better answer. Yeah, because right now everyone's talking about vibe shopping. Oh, God. Yeah. And so everyone's putting vibe before things that, like, let's not. Let's stop. The problem is, like, I don't. This is also one of those things where it's like we're trying to pretend that just because there's a large language model somewhere underneath that it's now a completely new thing that we're doing.

36:36And in fact, it's just like slightly new software. And like, let's just call it shopping. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean. Like, let's just let's just move past it. It's just shopping. It's fine. This is how we shop on the internet now. Did we used to, like, I don't know, 25 years ago, did they call it, like, e-shopping? They probably did, right? They did. I think, yeah. Cyber, cyber shopping. Cyber shopping. Cyber shopping, yeah. They called it cybering. That's a different thing. Yeah, that's a different thing. I would say cybering. That's not it. That's still the worst buzzword of the year.

37:07Cyber. Cybering still, in 2025, still the worst buzzword of the year. The worst buzzword of every year. I'm going with agentic. Yeah, it's good. I think these two are very good. The thing with agentic is at least it describes what it is. Like, I hate the trend, but at least agentic is descriptive. But it's come to mean nothing because they say agentic is everything and it is nothing is actually agentic. If you even know what agentic means. We're an agentic, you know, sales commerce platform. It's like, what? That's nothing. No, it's like a South by Southwest word. It is. it's the what was it mobile local social yeah that they always make fun of made fun of in silicon valley on hbo uh this that it feels like that um also for some reason this is not related to the verge cast but the minute i started thinking about worst new buzzword the phrase aura farming just came to mind and i just want to say that out loud once um because i don't like that either um all right next one is the best ai thing of 2025 you can define ai thing however you want, but it has to be the best one.

38:10Joanna, I want you to go first because you spent the year literally doing all of the AI things. I know. What was the best one of 2025? Well, there's like the stuff that like can show where I think we're going, but then there's the stuff that like, again, the practical use right now. I think I want to say AI search, right? Like AI mode for Google is not. Oh, here we go, Neal. What? Just say it. Say it. It's not good. Yes, it is. Yeah, I mean, it is getting a lot better. And also, for so much of the year, I just stopped using Google. And now having AI intertwined with Google is a lot better. So first half of the year, I just didn't use Google.

38:53And I used ChatGPT. And it was pretty frustrating in certain places, but in a lot of places, much better than regular search. And now having AI mode there is, I would say, I use Google a good amount still. But I'm still using ChatGPT far more than I ever thought I would for search stuff. I had this too. And I was surprised that this was my answer. But I have, like, frankly resisted web search in AI tools because, like, as someone who relies on the web existing to have a job, I think they are problematic in huge ways. But also it's like if I want to buy something on the Internet, ChatGPT is a vastly better way to figure out what thing I should buy than Google.

39:39It just is. Nila is really getting so angry at us. And I just don't want to be on the podcast anymore. Who cares? Here's the best AI thing of the year. It's this weird soul cover of Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine. That's the best AI thing of the year right here.

40:00do it in the name of oh that's pretty good what are you chopping this is weird robot magic this is actually one of the best i have so many it's pretty good send this to me the one it's so weird that's pretty good one of these that always crosses my feet is there is this like AI pop punk band called Skate Avenue, which is like a perfect AI pop punk band name. I'm going to look it up. It means nothing, but it also means everything. I have... And the number one thing that I love about it is I see these videos everywhere. Like, it's like a very popular sound to use on TikTok. And in every single one, the very top comment is somebody going, Spotify, when?

40:42I tried to... And then immediately somebody responds and goes, it's AI, bro. Like, every single time. And it makes me laugh so hard. I have a lot of weird conflicted mostly negative feelings about ai slop and then there's like this this one thing where it's like here are these covers that would have never existed but for suno and they kind of rip and they're kind of and it's fine it's just fine and it's i think easily the best ai development of the year yes it's everywhere like people send me that because we we've talked about it on the on the not that song but just weird covers on the version like everyone has sent me that cover of of killing the name of a ray chance machine it's pretty good uh it's it's where i don't think they it's ai like it like it makes some mistakes i i would have done the last course differently it's all i'm saying if you're out there robots call me you know but yeah that's usually the best thing of the year is like it got more complicated to judge the output of the generative systems in a specific way whereas that's interesting i don't agree with that big picture thesis i do agree that there are occasionally good things made by i whatever happens to the music industry happens to everything else five years later that's like a long-running trope at the verge and like i don't know about ai video like watching mr rogers and tupac is like funny and then it's like very depressing um the the what's happening in the music industry it is it it got there very fast and like the labels all caved they all signed deals with Suno.

