My fondest gadget memories, still to this day, are the gold iPod mini that I had in high school that got stolen out of my car.
This is the Tech Sploder podcast: conversations with tech professionals about being human in a binary world. Episode 24: David Pierce. Tech Sploder is made possible by the financial support of our patrons like Brian Yger, Brandon Quintel, and Jill Rilski. If you like what you hear, head on over to patreon.com/JasonHowell and you can support the show directly. And thank you for making independent podcasting possible.
Hello everybody and welcome to the Tech Sploder podcast. I'm Jason Howell, and I am super excited to welcome this week's guest, David Pierce. He's the editor-at-large at The Verge, co-host of The Vergecast. David has been at the forefront of technology journalism for a very long time. He's held prominent positions at some of the industry's most respected publications: yes, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Protocol, and currently he leads technology coverage at The Verge, where he writes about consumer technology. Like I said, he hosts The Vergecast podcast and has the very popular Installer column, which you should check out. His unique perspectives come from years of experience covering the intersection of technology, consumer products, and digital culture. Sure, and he's just a heck of a lot of fun to talk to. So why don't we get right to it: my conversation with David Pierce. David Pierce, welcome to Tech Sploder. It is so great to have you here today. Thank you for taking time.
I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for doing this with me.
Yeah, you know, the thing that I love about this show, and people who, you know, watch or listen to this show with any sort of regularity have heard me say it a million times, is the nostalgic quality of technology. I feel like tech, and you could probably speak to this at length if you were so, you know, inclined, but tech has become this like weighty, heavy, kind of almost depressing thing to a certain degree at times. And I like remembering when tech was fun and awesome and inspiring and everything. So that's why we got you here to see, you know, what that fire is for you. So I'm, I'm into it.
Yeah, it's weird. It's, uh, tech was so fun when it was like a nerdy thing to be into, and now that everybody's into it, it's, it's awful. And so many things have changed because tech has become more popular. And now, like, all my friends who for years didn't want to talk about gadgets and didn't want to talk about the stuff that I was into and was using are now like blowing up my group chat about DeepSeek. And it's like, how did this change so fast? And also, why is it so much less fun now?
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Like, I remember being a kid and being, you know, my, my computer when I was a child was a Commodore 64. That was like the love of my life. The fact that I had one in my bedroom, it was the best thing in the world. And that, that proved to the world that I was an outlier, that I was the nerdy little kid who would rather kind of sit in a room, you know, plunking away on his Commodore 64 than going out and playing football or something along those lines. And now technology has become so incredibly ubiquitous. Like, that's kind of a funny thing to think about. Like, now, you know, everybody lives that life. And yeah, it's taken a little bit of the quirkiness away from it because it's just kind of part of the oxygen in the air.
Totally. One of the things we talk about on The Vergecast all the time is, uh, if you go back, I don't know, 30 years, let's say, like mid-90s, everybody had a computer room, which was like a, a place in your house. A lot of people didn't have computers at all, but if you did, it was, it was in a space, and everybody's computer room was exactly the same. It had like wood paneling, and everybody had that same sort of like hutch that went around the computer, and it was this big, deep, wide, thick monitor, and you had a, you had a tower. Mine was a Gateway, back when Gateway was a thing. Uh, and it was like, it was like a piece of furniture in your house. And I think we thought of computers so differently then. They were, they were like destinations and things in the way that they're just kind of oxygen now. Uh, and I kind of think we had it right 30 years ago, and we should probably get back to that.
Well, there was something to be said for, and, and this was only because it was a limitation of the technology at the time, obviously. Now laptops are so incredibly ubiquitous that, so, you know, we all have them, but there was something to be said for going somewhere with the intention of doing the computer thing. And now the computer is always with us. It's in our pockets, it's in our bag because we're carrying it around because it's been miniaturized to this point that it's so easy to bring it with us. And sure, there are great things that come from that, but also it doesn't, you know, it does remove, I think, a little bit of the special quality of it, um, at this point.
