Apple's expensive Mac Pro, gadgets of the decade, and Twitter's project Bluesky

Stories this week: Apple’s most expensive Mac Pro costs $52,599 Apple’s most expensive Pro Display XDR requires a special, Apple-made cloth to clean it You can now buy Apple's new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR … The Mac Pro's optional wheels cost $400 Logitech made a bespoke $200 magnetic 4K webcam for … Apple will reportedly release an iPhone without any ports in 2021 Lightroom finally adds direct photo import on iOS The Apple TV remote is so bad that a Swiss TV company developed a normal replacement Rewound is a new app that turns your iPhone into an iPod The Verge’s gadgets of the decade Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its ... A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past Twitter will now let you post iOS Live Photos as GIFs Twitter is bringing back labels for US election candidates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, we talk about the new Mac Pro. We talk about our gadgets of the decade and what Twitter is doing by thinking about decentralizing itself. That's Vergecast coming up now.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Growing teams need a corporate card built for more, something that doesn't sacrifice speed for control. Introducing the American Express Corporate Cash Back Card. Get 1.5% cash back on eligible business purchases, advanced spending controls, and real-time visibility, plus intelligent expense management. Get started at go.amex slash amexcorporate. Terms and cap apply.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the holiday season. Can we get some like Jingle Bell sounds? No. Andrew said no. He didn't, he didn't say yes. Hi, I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. I'm back. It's been several weeks since I've been on the show, I think. Welcome back. 100 weeks? How many weeks? 100 weeks. Dieter is here, hi Dieter. I have been here the whole time. Dieter works hard. Diligent Dieter is here. So true. It's like a garbage pail kid name. Paul Miller is here. Hello. I don't have a nickname.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Pretty, pretty Paul. I'll come up with your children's book quality nickname soon. It is both a quiet week in the news, we're cruising into the end of the year, but a lot of things happened this week. Yeah. And we published our list of 100 gadgets of the decade, which just in full transparency was designed to make people argue about 100 gadgets, which is, what else are we here for? So we're going to talk about that. We got to talk about the Mac Pro. I want to start by congratulating our friend Kara Swisher. Recode Decode was awarded Podcast of the Year by Adweek, which is incredible. So go check out Recode Decode. I also want to say Zoe Schiffer's amazing away story continues to have twists and turns. You've probably seen it, Dieter. I think you mentioned on the show last week.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Steph Corey, the CEO of Away, was removed. There's a new CEO, the dude from Lululemon. There's more twists and turns coming. We're gonna have Zoe on the interview show on Tuesday. So, we're not gonna talk about it now. I just want to congratulate her for that story. Stay tuned. On Tuesday, she'll be back with more. There's more to come. It's gonna be fun. It was a really fun interview. So, if you haven't read it, go read Zoe's away story. It is a phenomenon. And we'll talk to her about it on Tuesday. Okay. Apple Incorporated, small purveyor of computers.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Apropos of nothing unrelated to anything we're about to talk about, I need a raise.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  Does somebody want a new computer? I need a raise that is approximately as much as a Tesla Model 3.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple, just a quick history lesson.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  These two guys named Steve were in a garage. And they're like, "We should make a computer." And it would go on your desk.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  And one of the Steves thought it should be like beautiful. And the other Steve was like, "What if it had ports?" It's true. What if it had card slots and ports? This is true. This is the genesis of Apple.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  And they had fights and fights. And one time, 1-1. And then one Steve got fired. And the other Steve is now like their mascot. And he says things on Twitter. And then Apple is like, "Well, just don't listen to him." Anyway, that's the story of the Steves. Now there are AirPods. I don't know. There's some stuff happened. Now there's AirPods. Inside of Apple, the debate over whether things should be totally beautiful and have no ports, or are we modular and powerful for people who actually want to use them? It's in the DNA of the company. That's what I'm saying.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  From the beginning.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  From the, like, the first day. They're like arguing about card slots.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  The wrong people won for a long time.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Very long time.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, too long. So, Apple's big strategy was that they would just make slow Macintoshes with bad keyboards. And everyone would use an iPad. And that would be the future. And then you'd be in their walled garden. It would be fun. The reality is people have to do work on their computers.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Can we back up? How firmly do you, I mean, I know it's a joke conspiracy theory, but like, there's some percentage of you that actually believes that they made the Mac laptops bad to force people to use iPads. And I just want to know what percent knows that it's a joke but believes it anyway?

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  The percentage went up way higher when they put out the MacBook Air everybody wanted.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  When they, when they tried to kill the MacBook Air by putting out the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and they're like, but we'll still sell this crappy Air. And then they were surprised that people continued to buy the MacBook Air despite it being the crappiest laptop that they offered. Not that it was a crappy laptop, just in their lineup, the worst one, but people liked the balance of things that it was. And that surprised them. That, I would say, my, my belief that they wanted people to buy iPads instead of entry-level Mac laptops, and it didn't break their way, that went higher. That's what, that's what I would say to you.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  But they learned.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  They have learned.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  They figured it out, we think. So they put out with the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a functional keyboard, remember a functional touchbar, it's functional keyboard, and then this Mac Pro with like all the slots and RAM do-hickies that you could want.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, the USB-A port on the inside.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  And now, everybody's happy.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  The end. That's very chest, everybody.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  So the, the news, if you haven't heard, is, you know, it was already announced, we already got to look at it, people have been talking about it, we knew it was coming for years, but now it's on sale. You can go buy one. And that meant a few things. Number one, it meant that some influencers and other sort of pros that Apple really likes have had them for a while and have talked about some of their impressions.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Profluencers.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Profluencers. It also means that anyone is free to go and spec out their dream Mac Pro. And, uh, yeah, it costs a lot of money, as you might expect, and there have been many a joke made about the money that it costs.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  So the, the spec goes from $6,000 to like $52,000 and change.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Plus monitors.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  Plus, plus monitors.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Plus wheels.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  Plus wheels.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Wheels are included at 52,000.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  At 52K, we throw in the wheels. We'll do, we'll do the clear coat protector, the underbody treatment, the whole thing.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  I want to go back to this Profluencer thing because it's not that it doesn't make, it makes perfect sense that this is how Apple would roll it out. But it's also worth noting that as of this Vergecast, I cannot find a single legitimate benchmark of this computer. Apple did not give people who professionally care about the speed of computers a chance to look at this before it was officially out.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Let me sand the rough edge off of that a little bit. Because I think the YouTubers care professionally about the speed of their computers. They did not give reviewers this computer, like professional media reviewers this computer. We didn't get one, Joanna didn't get one, Matt Panzerino didn't get one, Tom's Hardware didn't get one, Ars Technic didn't get one, like Anant Tech didn't get one. Like the people who do it that way, our way, the traditional sort of media reviewer way, did not get these computers. YouTubers got these computers. And I, just for the record, I think everybody knows this. I really like Marquez. We've like done a lot of stuff with him. I really like John Morrison, I really like I just seen. They're in our ecosystem, we see them at events, we like them, their videos are fun to watch, go watch them.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  And actually, can I even add to that? The videos that they made with the Mac Pro are very good. There are just, there's, there's the beginnings of some benchmarks, but they did the responsible thing and didn't act like they knew more than they knew when the embargo time came up for them to be able to post their videos. They, they, they talked about what they were able to truthfully say about what they knew about this computer, which involved a lot like, here's how it looks, here's how I feel about this, I was able to do these very small speed tests in the time that I had in order to do the thing. So in that sense, that's great. Like the, the videos are very good, you should absolutely go watch them.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm happy they're successful and happy they're, they compete with us in some dimensions, they don't in some other dimensions. Are they reviewers like we are reviewers? Like, I think they would be the first to say that they do not do the things that we do. That's fine. We all exist in ecosystem together. The thing we would have done is test a bunch of software that Apple hadn't already shown us worked really well, right? And that's the thing that's missing. That's the thing you're talking about, Paul. There's like benchmarks out there. I think a lot of people are very interested to see how Adobe Premiere operates on this computer, and we don't know the answer yet. A lot of people are not going to buy one until Avid certifies it, right? That could be a while. It could be a long time, but that's a major piece of software for pros.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  And maybe this isn't a fair comparison, but the way I kind of see it, there's this thing that happens with video games where sometimes the video game's just so good that they don't give it to reviewers. And sometimes there's a video game that's so bad that they definitely don't give it to reviewers because they'll get the day one sales before the really bad news hits. And I don't think there's like some super bad news waiting with the Mac Pro, but what I think the news that is waiting that will probably happen in a week is like, hey, we built this Hackintosh with off-the-shelf parts and it costs a quarter of the Mac Pro and it beats it on 95% of the benchmarks. And I don't know that for certain, but I'm guessing Apple doesn't want that to be the

