Top 100 Apple People to Follow in 2019

It's weird. I've blogged and done podcasts for a long time, and YouTube much more recently. And even when you're just talking about one company, like Apple, the analysts and journos don't always know the podcasters or bloggers, or vice versa, and the people on YouTube don't always know the people off, and also vice versa.

It's almost like we all exist in the same space but vibrate at different dimensional frequencies. And the intersection of people who read Daring Fireball, watch MKBHD, listen to Connected, and follow Above Avalon is way, way smaller than it should be.

So, let's fix that. These are all the Apple analysts, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and more that you need to follow at Apple's WWDC 2019 event.

Updated Video

Original Video

YouTubers

You all probably already know the YouTubers that focus on or at least regularly cover Apple, at least some of the million sub plus ones:

1. iJustine
2. MKBHD
3. Jonathan Morrison,
4. Jon Rettinger
5. Unbox Therapy
6. Everything Apple Pro
7. UrAvgConsumer
8. The Detroit Borg
9. Flossy Carter
10. Krystal Lora
11. Dave2D
12. ZoneOfTech
13. PolyMatter
14. SuperSaf
15. Dom Esposito
16. Brian Tong

But there are others who, every day, week, or month, cover Apple for upwards of hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube:

1. Snazzy Labs, hosted by Quinn, shares all sorts of super nerdy, and often frankly awesome, Mac and iOS tips.
2. Tailosive Tech, hosted by Drew, is like a constant stream of Apple and Apple user-perspective commentary consciousness.
3. Front Page Tech, hosted by Jon Prosser, just tears into the daily news, and I mean tears. But, like, with duck bleeped dick jokes and shit.
4. Sarah Dietchy, which, yes, rhymes with peachy, mixes up the Apple coverage with cool camera stuff.
5. Tyler Stalman is an absolutely amazing photographer who, when you watch him, just Jedis camera and workflows right into your force brain. Or something.
6. Daily Tekk, hosted by Chris, is positively filled to the brim with insanely great Apple tips and setups. Literally. Titularly.
7. EMKWAN, covers Apple and tech from a unique perspective… the other side of the world, and like with the Huawei Mate Foldy Foldy, sometimes with much more access.
8. Vyyyper, the man about tech, who hits news hard… like pro wrestler hard.
9. 9to5Mac, hosted by the oh-so-smooth Jeff Benjamin, has all the accessories, tips, and changelogs you can handle.
10. Michael Fisher, MrMoble, my pal and colleague who, you know, rocks the Android but is increasingly covering the Apple tech as well. Plus, so much Star Trek b-roll. So. Much.
11. Matthew Cassinelli, who used to work on the Workflow, now Shortcuts team, but has since gone indie and now makes really in-depth videos on how all of it works and how you can make it all work better for you. With new Siri intents, and Shortcuts for Mac expected this year, I can't wait to see what he shows with it all.
12. Aaron Zollo runs zollotech, which deep-dives on everything from new Apple hardware to the latest iOS beta.
13. Jason T Lewis is Painfully Honest Tech, all the Apple and other reviews, with a healthy dose of skepticism and a great sense of style.
14. Andru Edwards runs GearLive. He's been reviewing Apple and tech for a decade but always in a way that's fresh and new.
15. Brandon Butch and his Brandon Butch channel also has super detailed reviews on new Apple products and deep-dives into all the latest software and betas.

Apple

You probably know most of the major Apple people already, especially the executives. Tim Cook. Phill Schiller. Eddy Cue. But there are some others that are definitely worth keeping an eye on. I'm not going to include any personal accounts here, because Apple employees tend to be as privacy-centric the company they work for. But, if you dig around here a bit, you're bound to come across some of the more vocal ones.

1. Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, is much more active, especially on the topics of environmental responsibility and accessibility.
2. Deidre O'Brien used to run people, basically HR, at Apple. But, a long time operations executive, she's recently taken on senior Vice President of Retail as well… and joined Instagram. The retail team staffs WWDC, handling pretty much everything that needs to be handled. They're the unsung heroes that make it all happen so, hopefully through her, we'll get to see more of the magic they work every year.
3. Colleen Novielli works on Apple's Mac Product Marketing team, more specifically and recently, the iMac. She's new to Twitter and hasn't posted much yet but as we get into event season, that could change.
4. John Geleynse runs technology evangelism at Apple, the team that helps put together all the talks and work with all the speakers. He doesn't tweet much but some of the members of his team will tweet out some of the more important talks during the show. Mike Stern and Lauren Strehlow are design evangelists. Josh Tidsbury is media evangelist. And, though I think the org is a little different, Jonathan Davis is web technologies.
5. Shaan Pruden has been at Apple since 1989 and championing developer relations for just about that long. You may recognize her as the often co-host of the Apple Design Awards at WWDC.
6. WebKit isn't a person, of course, but Apple's open source project behind the Safari browser. Based on KHTML, it's since been forked into Google's Chromium, which is also now going into Microsoft's EDGE. They post a ton of details on new web features and technologies, and if you're really interested you can dig through and also follow a lot of the engineers working on it.

There are a bunch of other people from other team, including Events that handles logistics, WWDR or world wide developer relations that handles a lot of the coordination, App Store managers and editors, all the engineers and designers who work the talks and labs, PR that coordinates the media, and, again, the amazing retail team that staffs the whole thing.

If you look carefully, you can find some of them sharing photos and stories that mean a lot to them as well.

Analysts

Financial Analysts, I avoid like that alien plague you know is just hiding, waiting for Mulder and Scully alike, at the bottom of a glacier. Their clients aren't us. We're just the people they use to manipulate markets for their clients. Industry analysts, though, can be pure gold.

1. Kuo Ming Chi: You all know him. He exfiltrates information from Apple's supply chain like Agent Double-Oh-Leako.
2. Horace Dediu of Asymco spends a lot of time on electric bikes these days but still shows up, ninja-like, every quarter to give some of the best Apple analysis in the business.
3. Neil Cybart of the Above Avalon newsletter and podcast just nails what's happening in Apple markets, like pointing out the advent of Apple Watch, while most mainstream pubs are still asleep at their doomed wheels.
4. Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies is like an insight machine. She just assimilates all this seemingly disparate data and events, in real time, and tweets or writes out just exactly the context you need to make it all make sense.
5. Ben Bajarin, also of Creative Strategies, brings facts to feeling fights. People say all kinds of cockamamie nonsense online and in articles, but Ben just slaps down the data to show everyone what's really happening.
6. Ben Thompson writes Stratechery, a newsletter so good that if you read it every morning you'll feel like 5 or 10 times smarter than everyone else in the lunchroom, or boardroom. Ditto his Exponent podcast with James Allworth.
7. Kirk Burgess is another one of those indie analysts who, quarter after quarter, makes predictions that just clown many of those working for the big firms. Love it.
8. Daniel Bader runs Android Central but don't let that rusty green robot fool you, he's amazing at explaining Apple as well, and what the most complex technologies like 5G and mobile payments, mean for all of us.
9. Sascha Segan writes for PC Mag but, check this, every year drives all over the U.S. and Canada looking for the fastest mobile networks. While, yeah, tweeting from Android cameras, eating poutine, and hitting up French-Canadian concerts.
10. Brian Roemmele is all about mobile payments and voice-first, and I just love chatting with him about our shared personal passion for siriOS.
11. Patrick Moorhead is a staple of the industry and often comments of everything from the competitive landscape to the state of silicon.

Bloggers

As the internet rose so did blogs, or weblogs — pages on the internet that could post and host news and opinion faster than a traditional paper could ever go to press. There are far too many to count but there are a few that always seem to count.

