The WORST Gear Of 2023

Okay

This is going to be a bit of a weird one. I'm going to put a link in our show notes here that you can click on

All right. This is, this isn't really, this is a person who has been really irritating me on social media

Wow, he's going for it, man. I'm just, I'm going to, this is very personal. I'm going to single this guy out

Hey, this goes to Lewis's Twitter profile. What is this? This guy is, wait a minute, I'm sorry

You're, you're calling out one person? Yes. Wow. Let's do it, man

Light a bomb. This guy is named. Michael Darius. And he has been like the source of a bizarre fascination with me and a friend of the show, Sam Henry Gold

So this guy who has been going viral on threads for a few months now

And he's, this guy's a total hack. You can tell he's a pretentious ass hat because he has on his website a picture of Steve Jobs on the cover of Rolling Stone with the caption

I put my boss on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. I'm looking for it

That's where I'm going to start because this guy sells himself as being the personal protege of Steve Jobs

And he has like all of these, his whole bit is it on threads and like social media, probably Twitter too

He talks about his time at Apple history. So this guy worked, like I looked into it

He only actually worked on Apple from 2000 to 2005. and he worked on the iTunes Music Store and iTunes, iTools

the garage band, and later he claims to have worked on OS10 Panther. Like, okay, do you, if you think about it for a second

do you think Steve Jobs' protege was, you know, Scott Forstall, who he ate lunch with famously every day

or, you know, what's her name, Katie Cotton, who basically invented modern Apple PR

or do you think it was some random guy who worked on iTunes? That just doesn't make any sense

So, like, half the headshots on his webpage are AI generated, which is just weird

And, like, the thing is, this guy just doesn't even know what he's talking about half the time

Like, he was going on on threads about how the iPod hi-fi invented the premium iPod speaker market, which is just flat out not true

Like, Jason Snell was, like, getting a beef with this guy about it, like calling him out on it

And then he subsequently got blocked, which is just hilarious. He was talking about how the iPod Hi-Fi was discontinued

because Apple didn't want to interfere with the beats acquisition, which is just flat out wrong because the iPod Hi-Fi was discontinued in 2007

Beets had only been in business for one year. They hadn't shipped a product yet, and Apple didn't acquire Beets for like another seven years later

So like, where are you just coming up with this crap? Wow

He's some sort of, he claims to be some sort of Apple genius

And here's the thing. If you go to his website and you click on any of like these blogger

I just noticed this. Yeah. It goes to a page where you can book an hour-long design consulting meeting with him for $500 an hour

I think he should put you. I mean, he's Steve Jobs' protege

I think that might be worth it. So here's the thing. I reached out to a few notable Apple employees who I know worked on Apple on similar projects as him at the same time I reached out to Lisa Melton on Mastodon Lisa Melton practically the inventor like she is as close as you can get to like

the person singular responsible for creating Safari on a Mac. So same time, same time period

And she said, and I quote, I have no memory of someone by that name, but certainly he wasn't

some kind of protege of Steve Jobs because I certainly would have known him. And Scott Forstall was about the only person who could lay claim to such a title

I reached out to another person, Cricket, who that's what he goes by, and he has a blog

Jiminy? He has a blog like Tech Reflect where this person has worked on the mail app on OS10

They worked on aperture all around the same early 2000s time period

And it doesn't get any better than this. Who said, his resume on LinkedIn is definitely 100% spin with maybe a tiny sprinkling of truth

nobody that talks all about themselves like that lasts at apple for very long we never hire pretentious blowhards like that just for fun i searched old email and i see only six emails from him ever all to an apple internal humor mailing list there is probably no one that worked on the mac that i don't have dozens of emails from i have more direct emails from steve jobs than that i mean i can't tell if this guy's trolling or not but i do love that his whole page is just littered with images

of Apple. I don't know if any of this stuff has anything to do with him at all

Maybe projects he worked on. And also pictures of him. amongst a team of dozens of other people. But then he has pictures of like dot Mac or

all these Apple software boxes that. And I do love that if you click one of the images because

you're like, oh, I want to read more about what he did here. The title was I put my boss

in the cover of Rolling Stone. And that's a picture of Steve Jobs and Rolling Stones. And you click it. And it takes you to like Griffin said a page where you can try to schedule time with

him for $500 an hour. And I'm like, like, why would I click on an image where I wanted to read more about the story that you teased

and then book an hour of time with you? That is a great logical disconnect

Like, what am I doing here? Why would I want to pay you for anything

Although, should we pay this guy $500 to come on our show for an hour

I like it. Maybe I can get him to give us a deal

Oh, my God, design partner. He's Apple Pioneer. portfolio firms. It gets so gross

posted a video on Twitter where he was like plugging some AI garbage that he's been working on using a deep faked video of Steve Jobs using his voice like cutting it in with video from like an Apple keynote which is just gross

It's bizarre, man. Well, his calendar is wide open. We can literally pick any day we want

He is available from 9 to 4 p.m. literally every single week day

He's booked up in December, but in January, he's wide open. He probably lives like right down the street for that

Yeah, probably knows Leander. Leander probably interviewed him for the book. Oh, my God

Oh, man. Okay, well, I'm never going to hurt to this guy, which is surprising because as an Apple Pioneer and a skewomorph

