00:00:00 ◼ ► Hey there, it's your internet pal, John Gruber. I've got David Pogue on the show for this episode. The author, well, author of many, many books, but author of the new book, Apple, The First 50 Years. David is in the midst of a very, very tightly packed media tour to promote the book, and his time is really limited. It was really kind of serendipitous that I got him at all. I got him right out off an airplane after he arrived in Seattle,
00:00:29 ◼ ► after being in Portland. Didn't have the length of time I would love to have had him, so it's a little bit
00:00:36 ◼ ► shorter of an episode than usual, even though we could have gone longer than usual. And because his time was
00:00:43 ◼ ► limited, literally he had gotten off an airplane and he had to go to an event. I didn't want to interrupt
00:00:48 ◼ ► the show to do my sponsor reads live, so I'm going to unusually, for the talk show, record them in post
00:00:57 ◼ ► and we'll insert them in editing. And the first one, I'll just knock it out right here is our good
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00:03:01 ◼ ► for one year while subscription is active. Go to factor meals.com slash talk show 50 off. And now on
00:03:08 ◼ ► to the show with special guest, David Pogue. David Pogue, welcome to the talk show. You probably should
00:03:15 ◼ ► have been on long ago, but if there's ever a good time to have you on for the first time, it is to mark
00:03:20 ◼ ► the release of your book, Apple the first 50 years, which came out, I believe a week ago.
00:03:26 ◼ ► Well, give or take Tuesday. Yeah. Five days. And you are on a whirlwind book media tour. So
00:03:41 ◼ ► And when was the CHM event? Ah, that was the first stop of the tour. That was the day after the book
00:03:47 ◼ ► came out Wednesday, March 11. That was, that was one for the books. I'd watched yesterday. I'd put it
00:03:54 ◼ ► off. I did not watch live because I wanted to watch on a big TV and I wanted to, you know, take my time
00:04:00 ◼ ► and man, it was so good. I think, all right, let me start with this. Number one, I think the book,
00:04:07 ◼ ► I have not finished it. I have to say, cause it is 600 dense pages, right? It is a big book. And I kind
00:04:14 ◼ ► of feel bad about that because I think every time I've had the author of a book on the show, I have
00:04:18 ◼ ► finished the book before the author came on. In this case, I feel like I don't need that. Because I can
00:04:27 ◼ ► recommend the book wholeheartedly from like the introduction alone and the parts that I've cherry
00:04:32 ◼ ► picked. It is so good. But it is also in addition to being 600 pages, it is 600 dense pages, right? It's
00:04:40 ◼ ► beautiful, too. It is full color throughout. It's not like, oh, we're going to put 16 pages of color in the
00:04:47 ◼ ► middle of the book. And I'm glad you mentioned that because literally that was a stern conversation
00:04:53 ◼ ► with the publisher. They wanted to put 16 pages, you know, in the back and, you know, and you'd be
00:04:59 ◼ ► reading along and it would say, please turn to page 582. Like, no, sorry. No, we're not. We're not
00:05:07 ◼ ► doing a book that includes the iMac and the iPhone and printing most of it in black and white. We're just
00:05:13 ◼ ► not. So I'm very grateful. It is heavy. It is thick. It is dense. It is packed with color photographs
00:05:20 ◼ ► that are just terrific. It feels like what I think you meant for it to be, which is almost an
00:05:28 ◼ ► encyclopedia of the first 50 years of Apple. Yeah, no, no, you're right. It did. It did come out exactly
00:05:34 ◼ ► like what I envisioned. I'd say most of the Apple books that have come along so far are written by
00:05:40 ◼ ► business authors, not technologists. And that's great. You know, there's there's great stories in
00:05:46 ◼ ► the boardroom and, you know, the stock price and blah, blah, blah. But I've always been interested in
00:05:51 ◼ ► the products and the technologies and the backstories, especially. So as you've probably seen, there's a lot of
00:05:57 ◼ ► pictures of prototypes in there and and products that never made it to market. I actually got my
00:06:03 ◼ ► hands on the one and only Apple fax machine. Already the ship canceled it the last. So I really do mean
00:06:14 ◼ ► this with the utmost sincerity. I'm not sure there's any person on the planet better suited to have written
00:06:20 ◼ ► this book than you. It is amongst the ways your background. You were a columnist at Macworld for 13
00:06:28 ◼ ► years. You were the technology columnist at the New York Times, I think for the same number of years.
00:06:33 ◼ ► Yeah, isn't that weird? Yeah, you're still, you know, writing and talking about technology, but more on TV
00:06:41 ◼ ► than in in writing these days. You were literally a columnist for Macworld during a huge chunk of the
00:06:48 ◼ ► middle of Apple's 50 years. Your time at the Times included being one of the four reviewers who got
00:06:57 ◼ ► the iPhone in 2007. So you were right there, which gives you a first person perspective. But also, I
00:07:03 ◼ ► think, a credibility with Apple to get the last 15 to 20 years, the Tim Cook era, for sure, covered in
00:07:13 ◼ ► any way. Right? Which is, you know, and you've emphasized this in the book and at the event that
00:07:20 ◼ ► Apple had no editorial control over this book, but they did help you in some ways. Can you talk about
00:07:34 ◼ ► you're pretty golden because there's a lot of books, there's a lot of magazine articles,
00:07:38 ◼ ► there are interviews with former Apple people that you can do. They've left Apple. They're no longer
00:07:43 ◼ ► under NDA. The problem, as you so succinctly put it, was the last 15 years because everybody who was at
00:07:52 ◼ ► Apple is still at Apple. And Apple's rule is our people do not speak to journalists as a rule, unless,
00:07:59 ◼ ► as you know, from your onstage talk show with executives, when they're trying to make a point about AI or
00:08:07 ◼ ► introduce a product or something. Then they handpick the people they want to speak to. So I was
00:08:11 ◼ ► literally losing sleep. I mean, how am I going to do this? Who am I going to talk to? And it took six
00:08:18 ◼ ► months of making my arguments to Apple. And I wrote a sample chapter so they could see what the tone was
00:08:25 ◼ ► going to be like. And, you know, I stress that it's about the products and it's about the people who
00:08:30 ◼ ► created them who don't usually get credit. And finally, they said, okay, we're going to line up
00:08:36 ◼ ► a bunch of interviews. I mean, a lot of interviews, the entire Tim Cook executive team, engineers,
00:08:43 ◼ ► designers, sensor people, the camera technicians. I mean, it was, it was incredible series. Four times
00:08:50 ◼ ► I flew out to Apple Park over 2025 and interviewed back to back to back people. And, and they gave me
00:08:57 ◼ ► access to the archives. So the two archives who I did, I, two archivists whom I did not meet until
00:09:05 ◼ ► a couple of nights ago at a book signing, but I would submit lists of what I was hoping to find.
