Apple at 50: the good and the bad | The Vergecast

Thank you. It's great to be here.

They are killing it on hardware. I think that Apple's hardware has never been better. I think even if you did a kind of like sabermetrics, Baseball Prospectus kind of like value over the market in the '80s or the '90s or whatever, try to normalize everything, I think you'd still have to say like all their hardware is incredible. Like the fact that they design their own chips. They don't fab them, right? TSMC does that, but they make their own chips. That's been a huge advantage for them. It really has taken the Mac places it's never been before. The Mac sells better than it ever has in its 40-year history. And I wonder if the MacBook Neo is going to actually do something even beyond that. And that product can't exist without Apple's chip design because that's raised the bar. Like, it used to be the cheapest Mac was barely good enough to use. And for the last few years, the MacBook Air has been far more than barely good enough — like the original MacBook Air was still plenty good enough to use. And that's all down to their chip design. Also, you know, the Mac hardware, the quality, the stories about the MacBook Neo now, a lot of it is like, 'Oh, wow. Can you imagine a laptop at Apple quality being 599?' It's like, yeah, I mean, they know how to use aluminum. Their phone design is very impressive. The iPads, like the iPad Pro with the tandem OLED display. Like they are making some incredible hardware across the line, not just the chips, but the whole package. I think that they're working at a very high level. They're executing.

Yeah, I think you could probably trace the iPhone. I think Apple lost its way on the Mac in part because I think they took their eye off the ball. They were thinking that the Mac was a legacy product and that iPad was the future and so they just kind of let it spin away and then they had to, you know, steer out of the skid there. On the iPhone side, I think they've been going from strength to strength for a long time now. But you're right, the act of putting the Mac back on the priority list and putting it on the rails and putting it with Apple Silicon has, you know, solved I think their greatest weakness right now. And that is I think some of it is a consequence — to give Tim Cook a little bit of credit. Especially if you read that amazing book Apple in China, like part of the secret sauce of Apple over the last 15 years really has been manufacturing. They are using a process where they want to make a product that is made a certain way or does a certain thing in the process. And most tech companies — there are few who do this in some areas, like Samsung's a good example I think because they have so much display and they're making their own chips and stuff like that, I get it — but like Apple is very rare in sort of saying we're going to just make what we want, where most of the industry for most stuff they are using established techniques, established parts. And Apple, you know, I think that this goes back to the efficiency of Tim Cook. Like they want to be really great at manufacturing parts and then whole items and then putting the software on them. And I think from that this emerges their ability to build hardware at this level.

Yeah. I mean, look, we can score this on degree of difficulty a little bit because one of the things that Apple does that nobody else does is try. Again, I keep coming back to this and thinking about Apple at 50. I keep thinking about how Apple just plays a game that nobody plays. When I started covering Apple in the '90s when they were really teetering, everybody had an idea of what Apple should do and they were all be more like Microsoft or be more like Dell. Yes. And they've never been — I mean they've always been the whole unit that they build. But with software they've got all these OSs, right? And the truth is it's all kind of one base OS and then there are little variants on it. But like who else is shipping a phone OS and a desktop OS and a tablet OS and a TV OS and a watch OS? And like it's a super ambitious thing that they're doing. But when we talked about the butterfly keyboard, right, it feels like we're in the butterfly keyboard era of Apple software right now.

Where they've kind of lost their way. I think I personally ascribe some of that to the fact that after Steve Jobs died they desperately wanted to hold on to Jony Ive because they wanted to show that the whole place wasn't going to hell. And as a result they gave Jony Ive and all of his lieutenants way too much power. And I think that the whole design and user interaction philosophy at Apple got completely out of balance. And so, you know, for people who don't know, like the really the Mac users who really really care are deeply offended by the Liquid Glass design that came out last year. I think it's just a symptom of a larger disease, which is that they've been kind of not thinking about these things in terms of usability, how people use them every day, and thinking more about how they look. And I think maybe if you're mostly focused on the iPhone, as they should be, because it's their biggest product by far, that you're thinking about that super broad market and that you need to dazzle them. But even then, I feel like they kind of just have lost their way. And even some of the hardware stuff from the 2010s that you might scratch your head at, like the Touch Bar, like if you really break that down, they came up with this idea for an OLED touchscreen on the laptop and thought it might be interesting. But if you look at what happened to it on the software side, they literally shipped the software that made it operate and never updated it the entire time it was on. Every OS update would come out and they'd be like, 'What's the Touch Bar? We don't even know.' So, I think even then there was a real disconnect between the hardware and the software side and they're living it down right now.

