Bonus: Ctrl-Walt-Delete special edition - iMac 20th anniversary

Ctrl-Walt-Delete returns for a special episode all about the iMac 20th anniversary. Walt Mossberg and Nilay Patel reminisce on the introduction of Apple's iMac, and how it influenced the open web and computers going forward. 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.

• 0:09Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Control Alt Delete, a thoroughly retired podcast from The Verge. I am Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. I'm joined, for the first time in quite a while, by my friend Walter S. Mossberg. How you doing, Walt?

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I'm fine for a poor pensioner.

• 0:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sure you're really scraping by.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I'm just a retiree scraping by. And, you know, I've learned a lot about how little you get from social security. Let me just tell you.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so this is in the Vergecast feed, this episode. We're doing it separate from the regular Vergecast, where Walt and I had a show called Control Alt Delete for a while. Walt retired, as you may or may not know, but this is true. This last week was the 20th anniversary of the iMac, and Walt and I got into a pretty friendly spar on Twitter about the success of the iMac and where it came from and what it was doing. And Walt, when you retired, you promised you were gonna pop back around every now and again. And this figured like a great time to have you pop back around. It's also a pretty newsy time in tech. There's developer conferences going on everywhere, so I figured we would just do another little short bonus Control Alt Delete, and hopefully we'll do some more in the future. So, thank you for coming on.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  It sounds great. You're paying me for this, though, right?

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it'll be in your social security check.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, big money, I hope. I mean, you know.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely. So, Walt, so 20th anniversary of the iMac.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  I have your review of the iMac from July 30, 1998, the very first one, the Bondi Blue. I think your opening to this is relatively famous in tech writing. Here's the headline: "Apple Introduces iMac: A Fast and Potent PC." The first lines: "These words are being created on the coolest-looking desktop personal computer I've ever used. It's a handsome, two-tone devil, sort of a blue-green and off-white tapered at the rear with a crisp, built-in 15-inch monitor and internal stereo speakers. It takes up very little space and looks like part of the decor in your home, not an invader from some techie's workshop." That, I think, sums it up. That is how we all think of the iMac in history.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  It's the computer that brought style to the tech industry, that moved computers sort of out of the basement and into the living room, that brought design to the forefront. It was the kickoff of the revitalized Steve Jobs Apple. It certainly, you know, Johnny Ive became a presence in the world because he designed this computer. Is that how you think of it too, or do you think of it bigger?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I agree with all of that. I would go further, you know, lots of people know this and have written it, but some people, some younger listeners may not remember this. It saved the company. You know, it came out 10 months, just 10 months after Steve Jobs had come back to Apple to rescue it. And it's famous among those who are old enough to remember that Apple was, depending on who you believe, it was 60 or 90 days away from having to file bankruptcy when he came back. And, you know, he got, there's a whole long story, it's not worth going into, but he got some kind of temporary bridge money, but

• 3:21Speaker 01

  they obviously had to have a product that was going to be a hit and a success, that was modern and different, and it would stand out from everything else. And so famously, he killed almost every product they had. And they went to work on this, the iMac, a consumer laptop, which came out, which was similarly, you know, was colorful and all that, called the iBook. And then they had a Pro desktop and a Pro laptop. And even the Pro desktop, even though it was a tower, it was also had design applied to it. You know, it was kind of translucent, if I remember, it had those big handles. It was kind of

• 4:03Speaker 01

  cool. But the iMac was the key, it was the start of it. The one thing, looking back on that review now 20 years later, that I wish I had said, that you and I actually were talking about in our Twitter discussion, was that, and we did agree on this, although we, you know, you had to go off on a crusade about the open web, but...

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm here for!

