Apple
includes Apple Podcasts, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple II, Apple Store, Apple Mouse, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Maps, Apple AirPods, Apple App Store, Apple IIc, Apple Mac and 13 more
50 statements across 33 episodes · 13 bullish · 12 bearish · 32 people on the record · first statement Feb 27, 2017 by Nolan Bushnell · said 447 times in 184 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Guy Raz (277), John MacFarlane (11), Blair Hastie (10), Hernán López (9), Michael Dell (8), Casey Neistat (7), David Baszucki (6), Nolan Bushnell (5)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 19 mentions in 5 episodes 4 per episode
- Square: Jim McKelvey. He Lost a $2,000 Sale, Then Built a $10 Billion Company
- Advice Line with Hernan Lopez of Wondery
- Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant
- Advice Line: New Offerings, Bigger Markets
- Advice Line with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 36 mentions in 12 episodes 3 per episode
- Advice Line with Luis von Ahn of Duolingo
- WHOOP: Will Ahmed
- (July 2021) Ben Chestnut: From Side Business to $12 Billion – The Accidental Triumph of Mailchimp
- Advice Line with Troy Carter of Atom Factory
- Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith
- Advice Line with John Zimmer of Lyft
- Nirav Tolia: Nextdoor. How neighborhood chatter went global
- Crumbl: Jason McGowan
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 85 mentions in 18 episodes 5 per episode
- AI that can be your second brain with Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri of Humane
- Sonos: John MacFarlane
- CrunchLabs: Mark Rober
- Mythical: Rhett and Link
- The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 1
- Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams
- Viator: Rod Cuthbert
- MGA Entertainment: Isaac Larian
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 30 mentions in 15 episodes 2 per episode
- Wondery: Hernan Lopez
- Grindr: Joel Simkhai
- When your headphones listen to you with Ramses Alcaide of Neurable
- Twilio: Jeff Lawson
- Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong
- Framing the future of eyecare with Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker
- A biometric smart gun with Kai Kloepfer of Biofire
- When AI is your personal tutor with Sal Khan of Khan Academy
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 80 mentions in 27 episodes 3 per episode
2021 24 mentions in 13 episodes 2 per episode
- Dude Perfect: Cory Cotton and Tyler Toney
- Robert Reffkin: Compass
- Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut
- How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan
- Lynda.com: Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin
- Cisco Systems & Urban Decay: Sandy Lerner (2018)
- Boxed: Chieh Huang
- Planet: Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 43 mentions in 13 episodes 3 per episode
- Fitbit: James Park
- Dropbox: Drew Houston
- Video Artist: Casey Neistat
- Dell Computers: Michael Dell (2018)
- How I Built Resilience (Special Edition): Guy Raz
- Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz
- How I Built Resilience: Sarah Harden and Lauren Neustadter of Hello Sunshine
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018)
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2020 →
2019 35 mentions in 24 episodes 1 per episode
- Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson
- Compaq Computers: Rod Canion (2019)
- Yelp: Jeremy Stoppelman
- Dyson: James Dyson (2018)
- Belkin International: Chet Pipkin
- Chicken Salad Chick: Stacy Brown (2018)
- Outdoor Voices: Tyler Haney
- Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal (2017)
- 16 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 42 mentions in 28 episodes 2 per episode
- Dell Computers: Michael Dell
- LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman
- Live Episode! New Belgium Brewing Company: Kim Jordan
- Lululemon Athletica: Chip Wilson