00:09:18 ◼ ► I've sort of suspected that they had archivists, but until you mentioned it at the CHM show,
00:09:24 ◼ ► I wasn't sure they did. It's always there because part of, in addition to the culture of secrecy,
00:09:30 ◼ ► which is about the current day and sort of does date back a surprising amount of time because
00:09:35 ◼ ► the people at Apple have been there for so long, it's been steady leadership for a long time,
00:09:47 ◼ ► ouster of Scott Forstall in 2012 and Tony Fidel leaving, the only real high level departure was
00:10:05 ◼ ► it's complicated, but everybody else who's there has been there since then and they're not going
00:10:11 ◼ ► to talk. And even the people who did leave still tend not to talk. It's true. And there are always
00:10:20 ◼ ► these reports of things, you know, that, that Apple has the, in addition to the culture of secrecy,
00:10:24 ◼ ► they do have a culture and it comes from Steve Jobs. There's like the, the quote from him that,
00:10:29 ◼ ► Hey, if you, I'm going to paraphrase, but if you've accomplished something good, take a moment,
00:10:35 ◼ ► to enjoy it and then think about what's next and move on and make something else that's great. And
00:10:39 ◼ ► Apple does as an institution sort of have that mindset of let's not look to the past. Let's look
00:10:45 ◼ ► to the future. And there were stories that used to be the icon garden at the infinite loop park where
00:10:51 ◼ ► they had these classic Mac OS bitmap icons, but yeah, like six feet tall. And then supposedly they
00:10:58 ◼ ► were just like, yeah, let's get rid of them. And they just threw them out or something. I don't know.
00:11:05 ◼ ► Yeah. But I guess they didn't throw this stuff out. They gave it to the donated it to the computer
00:11:10 ◼ ► history museum or, or somebody. Yeah. But it's always been a question in my head of how does a
00:11:16 ◼ ► company that is this, not repulsed, but this sort of afraid to dwell on the past, right? That I think
00:11:24 ◼ ► that it's like, Hey, if we, if we dwell on the past, we're going to lose sight of the future. And that
00:11:29 ◼ ► they've seen other technology companies that kind of latch on to their big success and, and ride it
00:11:37 ◼ ► into the ground and never obviate their own successes, right? Like the prime example, the iPhone
00:11:45 ◼ ► obviating the iPod, you know, teach that one in business school, you know, that they had, it was
00:11:52 ◼ ► like the most successful thing Apple had made. It was only six years old at the time. People still
00:11:57 ◼ ► remember it, you know, like it was a much longer era, the era of iPods. And they're like, yeah,
00:12:02 ◼ ► once we make this thing, nobody's going to buy an iPod again. And they're like, sure, let's do it.
00:12:06 ◼ ► They know that other companies over the years in technology would be like, well, we can't do a
00:12:11 ◼ ► phone that's going to, you know, we should make it so that you have to connect your iPod to your iPhone
00:12:15 ◼ ► to play music. So they still have to buy an iPod. And, but with that attitude, it's like,
00:12:22 ◼ ► do they have an archive of all these photos? It's amazing that they do. It really, yeah,
00:12:27 ◼ ► they do. And I understand that these archivists are having quite, quite a moment right now because,
00:12:32 ◼ ► because Apple, you know, I interviewed Tim Cook a couple of weeks ago for a TV segment,
00:12:38 ◼ ► and he admitted that, yes, the motto is we don't look back, we look forward, but obviously we have
00:12:45 ◼ ► to commemorate the people who brought us here. He put that very, you know, very lovely way. And so he
00:12:50 ◼ ► said, we are doing some stuff to celebrate the 50th, but it's quote, a new muscle for us. It's, it's,
00:12:58 ◼ ► it's a little awkward. It's a little new that they have no mechanism in place for it. And, and one
00:13:03 ◼ ► reason for that, by the way, is, you know, I had a couple of takeaways, even after having covered Apple
00:13:09 ◼ ► for 40 years, you know, doing this book, I came away with a couple of things I hadn't really known.
00:13:15 ◼ ► And one is how unbelievably intense it is to work there. I mean, people either quit immediately or they
00:13:25 ◼ ► really love the mission and they stay for decades. But I mean, it is intense. And I, I interviewed John
00:13:32 ◼ ► Rubenstein, Ruby, who was, you know, the head of hardware for the iMac, iPod, iPhone at the
00:13:38 ◼ ► beginning. And I asked him, so it was his idea, by the way, it was Rubenstein who decided we're going
00:13:45 ◼ ► to do a new one every year. Yeah. So that's why we get a new iPod and now a new operating system and
00:13:50 ◼ ► now a new iPhone every single year. That was him originally because they were convinced that Sony
00:13:56 ◼ ► was on their heels when they made this music player. Yes. Apple came across the world's first
00:14:02 ◼ ► Oreo sized hard drive. They found it in a Toshiba meeting that Toshiba had come up with this and
00:14:08 ◼ ► didn't have any takers for it. Didn't know what to do with it. And Rubenstein's like, uh, we know what
00:14:14 ◼ ► to do with that. Uh, we'll buy right now. We'll write you a check for $10 million. We'll buy all you can
00:14:19 ◼ ► manufacture. But after that point, he was convinced that Sony was going to come out that Christmas with a
00:14:25 ◼ ► competitive project. As it turns out, Sony did not come out with a pocket hard drive based player the
00:14:31 ◼ ► first year or the second year or the third year or the fourth year. The fifth year, they came out with
00:14:37 ◼ ► a Sony MP3 player that, as you may remember, could not play MP3 files. Oh, that's right.
00:14:46 ◼ ► It could only play Sony's proprietary format. So arguably a bad feature in an MP3 player.
00:14:51 ◼ ► But, but what, what, what if you, if you described that to somebody, company A did it this way. Company
00:14:57 ◼ ► B did it that way. That would sound like Apple to some people's ears, right? That Apple made the player
00:15:02 ◼ ► that only played the proprietary format. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. But, but how this ties into your,
00:15:08 ◼ ► to your comment is that Rubenstein said like, when they had the mini, which is the first product to sell
00:15:14 ◼ ► hundreds of millions in Apple's history, I'm like, well, there must've been a big beer bash. There
00:15:19 ◼ ► must've been, he's like, no, we never had time. We never had time. He said every time they launched
00:15:25 ◼ ► something the next morning, there were all guns blazing on the next one. And that's the real reason
00:15:31 ◼ ► they don't look back. They just don't have time. Yeah. And I know somebody at the computer history
00:15:37 ◼ ► museum event even cited Andy Grove, who is from Intel, but his famous maxim that only the paranoid
00:15:43 ◼ ► survive and that that's how Intel stayed on top for so long. And I think you could also say it's sort
00:15:50 ◼ ► of how Intel has sort of fallen out of mention as one of the big tech companies in the last 15 years
00:15:57 ◼ ► or so that they sort of lost that paranoid mindset of, you know, I think if they had it, they would
00:16:03 ◼ ► have seen the initial iPhone. And when the iPhone took off and thought, Hey, we're not a part of this.