I can take it further too because the 12-inch — look, the butterfly keyboard, for people who don't remember, I would suppress that memory if I could. It's for the best — is that they designed this super low travel keyboard for this super small laptop that they made with the Retina MacBook which was underpowered and it never really went anywhere. They were trying to replace the MacBook Air. It didn't really work and it was one of their failures of the 2010s. But the big mistake with that butterfly keyboard is once they designed it to fit in this teeny tiny laptop, they're like, great, we made a new keyboard. Let's put it everywhere. Let's shove it in every product. Even if the other products didn't need a low travel ultra compact keyboard, all they needed was the keyboard that people liked, they're like, 'No, we're going to shove it in there, too.' And Liquid Glass is kind of like that where I can see places in Apple's product line where something like that, especially on the iPhone, where I think it is sort of the best at what it does, but they shoved it everywhere again. They just decided we're going to put this on all our platforms. And when I was reviewing macOS Tahoe — and I'm not down on Tahoe like a lot of my colleagues are — but like I feel like Mac users dodged a bullet with Tahoe because Apple did such a slapdash job of putting Liquid Glass on it that it's kind of like if they had really tried hard, I think it would have been way worse. But that's why it reminds me of the butterfly keyboard is it's a little bit like, this was not a great idea, but why is it everywhere?

But it doesn't sound like you're long-term pessimistic about software here. I'm open about it because if you had asked me in 2018 how I felt about the state of Apple's hardware side, especially on the Mac, I would have said I'm really concerned that they've lost the plot, right? And they turned it around. I do have some hope that we've hit rock bottom and we're coming back up the other side. What distresses me is when Alan Dye, who was their head of software design, was poached by Meta, the reporting suggests that the executives were taken aback and were upset because they had liked what he had sold them. And that bothers me because I think that was probably just — as an outside observer, it sounds a little bit like he had them under his spell. And it's like, you know, then again, I don't know for a fact. And sometimes when senior people leave, they leave because they're not as appreciated as they think they deserve to be. That does happen sometimes and it's possible. He's like, 'You don't love me as much as you should. I'm out of here. I'm going to go to Mark Zuckerberg. He seems to love me.' But you know, they've got a new head of design and they've got a bunch of executive turnover on a broad scale and you have been in this business long enough, you've seen this, too. Sometimes even if somebody's a great manager, like the act of having new people in charge, even if they were there before in a lieutenant role, they're going to do things differently and it's an opportunity to turn the page on stuff. And so having the new head of design come from — he's well-liked across the company in the design group but also in the engineering group and in terms of the software designers who I get the distinct impression did not like Alan Dye. The fact that he can turn the page and not necessarily — like he's not going to throw everything in the garbage can — but like it gives him a chance to say let's do things a little differently here. I think that's something Apple kind of desperately needs right now. So I'm going to be optimistic about it, but I would also say we've seen no evidence other than people moving around, but I would like to think that they've hit rock bottom with this now.

It's — I'd say it's a mixed bag. I think one of the challenges — well first off, Apple is and I think has been for a long time actually a pretty conservative company. They like Samsung for example, like just will release products and like we'll see what happens.

Yeah. They'll just — and Apple doesn't do that generally. It doesn't do that. And so you don't see wild ideas from them. And sometimes when they feel like they've got it wired, like I think a great criticism that I've seen is that the Apple laptop look hasn't changed essentially, you know, really much at all since 2011, since the second generation MacBook Air came out. Like, but if you ask somebody at Apple, they'd say that's because we nailed it and it's pretty close to an ideal form. And so the challenge is if you can say, well, where's the innovation? Look in the PC space. There are all these, you know, convertibles that you fold over the screen backward and all of that. And, you know, I'm pretty sure that they tried that stuff internally and they're like, nah, we don't like it. Like, and they may not be wrong. Like, they might have tried those things and it could have ended up like the Touch Bar. So, I think the challenge with them is always, you know, can we ship this and is it — these days Apple's so huge too that the challenge is can we ship this and will it sell in the millions? Because if it doesn't sell in the millions, it's not worth their time. They have such an enormous audience now. And I think — I mean, honestly, I think that's the problem with the Vision Pro is the Vision Pro is I would say an amazing piece of hardware. It's one of the most amazing products that Apple has ever shipped. It's not ready for prime time. It feels very much like the early days of personal computers where it's like, what's it for? Nobody knows. Let's just mess around with it. But isn't it cool? And like, but by the standards of modern Apple it's just a failure because Apple doesn't do explorations of technology and they want to sell millions and millions of whatever it is they're selling. So I think the challenge for them right now is that I think they've got innovation in them, right, but like it is — they are being careful and conservative and I do wish they would experiment a little bit more than they do. I think that maybe too much stuff gets left in the lab. And I'll give you a great example. It was apparent to a lot of us that Apple should have been really embracing the smart home like 10 years ago.

