00:00:16 ◼ ► It's June 22nd, 2026. Today's show is brought to you by FitBard Mercury Weather, oh boy, is
00:00:22 ◼ ► it the summer over here, and Squarespace. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason
00:00:28 ◼ ► Then we're going to talk about the weather. I'm actually going to talk about the weather
00:00:34 ◼ ► time for that. It's snow talk time. Justin wants to know, Jason, what should I tell people
00:00:40 ◼ ► or how should I respond when they ask where Dongletown is in the state of California? I
00:00:45 ◼ ► went on a cruise this weekend and had a man staring at my shirt for a while before he approached
00:00:50 ◼ ► me to ask where it was. He said he had lived in California all of his life and had never
00:00:57 ◼ ► Well, I mean, first off, you could just say it's a joke. And that's probably the polite
00:01:05 ◼ ► thing to do is, oh, it's a joke. It's about how Apple made a bunch of changes that required
00:01:10 ◼ ► people to buy a bunch of new cables and adapters and stuff. What I instantly thought of when
00:01:33 ◼ ► At Thunderbolt dock. So I would imagine that it's probably in... It's a little like, you know,
00:01:41 ◼ ► Buffy the Vampire Slayer was set in Sunnydale, which is not a real town. And even though it
00:01:49 ◼ ► So Dongle Town is somewhere in Southern California. It's like, I don't know. It's a beach town in
00:01:59 ◼ ► Southern California that somewhere down, like, I don't know where, you know, kind of south
00:02:06 ◼ ► of L.A. before you get to San Diego. Yeah. Okay. Very nice. Somewhere. There you go. So now next
00:02:13 ◼ ► time, Justin, someone asks, say, it's down there past L.A. It's down in Southern California, just
00:02:18 ◼ ► sort of like, like north part of Orange County, maybe, or just like, is it south of Long Beach?
00:02:22 ◼ ► I don't know. You know, because the truth is it disappears into the fog and only reappears
00:02:34 ◼ ► If you'd like to send in a question to help us open a future episode of the show, please
00:02:38 ◼ ► go to UpgradeFeedback.com, just like Justin did. We have some follow-up. Jason, Jamie wants
00:02:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I had a great time with Jamie. Hi, Jamie. And Jamie loves it when we mention her on
00:03:00 ◼ ► She edits our video. Hi, Jamie. Yeah, we did. Well, we obviously did Upgrade last week on
00:03:06 ◼ ► the wrong day, which was weird, but we made, and I was in the wrong place. I was in our Airbnb
00:03:13 ◼ ► in Eugene. It was an incredibly hot day. They had to call off or move, basically cancel and move
00:03:21 ◼ ► some of the graduations that were going to be held outside to later in the day inside because it was
00:03:27 ◼ ► like 100 degrees. Just extraordinarily hot. Fortunately, and unlike Jamie's graduation,
00:03:34 ◼ ► the all-campus graduation was at the stadium at 9 a.m., so it only lasted an hour. And it wasn't hot
00:03:43 ◼ ► then. It was still early in the morning. And the way it generally works on the West Coast,
00:03:48 ◼ ► especially, cools off overnight. So it wasn't hot in the morning. And then the afternoon
00:03:54 ◼ ► graduation was in the basketball arena. So yeah, we had a great time. Very proud of our second child
00:04:04 ◼ ► The most, to me, honestly, the most emotional moment is one of the graduation speakers was
00:04:09 ◼ ► listing things that some of their parents may have done for them. And one of them was pay for their
00:04:14 ◼ ► tuition. And I had that moment where I realized, oh, past tense. We did it. We paid. We put our kids
00:04:21 ◼ ► And now we're done with that. We did it. We, we, we, 25 years ago, we made an estimate of what would be
00:04:28 ◼ ► required for our children as they were being born. Because we started with Jamie and then we added an
00:04:35 ◼ ► account for Julian when he was born, um, to go to college. And I am happy to say that we nailed it.
00:04:42 ◼ ► Uh, with Julian, we really nailed it. Like, I think there's only a couple thousand dollars left in his
00:04:49 ◼ ► Oh, I see what you mean. You're like, you, you got it spot on the money. I thought you were just saying
00:04:55 ◼ ► No, we, we managed to do that. So that's, you know, we were putting money away for 25 years to do that.
00:05:00 ◼ ► But now it's over. Like the whole process is over. We did successfully pay for our kids college and
00:05:05 ◼ ► having some family members who have been crushed by student debt over the years. I am very happy to
00:05:11 ◼ ► have been able to do that for my kids so that they don't have to worry about their, their student debt
00:05:17 ◼ ► when, uh, they're trying to first make their way in the world as adults. So yeah, it was great. Great
00:05:23 ◼ ► time. Nice drive. Um, you know, the drive from Northern California to Oregon is beautiful. There's,
00:05:30 ◼ ► uh, you know, you have to go past Mount Shasta. I went past Mount Shasta this time and was like
00:05:35 ◼ ► thinking of the California bear trophy and thinking soon, soon it will be macOS Shasta, but not yet.
00:05:43 ◼ ► I did. It's a, it's a, it's a, it really is remarkable because it's so tall and out on its own
00:05:49 ◼ ► that like, you're just driving nowhere near it. And suddenly on the horizon, you see this giant
00:05:53 ◼ ► snow capped volcano and you're like, Oh, there, there it is. And then for the next four hours,
00:06:02 ◼ ► Uh, on a completely different note. Yep. I don't want to do lawyer up today. So this is in follow
00:06:08 ◼ ► up. Um, essentially Brazil has now taken on the Europe model, uh, for alternate app marketplaces
00:06:17 ◼ ► with varying pricing structures for third party payments and the core technology commission and all
00:06:23 ◼ ► that stuff. I did a scan, like I could kind of scan through it and look through Apple's documentation.
00:06:27 ◼ ► It seems basically akin to what has now been the proposal in Europe for a little bit. So
00:06:43 ◼ ► I have a quick roundup today of various reports from the sheriff, Mark Gurman over the last week.
00:06:49 ◼ ► A few little bits of stuff, little details. So the AirPods with cameras are now set to debut in late
00:06:56 ◼ ► 2027. Yeah. He didn't describe why. Yeah. He, what he said was they were initially thinking it might've
00:07:03 ◼ ► been as early as the end of this year. And now he said that they're not. Yeah. And he didn't really
00:07:08 ◼ ► say why. Um, but, uh, for some reason. And I honestly wonder if they feel like that tech could
00:07:17 ◼ ► get better or they're doing okay. Or quite honestly, given his reports about what they're working on,
00:07:22 ◼ ► um, and the fact that they got a bunch of stuff that they want to ship that they've not been able
00:07:27 ◼ ► to deliver because Siri hasn't been good enough. And now presumably it looks like it is good enough
00:07:32 ◼ ► as of this fall that they may have just said, this is too soon. Let's push it off. We have too much
00:07:37 ◼ ► already, but for whatever reason, uh, you know, cause Gurman didn't give one. They, uh, they seem to
00:07:43 ◼ ► have pushed this product off. The best that he gave was the deadline slipped in part because of
00:07:49 ◼ ► Apple's prolonged struggles with artificial intelligence software, but that doesn't say
00:07:53 ◼ ► why it would have been 26 to 27. Like, yeah, but it may, it may be that the pipeline is so, I mean,
00:07:58 ◼ ► like there is an argument to be made that even, you know, company like Apple, like too many products
00:08:02 ◼ ► at once is too much. It's, it's overload. And it's not just overload on the mind of the public,
00:08:11 ◼ ► your factories and your marketing team and your advertising. Like you can't ship, uh, uh, eight
00:08:19 ◼ ► new products at once, right? Like it's very hard. So this may be a product that for whatever reason,
00:08:24 ◼ ► they're like, we can wait on this one. This is not, the world is not crying out for the,
00:08:28 ◼ ► the, the AirPods with, with cameras in them. Um, however, I've been thinking about this. I think
00:08:34 ◼ ► you have too. Um, and Gurman confirmed, I think, you know, this has been the speculation for a while
00:08:41 ◼ ► that, but like, they're not for taking pictures or video or anything. They are sensors. They clearly
00:08:47 ◼ ► are about, uh, basically visual intelligence. And I have been using visual intelligence or,
00:08:56 ◼ ► or whatever you want to call it, the camera feature of, of the, the Siri feature of the camera,
00:09:01 ◼ ► whatever. And the betas for the last week, I've already used it far more than I ever bothered to
00:09:07 ◼ ► use visual intelligence. And I feel like the risk, the results are better and it's not just the results
00:09:10 ◼ ► are better. I feel like there's an automatic aspect of it that I really like. Visual intelligence seems
00:09:15 ◼ ► so weird. Like you sort of took a picture and then it was like, what would you like to do with this
00:09:20 ◼ ► picture? And I was like, I don't know. You tell me. And now it seems like it just sort of, I, I pointed
00:09:25 ◼ ► at it, you know, I basically held up, uh, my phone to a tag on a shirt I bought and held down camera
00:09:31 ◼ ► control and it popped it up and it said, well, here's the deal with that, with that tag. It's
00:09:37 ◼ ► made of, you know, whatever it's made of rayon and it's a here and you shouldn't put bleach on it
00:09:42 ◼ ► and don't iron it. And I'm like, great. That's all I needed to know. And I'm like, okay, I see
00:09:47 ◼ ► where, uh, seeing what's around you and using it as a feed for, for AI stuff, uh, is a, is a viable
00:09:54 ◼ ► thing. If you can make it work, right? Yeah. The way that they've implemented it in 27 is the,
00:10:00 ◼ ► like the camera button is replaced with the Siri icon. And so as you say, if you just press
00:10:05 ◼ ► the camera button, it will just start, it will just take a guess at what you want to know,
00:10:09 ◼ ► but that also has the buttons that they used to have, like the little question bubble thing.
00:10:14 ◼ ► So you can ask a specific question if you want to, but otherwise it's going to take the best guess
00:10:21 ◼ ► that it can. And, you know, I would say as well, like the quality of the responses that I'm getting
00:10:26 ◼ ► make me see more about why this product might exist. Like my mind is not being blown by what
00:10:35 ◼ ► Apple is telling me. Like sometimes it's just, it's not at all understanding what I want from it,
00:10:42 ◼ ► or it's just kind of, I've had it hallucinate with me today a little bit that I have some quotes on a
00:10:47 ◼ ► monitor on my desk. And there's a quote from Johnny Ive and it attributed it to Steve Jobs.
00:10:52 ◼ ► And I asked where it got that information. And it says the post-it note says it, but it doesn't.
00:10:58 ◼ ► And I said, no, it doesn't. It's like, oh yeah, no, sorry. It's Steve Jobs' quote. I'm like, oh,
00:11:03 ◼ ► you're just, you're just going with this. You're just like making it up. But the fact that it does
00:11:08 ◼ ► those kinds of things and also does the things I like is like, well, yes, then it is doing what I
00:11:13 ◼ ► expect of these systems that like they can give you some information, but also they're not going
00:11:18 ◼ ► to give you the right information. So now I kind of can see like, all right, their system for a kind
00:11:24 ◼ ► of looking through imagery and picking things out and trying to tell you what they are. It feels kind
00:11:31 ◼ ► of state of the art ish where before we saw 27, my feeling was like, what is the point of doing this?
00:11:38 ◼ ► I don't believe you can do it. And I'm not as well versed in the state of the art in order to say
00:11:43 ◼ ► that, but I will say that it certainly doesn't feel like it's dumb and behind and pointless. And
00:11:48 ◼ ► that's like step one, regardless of whether it's at the cutting edge or even just in the average,
00:11:53 ◼ ► like for in this, in this generation, getting to acceptable and average is sort of, I feel like
00:11:59 ◼ ► the goal in some ways. And I know that everybody's like, oh, Apple should aspire to be better.
00:12:04 ◼ ► It's like, yes, of course, but you got to stand up after you've taken a fall before you can start
00:12:13 ◼ ► the iPhone air two is coming in the spring of 2027. It looks like they may add an ultra wide camera
00:12:23 ◼ ► and improve battery life. So the battery life thing, I, and German even mentioned this in one of his
00:12:29 ◼ ► pieces. And I think it's really interesting where he's like, what I'm hearing is that they're going
00:12:34 ◼ ► to improve the battery life, but it's really unclear how, um, which I thought I, which is he's putting out
00:12:42 ◼ ► there what we've been thinking, which is like, okay, well they can't really make the battery bigger.
00:12:50 ◼ ► So how do they improve battery life? And maybe they're just hanging it all on the next chip
00:12:58 ◼ ► I think the combination of iOS 27 and the next chip set, they might just be able to get more
00:13:05 ◼ ► Right. Well then that's not, I mean, in that case, it's a little bit disingenuous to sell this as they've
00:13:12 ◼ ► improved battery life. Cause they're really just saying the next generation will of course improve
00:13:17 ◼ ► battery life. Yeah. But it's marketing, right? They'll just say like the, it has a longer battery.
00:13:23 ◼ ► Except this isn't marketing. This is people talking to Mark Gurman, but I think that's effectively what
00:13:27 ◼ ► it is, is that the watchword is some, whoever's talking to Mark Gurman about this is trying to say,
00:13:32 ◼ ► these are the selling points for this thing. And we're going to sell it as we added a camera and we
00:13:36 ◼ ► improve battery life, even though the improved battery life is like, well, what do you mean you
00:13:39 ◼ ► improve battery life? And it's like, we don't actually have an answer for that. The answer is
00:13:43 ◼ ► because our chips are better at it, which is great. It's a real answer. It's not a fake answer,
00:13:48 ◼ ► but it's also not like we solved this by building a better battery necessarily, but it's fine. These
00:13:54 ◼ ► are the two biggest criticisms. The iPhone air two now has whatever. It doesn't matter what the
00:13:59 ◼ ► iPhone air one, because the iPhone air original might also get a bit better battery because of iOS 27.
00:14:05 ◼ ► It might, but they just won't be selling that one anymore. They just won't be talking about that.
00:14:09 ◼ ► And also you would hope that the processor will help the processor being more efficient is undoubtedly
00:14:14 ◼ ► part of it. Yeah, for sure. And Mark also has a really long, uh, write up in his newsletter to
00:14:21 ◼ ► power on about all the trials and tribulations of the industrial design team over the last few years,
00:14:25 ◼ ► man, man. I know I, you've probably want to say some stuff about this column. Uh, I do.