42:08The music and his ears are at war with each other. And I'm saying best AI thing of the year is just that one song. But that's it. That's what I'm thinking. And I stand by it. But it is the signal of everything to come, I think. So if the category was like leading indicator of the year, it's also that song. Suno. Leading indicator of the year is Suno. That's probably right. Yeah. I think I still think our AI search is a good answer. I'm still going with web search. I think for me, it is the only thing that has settled into my everyday use case. There's other stuff that I go kind of do on purpose just to experiment or because I have a thing that I need to do.

42:52But the only thing that has sort of wormed its way into my just default day-to-day existence is web search in those tools. I mean, I straight up had ChachiBT negotiate to buy my car for me. like how the dealers would send me their deals and i would put it in chat you would be like say these things and i'm like all right i said those things did it work i felt i feel zero guilt about buying a car right so like i was like whatever there's robots talking to you not me and it totally worked i got a great deal in the car that's pretty good uh all right but i think it might have been because i was so confidently insistent that i needed to get a better deal because the robot was constantly telling me like i don't know do you know what i mean yeah i might vibe dealed.

43:33You did vibe deal. You really did. And I just. It sucks. Honestly, that term works. I don't like it at all. Oh, I hate it. It doesn't work, Joanna. Don't give me any ideas. I know. It kind of works. You know, it does. All right. All the way on the flip side. Worst AI thing of 2025. I want to lump together like almost all the AI gadgets that I tested. I tested a lot of them and wore many of them throughout the year. I would say The Friend was almost the worst of all of those just because the marketing and then the reality of that product was just like it is a paperweight. It doesn't do anything.

44:15But I would just put all of those things there. I would agree with this, but I will actually, a little more conceptually, I would say whenever Sam Altman brought Johnny Ive to talk about. Was that this year? It's all been this year. My original pick for this was whatever Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are building together. It's not out yet, so it's hard. You mean the San Francisco love scene? Yeah, the video where they're like walking through San Francisco and they shut down San Francisco. That video alone is a pretty good pick. And that image alone of them standing in the black and white, I mean, has become just the image of the year.

44:53they just did a talk recently where Johnny I was just describing his ideas for products and said a bunch of Johnny I stuff like it has to feel inevitable and like what are shapes and like Johnny I stuff. And I think Casey posted like this is what you would say if you had no idea what your product was. Because he ended he ended that whole speech with like they're just ideas, you know, thanks, Johnny. No, I've seen enough open AI executives talking about this device now that something exists. It's something. Oh, sure. Things exist. Oh, yeah. I do not know if they've settled on anything, but they all talk about it.

45:27Like, they're either super scared to say anything, which I think is, like, part of it, but also they have no idea what it really is. Like, maybe it's been described to them in concept or they've seen it. but like it's almost humorous when you realize like do they know what they're talking about i'm just saying they can't make anything that isn't a humane pin like i mean i'm hoping they make something you can accomplish is humane pin like all these things are fundamentally humane pins yes but like the friend is a humane pin the rabbit was a cheaper dumber humane pin the humane pin was a humane like they're all the same the humane pin sure was a human it was the most It really was.

46:09It really was. But like all of them are the same idea, which is what if you didn't have a phone? What if you didn't have a screen? What if the LLM was listening and like going off to do things for you and you just had a companion? And like the way they talk about it, like in that video, Johnny Abbott was like they described the laptop as a legacy device, as the phone as a legacy device. And it's like, all right, what's next? And it's like the only thing you can get to is there's an LLM that's in a little thing that's always with you that's listening. It's like, oh, it's a humane pin. And I believe that they can make a beautiful humane pin.

