Apple's best product ever

14:04Nilay Patel:They're pretty ubiquitous. TBPN is the Tech Bro Podcast Network. It's a three-hour live stream on X.

14:10David Pierce:Technically, it's not anymore, by the way. I just learned this. So what is it now? It is. It's just TBPN. It's like MTV is no longer music television. Oh, not ESPN. They have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now. Yeah. That's what it started as. It was the Tech Bro Podcast Network, yeah.

14:24Nilay Patel:But it's just a three-hour live stream. They have a lot of guests on there. A lot of CEOs go on there to hype up their investments. They are part of Founders Fund. like they're VCs with a three-hour live stream and they do a good job. It is Pat McAfee for VCs. Like I don't know how else to describe this. And AI. And OpenAI bought it like today, just before we came on air. And it's like, didn't you just talk about how you're not doing side quests and you're not going to chase all these things and do all this nonsense? And the reason that they bought it and they put out a press release and I'm reading it and it's utterly fascinating.

14:56Nilay Patel:It says, we're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift And the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes with the responsibility to help create a space for a real constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with the builders and people using the technology at the center. That's exactly what TBPN has built. So first of all, the mission is to bring AGI to the world. And you're going to buy a podcast. They're saying they're going to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team, that their comms and marketing ideas for OpenAI have really impressed them.

15:24Nilay Patel:They're going to be part of the policy group and run strategy. It's like, oh, you're going to turn this thing into branded content for OpenAI. Now, they're saying it will remain independent. But the history of companies trying to run media like this is necessarily that it's a side quest. Like, yes, running media is noisy. You have people talking all day and there will be OpenAI will be held accountable for what they say. Also, all of TBN's distribution is on X. and somewhat notably X is owned by Elon Musk, who is currently suing Sam Altman over the very existence of open AI. That trial is about to go.

16:03Nilay Patel:This is noise.

16:04David Pierce:And who is extremely happy to turn the knobs on the algorithm to favor and disfavor what he does and does not like.

16:11Nilay Patel:Absolutely. So I just, I, you can think of what you want of TVPN. And they, I think they're pretty honest that they're pretty biased. They read the ads, you know?

16:20David Pierce:I actually have a lot of like empathy and admiration for what TVP is. They are crystal clear on what they're doing.

16:26Nilay Patel:Yeah. I always say I like people who are honest. They're honest. It's right there out in the open. But now you're part of a company that's going to have ideas about what you should do and say, especially if you're directly integrated in the marketing of the company, which it appears that they will be. And you're hosted on a platform where the owner of that platform hates your CEO. It just hates him. And like, you're about to get a court. That's a lot of noise for OpenAI. After they killed Sora, and they put out the code red and they talked about pivoting enterprise and focusing on codecs, they're going to buy a lot of attention and a lot of distraction.

17:01Nilay Patel:And I think the reason they're doing it is because the gap in coverage is so big. Yeah. Right? The people in the polls, there was another poll just this week, 55 % of people do not think AI is going well. Right? The people don't want data centers built. There's all kinds of polling showing that. And it's because there's product market fit in enterprise and the consumer products aren't good. And they all think this is a marketing problem. They think this is a communications problem. And I'm telling you, it is a product problem. And buying a show that you think does a good job of communicating how great AI is, is not going to convince a bunch of people who don't see great products.

17:38Nilay Patel:It just won't.

17:40David Pierce:Yeah, I mean, I agree. And I do think I am increasingly convinced that the that marketing problem is not in bad faith or disingenuous. Like, I think I think a lot of people in this industry are so incredibly convinced that AI is going to be the future of literally everything that they can't believe other people don't see it. Right. Like this is the San Francisco versus New York thing you keep threatening to do that. We really need to do like the feeling coming out of that industry is like you how how do you not see this? Like it's so obvious. It is so ubiquitous. It is so everywhere. It's going to change everything like AI that can send iMessages for you is going to literally change everything about your life for the better.

18:19David Pierce:And I like I say that jokingly because I don't buy most of that argument. But I think the people who espouse that argument really believe it. And I think you only do this if you're open AI like you don't do this cynically, right? Like this is this is like this is our opportunity to reframe this conversation, not to make us more money, but because this thing is is so important. We need to make sure everybody sees it. It's just weird.

18:45Nilay Patel:I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own products. I mean, yes. And free chat GPT. 900 million people have used free chat GPT. They know what they think. They know what they think of that product. You can't put John and Jordy have great haircuts, man. They do. Terrific. I'm jealous of them. The jackets, too. Yeah. I mean, these are handsome, well-dressed, well-spoken, very smart people. You can't tell people that they're not having the experiences that they're having with these products. You just can't overcome it. You can't say, I promise you Sam Altman's ideas about universal basic income are going to work out.

19:29Nilay Patel:Meanwhile, ChatGPT is like, here's some weird ads that you don't like. Like, there's some collision coming for the consumer products and the reality of how this industry is perceived that you can't market or communicate your way through. You have to ship the products that work. And I really thought OpenAI, you know, shutting down Sora and pivoting to Codex and saying they were going to focus was evidence they understood that. And then you just have this other thing where it's like, I actually don't know. Like, it seems like they want to be loved, and the way you are loved is by shipping great products.

20:03Nilay Patel:Like, it is, that's the whole verge. Like, I don't know what to tell you. We run a reviews program for a reason. The evaluation comes from the products. It doesn't come from us saying that like you're great you know i do think it's possible to look at this actually as

20:18David Pierce:right in line with the pivot to business that actually if you look at the audience for something like tbpn like mike isaac at the new york times are a great profile of them a while ago and he called it something to the effect of sports center for the linkedin crowd oh sure which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right and it's like what if you're if If you're open AI, what you need is a way to communicate clearly and cleanly, essentially to all of the other companies in Silicon Valley, right? Like that's where all of these companies start. If you are a startup in Silicon Valley making business software, your first customers for a very long time are other startups in Silicon Valley, mostly making products for other business customers.

21:00David Pierce:Like this is the cycle forever and ever and ever. So I feel like a TBPN is basically like a very sexy B2B podcast, which again is like, I think fairly straightforwardly kind of what they're trying to be. Then this makes a certain kind of sense. It's just a very out there way of trying to accomplish that goal.

21:23Nilay Patel:We just went through all this. We're going to focus. We're shutting down all this stuff. And there's just nothing noisier than media. Which is what everyone discovers. It is absolutely the noisiest thing you can do.

21:35David Pierce:Ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company that might have some conflicts with the way that you own your own company.

21:43Nilay Patel:A media company whose incentives are all shaped by going viral on X. Right. Yeah.

21:50David Pierce:It's weird times. So what do you make of this giant funding round? So OpenAI raised$122 billion, mostly from its existing investors, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Microsoft, a bunch of individual investors. This is all under the, you know, huge looming IPO for both OpenAI and potentially Anthropic, both coming this year. There's just a ton of money brewing right now. And OpenAI is sort of flexing, A, this huge amount of money, and B, this 900 million weekly ChatGPT users as like it's trying very much to use this to remind the world that it is the Goliath in this space. What do you make of all of this right now?

22:29Nilay Patel:I mean, I think that list of investors is a bunch of big companies that are reliant on this technology or reliant on OpenAI being successful because they've already invested a bunch of money into this company and spent a bunch of money. And, you know, in the case of NVIDIA, the money's coming right back to them in a variety of ways. So that's confusing. Again, my thesis on OpenAI is that they do not end the year anywhere close to the same kind of company that they started the year as. and it feels like that is getting borne out. They have to start making real money on the free version of ChatGPT, which means competing with Google in a real way.

23:08Nilay Patel:Google is not easy to compete with. I think OpenAI, their ad pilot, they ran it for six weeks. They made like$16 million, which I keep annualizing to$100 million. And it's like, it sort of works that way, but it doesn't work that way at all. You can't be like, in six weeks, we made this much money. So in 52, we would definitely make this much money. Like, I wish it worked that way, but it absolutely doesn't. Advertising in particular is very cyclical. So who knows? But they have to go compete with Google for real. Google's obviously not going to just lose market share. They're going to compete back really hard.

23:42Nilay Patel:They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like their deal with Apple. Remember Apple Intelligence launched with a big open AI thing? That all feels like it's falling by the wayside, and Apple's going to be way more open to all kinds of other models. in Siri. Apple has a bigger deal with Google now. Like, OpenAI is sort of on its own, right? Their Microsoft relationship has been cut off. So they've got to go compete with Anthropic in the enterprise for agentic coding tools, which seems like a big business for both of those companies. And then they have to compete with Google, the greatest business in the history of technology and potentially business itself.

24:18Nilay Patel:Good luck. Like, I just don't, this much money might not be enough, especially if you don't have the focus. And especially if you're now run by a bunch of ad people and business people and not core technologists, many of whom have left to go to Anthropic. Yep.

24:34David Pierce:Yeah, I think the theory that OpenAI is going to look very different seems more and more obvious to me all the time. And I think like Google did a very funny announcement about the new Google VO thing, which is basically Google's version of Sora. It's its own video generation model. and basically what Google is able to do is just not worry about the money and compute that it costs to run a video model, right? Like, because it makes all of the money from search ads, like Google can just afford to lose money in a way that OpenAI can't. Like, nobody is making money on AI. There is no money in AI right now.

25:17David Pierce:Like, it's very important to remember there are two nickels to be made in AI right now. All of these companies are losing money at like record rates. It's just that Google made$100 billion last quarter and Anthropic and OpenAI didn't.

25:33Nilay Patel:And when Google wants to shut down things that aren't, you know, core to its business, it's like, have you heard of Calico Labs, the contact lens that might detect diseases? It's like, what? You were doing what? Yeah. And like, I don't even know if that's still running. Like they have that scale. Google is structured into Alphabet to allow things to try to succeed outside of the core Google business. Things inside the core Google business, like AI, they are extremely willing to subsidize even more. So again, I think OpenAI has found itself, it's gone from darling to sort of independent. They're not tied to the big companies the way they were in the past or supported by the big companies the way they were in the past.