Is that the same as a... It's the same as that thing in the aliens

Skeomorph? No, I'm not. Zenomorph. Yeah. So did you read his little description of himself Well which one There multiple needs have been proven to uncovering connectors In order to inform a company overall business strategy while strengthening the ties between products brands and audience

For many breakthrough product experiences, we have come to know and love, such as the original versions of iTunes

GarageBin, ICloud, and I Life. That's probably about a 70-word sentence. Well, I wonder if this guy's making any money

He might be on to something. I might have to create a little website for myself where you guys

can book me for $800 an hour to talk about my personal relationship with Steve Jobs

All right, that's Dearest Design, but non-ball. I like these pictures he has of himself on here

All right, Lewis, on to you for your first pick of worst things of 2020

All right, this is something I did not like in 20203. Apple hiking all of its services prices

Oh, yeah. Apple one, premier. The one that I've got, you know, I've had for ages since the very moment they launched it

Went from what, $29.99 a month to, I think, $37.99 a month, which is fair increase

Not a fair, a large size increase is what I'm trying to say

I said fair, but I meant fairly large. 3795, right? So I'm still saving $29 a month because I get all these things that also got jacked up in price throughout

the year. I mean, what do they charge? I don't even know what they charge for Apple News Plus these

days. It's something outrageous. Oh yeah, $12.99 a month. Apple TV plus this year went from what

$6.99 to $9.99. I mean, I didn't even realize this. Music is now $16.99 a month

I mean, wow, they just jacked them all up. It's crazy. Anyway, I think, I like that Apple One premiere

I've, like I said, I've used it forever. And I like the fact that I can listen to my Apple music

I like the fact that I could do an Apple Fitness Plus workout if I feel like it

Obviously, haven't been doing it much lately. I like the fact that I can read Apple News Plus once in a while

when and if I have time to read a magazine story. I, of course, use ICloud every day

And, you know, honestly, they couldn't give me a little bit more storage when they jacked up my thing

Why give you more storage when we can charge you for that, Lewis? That's terrible

TV plus 10 bucks a month I mean it was great at $499 a month

It's not a bad deal at $699 a month 999 a month oh it's starting to be expensive

All these things getting expensive I mean Apple TV Plus just by itself

Has now moved itself into the I don't know if I need to keep this zone right

I mean it's a shame I mean I know that Tim Cook likes to make his money

and Apple likes to pull in a bunch of cash every month

and they've you know have been naked about how they're going to make money off services

But I don't know. I feel a little bit ripped off this year because that is a substantial price hike

And I'm not, you know, am I getting anything more for it? No. I mean, I guess there's a couple of extra Apple TV plus shows that I don't watch

Another season has slow horses. That's good. But I don't know. I find that to be one of the big disappointments of the year Well then what a great segue from yours in demand because I was going to do this as my second pick but you teed me up perfectly because one of my big complaints about 2023 is that the state

of streaming, just all streaming services have, we're in this weird place where we are redoing cable

TV, right? You pay for these ad-free experiences. And then they keep raising the price, raising the price

and now they're introducing ads again. Like ads were gone. That's what I was paying you for

And all of these walled off ecosystems, if you want to watch their content

now you have to go and pay for every single one. They all think that their systems are worth $10, $15, $20 a month, and they're not

Everyone's trying to figure out how to make money because network television is dead and nothing is ad-supported anymore

although we're getting back to that place now. And everyone always starts with the low cost

It's like, oh, my streaming service is just five bucks a month like Apple TV. And then they start raising the price and raising the price

and raising the price. And then they do what Disney Plus did this year is they jacked their

fee for the non-ad service way up. And then they introduce the ad supported service, which just

happened to be the same price as it was before. But now it's with ads. And so now you've got to

pay for this content and it's more expensive than ever. And now you're watching ads. And then

In the future, they're going to start including more ads and more ads and more ads. And soon, we're going to be fully back to cable TV

We're slowly migrating from cable TV exists on TV to cable TV just existing on the internet

You know, and Apple, we had a rumor earlier this year that Apple is thinking about starting to bundle these services together

I mean, what a great novel idea, just like cable TV. I'm sure there will be plenty of shopping channels and golf channels for you to watch

on your new Apple streaming service. I would be shocked if Apple didn't introduce

an ad-supported tier this year for Apple TV Plus. So they'll jack up the rate for Apple TV Plus

to like 13 or 1499. And then the 99 tier will be

will include ads of some kind. Although I could also see Apple not doing that

because showing ads is so distasteful and it's something that Apple really hasn't done

across many of their other services except for, except for in the app store

So I can see them not doing it, but I'm just sick of this, man

Amazon video is at the end of, I guess, the beginning of January, going to be turning on ads

for all people who use Amazon video. And if you want to turn the ads back off

now you've got to pay them $3 a month. I'm just so sick of all the nickel of diming

across all these different streaming services. And I get that everyone needs to make money

I don't know what the answer is. But I am sick of having to subscribe to all these different platforms

And now you subscribe and they want to show you ads. And it's like, dude, I don't want to watch ads

I don't want my kids watching ads. So I'm not really sure what the answer is

But everyone's trying to figure out how to monetize their content because the ad ecosystem is completely collapsed

and no one can make ads or no one can make money that way anymore. And people have to make money to make content

Like, I get that. but I'm sick of it