Apple's best product ever

April 3, 2026·1 hr 45 min·5 clips

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The ads run long first. Vanta, Hostinger, MongoDB, Canva, and Odoo all get their turn, so the actual Apple argument has to fight its way out of the sponsor haze. Once it does, the fun is in the pushback. The conversation starts with a younger audience whose Apple timeline may begin at the iMac G3 and Steve Jobs' return, which is understandable but a little too neat. That framing turns Apple's between-Jobs stretch into a punchline, when it was also full of odd, consequential products. Jason Snell gets brought in as the useful reference point. His piece on Apple's weird 90s, with the headline "between Jobs," helps reopen the case for a decade that gets dismissed too quickly. Then the ranking gets personal. QuickTime shows up at number 43, and the speaker treats that like a clerical error. Top ten, easily. The argument comes from time spent on a site piece adapted from John Buck's book about the team that invented QuickTime, so this is not just old-software sentimentality. MP4 traces back to QuickTime, which makes the placement feel wildly underpriced. The kids don't know, and that line works because it is both the joke and the point. Older Apple software did more for the creative-computing story than the comeback myth usually allows. Final Cut Pro does better at number 42, though the modern version seems to weigh the legacy down. Then the Apple Extended Keyboard arrives at number 41, with the obvious John Gruber provocation waiting right there.

As heard by us

A lively Apple ranking that gives QuickTime, weird 90s Apple, and overlooked creative tools their due.

Apple's best product ever uses a countdown of Apple's top products to poke at a messier company history than the usual comeback myth. David Pierce and Nilay Patel linger on the weird 90s: the PowerBooks, the iMac G3 era, the stretch between Jobs chapters, and the way good…

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Two tech journalists rank Apple's all-time products and argue about every single placement.

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