And they just — it sounds like maybe now they're trying to and that there are some products on the way that might actually enter that space, but it really felt like they could have done that 10, 15 years ago. The competition is still not very great in a lot of those categories. And why didn't they? And I think the answer is they were just real reluctant and too careful and didn't want to put in effort in something that might not give them, you know, sales in the millions. And I think that's their biggest challenge. It's not their capabilities. We can see what they're capable of. I think it's more they're just a little too careful, a little too conservative, and honestly, a little too risk-averse. Like I think it would be okay if they released a bad product that was just a joke and that they said never mind and then they did it once. And I mean maybe the iPhone Air will be that. Maybe they'll never do another iPhone Air. But I'm really glad they did that product because it's so weird. It's really cool. I don't know if anybody wants to buy it.

For sure.

And there's something I think really cool and really exciting about that. But also the thing that was happening at the time is we were getting this massive change in display technology that was making all this new stuff possible. We were getting flat screen and so you look at, oh, flat screen displays, there's new stuff we can do and then it starts to get bigger and you're like, well, we have to change the design. And there's nothing in the laptop field as far as I can tell unless you think touch is the thing — and I think Apple continues to not think touch is the thing — but unless you think touch is the thing there just hasn't been a thing pushing that saying there is a new technology we need to rebuild around. The smart home strikes me as potentially full of those things. There are new standards, there are new use cases, there are whole new kinds of devices that no one has invented yet. And like if I hate doing the 'here's what Steve Jobs would do' thing, but like it seems like it is ripe for lots of new ideas in the same way that personal computing was in the '90s as all these changes were happening. So I think where I would grade — I would not grade Apple down for not reinventing the MacBook every year because I think everybody else tried those ideas that you're talking about and they largely sucked. And so — and I'm sure Apple tried them too and were like this isn't good enough and it never saw the light of day. I mean also the reason like we were saying earlier that the iMac G4 is in some ways Apple's most amazing design product with the chrome arm and all of that. Like why didn't — why did they go to the same design that they have to this day which is just like the G5 iMac was just like a flat screen with computer attached to the back. And the answer is you couldn't build an arm that could hold up a bigger display. And displays were exploding in size. And there was a moment literally when they introduced the G4, they're like, 'We could have just stuck a computer on the back of a display, but we didn't do it.' And then a year later, they did it. And it's because they couldn't make a big display and have an arm that could hold it up. So, they just gave up. And like sometimes, you're right, tech change drives it. I do agree. I think in the smart home space, there's a lot of opportunity. I do wonder — we talked about Apple Silicon and the MacBook Neo is one example of this, but that is the fact that they've got these chips that are so powerful that they control — you know, sometimes I wonder if that is a forcing function as well. Like if you can put the same — a more powerful chip in the Studio Display than you can put in the MacBook Neo. It does make you start to wonder is everything a Mac now? And they haven't gone there yet, but like so many of the products Apple ships from Apple TV to iPads to their displays could run macOS if they wanted it to. And I know why they don't, but like I wonder at some point if you just say, I don't know, maybe it should. Like maybe we should try that because the chips are so powerful that like what can't they do? Let's give it a go. But smart home strikes me as one of those areas where I think that they were just playing it too safe.