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I know, I understand. And I support the open web. I do, I do support the open web. Happy to talk about it. But, but what I wish I would have put in that review was that this was, I believe it's fair to say that this was the first personal computer built from the ground up for the internet era, for the internet. People, it may sound incredible to people who weren't around them, but if you bought a Windows PC or even a Mac preceding this one, it didn't come with the any ethernet, even though broadband was beginning to happen. And some of them still didn't even have dial-up modems.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  I mean, most of them by, by 1998, or many of them finally had dial-up modems, but particularly Windows computers, some you had to go buy a modem card or an external modem. So this had both of those things. This, this was ready to go, and they did a famous commercial, which you referenced in one of your tweets, but just briefly, it was hilarious, I watched it again. It was hilarious, there's only a kind of a grainy version of it on YouTube. It shows a race to set up a computer between, I think, a 10-year-old kid or something.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a 10-year-old and his dog.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And his dog. And he, they're setting up an iMac, and a 25-year-old, like, Brown University student setting up an HP, a very specific HP model that was popular. They were bending over backwards to be, they picked a popular model. They said it was a good computer. They deliberately, of course, picked it, one that had a slower processor and all that. But it came in, you know, two or three boxes, like Windows computers did, and you had to connect the speakers, and you had to, you know, do, put the ethernet in it, and then you had to register Windows and go through all these steps. And they said, "We'll help this guy out by even speeding up the video." But the whole idea was you could get from opening the box,

• 6:27Speaker 01

  being on the internet with the iMac in like 10 minutes, I forgot, something like that, 12 minutes, whatever it was. And I even, in my column, did something similar, but I didn't do a comparison. And the... Brown University student, it was like 27 minutes before he finally got on the internet. And the irony is they're both going on the internet, by the way, with Internet Explorer.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Because, because that first, Apple didn't have Safari at that time. So they shipped it with IE and Firefox, maybe, I think. I can't remember, there were two browsers. Netscape, Netscape, IE and Netscape both were on it.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And, but, so it was an ad, but it really was true. And the ad, then they had another ad about steps. Wasn't a race, it just the announcer, classic Apple kind of ad. The product is slowly turning and you're seeing how beautiful it is in that. Jeff Goldblum, I think, did the announcing on it and he said, "Step one, plug in the power cord. Step two, plug in the modem cord. Step three..." There is no step three, and there wasn't.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's like a massively influential ad, I think. In, you know, you were saying the iMac was a brilliant product. Everyone, everyone else in the tech industry was shipping beige boxes with tons of wires. Apple came out with this like designed product that was beautiful and they had brilliant marketing. And I think that is how most people think of the iMac, right? It's this beginning of the second Steve Jobs era where the combination of his brilliance in marketing and product design and focus on what's important kind of changed the tech industry. It set the stage for the iPod, of course, set the stage for the iPhone and the iPad, everything that's come after it.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  And my point, and this was just my little, I will say it was a little snarky tweet, because I think a lot about competition.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I'm shocked.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  I know.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  But I think a lot about competition in the tech industry.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  I, you know, we run, The Verge is a consumer publication. I hope that we do a good job of advocating for the consumer. And I think competition is in the consumer's best interest. It's the force that lowers prices and makes better products and all that sort of thing. The opportunity for Apple with the iMac, and this is what you just said, it was designed for the internet, was to get away from the enormous installed base of Microsoft Windows software, because there were, at that moment in time, I had Macs my whole life, everything cool came out for the PC first. It was just the way of the world.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  I'm just like you. I mean, I owned both, and you owned both, I'm sure.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  But it was clear that, you know, I wanted to work more on my Mac, but the better apps came out for Windows.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, I was younger when the iMac came out, I was like 17 years old, 18 years old, and all my friends had PC games. So if I had to have a PC just to play the games they were playing. And Mac games still are kind of not a thing, but set that aside. But the opportunity for Apple was to say, well, there's this exciting thing called the internet happening over here, and everybody wants in on it, and Dell will sell you a PC, and it's loaded with stuff, it's hard to set up, we're gonna sell you this integrated thing, and you plug it in, and the marketing is gonna say, there's no step three to getting on the internet. And then, in your review, you point out, it came with both, this is

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  hilarious, both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, two web browsers that no longer exist.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  But so goes, but it came with both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and it came with a, you know, a setup app that basically, I believe it signed you up for an EarthLink account, was a dial-up ISP back then, and it just put you on the internet, and suddenly the internet was in your house. And that was so powerful, and it was such an opening for Jobs and Apple to see this insatiable demand for connectivity, and they basically sold an appliance that let you be connected, that could also run Apple Works and Office and all the other software that are shipping on it. But without the web, without that opening, without that demand, that insatiable hunger for the internet, I'm not sure the iMac, on the strength of its design, or the Think Different campaign, or, you know, USB connectivity, I'm not sure

