Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Webby Awards. We are once again nominated for the Webby Award for best technology podcast. Please vote for the Vergecast. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hi, Nilay.
Can we win the award for the flagship podcast? Isn't that some self-dealing?
I think that's like a separate award. It's like the lifetime achievement award where they're just like, they're going to invent a new one where they're just like, you win podcasts. That's what I would like to do. I would like to win podcasts eventually.
Yeah, we're the best podcast.
Yeah. But yeah, go vote for us, otherwise Nilay will be sad. It's very important. We have a sort of unusual show that we're going to do today. Most of what we're going to spend our time doing today is talking about our rankings of the best Apple products ever. So, lots and lots of people have been on our site all week ranking Apple products. We made a lot of fun of Travis for trying to explain how the ranking system worked, where you pit two things against each other and it would make this live. It's a chess system-based ranking. It's a whole thing. It worked. Awesome.
We ended up getting 1.6 million votes. And the best part of this is neither you nor I knows how it turned out. Have you... you didn't peek at the rankings, did you?
The one thing I do know is that there was a bot attack attempting to push iTunes to number one.
Which is so funny. Graham on our team, shout out to Graham who did truly heroic work to make this happen, was like emotionally broken by the attempt to automate iTunes to the top of the list.
I do want to say shout out to the person who obviously vibe coded a bot attack to push iTunes to number one, but we caught you.
You didn't get what you wanted. That's the one thing I know is that iTunes is not number one, even though someone tried very hard to make iTunes number one.
Yeah. But anyway, so we're going to spend a bunch of time on that at the end of the show. We also have a new segment that we've been talking about and piloting for a while. Very excited to get that on the show. We have a little bit of housekeeping that we just need to do here right up top and then we're going to talk about some news. The two bits of housekeeping are: one, again, vote for us in the Webby Awards. Voting is live for like just shy of two more weeks as you're hearing this. I think you can only vote for us once, so just go do it now and then take your spot.
I didn't even finish the sentence.
Just take your iTunes spot. That's awesome.
If you know how to vibe code a thing that will make us win all of the awards, including the ones we're not nominated for, the Grammys, I will take them.
So yeah, go vote. We'll put the link in the show notes. The thing number two, and I'm actually more excited about this, is you and I and the Vergecast as a whole, we're hosting a movie night at the end of April. And I say hosting in the loosest possible way. We've just spent a lot of time like looking for reasons to hang out with Vergecast people. Like every time we do one of these live things at CES and elsewhere, the fun is just all being together to do stuff. And we're just going to come up with more ways to do that. So, if you're going to be in New York on Monday, April 27th, we're going to be at the IFC Center at 7:00 p.m. watching Sneakers. It's going to be awesome. Sneakers, by the way, you and I, without talking, independently had Sneakers as our number one movie for this whole thing.
It is the only movie you can logically start with.
We're going to get to Pump Up the Volume, but we all need to have a big conversation about how woke we are in 2026 so that we can evaluate Pump Up the Volume on its own merits from the '90s.
We have a lot of trust to build before we get to Pump Up. You can read like... Yeah, I will remind everyone the editorial ethos of The Verge is still the final scene for that movie where the FCC chases Christian Slater around in a little jeep. You see what we do every week. You see exactly what I want to have happen. I'm just saying it's a movie from a different time.
That movie walked so that Brendan Carr could... We have to build ourselves up as a community to watching Pump Up the Volume together. That's awesome.
That feels right. So, yeah, Monday, April 27th, 7 p.m. If you're hearing this on Friday, April 3rd, we're doing a pre-sale for Verge subscribers only. You can go to the site. If you're logged in, you'll be able to see our post with information about how to buy tickets. It'll open up to everybody starting on Monday, but we wanted to give subscribers first dibs. I think it's going to be very fun and I think this is a thing we're going to get to do a lot. I'm very excited about it. I think we're going to have a blast.
I'm just excited to watch Sneakers again.
Same. I haven't seen that movie in a minute and I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah.