1. John Gruber of Daring Fireball is like the chairman of the Apple blogger board. He's not just OG, he's OP, and his podcast, The Talk Show, has featured everybody from Craig Federighi to Phil Schiller to Eddy Cue. The man knows his Apple.
2. Jason Snell ran Macworld, and more, but now indie blogs at Six Colors and podcasts on Upgrade, and his deep, deep historical knowledge, helps put everything Apple does now in context.
3. Federico Viticci, king of the shortcuts, father of MacStories, first of his blog and the espresso line, and one of the most thoughtful people to ever work in the industry.
4. Juli Clover, who now that Arnis writing every few years and Erik like a couple of times a week — hi guys! — is still blogging story after story, day in, day out for MacRumors.
5. Gui Rambo writes for 9to5Mac, and has yet to meet a beta or a build he couldn't flip upside down, splay open, and yank all the secret guts out of. Wow, that got unnecessarily graphic and fast.
6. Benjamin Mayo, also a developer and also of 9to5, but living in the future in the U.K. where it's more like 4to1, and which often lets him stay ahead of everyone else.
7. Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. Voluminously. Multi-partedly. He just smashes open the industry and, often, skewering Apple's rivals and critics alike. Also, major shout out to Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider who does the hard work to report, not just rage the news.
8. Lory Gil, my colleague, who took over running iMore when Serenity Caldwell skated on over to Apple. She has an uncanny X-Mutant-class ability to just break down anything Apple or Apple related and make sure no aspect is ever uncovered.
9. Philip Elmer DeWitt finds anything that could possibly be of any interest to any Apple investor and links it up, with the tightest of tight commentary, over and over again every day.
10. Joe Rossignol, who writes for MacRumors, is just relentless. It's like he's just always poking and prodding and seeing what breaking Apple news pops out so he can write it up.
11. Michael Tsai blogs different. Instead of a lot of his own hot takes, he compiles a ton of hot takes from other developers and outlets. Sometimes it's the best of crowd-think, others the worst of mob mentality, but it always gives you a real sense of how a topic is being covered in the media and on social. Sort of like what Philip Elmer DeWitt does with financial coverage, but on hulk serum.
12. Caitlin McGarry was at Macworld and is now at Tom's Guide, but regardless of where she's writing she brings a ton of experience and savvy to everything Apple.
13. Steven Aquino covers Apple in general but with a special focus on Accessibility. He writes for TechCrunch, iMore, and his own blog, and just when most people think they know what assistive technologies are and how and where they're used and help, Steven shows you just how much deeper they go — and still need to go.
14. Stephen Hackett knows everything about every Mac ever released, and probably has most of them stacked up in his studio right now. Whenever a new one launches, he doesn't just review it, he tells you everything about going back to 1812. Or thereabouts.
15. Mark Spoonhauer runs Laptop Magazine and Tom's Guide and loves to put tech head-to-head.
16. Steve Moser contributes to MacRumors but also tweets out interesting spoilers based on deep diving into Apple's code.

Big Media

Traditional media might have been confused and offended when the internet first rolled around, with its unkempt, unregulated blogger type people, but it's long since evolved, adapted, and still often manages access and exploration bigger than any one-person, or few-people blog can do alone.

1. Joanna Stern went from The Verge to the Wall Street Journal, where she took the over Personal tech from the legendary Walt Mossberg and made it multimedia with some of the most creative and impressive videos in the industry. And inspired a lot of what I try to do with this show.
2. Matthew Panzarino, who runs TechCrunch, somehow figured out, probably through the dark arts of the Sith, how to cover not only Apple but Disney and Marvel, and even Sneakers and… I think.. Whiskey. Genius. So jealous.
3. Lauren Goode went from Recode to Wired and has just infused the place with her energy. I miss her Lauren vs. Lauren videos but I'm loving the bigger pieces she's been working on.
4. Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, is a lawyer with a spiked leather cuff, and I can't tell which makes his reviews more thoughtful… or brutal. Not just in writing but on The Verge YouTube channel and the Vergecast podcast as well.
5. Dieter Bohn, who gave me my first job in this business, is like that young professor whose smart enough to be cynical but still deeply, deeply in love with what he does. He helps run The Verge co-hosts the Vergecast but check out his YouTube show, Processor.
6. Ina Fried was at Recode but now writes for Axios where she's taken their format and used it to redefine smart, succinct tech coverage.
7. Christina Farr, health reporter for CNBC, has broken story after story about what Apple's doing not only with the Watch but with that whole industry.
8. Mark Gurman, previously of 9to5Mac, now of Bloomberg, breaks more Apple news by breakfast than most people do all year. Thank god he doesn't cover Disney or we'd already know how Marvel and Star Wars end.
9. Shara Tibken writes for CNET, part of CBS Interactive, and just kind of perfectly bridges modern blogging and big media.
10. Steven Levi, one of the all-time greats, who's now an editor at large at Wired and still landing some big Apple exclusives and inside looks.

Tweeters

For some people, Twitter is, for all intents and purposes, their blog. Instead of writing out long stories on their own sites, they tweet out in a bunch of very short, very insightful bites.