I mean, business-wise, I think it's going pretty well for them. They're making a lot of money and I would say agreed the iPhone, right, it's like half of their business and if you really consider that most of the services revenue comes from iPhone customers it's more than half of their business by quite a lot. I think that most of what they're doing is about leveraging the power of the — or the success of the iPhone and in that way I think they have been successful. I think building a, you know, building a streaming service, building a services bundle for your iPhone users and the MacBook Neo marketing is a great example of the power of this because you just do the math. There are so many iPhones out there that means that a majority — a strong majority of iPhone users don't use a Mac. And so their whole strategy is if you're in our ecosystem, it's better, right? Like if you use all our services on your iPhone and you then you tie it to the Mac and they all just kind of work together. They're selling younger users, right? Potential users who are in school or just out of school and they're saying this is like your iPhone but it's a computer too and it does all the stuff your iPhone does and it talks to your iPhone and there's that iPhone you can bring up your iPhone screen on it and use your iPhone while you know — and the notifications come over and the live activities come over and like that's their priority and I can't argue with it because it's a huge opportunity for them to reach — to convert iPhone users into Mac users. And the Neo just steps it up further. So on that level, you know, I think it's going pretty well for them as an integrator. You know, how the customers feel about it, I don't know, right? Like you're — I think the walled garden thing has always been a little overstated. There are lots of — I mean, like I use lots of Google services and I'm all Apple hardware and like it's fine. It's really not that big a deal other than the App Store being completely locked so I can't run other people's software on my iPhone and my iPad. It can be a little overstated, but I think it's been really successful for them. And it goes back again to that whole let's integrate everything together approach that like really is Apple's thing that they've been doing since the '70s and when most tech companies stopped doing it. Now more companies are doing that, right? Like we see Google do kind of lock down more of the Play Store and things like that, but that everybody else is doing it because they see how much money Apple is making and they want to be like Apple. It's not, you know, that's how it ends up being. So, I think it's just in their DNA. But I appreciate that they're trying to leverage it to sell other products off of their biggest product. I get why they're doing it.

I think they overdo it. I think — which is an understatement. I think they overdo it in part because the Apple culture that Steve Jobs brought back was an underdog culture. I mean, Steve believed — I can tell you I worked at Macworld, which was part of IDG for more than a decade. IDG had Macworld Expo and Macworld magazine. Steve Jobs hated us because he felt like all we were doing was being built on the great products that he created and the brands he created. He hated that we used the name Mac in our name and it was a window into Steve Jobs's worldview because I really do believe strongly that Steve Jobs believed that Apple created value and that everybody else was kind of like parasites generating their value off of the greatness of what Apple created. And you know, I get especially when you're an underdog why that's your perspective. If we're making all this great stuff and then people just take it and they go build whole businesses but our business is failing — but the fact is they're not now. Now it comes across like bullying and like rent-seeking and it's part of their corporate culture that I do feel like they need to say, I know Steve wanted it this way but it's not who we are now, it's not the right thing for us to do from the position of power we have in the market. And that's the — you know, there's a difference between saying we want to protect our users with this curated App Store and saying actually you can't link to the web because the web is terrifying. I mean we all know why they did that. It's like we want to keep you in our ecosystem and take a cut of everything. That goes back to that attitude that we create — and they've done it in court statements. You see them say it. In court they say we create the value, you know, and then everybody else is just — we're cutting them in on some of the value. Like developers don't — because let's be honest, third-party developers made the iPhone. Like without that there were no apps on the original iPhone without the App Store. The App Store is not a victory of Apple alone. It is a victory by Apple in that they modified iTunes interface hastily to sell software instead which has caused all sorts of distortions in the app market that we have to live with now. But like —

If the third-party app developers hadn't been there, what is the iPhone but like an empty box? So for them, anyway, I guess that's their biggest cultural issue right now is that they are so powerful that things that used to look like survival instinct now just look like bullying.

I mean, it's a really mixed bag. I think Apple as a brand is still really powerful because I think at the end of the day all of us analyze this stuff a lot. But for people out there who just are buying these products, it's does Apple make cool products? Do I love my Apple product? Really, it's like, do I love my iPhone? I think the answer is still yes. I think that people buy the hardware and they really love it and they use it and it does what they want and the Apple brand still stands for something, but the most important thing it stands for is you buy the products and you like them and they're good. And I think they still do that. It is probably if you were just to have somebody make a list of companies that make great gadgets, I feel like the only company I could think of having an approval rate as high as Apple might be like Nintendo.