Yeah, I think there, there's a, there's a thing about doing technology on purpose that I think is coming back in some really interesting ways. Uh, Chris Hayes, the, the MSNBC anchor, just wrote a really good book about taking back your attention, and in so many ways that whole conversation is just about like, how do we do this stuff on purpose again? And, and it goes back to, uh, I now have a thing in my pocket and a thing on my wrist and often a thing in my ears that is just making noise at me all the time, and it just, it has feelings about me that I have to react to all the time. And totally, and it used to be that even, even the idea of like, I have to put my laptop on a table and open it up is like, that friction is good and I think is, is productive. And I think there's like, there's a balance in there somewhere where like, I'm definitely not advocating for let's all get back to computer towers and gigantic CRT monitors. Like, things have gotten better since then, but there's something to just that tiny bit of like, I am, I am doing technology now. Yeah, that I think it, it sort of, it implies that there are times where you're not doing technology, and I think that's, that's a good thing.
Yeah, no, I would completely agree. Now, now that I'm doing, you know, technology, uh, as a career, but like as an independent thing, I can very easily fall into the trap of every moment in my life is a technology moment because when you run a business, when you own a business and you're trying to make it successful, it's like all of your time is valuable time. Totally. And you lose a little bit of that separation.
Well, actually, you lose a ton of it. Like, I, you know, right before this recording, I had to get myself out of the house for like a 25-minute walk with the dogs, which was partially for them, but I realize when I'm doing it, it's also for me because if I don't step away from this stuff, I can easily lose days staring at these screens that might not be good for me.
Yeah, walks. Everybody needs more walks in their life, uh, including you and your dogs and me and my dogs. Yes. So, um, so this all kind of, uh, you know, points to, I think, the thing that I sometimes am missing in the world of technology, which is the, the glimmer of excitement or, um, I don't know, that, that spark that I remember when I was a kid and I came across a cool piece of technology that, you know, I'd never seen anything like that before. I, I have to have that, you know, that sort of thing. I'm curious, like, when you think about your childhood, you know, ahead of everything that you've done with The Verge and all the places that you've worked, and you, you know, you're very well known for the work you do. I love the work that you do. Um, but ahead of all of that was probably a, I'm guessing, an early kind of interest in technology, and I'm curious to know where that story kind of starts. Where, what is that?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think, uh, I, I definitely don't have the, you know, I grew up taking apart computers story. Uh, I kind of wish I did. I feel like there's like a piece of the nerd cred that I'm missing in my life. That's a real bummer. Um, I hear you on that one. But I think, so my dad in, I think, the early 90s, uh, ran a software company, and so we had a computer in our house much earlier than a lot of people. Uh, and I like essentially learned how to program, as strong, but I like learned my way around a command line essentially in order to play games. Uh, and so that was kind of my early computer experience. And then, uh, just enjoyed the process of figuring all of that out and like learned just enough code to be dangerous without actually being any good at it. And then, uh, it just kind of spiraled from there. But I think really where it kicked off for me was I came of age with the iPod. Uh, like, I, I was, I was becoming my own person as the iPod was becoming a thing. And so I think about like my fondest gadget memories still to this day are the gold iPod mini that I had in high school that got stolen out of, of my car. Uh, and it was, it was devastating. And, uh, I had the thing that you would, you would plug one end into the headphone jack and the other end into the cassette part of the car. Uh, and it was like, I think about all of that as like core growing up stuff. And I still remember like, I have, I have awful music taste. That's like an important thing to say out loud. I have terrible music taste.
Great music taste for you when you say even I don't think I like good music. I like terrible music.
I like, I was the one in, in high school who like didn't like classic rock and all the stuff that was cool to like. And I was like, have you guys heard of this Britney Spears? Like, she's sick. And all my friends like, don't ever say that out loud again. Um, but, but like that was, that's really, I think, the first thing that I can think of as like gadgets that were mine that I loved in that same way. And then I graduated from there to like early smartphones. Uh, and I also loved the Palm Pilots. So there's something in that kind of like right before the smartphone era that was like, as I was really starting to understand technology for myself. And that's the stuff I really look back at.
Was the, uh, the gold iPod mini, was that a piece of technology that like you paid for, or, or was that bought, like, did your parents get that for you?
