The Fifth Column · Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch

Is Apple Still Apple? #550 (w/ David Pogue)

March 26, 2026·1 hr 23 min·5 clips

Apple invested three million in a tiny chip company. Six years later it was worth 800 million, right when Apple was about to go bankrupt. That money saved the company.

AI opens the room hot. The cold open imagines AI and deepfakes outrunning lawsuits, courts, and governments, which is about as cheerful as it sounds. Then the anniversary machinery starts wobbling. Camille Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch settle into their usual overlap while David Pogue brings the big Apple history book. The respect is real, not polite blurb energy. They seem genuinely surprised that an Apple history can move quickly and still look good. Apple is the excuse, though. The panel is really talking about product instinct: how timing makes a decision look obvious after everyone else missed it, and how the same instinct can look stubborn when the bet goes wrong. The Nano story carries that part. Pogue explains the device through the tiny coin pocket in jeans, and suddenly a hardware reveal becomes a little stage trick. It is a great bit, and the room knows it. Still, nobody turns devotional. The Apple myth has ugly edges. iTunes on Windows comes up as the counterweight, the choice that makes instinct feel a lot less magical when the outcome points the other way. The episode keeps swerving because that is how this table works. A serious Apple conversation gets knocked sideways by jokes, corrections, and sponsor turbulence. Ground News slides in, and even the ad copy fits the larger obsession: who covers a story, who skips it, and how the same headline changes shape by political lane. Airport waits become a media test case. Gavin Newsom's Israel comments get run through left, center, and right framing, where ambition and sincerity do different jobs depending on who is writing. So Apple is not treated as a sealed museum object. It sits in the same messy system as technology, politics, and media: sharp instincts, bad calls, tribal reads, and somebody always ready to sell the next thing.

As heard by us

A rangy Apple-history conversation with David Pogue, strongest when it tests the Jobs legend against both his hits and his misses.

David Pogue's visit gives The Fifth Column a loose, lively tour through Apple history, centered less on corporate mythmaking than on the specific choices that made the company feel strange even when it was winning.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a smart Apple history session with Pogue, Jobs lore, and a few newsy side trips.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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