00:14:31 ◼ ► We'll hold that for one second. Okay. The thing that I, the thing that is maybe the most
00:14:36 ◼ ► detail-y, um, and I've seen reported in a few places, so I just want to note it here for completeness
00:14:40 ◼ ► sake. Uh, this is Mark Gurman. Turnus knows a major design shakeup is needed and is getting ready to put
00:14:46 ◼ ► his firm imprint on the team. I'm told that's one reason he stepped up to oversee the design team last
00:14:52 ◼ ► year, a move that ultimately signaled his ascension to the top job. He has already spent a considerable
00:14:57 ◼ ► amount of time with the industrial design group, a contrast to cook's historically limited presence.
00:15:01 ◼ ► Okay. So first off that statement right there, let's, let's, let's, let's look at that a little
00:15:08 ◼ ► bit. Um, it feels very much to me like something that's being told to Mark Gurman by people in the
00:15:16 ◼ ► industrial design group, because they feel like John Turnus is giving them a little love and attention
00:15:20 ◼ ► that they feel like they didn't, that, that they, that they always deserved and didn't get from
00:15:25 ◼ ► Tim Cook. But they will not get, yeah, not be given. So then they just assumed he's not a design
00:15:29 ◼ ► guy, et cetera, et cetera. So the way, the way it's framed is I would say the way so much of, of, uh,
00:15:36 ◼ ► of Mark Gurman's coverage of this issue is framed, which is why we always say here at the upgrade program,
00:15:42 ◼ ► consider the source, consider the source. Uh, it is obvious that many of Mark Gurman's greatest
00:15:50 ◼ ► sources at Apple over the years are designers. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is obvious
00:15:56 ◼ ► to me that the design group is one of the, if not the biggest source of leaks at Apple, because I can
00:16:03 ◼ ► also point to the Trip Mikkel book and even Yukari Kane's book as being so focused on the design aspect of the
00:16:13 ◼ ► company and so taking the point of view, uh, of the, you know, that the heart of Apple, the heart of Apple
00:16:21 ◼ ► is design say designers, um, that it's very clear to me that the designers, not all of them. I'm not,
00:16:28 ◼ ► I look, I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying like a lot of them. One of the great sources for
00:16:34 ◼ ► people reporting about Apple is people talking in the design group. It's also the group that
00:16:40 ◼ ► probably has the majority of stuff to leak because they see everything. They see everything. Yeah.
00:16:46 ◼ ► Physical and digital. Exactly. So, uh, consider the source here. Uh, this is the, this thing about
00:16:54 ◼ ► John Ternus and him being put in charge, like, did they feel like really excited that the guy who was
00:17:00 ◼ ► going to be the CEO was, uh, first going to be given oversight over the design team. That was a
00:17:06 ◼ ► shot in the arm for them. This is what this looks to me like is that they're like, okay, we have a
00:17:11 ◼ ► little morale problem in the design group and John Ternus is going to kind of try to turn it around.
00:17:15 ◼ ► And what they're saying here is they turned it around. Now the framing of Mark Gurman's column is,
00:17:20 ◼ ► oh, thank goodness. John Ternus is going to save Apple because he's finally listening to the
00:17:24 ◼ ► designers. But I'll say again, John Ternus is going to turn around Apple because he's finally
00:17:29 ◼ ► listening to the most important group at Apple. The designers say the designers because the designers
00:17:37 ◼ ► are the ones who are the sources here. This is just like, you cannot look at Mark Gurman's coverage
00:17:42 ◼ ► over the last year of Apple stuff and not think that his sources are designers in the industrial
00:17:47 ◼ ► design group and the software design group. If it's not Alan Dye, it's people who know Alan Dye.
00:17:56 ◼ ► but they have a perspective. And I would say that because this is the information Mark Gurman's
00:18:02 ◼ ► getting, his analysis of these situations tends to follow that perspective. And what bothers me,
00:18:10 ◼ ► I know I'm getting a little loud here, but what bothers me about it is it's so self-important.
00:18:16 ◼ ► And of course it is because the people who work in that group think that they're the most important
00:18:20 ◼ ► because so many people think that they're important cogs at Apple and they don't get the
00:18:24 ◼ ► love that they should and all of that. I get it. But like this narrative that Apple lost its way
00:18:30 ◼ ► because, uh, like Gurman's newsletter says something about how like, oh, the laptops look pretty much
00:18:36 ◼ ► like they've done for 15 years. And that's a sign of Apple's failure. It's like, have you seen all
00:18:41 ◼ ► the other laptops that are out there? Like everybody just does Apple's laptops too. I'm not sure that's a
00:18:46 ◼ ► sign of failure. Maybe it's a sign that you're bored and you wish that there was something more
00:18:50 ◼ ► exciting and dramatic to write about, but it's not necessarily a sign of failure at all. And in fact,
00:18:55 ◼ ► there have also been a lot of design failures. And I personally believe that what happened is,
00:19:00 ◼ ► is, uh, I believe an alternative narrative about what happened, which is that Johnny Ives stayed long
00:19:05 ◼ ► before his sell-by date because he was bored and they kept him because of optics and they put him in
00:19:10 ◼ ► charge of stuff he should never have been charged in charge of. And that Alan Dye is a great example
00:19:14 ◼ ► of somebody who comes from a, uh, high fashion kind of sensibility, who's maybe disconnected from the
00:19:21 ◼ ► concept of Apple as, uh, making functional projects for products for regular people. But if I was in the
00:19:27 ◼ ► design group, I would look back at the era of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ives and say, yeah, we ruled then.
00:19:33 ◼ ► Why are we not, you know, why are we not the rulers of Apple now? Because this bean counter,
00:19:37 ◼ ► Tim Cook came in and he made it all about operations, but it's, it's a different company
00:19:43 ◼ ► in a different world. This doesn't mean that design isn't important. Industrial design and software
00:19:47 ◼ ► design, they're incredibly important. But I would say that a lot of these leaks say to me, not,
00:19:57 ◼ ► oh, the design group is a problem at Apple, that there are malcontents who think too much of
00:20:04 ◼ ► themselves and don't think as much about the work of the rest of the company. And they're really mad
00:20:09 ◼ ► that they're no longer completely centered in the company's culture and structure. And they're fed up
00:20:14 ◼ ► with it and they're going to, and they're leaking things to Mark Gurman and they're leaking things
00:20:18 ◼ ► to Trip Mikkel at the New York times or for his book. And like, that is the narrative that they're
00:20:22 ◼ ► pushing. What's funny is while Mark Gurman is still writing the narrative in his newsletter
00:20:27 ◼ ► that is Apple's kind of lost his way, there's now this little shiny bit in the middle, which is,
00:20:32 ◼ ► ah, but John Ternus will turn it around. John Ternus, he gets it. He gets it on a level,
00:20:37 ◼ ► by the way, John Ternus is a hardware guy. He's not, he's a not we, he's not the we of the designers.
00:20:43 ◼ ► He's a not we, he's a hardware guy, but oh, but he gets it. He's showing them love. And yeah,
00:20:48 ◼ ► you could say, oh, this is a, this is a real shift in strategy and, and, uh, a redemption of Apple
00:20:54 ◼ ► from the Tim, the dark Tim Cook era where the designers weren't listened to. Uh, I view it as
00:20:59 ◼ ► being, huh? John Ternus is a pretty good manager because he's gotten these people who seem so angry
00:21:04 ◼ ► and, uh, and discontented to feel like they're being listened to and that they're part of the
00:21:09 ◼ ► company again. That's smart management. I'm not sure that this is anything more than managing those
00:21:15 ◼ ► people to feel better about their role at Apple, which is an effective bit of management. I'm not
00:21:19 ◼ ► sure this is an enormous shift in the strategy of how Apple operates as much as it is making the
00:21:25 ◼ ► designers feel a little more, uh, a little more loved and appreciated. But anyway, so as with so many
00:21:32 ◼ ► things, uh, and I, I, I, I'm trying not to be mean here because I think Mark Gurman has great sources
00:21:37 ◼ ► and does incredible work as a reporter, but like the analysis in that column about how, uh, like he's just
00:21:44 ◼ ► taken what the designers say and I, I'm sorry. I just have to roll my eyes at the analysis in it.
00:21:48 ◼ ► I think it doesn't, uh, really hold up to any scrutiny. So congratulations, I guess, to the
00:21:53 ◼ ► designers for getting John Ternus to tell them nice things and maybe their leaks will be nicer in the
00:21:57 ◼ ► future. Who knows? Isn't it good though? Like both potential scenarios. So let's take it on its face
00:22:05 ◼ ► on the face of it. Ternus cares more about design. If we just take it at face value, sure. Or if we jump
00:22:12 ◼ ► into your analysis of it, Ternus is a good manager of people, aren't these both potentially good things?
00:22:19 ◼ ► I, I think they're both true to an extent. I just think it's the people who are being managed are
00:22:27 ◼ ► never going to say, Oh, thank goodness. He cares about us and he's giving us, he's shining some light
00:22:31 ◼ ► on us. They're going to say, yeah, we should be in it. It's not, it's not that they shouldn't.
00:22:38 ◼ ► And, and I will admit like when German reports that Cook really limited his interaction with
00:22:47 ◼ ► designers, he handed them off to Jeff Williams. He put, he kept them at arm's length. I, I understand
00:22:55 ◼ ► why he might've done that. Um, because he felt like it was not his area of expertise at all and he didn't
00:23:03 ◼ ► speak their language. And he's like, let other, I think he's a, I think Tim Cook is a delegator.
00:23:07 ◼ ► And, and one of his strengths is he recognizes aspects of his job that he doesn't know anything
00:23:12 ◼ ► about. And they said, I can't handle the designers because I don't know anything about that. So somebody
00:23:18 ◼ ► else handled the designers. And while that is admirable, having a CEO who understands it better
00:23:24 ◼ ► is better for the products. It is fundamentally better. So I would say to your point, yes. And yes,
00:23:31 ◼ ► I think, yes, it is true. This is a sign maybe that again, maybe functionally, if you ask people
00:23:38 ◼ ► across the organization, they might tell you that design was never on the outs. It's just that they
00:23:43 ◼ ► weren't getting the ego boost from attention from the CEO that they desired. But I think there are
00:23:49 ◼ ► knock on effects. They, they probably felt isolated because they were isolated to a certain degree.
00:23:56 ◼ ► I think that's true. Um, honestly, the Alan Dye situation where they, all the executives seemed
00:24:02 ◼ ► shocked and appalled that Alan Dye left Apple, whereas everybody else seems to have thought that
00:24:08 ◼ ► it was a relief that he was gone suggests to me, not just like, are they, are they fooling themselves?
00:24:15 ◼ ► But that, that's how disconnected they were. They didn't understand it. Design because they,
00:24:20 ◼ ► they weren't even thinking about it. Because they're literally like, no, I don't want to know
00:24:24 ◼ ► about it. Just let Alan is, because I think that that's how the Johnny Ive relationship worked with
00:24:28 ◼ ► Tim Cook. Yes. Not with Steve Jobs, but with Tim Cook, I think he was like, Johnny, you're the genius
00:24:32 ◼ ► here. I don't know nothing about this. You just do it. And when Johnny left, he's like, get the
00:24:36 ◼ ► lieutenants to do it. But I still don't want anything to do with it because it's just not my area.
00:24:44 ◼ ► in this before me. And honestly, if you're Tim Cook and you've got a, and you've got a reputation
00:24:48 ◼ ► for being a logistics guy and an efficiency guy, do you want to step into it with design? All you can
00:24:55 ◼ ► do is mess it up. I think all you can do is mess it up. Because eventually all you do is don't use
00:24:58 ◼ ► that material. It's hard to make. It's like, they don't want to hear that from you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So,
00:25:03 ◼ ► so yes, I think I understand those methods, but do I think it's better if you have a CEO who
00:25:08 ◼ ► actually cares about design and understands it at a level? Because in this case with Ternus,
00:25:13 ◼ ► he's been working with that group on hardware, the industrial design group on hardware all along,
00:25:19 ◼ ► right? He's, he's not a designer. He is a hardware guy, but he understands the relationship and the
00:25:27 ◼ ► value that they provide. And I see no evidence that John Ternus thinks that the design group
00:25:31 ◼ ► is stupid and they should feel bad and that we don't need them anymore because we'll just engineer
00:25:37 ◼ ► our hardware the way we want it. I don't think he thinks that at all. I think he understands
00:25:41 ◼ ► what makes Apple products special. He's been there 25 years. I, I, I, I keep saying this,
00:25:46 ◼ ► but like in my brief interactions with John Ternus and looking at his background, I think he's one of
00:25:51 ◼ ► us in a way he gets why Apple products are great. Yeah. And that's part of it. So I think it is a net
00:25:57 ◼ ► positive, but I also want to point out that it's also as somebody who managed people, I look at this
00:26:03 ◼ ► and I'm like, this is somebody who got a little love and a little attention and, and you know what?
00:26:08 ◼ ► They should, you should give your, uh, your employees love and attention. Yes. You, as a, as a top level
00:26:14 ◼ ► manager, I, and I'm going to just, I'm just going to say it. You, you have needy people and you're like,
00:26:21 ◼ ► geez, I wish they were not so needy, but what you do is find a way to give them that. And like,
00:26:28 ◼ ► you might roll your eyes in the background and be like, you don't, why do I have to do this for you?
00:26:32 ◼ ► But the fact is different people take it, need attention in different ways. Part of understanding
00:26:37 ◼ ► people having empathy for them is understanding this is what they need. And at Apple, a company
00:26:42 ◼ ► that's full of engineers and software developers, the designers probably feel a little bit like
00:26:48 ◼ ► outliers, even though they are software designers and industrial designers. They're still designers,
00:26:53 ◼ ► right? Their clocks probably tick a little different than the engineers do. And so I'm sure
00:26:59 ◼ ► they need attention in a way that, um, that some of the other rank and file at Apple don't need
00:27:04 ◼ ► attention. And, uh, I, I just, I look, it made me smile when I saw this line about Ternus because it
00:27:10 ◼ ► made me feel like, Oh yeah, I see what he's doing there. He's making them feel valued because they
00:27:14 ◼ ► didn't feel valued for a few years under Tim Cook and he wants them to feel valued. And it can,
00:27:19 ◼ ► the best ones are when both are true. When we want you to feel valued, we want you to be engaged
00:27:25 ◼ ► and you are valuable and you need to be engaged. It's all good. I think it's a positive story.