46:42And there are already examples of that idea being so much better than the humane pin and so much better than the friend. Like, I actually think the bee, the bracelet that always records that Amazon ended up purchasing, is a step in that direction. It's not a beautiful device, but it worked far better than a humane pin or a friend. Sure. Here's what I know. I know Sam Altman is addicted to tweeting and he has to ship a consumer device that doesn't let him tweet. Right. Like because it won't have an application to do it or won't have a web browser. And like eventually he'll be like, my phone's pretty good.

47:16You see it coming. It's but easily the worst. Like, you know what he's going to say? The best gadget of the year is the iPhone 17 Pro. that's that's my thing is like the most vaporware ai thing that made everybody be like the future is coming is it's it's so obviously nonsensical in my opinion it's not bad my answer was sora 2 um which has like kind of single-handedly made all of my social video feeds unusable um and then there are a bunch of other things out there but i think sora 2 is kind of the like leading candidate for a lot of this stuff that like i've reached a point now where half of the stuff that i see on tiktok and instagram either is or might be or everybody thinks is ai generated and it's just it just sucks it's like for some reason my feed recently has been filled with um dogs saving children from various things falling on top of them um the exploding packages when porch pirates come to take them away.

48:22The talking babies, though, I don't think it is from Sora, but those are so good. Look, the talking babies, my Instagram algorithm knows I love it, and I have tons of them, and I've seen all of them, and I love them. I don't know. I don't actually think they're Sora made. Maybe not. I think I... They may be VO or something. I don't know. Yeah, there's a bunch of them out there, and they're all getting very good very quickly in the same sort of uncanny valley-ish way. But it has really reached a point where, like, you can't just sit and scroll anymore because half of it's fake and the other half of it might be and all the fake stuff is like it's just not fun or interesting or cool and i wish people would stop doing it and then every conversation about every video is this ai generated yep and it's just exhausting yeah i don't like it and i wish it would stop and neil to your point about neil mohan like that we're just going further down that road 2026 is gonna get worse he has said it out loud the future of youtube is ai and it's like oh boy because they think you'll watch anything that's that's the pitch great um all right uh and this next category speaking of uh people like neil mohan uh big tech ceo most likely to be a podcaster in 12 months okay so i have some i have some foundational questions about this i knew it guest or host host no one wants to be the host this is somebody who is a host you don't want to be the host you know you can't like think about like satya or any of these guys being the host and being like i have questions like no no there are the answers their job is to be the answers you know what's this supposed to be like to come host my shows and i'll just be like a joke no this is who which of the big tech ceos is going to lose their job and launch a podcast in 12 months oh that's very you're much more specific about that.

50:13Yeah, that was not how I read this. Not just like branded content podcaster. Either one. I'll take either one. Like Mark Benioff has a podcast. Yeah, exactly. Jim Carley did a podcast at Ford. Brad Smith did one at Microsoft. None of those are the CEO of a big tech company. We're doing a great job proving my point here. See, I had down Mustafa. Because they all want to be the guest. See, I had down Mustafa Suleiman because he's on every podcast. That's not bad. And I just see him on every podcast. So that's where I thought you were going with this. It was like most likely to be a podcaster because because they are on every podcast and love podcasts.

50:45Again, I'm just going to come back to the core problem with being a podcaster is being the host sucks. It does. That's accurate. All these guys want to be the guest. They want to receive the questions and then sound smart in response and be validated by the host. I say this as a person who sells the opportunity. I was going to say. Validated to CEOs on the regular. They don't want to ask the questions. So like unless they launch like a buddy podcast, There's a lot of these out there where you launch the podcast and you end up as the guest. Yes. And you've got someone who's like the other host and it's whatever.

51:20It's the Tim Cook podcast. But then like Greg Jaws, we ask it, ask it like that could happen. But they don't want it. That is definitely not going to happen. This is why I'm asking my guest for host. Yeah. Okay. Let me, let me just, these are all fair points. Let me just ask a different version of this question. If I'm giving you Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jensen Wong. Jensen. Who's the best, who would most likely to be a great podcast host? Jensen. You think it's Jensen? Absolutely Jensen. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think they all could do it. I think Jensen would talk about himself too much.