• 9:31Speaker 04

  very first headline for Mac Pro. And so it makes total sense that that is not currently the very first headline. But for me, that's the most important thing about this computer is that Apple did manage to make a very powerful computer, but they didn't make the most powerful computer in the world and they made a computer that is way more expensive than it necessarily needs to be. And it defines Pro as someone with $6,000 where I would define Pro as someone with $1,000. And I think it's a mindset that really frustrates me about Apple and I just feel like this style of rollout, again, it's such a minor issue, but it speaks loudly to me in those

• 10:16Speaker 04

  tones.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I think is going on. I don't, I can't speak for Apple, but here's what I think is going on in their head. I think they know that there are a bunch of people that would not understand the right context in which to test this machine, right? They're like, oh, they'd run a benchmark, not know what it means.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Publish it, they get the bad headlines. They believe that this is a different kind of Pro machine than the other Pro machines. Like Pro means two different things to Apple now, right? And this Pro is like full on, I work at a movie studio or I, you know, I work at a big music label kind of Pro. And that's different than, you know, I, I just want a nice computer, so I'm going to buy the MacBook Pro because it says Pro and that makes me feel good, right? And so I think that they genuinely wanted to just make sure that people would, who understood the context of what kind of Pro machine this is, were in the first wave of people to like say anything publicly about it outside the company. Do I fully agree with that decision? I mean, you can guess what my answer is, it's like,

• 11:18Speaker 03

  there are, there are people that you could trust to like get the right, get the context right.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  So, right, so look, Joanna is one of our founders, she's one of my closest friends. I was like, did you get a Mac Pro? And she's like, what would I even do with that? So like, yeah, like maybe the, the average Wall Street Journal, the average Wall Street Journal reader is like using his iPad in first class.

• 11:36Nilay Patel?

  He's fine. But the point of the machine is like Apple stepping confidently back into the context of, we do make some of the fastest computers in the world. The content that you want to watch on the movie screen or play it on Apple Music, like those pros are using our machines to do the best possible work that can exist. The apps are coded on it, the video games are made on it. Like, that's the promise they're trying to make with the computer. That's a promise they failed with the previous Mac Pro to keep. It's a promise that their hardware, I mean, their last Mac Pro was 2013, so like for, for seven years, they've been out of that game, right? And as the MacBook Pro, that we've, how many times we've talked about the processor refresh cycle and Intel and like,

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  they've just been out of the game. They've been slow and this is their big, we're back. Donald Trump's in Texas at the factory, which he thinks is new and fine, we're just gonna let that slide. But like, it's a moment. And so they're capturing the moment. And I think the- The difference here is they rolled out what I would call like influencer marketing, right? Not reviews. And I, that doesn't mean I don't think that Marquez will eventually publish a review. I think he absolutely will. But this first wave was a bunch of unboxing videos and like, look at how fast it runs, Apple software. But pros use a lot of not Apple software and a lot of software that is slow to turn the corner to new kinds of hardware and new ways of working. With the last Mac Pro, the software never actually

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  turned the corner. It never actually got there and made the most use of that machine. We gave the last, the 2013 MacBook Pro, we're looking at that review, we gave it like an eight. And we were like, it'll do great when everyone figures out these graphics cards. And like, we were as wrong as anybody. So I think there's like a real danger here. The other thing I think is that which one do you review?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  That is actually really hard because there's so many different ways to configure this, right? You can configure it for audio or video or photo or like, and they all are actually wildly different machines.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so we're gonna, we're gonna get one. By hook or by crook, we're gonna get one.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  We're leaning towards crook right now.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I know how to get one by crook. That seems like the wrong choice. If you know how to get one by hook, please let me know, because that would be hilarious. But we're gonna get one, we're gonna review it. And one of the questions we've been having is like, which one? How do we configure? What do we configure it for? I think we've probably talked about this on the show, like, our video team uses Creative Cloud. That's, that's where we live. So like, do we spec the $2,000 Afterburner card that will never be used, just so we can test? Like, I think that is actually another huge problem for a review cycle on this machine. It is very hard to tell you where price performance lands if you just send people the $52,000 one, and everyone's like, it's very fast. Like, that doesn't mean anything to anybody.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Right. And that's becoming a very interesting thing of, kind of across all computers right now. There are video cards that are good for different workloads. There are CPUs that are, are good for vastly different. I mean, storage, you just want fast storage, but you know, there's always that, that trade off between speed and size. You know, there's, there are a lot of trade offs with, with. Computers. And so, yeah, and within the Mac Pro, yeah, I could definitely see a whole bunch of different specs for very different use cases.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Here's my question of the like, the true pros that we are like talking about here. How many of them, what percentage are just looking at the base $6,000 spec being, yep, that's what I need. That fits my needs exactly. I don't need to upgrade and maybe I'll upgrade down the line. But like, what percentage of people aren't specking this thing up from the jump to something over $10,000?

• 15:12Speaker 04

  I have to believe that's the largest percentage because all of those people want a $2,000 Mac Pro and they can't. And so now they have to, what is it called? Refinance their home. So they have a Mac Pro.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  So I asked the person in charge of technology at Vox Media Studios to spec one out. Like he would give to one of our company's Netflix productions or PBS production. There's a Hulu deal floating around Vox Media for either TV shows are made in this building is what I'm telling you. We have a post-production studio downstairs. So I asked Marilo Silva, who runs that operation, hey, spec out a Mac Pro. What'd you get? He came back at $11,800, which is not the most. So that's a 3.2 gigahertz, 16 core Xeon W, 96 gigs of RAM. The single Radeon Pro Vega 2 with 32 gigs of memory, a terabyte SSD. And obviously the Magic Mouse 2. I mean, how could you not? And he's like, we don't do anything that would use more cores than that.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  He's like, that's, that's what I'd buy. I asked Grayson, our motion graphics person. He like basically picked the same computer. He's like, I want cooler graphics cards. Two graphics card and he, and he added the Afterburner card because he's curious about it. And that got him to 17K, I think. So at least in the video world where we live, and this is like, we make YouTube videos and like, sometimes we publish them in 4K. So there's that side. And then the TV production that happens at our company. You're looking at 12 to 17, I would say. Above that, I think you have more specialized workflows, you're moving more data, you're doing more stuff. But at least in our zone, it seems like that's the number. I think a lot of people are buying those $6,000 ones just to chain the processors together.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  They don't really need the storage and whatever, but they just need lots of cores and a rack and that's what they're gonna do.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I'm sensing a vibe of outrage coming from you, Paul, because you brought it up a handful of times. I personally am not mad that Apple makes a computer that in order to do what it's designed to do costs somewhere between 12 and 17,000 dollars. The question is, should you be mad about the fact that they don't make that $2,000 computer?

• 17:19Speaker 04

  That's what I'm mad about. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. I do think it's probably overpriced for what you get. And like you, like you just mentioned, Eli, like people would like to be able to put Xeon processors in server racks to do Mac workloads, but they can't because Apple doesn't make that for them. But yeah, I'm not, it's not like this is horrible, but when Apple sat down two years ago and admitted that it had done a bad job for getting to make professional desktop computers, I assumed that they knew that there is a large, I don't know, maybe I'm the crazy one, but I feel like there's a large segment of people

• 18:01Speaker 04

  who get desktops that are around $1,000 to $2,000 that are super effective and do really great work with them. And Apple doesn't believe that that should exist for some reason.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Well, they make the iMac.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  The iMac fills that hole for them.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Badly, poorly.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  In my opinion.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Mac Mini with a Xeon. That's what you're looking for.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  I mean, the Mac Mini is no slouch right anymore, right? They fixed that thing up a bit.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  And I think if all you need to do is put Xeons in a rack, like first of all, why are you, why are you running all of macOS Catalina? With like Siri support and Sidecar? Like that makes no sense.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Because Apple makes it that way. Apple restricts places, for instance, Xcode. If you want to build Apple software, you know, you need to use Xcode.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  But if you are building Apple software at the scale that requires you to put a bunch of servers in a rack to compile.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  A, you're, hopefully you're putting that on your corporate business card because you're not like a single Lone Ranger in the basement. So you're amortizing it over the cost of your business. You're doing all kinds of accounting stuff. And B, like you're probably at the scale where the difference between $2,000 and $6,000 is not enormous to you, especially if it's as performant as Apple says it is.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I mean, it's almost, I don't know how to say reverse everything you said. Like, like right now, I contribute to an open source software project and it does builds across a whole bunch of platforms to, to test it all out. And so it's, it's a very common use case for a lot of, a lot of software and it's happening on, um, and GitHub is doing it now, which is Microsoft. Microsoft is doing like building thousands of software projects repeatedly every single day. And so it, it, it limit, it caps the amount of, of services they can offer people in a sense by gating Macintoshes behind such a high price point.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  I mean, this whole debate aside, because I think we're going to have this debate for another five years because we're not going to get the $2,000 Mac out of them desktop.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  Have you thought about a $2,000 iPad?