I think so we can get caught up in the other stuff and lose sight of what I think is the most important part, that it's so obvious and yet also we care about so many other things when we analyze this closely. I think your point, and this does come out of the Six Colors report card where I asked this question about Apple as a participant in the world, and they brought this on themselves, right? They always talk about how they've got values and they're going to do carbon neutral 2030 and that Tim Cook is talking about Martin Luther King holiday and all of these things. And I mean the truth is that it's kind of rough times for that now. Like they still, I believe that there are people at Apple who still believe all those things, but they also live in a world where the president of the United States is opposed to a lot of those things and so they just in the end... Look, I'll put it this way. I started covering Apple as a company in 1993. I went from being a fan to being a journalist. And I learned in the '90s Apple was kind of bad in so many different ways. I learned very quickly like all of the scales were lifted from my eyes about like this is just another company. They're kind of a mess. A lot of these people will tell you things that aren't true. Their PR people are kind of bad. What I've discovered in the last five years is that so many people in my sphere, whether it's people in our audiences or even people doing the work, kind of didn't quite have that awakening that I did right away and always sort of thought like well Apple is special. They say they're different. They are special. And I think a lot of people, and I'm not saying that they did anything wrong or that they're dumb or anything like that, but because I understand why it happened this way. There is this special story about Apple. And it's easy to lose sight of the fact that they are a voracious, publicly traded, profit-driven corporation. And when it was going good, and it was going good for a really long time, we didn't have to think about that because they're making hay while the sun shines. And it's only been the last few years. Although I would say it started with criticisms about them working with the Chinese government, being in China, questions about the factories, questions about participating in China and taking features out of the iPhone in China and replacing them with things that were approved by the Chinese government. That was the start of it. But now we've seen it especially with them jousting with the European Commission and most especially working with Donald Trump. And I feel like in some ways other than the scale it actually is the same company. It's just that now push has come to shove and in the end no matter what they talk about their values, and I do believe they hold to those values. They're still talking about carbon 2030. They're opening their manufacturing academy in Detroit that they opened, I am sure would have been talked about in context of diversity five, four years ago, but now it's talked about in terms of USA manufacturing prowess and that's just the political tea leaves, right? The bottom line is they could have made a decision to say, you know what, we think Trump sucks and we're going to tell him so and we don't care what the tariffs are, we'll fight it in court and it'll really hurt our bottom line but we're going to do it because that's what's right and we've always stood for what's right. And the fact was that they looked at it and they were like, 'But no, we make so much money from the iPhone, so let's not do that.' And I can see why people would be surprised, but I wasn't surprised because in the end, it's just a corporation. It's got shareholders and a board and a CEO who's compensated based on stock performance. And so I think that's just the danger to keep in mind, and that's not just Apple. It's literally any brand you love. This is why I would never get a brand logo tattooed on my body, right? Because it's like I just, I'm sorry. Corporations aren't people, but they can still disappoint you.

I mean my counter would be among the companies, among the giant corporations, does Apple seem to have more of a culture, more of a focus on the customer and the product quality than other giant corporations? I think the answer is yes. Yeah, but what we saw, it's almost perfectly targeted, is in the end, do you go to the inauguration, do you go to the Oval Office and create a trophy to give to the president of the United States in exchange for not hurting your iPhone sales? And they, I mean my theory is there was a moment when Trump flew to Saudi Arabia to meet MBS and Tim Cook was like, I can't do it. I can't meet the guy who ordered Jamal Khashoggi's assassination. I can't do it. And the whole trip, Trump just talked about how Tim Apple wasn't there. Yeah. And I think there was a moment where they're like, 'All right, I guess we got to go all in.' And I'm not trying to excuse it. I'm just saying that's a decision they made and they made it for money. And so yeah, I think as a corporation, I think that they've got some pretty good values, which is why their brand equity is so high and why we like their products, but they are still a corporation. They still are. And unless you're a public benefit corporation or a nonprofit or something like that, in the end where the rubber meets the road, sorry for all of these cliches, they're going to choose shareholder value and profit. They just are. They're built. That's how they're built. That's how they're managed. And if the people in charge, the people with their hands on the wheel won't do that, they will be replaced.

Yeah. I mean, you could be mad at Tim Cook for making these decisions, but in the end, I think the question is what's the boogeyman behind it all? And the fact is it is a giant profit-seeking capitalist system and that's it.