Okay. All of that aside, I think the one bit of news we need to talk about before we get into all of our Apple stuff is kind of on the theme of what is AI and who is it for that we've been talking about over the last several weeks. We've gotten a lot of feedback from people who both agree and disagree with many of our assessments about what AI is good for. I would say none of them have convinced me that we are wrong about whether the people do in fact yearn for automation. But the big news really since we recorded this podcast last, I think, is mostly around OpenAI. So, two things have happened. OpenAI killed Sora, its video generation app, for what turned out to be sort of fascinating reasons. OpenAI also raised a ton of money. They raised $122 billion, which is just an astonishing amount of money. They also quoted some really big numbers. They said they have 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, which is one of those numbers that just feels wrong to me for reasons I can't quite describe. I'm sure they're not lying, but boy is that a big number. There's just a lot happening in the space, right? Microsoft launched a bunch of stuff and sort of announced an even more aggressive pivot towards business AI. It just feels like this idea of the whole AI industry retrenching to 'we make enterprise software' is happening faster and faster. Is that what you're sensing too?
Yes. Can I just read you the Microsoft quote? So Hayden interviewed Mustafa Suleyman, who is Microsoft's CEO of AI, but then they restructured, as Microsoft is wont to do, and now he is officially tasked with super intelligence at Microsoft.
And then... I am hereby officially tasking you with super intelligence. This is like they hired Fidji Simo from Meta to be the CEO of applications and they made her the CEO of AGI and it's like, sure, cool, I'm the Pope of The Verge, like whatever you want, man. Anyway, so Hayden interviews Mustafa about all this stuff. It's a great interview. Hayden did a great job. And Mustafa says super intelligence has always really been my focus. And then here's his quote: 'Super intelligence is really about are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world-class language models.' Now I don't... you know, Mustafa Suleyman is a smart guy. He's built more AI stuff than I ever will. I just think that if you were to ask most people what they thought super intelligence was, they would not say, 'Oh, it's are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world-class language models.' They would say, 'It's alive.' And there's just a pretty vast chasm between enterprise value and 'it's alive.' Yeah. There's something just in that quote that I think tells you everything about the AI industry as it exists right now. And I actually think that particular bit of cognitive dissonance is about to be really hard for the AI industry to go through because what they've been promising for all of this time and what they've been saying and the way that they've branded it, like the fact that they're calling it artificial general intelligence and calling it super intelligence and we've made these deliberately consumer-friendly names about how great all of this stuff is, that if you're Mustafa Suleyman you can't say less than super intelligence. Do you know what I mean? Like you can't, you don't get to walk that back as you pivot to business, right? Because it'll make it sound like you have accomplished less than you thought. So your stock price will go down, right? So they've now set this bar so unbelievably mainstream and high that they have to pretend that's still what they're doing while they're pivoting to enterprise software. And I want to be super clear that deciding that all of the money in AI is actually in building SaaS products and business-to-business software is good and correct, right? Like this is obviously the truth, right? And I think this is why the Sora news from last week is part of this to me. Hayden on our team also did a bunch of research on that and reported this out and basically found that within OpenAI there is a finite amount of compute available and they looked at Sora and said Sora doesn't have that many users and is losing a ton of money but we think it's cool and cultural and zeitgeisty over here we have this thing that is like coding and enterprise which is obviously where all of the money is why aren't we putting all of our resources against that and Fidji looked at that and went well yeah we're going to give the resources to the thing that has the potential to make us money. That is a good and correct business decision. Like that is the right thing to do. The problem is that is up against what all of these companies have spent three years talking about, which is that we are going to reinvent creativity and we're going to enable everyone to be beautiful artists and everything is going to be great. And now it's like we're automating Excel.
Yeah, that's great. Like to be so clear, it's so good that Excel is going to get better because of this technology. It is just so completely different than the thing that they have been promising this would be that they're about to crash into that dissonance over and over for a while here.
Yeah. I mean I think every small business owner I know who has poked at AI and agents is super excited about it.
Yeah. 'I can do my expenses faster' is a real thing AI is going to do for us and that's going to be great.
Yeah. And it's not, it really just isn't like the generation of slop. Like there's whatever that is which is bad. And then there's 'I can automate business logic' which is basically what software does at businesses. And now I can do that with like natural language commands in a computer. Great. Like I think that's cool. It is roughly the same as being like everyone in the world must consider SAP at all times because it has first strike capabilities. And it's like I don't think that's going to go well. Like there are no great consumer products which we keep saying over and over again. And the only great consumer product that could exist probably looks something like 'hi' right where you have this all-seeing all-knowing robot in your house that does stuff for you. And so you keep making that promise and then instead what you actually have is a bunch of enterprise software that is really cool and interesting in that context. Yes.