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  The fact that the wheels cost 400 bucks and the display, if you get the nano coating on the display, you are not allowed to use anything other than the very special microfiber cloth that they provide because it might damage the, the nano finish on the, the XDR display is just like, Apple knows, right? Like,

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  I know.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Take the worst stereotypes that we have of Apple charging too much for stuff and they're, and instead of like trying to like talk us out of it or whatever, they're like, nope, the stand costs a thousand dollars. Don't touch the screen with a, with a piece of paper or Kleenex. Don't, uh, don't, you know, don't, don't buy a skateboard, buy a $400 wheels, right? Like they know.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  I have thoroughly enjoyed the cottage industry of people who are like, well, if you are a professional color grader, it doesn't matter because Pixar will just pay the money and like, A, I'm 100% certain that's true. It's probably true, but like it doesn't change the fact that most people react to a thousand dollar monitor stand the same way. Like no matter who they are, where they're situated in life. Like you could roll up to Bob Iger, CEO of Disney and be like, this monitor stand costs a thousand dollars. And he'd be like, that's a lot of money. Like, it's just the first thing he would say. Because it's just such an enormous amount of money. Or if you'd be like, I don't know.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  No, I got it. From now on, instead of asking presidential candidates what the cost of a gallon of milk is, we should ask them how much a monitor stand should cost.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. Pete, are you aware of the Pro Display XDR? Uh, cause I have a question about the nano coding for you, sir. Do you support single cloth cleaning only? Uh, that's great. We're going to get Pete on the Vergecast and we're only going to ask you about Mac hardware specs and maintenance.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  It's gonna be great.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited to like get the display in our hands. I'm excited to get the, like I said, we're gonna get this stuff, we're gonna review it. My idea for reviewing it, like I said, we do have all these folks in our building who do things and make things, is to, to let them at it a little bit and see what that's like. I think we can be a little bit more expansive with this review. We gotta get one. It's the holidays. I suspect we will not have a review of this thing until sometime next year, but I'm very excited about it. And Paul, just to counter what you're saying, I think it is very exciting for Apple to be in this market, to want to win in this market, to have a super high profile product that people have been waiting for a long time, that I don't, I think that they'd know that it can't fail.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  The worst thing that could happen to Apple at this moment is the Mac Pro doing badly. Right? Not the worst. The worst thing is like the tariffs, that there's no trade deal and the tariffs go up and the iPhones cost a hundred, that's the worst thing that could happen to them. But the worst thing that could happen with their rep, with developers, with designers, the video people, with all the people that are trying to court and keep on their team. Is that this product costs too much for what it can deliver? Or it doesn't work? Or it's a ridiculous cooling fan that was modded after car tires, or whatever they said at Popular Mechanics, is like, it's actually really loud and it like causes dogs to rush into your home. Like, those would all be catastrophic, right? I don't think it's gonna be that. And I actually, the more I think about the top end price, and I hear like, yes, you can build your own thing. That top end price is reasonable against the top end prices

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  of other vendors who compete in the same space, right? It's not reasonable against you yourself building a thing, but it's reasonable against you're gonna go to HP, and they're gonna spec you out a Xeon server, and they're gonna provide support and experience to you over the lifetime of that product. Like, that's what Apple will probably do for you if you send $52,000 on a computer. They do have their pro workflow team. They do have all this experience next to it. You can trust them. The thing is probably well engineered. The power supply probably is matched properly to the video cards. Like, that little thing that you're buying extra probably costs more than the home-built one. The question is, is it better materially than the other commercial ones? I don't know the answer to that question. But I think it's great that Apple's in the space. I think it, how many times have we talked about this?

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's wild that the App Store is the moat for iOS and the iPhone and the iPad. And it's developers who are like, where's the computer to make the stuff on that I need? And they haven't provided that solution. Now they have. Are those people all still just gonna buy MacBook Pros? Or else, I think this thing costs so much money. But I'm happy that they're in the zone. I'm happy they made this object. I'm very curious to get our answer on. I also really want that display. Like, I'm a display nerd and they made the craziest display? Like, yeah, give it to me.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  The joke on the Swift programming language subreddit was something like, "I maxed out all the specs. Will this be enough to run Xcode?" And someone said, "Yes, but you'll need to double the RAM if you wanna run Chrome as well."

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. Can we talk about the Logitech $200 webcam for the display? It's so ugly. So the display costs $5,000. The stand costs $1,000. If you want a webcam, you got a little magnet and $200 webcam on top. Which I love. I actually love the idea that this monitor doesn't have a webcam built into it. But I love more that Logitech, dear sweet Logitech, saw a market opportunity to put a $200 magnetic webcam on top of this thing. Remember the, what was it called? The i, was it called the iCam? Oh, you're talking about iSight. iSight. That thing was sick. That thing was badass. It was badass because webcams at that time, to run them for a long time, they generated a lot of heat. So it needed to be an aluminum tube with fins in the inside and holes in the outside. Yeah.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Incredible.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  It's the cheese grater of camera. It still looks beautiful.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, Apple's stuff from that period of time, the Steve Jobs plus Johnny Ive era, is the most beautiful stuff they've ever made. This thing is but homage to that time. I agree with that. Yeah, that, that moment when the consumer stuff was all candy colored plastic and the pro stuff was all stainless steel and they hadn't yet just sort of made everything the same, easily the most beautiful stuff. I think Walt just tweeted a picture of like his first iBook or whatever, like the blue one, the clamshell blue iBeck. That thing was great.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  It was so ridiculous and so underpowered and it had an eight by six screen and like, it was still great. There's some other Apple stuff to talk through. There's a rumor that they're gonna put out a phone without any ports in 2021. I just, I get, I can't, I don't, come on. Here's what I got for you. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna play the, I'm gonna play this game with you. The iPhone does not need a data port. Agreed.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  Done, your honor. We will be submitting our documents in full.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  When is the last time, I mean, Neel, you're a maniac, so don't answer this because you never do this, but you're in your car, just pull over, pick up your phone, look at it and think to yourself, when was the last time I was doing this thing I'm doing right now, holding my phone and I had it plugged in because I wanted to charge it whilst I used it? Oh, you did it all the time? Yeah. Explain to me how that works in a portless world. You uh, you clip a wireless battery on the back. Well, you think that Mophie can't figure that out?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And so you're gonna, you're gonna carry around a giant wireless charging pad with you?

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I carry one around for my watch.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  I mean, that's just bonkers.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  A perfectly sized circular coil that goes on the back of the iPhone.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  Instead of a USB or lightning connector. Like honestly, what is the difference?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, so why not just use pogo pins then?

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  No, cuz then, well, I got a Johnny Ive, so whoever's left will be very unhappy. Uh, cuz you don't need them, cuz you don't need data transfer.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the, the, you could do data transfer wireless, USB wireless at that close of connection, by the way. Um, but the charging speed is not great, and as soon as there's not a physical connection, you lose charging speed.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  Just picture this, Phil Schiller's on a stage, and he's like, "Look, every night I walk out of this circle and I walk towards my car, and I think to myself, it's a little chilly outside. That's why our new charger gets dangerously hot while it wirelessly charges your phone." No one of the issues ever thought of this before. Other folks, they're playing it safe. Apple, risks. Look, they can probably, look, they didn't do it right with AirPower. They can probably run it a little hotter than the standard, right? That's the thing they wanna do with cheese, improve it.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I bet, if they can get an efficient, I'm making this argument because I think this idea is horrible, uh, but I need to practice.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're already behind what Android phones allow on wireless charging. Like, you can, you can turn up the wattage on wireless charging for Android phones, much higher than Apple currently allows. Not much higher, but like higher.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like 7.5 versus 10.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  How fast does a 10-watt charger charge?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Uh, a hell of a lot slower than the like 45-watt charger I can charge my iPhone with right now with a cable. Like, come on!