00:16:10 ◼ ► Nobody's making these, whether it's Apple or whether it's the Android competitors, nobody's
00:16:14 ◼ ► using Intel chips for these. We need to be in this game. We need to do whatever it takes to be in this
00:16:18 ◼ ► game. And if that means all new chips, all new chips, it is, we need to be there. And instead they were
00:16:23 ◼ ► like, ah, well, whatever, that's cute. But I do think that that mindset, it's sort of like
00:16:31 ◼ ► when you're onto something, it's hard not to think, well, this is a great idea. And when you realize
00:16:39 ◼ ► it's a great idea, it seems starts to seem obvious and you think, well, everybody else must be onto it
00:16:45 ◼ ► too. And so when Apple realized this iPod idea is so great, we put it on the market. Each successive
00:16:51 ◼ ► model is selling more than the next. There's obviously this huge demand to make it something
00:16:56 ◼ ► other than a Mac peripheral to put a version of iTunes on windows so that it'll sync to anybody's
00:17:02 ◼ ► PC. Surely every single competing company in the world, including the one whose design chops,
00:17:08 ◼ ► we respect the most. Sony is going to come after this with guns a blazing because they're going to
00:17:14 ◼ ► see what we've got our hands on right now. And no, they didn't. But they convinced themselves they
00:17:25 ◼ ► That's right. And I'm doing these book talks. And one of the points I'm trying to make in the talk and
00:17:31 ◼ ► the book is everybody knows that Steve Jobs could see the future, blah, blah, blah. But even in instances
00:17:38 ◼ ► when everybody who knew anything about business or marketing knew that he was wrong. Like in the
00:17:44 ◼ ► classic case is the iPod mini. Again, it was the best selling electronics project in history. Hundreds
00:17:52 ◼ ► of millions a year. And Jobs said, right as it was ascending, it was ramping up. He said, okay,
00:17:59 ◼ ► we're going to shut it down. And like, what are you doing? Like Rubenstein is like, no, Steve, no,
00:18:05 ◼ ► no, this is wrong. This is crazy. And he's like, yeah, we're going to replace it with a new model
00:18:10 ◼ ► that holds less music. Right. The nano, right? It's smaller and cuter, but it doesn't hold as much
00:18:16 ◼ ► music. And the entire team is like, that's insane. People want the mini and Jobs shut down all the
00:18:24 ◼ ► factories. He stopped ordering parts for the mini. He transferred all the marketing money to the
00:18:29 ◼ ► nano and he was right. How, how did he know? I don't get it. Right. And it's that inflection point
00:18:38 ◼ ► between spinning hard disks, which held more data, but which are fragile, slower, less reliable to SSD
00:18:47 ◼ ► type storage that has no moving parts is, you know, much, much more reliable and smaller, but dollar for
00:18:55 ◼ ► dollar holds fewer bites and therefore fewer songs. And yeah, there was something, your book and the
00:19:04 ◼ ► event covered where early, if we go back in time, let's just zip all over the timeline here, but go back
00:19:12 ◼ ► to the 1985 or so when Jobs was on the cusp of being ousted from Apple under John Scully. And Jobs came to
00:19:21 ◼ ► Scully and said, Hey, we're getting, you know, the Macintosh is not selling as well as it should.
00:19:26 ◼ ► It's because you made me price it at $2,500. We should, I, we need to get the price down.
00:19:31 ◼ ► And Scully's answer was, well, you wanted a huge marketing campaign. It's the marketing dollars
00:19:36 ◼ ► that are driving the price, keeping the price this high. And Jobs wanted Apple to stop marketing the
00:19:42 ◼ ► Apple to take all the marketing money from the Apple to, so that they could lower the sales price of the
00:19:49 ◼ ► Macintosh. And you know, people who weren't around in the eighties don't remember this, but it was the
00:19:56 ◼ ► Apple to pretty much for most of the whole decade years after the came out. Then Apple's revenue was
00:20:02 ◼ ► from the Apple to line and the future was the Macintosh, but the Macintosh wasn't selling enough to keep the
00:20:10 ◼ ► lights on in Cupertino. It was the Apple to, and really that's what led to jobs as ouster. It was that
00:20:16 ◼ ► simple. He wanted to kill the Apple too. And he probably was wrong. We don't know. We can't prove
00:20:21 ◼ ► what would have happened if they said, okay, Steve, you know, whatever you want, we'll do it.
00:20:25 ◼ ► But it probably wasn't going to happen. Like the people who were buying Apple twos and I, you know,
00:20:31 ◼ ► I've told this story, like I was around, I was a kid at the time. I was like 10 years old, 10, 11, 12.
00:20:35 ◼ ► I thought the Macintosh was interesting, but it wasn't to me, it wasn't really a computer in the way that it
00:20:41 ◼ ► was computer was a computer. Like a computer was a thing that I turned on and I wrote software for
00:20:47 ◼ ► 10 print, you know, John is awesome. 20 go to 10, you know, and more, I, you know, I was writing more
00:20:54 ◼ ► complicated program, but that's what a computer was. And the Macintosh wasn't that it was like, wow,
00:20:59 ◼ ► this is really cool. And I was intrigued by it, but it really was a place where you ran software that
00:21:04 ◼ ► was pre complex software written by other people that, that, that you ran apps basically in today's
00:21:10 ◼ ► mindset. Whereas the Apple two, you wrote programs and you could run apps. There were word processors
00:21:17 ◼ ► from Apple and other companies and spreadsheets and stuff like that. You could run apps, but you also
00:21:22 ◼ ► wrote apps and it just was a different mindset. And that's what the market wanted. The market wanted,
00:21:27 ◼ ► including the big education market, wanted computers where the kids could turn them on and start writing
00:21:33 ◼ ► programs for their programming assignments. Right. And the Macintosh wasn't that. So I think jobs was
00:21:38 ◼ ► wrong then. And that, you know, what did you call it in the book? The interregnum, you know, the period
00:21:43 ◼ ► when he was gone, his exile, I often call it his exile. He was a different man when he came back.
00:21:49 ◼ ► And it maybe it's probably all of the above, you know, the age wisdom with age, the humility of,
00:21:57 ◼ ► of sort of being forced out of the company that was more successful. The fact that next never really
00:22:03 ◼ ► took off, you know, it was sort of a footnote in the computer industry, Pixar hadn't really taken off
00:22:11 ◼ ► yet. It was obviously a very interesting company that had a very bright future ahead of it, but
00:22:15 ◼ ► wasn't the Pixar we knew, right? Toy Story didn't come out till 1997. I, you know, humility, age,
00:22:22 ◼ ► I don't know, but he came back a very different person with, I think, a better sense of things like
00:22:28 ◼ ► that, right? Well, yeah, because, because if you think about it, the entire Steve 1.0 era,
00:22:34 ◼ ► he never had a successful product, right? So, I mean, Apple two, which is wise, but, you know,
00:22:40 ◼ ► Apple three, nope, Lisa, no Macintosh. Nope, not for the first few years. Uh, next, nope. And then when he
00:22:47 ◼ ► came back, he had almost nothing but tremendously successful products. I mean, right. iMac, iPod,
00:22:54 ◼ ► iPad, iPhone, iMovie, iPhone, I'm just incredible run. And yeah, the, the two jobs could not be more
00:23:01 ◼ ► different. Yeah. You can see the run through, right? The impulse is the same. That's why I thought back
00:23:07 ◼ ► when you mentioned that he was like, nope, we're going to kill the hard drive based mini in favor of
00:23:13 ◼ ► the smaller, cooler looking nano, even though dollar for dollar, it's going to store fewer songs
00:23:19 ◼ ► because his, his like, it's most like, like in Star Wars terms, the force, like he could use the force
00:23:26 ◼ ► and could tell, you know what, that's enough songs. And I think he was probably right where with the
00:23:37 ◼ ► And I mean, speaking of music, he was also dead wrong about people want to own their music.
00:23:44 ◼ ► Yeah. He hated the Spotify model where you pay a monthly fee and he would say, and I remember
00:23:49 ◼ ► being convinced by this. He said, the day you stopped writing a check to Spotify, you lose all
00:23:55 ◼ ► your music. You've got nothing for having paid all that money, but it turns out that's the model people
00:24:00 ◼ ► want. Yeah. It's, and it is the ownership. That's another thing too, where it is almost, it's, it's longer
00:24:07 ◼ ► than like the iPod, but I was just talking about this, I guess with my wife, but that, you know, and we have a
00:24:13 ◼ ► college age son and he just doesn't know the idea of owning music just doesn't really register for him.