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  it would have been a success. And that, to me, in this moment, as... You know, Facebook is a platform that is having its struggles. Google runs a search platform that is increasingly colonizing the internet with things like amp pages and what have you. Apple obviously has an app store and its apps don't run any, like, we see this sort of, these walls coming up. I look back at 20 years ago, the iMac was a product that was able to not only change the entire tech industry, save Apple, it was able to bring people to an open platform for connectivity that was not only able to rescue a company, but provide a much better experience to a lot of people.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I actually agree with all that, and particularly the salient points being two that you just repeat because I agree with them. One is that if you have the kind of lagging minor minority platform that people are not building apps for, and suddenly the web comes along and the web is platform is a device client agnostic essentially, as long as you have, you know, you have a browser that works on the, on the thing. It's a colossal, it allows you to basically deleverage a considerable amount of the app advantage that Windows had. And that, so you're absolutely right.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I think even putting the I in front of iMac was deliberately, people think Apple's always had I's in front of their products. They haven't, they haven't. The iMac was the first one, and the I was put in front of there, I think, to stand for internet. I don't think they ever exactly said exactly what it was for, but I think that that was meant as a signal to people that this was an internet computer, and it was. So I entirely agree with you. And then, of course, the brilliant marketing and design sense helped. I will say that rereading that column, which we've both just done, I did mention that

• 12:46Speaker 01

  they had claimed that just since announcing the iMac, they had gotten, I don't know, 176 apps that had previously not been available on the Mac had, had become available, or somebody, they, companies had announced that were going to make it available for the Mac. Because they could see light, they could see this thing. Selling and they could see that they could maybe make money off it. So apps still mattered in that day. Very few people called them apps. We used to call them programs. If you were in the industry, you called them apps. But so they, you know, yes, it was an internet computer. It was built from the ground up.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Having the open internet without those walls was crucial to Apple and to the success of the iMac. And we don't have to have an argument about that. My only, the only argument I would have for you is A, apps still did matter in 1998.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  Who did?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And B, apps on Android and iOS today are in, not in all cases, because it's very hard to generalize about two and a half million pieces of software. But a lot of them, most of them are just little focused browsers. They are bringing you internet content and, but they're just, you know, the kayak app is not going to act like a Google or act like a game or act like, you know, an email client. It's a client for travel reservations. All the data is coming off the internet. It's aggregating it and it's pulling, and they have the opportunity to design this

• 14:29Speaker 01

  software, Chrome, the container through which you're getting this in a way that is synergistic with the purpose of the thing. Whereas a browser, of course, is general purpose and you, a lot of techies will load up a lot of extensions to try to get it to be more customized for certain tasks. But why do that when you have an app that already is customized for that task? And so I think it's hard to be absolutist about it. I understand where you're coming from. I just don't think it's an either or thing.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny. We were tweeting at one another late at night. My newborn Max was literally asleep on me and I had just nothing else to do. Because she, she likes to sleep on me. That's where she prefers to sleep.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And I'm retired, so I have nothing else to do.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Walt and I are just hanging out. We got nothing to do. And we were attracting all these very smart people from the tech media and industry who were chiming in and John Gruber chimed in and said, I actually think Apple builds on top of the open web. And he linked to a talk that he gave. You should go look at that tweet. It's a good talk. Here's where I think that falls apart. It's largely the same point you're making, Walt. Where I think that falls apart is in 1998, when the iMac came out, the internet, the whole internet, was its killer app, right? It's the reason that you bought one.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Right. Well, simplicity too.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, right, but it was an appliance for the internet in that sort of conception from that time, which is an old conception of computers.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  And if there were parts of the internet that you couldn't get on the iMac, the value proposition falls apart. So if the New York Times at that time had signed a deal with MSN and the New York Times is only available to MSN subscribers and MSN is only on Windows, that chips away at the iMac. If, I don't even, I'm trying to think of Yahoo was only available on AOL.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I get what you're saying, yeah.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  It's just funny how far we've come. All of the first websites I thought to think of didn't exist in 1998. I was gonna say Google and Facebook, Twitter, none of those were there. So it was a lot of content websites. It was a lot of early, just like, check out the internet stuff. And all of it was available on this like, open platform where Apple could ship you a computer with a browser and you would have the exact same experience as somebody with a Windows PC. And now, you know, it's great. The apps on our phone, like the phone is a constrained screen. It's a lot smaller. You can build custom apps. They're native. They run faster. They perform better. All this stuff. But that means a platform like Windows Phone, which had some