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if you accept, and I sadly accept, that there's no need for data transfer to and from an iPhone anymore.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Hmm, I actually don't fully accept that because especially if you wanna use your iPhone as like your computer, uh, you wanna plug stuff into it. Like, you can't plug a microphone into an iPhone without a cable.

• 29:19Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard about the iPad Pro?

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  There's a USB-C port, that should be your laptop now, and that's who you are.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  Look, you're right. I just don't think there's like a great lightning ecosystem out there that anybody gives a shit about.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Okay. I mean, I think that there is for music. I think there is, they, there are, there are a handful of shits given for music accessories that use lightning.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, fair.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  But those should be USB-C.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  But then there's, there're gonna be no port at all.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  What if the iPhone Pro has USB-C and then I, this is the comp, the great compromise is the iPhone Pro gets USB-C, but the iPhone loses all ports?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Would you make that trade to have a world where the iPhone Pro has USB-C?

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Ooh, maybe, maybe, maybe I'd make that trade. But nobody would buy the iPhone without a cable, without a port.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  They would just ship a cord with USB-A at one end, almost certainly, and then like a little circle magnet thing.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Little puck?

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  On the other end.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  I think that, I think that little circle will be bigger than you want it to be. Like, it needs to be, like, like, not quite coaster-sized, but it needs to be fairly large to get any kind of, like, wattage through it.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's just gonna keep you and your loved ones warm. You're gonna really like it. We promise you. Uh, that's a rumor. I would say it's 50/50 shot.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  I just wanted to make the case, because it's fun to make the case.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  I'm just trying not to get prematurely mad, in case it's not true.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  In other iOS port news, huh?

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  Do you like my, uh, my local news segue?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  Lightroom, after all of this time.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  Can now directly import a photo on the iPad.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  2019, baby.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  Took just 45 years of people wondering what the hell was going on. Uh, one, I would say, uh, spicy review video from us. One entire change to philosophy about the iPad from Apple, and then two more years from Adobe.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:13Nilay Patel?

  But they got there, and you can now do it. I've done it. I've imported a JPG, my friends.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  How'd it feel?

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was everything. It's also the most intensely revealing thing about how frustrating it has been to use an iPad this entire time.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  Because you do it, and you're like, why is this a news cycle? This is just how it should have worked the whole time.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  And then my last favorite one, there's a Swiss TV company out there. That inside a cable box that ships Apple TVs. Which is great. Yeah, that makes sense, which is should do. Um, but so many people were confused by the Apple TV remote that they worked with Apple to make their own remote with a D-pad. That is big and has like buttons.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  And a power button.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Have power button, volume, the whole thing. I want one real bad. I want one real bad.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  You, you need to start a daily newsletter, subscribe to command line, the verge.com/newsletters, because a reader has replied to me and said, I'm going to Switzerland and I'm going to go to one of these, uh, cable stores from this, uh, Swiss cable company. And, uh, see if I can buy the remote. And if I can, do you want me to buy you one? And I said, yes, I will pay triple. Cause I want one so bad.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, every attempt to reinvent the remote control involves a retreat to adding a power button and a D-pad. Doesn't matter who you are. Doesn't matter what you make. Doesn't matter if you pay Jennifer Aniston to make TV shows for you.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Amazon included the power button, but they didn't include, I think, volume buttons for a while. And so they had to retreat and like put those back on.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I think the, the big, the big thing for most of those companies, Roku didn't have power volume for a long time. And then they sort of like added them on the side of the remote. To confuse people the most is all of these boxes used to be like the third box. And so I think there was an assumption that you would end up with a universal remote or something else along the way, or you just like have five remotes. Cause you needed five remotes, cause you had a cable box remote and that was doing volume power for you. Now they're the primary box and I, I don't think they've contended with that. And then reinventing navigation, like I have an LG OLED TV that does like the wavy mouse. Which is fun to a point.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you actually use the wavy mouse?

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  I try every time.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Really?

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Every time.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  It's been like two years you've had this thing.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you pick it up and you're like, there's that mouse cursor and you're like, remember that CES where they told us about Bean Bird, their helpful setup assistant that people would come to love it? Yeah. They, they don't talk about Bean Bird so much anymore. Uh, it's like there and it works for some things and for other things. And it's just like, just the D-pad's fine. My Sony TV has a very slow D-pad situation. You're like, this is, you know what? This is what I deserve. I run Android on this TV and this is who I am.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to talk about this Rewound app? Wrap up this Apple situation?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  So there's a Rewound app that it accesses your music library and it, the interface just looks like an old school iPod. But what's fascinating is when you go to install it from the App Store, it asks you, what kind of interface do you want? And it has like a really boring button interface, which is, you know, completely legal. And like, but if you want, you could like go on Twitter and search. And then if somebody happens to have used this hashtag, you'll be able to download a PNG from Twitter and then use that as the skin on this music player, like we're shipping Winamp in 2003. And then if you do that, then you can make it look and act just like an iPod.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And it is deeply fascinating to me that Apple let this thing, which is clearly designed, 100% designed to make you, give you a thing that feels like Apple's interface that it still obviously has like design patents on or something. And they just, they let it on the App Store because it has this one extra step of, you gotta go like download it, download the skin from the internet.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's probably because like Phil Schiller himself wanted it.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  You think so?

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, well, you got two things. One, it's nostalgic. It still streams Apple Music. They're still paying artists, you know, 0.04 cents a stream or whatever.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, that's fine. It's not replacing your phone. It's just another app on your phone. There's not like some iPod business for them to save. And it makes everybody feel happy. And on top of it, extremely clever way around the rules. Again, in Apple's DNA, I mean, this is like the company that started out making blue boxes together. So they're probably like a little, we love a little hacker spirit.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  No, they don't.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  No, they make a credit card with Goldman Sachs now. They fully do not love Hacker Spirit anymore.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  Do you give Apple credit for allowing someone to cleverly circumvent their rules and not cracking down on them, or do you just be mad at Apple that it's this difficult to get around there?

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  This is where we are with the platforms in our lives, with the monopolies that control America. We give them credit when they're like, "We've looked the other way to do this very obvious thing that most people should be able to do."

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Having used the Rewind app for a day or so, I will say two things. One, I don't think the physics on the scroll wheel are exactly right yet. It's like a little bit too slow when you try and go fast. Two, when you're on a long list of songs or artists, the scroll wheel is still far superior to swipe scrolling.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  If you want to get down to the bottom of something big and long, the wheel is way faster and more satisfying.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  A scroll wheel is like a quarter turn or a half turn and you're at full speed, where you've got kind of like a couple of upswipes to get to full speed on a traditional UI?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  But then you gotta, you gotta keep doing it. And so it's like, it just feels swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Whereas with scroll, you just go, go, go, go, go. Now, there's like, there's obviously benefits to the touchscreen. I don't need to talk about this. But like, you know, you get like letters, you get things to pop up, you get like little scrollbars. Like you can get a scrollbar that you can grab and drag to go fast. There's other ways to do it. But man, they nailed the scroll wheel back in the day. And I miss it.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Need I remind you, though, when Apple introduced the Apple Watch, they were like, "We've invented several ways to manipulate a computer in our time." And they're like, "The mouse and keyboard." They were like, "The touchscreen, multi-touch." And then they were like, "The scroll wheel." And they put them on the screen, Tim Cook gazed upon them, and everyone was like, "Yep, those are the three things you invented. They were awesome." And then he was like, "The digital crown." Then the industry continues to be silent in even attempting to clone the digital crown.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  That's how you know they didn't get it. When literally no one, there's not even like one bad Chinese smartwatch clone of the Apple Watch that like, really tries to have a digital crown.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Uh, there are some Wear OS devices that have like a crown that like does some scrolling. They just, they do feel like garbage. Like the digital crown does feel better. But I still prefer Samsung's bezel.