00:24:20 ◼ ► And we were trying, we were, as my wife and I went to college in the nineties and both of us, and I
00:24:28 ◼ ► remember very vividly doing the math because it, that enormous part of my, the majority of my liquid
00:24:37 ◼ ► net worth as a college student was tied up in compact discs, right? Because my bank, my, my actual ATM card,
00:24:46 ◼ ► the other story I love to tell is that I went to Drexel here in Philly. I knew where the, I had a
00:24:51 ◼ ► core state, one of those banks that got eaten by a bigger bank, eaten by a bigger bank, eaten by, you
00:24:56 ◼ ► know, now it's part of probably bank America, who knows which bank, but core state's bank had an ATM
00:25:02 ◼ ► on Drexel's campus that had no fees for me because I had a core state's bank account and gave $10 bills,
00:25:09 ◼ ► which was important as a college student, because sometimes I had less than $20 in my checking account.
00:25:16 ◼ ► But what I could do for money is take some of the CDs I had, go to the used CD store and sell them
00:25:24 ◼ ► for a reasonable price to get cash. Right. And then if I wanted to buy CDs, I'd buy them used instead of
00:25:31 ◼ ► buying brand new, but you know, I had hundreds and hundreds, I guess probably over, you know,
00:25:37 ◼ ► thousands of dollars in CDs, you know, cause I, I owned all my music. I had a big collection of compact
00:25:43 ◼ ► discs. And if I needed money, I would find some that was like, ah, I don't listen to that anymore.
00:25:48 ◼ ► Take it to the used CD store. And all of a sudden I'd have 30 or 40 bucks in my pocket.
00:25:52 ◼ ► It makes no sense. Try explaining that to the kids today. It makes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Although I
00:25:59 ◼ ► noticed, interestingly, iPods are suddenly hot again because of the cell phone, the smartphone
00:26:04 ◼ ► bands in schools. So kids need a way to listen to music. That's allowed. And it's iPods.
00:26:09 ◼ ► Yeah. And I will say my son, I noticed it cause we, we have an old car and it has a CD player.
00:26:15 ◼ ► He's started filling it with CDs. Like it is sort of a retro, like the way that my generation
00:26:20 ◼ ► got back into vinyl kids today are getting back into CDs, but it, the whole idea of owning music
00:26:28 ◼ ► is sort of an interregnum, right? Because previously people just listened to the radio, right? You'd
00:26:33 ◼ ► turn on the radio to listen to music. You didn't pay and you listened to ads in between songs. And
00:26:39 ◼ ► then there was a period where people bought albums and for a while tapes and CDs. And now it's just
00:26:51 ◼ ► I, well, we are. And it's, but it, but it is, I understand that Steve Jobs mentality of,
00:27:02 ◼ ► Hey, I don't want to pay anybody any more money. I already own all of Led Zeppelin's albums,
00:27:06 ◼ ► right? It's, I've paid once for the box set. I don't need to pay anymore. Um, I'm trying to think
00:27:14 ◼ ► what, again, we could talk forever, but there is the, in the jobs 1.0 era of Apple. And I think
00:27:21 ◼ ► your book makes this point clear. There really wasn't a strong CEO figure. Jobs was not the CEO
00:27:27 ◼ ► at the time, right? It was Mike Scott for a while and nobody, that's like a name you just never hear
00:27:34 ◼ ► anymore. Nobody's ever like, yeah, remember Mike Scott. Those were good times at Apple. No,
00:27:39 ◼ ► you know, he just, he just died and there wasn't a whisper of press release, memorial acknowledgement,
00:27:47 ◼ ► nothing. In fact, I will say that that's one really meaningful thing about the 150 interviews I did for
00:27:53 ◼ ► this book. Four of those guys have now died or become unable to speak since I did the interviews,
00:28:00 ◼ ► including Bill Atkinson. Uh, it was his last interview. And so, uh, really, I'm glad I did this
00:28:08 ◼ ► when I did. I think that's just to go back. I think that's why the 50th anniversary is so
00:28:14 ◼ ► special. Like it is a big round number, right? Obviously a hundred in our numeric system is a
00:28:21 ◼ ► bigger number, but we're not going to be around. None of the people who are around are going to be,
00:28:27 ◼ ► none of these people are going to be around for Apple's hundredth anniversary, unless Apple health
00:28:32 ◼ ► is a better success than, than we anticipated being right. 50 is the big number where it's the
00:28:41 ◼ ► biggest number where the people involved are still going to be around to be interviewed and tell their
00:28:46 ◼ ► stories for it. And it's also a further blessing that when Apple was founded and through the eighties,
00:28:54 ◼ ► so many of the principal players were so young, right? So that 50 years later, there's still,
00:29:03 ◼ ► you know, as, as the fact that some of them like Bill Atkinson, and of course, Steve jobs,
00:29:08 ◼ ► you know, have already passed and that some of them are starting to fall to other things like dementia
00:29:14 ◼ ► and things like, or just faulty, you know, just the memories. Now, maybe they're not suffering from
00:29:19 ◼ ► dementia, but they don't remember what happened 48 years ago, which, you know, right happens to
00:29:25 ◼ ► everybody eventually. This is the one where it's, it's the sweet spot of an anniversary that hits the
00:29:31 ◼ ► most number of people who are still there can recall the stories. Yeah. Bingo. And fortunately there's
00:29:37 ◼ ► one and only one person who's been at Apple for all 50 years. He joined when he was 14. It's Chris
00:29:45 ◼ ► Espinosa. He's still there. And thank God, he not only has been there, but he has a steel trap memory
00:29:53 ◼ ► for detail. He's a great storyteller and he's an incredible technologist. Like, like his explanation
00:30:00 ◼ ► of what went wrong with the Apple three, I've never seen written anywhere. And it was, it was golden.
00:30:06 ◼ ► He is one of a kind. He was 14 when he started working there. I think you cracked a joke at the,
00:30:12 ◼ ► on the stage event. Like, I don't know what the California child labor laws were at the time.
00:30:16 ◼ ► His mom would drive him to the homebrew computer club meetings and wait outside in the parking lot.
00:30:24 ◼ ► He couldn't drive. But still there. And he's not there in any kind of ceremonial sense. To my
00:30:32 ◼ ► knowledge, I think he still runs the developer tools group, right? Or do you know? He's working in
00:30:37 ◼ ► a TVOS now, but he's been worked on all kinds of places. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And what a guy he told
00:30:43 ◼ ► me that his, sorry, he told me that he's, his phone is blowing up this week and his cubicle is constantly
00:30:51 ◼ ► darkened by people stopping in both, both because of the computer history museum event. And that's now,
00:30:58 ◼ ► you know, on YouTube and getting a lot of attention, but also just because he's the guy who's been there
00:31:03 ◼ ► for 50 years. Continuously in positions of relevance and remembers the details like that.