26:16Nilay Patel:Most notably, I think Microsoft and Apple. And they're up against competing with Google, which I think is just going to be incredibly challenging. Yep. By the way, I haven't even mentioned, they brought on a bunch of Apple designers and Johnny Ive to try to compete with the iPhone. Good luck. Like, I don't know what, like, to pay off all this investment, they have made enormous promises. And if the answer is we can automate Excel, that might be a big business, but it's certainly not a big enough business to pay back on the promises that they've been making for a very long time. Right.

26:50David Pierce:I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business. And I think like it's worth saying very clearly that I think you and I are actually on the same page of like what this is going to do for business and for the way, and I mean business very broadly, like you and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful, valuable ways to get work done. That's awesome and exciting and cool and interesting. And we should cover a lot of that. That is so different from digital Jesus. and it is so different from this like mass consumer live your life inside of these chatbots tools that we've been promised that it's just like we have to figure out how to pull those things apart from each other.

27:30Nilay Patel:I really just come back to if you have software brain, you think that the computer is alive. And a lot of people have software brain.

27:38David Pierce:Yeah.

27:39Nilay Patel:Like they're like, I see the world as a series of databases that I can link and interconnect and make use of. And that might be right. like that might be a good way to describe reality, but it actually isn't. It's an incomplete description of reality and you can't actually extrapolate. Like now I can send my agent to go scrape databases for me to I have made God. There's something about software brain. We really should do New York versus California because what I mean is that people in California have absolute software brain and people in New York are like, yeah, I live in a city with other people in it.

28:15David Pierce:this is how we finally start our podcast beef with hard fork. This is it. This is how we do it. I mean, I love them both very much. I know I do too. It's great. We need more enemies. We always, we're always saying this. Casey was just Sundacoder. We need more enemies. All right, let's, let's pivot now to a new segment. We've been talking about this internally for a while. We've been trying to figure out what it is for a while. I'm very excited to finally get to bring this to the Verge cast. It's called the hype desk. And it features two of our friends. Welcome back to the show. Both of you, Ross Miller, Ashley Esqueda.

28:50David Pierce:Welcome back.

28:51Nilay Patel:Yay! I don't have an air horn. If I did, I'd hit it.

28:56David Pierce:I'm the closest you're going to get to that. I mean, I already have that kind of like cackle. So it's just, I'll be your sound effect for hype, basically. A fun fact you should both know is that we have steadfastly refused to give Neelai a soundboard for many, many, many years now. That feels wise. And it will not happen.

29:12Nilay Patel:I was in that reviews closet today and I saw a stream deck and I thought, I can make this happen for myself. But it's better because I have Ross and Ashley now, my human air horns. Happy to be of a service. Human air horn. That's what I want to be remembered as.

29:24David Pierce:That's beautiful. So before we get into this segment, Neelai, this is kind of your baby. And this is something you've been thinking about for a long time. And we've been planning for a long time going way back into VergeCast lore. Do you want to explain what the hype desk is before we get into it? Yeah.

29:40Nilay Patel:So if you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that we've had many iterations of the Hypedesk in the past. And the early iterations were like, what if we just had cool kids in the corner? And we never quite knew why, but it was fun. And then that ran its course. And if you've been listening to us recently, you know that we talk a lot about the creator economy, like the YouTube podcast economy, and how all of that requires a pretty uncomfortable smashing of editorial and ads. All the creators have to do the brand deals. They have to read the ads. David and I send each other other podcast hosts reading the ads in very odd ways all the time.

30:16Nilay Patel:You will also know that what we sell here is our ethics policy, and David and I are way too precious to read the ads. but there's like a the reality is we need an on-staff influencer to come and do the money and i have always thought that no one would ever want to be our on-staff influencers because you have to deal with me but you don't get the fun of being in the newsroom and then ross is like well i used to work here i never want to be in that newsroom again and i was like so i'm very excited that ross actually going to be here we're going to hang out with them, you know, once a week for a few weeks, see if we like it.

30:50Nilay Patel:And right now we're unsponsored for flavor. But the idea here is you can't buy me and David, but you can buy these two. I would encourage it. Please. We are for sale. Capitalism, baby. We're just going to see how that goes. And it's our little solution to the creator economy problem. Also, I just I love these two. I'm excited to talk to you every week. But this is our solution is to have people who are not in our newsroom come join the show, do cool stuff, tell us about adventures, and then, you know, make some money. I like it. It's so good to be back. To keep the journalism going. Make the money to keep the journalism going, which I don't want to do.

31:31Nilay Patel:No.

31:32David Pierce:I'm a recovering journalist.

31:34Nilay Patel:I quit that years ago.

31:35David Pierce:I want to be so clear about how church and state separate, like how strict Neal is about church and state being separate. We are literally 15 feet apart in the same room.

31:43Nilay Patel:I don't want you anywhere near me, Ross. You sit over there.

31:46David Pierce:We're going to get you a real desk. So glad to see. Yeah, there is no actual hype desk right now. It's a hype chair right now. It's just a hype chair. The idea here is basically you two are our friends who are going to go out in the world and bring us cool stuff every week. What have you brought us this week? Oh, thank you for asking. Well, first things first, this is an Ashley specialty. Both of us have a hard time staying focused. So Ashley bought me a Pomodoro Timers, a really cute little one from Amazon. It looks like a Chumbie. Do you remember the Chumbie? I do. Wow. That thing gives me real chummy vibes that you're holding.

32:18Nilay Patel:I need a timer. And so I tried one of these little cubie guys, and I hate the noise it makes. It makes me upset. It's like a high-pitched beeping sound, and it's like nails on a chalkboard. And so I was like, where are the timers for small children that would better suit me? And fortunately, I, in fact, found exactly what I was looking for, which is this. Again, this is totally unsponsored. I just found it. And it has like, this one has a rainbow on it and Ross's has a robot. And when you just turn the little thing to start up the timer to whatever time you want, up to 99 minutes, and then it has little lights on the outside that go away as it counts down.

32:58Nilay Patel:And then it sings you a little song. And honestly, like to make me drink water and get up out of my chair all day and not be like shrimping over my keyboard. Very nice. Like very nice thing. The Pomodoro is a system. It's not just like a pasta sauce, right? It's like a whole system of managing time. Yeah, the whole system of like, you know, 45 minutes on and then you do it. Like, Ross and I are both ADHD, so we need help. We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do, neurotypicals can do. I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time.

33:30David Pierce:I am, because if I don't, we will take over the whole Vergecast. And no one will be happy about this, because we want to keep coming back. So we're going to be very tight about this segment, as much as we can be. Or we'll hear a really cute sound. Tight 10. Tight 10, yeah. Ashley, where did you find this thing? This screams TikTok shop to me, I have to tell you.

33:47Nilay Patel:Not the TikTok shop. Wild, not the TikTok shop. I just found it on Amazon. I was scrolling through Amazon and looking for timers, and I just kept trying different search phrases, like a maniac, like Riker, Googling. It was like timer child music, MP3 upload timer. Like I just didn't want the little beepy cube. It's just terrible, and I don't like it. So I found this one and I was like, this seems like exactly what I'm looking for. It's very simple. It's like very close to being sort of like an analog timer. It's not like a smart thing. You don't have to connect it to your phone. I like all of those things.

34:20Nilay Patel:I just want it to do what I want it to do and nothing else. And so this was the it was a great little solution. I want to say it was like under 20 books. So it's it's really nice.

34:30David Pierce:Yeah, I think it was like 15. Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of this segment. All right. So moving on. This is not what we actually came to talk about. This was just meant to like help us stay on track. Ross's timer cracking the whip here. Good Lord. Here we go. So two hype things we already talked about. One big one was PAX East. Now PAX, Penny Arcade Expo, has been around since, I want to say, 2004. It's one of the longest running gaming fan conventions. There's currently four of them every year. And given a time like E3 is not here, GDC and DICE are all very industry focused.

35:02David Pierce:It's one of the few places where you can just be a video game nerd and really come and celebrate your fandom. And Ashley, you just went to PAX East in Boston.

35:09Nilay Patel:Yeah, went to PAX East, had a lot of fun.

35:13David Pierce:Did you see any games that stuck out? Like, what's a title that you were like, ooh?

35:16Nilay Patel:I got to play the new Pokemon Champions, which was really neat. That's that, like, they kind of just remade Pokemon Stadium. And it was really fun. It was just like, it seems like a nice little bite-sized game that you can just kind of play on the go. Like, it's real quick. Like, oh, I just want to get some battles in against some other people. That was awesome.

35:32David Pierce:I love hearing that Pokemon had a good game. Pokemon's having a moment right now, because I know Pocopia also came out. It's like an Animal Crossing, but the whole conceit feels very Lovecraftian. You play a shape-shifting Pokemon that turns itself human because all the humans have disappeared. And the Pokemon are just sad about no humans. So they just rebuild civilization.

35:52Nilay Patel:The Ditto transforms into a person. I have a hat from PAX. This is my Ditto hat. I feel like I already know how this is going to go off the rails every week. Every week. Every week. Never. Trust me. You come to the hype desk for a show. I'm here for it. But yeah, you're a weird little ditto who is like, oh, I think I remember what my human trainer looked like. And then they turn into this weird little abomination of a child that has a ditto face. And it's horrific and also delightful.

36:22David Pierce:It's good stuff. All right, so things we've learned. A, if you sponsor the hype desk, Ashley will wear a hat of your choosing. I will wear the dumbest hat imaginable. We've just discovered this. This is useful information.

36:33Nilay Patel:Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I just did it. I just did it.