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  So we're gonna break for an ad, and then we'll come back and have 30 minutes of digital crown apologies from Dieter Bodden. It's gonna be great.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Here we go.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  No, we're gonna talk about the gadgets of the decade. We'll be right back.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 38:43Speaker 06

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 38:53Speaker 07

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. So I was, before we started the show, I was explaining to Paul how we ranked 100 gadgets for a decade. And by the way, all credit goes to Jake Kastenakis, who is the editor of this project. He wrangled our entire staff to write little 200-word stories about gadgets. And like, more importantly, he wrangled our feelings about this because like, we, so many of them, it was a lot. So here's how, I'm gonna be totally transparent with you. Here's how we ranked the gadgets. We yelled at each other for five hours on one day. And then we yelled at each other with software for three hours the next day. This is 100% true. So we, we had the list. The list, the original list was far longer than 100. I think we were at like 135 or something.

• 39:59Nilay Patel?

  We, we pulled out a bunch of them that were like, obviously not important. But we needed a big list. Then we kind of like, subjectively did the top 10, I would say. We kind of knew like, there has to be an iPhone in the top 10. We think the Tesla Model S belongs in the top 10. So we kind of know it belongs here. Then for the rest, we, it was me, Dieter, Dan and Jake. We put all the gadgets in a list and then we all quietly gave them scores from what, zero to nine? Right?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  And then we summed the four and that tiered them all into a thing. And then Dieter, I still don't believe that it was this simple. He somehow took the CSV out of that spreadsheet and put it into Asana.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  I didn't even need the CSV, I just copied and pasted into Asana.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  You should make it sound more complicated. You should be like, I waved an incantation.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Blah.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  Software did its magic. And then, and this is what Asana is truly not designed to do. It is have four people on four different computers move cards around. It, Asana did not like this. So then we had tiers of each 10 and then we like argued about the cards. It, it took a long time. Let's talk about the most controversial decision we made.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Well, so before we even get there, I do want to point out that there was a big debate. Are these the best of the decade? Are these the most important? What are they? And we intentionally call it just gadgets of the decade because it's a little bit of a mix of those two things. But to me, the answer to what is this list? It's like, it's the list of like definitional gadgets. If you want to have a whole picture of what the hell happened in gadget world in the 2010s, these are the ones you need to know. These are the ones that were either the most influential or just like the biggest moments. Like they define what gadgets were in the past 10 years.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  And it's a little fuzzy, but fuzzy for a reason.

• 41:49Nilay Patel?

  They're the ones we think about. Like here's, you know, a hundred years from now, someone's like, give me a list of a hundred gadgets. This, it's this list. Keep that in mind, future generations. When you listen to this podcast, pull over in your space mobile. That was a joke about future.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I got it.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  Thank you, Dieter. I appreciate you. Paul has remained very silent.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  It's a quiet chuckle.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so it was obvious we're going to put the iPhone at the top spot. It was obvious to me that it should be the four. We didn't put the five there, even though the five had LTE, but the four had all the features and the legal controversy associated with it and antenna gate. And like a Steve Jobs moment, it's gotta be the four.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Well, it was the glass sandwich. That was the thing that sold me on it.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  On this topic, I, I, I agree with, as far as a pivotal moment for phone design. But.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Best iPhone is the five, right?

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Hmm, the four is, I think, more beautiful than the five. We could do this for like five.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Alright, well, I was just putting it out there. I think the five is more beautiful than the four.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  Yes, this was the argument that we had, right? Is it the four or the five in this spot? Whatever, the four and its associated controversies. And the fact that it was like a Steve Jobs reveal and a Steve Jobs controversy.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  That you gotta, you gotta give it the top spot.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  And I think the rest are pretty defensible. And then the one, if you look, it is very obvious the iPod is not, it was very obvious the iPad is not in the top 10, it is at number 11. And it's specifically the iPad Air.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  Not the first gen iPad.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Lot of fights about this, actually.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  I think Dieter just had a crisis of conscience before he came on there. He was like, we should have put it higher. I absolutely think that we were correct to put the Air, specifically the Air at 11. I think we probably could have put the original iPad way higher. I'm, I remain fine where it is, but I'm very confident the Air at 11 is correct. Here, here are my two, here's my argument. Oh, this whole thing is about making cases for gadgets to be in completely arbitrary places in this. If there's a more verge activity, I don't know what is. The iPad is, is important conceptually. Things like iPads are everywhere.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 43:59Speaker 03

  But we didn't wanna, we didn't wanna put concepts on this list, mostly.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there are some, there are some concepts on this, but they're more the exception than the rule. But the iPad as a product, if you just look at what is the most influential iPad, what is the one that iPads still look like the most, it's the iPad Air. Right? It's that one. It's the, the 329 base model iPad that they sell the most of is still basically the iPad Air. Like, sometimes it gets thinner, sometimes it gets thicker, sometimes the screen is laminated, sometimes it's not like, it's still the iPad Air. Like, the basic thing of the iPad is still the iPad Air. So that's the one that set the course for the iPad this decade. The iPad Pro before this last generation was like an iPad Air with a smart connector. In a flippy case, like that's the thing that made the iPad. Did the iPad have the impact, cultural impact of AirPods?

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  I would like absolutely say no, like the iPad is not a meme in that way. Like it's just outside the top 10 is my argument. It's like, it's so close to knocking on the door, but like it didn't do it. It never did the thing that Apple said it was gonna do. For 10 years, they've been saying, this is the future of computing. And for 10 years, people are like, this is pretty good for my email, but I can't import a JPEG. Right? And so like they're now, like now, maybe. Whereas with my AirPods, I get all sorts of things done. No, but AirPods are like everywhere, like they, they like exploded into the cultural consciousness.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  I was like, in 2047, what will matter more? What will, when we look back upon this era, I think the iPad, the iPad deserves to be ranked higher than AirPods. And I think that it may be that I'm wrong and AirPods will continue to be as culturally important in five years as they are today. I think AirPods are more culturally important today in this moment than, than the iPad. Uh, but I don't think that they will have the staying power in terms of their cultural importance that the iPad will have. So they, they got a big spike right now, but I think that's gonna, it's gonna settle down. Whereas the iPad has a slow and steady growth.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  And what timeline do you gauge importance? And I would say in, for a list of the decade, it's just the decade. By the way, if you'd like, if you'd like a little window into what this was like for five hours.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Neel is also the editor in chief and I'm just the executive editor and so.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  No, we made cases. There were, there are only, the only one, uh, and actually I lost my biggest fight. Yeah, like hardcore renegade lost my biggest fight. Uh, there are plenty, there, I think the only one that I insisted that we do it the way we do it was shitbox Dell Chromebook.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  That was my idea.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  It was your idea, but I insisted that that be the title. That was the only, I think that was the only.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  I didn't want to call it a shit box, but you went for it, so.

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  Ah, and it's the one that's like the most popular on the trend list. Okay, so Paul, you've heard the two cases.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  What do you think?

• 46:45Speaker 04

  I have, I have a hard time ever saying, like, here's my definitive opinion about anything.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  Can I explain one more thing? The Pixel 2 is higher than it, right, a 10. And the reason why is because the entire computational photography moment that redefined how we think about phones taking photos happened with that phone. Also, it was like, it was the Google phone for me. Like, it was, it was the one where Google was like, we're in the game. They didn't obviously succeed at being in the game, but like, but I think that the technology in that has longer repercussions, right? So the argument is like, I wanted to keep it just out, right? Based on Apple's promises versus delivery. And I, the Pixel 2 had this core technology that, like, literally over the past three or four years has like changed how we think about photos. So that, that's the argument there. Oh, and the Surface, sorry.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm just thinking about all the tweets that came at me and it's all in my brain. Uh, and why is the Surface Pro 3 as high? Two reasons. One, the Surface line effectively rescued Windows.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  That's like a pretty huge accomplishment. And two, more things, including the iPad, look like the Surface Pro 3 than look like the iPad.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's, it's insistence on that form factor and the, and the flippiness and the keyboard and, and the stuff, like, the iPad became more like the Surface Pro 3 than the Surface Pro 3 became like the iPad.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Yep, that's true. That's mostly because Microsoft doesn't know how to like make software with this.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's like reasons for everything.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 04

  So I wasn't in this whole, whole conversation. So when I saw list of the best gadgets, or the gadgets of the decade, the thing that came popped into my mind is like, what felt the most futuristic? And what did I not really expect in 2009?