00:31:10 ◼ ► I don't want to spoil it because I've told, I've linked to it on Daring Fireball. I want people to
00:31:14 ◼ ► watch the event. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but the story of the heat problems with the Apple
00:31:20 ◼ ► Apple III. It's the absolute best. And like you said, there are so many apocryphal stories in Apple
00:31:29 ◼ ► history and that you ruthlessly tried to weed those out. Like, well, that didn't really happen. And then
00:31:34 ◼ ► you heard the story of the Apple III overheating and you're like, well, that didn't happen. And then you
00:31:38 ◼ ► found multiple sources. You're like, no, that was exactly what happened. Basically. Yeah. It doesn't
00:31:42 ◼ ► spoil the whole thing, but this will, we'll give him a hint. So just the thing about it. So jobs turns
00:31:49 ◼ ► out, didn't like fans. So he wouldn't allow a fan to be in the Apple III. So it got 220 degrees inside
00:31:57 ◼ ► there. Like people would pull the floppy drives out of the slot and they'd be melting. It was really hot in
00:32:04 ◼ ► there. And basically pins would expand and, and daughter boards would come loose and the thing
00:32:10 ◼ ► would shut off. And so Apple, according to legend, sent out a service bulletin to all the dealers
00:32:17 ◼ ► saying, if your customers come in complaining that their Apple III's are shutting off, tell them to lift
00:32:22 ◼ ► it two or three inches off the desk and drop it. And that will receipt the posts onto the daughter
00:32:29 ◼ ► board and it works. But I thought, no way is that story true, but nope. Found the original designer of
00:32:37 ◼ ► the Apple III. And he goes, yeah, it works. Why would we not tell people that is a sort of difference
00:32:43 ◼ ► between then Apple and today's Apple? Yeah. Imagine if like there was a cellular reception issue with the
00:32:53 ◼ ► iPhone and the solution was to drop it six inches off the table onto the table. And that, that'll
00:32:59 ◼ ► reseat the cellular modem. Oh, I thought you were going for a joke. I thought you were going to say,
00:33:03 ◼ ► imagine if there were a cellular reception issue and they told you that you were holding it wrong.
00:33:07 ◼ ► Almost the same thing. That's probably the closest we've come to a similar, similar issue. You're,
00:33:16 ◼ ► you're seating your pins wrong. It was one you're holding it wrong is another. All right. I'm going to
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00:35:29 ◼ ► notion.com slash notion.com slash talk show. Before we continue into the minutia of some of these stories,
00:35:36 ◼ ► I talking about your writing the book itself. Like when did you decide to write the book? And was there a
00:35:43 ◼ ► point where you got worried that there would be too many of these Apple at 50 books coming out? Because as it
00:35:49 ◼ ► turns out, it seems like yours is the only one. It's the only one. I'm boggled. I mean, not even Apple,
00:35:56 ◼ ► not nobody. I'm absolutely. It's like John Rubenstein with Sony. It is. That's exactly what
00:36:04 ◼ ► made me think of the question, right? Was there a point where you're like halfway through this book
00:36:08 ◼ ► and you know, you've got gold, right? You're like, I've got sources. I've got these great stories. This
00:36:14 ◼ ► is coming together. There are going to be a zillion of these books. I mean, I was worried for the entire
00:36:21 ◼ ► two years. So I hosted another thing at the computer history museum in 2024 to celebrate the max 40th
00:36:27 ◼ ► anniversary. And they brought back Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld and Susan Kerr and Steve Capps and
00:36:33 ◼ ► Bruce Horn and Guy Kawasaki and all these legends from the Macintosh days. And that's on YouTube too. That
00:36:40 ◼ ► was unbelievable. It was just, you know, the audience is like Woodstock and these guys were laughing and
00:36:53 ◼ ► my wife's idea, this Apple at 50. She woke me up a few weeks later. I was supposed to be working on a
00:36:57 ◼ ► different book for Simon & Schuster. And she woke me up and she's like, you should dump that other book
00:37:02 ◼ ► and do a book about Apple's 50th. And I told this on stage, I literally shut her down. I'm like,
00:37:09 ◼ ► Nikki, you missed that. That's gone. That date is come and gone. And then in the morning, I looked
00:37:13 ◼ ► it up and she was right. It's, it's, it was two years away, just enough time to write a 600 page book
00:37:19 ◼ ► if you're crazy. But the part that worried me most was I felt really intense pressure about the different
00:37:29 ◼ ► contingents, the different groups of people who were going to pin expectations on this book,
00:37:35 ◼ ► right? So there's Apple fans and they want to know the internal stories, the fun stuff,
00:37:40 ◼ ► the making of the origin stories. There are Apple haters who are going to be looking over my shoulder
00:37:46 ◼ ► to make sure I'm not kissing their ass and not giving them a pass on, you know, Foxconn suicides or
00:37:52 ◼ ► whatever it is. There are the people I'm interviewing and man, this was crazy. A lot of these guys are older
00:37:59 ◼ ► and I could see in their eyes, this was their shot at immortality. They wanted the story, right? They
00:38:09 ◼ ► wanted the credit due to them. They wanted the old mistakes that have been passed on from author to
00:38:14 ◼ ► author corrected. And it was so important to them that the story be told correctly, you know, and then
00:38:22 ◼ ► there's, who is the book for? Is it, are there going to be business schools who want to know about the
00:38:27 ◼ ► financial shenanigans that Fred Anderson did to save the company in 1996? Are there going to be casual
00:38:32 ◼ ► readers who aren't Apple diehards, but they just like a really good yarn? I mean, this is the greatest
00:38:39 ◼ ► corporate turnaround in history. They went from six weeks from bankruptcy to making a $45 million profit
00:38:46 ◼ ► in one year. I mean, that's unbelievable. So that was the biggest stress is I felt all these different
00:38:53 ◼ ► audiences, you know, you missed it. You didn't say this, you were to this. Uh, so I felt like it was
00:38:59 ◼ ► threading 10 needles so far. I think I pulled it off. I think so too. I, it reads great. I have a very
00:39:06 ◼ ► specific question. There's a part where you're talking about the original iPhone and you talk about what the
00:39:20 ◼ ► Yes. Yes. That was me. I mean, what am I going to do? I wrote this in the New York times. So the
00:39:29 ◼ ► solution, and there's a few of those, there's a few times where I'm quoting reviews, but they were my
00:39:34 ◼ ► own. Uh, you're the only person, John, you're the only person to catch that. And it's, it's funny
00:39:41 ◼ ► because like in certain tertiary ways, I was a character in the Apple story. And this one did not
00:39:50 ◼ ► make it in the book. And I've never told this story in public, but the way you take a screenshot
00:39:56 ◼ ► on the iPhone press to up internally, they call that the pogue feature. Huh? And I'll tell you why
00:40:03 ◼ ► in 2007, I was writing the first iPhone missing manual, how to book about the iPhone. And there was
00:40:10 ◼ ► no way to create screenshots with the original iPhone. And so I contacted Apple PR and said,
00:40:22 ◼ ► screenshots. And they're like, well, yes, we have a very, you know, not polished looking
00:40:26 ◼ ► internal tool that we use. And I'm like, can I have it for this book? So it looks good. And they
00:40:33 ◼ ► went all the way up to Steve. And the answer was no. They said, you can fly to Cupertino and you can sit
00:40:40 ◼ ► in a conference room here under supervision and use our tool to take your screenshots. I'm like, okay,
00:40:46 ◼ ► great. I'll book my flight. And then two days later, they said, Steve's changed his mind.
00:40:51 ◼ ► You can't use the tool at all, but we will set aside an engineer. If you describe exactly every
00:41:00 ◼ ► screenshot you want, you know, this is a spreadsheet in the first column, it's revenue. You describe
00:41:04 ◼ ► exactly what you want. We'll have this engineer make the screenshots for you. So this poor slob whom
00:41:20 ◼ ► So then cut to, and they were beautiful and they worked out great, but then cut to a year later,
00:41:26 ◼ ► the second annual iPhone comes out and I called Apple PR. They're like, no, no effing way. We are
00:41:34 ◼ ► not doing that. We're not giving you an engineer for the whole summer. We will put in a feature
00:41:40 ◼ ► built into the iPhone. You press these two buttons and you take a screenshot. So that is with us today on
00:41:51 ◼ ► That's well, job well done. But you, you have been a player in this, like, you know, being the back page or
00:41:58 ◼ ► at one of the back page columnist in Macworld magazine was a thing. It really was. And you've been writing
00:42:09 ◼ ► about this stuff for a long time. You know, the missing manual series was super influential and that was your imprint. I remember you wrote the user manual for Conflict Catcher.