36:37David Pierce:All right, that's the hype desk, everybody. Thank you so much to Ross and Ashley. You guys are going to be here with us every week for the next couple of months. You're going to bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored. Some of it will be unsponsored. It's going to be great. We're very excited to have you guys here. This is going to be awesome. Thank you both. Bye. Bye. Love you both. We are going to take a break. And then, Eli, you and I are going to rank some Apple products. You ready for this?

37:02Nilay Patel:It's going to be rough.

37:03David Pierce:We'll be right back.

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38:16Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer-first, ACID-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500, and that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers.

38:57Nilay Patel:MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash build.

39:30David Pierce:out the door.

39:31Nilay Patel:Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work.

39:41David Pierce:Alright, we're back. So, this week was Apple's 50th anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. Eli, you wrote about the iPhone. I wrote about the generational heater that Steve Jobs went on when he came back to Apple. Jason Snell wrote a couple of great pieces including one that I know he feels very passionate about about the Apple II. We wrote about antitrust. We wrote about the MacBook Air. Amelia, our photographer, did an incredible visual history. Neil, have you looked at that? That's like, those photos are incredible. So much fun. It's very good. In the 50 years of Apple.

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

40:53David Pierce:And then you and I both made our own top 10s. and so we're going to compare our top 10s against each other and against the the overall ranking and see how we feel see who's right see what we need to fight about does sound good it does i'm and

41:08Nilay Patel:i'm convinced that i'm correct and everyone else is wrong obviously the first time ever for you

41:13David Pierce:this is this is great um all right so let's let's just start at the bottom here uh number 50 on the list, the worst of the best Apple products of all time is the ImageWriter 2. Well, it's the worst of the best. It's just coming in at number 50. Right. This is still a very good Apple product. But I will say, I think coming into this, we picked two printers for this list, and I would say there's a strong chance the other printer will be number 49. But I think we sort of knew these would be down at the bottom. Even though I think you could argue they're very good and very important and very innovative products, they're printers.

41:49David Pierce:Yeah. I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see, what's number 49? The Laser Rider 2. Rough!

41:58David Pierce:Super tough beat for the printers here. Yeah, I'm not surprised by this. Are you surprised by this?

42:05Nilay Patel:I think, I personally think the Laser Rider 2 should be higher, but I understand. We have a young audience. They don't remember. They don't know.

42:12David Pierce:I think instinctively most people look at printers and are like, this can't possibly be any good. How dare you?

42:18Nilay Patel:The Laser... I promised I wouldn't do this, but the Laser Rider 2 was Apple's business for a long time. Yeah, it really was. The Mac and the Laser Rider kept that company afloat. All right, number 48.

42:32David Pierce:The original cinema display. Rough. That's a little lower than I would have thought. Again, I think the kids

42:40Nilay Patel:don't know, man. Yeah. They're out here buying cheap LCDs. This thing was a sensation when it came out. It's true. All right, number 47, the Clip iPod Shuffle.

42:51David Pierce:Oh, that one kind of hurts my feelings. I don't actually think that's entirely wrong, but I loved that product.

42:57Nilay Patel:Again, this is the 50 best. It's just, it's hard to go head to head. I mean, that's literally how we rank them, right? Head to head against many other things on this list. The Clip iPod Shuffle is not winning. No question.

43:11David Pierce:Including number 46, PowerBook 500. This is one you used, Dan, for a little bit. This one hurts me.

43:17Nilay Patel:They're wrong.

43:18David Pierce:The whippersnappers are wrong. They're wrong. Okay. Number 45. The Apple TV second gen.

43:26Nilay Patel:See, the PowerBook belongs, deserves to go over the Apple TV second gen.

43:30David Pierce:Yeah, this is the first one that I'm like, the Apple TV second gen should be in the bottom three. This is recency bias. No question. Yeah. All right, number 44. The PowerBook 100 series. Boy, real PowerBook slander coming here. This is just a young audience. Yeah. This is a young audience of people who I think a lot of people, and frankly, if I were not a professional journalist, my Apple experience would have started. And my Apple knowledge would have started with the iMac G3 and the Steve Jobs return. I think that whole era is just sort of lost on most people. Yeah. Even though there were a lot of good products in it.

44:09Nilay Patel:And we had Jason Snell write an entire piece. Best headline we've come up with in a minute. Between Jobs. It's very good. about Apple's weird 90s and the power books are in there.

44:18David Pierce:Yeah, and everybody just looks at that decade and is like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece. Everybody should go read it. All right, number 43. QuickTime. This is wrong. I will spoil this. I have QuickTime in my top 10. Wow. Okay. In part because I spent a bunch of time working on a piece that we ran on the site about the creation of QuickTime by a guy named John Buck. It's an excerpt or an adapted book It's an adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good.

44:49Nilay Patel:John Buckwick was on the team that invented QuickTime in the weird 90s at Apple. I love that piece. Everyone should read it. It's great. QuickTime is foundational technology. MP4 is QuickTime.

45:01David Pierce:Yeah. And it makes a very compelling case that, like, QuickTime was the beginning of the idea that computers could be for creative tasks. It's a very important piece of technology. The kids don't know these days. This is my story so far. The kids don't know. All right, number 42. Final Cut Pro.

45:21Nilay Patel:Software's getting a rough beat here.

45:22David Pierce:I'm actually fine with Final Cut Pro being here. It's like, again, this is the top 50. All of these are good, but there are a lot better things than Final Cut Pro. Number 41.

45:29Nilay Patel:This is actually recency biased the other way, right? Like the modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here.

45:36David Pierce:I think that's probably right. All right, number 41. Ooh, the Apple Extended Keyboard 2. John Gruber is going to be very upset about this.

45:44Nilay Patel:He's furious about this.

45:45David Pierce:John Gruber, I think at one point, if I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings. And then John posted about it on Daring Fireball, basically saying it was a travesty that it was so low. So he got it up to 41.

46:00Nilay Patel:Great job, John. It's rough. John, by the way, agrees with me. This is the best keyboard of all time.

46:07David Pierce:Not just Apple's best keyboard, the best keyboard of all time.

46:10Nilay Patel:A strong argument. many people will make the strong argument the apple x10 keyboard 2 is the best keyboard of

46:18David Pierce:all time i will say fun fact according to the rankings this final cut pro and quick time are all exactly tied in the rankings fascinating um all right number 40 garage band yeah i think software is just getting a getting a tough especially again this is modern garage band

46:35Nilay Patel:if you remember when garage band came out sensation the idea that a digital audio workstation product would be on every single Mac that shipped for free was a revolution. But so it goes.

46:46David Pierce:Was.

46:47Nilay Patel:Umbrella by Rihanna. That's GarageBand loops. This is how important that software was.

46:52David Pierce:So and to this point, number 39, iTunes. Rough. iTunes, despite the best efforts to make it number one, is number 39 on the list. We defeated you,

47:03Nilay Patel:hacker! It should be lower. Can we manually switch them just to punish bad behavior?

47:10David Pierce:I'm fine with iTunes being here. iTunes is like great and terrible so simultaneously that I'm largely fine with it being here. 38 is the Mac SE30. This is one of those computers I have no context for, but you made a pretty strong case is a very important piece of hardware in Apple history.

47:28Nilay Patel:This is the best of that type of Mac, the little compact desk Mac, the black and white screen. I would argue this should be far higher, but I understand why it's where it is.

47:39David Pierce:There are Apple old heads who will argue this is one of Apple's best, like if you sort of consider it in its era, that this is one of Apple's best computers of all time.

47:48Nilay Patel:Best, most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for the CPU inside. Ooh, ooh. Yeah.

47:58David Pierce:Ooh, I love an SE30. There we go. All right. Number 37. The Mac Plus. This is really. See, this is all wrong. This is all wrong.

48:07Nilay Patel:I don't know what we're doing here.

48:08David Pierce:1980s Apple is just getting wrecked here.

48:11Nilay Patel:No, I'm saying even in this list, the SE30 is clearly superior to the Mac Plus.

48:16David Pierce:Oh, yeah, no question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings, which is very funny.

48:20Nilay Patel:Oh, there you go. Okay.

48:21David Pierce:The two of them, just alone, they're both ahead of iTunes, but they are tied with each other in the rankings. That's right. That feels somehow, that's definitely a lot of people being like, I don't know what either of these things are. I'm just going to click a button. All right, number 36. The black MacBook. Ugh. I think this is right.

48:39Nilay Patel:This feels like a tough beat for you personally.

48:41David Pierce:I loved that computer. It's like, as just the glowing Apple logo, the look of the thing, it was just black. I loved that computer. But this is probably the right place for it.

48:53Nilay Patel:Yeah.

48:53David Pierce:It was lovely.

48:54Nilay Patel:Mid-pack of the top 50. That's right.

48:56David Pierce:Yeah, I'm fine with it. 35. The PowerBook G3.

49:04David Pierce:The Steve Jobs comeback PowerBook.

49:07Nilay Patel:Yeah, this feels right. It sort of, we're accelerating towards what you might call the midfield.

49:12David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, number 35 is not the worst place to be of all time here. Number 34.

49:18Nilay Patel:It beat some famous competitors. It beat all the software.

49:20David Pierce:It did, that's true. Yeah, we're damn near the end of software here, except a couple of very recent things that I think are going to prove your point about the recency bias. We'll see how high some of those are. All right, number 34. The iMac G5.

49:37Nilay Patel:I honestly was not expecting this to be this high. Really? The slim unibody Mac is coming up, like the classic. The G5 was an interstitial.

49:47David Pierce:It was a little bit, but this was the first time it just became a giant screen on a stand, which is like, this is the first time we see the shape of the modern iMac.

49:57Nilay Patel:This is when Johnny Ive looked you in the eyes and said, what if your display had a chin?