00:27:32 ◼ ► I just, I also, I mean, I had, we had a mutual friend text us on Sunday morning and say,
00:27:37 ◼ ► woo. If you ever wondered if Mark Gurman sources were fed entirely by the design group, this, I mean,
00:27:46 ◼ ► this is exhibit a, but again, I think it's a positive. I think a lot of the design story is
00:27:51 ◼ ► moving in a positive direction now. Right now, Gurman, Gurman adds on a layer, which is like,
00:27:56 ◼ ► Oh, but they're in trouble because there's a brain drain and you know, who knows? And they're going
00:27:58 ◼ ► to keep losing people and all that. And like, I, I, I think that there, I think Gurman reports a lot
00:28:04 ◼ ► of gossip on the inside of that group. That's like very worried about people departing and all of
00:28:08 ◼ ► that. Um, I, I just, I'm a lot less interested in that narrative, but, um, but anyway, I think it's
00:28:14 ◼ ► good for John Ternus that he's giving them enough of a, uh, a feeling of attention that they feel better
00:28:19 ◼ ► about their place in Apple. Like how John Ternus values the industrial design group. I really value
00:28:25 ◼ ► our listeners. And so I would like to take a moment to apologize because I said, this would be a quick
00:28:30 ◼ ► rumor roundup, but in fact, I lied, I lied to you all. It wasn't a quick rumor roundup.
00:28:35 ◼ ► I mean, you knew I was doing this, right? I had a feeling I was, I didn't know for sure,
00:28:40 ◼ ► but I, I knew it was definitely a coin flip away and I know how coin flips can be with you. So
00:28:45 ◼ ► I almost, uh, I almost changed the rundown this morning. I was like, Jason's just going to talk
00:28:52 ◼ ► about this Mark Gurman report for a while. I was like, yeah, we'll just, we'll just slide it in there.
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00:31:16 ◼ ► Tim Cook has given a rare interview to Rolf Winkler at the Wall Street Journal to prepare
00:31:22 ◼ ► people for the fact that the prices of Apple products are going to increase due to RAM and
00:31:28 ◼ ► storage pricing and availability and the crisis surrounding it. That has all been brought on by
00:31:34 ◼ ► the advancement of AI infrastructure building, which is a thing Tim does not in any way address in
00:31:40 ◼ ► this interview. It's like those memory guys, oh, they got us and they're passing on. What did it say?
00:31:46 ◼ ► There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge
00:31:52 ◼ ► price increases. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer
00:32:19 ◼ ► They said, this is not sustainable. And I think it's fair. Ben Thompson has made this point a bunch
00:32:28 ◼ ► that Apple's holding, in an inflationary period, Apple holding the line on prices for five years
00:32:35 ◼ ► means that in some ways the stuff that they're selling has never been cheaper because the prices
00:32:42 ◼ ► essentially have gone, the actual prices have gone down over the last five years because there's been
00:32:49 ◼ ► inflation and Apple has not raised their prices, which is true. So I think it might've been inevitable
00:32:56 ◼ ► that at some point they were going to hike them and then the memory thing happens. It's like, well,
00:33:01 ◼ ► they're obviously going to hike them now. I think for me, the question is how, right? What levers do they
00:33:10 ◼ ► pull here? Because there are a bunch of different things they can do. They could just raise the price
00:33:13 ◼ ► on every single SKU at every single level. That's possible. And they may do that. They could do what
00:33:18 ◼ ► they've been doing, which is drop base level SKUs, drop the base model and start selling the higher
00:33:25 ◼ ► model. That's what they did with the Mac mini. I think that's probably not enough, although I think
00:33:28 ◼ ► it's possible to do it in some circumstances. And they've done it before with iPhones too, right?
00:33:33 ◼ ► Where like the starting price increases, but all they did was remove the base storage tier.
00:33:39 ◼ ► Right. They took the 999 and made a 1099, but it was really the 1099 tier was now still the 1099 tier.
00:33:44 ◼ ► It's just the 999 went away. These are, these are all tricks they can do, although they pulled some
00:33:49 ◼ ► of those levers before. And then my other question is how do they deal with it across product lines?
00:33:55 ◼ ► It's because, for example, the MacBook Neo, the price is incredibly relevant to what that product
00:34:04 ◼ ► is. And they have products above it in the line that are, and also the margins on, I know this is going
00:34:11 ◼ ► to be a little bit contradictory, but like the margins on the MacBook Neo are probably not enormous,
00:34:17 ◼ ► but also the percentage wise changes that you could make are not enormous because it's not a very expensive
00:34:24 ◼ ► product. So I guess my question is, do you raise the price of the MacBook Neo or do you keep the price of
00:34:31 ◼ ► the MacBook Neo where it is, but raise the price of the MacBook Air, which makes the Neo actually seem even
00:34:38 ◼ ► better. But also if you don't like the Neo, you can say, well, you can still buy a MacBook Air. It's just more than it
00:34:42 ◼ ► used to be. And then that allows them to raise, I guess that's part of the, what I'm thinking is,
00:34:47 ◼ ► are, are we going to see them raise prices across the board? Or is it going to be one of those cases
00:34:53 ◼ ► where Apple is more likely to raise prices on the higher expense items because the people who buy those
00:35:00 ◼ ► tend to be a little less sensitive to price change. And that's where you have your biggest margins or is
00:35:06 ◼ ► it the reverse? I don't know. Or what if you do it to everything, but you scale the amount,
00:35:12 ◼ ► amount of increase based on the starting price, right? So like the, the, the, the iPhone 18,
00:35:19 ◼ ► is it 18? 19. 19? Yeah. I don't remember anymore. 18. Yep. The iPhone 18. This fall? Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:29 ◼ ► We're at 17 now. Okay. The regular one goes up by $50, but the pro goes up by $150. Yeah. Or a hundred or,
00:35:40 ◼ ► I mean, maybe, maybe I, these are the calls and we don't, you know, the problem is we don't see the
00:35:44 ◼ ► other side of the spreadsheet. We don't actually know what the margin is on the, on the MacBook Neo.
00:35:48 ◼ ► Um, I would, I would argue that it would be very hard to raise the price on the MacBook Neo, but if everybody is raising the
00:35:56 ◼ ► prices, then they can get away with it. Um, but on the high end, I mean, this is, this is the, that rumored M6 touchscreen
00:36:02 ◼ ► OLED MacBook Pro is the best example of this, right? Because that product is totally going to cost a fortune.
00:36:08 ◼ ► And the reason is it doesn't, it doesn't even have a price and it's basically the very, very top of the
00:36:14 ◼ ► line. That is a product that they're going to be able to sell and say, look, the people who are already
00:36:18 ◼ ► spending thousands of dollars on the computer, you'll have to spend more. And I know that's frustrating if
00:36:24 ◼ ► you're like, yeah, but I wait many years to buy computers so that I can save up the money to buy
00:36:28 ◼ ► this expensive computer and then use it for many years. And now you're making it even more expensive.
00:36:32 ◼ ► Like, yeah, but that's kind of the rationale. I it's, it's a version of what I've been saving all saying all along
00:36:38 ◼ ► since the iPhone 10 came out, which is Apple keeps kind of exploring, um, are there prices above which nobody, you
00:36:44 ◼ ► know, nobody will buy a product. And what they found is that they, there's a large portion of Apple's installed base that
00:36:50 ◼ ► is, it doesn't mind spending even more and even more and even more. Remember people were mad. What was the original
00:36:56 ◼ ► iPhone? Was it like 699? And people were furious. It was 699 with a contract, which I get, but like,
00:37:02 ◼ ► we, it's been, you know, you could buy, uh, an iPhone 17 pro max with all the storage in it for
00:37:08 ◼ ► like almost $2,000. Yeah. It was, it was what 699 and then dropped to 499 after two months. Yeah. That
00:37:14 ◼ ► was, yeah. So, so what I'm saying is just like the, the, the prices have been going up for a long time
00:37:21 ◼ ► now at the high end and they split the line into two. And what they found is like people still, you could,
00:37:28 ◼ ► there are people for whom an expensive phone does not appeal and they will not buy it. And I,
00:37:32 ◼ ► and that's why it's great that they split their line in two, but what they're trying to do is say,
00:37:36 ◼ ► yeah, but for the people who are willing to spend more money, we want the money. We don't want to
00:37:39 ◼ ► just sell the iPhone 17. We want to sell the iPhone 17 pro max with lots of storage for $2,000 because
00:37:46 ◼ ► we make so much in profit on that phone and we don't want to lose that person and say, no, no, no,
00:37:50 ◼ ► just buy the 799 phone. You'll be fine. We want them to spend a thousand dollars more on us.
00:37:55 ◼ ► That is the challenge with them is like, do you do it? Yeah. I just, I'm, I'm, I wonder what they're
00:38:03 ◼ ► going to do. I wonder how their approach is going to, uh, is going to work here. And if it's going to
00:38:07 ◼ ► be something that happens now, or if it's just going to happen when products get announced in the fall,
00:38:14 ◼ ► It launched at $499 for the four gigabyte, $599 for the eight gigabyte. And then they dropped the
00:38:25 ◼ ► But it was at the time was ridiculous because nobody paid money for phones. They just got the contract.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Exactly. Exactly. And now Apple, and especially when the iPhone 10 came out, like Apple has just been
00:38:35 ◼ ► turning up the heat and just raising that price, not the price to get into an iPhone, the price of
00:38:48 ◼ ► We'll get those details locked in our head when we get to the iPhone for design in California. Don't
00:38:55 ◼ ► And Apple wants this. The bottom line is like, if you're willing to spend $1,500 on a new phone,
00:39:01 ◼ ► Apple wants you to spend $1,500 on a new phone. They don't want you to save money and spend 800.
00:39:07 ◼ ► They want you to spend all of your money. Give, give us all your money is what Apple says.
00:39:11 ◼ ► So, um, so that might factor in right. Knowing who this audience is. Um, but I don't know. I
00:39:18 ◼ ► mean, they, they do have a lot of, a lot of ways to approach this and it's going to be,
00:39:22 ◼ ► I don't have a prediction. I just, I think it's gonna be fascinating because it will tell
00:39:26 ◼ ► us some things about how they view their products and the markets for their products based on how
00:39:31 ◼ ► they approach it. Um, but it is important to, to note that the competition is not immune to this
00:39:38 ◼ ► at all. They're doing the same thing. So, um, that was, I think another thing that Ben Thompson
00:39:42 ◼ ► said was, uh, that the, the place, the iPhones that I'm in, like the competitions, like cheap,
00:39:49 ◼ ► cheap phones. And then like, everybody's going up in price. So like, you're not dealing with
00:39:53 ◼ ► tomorrow's prices on the iPhone and yesterday's prices on Android phones. That's not how it works.
00:39:59 ◼ ► Yep. My prediction is, uh, the prices will increase across the line inconsistently. Like there will be
00:40:07 ◼ ► different things they do for different products and different product lines and there will not be
00:40:12 ◼ ► like, uh, Oh, they put it up by 10% on everything. Like, I just don't think, I think it's going to be,
00:40:16 ◼ ► yeah, they're going to apply what they want to apply depending on how it works for them.
00:40:21 ◼ ► And everything's going to go up by 50 or a hundred or 150, right? They're not going to do percentages
00:40:26 ◼ ► anyway. It's going to be like steps. So maybe the Neo goes up 50 and the air goes up a hundred and
00:40:31 ◼ ► goes up 150. I don't know. I don't know. I think, I think it, I have no, I want to read
00:40:38 ◼ ► some quotes from this, uh, interview that you gave. Okay. Um, unfortunately, price creases are
00:40:43 ◼ ► unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us.
00:40:47 ◼ ► And we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become
00:40:52 ◼ ► unsustainable. This is a hundred year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40
00:40:59 ◼ ► years. That is a really important data point, right? That the operations guy is like, no,
00:41:06 ◼ ► this is nothing like this has ever happened before. That is, I got a little bit more nervous reading
00:41:11 ◼ ► that. Like, I know that this thing is out there and I know it's a problem. Like I know, like I'm,
00:41:16 ◼ ► I'm very plugged into video gaming too, in the same way that I care about tech, I care about gaming.
00:41:21 ◼ ► And it is a bloodbath in gaming right now where it's the only time ever that consoles have increased
00:41:27 ◼ ► in price at a time when they were supposed to have decreased in price by now. You know, like the
00:41:31 ◼ ► PlayStation five, the same PlayStation five model that came out years and years and years ago is now
00:41:36 ◼ ► hundreds of dollars more expensive. Yeah. Yeah. And the switch, switch two went up and like they all,
00:41:41 ◼ ► they all went up. Yeah. I think I've never seen anything like it in any area over 40 years is quite a,
00:41:47 ◼ ► quite a statement. Yeah. It's a worry. Yeah. That's, that's quite a statement. And this is from the,
00:41:56 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. They just, they swallowed the chip shortages in COVID. Like they just took care of
00:42:00 ◼ ► it. And they've swallowed this so far as well. Right. Where like their competitors haven't.
00:42:05 ◼ ► Yeah. Because they, they were prepared, but not, they were not prepared for the a hundred year flood,
00:42:09 ◼ ► which by the way, given everything, everybody, a hundred year flood doesn't mean what it used to
00:42:19 ◼ ► you got to listen to the guy who's been doing this for a long time, that this is a wild moment that
00:42:24 ◼ ► even the most prepared Apple was like the, the ant, not the grasshopper. Right. But it didn't matter
00:42:30 ◼ ► because the winter was so bad. He says, we're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part
00:42:36 ◼ ► of the solution. Obviously more capacity is needed, but also says like in about the idea of building
00:42:42 ◼ ► their own facilities, we can't do everything. We know what we're good at. So I don't really know
00:42:47 ◼ ► what the balance sheet solves then. Yeah. Well, so this is it. This, this, he's, he's laying it out
00:42:55 ◼ ► here. I, I, I think I got to read on this, which is Apple doesn't make their own factories. Apple hands
00:43:02 ◼ ► bags of money to companies who build factories to increase capacity and then provide that capacity to
00:43:08 ◼ ► Apple. Right. You, this is, this is how they've done it with, in so many different areas. Apple
00:43:14 ◼ ► says, Hey, if we sign a contract for you to provide us with this chip, RAM processor, whatever,
00:43:23 ◼ ► and we give you billions of dollars in cash, can you do it? And they'll, and, and the response is
00:43:30 ◼ ► something like, well, we're going to have to build a factory to do this because we don't have the supply
00:43:34 ◼ ► right now. And Apple's like, uh-huh. Yeah. You build a factory and you give us everything you
00:43:40 ◼ ► make in it for three years and, uh, we'll give you $2 billion or whatever. And that's how they do it.
00:43:46 ◼ ► So they don't own the, they don't want to own the factories. They don't want to be in that business.