00:42:29 ◼ ► Jeff Robin, who is still at Apple and has been, at least my knowledge, he's still at Apple, was in charge of iTunes, might still be our Apple Music for a long time, the software.
00:42:41 ◼ ► But before he went to Apple, before he wrote the music player sound jam that Apple purchased that became iTunes, he had this utility for the classic Mac OS called Conflict Catcher, which, and again, a description of Conflict Catcher is going to sound crazy to people who weren't around for the tail end of the classic era.
00:43:03 ◼ ► But to really trick out a Macintosh in the 90s, you would install third-party system extensions and control panels that would add features to the operating system, depending on what business you were in or what fun stuff you wanted to do.
00:43:19 ◼ ► But if you were in graphic design, almost everybody ran Adobe Type Manager, just to name one that was very serious.
00:43:26 ◼ ► And Adobe Type Manager was a way to get PostScript fonts to render on screen beautifully.
00:43:36 ◼ ► But because all this stuff came from third parties, they often conflicted with each other because they would patch the same traps in the operating system.
00:43:45 ◼ ► And if two extensions were trying to write to the same magic spot, you'd have a conflict.
00:43:55 ◼ ► And you'd have to boot up with the shift key down and take half your extensions out and see if that did the trick.
00:44:15 ◼ ► And you could make sets of extensions so that if you were doing graphic design work, you'd have these extensions enabled.
00:44:26 ◼ ► And you'd have different extensions so that, like, a MIDI keyboard could connect to your Mac.
00:45:10 ◼ ► But B, there is a place for somebody who wants to write with a voice and with style and inform people, right?
00:45:18 ◼ ► Like, your book, the manual for it taught people how they wouldn't even need Conflict Catcher, right?
00:45:53 ◼ ► But that was not Jeff Robbins' first music app for the Mac in the late 80s when I was still a Broadway conductor.
00:46:09 ◼ ► This is the company that rents out Fiddler on the Roof or Les Miserables if your school wants to do it, right?
00:46:15 ◼ ► And our CEO thought, it's too hard for some junior high school choir teacher to play these difficult pieces of music,
00:46:32 ◼ ► It could play just the Sopranos, now just the Tenors, and now here's the dance break but at half speed.
00:46:41 ◼ ► And I was put in charge of that project and I found this kid, this genius young programmer to write our MIDI playback app,
00:46:55 ◼ ► And so Jeff Robbins and I worked together to write a music playback app long before he would then go on to write iTunes.
00:47:12 ◼ ► But again, with the talented teenagers or young people, you know, precocious programmers doing amazing things with these computers that seem so technically primitive in their capabilities to today's eyes.
00:47:29 ◼ ► No, I definitely remember the conflict capture manual because I remember thinking there might be a future for me writing about this stuff, you know.
00:47:40 ◼ ► We were talking before that in the early years of Apple, the Steve Jobs 1.0 era, they didn't really have a charismatic or influential CEO, really.
00:47:49 ◼ ► The products of those early years from 76 through Jobs' ouster, or I guess when Scully came in, which was like 1983.
00:48:02 ◼ ► The Apple II was clearly more the Waz computer and then, you know, the Lisa and the Macintosh, you know, the Steve Jobs computers.
00:48:15 ◼ ► But the three main ones, and I think they define three eras of the company, John Scully, 1983 to 93, Jobs from the return with Next in 1997 through his death in 2011, and then Tim Cook after that.
00:48:41 ◼ ► Like your book even opens with somebody, a woman who's been there since like 19 – somewhere in the 90s, and she's like, I've worked for five different companies, but they're all named Apple.
00:48:53 ◼ ► You had Scully on stage for the CHM thing, and I thought that was a pretty cool thing because as much as you can see the mistakes,
00:49:05 ◼ ► that he made and the way that he wasn't the right person for the long run, overall, he was a successful CEO, right?
00:49:14 ◼ ► Like I think that the idea that, hey, he's the guy who ran Steve Jobs out of the company, and then he got run out himself, and he was the guy behind the Newton, and the Newton was a joke.
00:49:34 ◼ ► I mean, he also was the guy who got the Macintosh onto Rift processors, which are still with us today.
00:49:57 ◼ ► The first speech recognition that happened under Scully, I do think he's gotten a little bit of a bum rap.
00:50:05 ◼ ► But he did keep the innovation going, and I would say he was even more of a product idea guy than Tim Cook is.
00:50:14 ◼ ► I mean, remember the 1987 concept video that Scully would show off at educational conferences, the Knowledge Navigator.
00:50:21 ◼ ► I mean, it was a mock-up of a six-minute short film about a professor in the future who comes in with an Apple-branded folding tablet.
00:50:32 ◼ ► It is very obviously an iPad, except that it folds in half and expands with a front-facing camera, and he's on the Internet, which was still six years away, and there's an AI bot in the corner talking to him, which was decades away.
00:50:59 ◼ ► I mean, the number of technologies on display in that little video that didn't exist then but now do exist in almost exactly that form is stunning.
00:51:09 ◼ ► And, of course, the answer is not necessarily, oh, they were so visionary, they knew where technology was going.
00:51:15 ◼ ► It might be the other way around, but that video was so influential that people thought, oh, maybe there should be multi-touch.
00:51:37 ◼ ► And the big obvious thing that was missing from all of those devices, and then I wound up with the Handspring visor on the Palm, but not a Palm-branded one.
00:51:47 ◼ ► It was like the Palm founders went and founded a sort of an Apple-like story where they left, started their own company, Handspring, and licensed the OS, and then made better products than the company.
00:52:00 ◼ ► But all of those devices, the Newton or the Palm, the big missing thing was always on wireless Internet, right?
00:52:13 ◼ ► And it turns out that all of those things, not that they were useless, but they were almost useless.
00:52:19 ◼ ► And if you think about what people do with their phones and have ever since 2007 when the iPhone came out, it's about being connected to a network at all times.
00:52:31 ◼ ► And you could talk about multi-touch and the color and the size of the phone and the simplicity of just having that one home button on the front.
00:52:49 ◼ ► I mean, there are exceptions, and there are people who've written books by thumb-typing them on their phones, but not a lot, you know.
00:52:56 ◼ ► I'm guessing that out of the 600 pages of your book here, you didn't type many of them with your thumbs.
00:53:04 ◼ ► But the interesting thing that you mentioned, that these things were worthless without wireless, reminds me of the iPhone story.
00:53:23 ◼ ► For the first year, there was no app store, and people started, as I'm sure you remember, jailbreaking these phones using illegal tactics to install their own apps.
00:53:33 ◼ ► And Scott Forstall, who was the head of software for the iPhone and Mac OS X and other projects, who is now a Broadway producer.
00:53:51 ◼ ► But I made him a QuickTime video of me playing the opening of Hadestown, for which he was an investor, and sang to him, begging him for an interview.
00:54:03 ◼ ► Anyway, so he told me this incredible story that people started jailbreaking the phone, and Forstall would show jobs.
00:54:18 ◼ ► You and I are going to sit down, and we're going to make a list of every app anyone could ever think of.