50:02David Pierce:And the people said, yes, Johnny. all right let's keep going number 33 the ibook g3 i struggled with this one i i at one point put this in my top 10 but i had it in the top 10 because i think the demo when it was launched where steve jobs waves the hula hoop over it to prove there are no wires phil schiller second story balcony yeah one of the all-time great apple moments uh i think it's probably better than the product itself actually was yeah yeah i

50:36Nilay Patel:mean it quickly got replaced by the ibook g4 which presumably is much higher than this i mean we'll

50:41David Pierce:see um all right number 32 the original ipod touch this feels right oh i had this one's so much lower

50:49Nilay Patel:really so much lower i was like put this at the bottom of the list no way you're wrong the ipod

50:54David Pierce:which was awesome. All right, number 31. The Apple Watch Series 3. The first great Apple Watch. The one where Apple figured out what the Apple Watch was.

51:04Nilay Patel:This is right. Solidly mid-pack. Yeah, no, you're right. It's hard for this to beat anything on this list.

51:11David Pierce:Yeah, I mean, we are getting pretty quickly into like legendary product territory.

51:17Nilay Patel:Oh yeah, we're getting into, I mean, the number of screenshots I got from people that were like, how do you expect me to make this choice? Like we're headed there.

51:22David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. All right, number 30. the titanium power book g4 the tie book nila's favorite this is you already know what my top looks like it's the titanium power book g4 10 times in a row yeah uh i think i think this one i'm gonna say this one's about right this this is your black macbook right like this is a computer you just love this is the laptop with no reason to love it as much as you know no bones about it all right number 29 the ipad 2 okay so i had i i flipped the original ipad and the ipad 2 because the ipad 2 came out very quickly after the first ipad and was such a vastly better product oh yeah that it is actually when the ipad became the ipad uh the original ipad was not all that good a product like on its own um but it's going to get a lot of love and it's going to be higher than this on the list because and that's wrong it is like the the important one because it came first and yes that is wrong um all right number 28 the intel mac mini uh i expected this to do far worse you made fun of me for putting this i don't think this should be honest and yet it came in number 28 i'll take it justice for the mac mini uh it's good stuff all right number 27 the ipod nano third gen this is the the squat ipod nano with the video uh is this the first we have a bunch of ipods on this list and it's interesting that this is the first click wheelie ipod that has appeared

53:03Nilay Patel:this is this is a fat one right yeah yeah this is this was not a beloved ipod no it wasn't it was

53:09David Pierce:it was like ubiquitous it was everywhere but it was not i don't think it was anyone's all-time favorite ipod yeah uh so this feels about right all right number 26

53:20David Pierce:the iBook G4, as you said.

53:23Nilay Patel:Yeah, this is where this belongs, right? Now we're in the top quarter. So it's just outside the top quarter and this top 25 is going to be brutal.

53:30David Pierce:Yeah, I think it gets very hard very quickly here. All right, number 25, halfway through the list. The iPhone XS. So we got a bunch of questions from people why we picked the XS and not the X.

53:42Nilay Patel:Furious people, I would say.

53:43David Pierce:And it's the exact same logic as the iPad or the iPad 2, right? Like they fixed it on the next one. It's like made a cool product, shipped the better version a year later.

53:55Nilay Patel:Yeah, most people did not have an iPhone 10 and the iPhone 10 was compromised in many ways. The XS actually was a good mainstream product.

54:03David Pierce:Yeah, and it was everywhere for a long time. I remember getting to like the iPhone 13 and 14 reviews and there were a lot of people who were like, is it finally time to update my XS? Like people held on that phone a long time. Yeah. All right. So that's number 25.

54:18Nilay Patel:This is when they started doing smart HDR, which revolutionized photography. I mean, the Pixel 2 is right next to it, I understand. But this is when the race really took off.

54:25David Pierce:Totally.

54:26Nilay Patel:All right. Number 24.

54:29David Pierce:HyperCard. Hell yeah. This makes me so... I honestly believed HyperCard was going to beat 50. And a bunch of people are going to be like, what the hell is this? What is this weird thing you're saying about building block software? I don't care.

54:44Nilay Patel:They got it. The HyperCard stans came through. There was a lot of conversation about HyperCard, at least on Blue Sky and Threads where I saw it.

54:52David Pierce:I love that. That's awesome. Kids, if you don't know, go read about HyperCard. It was right about everything, except... They were right about everything. ...how to be good. Number 23. The Apple won. The computer that started it all is number 23 on the list.

55:10Nilay Patel:I don't know, man. This is like the opposite of recency bias. You're like, well, that had to have been important. And it's like, no, this isn't very good at all. They made like 500 of them.

55:18David Pierce:I mean, true. Yeah, it's good that this is lower than the Apple II, which better come up much, much, much higher on this list. All right, number 22. The iPod Nano, second gen. Okay, this is the tall, skinny Nano before they made it short and fat. This is fine. I'm good at this being here. I think it's very funny that the second gen iPod Nano is slightly higher in our rankings than the first Apple computer ever. But here we are. All right, number 21. the iMac G4 wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

55:53Nilay Patel:I mean this computer was not a success it's just a thing everyone wanted no but it is the best looking computer

55:57David Pierce:Apple has ever made

55:59Nilay Patel:but everyone wanted the flat panel yeah this is the problem this is the I knew this would happen I'm as big of an iMac G4 stand as you can find and you're like oh but the reality was no one wanted this computer and they quickly pivoted to the flat panel display that i mean that's true and yet i don't care uh

56:22David Pierce:it rules uh i'm just i'm looking at the list i have of all 50 and i'm seeing the things that have not come up and i'm preemptively angry about some of these things that are going to beat the imac g4 all right number 20 we're in the top 20 now the original ipod mini not better than the iMac G4 but worthy a sensation nonetheless it was I had one I loved it I think it was my first iPod it was when I went from like giant creative jukebox land to I had a gold iPod mini and I loved that thing to pieces alright number 19 FaceTime I'm fine with FaceTime being here I think you could argue this is like a smidge

57:06Nilay Patel:high it's just it's way high i i had facetime on my list facetime was way at the bottom really video calling like apple did it they invented it yes that's all very important but it facetime as a product is not necessarily better than the other video calls products no and it wasn't like

57:26David Pierce:the concept of talking to people on video had been around this was not like apple made it really easy which was great, but it did not create the concept of video. Yeah. Yeah, this feels a little high. That's right. All right, number 18. Power Mac G3. Fascinating. Shocked by this. Fascinating. This was Apple's first desktop back. So Steve Jobs comes back, launches the iMac G3, and then they basically take the Bondi Blue look, transparent everything, and just shove it onto the Power Mac. fine good computer i would not have this is a lot of people with a lot of memories yes right the whippersnappers are starting to lose now yeah i think that's right uh yeah this is like the computer a lot of our audience grew up with in their house i suspect um all right number 17 apple pay rough i had apple pay way at the bottom i can't i can't give you credits for

58:27Nilay Patel:being like credit cards i'm sorry yeah i understand that it works well and you know i understand it's

58:33David Pierce:a good product i also had apple pay pretty low i think this is where we're getting to like people who love the thing that currently exists in their pocket and are want to give it flowers you know what i mean it did make me think we should have put the iphone 17 in here just to see how it would have done in terms of like well clearly it's the best one it's the new one it still works it's still great maybe i should just do that part of me wishes we had done that but at any rate number 16 airdrop that's preposterous i'm sorry this is ridiculous facetime apple pay and airdrop all in the top 20 is bananas i this is we don't we need to understand what the people

59:14Nilay Patel:are saying to us david they're saying i'm here imperious and are high and mighty thrones and And people are like, I'm airdropping. I'm airdropping so much that Google had to reverse engineer airdrop and give it to Samsung.

59:26David Pierce:This is making me feel older and older every single one of these that we do. Because they're like, oh, I remember when I was five and airdrop came out. And I'm like, screw you. I was 56 when airdrop came out.

59:38Nilay Patel:I'm going to get my image writer too and I'm going to get out of here.

59:41David Pierce:Exactly. All right. Let's do, now we're in the top 15. It's starting to get wild here. We have a few more of these and then we're going to get to our list too. Number 15. Number 15. the iPhone 5S. Many people would argue the best iPhone ever. Except me. Many smart, correct people with great taste and extreme intelligence.

1:00:03Nilay Patel:It's very hard to have feelings about great products in this zone.

1:00:06David Pierce:I know, it's true. It is basically bangers all the way up to the top here.

1:00:10Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:00:12David Pierce:Although I will say, just the thing that is seared into my mind right now is that there are two pairs of AirPods on this list and we're at number 14 and we've hit neither of them. Rough, I know. I hate it already. All right, number 14. Okay, there we go. Good. All right, fine. The original AirPods Pro, number 14. Sure. Thank God we've dispensed with this. Is that 20 spots too high? Sure is. Here we are. Number 13. The Apple IIe. Sure.

1:00:43Nilay Patel:Respectable. Respectable. It should be higher, but it's respectable.

1:00:47David Pierce:Sure, fine. Yeah, everything in here is, it's all gravy from here, I think. Number 12. The original AirPods. All right. So we have finally dispensed with this bad idea of ranking these this high. I will say, I appreciate that the AirPods are meaningfully higher than the AirPods Pro. That feels correct to me. And I was very curious to know how that would shake out. I think the AirPods are more important than the AirPods Pro. And that makes me happy. which do you have are you an airpods guy airpods we've ever talked about this i think airpods sound

1:01:21Nilay Patel:horrible and i i think your pods sounded horrible airpods are airpods pro are tolerable what is your like day-to-day pair of headphones it's the sony's i think i have the mark 4 okay they folded and then they didn't fold and now they fold again and i have the last ones that folded got it okay those are really great um all right number 11 the original ipad way higher than the ipad 2

1:01:44David Pierce:a clearly obviously better product.

1:01:45Nilay Patel:Yeah, this is wrong.