But that has nothing to do with the way people live their lives today.
Yeah. It's like if you go back to the first computing revolution, right? And there's this moment where spreadsheets happen and spreadsheet software was this huge advancement in how we thought about what computers could do and it became this like, I mean it was an automation tool in a very real way. It would be like if a bunch of people had run around at the early days of spreadsheets and been like 'I have made God.' It's like, no, you made spreadsheets and now what we're making is better spreadsheets. Like maybe orders of magnitude better spreadsheets.
I will say that at least in the spreadsheet community, a dominant sort of frame of thinking is 'can your god defeat my spreadsheet?' And the answer is often no.
It has been no for a long time.
It's like it's pretty often no actually. Like no, no one can take Excel. It can't be done. Most businesses run in Excel. But you see this gap. We keep talking about it that the money is in enterprise. The product-market fit is in enterprise. The consumer products keep hitting the rocks in like very obvious ways. And then OpenAI after this big pivot and all of this talk about cutting down on side quests and killing Sora bought TBPN, which if you're listening to this and you don't know, I'm actually quite frankly surprised. They're pretty ubiquitous. TBPN is the Tech Bro Podcast Network. It's a three-hour live stream on... technically it's not anymore by the way. I just... What is it now? It is. It's just TBPN. It's like MTV is no longer music television. Oh, ESPN. They have deleted the acronym of it. It's just letters now. Yeah, that's what it started as. It was the Tech Brothers Podcast Network. Yeah. But it's just a, you know, 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 is utterly fascinating. It says we're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift and the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes with a 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. 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 TBPN'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 OpenAI. That trial is about to go. This is noise.
And who is extremely happy to turn the knobs on the algorithm to favor and disfavor what he does and does not like.
Absolutely. So, I just... you can think of what you want of TBPN, and I think they're pretty honest that they're pretty biased. They read the ads, you know.
I actually have a lot of empathy and admiration for what TBPN... They are crystal clear on what they're doing.
Yeah. I always say I like people who are honest. They're honest. It's right there out in the open.
But now you're part of a company that's going to have ideas about what you should do and say, especially if you're directly integrated in the marketing of the company, which it appears that they will be, and you're hosted on a platform where the owner of that platform hates your CEO. They just hate him. And like we're about to go to 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 to enterprise and focusing on Codex, they're going to buy a lot of attention and a lot of distraction. And I think the reason they're doing it is because the gap in coverage is so big.
Right. The people in the polls, there's another poll just this week, 55% of people do not think AI is going well. Right. The people don't want data centers built. There's all kinds of polling showing that and it's because there's product-market fit 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. It just won't.
Yeah, I mean I agree and I do think I am increasingly convinced that the marketing problem is not in bad faith or disingenuous. Like 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. The feeling coming out of that industry is like 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. And 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 OpenAI. Like you don't do this cynically, right? Like this is our opportunity to reframe this conversation not to make us more money but because this thing is so important we need to make sure everybody sees it.
Yeah. I just... I think companies trying to persuade people in this way run into the reality of their own products.
I mean yes. And free ChatGPT, 900 million people have used free ChatGPT. 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're terrific. Like I'm jealous, 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.' 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. Like that's the whole Verge. Like I don't know what to tell you. We run a reviews program for a reason. The evaluation comes from the products. It doesn't come from us saying that like you're great. You know.
I do think it's possible to look at this actually as right in line with the pivot to business that actually if you look at the audience for something like TBPN, like Mike Isaac at the New York Times wrote a great profile of them a while ago that he called it something to the effect of SportsCenter for the LinkedIn crowd.
Which is both like a slightly funny burn and also like pretty much exactly right. And it's like if you're OpenAI, what you need is a way to communicate clearly and cleanly essentially to all of the other companies in Silicon Valley, right? Like that's where all of these companies start. If you are a startup in Silicon Valley making business software, your first customers for a very long time are other startups in Silicon Valley mostly making products for other business customers. Like this is the cycle forever and ever and ever. So, if you look at TBPN as basically like a very sexy B2B podcast, which again is like I think fairly straightforwardly kind of what they're trying to be, then this makes a certain kind of sense. It's just a very out-there way of trying to accomplish that goal.