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  And I remember. I don't know, I might be completely contradicting myself of what I said back in the day, but I remember just not being sure what an iPad was good for. And that has been true for most of this decade. But this, literally this year, and this might be recency bias, but like in the past couple of months, I've gotten very into iPad music.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  And like, the way I've used the iPad most of the time I've had iPads is with physical keyboards. I even, with my first iPad, I got that dock that you could, like, it was a keyboard with the 30 pin connector or whatever, and you dock your iPad into it. It was awful.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I had that.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  But this is, this past couple of months is the first time I've started, I, I hold my iPad in one hand, no case on it, no keyboard on it. I walk around and I can create music. And, and it has, and also, it's really weird to me because it's mostly based on all of these, all this software that's really skeuomorphic, like all these, like modeled synthesizers, like they're skeuomorphic aesthetically and internally. It was one of the best technology feelings that I've had this decade. It just felt so good and so cool and so futuristic. And I did, I didn't see it coming.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  I don't know that it's had, yeah, as far as impact, like it maybe hasn't had nearly as strong of an impact, obviously, as something like the iPhone 4. But it's something that felt like the most wow gadget of the decade. It's my, whatever, I, I don't know which iPad it is.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  The concept of the iPad.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  The iPad Pro that's 64-bit and fast enough to run like seven synthesizers and a bunch of effects at the same time.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  So I think what you're describing there, and I think the reason, again, that like, you kick it to 11 and not 10, is I can tell you how a bunch of consumer behaviors changed around the phone. In fact, that is mostly what we talk about on this show, is like consumer behaviors in the phone and how they interact. Like, everything in the world changed around the phone. I can tell you how computational photography and HDR systems changed how people take photos. I just tell you, like, it did. We talk about that a lot, too.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  I can, for most of the items on our list, I can tell you how the, how people's conception of a car changed around the Tesla Model S. Specifically, the Model S, not the Model 3, right? Like, the Model S came out as a phenomenon, and it was a status symbol, it was electric. The world sort of moved itself around it. I kinda cannot tell you that about the iPad. I can, I can tell you a lot of things that happened, right? But like, this like, universal change in behavior around the iPad is like, it's still not quite there. It's like, it's always been just out of reach.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  And I think, I think it makes the iPad a little more Tesla than some of those other things, because in a sense, when the iPad works really well, it's like, oh, this is where the puck is going, you know?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  It feels-

• 51:40Speaker 03

  And that's what you're describing with music, right?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But I, I recognize that this is a very niche thing and hard, like, it makes me wish, like, why isn't text editing more like iPad synthesis, you know?

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  Well, I don't have audio unit plugins for text or something.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  All right. So we don't argue at every single spot and recapitulate our entire 10 hours of argument. Everybody pick one thing from the list that they like have a special feeling for. So I'll go first. Number 20, I think this is the exact right spot for it, the Juul.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  I think, in terms of cultural influence, in terms of a technology product that literally is like a drug delivery vehicle, like, phones might, like, you know, hack our brains and the phone addiction is like, the science is out or whatever, but like, the, the science on nicotine addiction is very clear. And we made a gadget that delivers it, and it completely changed the way that a whole lot of people take in nicotine, and it became just, especially in this moment right now, the rise of teen vaping and like, the percent of high school seniors who have tried a vape in the last month is just shooting up, it's doubling year over year. The Juul is at least a number 20 in terms of influence of gadgets this decade.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Just go, just going off of TikTok alone, I would say I've seen as many jokes and memes about Juuls as I have about AirPods.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. AirPods also deliver nicotine directly into your brain. It's a little known fact, and I didn't want to say it until now. That's true. Uh, but it's out. No, that's pure misinformation. Please don't repeat that. Please do not tell your parents that information. They will definitely believe you. Well, I still have two. Can I have two? Fine. Well, it's one, mine got knocked off. Oh, okay, yeah. So they're the same one. So at 91, Nat Garen put the Dyson Supersonic in. Yep. And she rogue deleted mine, which was the Chromebook Pixel. Yeah, which Everyone agreed with. Just like, flatly, everyone agreed with. So I think she was correct in the end. The Dyson Supersonic is a $400 hairdryer. In itself was a meme. Friend of the verge, Helen Rosner, who writes about food at The New Yorker, we wrote about this.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  But she tweeted during like a snowstorm that she was drying the skin of a chicken with a Dyson Supersonic and became this like insane meme. Where she thought she was cooking the chicken with a hairdryer and then we were, whatever. But like, it's a hairdryer that was a meme. It's also like re-engineered this product. Created this ripple effect. So Nat was correct. And made her make the case to me, like, I pushed her to make a very strong case. She made a very strong case. Fine. She, everyone won. The Chromebook Pixel. Yeah. Is still one of my favorite products of this decade. It was a, it, I bought one for my mother. It is a $1,000 computer that just runs Chrome. Yep. If there is a more, and it's beautiful, and it's well engineered, and it looks cool as hell. It has a beautiful screen, it has touchscreen, the whole thing.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  If there was a moment, when like, maybe the whole internet was gonna go different. It was when Google made a $1,000 computer that just ran Chrome. When they're like, you don't need a laptop that can do other things. Yeah. You need a computer that's as powerful, like the one I bought my mom has an I7 in it. It's ridiculous. It's insane. Um, but you need a computer that's as powerful as any Windows or Mac laptop, as well engineered. It costs $1,000 and all it can do is run this web browser. Like, that was just a, it was like an inflection point in the entire industry, that they thought that that would work. It did not work. Just to be very clear. But they thought desktop computing will persist such that people will, and like, succeed.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Such that people will buy a thousand dollar computer that just runs Chrome. I gotta tell you, I kinda wish it had worked. Maybe that's why I'm so fond of it. But that to me is like a moment that I could not, I'm still not making a good enough case for it. It was the one I wanted on the list. I couldn't quite get it. But it's a thing I think about every day that we talk about whether or not social media apps with algorithmically determined feeds will just sort of destroy the web and everything we hold dear.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  There was a time when just like a thousand dollar computer that just ran a web browser was a good idea. That's my story of the 2010s. We'll see what happens in the 2020s.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  Remember, Google used to do like these really proprietary wild plugins to support some of its services and then it started slowly killed them off and then completely deprecated that. Was that, was that pre or post Chromebook Pixel?

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, pre, I think. Yeah. They all swirling around, but yeah. They stopped doing that. Um, the other one I just want to point out, uh, we put it on the list to confuse people was the Toyota Camry. Here's why. This was the decade where you could push a button on your phone and a Toyota Camry would appear.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  That's remarkable. Like if you live in New York City, you can summon a Toyota Camry anytime you want. That was not possible before.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  You mean like Uber and Lyft?

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  Uber and Lyft. And it, it became, it's the commodity engine of ride sharing.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  I get it.

• 56:36Nilay Patel?

  And it is like Uber and Toyota have a partnership and like I said, there's reasons for it. But it is, it is the, the hardware instantiation of Uber. Obviously there's drivers, like let's not forget them. But it is such a remarkable, people did not have a relationship with a model of car in that way before. That's why it's on the list. What's your favorite, Paul?

• 56:57Speaker 04

  I, I really, uh, not my favorite gadget, but my just thing on this list, the, the Kinect has so much meaning for me.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  Ah, yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  Especially because it was one of my, my biggest, most wrongs ever, where I doubted the PS4 because it wouldn't have bundled motion controls. And I thought that because Microsoft was betting on guaranteed Kinect, cause obviously you don't get motion controls unless every console ships with them, right?

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Um, I thought Microsoft, I just, I thought it was the future. So with the Xbox One, that the Kinect would, being bundled, it would be a big deal. And because it was so much higher fidelity than the Xbox 360 version. And it was just. And it's still like, I have an Oculus and I hardly use it because it's just standing up and moving your arms is too much work when you're playing a video game. And I wish that wasn't true. I'm reading like a novel where this guy's in MMO, but he, the VR capsule, you just lay down. Like, that's what it should be. And so I love motion controls conceptually

• 58:08Speaker 04

  so much. I wrote a whole essay how, you know, like this idea of capturing a higher amount of bandwidth from the user. Instead of, you know, if you think a mouse is just a click and, you know, movement on the X, Y plane, you know, but analog input of your whole body could be so much more interesting, but it wasn't.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, the, the Kinect also was, you know, it was the fastest selling something, something ever when it first came out. And it, it had such a trajectory. And doctors were using it and telemedicine and all this stuff was happening. And it was like, wow, they, they made a new thing. This is going to be a part of our computing lives. And like, this first thing is really, really interesting. And clearly, this is just going to keep on getting bigger and more important over time. And then like, three years in, just, yeah.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. One, it did change robotics forever.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  This sensor technology and making it a commodity did change robotics. Two, Microsoft did a terrible job of coming up with games for it. And, and they didn't ever make a good Wii Sports. And, and three, the thing I already said about standing up and moving around.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  By the way, that tech in the first Kinect is now Face ID, right?