1:01:46David Pierce:I do think we're at, like, you and I spent a lot of time on the selection show debating the difference between best and most important, and I am getting the distinct sense that this ranker leans pretty hard towards most important.

1:02:02Nilay Patel:I saw a post, I think it was on Blue Sky, or someone was like, if you just put original in the name, it's going to win. And I was like, ooh, we did that. That's a really interesting point. Yeah.

1:02:12David Pierce:That's a really interesting point. Okay, we are now to the top 10, which means you and I are also going to reveal our own picks. I'm now feeling a lot of feelings about my picks because, boy, do I disagree with this ranking in a lot of ways. But let's just do this. So, number 10, I will just say I had QuickTime, number 10 here. And I could make a long and impassioned argument for why QuickTime is so important, which concludes with the fact that it is still an app on Max. that is a thing everybody knows and uses, according to our rancor, which we should say, if you're watching this, Travis, our producer, vibe-coded this rancor, and it's very impressive.

1:02:55David Pierce:It's not as impressive as what Graham did, but it's very impressive. So that's what I had at 10. Neal, what did you have at 10?

1:03:02Nilay Patel:I'm like still, I vibe-coded my own little rancor to move things around, and I've moved things in and out of the 10 spot. I'm very confident in my top nine. Oh, interesting. The 10 spot is really hard.

1:03:14David Pierce:What do you have at 10 and 11, then?

1:03:16Nilay Patel:Right now, at 10 and 11, it's the M1 ship and the iBook G3. And I think this has to be the M1 ship. Okay.

1:03:26David Pierce:That's my call. Interesting. I have the M1 chip higher, as we will get to. Because it's obviously in the top 10.

1:03:35Nilay Patel:It is obviously in the top 10. But as many people point out, it's not a product. It's just a thing that enabled all the other products. But you got to put it in this list. I will say.

1:03:44David Pierce:Because it obviously belongs in this list. There are a couple of those still to come in the top 10 here. Yeah, I think this is fair. um i the the m1 for me is like it could go anywhere on this list and i would like we were talking about this before we recorded i had a pretty easy time making my top 10 ranking them i found very difficult yeah um and it sounds like you had the same experience but with 11

1:04:09Nilay Patel:it was it was 10 11 my top nine were like there's nothing's moving interesting okay um all right what

1:04:15David Pierce:was the audience number 10 the ipod with click wheel interesting okay yeah i don't hate it um all right so now at number nine i had the ipod with click wheel uh which i think is like it is the the ipod the ipod classic uh i had that one at number nine what did you have at nine

1:04:37Nilay Patel:the apple 2e oh okay and i feel great about this this was for years apple's most important computer it defined the computing experiences of an entire generation it kept Apple alive for an entire generation kept Apple alive if you have a list without the 2E in particular in the top 10 I don't know what you're doing

1:04:59David Pierce:fair enough alright what do the audience have the slim unibody iMac interesting okay

1:05:07Nilay Patel:that's a rough one I don't know what we're doing

1:05:10David Pierce:you think that's too low

1:05:12Nilay Patel:I think it's way too high

1:05:15David Pierce:compared to what else you can put in the top 10 you don't have the unibody iMac in your top 10 no okay okay um all right well that's let's get to number eight um i'm like i'm staring at my list and i already don't like a bunch of them i'm just i'm gonna go with it i will i will go with what i wrote before we started i have the iphone 4 here david come on man you have the iphone 4 i think either one or two would be my guess and i'm very excited to get to that

1:05:42Nilay Patel:declined response.

1:05:43David Pierce:Yeah, I don't, listen, we've been doing this for a long time together. What do you have at number eight?

1:05:48Nilay Patel:What do I have at number eight? The Titanium PowerBook G4.

1:05:51David Pierce:This is your quick time. Yeah, you are 22 spots higher than the consensus. And I think you're right. This is still the laptop

1:05:58Nilay Patel:everybody wants. At the end of the day, if you were like, do you want whatever garbage laptop you can have today in 2026 or a modernized TyBook, everyone's going to pick the Titanium PowerBook G4.

1:06:11David Pierce:I mean you might not be wrong about that alright what did the audience have at number 8 the wedge MacBook Air wrong too low but only slightly too low it's okay yeah this is very interesting alright number 7 I had the now I'm feeling the knee-lieve shame already I had the slim unibody iMac here I went back and forth on which iMac I should include I had the iMac G4 in here for a long time because I think that the sunflower design is just one of the best, coolest things Apple ever made. But this is the best iMac. Like this is the one where my in-laws had one of these for 13 years in their house and I had to bully them into getting rid of it because it just didn't work anymore and they still didn't want to get rid of it.

1:06:58Nilay Patel:I just turned one into a monitor. I'm with you. I love these things. They're not in the top 10.

1:07:03David Pierce:Yeah, lightning round spoiler. We're coming back to that, Patel. What did you have at number seven? the iPad 2 okay

1:07:12Nilay Patel:I have a thesis for my top 10 but yeah I'll get to it but my yeah the iPad 2 belongs solidly in the middle of the top 10 in my opinion I think that's totally fair

1:07:22David Pierce:alright what did the audience have? Number 7 the Bondi Blue iMac the iMac G3 sure sure not mad at it wow boy I am like almost right in step with the audience because I had the bondi blue imac g3 at number six uh like i we we don't need to litigate why that thing mattered and why it was great and that is like i i had one of those in my eighth grade class in a way that was very important to me yeah and and that's i think that thing rules um all right what did you have at number six this is where i put the the original ipod okay this is where this goes i i

1:08:03Nilay Patel:I agree with everybody at the iMac because I just have it higher. But the iPod goes here. So my list is like the products that definitively change the industry around.

1:08:13David Pierce:OG iPod over click wheel iPod? See, I debated this and picked click wheel iPod. I don't have another iPod in my top 10.

1:08:20Nilay Patel:No, this is the only iPod in my top 10.

1:08:22David Pierce:And you picked the original instead of the click wheel, which is like the, when you think of like what is an iPod, it's the click wheel.

1:08:31Nilay Patel:yeah no i make the argument but i think by that time the click wheel actually came out i think on the mini i believe that's right so like you're we're just in this you just got to pick an eye and like actually it was just the ipod it was just apple saying we're gonna make a music player because we missed out on cd burning and then like shipping an ipod and then relentlessly iterating on it like the original ipod was a moment for apple in a very real way it was that's totally

1:08:55David Pierce:fair. I buy it. All right. What was number six from the audience? The iPhone 4.

1:09:05David Pierce:Sheer

1:09:05Nilay Patel:rage from Eli. What are you doing? You people don't understand beauty. You don't understand grace. Come on. The people like when their phones connect to the network.

1:09:15David Pierce:That's true. At number five, I had the original Macintosh. Which, go listen to the Virgin History episode on the Macintosh. Lots of feedback about Mr. Macintosh from that episode. This is like, I think you could rearrange my top five here in basically any order and I would feel fine with it. But to me, the original Macintosh belongs in the top five, no question.

1:09:42Nilay Patel:I don't have it in my top ten at all.

1:09:44David Pierce:No?

1:09:45Nilay Patel:Nope. Really? Fascinating. What did you have at number five? The Wedge MacBook Air. Okay. The entire industry chased this product for, till now, for 30 years. I was going to say, for all,

1:09:55David Pierce:forever yeah uh okay uh what does the audience have at number four or number five sorry mac os 10

1:10:04Nilay Patel:that's good it's good their audience is redeeming itself yeah we're we're the i'm feeling good about

1:10:08David Pierce:the the audience top 10 here um all right so before we get to well let's let's do number four and then before we get to top three we'll recap um so at number four i have the wedge macbook air I'm right here with you that is like again we're doing iconic like world shaping Apple products over and over here what did you have at number four?

1:10:31Nilay Patel:the iMac G3 the original iMac okay

1:10:35David Pierce:that's the yeah the Bondi blue one so that's so okay and let's see what the audience had the original iPod okay so so far between us like if you if you sort of smush you and me together we're actually like kind of in step with

1:10:51Nilay Patel:this is right this is exactly where you are this makes sense

1:10:55David Pierce:alright now to our top three I had at number three I had the M1 chip

1:11:04David Pierce:which I think interesting according to the vibe coded ranker here it's possible that the audience might have it even higher we shall see I think the M1 chip is like it is it is a turning point for Apple across products in a way that I think was really important and huge and just put it like, it no longer was just the best one. It was playing a different game than everybody else across a bunch of different products. What did you have at number three?

1:11:32Nilay Patel:The iPhone.

1:11:33David Pierce:The original iPhone?

1:11:35Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:11:36David Pierce:Okay.

1:11:37Nilay Patel:And I think I have the M1 way lower, right? Like my feeling is it's in the top 10, but, you know, Apple entered this weird period where everything was super iterative once they had the M1. You know?

1:11:51David Pierce:To me, it's like, I remember getting the M1 MacBook Air and all of a sudden going, oh my God, I don't think about the battery life on my laptop anymore. And the shift that that suddenly was in my computing experience just shot this thing to the top of the list for me.

1:12:08Nilay Patel:Yeah, no, I agree with that. It's like I'm making a distinction between top 10 and top 5. you know and my top five is like these products change the world and m1 is in the top 10 which is like this was very important but apple in its moment in with the m1 you know the m1 came out in 2020 somewhere there 21 um i will i remember it because i we were all at home it was like the pandemic i reviewed it in my basement um the m1 air the m1 pro i reviewed and i just remember thinking like Apple is in such an iterative place right now that they're not going to make another kind of product with this chip.

1:12:45Nilay Patel:They're going to make the best laptops. They're going to make some very interesting desktops. But the wild left turn that you could make because you have this thing, it's not going to exist. And indeed, it still doesn't because Apple doesn't make wild left turns anymore. And I think the top five is the whole industry has to make a wild left turn right now because Apple made a wild left turn.