00:54:25 ◼ ► And then you are going to assemble the world's largest army of Apple engineers to write every program.
00:54:35 ◼ ► He wanted both to have a closed system, right, because all the apps would be written by Apple,
00:54:59 ◼ ► And behind Jobs' back, went to his team and said, here's what we're really going to do.
00:55:06 ◼ ► And so by the time Jobs finally came around after a year, okay, okay, we'll open an app store up to anyone.
00:55:22 ◼ ► And that was when the iPhone really took off, because not just apps, but entire businesses, you know, DoorDash and Airbnb and Tinder and Uber and Lyft and all of those things from that app.
00:55:35 ◼ ► I'd heard pieces of that story before from other reports, other books, things that I've been told, but I've never heard it, that part of it, that Forstall told you for the book.
00:55:48 ◼ ► That Jobs, at one point, became convinced, well, obviously we need more apps for the phone, but we'll just write them all?
00:56:03 ◼ ► And I've met Scott a few times, not recently, but since, you know, it was when he was still at Apple.
00:56:08 ◼ ► But I can see why he got along so well with Steve Jobs, but also there's a practical side to him.
00:56:16 ◼ ► That he recognized the folly of that in a way that Steve Jobs, even at his peak as CEO, maybe couldn't recognize the folly of thinking that Apple could, you know.
00:56:30 ◼ ► If there was only going to be one word processing app for the iPhone, where's the competition going to come from, right?
00:56:36 ◼ ► If there's no competition, you know, and then Jobs' mind is, well, we're going to hire all the best engineers, so there doesn't need to be competition because we'll have the best designers and the best engineers.
00:56:45 ◼ ► So, of course, it'll be the best possible theoretical word processor for the iPhone, so we don't need competition.
00:56:58 ◼ ► Like, people being so convinced secretly that Jobs was wrong that they contradicted him privately.
00:57:14 ◼ ► They knew that by the time this thing shipped, it would be obsolete, that memory would be cheaper.
00:57:20 ◼ ► And so, Burl Smith, this genius hardware engineer they had, he secretly put traces in there, like copper circuits on the circuit board,
00:57:29 ◼ ► that would permit hobbyists to expand the memory without having to buy a whole new Mac.
00:57:37 ◼ ► On the bill of lading, like on the list of parts that they had to pay for, they called it something hilarious,
00:58:14 ◼ ► And so, this guy at Next, where Jobs had failed to create the next hardware computer, but had a kick-ass OS, Next Step,
00:58:25 ◼ ► this guy who is a developer relations guy, not even on Jobs' team, at the risk of his job,
00:58:32 ◼ ► he called Apple's CTO without anyone's permission and said, I think you should look at our OS.
00:58:46 ◼ ► And so, Ellen Hancock, the CTO, called Jobs and said, okay, I hadn't thought about this,
00:58:54 ◼ ► And so, this guy, who all writes Garrett Rice's name, by all means, he should have been fired.
00:59:00 ◼ ► Instead, Jobs hailed him in an all-hands meeting and wrote him a check for 20 grand for going rogue and then calling up Apple.
00:59:11 ◼ ► There's a picture on, as we talk about this transition from Scully, who got forced out in 93, and then Jobs coming back in 97.
00:59:51 ◼ ► It's six white guys, all wearing identical navy blue suits, all with white shirts and ties.
01:00:13 ◼ ► And I don't know how we got talking about it, but it was one of the court cases, maybe the epic one.
01:00:22 ◼ ► And he said, you know, I only wear a suit for three things, weddings, funerals, and when I have to go to court for Apple.
01:00:40 ◼ ► You know, during this interregnum period when Apple just sank and sank and sank and sank and they had 50 different Mac models and 12 different ad agencies and everything was going to hell, just fiefdoms and redundancies.
01:00:53 ◼ ► Phil told me that at one point, two Apple trademark lawyers showed up in trademark court to sue each other.
01:01:10 ◼ ► But the gist of it was that, like Phil said to me, that if it's a wedding or a funeral, you have one good suit and you could work for both.
01:01:20 ◼ ► And so like every time you'd have to like go out and buy suits because he didn't own them.
01:01:27 ◼ ► By the time he stepped aside and became an Apple fellow, you know, they were the biggest company in the world and he didn't own suits because he didn't need to because he worked at Apple.
01:01:41 ◼ ► And I remember as a kid in the 80s, I read a story about the company and it said all of the engineers showed up at work in T-shirts and jeans and sneakers.
01:01:57 ◼ ► And I remember telling my dad this and my dad said, John, there is no computer company out there where you show up to work in a T-shirt and jeans.
01:02:09 ◼ ► But there's something to that, though, where fundamentally Scully wasn't meant to be there for long.
01:02:36 ◼ ► I mean, there's just so much like nobody's Steve Jobs, like not even in Apple, outside Apple.
01:03:01 ◼ ► But on the other hand, nobody in the world has come up with a Jobs-level new platform either since he died.
01:03:08 ◼ ► So it may just be that that was a perfect era of miniaturization and Chinese manufacturing and the public getting used to technology and that Jobs was there at the right time and that the world has now moved on to software and services, which is, of course, exactly where Tim Cook took the company.
01:03:27 ◼ ► And I thought your book covers it well and I thought the event covered it well, that it is sort of an unfair knock.
01:04:06 ◼ ► And I think even the people at Apple, even Steve Jobs himself, I think they had had so many false starts of, oh, this is the one that's going to set the whole world on fire and get 2 billion users or 2.5 billion, whatever Apple's at now, which is mostly iPhone users.
01:04:25 ◼ ► You know, you might use a Mac, you might have an iPad, you might have AirPods, but you probably have an iPhone too.
01:04:30 ◼ ► Like the number of Apple users who don't have an iPhone is probably a pretty small sliver of the 2.5 billion people.
01:04:43 ◼ ► And it was the computer for more people, but there wasn't anything to it that really engaged the billions as opposed to the millions of people.
01:05:07 ◼ ► The fact that it's a communication device that you text people and FaceTime them and call them.
01:05:16 ◼ ► They want to communicate to their friends and family or to the world, you know, for people who want to put their stuff out on social media.
01:05:25 ◼ ► But I almost feel like with the iPhone and they even said it like, did you guys think it was going to be as big as hit as it was?
01:05:50 ◼ ► You know, that I think if he had been thinking about 2 billion users, he would have known it had had to be open.
01:05:55 ◼ ► And as opposed to making just sort of another iPod size hit, which, you know, if that's how big the iPhone had gotten, as big as the iPod had gotten from 2001 to 2006 or 2007, that still would have been a success at that time for Apple and for the cell phone industry.
01:06:26 ◼ ► And a lot of people that I spoke to regret the dark stuff that the iPhone has unleashed.
01:06:33 ◼ ► You know, I mean, you could argue that's why Apple and the rest of the industry are now working on how can we use the benefits, the virtues of that online always computer without occupying your eyes.
01:06:50 ◼ ► They're playing with putting a camera in there or Johnny Ives new company is talking about a pendant or a badge or a necklace or or a thing you wear in your head.
01:07:05 ◼ ► I mean, maybe an Eddie Q, Apple's VP of services, recently testified in one of those copyright patent lawsuits that 10 years from now, it won't be about the iPhone.
01:07:24 ◼ ► But I think if Apple is still Apple, if somebody is going to obviate it, they want to be the ones.
01:07:29 ◼ ► But I do think that that's the bum knock against Tim Cook, where I'm with you, where I don't really see the missed opportunities after the iPhone for something that would be as exciting as the iPhone.