51:56I think all these people are great at talking and will. Tim Cook would be an awful podcast host. Like, just awful. Imagine Cook trying to do the banter at the beginning of the show. That's what I mean. give Tim Cook like an Auburn football podcast and it might go fine. I don't know. I just don't see it. Again, I will say this out loud. I don't know if you've ever asked, but I've never even asked for Cook on Decoder. It has just never come up. It's never even on the list. I'm like, I don't, there's nothing to learn here. I don't have a podcast to host, so I don't ask for such things. You've asked for interviews.

52:27Like you've interviewed other Apple executives. Like I think Craig has like interesting things to say about garage door openers, but it never even occurs to me that I should ask Tim Cook a question. I think Satya Nadella might be an excellent podcaster. I think it's in there somewhere. I've seen him be good on the stand at the Google search trial. We've seen him say spicy stuff recently on podcasts. Like there's a good take artist in there in Satya Nadella in a way that I don't know that I see it in some of the other CEOs. So you're imagining kind of like a Stephen A. Smith situation for Satya, where he just gets on solo on the mic and he's just going for it.

53:01Exactly. All right. I'll buy that one. Just a full hour of Satya. Of all of them, I think, having interviewed Satya, he does have it, right? Like three years into I Will Make Google Dance and they're still pissed about it. He can do it. Yeah. He can throw the jabs when he needs to. All right. That whole question was just designed for me to say, Satya, quit your job and start a podcast. I'll listen. Be Stephen A. Smith. Exactly. Okay. Next one, the policy move of the year. And this can be from the perspective of the people making the policies or from the perspective of the people on the end of the policies.

53:43Nilai, this is also your permission to have a lot of feelings about Brendan Carr if you so decide. But you don't have to. I wanted to make it so that you don't have to, but you can if you'd like to. The biggest one of the year in that context then is Brendan Carr going after Jimmy Kimmel, that launching an outcry, them having to back down, Kimmel going back on the air in a total reset of free speech norms in the country. Ted Cruz being like, I'm going to defend free speech against Brendan Carr is a weird outcome of all of that, which is a thing that is happening. Yeah, it's got to be that. I can't think of another policy move that had that much repercussion into the culture.

54:24Everything else is kind of on the edges. Like, I mean, out in tech, like obviously the Trump administration had massive policy moves left and right. But in kind of verge castling, it's got to be the Jimmy Kimmel situation. The only other one I was going to say is I think Meta sort of fully dodging the monopoly allegations was a huge one. Just the way that that case came out, I think, is going to end up having a lot of ramifications in a lot of directions that all of a sudden there are a lot of people who are like, oh, big acquisitions are allowed again. And Meta gets to keep doing Meta things.

55:01And there was a world in which Meta had to get rid of Instagram, and that would have changed a lot of things in a lot of ways. And this is like a gigantic victory for a company that I think has been very afraid of what might happen. But I really like Jimmy Kimmel on that one. I think as just as a pure politicking decision, that is one a lot of people are going to remember for a really long time. Joanna, did you have anything else? I mean, I think just like if I know we're like kind of pointing here to very specific things, but I would say what we were talking about before, that image of every big tech CEO gathered around in the whatever room it was.

55:37I think that all is just like just so emblematic of kissing the ring, cozying up to the administration and then seeing repercussions, whether it's been data center builds or tariffs and all types of flexibility for these companies, I think, is probably the big policy move of the years of these people just kissing the ring and going to the way. If I actually have one image of that, it's Tim Cook presenting him with the. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. I was just about to say, there's a perfect image if you want to describe everything that happened in politics this year with the tech industry. A 24-carat golden glass.

56:16It looks like a record that just says President Donald Trump. I mean, Tim Cook, he can never retire. This is all I'm saying. He cannot retire until Trump is out of office. You cannot introduce him to a new guy at this stage in his life. one of the questions that we talked about last year was will tim cook still be the ceo of apple and uh after a year filled with a lot of people saying it might maybe is he possibly retiring is the what's the succession boy is that man still in charge and there's a i think a bloomberg report saying that all those rumors are false and it's because you cannot introduce donald trump to a guy right now no it's not he's not the he's not in the business and you guys that's not a thing all right we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna go back we're gonna do the last three categories and we're going to get out of here.