And I paid for it. Um, I was, uh, I, I figured out that the, the babysitting racket was a pretty successful way to make money as a, as a teenager. My dad was a pastor, uh, so I came sort of inherently trustworthy because like, you know, my dad knew Jesus. And so, uh, there were people all over our church who were like psyched to have me babysit. Fabulous money. Can't recommend it enough. And that was how I bought my iPod. But first I went through a sort of parade of other lesser MP3 players. I had all of the like huge boxy Creative ones, and I had like a Rio and all these things that were like actual spinning hard drives in an MP3 player. And then a bunch of those broke because I was like, I was, you know, I was, I was young and didn't have any actual money. So I was cheap and I was like, I'm going to buy the crappy thing. And I learned the buy the good thing because it's cheaper in the long run lesson, uh, pretty early on. And that was, that was how I landed on the iPod mini. And it was like, okay, this is, I have bought the good thing and it is magical until somebody stole it out of my car. But that was years later. So I had, I had a good run with the iPod mini.
All right, so you got, you got your money's worth at least to a certain degree. The downside of this is that you no longer have it to like pull out and look at. Like, that's, that's something that I cherish is the ability to kind of sometimes take out some of those old pieces of technology and if even only for like five seconds and that's all it lasts for, you know, be able to look at it, be like, oh yeah, this is a good one, this right here.
If, if you're listening to this and you're the person who stole my iPod mini, I will pay you an alarming amount of money to give it back to me. They've formatted it. It's a shell of itself. Battery doesn't even hold anymore. But you know, I don't care. I'll frame it. It'll go right back there behind me. It'll be awesome.
I, I can't remember, I can't remember which, um, pre-iPod MP3 players I had, but I know I had one or two. And I don't know if you remember this, this era where, I mean, auctions, online auctions were a really big deal. You know, eBay obviously is the, the easy one to point to. But I remember back in the like very early 2000s, pre-iPod, there were these sites that, that the auction sites, they seemed too good to be true. And you'd go there and you'd be like, oh wow, I could get that thing for like ten dollars or whatever. And I, I, I don't know if my memory is flawed, but I remember getting, using one of those sites to get one of those off-brand, you know, MP3 players. And it was just total garbage. Like, I think it could hold like seventy-five megs at any given time. So you, you're managing the seven or eight songs that you ever want to take with you or whatever. And it was, it was hot garbage. What was it about the iPod mini that really captivated you in comparison to those other ones?
Uh, it was, it was, it had been loved in a way that I think a lot of technology hadn't. And I think that's like, there, there was that run of Apple that I think, I think everybody kind of lionizes Apple too much in a lot of ways, but like it did a thing where they just cared more than everybody else, and you could feel it in the products for a long time. And with that, it was, uh, like there was just something about the, the scrolling mechanism was exactly right. I still would rather scroll music on a click wheel than with a touchscreen. Uh, it was totally understandable in a way that I really liked. Like, I would hand my Creative Jukebox to somebody else, and they had, they literally had to use a joystick. Like, there was one that had a joy, like a D-pad joystick on it, and the menus were insane, and the thing essentially like ran Windows, and it was bad. But then there's like, you could just sit down in my passenger seat, and I could hand you my iPod, and it was like, I was sort of very vulnerable in that moment because I'm like, here is all the music that I like. Do you like it? Have you even heard of any of it? Are you going to make fun of me about this? Uh, but like ninety-nine out of a hundred people could just sit there and figure it out. And like, it, it looked cool, it was small, the battery lasted a long time, and it was just like, it, it felt like the thing should feel in a way that I, I remember being just so impressed by the whole time. The software was trash. I had a Windows computer at the time, and trying to get music on and off that thing was just a full nightmare. Uh, but actually using it was, was delightful.
Yeah, I mean, the hardware experience itself, and you're right, the, the, the wheel and that, that kind of like that clicky sound that it would, you know, that, that, oh man, it was just so satisfying. You knew when you moved to the next line because it was just like a little kind of like snappy click.
Yeah, you could do it without looking at it, which I think is an underrated thing in technology, that you, you would learn to scroll by feel. And like, I could, I could basically remember in order the lists of a lot of my music. And so it's like, like, okay, it's the third track on this one, and you could feel it click three times and hit it, and that's like, that means something. I think it felt good.
I, I totally agree. I totally agree. Uh, going to take a super quick break, come back, uh, talk a little bit more about all this stuff. I love the nostalgia, uh, conversation, and, uh, I have something to touch on what you just were talking about here in a second. So you're talking about the clicky wheel, and what that reminds me of, and I, and I'm, and I'm happy to see this, I think is there seems to be kind of a movement right now around returning to tactile, returning to like the, the, the touchscreen came along and everybody thought this is the best thing since sliced bread. Everything needs to be a touchscreen. You know, like I've got a touchscreen in one of my cars, and I'm still not entirely sold it's the best method, but you know, I'm so used to touchscreens that I, that I put up with it and it's fine. But I'm starting to see kind of like a resurgence to this idea that like, oh, wait a minute, maybe having tactile, maybe having dedicated single-purpose, single-use-purpose buttons, uh, is a good thing. And I think I'm, I'm kind of heartened by that. I don't know.