00:43:50 ◼ ► They don't want to amortize the cost of the factory over time, but they are a big buyer who needs a lot
00:43:55 ◼ ► of stuff and they can throw that weight around to say, and, and as a chip maker, because TSMC has
00:44:01 ◼ ► benefited from, from this Intel is probably going to benefit from this. Um, and other Apple partners
00:44:06 ◼ ► have probably benefited from this. You're using Apple. I mean, Foxconn in China, right? Like you're
00:44:14 ◼ ► using Apple to fund the development of your infrastructure in exchange for supplying Apple
00:44:19 ◼ ► with the product for some amount of time. And that like, I, I can't speak for those companies,
00:44:26 ◼ ► but it strikes me that historically that's been a pretty good way to grow your company is to let Apple
00:44:32 ◼ ► write you a giant check, build your factories, give, you know, sell the proceeds, you know, sell the,
00:44:39 ◼ ► the, the stuff coming out of the factory to Apple. And then at the end of the day, as that becomes a
00:44:45 ◼ ► legacy node, Apple moves on to the next factory, but you've got, you've now got a factory that you
00:44:50 ◼ ► can reposition to sell to other providers or update or whatever like that. That's their, that's their
00:44:57 ◼ ► game. That's what they do. So using their balance sheet to help, to be part of the solution. Maybe
00:45:02 ◼ ► that is handing a lot of money to Intel or somebody else to build a factory and increase capacity and
00:45:09 ◼ ► provide a key part here is and provide Apple with that capacity. My, the detail that I found the most
00:45:15 ◼ ► interesting from this article is this. So this is the Wall Street Journal. I'm just quoting from it
00:45:20 ◼ ► because this is a back and forth between them and Cook. China has national champion companies in memory
00:45:25 ◼ ► and storage, but due to national security rules, American companies would likely require licenses to
00:45:30 ◼ ► work with them. When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said, I think everything needs
00:45:35 ◼ ► to be on the table. I think we should look at all supply. I find this very interesting that, you know,
00:45:42 ◼ ► he sees it as there is a way to help, but we're not allowed to do it. And he is speaking out on this.
00:45:56 ◼ ► I, I make this link to, I make this link to, go ahead. The next day in a true social post,
00:46:01 ◼ ► President Trump said that Apple, along with other companies is going to work with Intel to produce
00:46:06 ◼ ► chips in America. I think there is a something coming soon, which is that the restrictions for
00:46:15 ◼ ► American companies using Chinese RAM is going to be lifted temporarily. And to get that in exchange,
00:46:21 ◼ ► these companies need to invest in Intel. Because it is very weird to me that the next day Trump will
00:46:38 ◼ ► this memory story is just killing us, but China has memory, but we're not allowed to do it. Can you,
00:46:45 ◼ ► can you do it? And then Trump says, how would that work? And what's in it for me? Yeah. And
00:46:52 ◼ ► Cook's like, we'll invest more in Intel. You know, you like, or, or, or Trump might even say something
00:46:58 ◼ ► like, yeah, I don't, I don't want you to invest in China. He's like, no, no, no. It's a temporary
00:47:03 ◼ ► thing for the shortage. Meanwhile, we'll make an investment in American manufacturing for the long
00:47:08 ◼ ► term, but in the short term, we need relief. And that has been in this administration, that seems
00:47:13 ◼ ► to be a winning strategy for negotiating with the white house is to say, let us do this temporarily.
00:47:18 ◼ ► And then in a future time, we will have it in the U S but right now we can't do it in the U S and
00:47:25 ◼ ► we're dying here and we're an American company. Please help us, uh, by letting us import these
00:47:30 ◼ ► things from China, but we won't do it forever. We'll, we will just do it for during this crisis.
00:47:34 ◼ ► And we've got a solution in the future. That's, that's like a, I, I feel like they've done
00:47:39 ◼ ► that, that this administration has done that so many times now that this seems pretty obvious
00:47:49 ◼ ► I don't, I don't know enough about Chinese ram manufacturing to understand if the, how significant
00:47:58 ◼ ► I, I don't either. And then my, my other thought was that Trump would say something like, well,
00:48:03 ◼ ► okay, um, you can use that, but not in stuff you shipped to the U S and, and that might
00:48:12 ◼ ► ram chips and the ones that are bound for Europe and rest of world. And in, in America, USA,
00:48:17 ◼ ► we're going to use the good ones that aren't from China that we trust better. And I, and I
00:48:21 ◼ ► mean, I, I'm not seeking a lot, an argument analyzing the logic of that statement. I'm just
00:48:32 ◼ ► from China could have stuff in it that is, uh, you know, doing nefarious things I think
00:48:37 ◼ ► is the, is the fear. And then the secondary fear is you're, you're benefiting China, which,
00:48:41 ◼ ► you know, the, the U S has this very weird relationship with where sometimes they're very
00:48:46 ◼ ► friendly and other times they're entirely adversarial. And, you know, I'm not sure it's
00:48:55 ◼ ► here's a lever you could pull that will save us. And here's what we'll do in return. And
00:49:00 ◼ ► that there's a transaction to be made there. Cause this white house seems to be nothing if
00:49:29 ◼ ► low volume product anyway. And it was always going to be very expensive. And I could make
00:49:33 ◼ ► the argument that the people who were okay, buying a $2,000 iPhone will be okay. Buying
00:49:39 ◼ ► a $2,200 iPhone or a $2,300 iPhone. Okay. I can make that, but it's not great. Right. It's
00:49:46 ◼ ► not great because everything else is drifting upward and this might have to go up at a,
00:49:50 ◼ ► at a higher price. And, um, you know, that, that it's a, it's bad timing. There's no doubt
00:49:57 ◼ ► And I do wonder if they may, cause there's a bunch of products we're expecting, right? Including
00:50:08 ◼ ► Macs, iPads, that kind of stuff. I wonder if it makes sense for them to release other products
00:50:13 ◼ ► at higher prices before September to take some of the blow out of the iPhone. I don't know if it would
00:50:21 ◼ ► realistically, but I wonder if maybe the story might be a bit more understood if they start doing it now.
00:50:29 ◼ ► that's the argument. The argument is if you raise the prices on the current iPhones, then the new
00:50:36 ◼ ► iPhones, the new iPhones don't get painted with the brushstroke of the prices going up because they're
00:50:42 ◼ ► actually the same prices as the raised prices over the summer. I don't know if Apple wants to do that.
00:50:48 ◼ ► Apple historically has really hated raising prices. That's why they do stuff like drop the low end
00:50:53 ◼ ► SKUs instead is that they hate just saying all prices are going up in the US. They do it. They
00:50:58 ◼ ► reprice in other countries, but they hate doing it in the US. Um, in their home territory, they like to
00:51:04 ◼ ► keep it pretty solid, but that would be, I mean, I guess I'm sure they had that argument of like, what,
00:51:08 ◼ ► what is the, what is the cost of repricing everything now versus just repricing in the fall when we
00:51:16 ◼ ► introduce new models? Um, I can see both sides of it. It adds complexity now. Does it really,
00:51:22 ◼ ► does it really solve anything or yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You could, I could see the
00:51:30 ◼ ► argument on both sides and I don't have enough data to say so, but like that, those are your choices,
00:51:35 ◼ ► right? Is, is, do you benefit by just repricing everything now with the current models? So when the
00:51:41 ◼ ► new models come out, the pricing is not part of, is not as much part of the narrative or does it
00:51:46 ◼ ► really not matter? Cause the pricing is still going to be part of the narrative because the price is the
00:51:49 ◼ ► price and people are still going to point back to what the old one sold for a year ago, even if it's
00:51:54 ◼ ► sold for more in the summer, the iPhone 17 pro going up in the summer is not going to change that many
00:52:01 ◼ ► stories about what the iPhone 18 pro costs versus what the iPhone 17 pro costs at introduction,
00:52:07 ◼ ► right? Those, those, that narrative is there if people want it. And, and so I don't know. I don't
00:52:14 ◼ ► know. It's a tough one. This is Apple in a, in a space we haven't seen them before. That's why I keep
00:52:19 ◼ ► saying, I, I don't know if I can predict what will happen, but whatever happens will be very interesting
00:52:23 ◼ ► because it will tell us some things about the decisions they made. I was already expecting that
00:52:27 ◼ ► September was going to be full of interesting conversation, right? That like just put from John
00:52:33 ◼ ► Ternus to a folding iPhone to everything else going on. Now this, like all I know is that the rest of
00:52:41 ◼ ► the year is going to be full of interesting things to talk about. I don't know if I'm going to like
00:52:48 ◼ ► This episode is brought to you by Mercury Weather. Mercury Weather is a thoughtfully designed weather
00:52:56 ◼ ► app that shows all of the essential weather details you need at a glance. It has a gorgeous,
00:53:00 ◼ ► colorful interface that dynamically adapts to the conditions of a warm orange palette on a sunny day,
00:53:05 ◼ ► icy tones on a cold day, or a deep blue on a rainy night. Mercury uses a glanceable chart layout to
00:53:12 ◼ ► present the hourly and daily forecast in a way that feels intuitive right away. There's a really cool
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00:53:23 ◼ ► weather at your destination right in your daily forecast timeline. So you'll always see the weather
00:53:28 ◼ ► weather for where you're going to be, not just where you are. Jason, for me right now, Mercury is
00:53:34 ◼ ► very orange, very orange, uh, because right now in London, it is 36 degrees, it's going to be 36 degrees
00:53:41 ◼ ► Fahrenheit, uh, Celsius, sorry, for the next few days. That is 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. So it's going to be a
00:53:47 ◼ ► really, it's going to be rough, uh, over the next few days. Luckily I have Mercury with me to show me the highs and
00:53:52 ◼ ► lows. It's going to show me the charts up and down. It's going to show me the parts of my day where I'll have a bit of
00:53:57 ◼ ► respite because you know, the lines are going to show me, oh, now it's good to go outside. Yeah. Go
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00:54:06 ◼ ► a rough couple of days. And one of the things I love is their trip feature, which is how I discovered
00:54:11 ◼ ► Mercury. And it's so great. So I have, uh, the trip feature set. So like when I went to Eugene
00:54:16 ◼ ► for the graduation, we were gone Friday to Tuesday and at WWDC, I would look on my iPhone at the Mercury
00:54:24 ◼ ► weather widget and it would show like 75, 73. And it's like the Mill Valley temperatures, or it might
00:54:33 ◼ ► have actually been because I was in Cupertino, the Cupertino forecast 75, 78. And then it got to Friday
00:54:40 ◼ ► and it was like 95, 98, 100, 98. And then, uh, I could then see the rest of the week after I got
00:54:49 ◼ ► home and it was like 68, 70. And I was like, wow. Okay. And it was great. Cause I knew, I knew it was
00:54:56 ◼ ► going to be coolish when I left here, but very hot in Oregon. And then when I got back, it was going to
00:55:02 ◼ ► be cool again. And I love that. I love knowing, like, I'm not interested in a forecast of where I'm not going
00:55:06 ◼ ► to be. I'm interested in the forecast of where I will be. And Mercury does that. And, and the widget
00:55:12 ◼ ► is, is, uh, awesome. So I love it. Yeah. It's really great. I love it a lot too. Uh, I also met
00:55:18 ◼ ► the developers, uh, at WWDC. Yes. It's really lovely to speak to them and they're just, they love their
00:55:23 ◼ ► app so much and it really comes through it in the app itself, but also in talking to them about it as
00:55:28 ◼ ► well. So that was really wonderful. Uh, when the weather gets serious, Mercury offers storm and
00:55:33 ◼ ► hurricane tracking, it also has information about heat alerts. I'm finding out, uh, but also has
00:55:38 ◼ ► maps, live positions, forecast paths, cones, and intensity plus widgets. So you can keep tabs on
00:55:43 ◼ ► specific storms or the closest one to you right from your home screen. Mercury weather's gorgeous
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00:56:12 ◼ ► That is mercury weather dot app slash upgrade. Try it out. Get all the standard features for free.
00:56:21 ◼ ► As some breaking news for you, Jason, uh, Zoe in the discord, just let us know that beta two
00:56:28 ◼ ► is out now. Oh, good. So we have that to look forward to, but that's not what we're talking
00:56:32 ◼ ► about. Jason, it is the summer of fun. Summer of fun. During the summer of fun, we do fun things.
00:56:38 ◼ ► We're also during June, 2026. We do Kickstarter related things. Indeed. So what if we take those
00:56:47 ◼ ► two beautiful flavors and we just put them together? So today we have a summer of fun and designed in
00:56:53 ◼ ► California collaboration. Uh, we're going to be joined in a moment by John Syracuse to talk about,
00:57:00 ◼ ► this is actually going to be the first in a series that we're going to do about the operating system
00:57:13 ◼ ► the first episode of a future design in California series. Cause we, the one we've been releasing in
00:57:18 ◼ ► the upgrade feed, as you probably have heard, dear upgrade listeners about the rise of the Apple too.
00:57:23 ◼ ► This is later. This is about what happened when Apple, uh, needed, realized it needed to do a new OS
00:57:30 ◼ ► and it tried a bunch of things and failed. And it's the crisis that ultimately led to OS 10. So,
00:57:36 ◼ ► um, I wanted John to be involved with, uh, talking about it. Cause he is, uh, I think you in the
00:57:43 ◼ ► episode refer to him as a subject area expert. Absolutely. On OS 10. And like me, a user of the
00:57:51 ◼ ► classic Mac OS. So this episode, we found ourselves talking more about sort of the dire straight that
00:57:57 ◼ ► Mac users were in that led to the fact that they had to make a new operating system because things were
00:58:03 ◼ ► just so bad. And like, I mean, the stories, we, we laugh about it in the, as you'll hear about like
00:58:11 ◼ ► all the ways that the Mac was unstable and why they had to do something new. So, um, it's a different
00:58:17 ◼ ► kind of episode for us. And we, we wanted to show, and we thought this, since we're releasing those
00:58:21 ◼ ► other episodes on Thursdays, we thought we would just use this as a summer of fun, get it in for the,
00:58:26 ◼ ► for the, the Kickstarter campaign. And then as another teaser, plus John's really great at it. We,
00:58:32 ◼ ► we do hope that some of our series, we will be bringing in sort of subject matter experts to
00:58:36 ◼ ► chat with us about it. And as you will hear, one of the great things about that is I've still got my
00:58:41 ◼ ► script that I'm reading, but like, there's little marks in it where it's like, John is going to talk
00:58:44 ◼ ► now. Yeah. And John talks now. And he did. And he had great stuff to say. So, um, it's a thing that
00:58:52 ◼ ► we're going to do. And so we wanted to give you an idea of what it would sound like. Also something
00:58:59 ◼ ► that's not happening in the 1970s. Yeah. Cause obviously we've, we've, we've really front
00:59:04 ◼ ► loaded on that from the Apple at 15 and straight into the one to two, um, which by the way, the
00:59:09 ◼ ► final episode of our Apple two series will be out on Thursday. So you can look forward to that.