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
- Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell (2017)
- Warby Parker: Dave Gilboa & Neil Blumenthal (2016)
- TRX: Randy Hetrick (2018)
- 20 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 50 mentions in 27 episodes 2 per episode
2016 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Apple, oldest first
Feb 27, 2017 neutral
Apr 3, 2017
Apr 3, 2017
Apr 3, 2017
Case: Apple paid millions to buy out brand license, prompting AOL rebrand
“It was, I think, the first time Apple licensed their brand to another company, and indeed, not long after, within the first year of launching the Apple Inc. Service, Apple basically decided they didn't like the idea of, you know, they wish they hadn't licensed…”
May 22, 2017 positive
Nov 13, 2017 positive
Krieger: Instagram seeded pre-launch beta invites to Dribbble designers and journalists
“So one of the things we did was we have you have a hundred sort of Invites that you can have before you launch your app to the Apple store where you can invite people to try it out. And we're like, how are we going to use these hundred people? And we use them …”
Mar 26, 2018 neutral
Mar 25, 2019 positive
Jun 24, 2019 neutral
Steve Jobs called Stoppelman urging Yelp not to sell to Google
“You know, he said, don't sell to Google. We think you're a great company. We think what you're doing is really interesting. He didn't say, oh, well, Apple, you know, is interested in you, but he did say, is this about money? Because Apple has a lot of money, a…”
Mar 2, 2020 positive
Mar 2, 2020 negative
Apr 27, 2020 negative
James Park says the original Apple Watch did not impact Fitbit
“If you looked at the Apple Watch that was announced at that time, I think everyone will admit, maybe even Apple, that it was a product that didn't quite know what it was supposed to be used for. So, with the launch of the first Apple Watch, I don't really thin…”
Nov 9, 2020 negative
Steve Jobs told Drew Houston Dropbox was a feature, not a product
“He was like, alright, well, in so many ways, he's like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're gonna have to build our competitor, and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.”
Feb 22, 2021 neutral
Social games dominated Facebook but were rare on Apple's App Store
“They evaluated the game, probably liked the story of us just being a few country bumpkins in Jersey in a, in an attic trying to build for this new platform they were launching, and liked the fact that we were building a social game, which was wildly popular on…”
Jul 26, 2021 negative
Reffkin: Traditional brokerages pocketed profits instead of investing in R&D
“This has been a model for over a hundred years where brokerage firms had taken the profits from the agents, split it between the manager, the manager's manager, and the owner, and on balance that owner put in their pocket and then they went on vacation. But wh…”
Sep 6, 2021 positive
Lynda.com secured massive enterprise adoption entirely through organic employee demand
“A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the employees were start…”
Nov 1, 2021 neutral
Nov 8, 2021
Jony Ive replied to founders' cold email and mentored them
“We actually, funny story guy, we ended up reading the Steve Jobs biography and were super inspired by their design principles and cold emailed Johnny Ive from Apple on a Sunday afternoon, and he actually got back to us in like five minutes. And We were able to…”
Dec 13, 2021 positive
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”
Dec 13, 2021
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Mar 7, 2022 neutral
Mar 7, 2022
Citron: Aurora Feint was among the first 50 App Store titles
“We were one of the first 50 titles on the App Store, and I remember thinking, like, if we get a thousand players in the first, you know, week, that would be incredible, and we got a thousand in the first hour, and I was like, oh, this is something.”