I completely agree. I mean, I think we hit this point where the smartphone became so big and so mainstream and so successful that everybody just kind of assumed that the smartphone must have gotten everything right and was definitely the future of everything. That it was, it just, it hit scale unlike anything ever had before, right? Like everyone had one, like in a real way. Everyone, more people have smartphones than have ever had any other technological product ever in history. That is nuts. And so I think a natural thing to do is say, okay, this got everything right. What else can we do with this, right? You have all this supply chain stuff that's like, let's, let's rethink the way that we make everything with smartphone parts. But then it's like, okay, most people know how to use a smartphone. Let's just give them smartphone-style things everywhere. Perfectly reasonable idea. Horrible in practice. Like I, I actually think, I think touchscreens are the precise wrong thing for cars because do you know what you shouldn't be doing is looking at the screen in your car. Like this is so uncomplicated. And, and we as humans, we know how to use tools and we know how to use buttons and we learn how to feel these things in a way that you physically cannot on a touchscreen. There's something deeply inhuman about a touchscreen, and in some ways that's fine. But when I need to look down and hit four buttons just to change the temperature in the car, you've now caused actual danger in my life, and that is a problem. And so I think, I think you're right that what we're starting to see is, uh, car companies are realizing people like buttons, which thank God. And there's a mix to be had there, right? Like scrolling through your music works on a touchscreen, sure. If I like, I think CarPlay is generally good, but this thing where Apple is like, we're going to take over the, the temperature controls, and if you want to change gears, that's a, it's like, no, no, no, no, none of that. Give us buttons. Uh, but I also think, again, we, we pulled everything into the phone, and it, like they say in tech, everything is always either bundling or unbundling. And I think what we're starting to see now is people who are like, I don't want to spend my entire life looking at my phone. I want things that feel more tuned to what they are. I mean, vinyl is coming back, for God's sake, right? Like people like the idea of I get to hold a record in my hand and put it down and put a needle on it and have it play. Like, sure, there's a pure just nostalgia kind of aesthetic factor to that, but there's also something to like, this is a purposeful device made for this thing that I think we've lost by just yanking it all into smartphones. And it is fun to see that slowly starting to come back.
Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, I think of, I think of when I was in high school and, you know, um, CDs were of course the thing at the time. This is pre-MP3 era. And the idea of listening to music or the idea of buying music was, man, it was just so different than it is now. When I think of when I was a kid, my dream of the future was, oh, when we're driving around in the future in our car, we, we're going to have every single song that's ever been written. Like, I remember having this conversation with my parents, and I don't think that it was like overly prescient of me. I think it was just an extension of what I believe technology would do someday. And we got there. And what I realized in looking back is that we really lost this tangible quality of what you're talking about, of being able to like, of, of it meaning and mattering so much that I own or I went out and sought this, sought out this one thing, and I decided I'm going to spend my money on that one thing. And as a result, I end up listening or playing that one thing a thousand times because I did that versus having access to everything, and everything just kind of feels not very special at all.
Right, yeah, and it's, it's so funny because on the other hand, you wouldn't go back, right? Like if, if I could, if I could snap my fingers and Spotify is gone, like, no thank you. I love Spotify, but there is something about that that we've either lost for good or need to figure out how to get back, right? And there's like, you go back far enough, and there's the like flipping through the, the record crates at the record store, and then kind of one step after that was like, for me, that experience was the, the black binder of CDs that everybody had. And it's like, it sits on the backseat of the car, and you unzip the binder, and you're flipping through the sleeves of people's CDs, and that's like, that's the discovery mechanism. And there is nothing like that in scrolling through Spotify recommendations, right? There's that, that sense of like, I have decided all of these things are good, and you can look at them, or like, I'm going to flip through a bunch of mixtapes that I've made for myself. Like, even Spotify playlists don't work that way. And there's something about, technically it's, it's the same, right? Like technically here's a playlist with all my favorite songs. Like it's kind of the same thing, but it is different. It doesn't feel the same. Yeah, and there's, there's something about the work, and there's something about the physicality, and there's something about the kind of finiteness of it that I think is just lost now. And, and again, maybe that's a trade worth making for access to every song ever made in history. Uh, but we did lose something.
Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Um, and meanwhile, like, I, I don't know, I've probably been saying for the last three years, I really do want to get a record player again because, you know, I used to have one. I used to be a DJ, so I used to have, you know, walls of records that I at some point decided, you know, I no longer needed because it took up space. And now, of course, I'm regretting it. You know, I wish I had those records. But, um, but it's three years later. I've been saying this for three years. I still don't have a record player. I still don't, you know, haven't started shopping for records again. So there's obviously some sort of barrier there. But I like to, I like to romanticize the idea, you know.
Totally. I keep claiming, I keep claiming I'm going to buy all the movies that I like because, you know, streaming services, everything's moving around too much. It's too messy. I'm like, I like to watch The Office. Maybe I should just buy The Office and have it on DVD. And I'm like, I don't think I own a DVD player. Like, I don't think I, I literally don't think I have a way to play that in my house. So now I'm like, am I going to buy a DVD player when it's just right there on Peacock? Like, no. So, but maybe I should. Maybe, maybe it would be better if I had, you know, a thousand DVDs of my thousand favorite things sitting behind me right now. I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, I do, I do, uh, recall, um, one time, God, I must have been probably like twenty or twenty-one. This is probably going to date me, but, um, getting a LaserDisc player. There you go. Uh, but not just a LaserDisc player that played one side. It's the kind that played both sides, so you didn't have to, however many minutes. Yeah, I don't know if you're very familiar with the LaserDisc experience, but there were, there was a point in a movie during which you have to flip to the other side, and I can't remember if it was like forty-five minutes in or whatever. If you had to do that manually, that was just a total bummer. Um, flip it. But again, it was the, it was the process of like, I remember at the time being so into film, and, um, the coolest releases were released on, on LaserDisc. Like, you could get your normal version of The Abyss by James Cameron on VHS or whatever, but if you got the LaserDisc, you got all the bonus features, you got all the behind-the-scenes, and the, the audio track that is the cast talking over it, which later came to DVD, and, you know, everybody got access to that. Now we're in the digital realm, and do we even have that in the digital realm? Like, I don't even know if that exists.
The idea of bonus features has been totally killed by just go watch another movie, right? Like, why do you need another thing to watch? Just go watch a different movie. And, and again, like, that's, that's a thing we lost. I miss that, the, the deleted scenes and the, the bonus features and the commentary. Like, that's the kind of stuff that if you liked a thing, you wanted to sort of live inside of it in a way that you can't anymore because there's other things to go do, and they just want you to go do those other things.
Yeah, and all of those things and your interest in it was kind of an emblem of how, yeah, how passionate you were about that particular thing, how you decided that it was worth spending forty dollars or however much, I can't remember how much it was, but whatever that cost was to buy that one thing instead of like, like you say, what we have now, which is just infinite choice. And that's cool in its own right, but right, again, like I would not snap Netflix out of existence if, if you allowed me to. Uh, but I do, I do miss having DVDs, and I don't know what to do about that fact.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, you, you, well, I guess now it's what, it's, it's Blu-ray. And like, I've done the thing where I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to buy it. Like, I actually, I remember probably like three or four Christmases ago, I bought for the family the entire Harry Potter Blu-ray collection. I was like, you know, they aren't interested in, in Harry Potter yet, but I know they will be because every kid is eventually. And once they are, we'll have the best versions of them all.
I think we only ever watched the first disc, just primarily because, A, they didn't get as interested in it as I thought they were going to get. Fair. Um, and B, because it was already available in all the places. So the idea of like going through the extra step to find, pull them out, you know, make sure the thing's plugged in that actually plays it, because we never played Blu-rays. I mean, it's just, it's just a different time.
Yeah, I mean, it is. Like, if, if you and I were to race right now, I could be playing Harry Potter on Max much faster than you could get the, the Blu-ray. At some point, it's like, I, maybe I'm just buying this because it makes me feel better for no particular reason. And I think this is why you don't have a record player and I don't have a DVD player, because ultimately I kind of don't know what it's for anymore. But I still long for that thing, and I, I always have trouble squaring those two things in my brain.