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58:08All right, we're back. Three more categories to go. Two that I told you about and one that I forgot to tell you about. So we're going to get to all of them right now. The first one is product announcement we're most excited about for 2026. Neal, if you'd like, I will allow you to use Steam machines here because that is actually... Yeah, that's the one. I'm just taking it. Okay. Either that thing is going to work or it doesn't work. You're not like a gamer. Make the case for Steam machines. I'm surprised that you in particular would think this is like a huge deal. 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop, David.

58:40And I think it's important to say that out loud. Okay. I think the... Can that be your answer? Forget the Steam machine. The product announcement you're most excited about for 2026 is Linux. Linux on the desktop. um uh it's it's time it's finally time since i was a young boy i've been waiting for it to be the year of linux on the desktop um i think the fact that valve has invested so much in making windows games run on linux and on arm and then they're putting out actual hardware to do that thing will completely like bottom out the consumer market for windows pcs in like a very specific kind of way.

59:22And it will make people rethink, like, why do I have PCs? Like, why am I running the overhead of Windows to play these games? Which is, like, basically the growing part of the consumer Windows market outside of, you just have to have a$300 laptop, so here's some garbage you buy. There's just something there that is going to make Microsoft in particular react to it, which I think is fascinating. And I think people are going to be generally excited about a game console again. Yeah. Because that hasn't been a thing. You mentioned the Switch, too. But the console wars are about to get reset on top of it, which I think is fascinating.

59:58I buy it. That's a good answer. Joanna, what's yours? I think it's a foldable iPhone. I'm very interested to see. I mean, the reports do say the fall. Yeah. I'm just very interested to see how Apple approaches this, what they're going to do on software. Yeah, I think. Do you think it's going to flip or fold? Is it a clamshell or is it a shutters? I want to say it would fold like up, right? No, sorry. That's flip. I do think, I don't know. I'm torn because I'm like very, I come at it from the view of what software they currently have and how they would adapt it. And so I think if you fold and you go out, you're kind of really thinking like iPad territory and are we going to see some sort of flexibility there versus like if you just flip up, they don't have to do a ton of software reconstruction to make that happen.

1:00:55I don't know. The rumor, the last rumor I read about Apple's attempts at this were all about how they would get rid of the screen crease. Right. And they would put some structure underneath the crease to even it out, which really implied fold, not flip. True. I mean, there is a crease in the flip phones, but it's a much bigger literally project. no i meant that they would need the space in the bigger form factor to do the structure to get rid of the crease oh i see that's yeah that's fair right so that implies they were they were putting something under there to create tension under the screen to get rid of the crease got it yeah so that implies it's like an ipad mini that folds into the size of an iphone not an iphone that folds into the size of an apple watch which is what it should be to be clear that's what you want that's what i want i want a flip phone i don't think people are like what if my phone was bigger I don't think that's like a feeling a lot of people have.

1:01:47No, we just spent half the podcast talking about how happy I am that I don't have that big phone anymore. Yeah. Okay. Mine is the touchscreen Mac, which again— Is that said to come next year? It is said to come next year. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg and others have been reporting that this is actually a real thing that's in the pipeline and could launch as soon as next year. And I am excited about this thing, not necessarily because I want one. But so I can win this bet finally. Even though I do want one, but it's for exactly that reason, Joanna. It is because this will make so many debates and so many fights and so many bets and so many questions actually come to a head in the world.

1:02:28I can't wait. What do we want from our computers? And that I think like this thing, it just it will be what it will be. And then we will know and we can stop talking about it. Let's do it. I'm very excited about that. We have to go back to that podcast of many years ago where we all made our predictions about the year that this would happen. I need to find it. It was a long time ago. I will write it down and I will find it. Well, so put those ideas next to each other. You have an iPhone that unfolds into something that's like an iPad and you have a Mac that lets you touch it. The question is like, what is left for the iPad?