1:13:02David Pierce:Yeah. I do also think you have picked the wedge MacBook air the bondy blue iMac and the iphone which i think are three products most people could close their eyes and draw from memory which which goes a long way when you're talking about like iconic tech products yeah all right what did the audience have at number three the original macintosh wow so you know david and the nostalgia that's like we're gonna make a we're

1:13:28Nilay Patel:gonna make an entire movie with ben affleck about sneakers like that's just nostalgia yes i don't

1:13:33David Pierce:see the problem sold a hell of a lot of sneakers uh all right at number two i had the original iphone i think uh i i think this very clearly had to be either like somewhere in the top three fred just because yeah again it goes on the list of like it wasn't the best iphone anyone had ever made but it was so vastly better than what was out there and it you just can't mess with the legacy of the thing just is what it is i think it's so funny that you're gonna rank the iphone 4 higher than the original iPhone.

1:14:03Nilay Patel:The iPhone 4 is number two.

1:14:05David Pierce:I love this for you. Everyone's still chasing the dragon, man.

1:14:08Nilay Patel:Everybody wants this high. You know what I mean? You can't. You'll never feel it again. Ever again. There will never be another phone introduced that does what the iPhone 4 did to people.

1:14:18David Pierce:Go down several bars when you hold it in your hand.

1:14:21Nilay Patel:I'm just saying, man. The original iPhone is great. It's very important. You know, there's the Steve Ballmer clip. Like, whatever. The iPhone 4 came out and the whole industry was like, we don't know how to make that. That is true.

1:14:33David Pierce:And it was one of the first phones that everybody who touched it just immediately was like, oh my God, this is great.

1:14:39Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:14:40David Pierce:All right, what did the audience have at number two? The M1 chip. Okay.

1:14:47Nilay Patel:That's the recency bias coming through.

1:14:49David Pierce:So this makes very clear that the overall ranking system had the original iPhone at number one, which I would have been absolutely shocked had that not been the case. Interesting. I'm shocked. Like, it's just, it is the Apple product of all time, right? Like, kind of no matter who you are, it is the most important, most successful product in consumer electronics history. Like, I clearly don't agree that it's number one, but it is perfectly fine that it's there. What did you have at number one? I've lost track of what you have not ranked yet.

1:15:22Nilay Patel:Oh, Mac OS X. The single most important Apple product.

1:15:26David Pierce:We agree.

1:15:27Nilay Patel:There is no Apple without Mac OS X. Yep.

1:15:30David Pierce:I love that we agree on this. This actually makes me really happy. Mac OS X is, A, the thing that came out of buying Next, which is one of the most important Apple decisions of all time. It is the foundation of 25 years of Apple software. It is, it's what you said. None of the rest of this happens if OS X isn't what it is. Not even a little bit. Yeah. I'm so, I'm both annoyed and sort of like gleeful that we agree on it.

1:15:55Nilay Patel:This was the easiest one for me. I agree. I never thought anything else.

1:15:59David Pierce:I agree. I started my list at the top with OS X. Why do you think people don't see that? So the original iPhone in the rankings is number one with a bullet. It is way ahead of everything else. And then the M1 chip, the original Macintosh and the original iPod 2, 3 and 4 are all kind of clumped together. And then Mac OS X, iPhone 4 and the iMac G3, the Bondi Blue iMac are also all pretty clumped together. so in this ranking Mac OS X is like decidedly sort of third tier which I find sort of fascinating why do you think people miss this?

1:16:35Nilay Patel:I mean there's one obvious reason not enough people have used Mac OS X Snow Leopard the single greatest operating system of all time

1:16:42David Pierce:if we had just made this Snow Leopard

1:16:44Nilay Patel:would you have still made it number one? yes like to this day companies are like we're our next version of the operating system we're doing a Snow Leopard like we're not going to do new features we're just going to make it perfect and they never do it. They say they're going to do it, but Apple one time did it. They just stopped for one year and they made it good. And then it's been chaos ever since.

1:17:07David Pierce:I remember so many years of you resisting updating your laptop because you just refused to get off of Snow Leopard.

1:17:14Nilay Patel:No, Snow Leopard was early. I was stuck on like Big Sur. Like there was a whole different, it was some other newer version that I stayed on for as long as I could. like some of it was like 10.3 or something it was like very old um but i well i think what most people they they see ios and they don't realize that ios began with mac os 10 and you can't pull like mac os 10 was box software you could buy it so we could put it on this list right you can't really separate ios from the iphone right so i think what most people see is the modern mac os that they use on the computers they buy which is really messy lately particularly the liquid glass I don't use my MacBook Neo as much as I want to because I just don't like looking at it.

1:17:57Nilay Patel:Like, it's bad. It's a messy piece of software. And so I think the history and the fact that it's the foundation for iOS and iPadOS and watchOS and tvOS is completely obscured. But the reality is Apple does not exist without buying Next, without bringing back Steve Jobs, without the foundation of OS X and without being committed to that foundation in like, you know, kind of like rebuilding it bit by bit over the years to be way more cutting edge. Like no other company pulls that off. Like Microsoft certainly has not pulled that off with Windows. So that's why it's, to me, it's number one. It's like, you don't get literally any of these other products.

1:18:38Nilay Patel:But I think for the big audience, it is obscured that iOS is actually just Mac OS X. Right. Or it began its life as Mac OS X.

1:18:46David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. I actually think everybody did fairly well here. There's not a lot of super insane stuff on our lists. Congrats to everybody. But we didn't pick the lists. Well, we did. That's true.

1:18:59Nilay Patel:Like if we had been like, you can type in polishing cloth, right? I think some weird stuff would have happened. That would have.

1:19:05David Pierce:Yeah. You're furthest away from the norm was the iPad 2, which you had 22 spots higher. I had QuickTime 33 spots higher than norm. And I think you and I both feel very strong.

1:19:17Nilay Patel:Everyone should go read that piece. It's very good.

1:19:18David Pierce:It's very good. I think you and I both feel very strongly that we're correct so I feel good about it that's it this has been the Apple ranking process you and I have poured all of our heart and soul into ranking 50 Apple products it's like it was super fun to see this out there we'll do it again in 50 years you guys

1:19:35Nilay Patel:we're going to live forever if you're a young person send us your blood so we can live forever sure

1:19:42David Pierce:throwing that out there thank you to everybody who voted and was part of this go read all of our Apple 50 covers. There's a lot of great stuff out there. It was a fun week on the internet in that sense, actually, that like our whole kind of tech universe spent a lot of time covering Apple and I learned a lot of new stuff about that company these last couple weeks. It's been very fun. We are going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do a lighting round. We'll be right back. Right now at the Home Depot,

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1:21:07David Pierce:In a classroom of sodas, most stay quiet. Then there's Mr. Pibb. Sweet cherry, bold outbursts. The kind of flavor that gets attention.

1:21:17Nilay Patel:Bold kick of cherry. Hey, yo, Mr. Pibb.

1:21:23David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. I feel like I gotta get a little longer every time I do that. Neil, should we begin where we always do? Yeah, it's time. It is time once again for America's Favorite Podcast Within a Podcast, which has developed some new competition that I'm not feeling great about. But America's favorite, did you hear me? Podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. What do you do this week, Nilay?

1:21:50Nilay Patel:Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:21:57Nilay Patel:I forgot to say,

1:21:58David Pierce:we didn't get any new theme music submissions this week. Please keep the new theme music coming and until then, we will continue to play the Gregorian chant.

1:22:08Nilay Patel:I love that everyone's favorite is the Gregorian chant. Like, we've had some really good ones, but if we were to do a ranker, I know Gregorian chant would hit number one. It is the original iPhone of Brendan Garvis Adami. Very good. All right. Brendan, this week, I mean, he just did the dumbest possible thing, which is he went to CPAC, the big conservative conference. There's a lot of tension at CPAC. There's a New York Times piece about the young people at CPAC being like, what are these boomers talking about all the time? So CBAC was weird. But Brian got on stage, and then he did the thing you're not supposed to do when you're America's speech police.

1:22:45Nilay Patel:He proudly said how much speech he's been policing. We just had the clip. Let's just listen to him. And President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid gone from MSNBC. Sleepy Eyes, Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving.

1:23:08David Pierce:CBS is under new ownership and soon enough, CNN has got new ownership as well. This sucks, man. Yeah. It's like, it's one thing when you know that's the goal. It's another when he just gleefully sits on stage and tells you out loud that has been the plan all along.

1:23:22Nilay Patel:Especially because what he usually does is he's like, I'm just enforcing the law. You know, I'm making sure everyone's fair. And then he gets on stage and he's like, look at all this speech that I've curtailed. Right. Look at all these people who are not on the air anymore. That's not the role of the federal government, Government speech regulations are bad, as I continue to say in the face of remarkable opposition. Everyone loves a government speech regulation lately. So that's bad. It is just very dumb. Like, I mean, like, tactically dumb. Because if you're the speech police, you move quietly, right?

1:23:53Nilay Patel:You're not—you're supposed to quietly influence what people see, think, and hear. You're not supposed to get on stage and be like, look at how good I am at affecting the speech. If there's one thing Americans hate, it is censorship. They do not like it. That's kind of like our whole thing in a lot of ways. It's the first one. It is the first amendment. We put it right at the top of the list. So anyway, this is just Brendan being tactically stupid. The actually stupid thing that happened this week because of Brendan and how corrupt his FCC is, is Nextar and Tegna, the two big companies that own all the TV stations, are trying to merge.

1:24:28Nilay Patel:And they had to tell a court this week that they couldn't follow a temporary restraining order because they'd already merged. So this is just like the funniest possible set of like facts. So Nexstar and Tegna are two big TV companies. They own a bunch of stations. We talked about this show last week. There's a statutory cap on how many stations you can own in a given market. It's 39%. Brendan says, I can change it by fiat because I'm Brendan Carr and I can do whatever I want with that process. This is the one he just waived, right? He was like, no, you're good. The rules don't apply. Go forth.