00:59:13 ◼ ► And we promise that's it for this feed. We are not going to stick more design in California in this
00:59:22 ◼ ► I won't say no more ever. That's probably not a fair thing to say. Cause we're, I would
00:59:32 ◼ ► Crossovers. It's possible, but I don't want to say those who are like, why are you releasing
00:59:36 ◼ ► this, uh, this thing in the other feed? We know. Um, and we have to do it because we are doing
00:59:42 ◼ ► a Kickstarter campaign, but it will be over next week. And we would love your support at design.fm
00:59:48 ◼ ► if you haven't yet. But, um, and this will be another preview of what we're planning to
00:59:53 ◼ ► do when we launch that podcast, which is going to happen because we, uh, are, we, we made our
00:59:58 ◼ ► goal, but we would like to continue to grow. And, uh, thank you to the 2000 people who have
01:00:06 ◼ ► supported us already, but we would love more support if possible. Um, and we did a bunch of,
01:00:12 ◼ ► we made a bunch of announcements, the, the poster, the, the, the, the show, the art that a four,
01:00:19 ◼ ► um, show art that we promised, um, at that tier level, we're going to, everybody gets two
01:00:26 ◼ ► different ones. Now we just, we just doubled what what's in that one. So if you were thinking
01:00:30 ◼ ► about that tier, now you've got another reason to think about it. Cause there's a, there, there's
01:00:35 ◼ ► going to be, you get two different pieces of art. Only one of which will probably be signed
01:00:39 ◼ ► by both of us because there's only so many things we can sign. Yep. Um, and we're going
01:00:44 ◼ ► to do more theme song variations by Chris Breen. We're going to get, we're going to commission
01:00:47 ◼ ► more art. We've got, uh, Sam who worked on, uh, the atomic blonde graphic novel with Anthony
01:00:53 ◼ ► Johnson. He drew it. He's doing art for us for this project. Uh, we have some great original
01:00:58 ◼ ► art by Katie Shuttleworth. That is in a, an incredibly adorable thing that we're working
01:01:04 ◼ ► on. I am waiting on a, on a quote, a feasibility quote. Yeah. And then we can share it. And
01:01:11 ◼ ► then we can show you our enamel pin, which is like, it's so good gang. I love it. We love
01:01:17 ◼ ► it. Fingers crossed. Cause also like the company that I got quotes with for pins before, uh, I
01:01:22 ◼ ► have now quintupled the amount of pins that I originally asked for in my initial quote.
01:01:29 ◼ ► Right. Um, so I think now they're like, they're just like, let's just, let's just check. We
01:01:35 ◼ ► can do all of this. And so we'll be back with that shortly. That's fair. But we do it. We're
01:01:39 ◼ ► doing enough volume on the, on the art prints that we can just double the, yeah, the prints
01:01:44 ◼ ► and, um, and give people the art that's on the Kickstarter project and some original art
01:01:49 ◼ ► for the show, both, which is awesome. So, um, yeah, so it's all still rolling. We'd love
01:02:01 ◼ ► A lot of Mac users don't remember a time before Mac OS 10, but before OS 10 arrived on the scene,
01:02:10 ◼ ► the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us
01:02:16 ◼ ► from the Mac's launch in 1984 through the funeral of Steve Jobs held for Mac OS 9 in 2002.
01:02:22 ◼ ► The original Mac OS evolved a lot across those 18 years and perhaps its single most important
01:02:28 ◼ ► update system seven arrived 35 years ago in May of 1991. It seems like a footnote now, but
01:02:37 ◼ ► so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in system seven. Take
01:02:41 ◼ ► it from someone who was there. I wanted system seven so badly. I downloaded a load of floppy disk
01:02:46 ◼ ► images across my college computer network so I could install it. And I wasn't disappointed
01:02:51 ◼ ► by what I got system seven really did show the way to the future of the Mac. This was Jason
01:02:58 ◼ ► Snell writing in May of this year for Mac world about system seven and its demise. Hello and welcome
01:03:05 ◼ ► back to designed in California. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by the aforementioned and quoted
01:03:11 ◼ ► Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. Good to be here. Well, yeah, system seven. This is not our system seven
01:03:18 ◼ ► episode, but it's sort of like what came after why Apple struggled in this era to make OS updates.
01:03:25 ◼ ► And since we are going to be talking actually about the origins of OS 10, Mac OS 10, which had led to
01:03:31 ◼ ► Apple's entire OS strategy for the 21st century, who better to have our first ever guest on design in
01:03:38 ◼ ► California? Please welcome the man who wrote all those reviews of OS 10 in the early days. It is John
01:03:42 ◼ ► in Syracuse. So hi, John. Hi, guys. I am excited to be here to talk about one of the most terrible but also
01:03:48 ◼ ► exciting times in Apple's history. Would you consider yourself a domain expert in OS 10, John?
01:03:53 ◼ ► Yes, I would. Yeah, absolutely he is. I just wanted to, I believe it. I just wanted to know if you believed
01:03:59 ◼ ► it as well. Yeah, this is fun because we've recorded a bunch of episodes about things that
01:04:04 ◼ ► happened in the 1970s when, you know, I still wore short pants and went to elementary school and things
01:04:09 ◼ ► like that. And now we're going to talk about an era that we lived in, you and I, John, and went through.
01:04:16 ◼ ► And yes, it was traumatic, but you know, it ended up being good. It was super formative. So let's get
01:04:25 ◼ ► started talking about the origins of OS 10 and how that happened, because it is a wild story. If you go
01:04:32 ◼ ► back and you think about 1984 and the original Mac, that is a legendary creation myth almost
01:04:37 ◼ ► about the Mac. They were inspired by all sorts of different attempts to completely redefine how
01:04:43 ◼ ► computers looked and work in the earliest days. The original Mac team ended up shipping a product that
01:04:48 ◼ ► fulfilled those dreams. They made their dent in the universe. They changed how people viewed what a
01:04:52 ◼ ► computer could be. It was really a design and technical achievement for the ages. It's a hall of
01:04:57 ◼ ► famer, put it in the hall of fame. But the thing is, innovation in the computer world kept going forward
01:05:04 ◼ ► after the Mac came out. By the mid-90s, just as Microsoft finally went in on an all-Mac-inspired
01:05:12 ◼ ► interface, which they called Windows 95. Long-time Windows users were actually really mad. They're like,
01:05:17 ◼ ► it's just like a Mac. What are you doing? In this era, the Mac operating system found itself increasingly
01:05:22 ◼ ► out of date on the technical side because they had built this amazing thing, but they built it in the
01:05:26 ◼ ► early 80s. Remember, they shipped it in January 84. They were building it in the early 80s. It was
01:05:32 ◼ ► amazing, but also kind of bodged together. And Apple looked around and realized Microsoft was shipping a
01:05:39 ◼ ► Mac-style interface. The Mac suddenly seemed to have an expiration date on it. Apple needed to fix it
01:05:44 ◼ ► or replace it fast or else there would be no Apple or Mac left to fight on with Microsoft. This is the
01:05:52 ◼ ► story that we're telling here. It is the death and, yes, spoiler alert, rebirth of the Mac. So let's
01:05:59 ◼ ► start at the beginning. In the late 70s and early 80s, Apple started planning its next generation computer.
01:06:03 ◼ ► There were plenty of candidates for that title, each of which has their own unique story, which we will get
01:06:08 ◼ ► to undoubtedly on this podcast. The one that ended up making the biggest splash was the Macintosh,
01:06:13 ◼ ► a groundbreaking computer that introduced the graphical user interface to the masses. There's a
01:06:18 ◼ ► whole story to be told about the Mac, and I'm sure John would like to tell it right now.
01:06:27 ◼ ► Let me tell you, that was maybe one hour of 20 Macs for 2020. On Design in California, that's going to be
01:06:35 ◼ ► I think that's right. There's so much. We're all about the detail here. Like I said at the beginning,
01:06:39 ◼ ► the original Mac operating system was amazing, but it was from the early 80s. It was designed for
01:06:44 ◼ ► limited hardware. As a result, you know, it wasn't designed to run more than one program at once.
01:06:50 ◼ ► It could barely hold anything in memory. It didn't have a lot of memory to begin with. It had this tiny
01:06:54 ◼ ► black and white screen. It was built to be the original Mac, and then they iterated it over time.
01:07:01 ◼ ► But internal features were groundbreaking and brilliant, but they were often hand-built and
01:07:05 ◼ ► hard-coded and limited. And you could argue that some of the things that made the Mac so amazing
01:07:10 ◼ ► also meant that in the long run, it was going to be a bear to evolve it in the years after it shipped.
01:07:15 ◼ ► All right. But why? Was it that rigid? Like what about the system meant that it was going to be
01:07:22 ◼ ► The way I like to think of original Mac OS is that it's this incredibly built, hand-built,
01:07:28 ◼ ► bespoke operating system where they were making art, in a way, out of their software. And they built
01:07:36 ◼ ► this computer that they envisioned and they shipped it. But I do get the sense a little bit that there
01:07:42 ◼ ► was a what now kind of moment thereafter where the fact that they made it was a miracle, but then you
01:07:48 ◼ ► have to drag it forward. And it was based on a lot of assumptions of early 80s, late 70s computer
01:07:55 ◼ ► operating systems. And part of the point was to get it out the door and ship it. I don't know what John
01:08:07 ◼ ► Something that, I mean, I know today everyone feels like technology, boy, it's changing my leaps and bounds.
01:08:13 ◼ ► Things are changing so fast. But back at the dawn of the personal computer age, things were changing
01:08:17 ◼ ► so much faster in the specific realm of personal computers that year over year, it's like the entire
01:08:22 ◼ ► world was wiped out and remade anew. Like we are excited when new Macs come out and a little bit
01:08:26 ◼ ► faster than before, but the pace of change in the early years of the PC was just ridiculous. So
01:08:32 ◼ ► a couple of years in either direction and either the Mac wouldn't have been possible or they would
01:08:37 ◼ ► have had a better foundation. But the, and I guess it also probably has some ties to the origins of the
01:08:42 ◼ ► Macintosh project with Jeff Raskin at being an affordable computer. Remember there was the
01:08:46 ◼ ► Lisa, which was $10,000 in 1980s money. Right. And that was trying to do the same thing. And then
01:08:52 ◼ ► jobs took over the Macintosh project and that was supposed to be less expensive. And it did end up
01:08:57 ◼ ► being significantly less expensive than the Lisa, but still it was pretty expensive. But the idea of it
01:09:02 ◼ ► being slightly less expensive is in contrast to, you know, like next computer or something where like,
01:09:07 ◼ ► we're, we're just going to, whatever it costs is what it costs. That was not the story with the
01:09:10 ◼ ► Macintosh. It was like, we want this to be a thing that people can actually buy. And in that time in 19,
01:09:15 ◼ ► you know, the, the early to mid 1980s, if you wanted to do something that looked and behaved like the
01:09:20 ◼ ► Macintosh was on the ragged edge of what was even possible. Yeah. Kind of like the original iPhone.
01:09:26 ◼ ► It's like, can we literally do this at all? And just incredibly smart people had to do incredibly
01:09:31 ◼ ► clever things to just barely get this thing to work. And then a little more memory would have helped,
01:09:35 ◼ ► but memory was expensive then kind of like today. Uh, so they, they, you know, they couldn't even
01:09:40 ◼ ► get more than one 28 in there. And it was just like, it was a miracle that it was possible, but
01:09:43 ◼ ► push it forward three or four more years. And they could have made more forward looking decisions
01:09:48 ◼ ► because the Lisa was more technologically advanced and had more capabilities than the Mac. But it's
01:09:52 ◼ ► like, if you own a machine that's 2,500 bucks in 1984, that has a GUI that works like the Mac
01:09:56 ◼ ► with only 120 kilobytes of ramping, Steve jobs is a stubbornly sticking to that. Even though we'll
01:10:02 ◼ ► sneakily make it easily upgradable to five 12, you get the Mac, you know, here's your foundation.
01:10:06 ◼ ► And you know, and the Mac was a victim of its own success eventually, because it did eventually take
01:10:11 ◼ ► off. And it's like, you remember all the decisions we had to make in 1984? Guess what? We're stuck
01:10:17 ◼ ► with them real hard now because it's a big industry and people using it for desktop publishing. And
01:10:21 ◼ ► like, that's what it is. It wasn't like a, someone made a mistake or it was like a, you know,
01:10:27 ◼ ► even Steve jobs is stubbornness. It was like, this is where we're at at this time. So that's why it's
01:10:31 ◼ ► looked back on. It's so miraculous because like the iPhone, people would think, you know, that's how is
01:10:35 ◼ ► that even possible? Like when Bill Gates saw it, he didn't know how the cursor works. He's like,
01:10:38 ◼ ► what do you even, how, how, why? Well, they were focusing also on, on bringing the state of the art
01:10:43 ◼ ► forward with the GUI, you know, and the things they did quick draw, all these stories that we
01:10:48 ◼ ► will tell in great detail in the future, but like they had their moments, they picked their spots of
01:10:54 ◼ ► where they wanted to bring the state of the art forward. But also to John's point, some of the
01:10:58 ◼ ► fundamentals were kind of old world, not that there weren't other computers that could do better things
01:11:04 ◼ ► with memory and all of that. But like, you have to make your decisions when you're shipping that
01:11:07 ◼ ► product and what made it revolutionary were the things that we all know, but they were building on a,
01:11:13 ◼ ► again, kind of a hand-built foundation and also a foundation that was from, you know, 1982
01:11:19 ◼ ► decision-making. And then by the early nineties, the Mac did take some steps forward. They added
01:11:25 ◼ ► color support, although I would argue it was like color in the sense of coloring in a coloring book
01:11:32 ◼ ► where it was really black and white, but they're like, but there could be color on it a little bit.
01:11:36 ◼ ► It was not an interface designed for color. And so that color additions were at the edges in the
01:11:42 ◼ ► basic UI. There was multitasking kind of, but it was also kind of hacked on there was switcher.
01:11:49 ◼ ► And then later there was multi finder, which was just this idea where you were taking a,
01:11:54 ◼ ► a single tasking system and letting it run multiple programs. If you had enough memory,
01:12:00 ◼ ► but it was not made for it. It was an add-on. And the big moment was what Mike quoted earlier,
01:12:07 ◼ ► the arrival of system seven. I think that was the most monumental update in the history,
01:12:12 ◼ ► of the classic Mac OS. It added a whole bunch of features that the Mac hadn't supported in the
01:12:17 ◼ ► first seven years. You know, it had native multitasking, run a bunch of apps. It's fine.