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Partially, yeah.

• 59:28Nilay Patel?

  So it got there. But it's like a classic example of like, something is so big at one point in time that you just assume that it will persist.

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Always be, yeah.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  I just searched for this. This is 2009, so it doesn't count. But, um, there's a New York Times review of Beatles Rock Band.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 59:44Nilay Patel?

  Plastic rock band games. And it's so long. And it's like such a deep dive in how they make rock band. And it ends, like, they interview McCartney and Ringo Starr, and it ends with, in 10 years' time, you'll be standing there and you will be Paul McCartney. You'll be a holographic case and it will case you and you will be Paul McCartney. It's like, no, that didn't happen at all. Like, Beatles Rock Band did not portend that future at all. Like, I'm standing here in 2019, and I can tell you that no one is Paul McCartney, except for actual Paul McCartney.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  Anyway. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back. We gotta talk about this Twitter, this Twitter protocol thing.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.

• 1:01:10Speaker 07

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had: impressions.

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller, every week. That's right. Our nation held together. Mm-hmm. By the tenuous thread called... Web-Authen, oh yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  So, I discovered... If anything holds people together, it's, it's Web-Authen.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Web-Authen, which is like a shortened way to say web authentication, which is a new...

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  I mean, 2018, but I'm just finding out about this like new standard for web authentication with uses public key cryptography that that my news peg for this is iOS 13.3 is gonna support security keys.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's there, it's out, but Google doesn't support Safari yet for Google to factor. And so a but and like a bunch of Safari stuff, which is as it works. Like you could use it with like some apps, but it's pointless to me now. Anyway, continue.

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  There's so much to learn about web authent like the idea would be that you could log into something and it would say, okay, just insert your security key and insert it or, you know, use your fingerprint or use Windows Hello or whatever. You can log into things with just the security code or just the security key or just your fingerprint or just your face or something like that. And what's cool about web authent is that it portends an end of the password. So anyway, I think people should check it out. I only just heard about it. It's really exciting. It doesn't just it. It's obviously designed with security keys in mind, but it also like I logged into something using my phone and my fingerprint

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  the other day. And it was pretty, it was pretty magical that they don't have my email address. I didn't have to remember a password. And I feel like that's the wave of the future. It's very exciting.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Well, and like all web standards, everyone's going to agree on it, implement it really quickly and everything will support it right away.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  It's just around the corner.

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  There you go. There you go.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter Bohn. In a surprise tweet storm, Jack Dorsey announced that he was forming an elite team called Blue Sky.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Five people.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Five people to create a protocol upon which Twitter could be a mere client.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  I would say the reason I started this by saying, Dieter Bohn.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Is because the web people got very mad.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  And when I need to understand why the web people are mad, I turn to you, my friend, Dieter Bohn.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  So I cannot speak for all web people. I did not.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  The web or the people that persist on it. So if you're not familiar, like basically Dorsey's whole thing is like, look, like there's SMTP for email, there's HTTP for webpages, like there should be like it's a standard. And the way people got mad because one, of course, there's a standard, there's like five, what about Mastodon, what about web pub sub hub, bub, bub, bub, bub, bub, bub, bub, and like all these other things that are out there. So how dare you just ignore all of the work that we've been doing? You're just trying to create a thing that Twitter is secretly going to control anyway. And that's fair anger to have, but also this thing is so far from being a thing that it's like, it's, I'm not saying don't prejudge it, but I'm saying don't prejudge it.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  I'm saying like, find out what they're do before anything happens, right? So that's one. I think some of that anger is premature, but I, and I, why is everybody actually angry? And I think it's because we never got closure from when Twitter first started screwing everything up. When Dick Costolo, the former CEO, came over from Google, Casey's made this point a couple of times, he's like, well, we gotta make money. I make money off ads, that's why you hired me. And the way you make money on ads on a social network is you lock everything down so everyone has to come to your app and then you put ads on it. So that's what he did. And it just, it killed, they killed off the, you know, the third-party APIs and the, you know, freedom to like download a whole bunch of data really easily.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And all the third-party clients started to wither. But he didn't have the courage to just like kill it hard. It was like, we're gonna shut it down in six months and then maybe we won't and then well, no, we kinda are and then well, maybe some people, and like, it was just this like slow bleeding out. If we had had the moment where they just cut everybody off, we'd all have been angry, we might have all gone to use something else, we would have had this, this furious moment. Instead, we just had this like slow petering out of anger and we just continued to use Twitter because what the hell else are we gonna do? And him saying, you know what? That was all a mistake, we're gonna try, try again and do it the way that you all really wanted us to in the first place.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  It just reopens all of those wounds in a way that like brings anger. And Dorsey's only gesture to this in the tweet storm was quote, "For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path." And it's like, yeah, you did.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  So let me make the argument for shutting, for closing down the API. And for doing it much harder, because it, at the time, it was correct. Like, I just want to say that flat out. It sucked, and I really liked my third-party Twitter clients. Uh, and it was like a design playground, and like, whatever. The reason it was a design playground is because people could try new ways of interactions, and new ways of displaying content. Yep. In a social network, which was like the hot, cool thing. Yep. And they would plug into Twitter, which is where everybody already was. They didn't have to architect a social network, right? Right. And they also didn't have to, like, deal with, you know, Nazis and failure to, like, handle the Nazis. All of that was Twitter's problem. So Twitter had the cost of all the people, they had to keep their servers up, which they were not great at doing for a long time there. Yeah.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  They, we knew about the Nazis, but they weren't, like, the only thing people talked about in terms of content moderation. Mm-hmm. We had not yet descended into total political chaos in Twitter. It was just like the place where all the cool kids were, and you can build, like, a front end to the cool kids, right? Yeah. Okay, that was neat. Twitter itself was a horrible business at that point in time. Yeah. They, they didn't have a business. It was not reasonable to expect that they would become like the monopoly provider of the president's deranged tweets, which is what they currently are. It was reasonable to expect that they would have competition, that they would fail, that they, that other social networks would just eat them. Everyone thought Facebook would eat them. I'm just making a case. Google is maybe gonna buy them for a minute, or we thought they would.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  Disney almost bought them, like, it was, who knew what was gonna happen to Twitter? The business model for most of these networks now is still introducing artificial scarcity through algorithmic display. Right? And that is a long way of saying, they mix up all the tweets and stick some ads in the middle. Right. That's like mostly what, how Twitter makes money. It's how Instagram makes money, it's how Facebook makes money. They take all the content in, they promise you, the user, they will filter it for you and only show you the best, most relevant stuff. And in the middle, you're gonna see the ads that are hyper-targeted to your particular interest, sometimes so well that you believe that they're listening to you. That's the business model of social networks right now. Okay, well, so they did it, and they make a little bit of money, they don't make a lot of money, still not a great business. So if you're Jack Dorsey, you're the CEO, you spend half your time at Square, and then

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  More than half.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna move to Africa sometime this year, and you're like, looking at your like, sort of medium-good public business. Why wouldn't you be like, I'm not gonna be Facebook, I'm not gonna be Instagram, I'm not gonna be YouTube, where they've monetized artificial scarcity in this way? Why wouldn't you just like, swerve the other direction? And say, I don't have a business that can support an army of content moderators in every country in the world. I don't have a business that can reasonably deal with, the President of the United States should be banned under our policy, but we had to create this other policy. Like, I don't have a business that can support new kinds of formats, the way that Instagram

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  could just roll out stories. Like, it's just people tweeting, that's still the thing that it is. And they're gonna roll out, and they rolled out like, higher-res images yesterday, and like, they can sort of like, add to it. The main thing is still the main thing, and it will always be the main thing. Why wouldn't you just go the other way?