1:03:06Like, weird. Are you going to allow iPad-style multitasking on your foldable iPhone? you certainly have to allow max out multitasking on your touchable mac yes yes so i i if we were if there was a category here that was david's great call of the year um it's that liquid glass sucks um which i have been i have been so i took one look at liquid glass and i was like this ain't it friends uh and everybody was like just wait and then no it sucks and i was right and i feel great about it the thing that liquid glass like portends is this like incredible collapse of Apple's gadgets that actually they're all sort of the same thing with the same ideas about how they're all supposed to work, that it is just like it is screen in various shapes and sizes.

1:03:49Everything is screen and you attach things to it as you would like to, but it's just screen. And that's what you're talking about, Neelay. Like if all this stuff happens, there will be a bunch of things about the same size and shape that move in slightly different ways that Apple's going to have to make a bunch of like really weird, complicated decisions about how they're supposed to work that are going to be very complicated to get right. I like everything is screen. I like that as a slogan. That's not Apple. Apple needs to sell you an iPad, an iPhone, and a Mac on cadences every year. They're not going to sell you one thing that turns into other stuff.

1:04:28But functionally, if we get a touchscreen Mac and an iPad and a foldable iPhone, all three of those things have a case to be essentially the same device. Sure. Yeah, but have you met these people? They want to sell you three devices. It's the opposite of the Steve Jobs keynote. That's a marketing question, right? Well, yeah, but that's the product they're going to make. They're going to put the walls up in the product to keep you from doing the thing. Yes, but what that's turning into is they're going to make them all slightly worse in the name of selling them all to you. Yes, exactly. You're going to unfold your iPhone, and you're going to scroll to the right, and you're going to keep scrolling, and you're going to keep scrolling, and it's going to come to the last screen that says, You've gone too far.

1:05:03You have to buy an iPad now. Yeah. and they're going to ban you from attaching any kind of bluetooth keyboard to that iphone you see what i'm saying if you connect a mouse i mean they're not going to do that it's just going to be terrible like you know i don't think that's it's going to be an ipad where you can't like run two apps on it or whatever yeah yeah yeah all right or it's going to unfold and you can't run ipad apps on it look i can't wait for this verge cast in 2026 i'm it's going to be a multi-series first verge cast of everything is screen what is computer if if apple launches a touchscreen mac i promise you that a the three of us will do a verge cast about it and b it will be four hours it will be 24 hours long like yeah it'll just do a 24 hour live stream of just us talking about it let's see how long we can do it i like this um all right next category the the headphone jack memorial award for thing that died in 2025.

1:05:58It can be a feature. It can be a whole thing. It can be a company, whatever you want. Thing that died in 2025 that you're sad about. Can I merge this with a category that you have for if we won't get time for it? Sure. Okay. Because David has most insidious insertion of ads into a previously ad-free product on the list down here in the cut line. Travis, our producer, gets credit for that one. And I would just put the memorial award for the thing that died was ad-free products. Because as soon as I was at my sister's house for Thanksgiving, and boy, are there just ads on her Alexa display. They're just there.

1:06:35Just the weirdest Amazon ads you have ever seen in your entire life. All of the streaming services were like the ad-supported tiers or growth tier. That's the one we're doing. It is just the ad-free internet experience has come to an end. Yes. I my least favorite thing right now is my two and a half year old really likes watching The Grinch, which is on Peacock. And every we watch, you know, it's a 90 minute movie. There are 15 ad breaks. And every single time it comes on, he goes, I don't like this part. And I have to explain to him what commercials are. And I'm not a fan. This is just just we're back to there was like a generation that like everybody grew up with commercials.

1:07:17Right. It's like that was a gen. Our parents all grew up with commercials. That's just like what it was. And then for a long time, nobody had commercials. We could get we could avoid them. You could fast forward past them. You could skip them entirely. And now we are just fully back to commercials and everything. Yeah. I don't like it. Neither does my toddler. I don't have an answer for this of something that like was phased out that I'm sad about. Mine is Skype. Oh, that's a good one. I forgot that there was some no icon. Purely emotional. I have not used Skype in probably a decade. But Skype died officially this year.

1:07:50And I was like weirdly sad about it. Skype was like cool and important and good in the history of the Internet and should have. I also think that like how Skype fumbled the pandemic story remains weird and wild and unknown. But but yeah, that was the one that I was looking back at, like all the all the stuff that went away this year. And Skype was the only one that made me go like, oh, Skype. What else went away? Like, I just can't like the humane pin going away is not a sad thing. The humane pin went away. I know you were sad about that. I was not sad. I still have mine sitting here and I'm like, I have no idea what to do with it.