We just went through all this. We're going to focus. We're shutting down all this stuff. And there is just nothing noisier than media, which is what everyone discovers. Like it is absolutely the noisiest thing you can do.
Ask Jeff Bezos how it feels to eventually own a media company that might have some conflicts with the way... media companies whose incentives are all shaped by going viral on X, right?
Yeah. 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 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 this huge amount of money and 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?
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. Google is not easy to compete with. I think OpenAI's ad pilot, they ran it for six weeks, they made like $60 million which I keep annualizing to $500 million and it's like it sort of works that way but it doesn't work that way at all. You can't be like in six weeks we made this much money so in 52 we would definitely make this much money. Like I wish it worked that way, but it absolutely doesn't. Advertising in particular is very cyclical. So, who knows? But they have to go compete with Google for real. Google's obviously not going to just lose market share. They're going to compete back really hard. They have a massive distribution advantage. It feels like their deal with Apple, you remember Apple Intelligence launched with the big OpenAI thing? Yeah. That all feels like it's falling by the wayside and Apple's going to be way more open to all kinds of other models in Siri. Apple has a bigger deal with Google now like 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 they have to compete with Google, the greatest business in the history of technology and potentially business itself. Good luck. Like I just don't... this much money might not be enough especially if you don't have the focus and especially if you're now run by a bunch of ad people and business people and not core technologists many of whom have left to go to Anthropic.
Yep. Yeah. I think the theory that 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 Veo 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? 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. 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 a hundred billion dollars last quarter and Anthropic and OpenAI didn't. And when Google wants to shut down things that aren't core to its business, it's like, have you heard of Calico Labs, the contact lens that might detect diseases? What? It's like, what? You were doing what? And like, I don't even know if that's still running or like that. They have that scale. Google is structured into Alphabet to allow things to try to succeed, right, outside of the core Google business. Things inside the core Google business like AI, they are extremely willing to subsidize even more. So there I again I think OpenAI has found itself, it's gone from darling to sort of independent that they're not tied to the big companies the way they were in the past or supported by the big companies the way they were in the past most notably I think Microsoft and Apple and they're up against competing with Google which I think is just going to be incredibly challenging. Yep. By the way, I haven't even mentioned they brought on a bunch of Apple designers and Jony Ive to try to compete with the iPhone. Good luck. Like I don't know what... they have 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 the promises that they've been making for a very long time.
Right. I actually think there's a shot that it is a huge business and I think like it's worth saying very clearly that I think you and I are actually on the same page of like what this is going to do for business and for the way and I mean business very broadly like you and I are going to use AI tools in really powerful valuable ways to get work done. That's awesome and exciting and cool and interesting and we should cover a lot of that. That is so different from digital Jesus and it is so different from this like mass consumer live your life inside of these chatbot tools that we've been promised that is just like we have to figure out how to pull those things apart from each other.
I really just come back to if you have software brain you think that the computer is alive and like a lot of people have software brain.
Yeah. Like they're like I see the world as a series of databases that I can link and interconnect and make use of and that might be right like that might be a good way to describe reality but it actually isn't it's an incomplete description of reality and you can actually extrapolate like now I can send my agent to go scrape databases for me to I have made God. Yeah, there's something about software brain. We really should do New York versus California because what I mean is that people in California have absolute software brain and people in New York are like, 'Yeah, I live in a city with other people in it.'
This is how we finally start our podcast beef with Hard Fork. This is it. This is how we do it.
I mean, I love them both very much.
I know. I do, too. It's great. We need more enemies. We're always saying this.
Casey was just on Decoder. We need more enemies.
All right. Let's pivot now to a new segment. We've been talking about this internally for a while. We've been trying to figure out what it is for a while. I'm very excited to finally get to bring this to the Vergecast. It's called the Hype Desk, and it features two of our friends. Welcome back to the show, both of you, Ross Miller, Ashley Esca. Welcome back.
I don't have an air horn. If I did, I'd hit it.