01:12:24 ◼ ► There was a process doc. You could see all the running apps. You could, you could pull the process
01:12:27 ◼ ► doc off and make it a little floating palette, showing you all your apps that were running at
01:12:31 ◼ ► any given time. There was virtual memory. There was file sharing. The idea that without any extra
01:12:36 ◼ ► software, you could say, I would like to put my hard drive on the network. So someone else can look at the
01:12:40 ◼ ► files. That was system seven quick time was in system seven global support for color at a little,
01:12:45 ◼ ► a little more colorful interface was there. If you're a modern Mac user, like I said, in the thing
01:12:50 ◼ ► that Mike quoted at the beginning, I think if you saw system seven, you would feel much more at home
01:12:55 ◼ ► than you would in system 6.0.8. Yeah. System seven, like gets forgotten for people who weren't
01:13:02 ◼ ► adolescents when it came out. Like so many things, things that happened to you when you're an adolescent
01:13:05 ◼ ► seems so much more important and big and time slows down then. And it just so happens I was an adolescent
01:13:10 ◼ ► then, but system seven was just such a huge deal because the Mac had become successful, you know,
01:13:16 ◼ ► almost despite itself. It had, it had advanced, people were using it and the addition of color to
01:13:21 ◼ ► system six and everything was not that great. And when system seven arrived, it was, it was an important
01:13:25 ◼ ► point for me because I was so steeped in the original Macintosh story and had been using it since 1984.
01:13:31 ◼ ► And the original Mac had so many features that like embodied the spirit of the Mac team. Like
01:13:37 ◼ ► it was, it was clever. It was whimsical, everything in it was clean and tasteful. There was very sort
01:13:42 ◼ ► of artful solutions to like thorny technical and interface problems. You're like, wow, these people
01:13:46 ◼ ► are so smart. They came up with such great ideas and it's so cleanly self-contained and years passed.
01:13:51 ◼ ► And it was like, all right, the world is moving on. Hardware is advancing rapidly. So a lot of the
01:13:56 ◼ ► decisions you made for the original Macs are just no longer relevant because everything is getting so much
01:14:00 ◼ ► faster year over year. And system seven was proof to the external world that, Hey, Apple still got it
01:14:08 ◼ ► because what system seven added was a boatload of new features that had the same character as the
01:14:13 ◼ ► things we love from the original Mac. And it was like, okay, they can still do it. Like, cause you
01:14:18 ◼ ► know, I know it's only like six years or whatever, but you're worried to like, Hey, they did this
01:14:21 ◼ ► original Mac. And so far it's, it's gotten a little bit better, but like as the original Mac team
01:14:25 ◼ ► gone, Steve jobs is, can they still, can they still do this stuff? But system seven was like,
01:14:29 ◼ ► yes, we can still do it. So I'm forgive me for dwelling a little bit on system seven because
01:14:33 ◼ ► it's like one of my favorite operating systems ever. And I also, by the way, I chipped in with
01:14:38 ◼ ► my friend and my French teacher. So we split the cost three ways and bought a single copy of system seven
01:14:44 ◼ ► between me, my friend and my French teacher. And we each took turns with the floppy disks. So the
01:14:49 ◼ ► French teacher got them and he installed system seven, his computers, and he gave me the floppies
01:14:52 ◼ ► and I installed them and I gave it to my friend. It was a big, big moment for the French teacher.
01:14:56 ◼ ► So like, here's some examples of showing that they still had it. Okay. Consider the way fonts and
01:15:09 ◼ ► desk accessories were handled before system seven. Some fonts and desk accessories existed in the
01:15:13 ◼ ► original classic Mac OS desk accessories were the things in the Apple menu, like calculator or control
01:15:17 ◼ ► panel or whatever. And then fonts, you know, or fonts, there was an app called font DA mover. And by the
01:15:22 ◼ ► way, it was font forward slash DA mover forward slash in the name of an app, take that Unix.
01:15:27 ◼ ► Anyway, font DA mover, which was a truck icon and it looked like transmit with a two pane thing. And
01:15:33 ◼ ► you would open font DA mover and it would show on the left hand side, here's your system. You've got
01:15:36 ◼ ► these fonts. And on the right hand side, it's like, oh, you want to install fonts, show them in the right
01:15:40 ◼ ► hand side. And you had an arrow, put the thing from the right to the left, or you want to take a font
01:15:43 ◼ ► out, put it from the left to the right. Same thing with desk accessories, a separate app that you ran that
01:15:47 ◼ ► I think was modifying resources inside system files, right? That's how you dealt with fonts and DAs.
01:15:53 ◼ ► System 7 solution to this was like, look, we're desktop publishing. That's happening now. People
01:15:57 ◼ ► want to use more fonts, using font DA mover is barbaric and DAs being these things that you have
01:16:02 ◼ ► to shove into the system is weird. So System 7 made a fonts folder in the system folder and inside the
01:16:07 ◼ ► fonts folder were individual files that were the fonts. If you want to install a font, you drag it
01:16:13 ◼ ► into the fonts folder. If you want to uninstall a font, you drag it out of the fonts folder. If you
01:16:16 ◼ ► double click the font in the finder, it would open a little window that showed you all the different
01:16:20 ◼ ► sizes of fonts that are there. Same thing with desk accessories. They didn't have any embodiment other
01:16:24 ◼ ► than the appearance of a word and font DA mover back in the day. Now, there was an Apple menu items folder
01:16:30 ◼ ► in the systems folder. And anything you put in that folder appeared in the Apple menu, including all your
01:16:35 ◼ ► desk accessories or applications or aliases or other folders, which would appear as sub menus, literally
01:16:40 ◼ ► in the control panel, there was a folder in the system folder called control panels. And every individual
01:16:44 ◼ ► control panel was a little thing in that folder that you could double click. And all this stuff was like,
01:16:49 ◼ ► it works like the finder you've used to use the original Mac since 1984, you know how to drag files
01:16:53 ◼ ► around, you can change everything in your operating system by dragging stuff around. It was do it yourself,
01:17:00 ◼ ► you can manage your computer kit for people who had become accustomed to the Mac. Every part of it that
01:17:06 ◼ ► used to be like sealed in there or like, Oh, this is a this is a thing where you need to use some kind of
01:17:10 ◼ ► weird editor to do was just a bunch of files. And it was understandable and extremely human. Like,
01:17:15 ◼ ► they wanted people to understand their system and be able to manage it with the tools they had used
01:17:22 ◼ ► from simply using the finder. Yeah. And this was in contrast to use a text editor to modify config.sys
01:17:28 ◼ ► and autoexec.bat, which was a million miles from drag this font into or out of a folder. And it meant I
01:17:35 ◼ ► mean, you can look back on it now and say that's barbaric. You shouldn't have individual users dragging
01:17:38 ◼ ► stuff around in the system folders. And then people would like accidentally delete something
01:17:41 ◼ ► in the system folder and hoser system, right? Like it was, it was a different time. But compared to
01:17:45 ◼ ► what came before it compared to editing config.sys with a text editor, it was miraculous. And that
01:17:51 ◼ ► type of thing, you would look at like, Oh, it's so obvious. I, you know, we're so used to the way the
01:17:55 ◼ ► Mac work now. But now system seven is like, Hey, we have clever, human, tasteful, clean, uniform solutions to
01:18:02 ◼ ► thorny system interface problems. And it was just a revelation. It was like, I can't, it felt like the future.
01:18:08 ◼ ► It's like, I cannot believe operating systems can be like this. And it, you know, and it was like a
01:18:13 ◼ ► compounded at the original Mac because the original Mac was this one singular thing, but you're like,
01:18:16 ◼ ► can they do it again? And the system seven was like, the only thing I can compare it to is like when the
01:18:20 ◼ ► dual G5 came out where it was like an Apple needs a new computer. And they came out with that one and
01:18:24 ◼ ► people thought it was fake because it was so good. System seven blew me away. Loved it.
01:18:27 ◼ ► when I say people today would feel more at home in system seven, I mean, mostly that the previous OS is
01:18:34 ◼ ► feel ancient and charming in a way, but weird and old and system seven, although it is old,
01:18:43 ◼ ► it is much closer to what we might think of what a modern Mac user would think of as a Mac because it
01:18:49 ◼ ► added so much. It really was their early nineties rethink of an OS that had kind of been around for
01:18:56 ◼ ► 10 years. Interestingly, system seven with all its great ideas and everything coming six years after
01:19:01 ◼ ► the original OS, there's probably no other six year gap in the history of the Mac where you could have
01:19:08 ◼ ► made an advance like that because the hardware had become so far in that six years from the original Mac
01:19:13 ◼ ► that that's why people would feel comfortable with. It's like, Oh, you know, multiple finders can be
01:19:16 ◼ ► running. You can copy something in the finder and do something else. You can run multiple apps. Why
01:19:19 ◼ ► could you do that? Because the hardware was phenomenally better than the 128 kilobyte monochrome
01:19:24 ◼ ► nine inch original Mac. Like it would, it just got advanced by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately for
01:19:30 ◼ ► Apple, and as we'll get into, you can have these color Mac twos with incredible processors and
01:19:35 ◼ ► incredible amounts of memory. And it was just, and storage and the speed of storage and just
01:19:39 ◼ ► everything having to do with it. But like the underpinning, the basic underpinnings of the operating
01:19:43 ◼ ► system had not changed. It was just like, now we have some computers got way better. Yeah.
01:19:46 ◼ ► Now we have so much more room to play with and we can do all these things we always wanted
01:19:49 ◼ ► to do, but fundamentally it is just, it's the same as that original Mac, but with a vastly
01:19:55 ◼ ► bigger playing field and faster CPUs and everything. And there was a, you know, from system seven
01:20:00 ◼ ► on, there was a heyday of the Mac with, with, you know, desktop publishing and selling expensive
01:20:06 ◼ ► computers with lots of Ram and fast CPUs and lots of features and lots of apps. And just, it
01:20:11 ◼ ► was this huge Renaissance, but it was all built on this crumbling foundation that it was set
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01:22:14 ◼ ► System 7 was still lacking a lot of features that were clearly going to be important, even then,
01:22:21 ◼ ► clearly going to be important to the future of computing. There was this rickety foundation.
01:22:24 ◼ ► In fact, the features that shipped with System 7 were created by a software group. Here's the story.
01:22:31 ◼ ► They're called the Blue Meanies, which is a reference to the villains in the Yellow Submarine,
01:22:35 ◼ ► Can you explain? I can explain this. So here's what happened. Apple engineers were figuring out
01:22:42 ◼ ► what features they needed to build for the future of macOS, and they wrote them down on index cards.
01:22:46 ◼ ► And the ones that were achievable, that they thought, like, we could do this. We could do
01:22:50 ◼ ► this pretty soon. They wrote on blue index cards. They put their long-term goals on pink
01:22:55 ◼ ► and red index cards. The team in charge of implementing the near-term features on the blue cards got the name
01:23:02 ◼ ► blue meanies and what they shipped with System 7. Another team focused on the most complicated long-term
01:23:08 ◼ ► issues. They were on the pink cards. These were so far out that eventually Apple created a joint venture
01:23:15 ◼ ► with IBM called Taligent to work on a thing that they called pink based on, again, the cards, because
01:23:23 ◼ ► this is like, these are way out, far future computer ideas, and it never shipped. But there were a lot of
01:23:29 ◼ ► OSs in the 90s and joint ventures in the 90s that never did anything. And this is just,
01:23:34 ◼ ► I will cover some of them in this podcast, undoubtedly. But so they basically broke things
01:23:39 ◼ ► up into what can we accomplish, which is good, and they accomplished System 7. And then there were these
01:23:45 ◼ ► cutting-edge features that were going to take more time, and they were not, that was a dream deferred,
01:23:50 ◼ ► which in the end became a real problem for Apple, that they deferred that dream. But they were right
01:23:57 ◼ ► So here's a little bit of the problem with pink. During that period of personal computing,
01:24:02 ◼ ► there were a lot of different concepts of how advanced operating systems might work. People
01:24:07 ◼ ► knew how the current ones work, but there was not a lot of consensus about the advanced ones. And I
01:24:12 ◼ ► also feel like there was a little bit of a credibility adults in the room hangover that
01:24:16 ◼ ► Apple and its peers had regarding companies like IBM, which is like, yeah, but in the big,
01:24:21 ◼ ► serious future, surely it will be beneficial for us to get together with the big, serious companies
01:24:28 ◼ ► like IBM and work on some kind of common standard. Because at that point there have been, you know,
01:24:32 ◼ ► there's so much war. Why are we always fighting with our different standards and our different
01:24:35 ◼ ► applications? And like, why don't we have these future ideas that can be globe spanning? And like,
01:24:40 ◼ ► I mean, this is not like, you know, it's like coming up with the web versus doing, you know,
01:24:43 ◼ ► hypercard or whatever. But anyway, like, let's come up with standards for sharing C++ objects and
01:24:49 ◼ ► operating system structures that can be a common API used across multiple companies. And they had
01:24:54 ◼ ► all these grand ideas and all of them involved everybody cooperating and a techno utopian future.
01:24:59 ◼ ► And a lot of those ideas were either bad ideas or were just never going to happen due to like human
01:25:03 ◼ ► nature and competition. Cause it's like, that's okay, but like that's never going to happen. And so it's not
01:25:10 ◼ ► as if like, oh, the, the people weren't good programmers and didn't correctly do it. It was
01:25:13 ◼ ► like, this is, this is just not going to happen. Like your interests aren't aligned. What you're
01:25:17 ◼ ► trying to do is a bad idea. C++ is not the future. Like it's definitely the type of project that you
01:25:23 ◼ ► embark on when things are going well with your product and you're selling a lot of Macs to desktop
01:25:28 ◼ ► publishers. And you're like, we should be thinking about the future. And so they had all these teams
01:25:32 ◼ ► out there thinking real hard about the future. And it's kind of a blessing that they didn't go
01:25:39 ◼ ► people doing a lot of clever things, but in hindsight, it's so easy to look back on them
01:25:43 ◼ ► and say, yeah, that wasn't it. That wasn't the way actually in hindsight, the story I'm telling
01:25:47 ◼ ► now about how Apple ended up in a quandary and, and how OS 10 came out of it. The truth is like
01:25:53 ◼ ► OS eight added some nice stuff. They threw some stuff in there. There's a story about that,
01:26:06 ◼ ► that's kind of it for classic Mac OS. They have to essentially toss it like all their other attempts
01:26:11 ◼ ► to kind of bring it forward. They are adding little bits, but the fundamentals of it really can't change
01:26:19 ◼ ► until OS 10 comes on the scene. I've got a line here from Mac user magazine in 1996, where I worked.