1:08:25The laser projector, it still projects. It doesn't project anything. But I can still, I can hold out my hand and not see what's on it. Yeah, exactly. It's just a sad face. All right. Last category is the best thing that you personally spent your own money on this year. Oh, I have such an esoteric answer for this. This is allowed. What do you got? um we we put a tv for max in the basement and it's like an lg tv and you can just buy huge strip lights and put them on the back and then you can just enable the feature in the lcd tv to make them the backlight and it's just a thing that worked of the tv of the tv like it shines on the wall you know like you you can do that ambulite thing but it's just built into the tv it was like cheap and i just like put the strip lights on the tv and i was like i'm buying this feature and it looks cool and Max loves it and it just works.

1:09:18There's no subscription was involved in this. I just bought some strip lights and put them on the TV and it connected to the Hue app and we're off to the races and it's done. And it was like one of those technology moments where I was like, I bought something. The transaction was completed. No data is being sent away from my home. Do you know what I mean? Yes. It was very good. That is good. But easily one of the more delightful like, oh, this is just like, I can just like yeah that works like it's done you know and it like every day every time she turns on tv she's happy that's such a perfect smart home success story that you hardly ever hear where you're just like I did a thing and then I set it up and now it works forever now I never have to think about this again yeah oh I have more smart home stuff actually all of my best things I bought this year were like weird smart home gadgets we bought smart shades for the baby's room and they just work they're just matter smart shades that just work all the time were they new shades or they were like the ones that you put on the little attachments um we have both so in max's room um we it's like they turn the chain and they're really noisy but they work and then in the babies are in the brand new and they totally work and they were cheap and they just they just do the job they're meant to do and you can talk to because they're matter you can talk to any of the things and they just do the thing and it's like oh this works like this is an you would not expect this to work.

1:10:42I, Jen Toohey was on the show a few weeks ago and tried to sell me on smart shades and I kind of waved her off and was like, that seems ridiculous. I can pull the shades down. And I have heard from so many people who were like, you don't understand. Smart shades are incredible. The thing where you can just make them go up and down is awesome. I'm like, I kind of get it. Particularly for baby room where you are constantly trying to make that room dark. A real thing. Yeah. Those are the two that I would say like, oh, they just worked. And again, no subscription fees, no ecosystem lock-in. These are the things that I value now.

1:11:16Yeah, it's pretty good. My two are either the M4 Mac Mini, which I mentioned before, which is just a perfect regular human computer. Or I just bought this thing called the Yodo Player. I don't know if you guys know what it is. Oh, yeah, we have a Yodo Player. The Yodo Player is amazing. It's this little like music box for kids, basically. And it is. I've seen this. There's the Tony and there's the Yodo. And I said at one point in Installer that I was going to buy a Tony. And I heard from, I'm not kidding, 50 people, easily 50 people who were like, don't buy that, buy the Yodo. It's better. So I bought the Yodo.

1:11:56And it is maybe the most thoughtfully put together gadget I've used in years. it is like it's this little thing so it's it's a little music player and it has some built-in stuff like it can play radio stations and it has it does sleep sounds but its main thing is it has these like little nfc cards that you stick in and it just starts playing whatever the card decides um but you can also use the nfc reader on your phone to scan them into a library on your phone and you can play them that way you can get cards you can make cards you can record cards it's just like it is the most seamless gadget experience i can remember just wait till this thing falls off the wi-fi dude just you just you just wait like i'm seven years deep into yodo player we never have had these these tonys or the yeah my kids were never into it i guess actually the best thing is max constantly falls asleep uh listening to your yodo player and we because it has a phone app we just turn it off from our room we're like what is that is that rapunzel maybe i'll try it it's cute it's it's good i'm a fan um yeah so far we like we gave arthur the the yodo and he like doesn't totally understand how it works yet but he understands that he can stick the cards in and pull them out and he likes that all he needs to know so that's it's going great yep um joanna you have not picked yet what's yours best thing you spent money on this year It was the Brother HLL2460DW.