I'm the closest you're going to get to that. I mean, I already have that kind of like cackle, so it's just I'll be your sound effect for hype, basically.
A fun fact you should both know is that we have steadfastly refused to give Nilay a soundboard for many, many, many years now and it will not happen.
I was in the 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.
Human air horn. That's what I want to be remembered as.
It's beautiful. So before we get into this segment, Nilay, this is kind of your baby and this is something you've been thinking about for a long time and we've been planning for a long time going way back into Vergecast lore. Do you want to explain what the Hype Desk is before we get into it?
Yeah. So if you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that we've had many iterations of the Hype Desk in the past. And the early iterations were like, what if we just had cool kids in the corner? And we never quite knew why, but it was fun. And then that ran its course. And if you've been listening to us recently, you know that we talk a lot about the creator economy, like the YouTube podcast economy, and how all of that requires a pretty uncomfortable smashing of editorial and ads. All the creators have to do the brand deals. They have to read the ads. Dave and I send each other podcast hosts reading the ads in very odd ways all the time. You will also know that what we sell here is our ethics policy. And Dave and I are way too precious to read the ads. But the reality is we need an on-staff influencer to come and do the money. And I've always thought that no one would ever want to be our on-staff influencers because you have to deal with me, but you don't get the fun of being in the newsroom. And then Ross was like, 'Well, I used to work here. I never want to be in that newsroom again.' And I was like, 'Oh, this is perfect.' So, I'm very excited that Ross and Ashley are going to be here. We're going to hang out with him, you know, once a week for a few weeks, see if we like it. And right now we're unsponsored for flavor. But the idea here is you can't buy me and David, but you can buy these two.
I would encourage it. Please, we are for sale, baby.
We're just going to see how that goes. And it's our little solution to the creator economy problem. Also, I just 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.
Yeah.
To keep the journalism going, you know, make the money to keep the journalism going, which I don't want to do.
No. And I got... I'm a recovering journalist. I quit that years ago.
I want to be so clear about how church and state separate, like how strict Nilay is about church and state being separate. We are literally 15 feet apart in the same room.
I don't want you anywhere near me, Ross. You sit over there. We're going to get you a real desk.
So glad to say. Yeah. Yes. There is no actual desk right now. It's just 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 timer. It's a really cute little one from Amazon.
It looks like a Chumby. Do you remember the Chumby?
The thing gives me real Chumby vibes that you're holding.
I need a timer. And so I tried one of these little cube guys. And I hate the noise it makes. It makes me upset. It's like a high-pitched beeping sound and it's like nails on a chalkboard. And so I was like, where are the timers for small children that would better suit me? And fortunately I in fact found exactly what I was looking for which is this. Again this is like totally unsponsored. I just found it and it 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 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 a pasta sauce, right? It's like a whole system of...
A whole system of like, you know, 45 minutes on and then they do... Ross and I are both ADHD. So we need help. We just need help doing basic human functions that normal people can do, neurotypicals can do. I get the feeling Ross is timing this segment in real time.
I am because if I don't, we will take over the whole Vergecast and no one will be happy about this because we want to keep coming back. So, we're going to be very tight about this segment as much as we can be or we'll hear really cute Titan. Yeah. Ashley, where did you find this thing? This screams TikTok Shop to me, I have to tell you.
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's like timer child, music, MP3 upload timer like I just didn't want the little beep cube but it's just terrible and I don't like it. So I found this one and I was like this seems like exactly what I'm looking for. It's very simple. It's like very close to being sort of like an analog timer. It's not like a smart thing. You don't have to connect it to your phone. I like all of those things. I just want it to do what I want it to do and nothing else. And so this was a great little solution. I want to say it was like under 20 bucks. So it's really nice.
Yeah, I think it was like 15. Speaking of timing, we've already done two minutes of this segment. So, moving on.
This is not what we actually came to talk about. This was just meant to help us stay on track. Ross is cracking the whip here. Good lord. Here we go. So two hype things we talk 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. Like, it's one of the few places where you can just be a video game nerd and really come and celebrate your fandom. And Ashley, you just went to PAX East in Boston.
Yeah, went to PAX East. Had a lot of fun.
Did you see any games that stuck out? Like what's a title that you were like?