1:25:01Nilay Patel:They don't apply. We approve your merger. So Nexstar and Tegna rush into merging. the day after. They got their corrupt opinion from Brendan and they rush into closing their deal.

1:25:11David Pierce:Does that just mean everybody just got new Outlook instances and they're like, well, now we're merged.

1:25:17Nilay Patel:We're all in Slack together now. Right, so they sign their paperwork. The problem is not everyone agrees with Brendan, not everyone agrees this is the right thing to do. Most importantly, DirecTV, which is actually their competitor. They sell their channels to DirecTV, DirecTV distributes their channels. There's a lot of market power for these companies to have. They should be competitive with DirecTV so they can – DirecTV has different rate negotiations. So DirecTV is sued along with a bunch of other companies to block this merger. So Brendan goes through his corrupt process and says, I waive this rule that would have blocked this merger anyway.

1:25:49Nilay Patel:They rush to close. And then like the next day, a court grants a temporary restraining order in favor of DirecTV saying, no, you have to let this lawsuit play out before you can merge. And these companies are like, no, no, no, no. We thought we already got Brendan's corrupt approval. We can't abide by your restraining order because we've already merged. I'll just read you a quote. We hereby notify the court that defendants cannot implement certain provisions of the TRO as written, the temporary restraining order as written, because of actions already completed at closing and legal obligations that cannot be reversed.

1:26:23Nilay Patel:Whoops, we already merged. It's ridiculous. The temporary restraining order creates immediate operational harm to Tegna and Xtar, regulatory conflicts, and a governance vacuum because they already merged. They're claiming that these two huge companies have already merged and they can't possibly hold off on the merger. And the only reason they had already merged is because Brendan waived the rule. So this is just pure chaos now for some of the biggest media companies that control the most TV stations in the country because Brendan's process was so corrupt and ridiculous.

1:26:57David Pierce:And he gave himself a bunch of unilateral powers. It appears he doesn't actually have.

1:27:02Nilay Patel:Yep. Upon closing, Nexstar and Tegna took many typical steps that may not have been apparent to the court. It is particularly difficult to freeze integration that has already taken place. What? Integration? Your deal closed yesterday.

1:27:13David Pierce:This really sounds like we started uploading our Microsoft OneDrive to their Microsoft OneDrive, and we can't stop it now.

1:27:20Nilay Patel:Yeah, pretty much. Or we knew we'd paid Brendan so much under the table that we knew we were going to get this approval we'd already started. We didn't expect this lawsuit to get in our way. So Brendan is just causing chaos because if he had just done the process the correct way, these companies would not be in the situation. But because he's so corrupt, everyone's getting confused and they think his corruption is actually the point when in fact there are other processes that still operate in this country, which is nominally still governed by laws. So you have Brandon on the one hand saying, look at all this speech that I shut down using my corrupt process.

1:27:53Nilay Patel:And on the other hand, you have these companies who are falling for his corruption and getting themselves all gone into trouble. As always, Brandon, you're welcome to come on the show. I can't decide if it makes it better or worse

1:28:02David Pierce:that he sucks at his job.

1:28:05Nilay Patel:I'm starting to get notes. You know, we have reporters in D.C. and I'm starting to get notes from people who are telling them that they want like a four-hour super cut of Brandon Carr as a dummy that they can just play on loop because people in D.C. hate him so much. Brendan, I'm happy to come on the show. We can make that super cut together using the power of AI, which you also seek to regulate. Or you can just listen to yourself talk at CPAC and explain to me why that is appropriate. I would love to hear your explanation for why you think that's appropriate. Anywhere, anytime, on any show. As you know, Brendan Carr's Dummy is now federated and it can be a podcast within any podcast.

1:28:40David Pierce:The B-C-I-A-D-C-U is growing.

1:28:45Nilay Patel:Anyway, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. within a podcast. That's good stuff.

1:28:50David Pierce:All right. My first lightning round item is also like kind of on a slant, like a little bit of verge news. I think it is not exactly news to anyone who has been paying attention to show that you and I are both big believers in the Fediverse. Yeah. The open social web, this idea that instead of everything being platforms, that the social web should work like the internet does. You and I have both spent a lot of time over the last couple of years with Mike McHugh, who is the CEO of Flipboard, who is like, I mean, just the zealot of all zealots when it comes to the social web. Flipboard just launched this app called Surf, which has been in beta for a long time.

1:29:27David Pierce:I'm sure we've talked about it on the show before. I think you and I have both been beta testing it for a long time. Surf is basically, it's a mix of sort of social network and feed reader and like algorithmic content delivery system. It's very cool. The app has a lot of like little sort of niggling things to work out, which I think are really interesting and point to a lot of the stuff about the social web. Stuff loads slowly, for one, because it has to come from a lot of places. But I think this app is very cool. And if you want to understand why the social web is interesting, it's the best example of that that I've seen, actually.

1:30:03David Pierce:And it's basically, instead of taking a bunch of posts that are accessible to anyone, I sort of explain the Fediverse to people as just like a giant database of stuff. It's posts, it's links, it's videos, It's just stuff. And you can choose to write to that database of stuff or read from that database of stuff any way that you want. And until now, everybody has chosen to do things that look and feel like Twitter. Right. And that's why Blue Sky looks like Twitter, not because it is like technologically like Twitter, but because that is an experience that people like. this is a completely different skin on top of that whole idea right it says what if instead of being sort of a fast-moving timeline of social posts it was very like content first and community first and it has a lot of really interesting ideas about how you can go find stuff to watch and read and listen to and whatever um the verge news of this is that uh we and i think you in particular have spent a bunch of time standing up a bunch of surf pages for various verge things including this podcast, The Vergecast.

1:31:06David Pierce:So there is a Vergecast feed and page on Surf with you and me and a bunch of other folks putting stuff in. It has all the latest episodes. It has posts from people who are on and around the show. It is designed to be a sort of open web community space for The Vergecast. And we have one for Decoder, too. We have one for Version History. We have one for The Verge. I'm very excited about this. And I get the sense you're very excited about this, too.

1:31:32Nilay Patel:Yeah, I think these kinds of products are the first evidence that the open social web can be more than a bunch of Twitters.

1:31:40David Pierce:Yes.

1:31:41Nilay Patel:And if you remember, there was a period where building a new Twitter client was like the cutting edge of interface design. Yeah. Because you got to, you know, a bunch of app designers and really smart people got to spend all of their time, like, inventing new interface paradigms and what you could do with that kind of stuff without having to worry about how do I get 10 million people to sign up and tweet? Like Twitter was like, we've got that covered user API, build a cool app. And then they shut that all down for a lot of reasons. But like big ideas came out of that moment of experimenting. Pull the refresh came out of people building Twitter clients because they didn't have to worry about getting users and building a big network.

1:32:21Nilay Patel:That's what the open social web is, right? It's a big network of people all posting stuff. And some of that stuff looks like TikToks and some of it looks like tweets and some of it looks like newsletters. and you can just build different kinds of apps on top of that that show you that stuff in different ways. And Surf, I think, is the first app that kind of brings it all together. I think there's a lot of ways you could use those tools. We're in it, like The Verge's in it, but Wired is in it and Rolling Stone is in it. A bunch of media companies are seeing, like, oh, this is a way for us to bring together everything we publish in one place.

1:32:53Nilay Patel:I think that's really neat. I'm just hopeful that there's vastly more experimentation there instead of ever being like, are threads or blue sky ever going to have the juice? Like, it's not the point. Like, I don't, I don't know how to say it. Like the point is to not remake Twitter. Twitter wasn't good. It was a bad company. It lost a bunch of money. And then it was taken over by a madman. That, that should not be the outcome you're chasing. The outcome you should be chasing is like, there's a big internet of people sharing stuff and a lot of tools to help build communities around it. So I'm just excited that surf is like a little proof point along the way.

1:33:26Yeah, I agree.

1:33:27David Pierce:And I think, yeah, it's surf.social. We'll put a bunch of the Verge stuff in the show notes too. People can go post to it. It's a good way to, like, I think for us, it's going to be a really cool way to engage with people, right? Like we have the email, we have the hotline, but I think this is going to be an even sort of lower barrier for people to clear, to just post things that we can see.

1:33:50Nilay Patel:You have a line in your news post, where you're like, it's a big bet on hashtags. It is. It's a big bet on hashtags. It's a big bet on hashtags. Hashtag decoder, hashtag vergecast, we'll see it now.

1:34:00David Pierce:Yeah, from now on, if you post hashtag decoder or hashtag vergecast, we will see it. It'll be there on surf. And if you do stupid things, we will moderate you out of existence because that is power that we have. That's true. What's your next one?

1:34:15Nilay Patel:My next one, I just have an update on my iMac reclamation project.

1:34:18David Pierce:Oh, yeah.

1:34:19Nilay Patel:And I'll, where we at?

1:34:20David Pierce:Your weird thing from China arrived.

1:34:22Nilay Patel:My thing from China arrived. It's a little bored. I bought it from a company called Stone Tasker. It's the R1820. It's the newest one. It's hot. So I opened the iMac. I pulled out all of the guts. That was actually the hardest part. Johnny Ive, some unibody iMac, very tightly packaged. Like brilliantly packaged device. So you rip out all the guts and you're left with just the display. And I, you know, wired it all together. Those connectors are very delicate. You have to be very careful. My daughter was furious because the closest like big flat surface to my office is her bed. So it was just like a splayed open iMac on her bed.

1:34:57Nilay Patel:And she's like, what? Get out of my room. You're like, not now, honey. Daddy's working. Yes. She came over from school. She's like, what are you doing? And I was like, I needed a flat surface. This is journalism. Got it all together. Other people have done a vastly better job of this than me. There's a snazzy Q video that everyone should watch. like 3D printed like port holders and everything. It's like, he did a beautiful job. I did not do a beautiful job. I just shoved the board in the back of the thing, ran the wires out the RAM access panel in the back and plugged it in. And my God, does it work?