I have good feelings for a couple reasons. One is, as we detailed earlier, they've actually been killing it on the hardware side. And the guy in charge of hardware, I don't know if you saw it in the report card, several people made the exact same joke, which is, hey, hardware is doing pretty good. Maybe that guy should be CEO. And I think, I mean, it's never that simple. And the CEO's job is to be the CEO of the whole company, but I do think they all come with their perspectives. Jobs had his, Cook has his, and you see that he views the world from a term of operations efficiency. John Ternus seeing the world from the products, being a product guy with his hands on the products. I think not every Apple CEO needs to be a product person, but it's been a while since we had one and having one again is probably good for Apple. I think what I said before also about like whenever there's a new boss and there's a new leadership structure, it is also an opportunity to revisit everything you do. Like everybody talks about Tim Cook and his great relationship with Steve Jobs. All true, but the fact is day one when Tim Cook was CEO, he reestablished all of their donation matching and stuff like that because Steve just didn't care. And Tim was like, 'Well, that's wrong. We should do that.' And so that's part of it too is I think it's just healthy that a lot of these execs, because they've been so successful for so long. These people have been there for forever and Ternus has been there a long time but he's in his early 50s. It's not quite the same. I think a lot of people have stuck around. They love it. They've got a lot of money. They're type A personalities but like we're going to get that turnover. We're starting to see it. And I think that's super healthy for Apple right now because I do think they need to look at where they are versus where they were when Tim Cook took over. It's a very different place. The company is vastly larger than they were then. There's more money, there are more products and so part of it is Ternus seems really sharp and having the hardware guy in charge for a while seems like a good idea, but also it's just like I think they need change. I think that it's been really static because they've been, what a classic line the football coach John Madden used to say, winning is a great deodorant, right? All of the problems in your locker room go away if you just keep winning. Apple's been winning for so long now that they can't really tell what stinks. And it would be nice to have somebody else who can come in and say, 'Hey everybody, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of stinks that I want to take care of now that I'm taking over.' So I choose to be optimistic. Also, the iPhone is such a successful product. It's possible that something will dethrone the smartphone in the next couple of decades. I'm not sure I believe that, but that's an annuity that allows them a lot of room to maneuver.

Yeah, I know. What an idea.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I really had a great time.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, sure. It's a subtle thing. So, at the end of every podcast you listen to, they say go listen to us on whatever app you want. And the thing that's easy to miss is that what it means is that you have a choice. And the reason you have a choice is because podcasts are based on an open standard. And this is different from almost everything else that we do because they're all proprietary, right? So when you watch somebody on YouTube or TikTok, you're locked in and you can't say, 'I'm going to watch that TikTok that I love on some other app.' And you know, podcasts were created more than 20 years ago just around this open standard RSS. And that was an intentional choice. It was a sort of very deliberate technical choice where people were saying at that time it started with text, just I'm going to subscribe to a feed and text, and then it sort of evolved into including audio and then eventually video. And that opportunity of like wherever you want to listen to this, whatever app you want to use, still being true like 20-plus years later is kind of shocking that they haven't stamped it out. Although of course many have tried over the years. Many have tried.

I think the fact that you couldn't name another platform is about to become very important in this conversation as we talk about video. But I was thinking about why podcasting in particular has endured this way and it strikes me as either podcasting was so early that it was set up on this infrastructure that became eventually fairly hard to change. Right. Like you said, it started on RSS, which is like a foundational early internet technology. It's the reason RSS readers grew up. Like the way that feeds work on the internet has been a remarkably stable thing for a very long time. The flip side is also that nobody made any money on podcasts for a really long time. And part of me wonders if maybe that's the reason that actually we sort of skipped podcasts and started doing video. And so everybody figured out how to make money doing video and then kind of went, 'Oh, podcasts. What if we did podcasts?' And so maybe if what we're seeing now is the sort of inevitable path toward all of this stuff being run out of standards and into platforms. It's just that it took so long because everybody did it with video first.

Yeah. The reason that podcasts didn't get captured was they were a loser. And I mean really, and so but fair. I mean, you know, having had a front row seat to it, what had happened was at first everybody got excited and you know, so it was like a classic nerd battle, like one of those like VHS versus beta kind of things where everybody's like there's going to be a format war and we're going to choose what's the best spec and all that kind of stuff. And so everybody rushed in when the iPod was ascendant and this is why they got named podcast like after the iPod. And of course the geeks were like, why are you tying it to Apple's format? All those kinds of things. And then everybody realized there's no money in this initially. And like a little bit of trivia was one of the players in the early sort of gold rush around podcasting was called Odeo which Ev Williams had started and tried to make a directory or a marketplace for podcasts and failed and that company pivoted to become Twitter. That's how sort of definitively the podcasting market had not had any way of making money.

Right. Exactly. Like that's how little money there is in podcasting. But actually, you know, sort of jokes aside was that they sort of set the tone of people being like, man, that is radioactive. Like don't go over there. That's something where you are going to, if that guy can't make money here, nobody can. And then around the same time as Odeo was pivoting, Apple had added podcasting to iTunes and people were like, 'Man, that's a category killer too.' Like, if they bundled it in, you're not going to compete with the guys who made the platform, who made the actual iPod that everybody's got. And so, it just seemed like they had kind of killed it before they had even taken off in terms of revenues. And it wasn't really until Serial comes out and has that sort of moment of like podcasts are back, which is like the better part of a decade later, that people are like, 'Oh, that thing's still around.' Like it still works. And that's when the format returns.

No.