I got to play the new Pokémon Champions which was really neat. That's like they kind of just remade Pokémon Stadium and it was really fun. It was just like it seems like a nice little bite-size game that you can just kind of play on the go like it's real quick like oh I just want to get some battles in against some other people. That was awesome.
I love hearing that Pokémon had a good game. Pokémon's having a moment right now because I know Pokopia also came out. It's like an Animal Crossing but the whole conceit feels very Lovecraftian. You play a shape-shifting Pokémon that turns itself human because all the humans have disappeared and the Pokémon are just sad about no humans. So, they just rebuild civilization.
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 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 like is...
Like, "Oh, I think I remember what my human trainer looked like." And then they turn into this like weird little abomination of a child that has a Ditto face and it's horrific and also delightful.
It's good stuff. All right, so things we've learned. A, if you sponsor the hype desk, Ashley will wear a hat of your choosing.
I will wear the dumbest hat.
We've just discovered this. This is useful information.
Nintendo didn't even sponsor this. I just did it. I just did it.
All right, that's the hype desk, everybody. Thank you so much to Ross and Ashley. You guys are going to be here with us every week for the next couple of months. You're going to bring us all kinds of cool stuff. Some of it will be sponsored, some of it will be unsponsored. It's going to be great. We're very excited to have you guys here. This is going to be awesome. Thank you both.
Bye. Love you both. We are going to take a break and then Nilay, you and I are going to rank some Apple products. You ready for this?
We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. So, this week was Apple's 50th anniversary. We did a big package full of really great stories. Nilay, 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. Nilay, have you looked at that? That's like...
Those photos are incredible. So much in the 50 years of Apple. That whole package is out. But the main thing is we asked everybody to rank the top 50 Apple products and they did so. Tens of thousands of people, 1.6 million votes, lots and lots and lots of input and feelings about what this thing is, and one, as you mentioned, very aggressive bot attack in favor of iTunes, which I am told we successfully mitigated. So, what you and I are going to do here is we're going to go through the bottom 40 of the audience's reaction. And essentially what we're going to do is neither you nor I have seen this list. So we're just going to reveal the pick and if we have any reactions, great. But we're just going to reveal from 50 to 11 and then you and I both made our own top 10. And so we're going to compare our top 10s against each other and against the overall ranking and see how we feel, see who's right, see what we need to fight about. Does it sound good?
It does. And I'm convinced that I'm correct and everyone else is wrong. Obviously.
The first time ever for you, this is great. All right. So let's just start at the bottom here. Number 50 on the list, the worst of the best Apple products of all time is the ImageWriter II.
Well, it's the worst of the best. It's just coming in at number 50.
Right. It is. This is still a very good Apple product. But I will say I think coming into this, we 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.
Yeah.
I just don't think a printer ever had a chance. Let's see what's number 49. The LaserWriter II. Tough, super tough beat for the printers here. Yeah, I'm not surprised by this. Are you surprised by this?
I personally think the LaserWriter II should be higher, but I understand. We have a young audience.
They don't remember. They don't know.
I think instinctively most people look at printers and are like, "This can't possibly be any good. How dare you?"
The LaserWriter—I promised I wouldn't do this, but the LaserWriter II was Apple's business for a long time.
The Mac and the LaserWriter that kept that company afloat.
All right, number 48.
The original Cinema Display.
That's a little lower than I would have thought.
I think the kids don't know, man.
Yeah, they're out here buying cheap LCDs. This thing was a sensation when it came out.
It's true. All right, number 47, the Clip iPod Shuffle. Oh, that one kind of hurts my feelings. I don't actually think that's entirely wrong, but like I loved that product.
Again, this is the 50 best. It's just...
It's hard to go head-to-head. I mean, that's literally how we rank them, right? Head-to-head against many other things on this list. The Clip iPod Shuffle is not winning.
No question. Including number 46, PowerBook 500. This is one you stand for.
This one hurts me. They're wrong. The whippersnappers are wrong.
They're wrong. Okay. Number 45, the Apple TV second gen.
See, the PowerBook deserves to go over the Apple TV second gen.
Yeah, this is the first one that I'm like, the Apple TV second gen should be in the bottom three.
This is recency bias. No question. Yeah.