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  So, this is, this is, I should have just put this on the website, but it was just in the newsletter. I think that Jack Dorsey's plan is sincere, but it's not serious. I like, I believe him that he's trying to do this thing that like, actually makes sense conceptually. Like, yeah, the way we make money is off of running an algorithm and putting ads in it, we don't actually need to be the person that pulls in all the data, so we're just gonna like, do it, and then once we do it, we can like, actually push even harder in moderation, because there'll be other people that can like, you know, make their whatevers. All of it like, makes sense conceptually, but, you know, why didn't you wait until you would like, hired one of these five people? And the sincerity of it is actually part of the problem, because their answer to that would be, well, you know, we don't want to prejudge, and we want the widest possible, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  It's like, or you just really enjoy being Jack Dorsey public intellectual, who has deep thoughts about how the internet works. That's, that's what he's really doing here.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  Along those lines, Jack Dorsey, not, I don't know, less than six months ago, made a very similar announcement, saying, we're gonna start a thing called Square Crypto, it's gonna be separate from Square, we're going to hire- Open source developers to work on Bitcoin to make Bitcoin better. They don't have any, they're not beholden to Square's bottom line. And he was universally among the Bitcoin community, loved for it. So maybe he just thought he'd have another like, oh, good one, you know? I don't know. But I, I, I like that, like that, I forget, serious, not

• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  Sincere, not serious.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Sincere, not serious. I think is a good, I just, it sounds like something that's totally not going to work. I'm sure he will find a few really great people. I could imagine that, I do want to make it clear because I feel like I saw in his thread and the Blue Sky put it on their Twitter right away. They, they are open to looking at existing open source solutions. The obvious one is, is Activity Pub, which by the way, Mastodon didn't start with Activity Pub. It added that in later. So I could, I could see them adopting something that exists, but it is very hard to imagine. Like, is there any example of somebody making a very successful closed platform? And then making it an open protocol? Like, like I'm sure that this has happened. I've just, nothing is coming to mind.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  Apple promised to do it with Face, FaceTime and iMessage.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  And they never did it, but there was like a patent issue there. They never promised to do it with iMessage, right? No, it was just FaceTime.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Oh, just FaceTime.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  There was some weird patent issue that made them re-architect it. I'm sure our listeners know. Tell us if there's ever been a super successful proprietary thing that turned into a public protocol, like actually let us know because I can't think of one off the top of my head.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  I mean, I was saying this on the show a while ago, like, I like open source decentralized protocols and I really am trying to get myself out of, slowly wean myself off of my dependency on centralized platforms because they're, they're really capricious and they also can like, they're kind of like becoming like the Kraft macaroni and cheese version of everything. Like, like the really cool, if you want to hear weird things or talk to your friends, like you're on Discord or you're on Telegram, you know, you're in smaller groups or on weirder platforms. And then, but because like places like YouTube, you know, there's all this uncertainty like,

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  ah, like I review toys. So now I'm apparently I'm a children's channel. It'll be fun. You know, the, a lot of the centralized platforms create a lot of uncertainty about your permanence and your, your privileges on that platform.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  So the YouTube thing, I don't love defending YouTube. It's not my favorite thing to do. But that specific thing that you're talking about, the uncertainty is created because YouTube has chosen to hide the responsibility from the people, right? So you sign up for YouTube and you expect like, oh, I'm on this platform. It's paying me money. Everything must be on the up and up because it's a big company, right? And so YouTube just like shirked its responsibility because if you are making stuff for kids on the internet, you do have a set of responsibilities, right? And like YouTube either needs to police those responsibilities or it needs to get out of the way and let you feel the consequences of your responsibility and be accountable for them.

• 1:14:01Nilay Patel?

  And they sort of like just put themselves in the middle. And they like took some of their responsibility, not all their responsibility, and they enforced some of the rules. And they changed a bunch of rules this week and like, that is the problem with centralization. It's not that they, it's that the big platforms, the bigger they get, to be fully in control, they would have to do a lot more than they're doing. Or they just need to get completely out of the way and let you, provider of children's videos, be responsible for that thing.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I said they end up like a Kraft macaroni and cheese. They, they, they, they need, at scale, they need to be able to do the exact same thing for everybody. And so it inevitably they have to shave off the rough edges and the weird, the weird edge cases.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I guess I buy it. I just think that the responsibilities of these platforms. Let me put it this way, like Zuckerberg goes in front of Congress or he makes his freedom of speech argument and his thing is like, we have to be this big to secure the election. We have to be this big so the United States can compete with China. And his argument is scale, like pure scale, like Facebook should get bigger is basically what he's saying. It should be bigger and bigger and bigger and we will solve the problem. And we will have enough content moderators and we will have enough engineers on the Instagram team to make cool new experiences and we will have enough AI research and Libra teams to compete with all of China.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  That's his argument. It's like very explicitly his argument. I think Jack is like, I can't get that big, like, I don't even want to be that big. It's too hard.

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  An ideal Twitter, you know, where people are making bespoke tools for using it, you know, like instead, like a lot of people use block lists on Twitter, uh, but you know, you could have a, an algorithm that's just, you could have your own algorithm that you pick that is designed to like, help your mood, you know, like, did you feel good at the end of today? Yes or no? Okay. Well, we'll tweak some things, you know, like I, that's how I've started using social media more of just like, I'll unfollow things if I just, you know, if I'm not feeling good. And so like the personalized tools would, I think, have a way better shot of than Facebook becoming the largest thing in the world, you know, solving the problems of social media.

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  So here's the problem for Twitter becoming the end state. If all goes well, the blue sky team, they figure it out, the Twitter protocol ends up on the blockchain and whatever, it all works. Seems unlikely, but let's say it all works. Isn't Twitter's product just the best Twitter client?

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  At the end of, at the end of all that, aren't they just making the best Twitter client that's the best monetized thing? Like there's an existential threat buried inside of this plan that Jack is not like gesturing at, like, there's a reason Gmail, the service and Gmail, the client get tighter and tighter and tighter. And there's weird Gmail features that are only Gmail features because that keeps people using Gmail.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  But like you can, no one else has built a business of like, Gmail is not a business on the scale of Twitter. Right? Like it just isn't that thing. Gmail doesn't make any money.

• 1:17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  Consumer Gmail makes money.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  It's got ads.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  It's got ads, but like some ads and they don't target it against your email.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:15Nilay Patel?

  But like, it's not business. It's not like a, I mean, Google doesn't tell us.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:17:20Nilay Patel?

  We don't know. But like, but Twitter is a public company, like, in the billions, right?

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  So, but Neel, what you're saying is, yes, an argument against the business Twitter doing this, but it's an argument for anybody in the world wanting to leave Twitter.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 04

  If, given the opportunity and the appropriate set of decentralized, open-source tools, you know, I think people would want to leave Twitter because the alternative is that Twitter can't let them go and has to lock them in and has to increase the shackles to keep them there.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Even if you walk away from the lock-in argument, Twitter just, like, got to hit scale and hit critical mass, you know, before any of these other competitors. And so, Matt Panzarena over at TechCrunch actually had the best comment, I thought, which is, "This actually seems kind of interesting. Lots of people have tried this before, but they all basically failed because Twitter was there." And so, what does it mean then that Twitter itself is trying to do this thing? And we just don't know yet.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that one answer is that we will never know.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the most likely answer.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we've gone way over. I'm glad that we started with, like, a big, silly computer, some wild gadgets, and we, like, ended on, like, a bunch of web stuff. That's like, the full range of nerd stuff that people, I think, come to us for.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:40Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it's almost the end of the year. This is the decade we lost the headphone jack. Just hold that in your heart. If you were alive this decade, you experienced, you know how the people call it the Oregon Trail generation? Like, you experienced life before computers and after computers? All of you experienced life with headphone jacks and now without. And you're gonna tell your, you're gonna tell your kids. I'm gonna try to make it a meme by the end of the year. It's not gonna work, but I'm gonna try. Go with me on this journey. That was the Vergecast.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  Again, no one, no one responds. On Tuesday, we're interviewing Zoe about her amazing away story. That was just a super fun conversation with Zoe. That story's great. Dieter's got a newsletter where he writes his thoughts about the web people.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's at theverge.com/newsletter. It's called Command Line currently, but it may not always be called Command Line.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  Ooh. The new year brings changes. You can tweet at us. If you know an answer to the question of a private protocol or API that turned into a successful public one, let me know. I'm at Reckless, Paul's at FuturePaul, Dieter's at Backlon.

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  Java.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  Java. No, that's going to the Supreme Court, my friend. That's, that's the, the opposite thing happened. Um, and that's it. We'll be back next week. See you then. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code Paul.

• 1:20:08Speaker 08

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 1:20:38Speaker 09

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.