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  very good ideas about how to use a phone and how the interface should work, couldn't compete because there was no Instagram web experience. And I think literally every review we wrote of a Windows Phone for five, eight years, or whatever it was, said, "Windows Phone doesn't have Instagram." In a way that nobody could ever write about the iMac, it has every website but this one. Every website but the one you need.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Your app, so you're right on this point. Again, we can have a huge debate about the overall open web versus apps issue, which I think is a little bit of a false debate, but but that's not, this is not, we've done that before on Control Alt. We don't have to do it today. I think you're right about the iMac. And I'll strengthen the point by saying that Steve Jobs went and did this a second time. In other words, he built an easier to use internet appliance one more time, as he liked to say. And it was the iPhone.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  It was, yeah. The first iPhone had no app.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  There were three huge elements, and this is another famous video that this one, I think, most of our listeners have seen, and if you haven't, you can, you should watch it on YouTube. It's one of the best product introductions, along with the iMac one you'll ever see. But, and the MacBook era was a pretty great one, too. But when he introduced the iPhone, one of the big points was it had a real web browser in it. And it did. You could, he called every other phone, or, you know, alleged smartphones' browser a baby web browser. And in private, he was much harsher than that. But in the iPhone web browser, when you went to the New York Times, you got the, or the

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Wall Street Journal, or any website, you got the whole website. Now, the whole page on a phone screen wasn't really readable, so they did this, what I thought was a tremendously brilliant thing for the time, where if you tapped twice, it automatically and instantly fitted perfectly to the screen, and you could read it, and you could just pan around and, you know, read the article. And of course, it's better even than that now, because, because now publishers make things specifically for mobile. But at that time, they didn't, and the iPhone was, to my knowledge, the first phone that gave you the full web on the phone. And he marketed, that was a big point in what was valuable about, and what was revolutionary

• 19:30Speaker 01

  about what they were doing in his mind, and they sold it. Their ads sold it partly on that.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So he did the same thing again.

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  And it took him another year to do the App Store. And I, that's it, that was the only point I was making, is that if you think about competition, which is maybe only I think about it all the time this way, but the opening, the openness of the web provided to Apple was to put the iMac in front of people and say, "This is better at browsing the internet than everything else, because we focused it on that." The iPhone was a diff- I think it came about at a different moment in time. Like you said, he said it was an iPod. He said it was a movie viewer. He said it was a phone. All right. It was widescreen iPod with touch controls, telephone and a breakthrough internet communicator. Those were the three. And I remember first he announced phone and people cheered. Then he announced widescreen iPod with touch controls and people cheered.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  And then he said breakthrough internet communicator third. And I think the Apple people in the audience cheered and everyone else went huh? And now, obviously years later, it's the most important thing, by far the most important thing. So, well, I gotta ask you. You were, you know, you reviewed the iMac in 1998. What was it like when Steve Jobs showed you the iMac for the first time? Was he, did they ship you one in a box and not say anything to you? Did you get to talk to Steve? What was that like?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Well, I wish I could tell you I remembered. I think they, they did, first of all, they never shipped you anything in a box that was big. You know this.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  I mean, Apple, listeners don't know this, but you know, most companies, when you have a review unit coming, you might have had a meeting with them and a demo, but when it comes time to get the review unit, they just ship it like anything. But Apple would never do that. I mean, I actually had one occasion where they made a, not a PR person. They made a senior executive of Apple who was not involved in the product, but happened to be on their way to Europe. They made that person fly through DC, stop off in DC, take a, this is before Uber and Lyft, take a cab to my house and hand deliver whatever, I can't remember which product it was, for me to review because that was the way they did it.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  So I'm sure I got the iMac in person in a meeting. I think what happened was that I didn't get it from Steve. I talked to Steve about it several times because that's also what happened to me whenever I was reviewing something of theirs. But a team came to my office in Washington DC, which is where my office was, and brought it and I had it. And I had it, I think for a week, five days, something like that. And And reviewed it. I want to touch on one more thing about the iMac and then if there's anything else you want to talk about, let's do it. If you notice, a bunch of my reviews devoted to me being angry that they didn't have a floppy disk in it.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's like the heart of the review. It's the middle third.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Right, and I had a big argument with Jobs about this at the time, in which I basically took the, he took the position that I stayed there, which, and then I'm sure if you look at everybody else's review, it's, people raised it and they stated Apple's reason, which was, files in 1998 were getting too big for the, for the size available to store in a floppy disk. And that's true. And in fact, it got ludicrous eventually, you know, to a new version of Windows or macOS, when it was still coming on floppy disk, came in like 20 floppies. It was ludicrous. You had to like, put one in, take, you remember this, right?