All right. Number 44, the PowerBook 100 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, like 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. And we had Jason Snell write an entire piece. Best headline we've come up with in the minute between Jobs.
About Apple's weird 90s and the PowerBooks are in there.
Yeah. And everybody just looks at that decade as like, well, nothing happened. And that's not exactly true. It's a good piece. Everyone should go read it.
All right. Number 43. QuickTime.
I will spoil this. I have QuickTime in my top 10.
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 adapted excerpt from his book. It's very good.
John Buck was on the team that invented QuickTime in the weird 90s at Apple. I love that piece. Everyone should read it.
QuickTime is foundational technology. MP4 is QuickTime.
Yeah. And it makes a very compelling case that QuickTime was the beginning of the idea that computers could be for creative tasks. It's a very important piece of technology. The kids don't know these days. This is my story so far. The kids don't know. All right, number 42.
Software's getting a rough beat here.
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. This is actually recency bias the other way, right? Like the modern Final Cut Pro is hurting the ranking here.
I think that's probably right. All right, number 41. Ooh, the Apple Extended Keyboard II. John Gruber is going to be very upset about this.
John Gruber, I think at one point, if I remember correctly, this keyboard was either last or second to last in the rankings. And then John posted about it on Daring Fireball basically saying it was a travesty that it was so low. So, he got it up to 41. Great job, John.
It's rough. John, by the way, agrees with me. This is the best keyboard of all time.
Not just Apple's best keyboard, the best keyboard of all time.
A strong argument. Many people will make the strong argument the Apple Keyboard II is the best keyboard of all time.
I will say, fun fact, according to the rankings, this, Final Cut Pro, and QuickTime are all exactly tied in the rankings. Fascinating.
All right. Number 40, GarageBand. Yeah, I think software is just getting a...
Yes, software is getting a rough beat. Especially again, this is modern GarageBand. If you remember when GarageBand came out, sensation, the idea that a digital audio workstation product would be on every single Mac that shipped for free.
Was Umbrella by Rihanna. That's GarageBand loops. This is how important that software was.
So, and to this point, number 39, iTunes. Rough.
This is despite the best efforts to make it number one, it's number 39 on...
It should be lower. Can we manually switch them just to punish bad behavior?
I'm fine with iTunes being here. iTunes is like great and terrible so simultaneously that I'm largely fine with it being here. 38 is the Mac SE/30. This is one of those computers I have no context for, but you made a pretty strong case is a very important piece of hardware in Apple history.
This is the best of that type of Mac, the little compact desk Mac, the black and white screen. I would argue this should be far higher, but I understand why it's where it is.
There are Apple old heads who will argue this is one of Apple's best, like if you sort of consider it in its era, that this is one of Apple's best computers of all time. Best, most configurable, most expandable. You could buy accelerator cards for the CPU inside.
All right. Number 37, the Mac Plus. This is really...
This is all wrong. I don't know what we're doing here.
1980s Apple is just getting wrecked here.
No, I'm saying even in this list, the SE/30 is clearly superior to the Mac Plus.
Oh, yeah. No question. Absolutely no question. They are tied in the rankings which is very funny.
The two of them just alone, they're both ahead of iTunes, but they are tied with each other in the rankings.
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.
This feels like a tough beat for you personally.
I loved that computer. It's like just the glowing Apple logo, the look of the thing, it was just black everything. Oh, I loved that computer. But this is probably the right place for it.
Mid-pack of the top 50. That's right.
35. The PowerBook G3, the Steve Jobs comeback PowerBook.
Yeah, this feels right. We're accelerating towards what you might call the midfield.
Yeah. No, I think that's right. Yeah, number 35 is not the worst place to be of all time here. Number 34 beat some famous competitors. It beat all the software.
It did. That's true. Yeah, we're damn near the end of software here, except a couple of very recent things that I think are going to prove your point about the recency bias. We'll see how high some of those are.
All right, number 34, the iMac G5.
I honestly was not expecting this to be this high.
Yeah, the slim unibody Mac is coming up. Like the classic. The G5 was an interstitial.
It was a little bit, but this was the first time it just became a giant screen on a stand, which is like this is the first time we see the shape of the modern iMac.
This is when Jony Ive looked you in the eyes and said, "What if your display had a chin?"