01:26:25 ◼ ► I didn't write this, but this is what they said. The Mac pays a price for Apple's evolutionary approach to
01:26:31 ◼ ► OS development. System seven is built from blocks piled up over the course of a decade, and that has
01:26:37 ◼ ► compromised the OS's stability and performance. For the Mac to move forward, that OS needs to be
01:26:44 ◼ ► rebuilt from scratch. This is describing Apple's next generation operating system project that they were
01:26:51 ◼ ► working on in 1996. I guess it's funny because this kind of sentiment is what people say a lot about
01:26:57 ◼ ► Windows now. Like now. That like a lot of Windows problems is it's just, they're just layering things on
01:27:03 ◼ ► top of Windows and eventually you'll find your way back into 95. Windows has its core OS story straight
01:27:10 ◼ ► now, actually. But what you're talking about is the archaeology of like, you're right, if you dig,
01:27:14 ◼ ► if you keep digging into Windows, you're like, what? It's like when you dig in like the Roman roads
01:27:18 ◼ ► in the UK, and you find like what level of different statements. It's like, oh, there's a boss.
01:27:22 ◼ ► It's like, you just keep going. You're like, wow, how deep does this go? There's like 17 roads
01:27:26 ◼ ► underneath here and Windows is like that. But that is mostly a problem of like interface and management.
01:27:33 ◼ ► like System 7 was the start of something great. And in the 90s, the Mac was exciting and it was
01:27:37 ◼ ► getting lots of applications. But if you were a tech nerd, you were like, okay, but like I see what's
01:27:42 ◼ ► going on in the rest of the industry. Eventually, they're going to have to address this thing.
01:27:45 ◼ ► And it was like watching a car drive at 60 miles an hour towards a cliff that's seven miles away.
01:27:53 ◼ ► So are we going to build a bridge or like, and you get closer and the years would pass and it'll be
01:27:58 ◼ ► like, we're going the same speed and no bridges there. And like, no, we have teams work thinking
01:28:03 ◼ ► about it. What's actually happening is they're just putting a faster engine in the car as opposed to
01:28:08 ◼ ► dealing with what's down the line. We have seven teams working on bridges. And then you'd hear from
01:28:12 ◼ ► each team, like one year, it's like, oh yeah, that team, they disbanded and went on vacation. So they're
01:28:16 ◼ ► not going to make a bridge. And this other team made a bridge, but they made it vertically,
01:28:23 ◼ ► But we repainted the car. The car finally is no longer gray. It has color. What are you talking?
01:28:27 ◼ ► So let's go through it because we've been talking vaguely about this rickety foundation. Like what
01:28:32 ◼ ► in you're in the mid nineties, what do you want your computer operating system to have? And I know that
01:28:36 ◼ ► people who are a little less technical or younger and didn't live through this period might be thinking
01:28:40 ◼ ► like, what could they even be talking about? What bizarre, arcane, abstract concepts could they be
01:28:45 ◼ ► dealing with? Okay. Well, here we go. The Mac use something called cooperative multitasking. You're
01:28:51 ◼ ► like, great. You can run more than one program at a time. We do that today. Well, another phrase
01:28:55 ◼ ► for cooperative multitasking might be not actually multitasking. More than one program could run at
01:29:00 ◼ ► once, but any program at any time could take control of the entire computer and not give it back until it
01:29:05 ◼ ► was ready. Which means if you had one misbehaving program or bad behaving program, everything else,
01:29:12 ◼ ► literally everything else on the system would stop. I have a great example of this in classic Mac OS.
01:29:16 ◼ ► If you clicked on an item in the menu bar and kept the mouse button down, everything stopped on the
01:29:23 ◼ ► whole computer because the system is waiting for the menu process. It's like, I'm wait, what menu is it?
01:29:35 ◼ ► This is a great place to highlight the word multitasking, because especially back in this era,
01:29:40 ◼ ► what multitasking actually meant was not doing more than one thing at a time. It meant doing thing one,
01:29:46 ◼ ► then thing two, then thing three, then thing one, then thing two, then you're only ever doing one
01:29:50 ◼ ► thing at a time. But you're like, now I'm doing the first thing, then the second, then the third,
01:30:06 ◼ ► how do I allow programs to access my one CPU? And as Jason has said, cooperative multitasking is like,
01:30:16 ◼ ► but now I'm done with it. Now you can have it. Another one go, oh, me? Oh, great. I'll use CPU,
01:30:21 ◼ ► and then I'll wait. Okay, now I'm done with it. But what if they never said they're done with it?
01:30:24 ◼ ► Yeah. Hilariously, this doesn't sound cooperative at all. There's no cooperation going on.
01:30:29 ◼ ► Well, it's like, when you're using the menu and pulling down the menu bar, it's like, well,
01:30:33 ◼ ► I can't give up the CPU until they've picked the menu, because I need the CPU to draw the menu,
01:30:38 ◼ ► and the cursor go, like, I need, like, I can't, I can't give it up. I'm not holding it. I'm not
01:30:42 ◼ ► hoarding it jealously. I'm not a badly behaved program. It's like, literally, if I give up the CPU,
01:30:46 ◼ ► the menu item will stop highlighting. When you bring the cursor up, like, I need to have the CPU
01:30:51 ◼ ► to highlight the item that the cursor is over and to make it blink when you release the bar. Like,
01:30:55 ◼ ► I can't give it up. If I gave it up for a second, and you can't say, well, why did it just give it up
01:30:59 ◼ ► for, like, a millisecond so somebody else can use it? But if you give it up for a millisecond and
01:31:03 ◼ ► somebody else uses it, and they're like, I'm running a Photoshop filter. I'll be done in a minute.
01:31:06 ◼ ► Oh, now your menu doesn't work anymore. So the, what happened was that you'd pull down the menu,
01:31:11 ◼ ► the menu tracking routine would run, and it would give up the CPU when it was done tracking the menu,
01:31:16 ◼ ► and that's it. Yeah, I mean, a good example here, when I was digging through, because I've forgotten,
01:31:20 ◼ ► you know, just how bad this was, right? But then I was reminded, an example from one of the magazines
01:31:25 ◼ ► of the time was, you're downloading a file in a web browser, and until the file downloads,
01:31:30 ◼ ► you just have to sit there and watch it, because that's all it's going to do is download the file.
01:31:37 ◼ ► That was what it was like. So what do you do? The answer is preemptive multitasking. Yay!
01:31:42 ◼ ► Which is each individual program can't take over everything and ruin system performance. So the
01:31:48 ◼ ► idea is, and this is basically what we have now, is that you can ask as a program to do a task,
01:31:54 ◼ ► but there's like a scheduler, whereas it was more like a relay race with classic Mac OS. Once you had
01:31:58 ◼ ► the baton, it was yours until you let it go. And the result was terrible performance. Sometimes you'd be
01:32:05 ◼ ► using a program, and then it would just cease to move. And you're like, why, what is happening now?
01:32:11 ◼ ► And the answer is something else is going on. Or you would perform a task, and in a modern computer,
01:32:15 ◼ ► you'd think, well, I'll switch. I'll look at the web while that task is running in the background.
01:32:20 ◼ ► It's like, nope, you're not going to do that. You've got to leave that task sitting there,
01:32:23 ◼ ► chunking away, because it's got the baton right now. Yeah. Yeah. So preemptive multitasking,
01:32:29 ◼ ► like that existed in the eighties when they made it. But, and basically what that means is the operating
01:32:33 ◼ ► system says, you don't get to choose when you're on the CPU. I choose when you're on the CPU. And
01:32:37 ◼ ► when I decide you're done, you're done and somebody else gets a chance. And to do that with eighties
01:32:42 ◼ ► technology, especially in the early eighties, you needed more RAM and more CPU because you were slicing
01:32:47 ◼ ► it up. You were like, okay, a little for you, a little for you, a little for you. And it would make
01:32:49 ◼ ► things feel jumpy and bad. It's like, you couldn't have done the original Macintosh and made it feel as
01:32:54 ◼ ► smooth as it did with preemptive multitasking, unless you had the resources of the Lisa, which way more RAM and a
01:32:59 ◼ ► bigger CPU. And so it's like, we can't, we can't have preemptive multitasking. But once you build on
01:33:04 ◼ ► that foundation, once you build set of APIs, which is like, use the CPU, give it up when you're done
01:33:09 ◼ ► with it, or when you when you want someone else to have a turn, and everyone tries to cooperate,
01:33:12 ◼ ► and you try to be well behaved. That's just the way it works, which is I have the CPU until I'm done
01:33:16 ◼ ► with it, or until I decide to give it up. And there was a culture and APIs of like, you should give it up
01:33:21 ◼ ► pretty much anytime you're not using it, even for a second, use it, give it up, use it, give it up,
01:33:25 ◼ ► abuse. That's what you should do. And if you're a well behaved app, you should do that. But that was
01:33:29 ◼ ► baked into the programs. They, there was not even a facility to say, I'm using the CPU and wait,
01:33:34 ◼ ► the operating system is going to stop me. I'm in the middle of doing something. Why is the operating
01:33:38 ◼ ► system going to take me off the CPU and let somebody else have the CPU, things would break,
01:33:42 ◼ ► things would not work, they needed to be in that cooperative environment where, like Jason said,
01:33:47 ◼ ► the relay race is perfect, I've got the baton, I give up the baton, they may be grabbing the baton and
01:33:51 ◼ ► giving up really fast. But the point is, they're choosing when the programs are choosing when to do
01:33:55 ◼ ► that. And the operating system has no say. Yeah, exactly right. And it had all of these
01:33:59 ◼ ► weird knock on effects. And we could say like, well, why didn't they anticipate that they were
01:34:04 ◼ ► going to need this and build it into the original Mac, even though they couldn't use it then. And the
01:34:08 ◼ ► answer is real artists ship, right? Like they had to ship, they, they were not, they were struggling
01:34:13 ◼ ► to ship a Mac, not spend a lot of time building a foundation for theoretically what it might become
01:34:19 ◼ ► because they needed to ship the product. But the result is that, yes, you're now on that shaky
01:34:23 ◼ ► foundation. So another example of this, and then a major one is this concept of memory protection,
01:34:29 ◼ ► which we take for granted today. Basically, software behaving badly on a Mac running classic
01:34:35 ◼ ► Mac OS could wreck all the other software running on the Mac. It could spew bad stuff into memory,
01:34:43 ◼ ► you know, that the other programs thought had its stuff in, but now it wasn't there and it was broken.
01:34:48 ◼ ► Back in the day, if one program behaved badly, that was it for your Mac. And when it crashed,
01:34:54 ◼ ► everything crashed all at once and you needed to reboot. And in this era, I remember rebooting
01:35:01 ◼ ► my Mac. I'm not kidding here. Half dozen or a dozen times a day due to a hard crash. Like
01:35:09 ◼ ► literally everything stopped moving and there was nothing you could do, but turn it off and turn it
01:35:14 ◼ ► back on, including the cursor, by the way. Yeah. Even the cursor. Oh yes. Oh yes. The whole thing.
01:35:19 ◼ ► Well, that was the telltale moment, right? You're, you're watching the little pointer move along the
01:35:23 ◼ ► screen and then it stops and you're like, but what, what, what? And it's gone today. We think of the
01:35:28 ◼ ► idea of like force quitting an app. You can force quit an app and then like, oh, that app went bad.
01:35:32 ◼ ► I'm going to force quit it. And then I'm going to move on. Or maybe the system quits it.
01:35:36 ◼ ► But a funny thing that I realized when I was researching that story that Mike quoted at the
01:35:40 ◼ ► beginning about system seven is that system seven actually added the force quit an app feature.
01:35:45 ◼ ► However, you were instructed very sternly. The moment you force quit an app immediately,
01:35:54 ◼ ► It's like, yeah, yeah, you quit. That's good. Good for you. You might be able to save something.
01:36:00 ◼ ► That's why, that's why it was useful. Cause you could save in other apps if you're lucky.
01:36:03 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. But get out. But you've essentially set a time bomb at the moment that you've done
01:36:08 ◼ ► that. Like something bad's going to happen. So, and this is, this is the, the technical underpinning
01:36:13 ◼ ► of that. Like the, all personal computers in the era, they were like affordable personal
01:36:17 ◼ ► things that you could buy. Memory was just a big green field that started at address zero
01:36:21 ◼ ► and ended at address, whatever, you know, 128 kilobytes. Right. And every single thing running
01:36:26 ◼ ► on the computer saw and could access all of those addresses. You know, what was in all those
01:36:32 ◼ ► addresses? The operating system was in the address. Every other application was in that. Any data that
01:36:37 ◼ ► any application was using was in there. And so it was like, okay, everyone's on one big green field.
01:36:42 ◼ ► And the operating system would say, this is your area application number one. And if it had like a
01:36:45 ◼ ► bad pointer dereference and it's like, oh, I'm scribbling over here. What did it just scribble over?
01:36:49 ◼ ► Did it just scribble over part of the operating system? Did it just scribble over part of your
01:36:53 ◼ ► like word processing document in another program? Like, did it just scribble over the thing that controls how
01:36:58 ◼ ► windows closed? Like any part of memory was accessible to it. That's what unprotected memory
01:37:03 ◼ ► is. So not only was it unprotected, but everyone was in the same address space. You got addresses
01:37:08 ◼ ► 10 to 15. The next one got addresses 20 to 25. Right. Obviously, the numbers are bigger than that.
01:37:12 ◼ ► The operating system got address from here to here. Right. And that's not a way to run.
01:37:18 ◼ ► There's no way to run a railroad. Yeah. Because like, because they're using languages like C where
01:37:22 ◼ ► you do reference a pointer that's supposed to be an address to like in your 10 to 25 range or
01:37:26 ◼ ► whatever. But it turns out that the value in there was 700. And now you're writing memory at address
01:37:31 ◼ ► location 700. What was the address 700? I don't know. Maybe nobody knows, maybe something super duper
01:37:36 ◼ ► important. And so that's why when you would force could it would kill the app that was misbehaving.