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Put one in, take it out, put one in, take it out. It was stupid. And Apple had invented the, or Sony had invented, but Apple had popularized the three and a half inch floppy and all that, but it was still too little. And so that was his argument. Not unlike the fact that when they, when they dropped DVDs years later, not unlike dropping the headphone jack.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think it's unlike dropping the headphone jack.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Bluetooth. I know you do, but it has some similarities then. So, when I wrote that, he called me and complained again about it. But, not about the rest of the column, but about that, you know, and that was fine, because it was just a continuation of the argument we had before. But the argument was really about timing. I said to him, I get it, I can see why the floppy drive is going to have to be dropped soon, but I was, I was a big champion of the consumer, and I knew a lot of average consumers still depended upon floppies. And he was saying, well, you can transfer files through email, and I don't think, I don't know if USB thumb drives existed then, but they, zip drives and these other higher capacity

• 24:23Speaker 01

  drives were mentioned. And I just said, look, people are, people buy this, I made the flat statement in the column, that you weren't going to be able to buy the iMac without buying an external floppy. And so you really should consider the price to be a hundred dollars higher. And that's where I stood on it.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  And I think every iMac I ever saw for the next two or three years had, you know, the iMac came out and it set off this wave of redesigning products with clear translucent or translucent colored plastic. Then everyone, everyone had like a translucent plastic floppy drive that was just slightly the wrong color. No one quite got Apple's Bondi Blu-ray.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  But they sold, but they sold a bunch of them.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  They sold a bunch of them.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  People still needed floppy drives.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  But I think that was, you know, Apple saying, Jobs saying, we're pushing on to the next technology. It's funny, you know, the zip, I have a box of zip drive. I don't have a zip drive at my house, but still have a box of zip drives. I'm not sure what, or zip this, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with them, but I can't.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  You're supposed to throw them away.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  Clearly, yet they are. But you know, that next round of storage, apart from zip, which was a pretty mediocre technology, looking back on it, but everybody had them.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  It was a bunch of, again, not to beat on this drum, open formats, right? It was files over email. It was DV, you know, DVDs, it was CDs, eventually Apple put writable CDs. I think it.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  DVD, by the way, DVDs was not an open format at first. You will remember, there was a giant stupid standards battle between companies that wanted to control the IP. Toshiba versus Sony, I think. And, you know, there was DVD minus R and plus R. It was crazy for a while there.

• 26:12Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things, the iMac is such a watershed product that I'm glad we spent half an hour talking about it just now. Like, it was an important product and it's so important that it was successful because I don't know that any of the consumer or user centric things that happened afterwards happened without this shock to the system that was the iMac. And I think that's great. So that's that. Now, for the last five minutes, what are you doing now? You're doing something very interesting with the news literacy project. I just want to, I want you to tell people what that is and what's going on with it.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Sure, thanks. So, you know, I wrote at the time and in The Verge that my. My sense of my retirement was really more of a reinvention and there were some things I wanted to do that were different and one of those is I'm on the board of an organization called the News Literacy Project and what we do is we basically, put it as simply as possible, teach kids in middle school and high school how to know what to believe. Not what to believe, but how to make judgments about whether a news item that their friends shared or that they see posted on Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter or whatever