Apr 18, 2022
Apr 18, 2022
Nobu Nakaguchi designed Gilt's original iPad app using a cardboard cutout
“What Nobu did to design this was he watched the Apple, there was one Apple TV commercial where they showed an iPad, and he would watch that commercial again and again and freeze frame it to kind of zoom in on what is actually possible on this magical new devic…”
Jul 7, 2022 positive
Baird: Targeting low-income customers gives BlocPower a mass-market advantage
“We've flipped that on its head and said, we're going to start with the lowest income people first, and that allows us to be mass market first, and so that has been a painful journey, but now that we've seen a little bit of success, yeah, we do have a competiti…”
Jul 28, 2022 positive
Kelley: IDEO Predecessor Designed Around 50 Products for Apple
“And we ended up doing like 50 products for him, and Steve became a close friend and, you know, introduced me to my wife and couldn't have been closer to him. It was really that initial connection to Apple for IDEO, was called David Kelly Design at the time, th…”
Jul 28, 2022
Dec 12, 2022 positive
Dec 11, 2023
Apple gave Wondery's 'Dirty John' a rare carousel takeover promotion
“And then finally we went to the Apple podcast team and actually shared with them the first episode of the show. They loved it so much that they agreed to give us what at the time was called the Beyonce treatment, you know, the takeover of the top carousel of t…”
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Sonos Anticipated Apple, Amazon, and Google Would Enter the Audio Market
“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Feb 19, 2024
Feb 19, 2024
Mar 14, 2024
Bongiorno: Apple gave 24 hours to accept secret iPad role before NDA
“A couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a new project. And at the time they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next, you know, year and a half to two years of my life, I woul…”
Mar 14, 2024 positive
Chaudhri: Multi-touch was the fundamental unlock for direct digital manipulation
“You know, I think that was the fundamental unlock for making the transition from remote interactions from a keyboard and mouse to really allowing people to do what we call direct manipulation, and that's literally just being able to touch the screen and have a…”
Mar 14, 2024 neutral
Chaudhri: Siloed stealth teams enable 1.0 products but create integration friction
“You know, there's some advantages. You get a, an amazing amount of focus, which is good, and I think the projects that, that I worked on were all essentially one point O's that, that turned into something else, and that really siloed, protected space allows fo…”
Mar 14, 2024
Mar 14, 2024 positive
Bongiorno: She and Chaudhri co-developed FaceTime and iMessage at Apple
“We, had the opportunity to build a lot of things together, whether it was new hardware and new, totally new product categories or software, things like FaceTime and iMessage, you know, that were really complicated things for billions of people that involved a …”
Mar 14, 2024 negative
Apr 15, 2024
Apr 15, 2024 positive
Rober's YouTube earnings surpassed his Apple engineering salary around 2017
“Yeah, and that deal, that one specifically, I think, was a brand deal for, like, 40,000 dollars, which to me was, like, really big money, like, to make that much money on a brand deal. So I started to make more money on YouTube than I was at Apple, for starter…”
May 6, 2024 negative
Odeo's $5M pre-product seed round eliminated agility against Apple's podcast entry
“We made the mistake of actually raising too much money pre-product, really even pre-product, we raised five million dollars, which was a terrible mistake because it allowed us to grow the team to the point where We just weren't nimble enough to easily pivot”
Nov 4, 2024
Meeker Traded Loaded iPods for Meetup Angel Investor Checks
“It was the exact moment where the iPod came out, and we sent notes to all of them, and we said, hey, Matt's gonna come up and pick up your paperwork and your check and if you hand it to him today, he's gonna hand you back an iPod pre-populated with a thousand …”
Nov 11, 2024 neutral
May 1, 2025 negative
Luis von Ahn: Do not bet early on unproven new tech platforms
“What we've learned
Is not to bet on these very new products, because you really never know if they're going to work. So it's not that Apple Watch didn't work. Apple Watch ended up working, but what didn't work was apps on Apple Watch. There's just.
That's ju…”
May 26, 2025 positive
Tew: 10% of early Calm mobile app downloaders paid the $5 fee
“There was like a couple of audio recordings for free, and then you'd pay five dollars to unlock the full app. There was no subscription. In fact, at the time, Apple hadn't embraced subscriptions at all but it was encouraging because 10% of people who downloade…”
Jul 24, 2025 negative
Gina Davis: Good Thomas ROAS fell from 10x to 3x after Apple changes
“We raised that outside capital in twenty-twenty-one, and then in the summer of twenty-twenty-two, the Apple Privacy Act happened, and our digital ad spend or return on ads went from 10 X To eight X to five X. And now we are lucky to hit three X.”
Sep 15, 2025 negative
Feb 23, 2026 negative
Apple's strict dock connector rules nearly killed Square's early hardware ambitions
“And at the time, it was this big port at the bottom, and you had to pay Apple for access to that port. You had to pay Apple for a special chip that allowed you to build your hardware, and then you had to Convince them to let you do it, and at the time the iPho…”