1:35:30Nilay Patel:And is it perfect? The iMac panel without the iMac software and display is a little greener than normal. So I have a color calibrator. So I color calibrated it and immediately ran into the reality that the software to control the backlight is like not correct. and it's like hard to explain but if you use this thing called Better Display to make the brightness keys on your Mac control the actual hardware brightness it's mapped wrong so about halfway through it hits 100 % and then it restarts and this is maddening so you can get to 100 % which is all you really want but you can't have it you know because I like to jam on the key and so it like remaps to like 30 and it goes back up to 100 which is crazy oh that is amazing So I emailed the company.

1:36:14Nilay Patel:I am now in possession of an updated firmware file that can only be installed from Windows using a piece of software that I believe I'm going to have to pirate. All the instructions are on Chinese, so I'm just kind of on my own here. And the only way you can do it is you have to – I had to reach back into the iMac and plug a DisplayPort cable into this board because the update takes place over DisplayPort, which I've never heard of before in my life. but I'm assured that once I do this sketchy firmware update, whose instructions are almost entirely in Chinese, that the brightness keys will work perfectly.

1:36:50Nilay Patel:And then the thing will be perfect. And I've never been happier in my entire life. Now I'm aware that there is another company on Amazon called KTC that is selling basically the same panel refurbished as a display for like 550 bucks. And I've now spent$350 on a retrofit board and hours of my time. I don't know, man, but I'm having the time of my life and it works perfectly. I've never been happier.

1:37:14David Pierce:It's got to feel a little like you're, you know, putting together IKEA furniture where you're like, yes, this was more work and money than it needed to be, but I have accomplished something.

1:37:25Nilay Patel:Yes. Let's go with yes. What it feels like is I didn't throw the thing away. Right? Like I, my, you know, that feeling where you throw away like a perfectly good display, like it just crushes me. And like, that's the part, that's the kind of hoarder I am. like everything else let's throw it away but a perfectly good display I'm like we should hold on to that my wife is like why and I don't know the answer so I didn't throw away a perfectly good display and it looks beautiful it's still I was using some old Dell 4K display before and like this thing is so much better it's so much better and I you know and I got to Lego it wasn't hard the hard part is actually just cutting the glue that holds the display

1:38:03David Pierce:on the case I'm proud of you that you did this it's like there was it took so long that I was like there's no way he's ever going to actually do this. It's good for you. That's awesome. You're getting back to your repairing Mac days.

1:38:15Nilay Patel:I'm pulling. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to yank. I need a Windows computer with a native DisplayPort. So I'm digging through the reviews closet when we're done with the podcast. Oh, boy. So I can update the firmware and make the brightness.

1:38:28David Pierce:That'll be a computer that's super fun to use. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. Yeah. All right. My next one is just a thing I feel sort of obligated to keep harping on, which is price increases. Largely due to the RAM and memory shortage, but also it's just wild out there, folks. The price of gas is going up. There's a helium shortage. Just the world is a mess, and it is making electronics more expensive. And I think the effects of that are getting worse very quickly. There were a bunch of them this week. Sony stopped selling memory cards because there were shortages. The PS5 went up$150 in price.

1:39:08David Pierce:the ps5 famously not a new console now 150 more expensive but the one i really want to point out is uh raspberry pi the the like cheap low-end computer that people do lots of interesting things with um up to the price of the 16 gig raspberry pi 5 by a hundred dollars they took a thing that was 120 and raised the price by a hundred dollars just to give you a sense of what memory costs. That is it. They raised prices kind of across the board. And Eben Upton, who is the CEO of this organization, wrote a blog post explaining the price hikes and sort of what it means. And there's two really fascinating pieces of this blog post that I just want to point out because I think they're really interesting.

1:39:56David Pierce:One, he writes, in this environment, it's well worth right-sizing both your memory and your overall compute rather than going for something with more headroom than your application actually needs. That is a lot of words to say, buy less computer. Yep. Which is, which is fast, like that you never ever hear that from anybody. And especially with something as cheap as the Raspberry Pi, it's always like, buy the most of it, right? Like it's all pretty cheap. Give yourself some headroom, give yourself room to work, get more RAM, get more memory. Like a piece of advice that you and I have given to many, many people over the years is that you should always get more RAM and more storage first.

1:40:32David Pierce:That those are the two things you will run into the fastest. And that is where you should invest all of your money. And it was just, it was so shocking to me to see somebody for perfectly correct economic reasons, say the opposite of like, you can probably get away with less RAM. Like this is the world we've come to. Yeah, it's not great. On the other side, this is the end of the blog post. He says, we've said a number of times now that memory prices won't remain at their current high, very high level indefinitely. I'm going to bet there's no way he knows that to be true. The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future, they will abate.

1:41:00David Pierce:When they do, we will reverse our price increases. And until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can. Like, this is raspberry pie. This is not some like money gouging, profit hungry organization desperate to find ways to nickel and dime you. This is raspberry pie. And it is very clear that this is like, they're not raising prices$100 because they think they can get more money out of you. This is brutal, brutal economic times in this industry. And he's basically just throwing his hands up being like, well, it can't be this bad forever, but we don't know how long it's going to be this bad.

1:41:35David Pierce:And this is where everybody has landed is it's not a thing you can just weather. It's not a cost you can find another way to, you know, make up for on some other piece of it. There are a very small number of companies that are going to be able to even continue to make things at this scale that they want to be. and the rest of them are either going to have to charge vastly more, make many fewer products or go out of business or some combination of those things. And like, it is just getting uglier across so many different vectors so fast. It's just wild out there.

1:42:08Nilay Patel:Eben was on Decoder in 2022 during the chip shortage and people were furious at him about Raspberry Pi costs and decreases. You can go listen to that episode. He is a very sincere person. Like, this is an academic project to, you know, there's a foundation. I love an org shard on Decoder. This is not a profit-hungry thing. We want to give lots of people lots of computers. Yeah, this sucks. It's bad.

1:42:33David Pierce:And it really is. Every time you turn around, it gets worse. And there is a new reason to be worried about it.

1:42:41Nilay Patel:I will say, I pulled the RAM out of this old iMac, and I was going to throw it away. And I was like, wait, I can make some coin here. It's on eBay. If you're interested in some 2019 SODIMs, search them up.

1:42:50David Pierce:I mean, you joke, but somebody building a data center is going to buy that from you right now.

1:42:54Nilay Patel:They want my old non-ECC RAM from an IMAX. Yeah.

1:42:58David Pierce:But it's like, I mean, did you see the story about how they're having trouble shipping EVs because they can't get through the strait that is being so heavily militarized in Iran? It's like everywhere you turn, it's like the end result of all of this is no one is ever getting new gadgets ever again. That's the main outcome.

1:43:15Nilay Patel:That's finally how we will convince Americans that globalization is actually pretty good. Seriously. It was like the Pax Americana, but also there were some sick gadgets along the way. Yeah, that's about it.

1:43:27David Pierce:Do you have another one or are we done here?

1:43:28Nilay Patel:No, I'm still puzzled about the recency bias in the Apple ranking. I need to go start the window for a while. It's fair. Eli's going to go hug his slim unibody iMac.

1:43:38David Pierce:It's going to make you feel good. Which I've gutted.

1:43:40Nilay Patel:By the way, that last pull to get the motherboard out of the chin, I was like, oh, Johnny would be so mad at me. I was just like, get out of there. It was not, you know, when you have to pull something a little bit harder than you want to, but you know, it's the right thing to do. There's about 10 minutes of that and taking apart an iMac.

1:43:55David Pierce:Yeah. My last one is just a PSA, which is don't download the White House app. We don't need to talk about that. Just don't download the White House app. If you want to know why, Google it. It's all right there. It's very good. Bad times out there. All right. We should get out of here. Thank you again to everybody who participated in all the Apple 50 stuff. The Raker turned out super fun. That whole project has been incredibly fun. Our team did really great work. it was a lot to keep that thing up and running so shout out again to Graham who did a ton of work to make that thing happen everybody did super cool work and to all of the people who sent us your most complicated choices just know that we feel you there were a lot that were like original iPhone versus original Macintosh and people were like what do I do with this it's rough out there like yeah I feel you, it's hard times alright we should get out of here Neelai, it's been a pleasure we did the Hype Desk, Hype Desk is here

1:44:42Nilay Patel:we did it, let us know how you feel about the Hype Desk

1:44:44David Pierce:Yeah, call the Vergecast hotline, 866-VERGE-11. Send us an email, vergecasttotheverge.com. Tell us what you think we got wrong in our rankings. Yell at us about what the youths got wrong in their rankings. We want to hear all of it. Tell us what you think about the hype desk. We're going to keep figuring out what that thing is. So we want to hear all of your feedback. Vote for us in the webbies. Come to the movie night at the end of April. A lot going on in Vergecast world. It's good times out here. This show is part of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

1:45:14David Pierce:Neil, what's on Decoder next week? It's the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins.

1:45:19Nilay Patel:Oh, that'll be a fun one. We talked about data centers in space. As one does. Just letting you know that's where we began.

1:45:26David Pierce:I have gone from thinking all of that is ridiculous to it being the thing I think about the most. Data centers in space is my Roman empire right now. I'll just give you a little preview.

1:45:36Nilay Patel:He straight up was like, no small talk.

1:45:41Amazing.

1:45:42David Pierce:I love it. version history this weekend is the Amazon Echo very fun episode it involves a lot of me being very upset at how young I look in the Verge's review of the Amazon Echo from like 12 years ago that's over a decade ago it was a time alright thank you as always we'll see you next time Neelai, rock and roll