1. Steve Troughton Smith has often been called the most knowledgeable person about Apple frameworks who's never worked at Apple. And it shows. He finds all the things and casts a spotlight on all the issues. And, FYI, he also makes an amazing app for people with autism called Grace.
2. Christina Warren might work for Microsoft now but she's covered Apple most of her life, at some of the biggest outlets, and so now she shares all her analysis, all the time, on Twitter.
3. Ish ShaBazz is just a staple of the community, attending shows, speaking at conferences, and sharing smart stuff on and around WWDC every damn year.
4. Craig Hockenberry was coding for iPhone before there was an SDK, dreamt up Twitterrific in the shower, and still shares a chock-ton of insight on Twitter every show.
5. Jessie Char was once the fastest iPhone typist at Apple. These days, she runs Layers, the design-centric counterpoint to WWDC, held the same week, so that people can get as much out the pixels as they do the bits.
6. Marc Edwards is a designer's designer. The depth of knowledge he has about everything from color space to icons is matched only by how generous he is in sharing it. Come for the speed renders, stay for his tutorials.
7. Chris Lattner founded and ran so many of the open source and Apple development technologies, from the LLVM compiler to the Swift Language. He may no longer be at Apple but he's still sharing a lot about the projects.
8. Sebastiaan de With probably designed your favorite stitched-leather iOS app back in the day but these days he's working on Halide and he and partner Ben Sandofsky just love to tear through all the new imaging stuff every year, from manual modes to depthy API and more.
9. Jean MacDonald founded AppCamp4Girls and along with the likes of Kelly Guimont and an amazing team of workers and supporters helps make sure future WWDCs will only get better.
10. Megan Marrone isn't talking Apple news on podcasts every day like she used to but she's still sharing smart stuff on Twitter.
11. Ben Geskin makes the most terrific mockups and concepts around the latest spec rumors, including iPhones and more!
12. Max Weinbach might blog for XDA Developers, but he also tweets plenty about Apple.
13. Ashley Esqueda has worked for some of the best and biggest media companies on the planet, but it's on Twitter where she serves up her prime Apple commentary.
14. Steve Hemmerstoffer is on leaks. Like, @onleaks but also ON pretty much every leak that happens everywhere about everything tech. Including and often especially Apple.

Podcasters

The tech industry in general and Apple in particular helped lift podcasting from RSS obscurity to one of the biggest mediums in the world. So many bloggers and, increasingly, journalists and even YouTuber's have podcasts these days, sometimes several, sometimes even a dozen, that it's hard to keep it all separate.

Now, I've already rattled off like a dozen shows already and I could easily rattle off a dozen more like:

1. MacOS Ken with Ken Ray
2. iOS Today with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte
3. The Mac Observer's Daily Observations with Kelly Guimont
4. Clockwise with Dan Moren and Mikah Sargent,
5. The iMore show with Lory Gil and Georgia Dow.

But, I'm going to focus on a few I haven't already mentioned, and also on news rather than developer shows… at least this time.

1. ATP, The Accidental Tech Podcast, where Marco Arment talks, Casey Liss empathizes, and then John Siracusa hyper criticizes them, and then everything else. Last week with special guest Phil Schiller.
2. MacBreak Weekly is the granddaddy of Apple podcasts. And no, don't call ATP for olds because then people are going to ask about ATP for millennial and centennials and I won't even. Just know it's hosted by Leo Laporte who damn near founded the industry, Alex Lindsay who was streaming in 4K before it was invented, and Andy Ihnatko who's just the journalist's journalist. And somehow your's truly gets to join them.
3. Rocket, Christina Warren, Briana Wu, and Simone de Rochefort who get geek, get culture, and get totally geek culture. And Christina at a speed that even I can't keep up with.
4. Connected, from Relay.fm isn't just about three transatlantic accents, but three super smart perspectives. With Myke Hurley, Stephen Hackett, and Federico Vitcci But, yeah, the accents help you tell all the smart stuff apart.
5. The Dalrymple Report, even more than The Loop, gives you all the insight Jim Dalrymple, whose been live-blogging Apple since before the iPod, and developer David Mark are willing to share.

To be continued

Now, I'm sure I included a ton of people here that you already knew about, some you already rage about, but hopefully others that are new and fresh and interesting for you to follow, especially as we head into the new iPhone year.

But I'm equally sure I missed a bunch of the best, or at least your favorite top follows.

So, since I'm also looking for new, interesting, fresh people to follow, do me a solid and jump into the comments and drop their show or their social.