1:13:30Boom. Bought it in August. Is that actually the product name? Yep. Which you've memorized because you love it so much. Yep. I bought Nealai's favorite printer. The type that you know the model number is so much farther ahead than me. You may have heard I was writing a book this year, and I needed to print said book multiple times to copy edit and work on it. And I bought that printer. and it is just the book printer and i'm happy with it oh i can do an honorable mention uh we went home for thanksgiving and my parents had a giant box of of photos and we bought uh the epson fast photo scanner the photo scanner well it's it's the it's specifically the fast photo yeah yeah and you just put in like a stack of 40 photos i've tested it before yeah and it like the scans aren't great but the thing works and you just like dump them into google photos and you're done yeah and it's really we have a we have a weird shared family google photos account and i'm like oh this thing works and this you know it's like it's printer software like why is this why is there a menu bar icon for the scanner get out of my face but it absolutely does the job and i was like oh this is like another gadget where it didn't ask me for a subscription fee this is my my main criteria it's like did it ask me for a subscription fee neither did my brother printer yep and it did the job and it made my parents happy and that's all that matters Joanna, how many pages do you think you've printed this year?

1:14:51Oh, thousands. I mean, like, yeah. And I liked, yeah. Yeah, I had to read, like, I had to read on paper. I had some people read, so I had to give it to them on paper. Lots of printing. Do you have, like, an old-timey office now where it's just full of stacks? You're, like, a college professor from the 70s with just huge stacks of paper everywhere? With markings on them. Because I don't want to throw them away. I'm like, this poor paper. And I feel someone you're I'm definitely going to get a listener telling me how wasteful it is that I printed these. I understand, listener, and I hear you. And please don't email me.

1:15:27You should also know that Joanna lights them all on fire in an open field every time. I mean, I could use it as like, yeah, I could use it. It's Joanna's landfill at gmail.com. Sponsor the show. All right. We have a bunch of other categories. Is any other ones either of you want to get to before we get out of here? Oh, I liked this one. Most memorable product keynote moment of the year. The meta display keynote, the meta keynote where they were presenting and the Wi-Fi went out and none of their products worked was pretty great. I've said this out loud several times already. Not a Wi-Fi problem.

1:16:06Your demo failed. Right, sorry. Not a Wi-Fi problem. The Wi-Fi did not fail. They blamed the Wi-Fi. They super-duber blamed the Wi-Fi. No, they blamed the access point that was all of the, because when they said, hey, meta, they said they DDoS themselves. Yes, exactly. Which I sort of believe. But yeah, fundamentally stood on the stage and blamed the Wi-Fi. Definitely not the Wi-Fi. I mean, but there was actually a lot of memorable or cringe-worthy keynotes this year. There was the Jimmy Fallon Pixel. Oh, yeah. That was tough. But I will say, like, we have seen a nice comeback this year of in-person keynotes.

1:16:45We've had Amazon doing things in person. We've had Meta doing things in person. And I think that's a nice trend. I do think for pure like cringe inducing reasons alone, the meta one has to win. Oh, yeah. Because that was a truly brutal like 60 seconds to be part of even sitting at my computer watching the live stream. Yeah. It was tough. It was a tough beat out there. Yeah, that's my only one I would add. That's pretty good. All right. Time for us to get out of here. Thank you both for doing this. This was very fun. we did not compete this time because you know next year we're going to compete again but I wanted us to all be nice to each other this year but thank you both for doing this this was super fun and we're going to be back next time with some 2026 predictions so until then I'll see y 'all later alright that's it for the show thank you again to Joanna and Eli for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening if you have other superlatives other things you think we should have added to those categories other categories you think we should do next year I want to hear all about it Email us, vergecast at theverge.com.

1:17:47Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Get at us. The year-end stuff is like an ever-changing idea, as you can tell, and eager to figure out even more stuff we can do going forward. So get at us with all of your questions about this and everything. Looking forward to hearing from you. Until then, The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by River Branson, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll be back on Friday with a whole bunch more news because it's somehow the holiday season and the news just keeps newsin'. We'll see you then.

1:18:18Rock and roll.

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