• 27:29Speaker 01

  they're using is fake or true. That's not the whole of it, that's part of it. What's the difference between reporting and opinion and satire? You would think that people would know that, but kids don't know that. We teach why journalism matters, why the press matters. We're strictly nonpartisan. We are not teaching these kids only believe liberal stuff, only believe conservative stuff. That's not the point. The point is, this is how you can evaluate whether this was a well-reported story. Is it all full of nothing but anonymous sources? Does it have at least some on-the-record sources? Have other publications? If it sounds fantastic and sensational and all you want to do is retweet it or reshare it, but think for a

• 28:13Speaker 01

  minute. Why is nobody else reporting this if it's so amazing? Maybe it's not true or, you know, maybe it's just to serve somebody's political purpose. So, we have a curriculum. It's a digital, online curriculum and, by the way, Neelai, it can be used on anybody's device. If the classroom has Chromebooks, we're good. If they have iPads, we're good. If they have Dells or Macs, whatever they have, we're good. And it's, individual teachers can use it, entire school systems can use it, and we're in all 50 states and 90 countries and we're just getting started. That's what I'm doing.

• 28:53Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome. How can people support you in this effort?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  They can go to check. It's the, the name of the curriculum, uh, the, which we call a virtual classroom is checkology. And it's not a fact checking thing, but it means we're teaching students to check things out before they believe them. Called checkology and there is a website, checkology.org. So if you're a teacher or a parent or a student and you're edu- and you're interested in it, go to checkology.org. There's a little sample of what it's like. There's some statistics on how it has improved students understanding of the news and um, they, there may even somewhere there be a donate button. I don't know, but um, but that's what I'm doing.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Well, and apparently now making podcasts again with you.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  I think I am very excited about that and I suspect our listeners will be very excited about that too. That said, I have taken up far too much of your time. I might be the first person who's ever made you work for free and I'm gonna, I'm just gonna hold on to that. I'm proud, I'm happy about that. Um, but I've taken up way too much of your time today. Thank you so much for coming by. Hopefully you'll come back again, visit us again.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I will and, and.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  By the way, we did a whole thing and we talked about the open, we didn't mention Dieter. And so one of these days you gotta just come back on the Vergecast and have, and, and hang out with me and.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Well, Dieter Bone, yeah.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's having a week, by the way. He interviewed Sachin Adella, he's at I O.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Oh, he's amazing. He's, he's amazing. He just gets better and better. And, and it, and you know, from the, just the tweets I've been reading today, he seems to be staging a coup while you're on parental leave, so.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  That would be great.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  Please, please take it over, Dieter. I'm just gonna hang back with Max. It's gonna be great. I'm, I'm all about that. But anyway, thank you so much, Walt. How can people get ahold of you? Twitter's the best way?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Twitter. You can DM me on Twitter. You can use Facebook Messenger. Don't use them for anything serious because neither one of them is, is secure, but um. If you do contact me there and you want to discuss something actually serious, I'll probably give you some other way of communicating.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  But that's a good way to start.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  At Walt Mossberg on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Thank you so much Walt, and thank you everybody for accepting an episode of Control at Delete in the Vergecast feed. Hopefully we'll talk to you again soon, Walt.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're gonna have to keep in touch because I need to, I need news about Max.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  That's true. You know, I've got to, I've got to figure out, I gotta stop putting Max on my public Instagram. I gave myself, you know, the first couple of months, she doesn't know. I love taking photos and videos of her. I gotta figure out.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  They're great. They are the best Instagram stories I see. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. They're really well done. But you gotta stop putting her out in public.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  I know. So at some point.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Which is why you'll be using a closed thing like iCloud Shared Photo Libraries, or Google Photos Shared Libraries.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  Now, I said this on the Vergecast last week, but if you, if you want to feel the walls of an ecosystem, just, just crash down around you. Just have a baby.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. Thank you so much, Walt. We'll talk to you soon.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Thank you, Eli. Take care.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  Thanks, Eli.