01:07:43 ◼ ► And the fact that nobody else made it, it's not like you can say, hey, Apple missed out on blank, which is a computerized consumer electronic device that you can't.
01:07:56 ◼ ► I really think that a iPhone sized device that's in your pocket all the time and can run any software imaginable.
01:08:10 ◼ ► I think that we will start to see things like, who knows, if it'll be glasses or earpods or pendants or all of the above or something like that.
01:08:18 ◼ ► And it'll involve computers getting ever smaller so that the iPhone seems big and hulking compared to these computers.
01:08:26 ◼ ► But it's one of those things where it's a decades long gap between where the modern phone came out and this came out.
01:08:34 ◼ ► And I think that if you took somebody back to 2012 when Tim Cook first took over as CEO and had them live in the world of that time and the phones of that time and the camera quality of that time and what you could do.
01:08:55 ◼ ► You know, did you I'm sure you've seen the movie her the independent movie or most people have it.
01:09:08 ◼ ► So of all the movies that depict future technologies, I actually think that one's the most plausible.
01:09:15 ◼ ► So, you know, in this near future, everybody's wearing what amounts to an AirPod and you do all your computing and information seeking by talking to this glorified Siri played by Scarlett Johansson's voice.
01:09:28 ◼ ► But they then you have to answer the question, what if someone wants to send you a picture or if you need a map or you need some visual, they also have in their pocket this little index card size screen that they can whip out and look and then put it back in their pocket.
01:09:55 ◼ ► I watched it when it was new and then I rewatched it at some point after AI came became a big thing.
01:10:02 ◼ ► So let's say like two years ago, I don't know, a year or two years ago, I rewatched it and it's like, yeah, this really holds up.
01:10:10 ◼ ► You know, I'm a big Kubrick fan, but I also feel like 2001 A Space Odyssey really holds up in terms of there's one computer.
01:10:27 ◼ ► And that's sort of the vision of AI in the future where you don't it's not like your AI lives in your phone.
01:10:35 ◼ ► You could keep it in your pocket and talk to it through your headphones or you're at the gym and the phone is in your locker and all you've got is your AirPods in and you could still bring up the context.
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01:13:27 ◼ ► The other thing that I concluded from doing this research is that Apple has quietly crept up on us as it turns into a medical company.
01:13:42 ◼ ► I mean, it's more or less diagnosing atrial fibrillation, this devastating heart thing that can give you a stroke, and hypertension, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, senses differences in your gait if you're getting Parkinson's.
01:13:55 ◼ ► And with FDA approval, which is so hard to get, to get FDA approval for the heart atrial fibrillation detection, they had to do a study with Stanford involving 400,000 patients.
01:14:16 ◼ ► I mean, it is really hard to get approval, and that they're doing it, and that they have more to come.
01:14:31 ◼ ► And it's sort of a side of Apple that's crept up on us that isn't really recognized, I feel.
01:14:42 ◼ ► The fitness tracking is sort of health-related, but it's not what you're talking about here, right?
01:14:48 ◼ ► It's not about – because nobody wants to think that they're going to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, right?
01:14:54 ◼ ► If you already know you have it, Apple Watch isn't what you need, and that's what your Apple Watch will tell you if it detects the signs of it.
01:15:02 ◼ ► It will say, hey, you should go see your doctor and show them this, and if you really have it, they're going to give you the real treatment that you need.
01:15:13 ◼ ► It's like you buy it for the fun stuff that you want to have with your Apple Watch and your AirPods and your iPhone.
01:15:39 ◼ ► And otherwise, he would have just sat there, like, bleeding to death off the side of a cliff.
01:15:45 ◼ ► Like, last night, I was at a bookstore in Portland, and I was making this argument about Apple's turning into a medical company.
01:15:51 ◼ ► And during the Q&A, this guy raised his hand, and he said, I just thought I'd tell you that one day, six weeks ago, my Apple Watch said,
01:16:15 ◼ ► All of this stuff accretes over time, where, as the Apple Watch gains new sensors and new capabilities, the atrial fibrillation detection is still going to be there.
01:16:40 ◼ ► But they keep asking themselves those questions, like, if we have a thing in their ear, what could we detect about them?
01:17:00 ◼ ► So even if you want to be cynical, it is an area of growth for the company without selling, without introducing all new products.
01:17:14 ◼ ► It was like a footnote in the introduction of the new studio displays that came out with the MacBook Neo earlier this month.
01:17:28 ◼ ► And the guy, the product marketing guy, was like, yeah, you're the first one to ask about that.
01:17:42 ◼ ► In that, so the studio display XDR, which costs like $3,500, that's the one that's FDA certified for the color and the calibration that needs to happen.
01:17:57 ◼ ► And the MRI technicians who use these displays always have four displays in front of them for it.
01:18:06 ◼ ► So a four-display setup with the Apple Studio Display XDR is like $13,000 to $14,000 for four of them.
01:18:32 ◼ ► The other thing that's super, super fun in your book, super fun, is you have documentation, including photos of so many abandoned and aborted products that never saw the light of day.
01:19:22 ◼ ► So you could look out the window and see the reviews of the restaurant you're passing or whatever.
01:19:29 ◼ ► And it was the really sad thing, according to the people who worked on it, is that the original plan was to do a 1.0 version that wasn't level five self-driving.
01:19:42 ◼ ► It was Tesla level, but not completely go to sleep behind the wheel and I'll wake you when we get there level.
01:19:49 ◼ ► And his argument was, the guy I talked to, that the iPhone 1.0 didn't have video capture.
01:20:37 ◼ ► It seems like there's the people who want to play the what would happen if Steve Jobs was still around game and the people who are resistant to it.
01:20:48 ◼ ► But you can't help but think, if Steve were around, wouldn't they have shipped something, right?
01:20:56 ◼ ► Where somehow, under Johnny Ive, they set the bar so high for what they wanted to ship that they never took a moment.
01:21:09 ◼ ► Where early, like 2004, in the iPhone development project, Scott Forsall's team is showing the software to Jobs.
01:21:25 ◼ ► And you better show me something that wows me or I'm going to shut the whole thing down, right?
01:21:50 ◼ ► We make computers and we step into things like music players that are going to become computers when they weren't computers at all before.
01:22:17 ◼ ► I think he could tell us exactly to the dollar how much money the company spent on the whole endeavor.
01:22:26 ◼ ► But I also think that with Steve Jobs, he had more of a, I don't care how much we've spent.
01:22:46 ◼ ► I mean, there's an equal likelihood that we would have watched just Steve burn himself out, lose his ideas.
01:23:00 ◼ ► And that might have been what happened if he had stayed ahead of the cancer or even better,
01:23:04 ◼ ► if he had never come down with it, that we would have lived to see Steve Jobs deliver some busts for Apple again.
01:23:15 ◼ ► And I can't help but feel that that's one of the differences between him and Tim Cook, where Cook doesn't pretend that he's a product person.
01:23:53 ◼ ► I was obsessed with something that was simple and pure and streamlined like an Apple product.
01:24:02 ◼ ► I wanted it to have a secondary meaning that if you really thought about it, you'd get.
01:24:10 ◼ ► So, it's an iconic design element on an iconic product, the product that turned Apple around.
01:24:18 ◼ ► But, if you look at those double arrows on the right and left side of that wheel, they represent a timeline.
01:24:44 ◼ ► And I just knew, as many times as I've talked to people who've written books, and they're like,