And the people said, "Yes, Jony." All right. Let's keep going. Number 33, the iBook G3.
I struggled with this one. I at one point put this in my top 10, but I had it in the top 10 because I think the demo when it was launched where Steve Jobs waves the hula hoop over it to prove there are no wires.
Second story balcony. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the all-time great Apple moments. I think it's probably better than the product itself actually was.
Yeah. I mean, it quickly got replaced by the iBook G4, which presumably is much higher than this.
All right. Number 32. The original iPod Touch. This feels right.
Oh, I had this so much lower.
So much lower. I was like, put this at the bottom of the list.
No way. You're wrong. The iPod Touch was awesome. All right. Number 31.
The Apple Watch Series 3. The first great Apple Watch. The one where Apple figured out what the Apple Watch was. This is right. Solidly mid-pack. It's hard for this to beat anything on this list.
Yeah. I mean, we are getting pretty quickly into like legendary product territory here.
Oh, yeah. We're getting into... I mean, the number of screenshots I got from people. They're like, "How do you expect us to make this choice?" Like, we're headed there.
The Titanium PowerBook G4. The TiBook. Nilay's favorite.
This is... You already know what my top 10 looks like. It's the Titanium PowerBook G4 10 times in a row.
Yeah. I think this one I'm going to say this one's about right.
This is your black MacBook, right? Like this is a computer you just love.
With no reason to love...
The laptop. No bones about it.
All right. Number 29, the iPad 2.
Okay. So, 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.
That it is actually when the iPad became the iPad. The original iPad was not all that good a product on its own. But it's going to get a lot of love and it's going to be higher than this on the list because...
And that's wrong. It is like the important one because it came first. And yes, that is wrong.
All right. Number 28, the Intel Mac Mini. I expected this to do far worse. You made fun of me for putting this on.
I don't think this should be on this list at all.
And yet it came in number 28. I'll take it. Justice for the Mac Mini. It's good stuff. All right. Number 27, the iPod Nano third gen. This is the squat iPod Nano with the video. Is this the first? We have a bunch of iPods on this list. And it's interesting that this is the first click wheel iPod that has appeared.
This is a fat one, right?
Yeah. This was not a beloved iPod.
No, it wasn't. It was ubiquitous. It was everywhere, but it was not... I don't think it was anyone's all-time favorite iPod.
So this feels about right. All right. Number 26, the iBook G4. As you said.
Yeah, this is where this belongs right now. We're in the top quarter. So, it's just outside the top quarter. And this top 25 is going to be brutal.
Yeah, I think it gets very hard very quickly here. All right, number 25. Halfway through the list, the iPhone XS. So, we got a bunch of questions from people why we picked the XS and not the X.
Furious people, I would say.
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.
Yeah. Most people did not have an iPhone X and the iPhone X was compromised in many ways. The XS actually was a good mainstream product.
Yeah. And it was everywhere for a long time. I remember getting to like the iPhone 13 and 14 reviews and there were a lot of people who were like, "Is it finally time to update my XS?" Like people held on to that phone a long time.
All right. For nothing. 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.
All right. Number 24, HyperCard.
Hell yeah. This makes me so... I honestly believed HyperCard was going to beat 50 and a bunch of people were going to be like, "What the hell is this? What is this weird thing you're saying about building block software? I don't care."
They got it. The HyperCard stands came through.
There was a lot of conversation about HyperCard, at least on Bluesky and Threads where I saw it.
I love that. That's awesome. Kids, if you don't know, go read about HyperCard. It was right about everything except...
They were right about everything.
Number 23. The Apple I. The very... the computer that started it all is number 23 on the list.
I don't know, man. This is like the opposite of recency bias where like, well, that had to have been important. It's like, no, very good at all. They made like 500 of them.
I mean, true. Yeah, it is 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.
I mean, this computer was not a success. It's just the best looking computer Apple has ever made.
But everyone wanted the flat panel.
This is the pro. 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 actually want.
And yet I don't care. It rules. 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 have 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.
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.
All right. Number 19. FaceTime.
I'm fine with FaceTime being here. I think you could argue this is like a smidge high.
It's way high. I had FaceTime on my list. FaceTime was way at the bottom.
