Apple's PS5 competitor

gm legends! Welcome back to another edition of the Leaderboard. We're once again talking about our favorite products of 2024 including Apple's latest Mac Mini, Replit's AI developer, and Windsurf, a worthy competitor to Cursor. Let's dive in.

The new Mac Mini: Apple’s heavily upgraded micro computer.

The Mac Mini taking the internet’s attention during Apple’s week of Mac launches was not on my bingo card. But after seeing it, I can see why. It’s tiny but it packs a punch with the new M4 chip all while having less than half the footprint as the previous model (really, it's tiny) and starting at only $500. So much so that Apple is touting it as a potential PS5 competitor (if devs ever build games for Mac). One quirk is the power button placement, located on the underside of the machine. A bunch of people have questioned this and even compared it to the Apple mouse charging situation — but honestly, when is the last time you turned off your Mac? I can see this easily being a main machine, but also could be a fantastic home server option for makers

Replit Agent: Transforms ideas into fully-functional apps

When Replit Agent launched, I didn’t try it. I thought it would be within the same UX and quality bar as other AI IDEs, assistants, etc. I was wrong. Even as a v1, Replit Agent is mindblowing even in a year where my mind has been blown by many other AI products. Watching the agent create apps, modify them based on my prompting, and deploy them from the same interface feels like watching the future of tech. It feels like only a few years ago that VCs were postulating that software developers of the future would be conductors more than coders and Replit did it faster than I could have imagined.

Windsurf: An agentic IDE

Windsurf is an AI code editor that shares a lot of similarities with Cursor, and at first glance, it might be hard to tell the difference between the two. However, Windsurf excels with its ability to easily search your codebase and identify what’s relevant, and I prefer its approach of directly editing your code. While I can’t definitively say Windsurf is better than Cursor, it’s tool I prefer right now.