01:37:40 ◼ ► But at that point, what's the state of memory now? Did that thing scribble all over the rest of the
01:37:45 ◼ ► memory? You needed to get the hell out of that and reboot. Because there's no fixing it. There's no
01:37:50 ◼ ► like, we don't know what addresses got overrun with this data. You just need to reboot. Yeah. So I recall
01:37:56 ◼ ► from those days that sometimes you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but I'm just going to do this
01:38:00 ◼ ► thing. And let me tell you, it led to hilarious consequences. What would usually happen is you'd be
01:38:04 ◼ ► like, okay, I force quit that. And I know I need to reboot here soon, but I'm going to do this other
01:38:08 ◼ ► thing that I'm in the middle of. And then that app would crash. And you'd be like, oh, no. And so you'd force
01:38:13 ◼ ► quit that one. You'd be like, I could go over here and look at this. And then there would be a whole
01:38:16 ◼ ► chain of crashes that would lead to, well, I guess I'm rebooting after all. And then you do restart and
01:38:21 ◼ ► it wouldn't restart because it was so busted. And then you had to force it to reboot. And so, okay, that's
01:38:27 ◼ ► bad. Although there's one good, I want to say there's one good thing about that. One, one and only good,
01:38:31 ◼ ► good thing about that, other than the performance benefits and the fact that the Mac could ship and
01:38:35 ◼ ► you know, blah, blah, blah. If you're working on something like you're in a text editor and it crashes.
01:38:38 ◼ ► Yeah. You should reboot. Right. But you're like, but I was in the middle of writing something I
01:38:42 ◼ ► didn't save. There were programs that would scan all of memory for like a text string. You're like,
01:38:48 ◼ ► I know I wrote this three word phrase in ASCII and this thing. And so it would just look through
01:38:53 ◼ ► all of memory to try to find like the text strings from the document used to be working on. Yeah.
01:38:57 ◼ ► And you could rescue your document that you didn't save by having it scan the entire RAM of your computer
01:39:03 ◼ ► to find whatever pieces of that document happened to me in RAM. And I did that multiple times and I
01:39:08 ◼ ► did save my butt. You get little chunks and you'd have to kind of piece it back together,
01:39:11 ◼ ► but it would be better than the alternative. And as you can imagine, this is a security nightmare.
01:39:19 ◼ ► I feel like Mike is looking at us like, why did people use computers that were like this? And the
01:39:23 ◼ ► answer is, well, there was no alternative really. So this is all of these horror stories. And these are,
01:39:28 ◼ ► these are computer ghost stories that we're telling here. This is why Apple had to be motivated to do
01:39:33 ◼ ► something. So the next one I wanted to mention is multi-threading, which is the idea that programs
01:39:37 ◼ ► could be broken up into separate tasks that operate independently of one another. For example, in the
01:39:43 ◼ ► Finder in the early days, you couldn't say, copy a couple of files at once while also looking through
01:39:48 ◼ ► a bunch of folders and stuff. It's like, no, those one at a time, please one at a time. And this needed to
01:39:56 ◼ ► change also because in this era, there was a realization that you might have more than one processor on your
01:40:02 ◼ ► system. And if you had multi-threading, you could have a traffic dispatcher that could say, this thread
01:40:08 ◼ ► could work over there while this one could work over here. And the only way you could do that with
01:40:13 ◼ ► multiple processors or what we now have, which is multiple cores, is by not having everything run on
01:40:18 ◼ ► a single thread. So programs were very single-minded back then. And the system and all of the system
01:40:25 ◼ ► apps and everything else needed to have the ability to spawn processes in different threads and do more than one
01:40:31 ◼ ► thing at a time, which we take for granted today. Yeah. And to be clear, it's because the operating
01:40:35 ◼ ► system expected to run on a single CPU and expected to do everything was going to happen on a single
01:40:39 ◼ ► CPU. So if you had a second CPU, it'd be like, well, that's nice. What the hell am I supposed to
01:40:42 ◼ ► do with that? Right. They would give extensions. They would be like, okay, in Photoshop and Photoshop
01:40:46 ◼ ► only, Photoshop plus some extension to the system combined are now aware that there's another CPU over
01:40:52 ◼ ► there. And you know what you can do with that CPU? When I run a Photoshop filter and only when I run a
01:40:55 ◼ ► Photoshop filter, I'm going to use the second CPU plus the first one to be faster. But everything
01:41:00 ◼ ► else was like, I don't even see that CPU. I have no, I want to, what are you expecting to do with
01:41:08 ◼ ► You can listen to the Daystar Digital episode of 20 Max for 2020, where I talk about how this clone
01:41:13 ◼ ► company with Apple's help invented a multi-processing plugin, but it was very much like just for Photoshop.
01:41:19 ◼ ► But there was this anticipation. This is the thing is like, how do you get faster computers?
01:41:24 ◼ ► In the mid nineties, we knew one of the ways you got faster computers was by having more than one
01:41:29 ◼ ► processor. And again, without multi-threading, it's useless. So they have to do multi-threading.
01:41:35 ◼ ► They have to do virtual memory, which system seven introduced, which is good. Virtual memory is a concept
01:41:41 ◼ ► that a computer can have a larger memory space than its actual RAM that it has. And that lets you swap
01:41:51 ◼ ► but you can sort of efficiently manage memory. It also allows apps to have their memory in a kind
01:41:57 ◼ ► of a virtual space instead of it being physically exactly what's on the chip. This is good. These are
01:42:02 ◼ ► all modern ideas. The Mac needed a memory model with virtual memory as more than kind of a patch in.
01:42:08 ◼ ► The way the classic Mac OS did virtual memory. And this, this gets confused because casual people
01:42:14 ◼ ► saying virtual memory mean multiple things at the same time. But virtual memory is what Jason just
01:42:18 ◼ ► said, which is remember I said that everyone is sharing the same big address space and your RAM goes
01:42:22 ◼ ► from like zero to two, five, 12 K or however much memory you have. When you have virtual memory,
01:42:30 ◼ ► Every bit of it gets, you know, whatever. Right. But what we're going to say is what you're going
01:42:35 ◼ ► to see as a program and what the operating system is going to see is still going to be one on the
01:42:39 ◼ ► classic Mac OS. It's still going to be one giant memory space, but that memory space is going to go
01:42:43 ◼ ► from zero to 4 billion. Yeah. You're like, well, I don't have 4 billion. Don't worry about it. Don't
01:42:48 ◼ ► worry about it. It's like, well, I know you have the RAM that you have, but I'm saying instead of
01:42:53 ◼ ► seeing just zero to that amount of memory, you're going to see zero to 4 billion. And you're like,
01:42:58 ◼ ► well, how is that supposed to work? It's like, well, there's a piece of hardware that you need in
01:43:02 ◼ ► your Mac to do this, which is a million reason number a million why you couldn't do this in the early
01:43:07 ◼ ► days. You need a MMU, a memory management union, which was this thing in your CPU or next to your CPU
01:43:13 ◼ ► that would say, whatever a program tries to look up an address and it tries to look up address 2
01:43:17 ◼ ► million. There's no address 2 million in your RAM. You have like a megabyte of RAM, right?
01:43:21 ◼ ► It says, okay, I have a table that maps every single address from programs are using to a physical
01:43:29 ◼ ► address in your RAM chips. And I keep that table updated. And without the hardware, you can't do
01:43:33 ◼ ► this because obviously it would be too expensive to like, try to do this in software. There needs to be
01:43:38 ◼ ► special hardware that would say, I need to map from physical to virtual addresses for every
01:43:42 ◼ ► single thing. It was still one memory space. Everyone can still see everyone else's junk,
01:43:46 ◼ ► but the memory space was way, way bigger. And as Jason just alluded to the other part of quote,
01:43:50 ◼ ► unquote, virtual memory that people put under that phrase is the concept of, okay, well, now when I have
01:43:55 ◼ ► more addresses than physical RAM, what happens when I run out? I'm using more and more virtual addresses,
01:44:01 ◼ ► and there's no more physical addresses to back them. Then it would say, okay, something that is using
01:44:06 ◼ ► physical address number five. I'm going to put that in a file on disk. And now you can use physical
01:44:10 ◼ ► address number five, and I'll update the mapping table. And if someone goes to look for that RAM
01:44:13 ◼ ► again, you're like, oh, that used to be an address number five, but we wrote it to disk. And now we'll
01:44:19 ◼ ► So virtual memory is just the concept of a virtual address space, but swapping is where you take
01:44:27 ◼ ► things out of RAM and put them on disk. And those all go under an umbrella term. But you'll note,
01:44:31 ◼ ► none of this solves the underlying problem. It just extends the timeline as we race towards the cliff.
01:44:35 ◼ ► Yes, that's right. We've got some new seat covers on our car that's racing toward the cliff. I will also
01:44:40 ◼ ► say that one of the consequences of all of this decision is, as veteran Mac users will remember,
01:44:45 ◼ ► you used to be able to get info on apps and assign how much memory they could take. It was very common
01:44:51 ◼ ► back then. The idea was, oh, your word processor is misbehaving. Why don't you give it a little more
01:44:56 ◼ ► memory? But you didn't want to give it too much because they would try to ask for that, and then you could
01:45:01 ◼ ► end up in a situation where you were running out of memory. So the idea that the user is managing how
01:45:07 ◼ ► much memory each individual app uses, which should never be allowed to happen, but that is what we did
01:45:14 ◼ ► back in that era. Yeah, before that get info dialogue existed, that was still happening. Because remember,
01:45:19 ◼ ► you've just got one address space, whether it's real or virtual. Every app needs to reserve a little
01:45:23 ◼ ► portion of the green field for them. But then you could adjust it. How big is that portion? It used to be that
01:45:31 ◼ ► 50 kilobytes. But of course, that would limit, especially in the days before swapping. That
01:45:35 ◼ ► meant you could never edit a document more than 50 kilobytes. Your whole program fits in 50 kilobytes.
01:45:39 ◼ ► And so the innovation of System 7 is like, what if you let the user change that? Obviously,
01:45:44 ◼ ► you couldn't change it below the minimum, but you could make it bigger. And to Jason's point,
01:45:48 ◼ ► sometimes you'd make it bigger because like the program was crashing, and it was scribbling over
01:45:51 ◼ ► something outside of its bounds. And you just give it a little bit more room to scribble in,
01:45:55 ◼ ► because you say, I'm going to reserve four times as much. And now it doesn't crash anymore. It's
01:45:59 ◼ ► still got the bug. But when it scribbles, it turns out it's scribbling in its own space that ends up
01:46:03 ◼ ► being unused. Or if you wanted to open up a larger document, you would say, it can't open this document.
01:46:08 ◼ ► It tells me out of memory. I'll give you more memory in the get info thing. I'll relaunch you. And now you
01:46:16 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a wild idea. Also, the opposite is also true, which is if there was a piece of software that
01:46:21 ◼ ► thought it wanted to reserve a large amount of memory, and it didn't use it. That was not great,
01:46:27 ◼ ► ideally, because it was reserving memory that it didn't actually need. And maybe you needed it for
01:46:32 ◼ ► something else. So it goes both ways. But yeah, this was bad. Don't do this is what I'm saying. And Apple
01:46:42 ◼ ► It makes me feel like you really needed the internet. So you could have something else to do.
01:46:51 ◼ ► This is all I did all day. The days before the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours
01:46:55 ◼ ► just in front of my computer that was not connected to any other computer. And I would just be on the,
01:47:02 ◼ ► I also did have that experience. I would sit at my PC and just search the file system. Like,
01:47:13 ◼ ► That was all I could do. Because even when we had the internet, I couldn't be on the internet all the
01:47:17 ◼ ► time. My internet time was allotted to, when does mom not need the phone? You know? And that was all I
01:47:22 ◼ ► got. So I do, I do remember those feelings too, of like, being on the computer is just seeing what the
01:47:28 ◼ ► computer can do. So we have listed a whole bunch of reasons why Apple might need a new operating
01:47:33 ◼ ► system. And I should also say, in the nineties, percolating in the background, there were a lot
01:47:37 ◼ ► of big ideas about the future of computing. And that was going to be a challenge too. So those were also
01:47:44 ◼ ► written on cards at Apple, right? New ways of working that go beyond the open a file paradigm,
01:47:51 ◼ ► the entire concept of using a standalone app to edit documents. There were all these ideas about like,
01:47:56 ◼ ► what if everybody was the document man and then the stuff you put in, it could be written by any
01:48:02 ◼ ► program. And there was a lot of that going on. Mac couldn't do any of that, but maybe the next
01:48:06 ◼ ► generation could. There was this amorphous feeling like it needed to be flexible enough to enable
01:48:11 ◼ ► Apple to build the next big thing. And the current Mac OS couldn't do it. So they, they knew they needed
01:48:16 ◼ ► to replace the old Mac OS with something new. They were challenged by the fact that Apple sales were
01:48:28 ◼ ► but if the Mac is going to be, think about it this way. I love the Mac. I want to use the Mac
01:48:33 ◼ ► in a windows world where windows 95 is a hit. And I'm a real outlier. I'm the only person in my
01:48:38 ◼ ► company with a Mac because I'm in the art department, but everybody else uses a PC. And then Apple comes to
01:48:44 ◼ ► you and says, well, we're going to make a new operating system that is completely incompatible
01:48:51 ◼ ► with the Mac that, you know, it's a totally different thing. It's like a different computer.
01:48:56 ◼ ► At that point, a lot of those people, you know, I'm going to say, well, if I have to choose between
01:49:01 ◼ ► brand new, completely unrelated, non Mac operating system from Apple and just using windows at this
01:49:07 ◼ ► point, why don't I just go to windows? Your thing is new and weird. Windows is going to be new and
01:49:12 ◼ ► weird, but everybody's using windows and nobody's using the Mac. And now the Mac's not going to exist
01:49:16 ◼ ► anymore. And this was a huge problem for Apple because they wanted to maintain their existing markets.
01:49:21 ◼ ► They wanted to give them a bridge to whatever they were going to do next and not make it so alien
01:49:26 ◼ ► that they just gave up and started using windows, like literally everybody else on the planet.
01:49:31 ◼ ► And that is the premise for what Apple has to do next, which is go on a bit of a vision quest,
01:49:37 ◼ ► try to find whatever Mac OS is going to become or replace the classic Mac OS. And I wish I could
01:49:45 ◼ ► tell you that Apple wrote it all down on some cards, put it all together, got their story straight,
01:49:52 ◼ ► put in a plan, and a couple of years later out popped a new Mac operating system. That's not what
01:50:00 ◼ ► happened. It took way longer than anybody expected. There were far more twists and turns than anyone
01:50:05 ◼ ► ever imagined. And that is an exciting story that we'll tell you next time on Designed in California.
01:50:13 ◼ ► Until then, thank you, John. Glad to be here anytime. Well, there'll be many more times.
01:50:18 ◼ ► Don't you worry about that. We got a lot of OS's to cover. We haven't even gotten to the next one.
01:50:23 ◼ ► All right. So we're on our way to replace classic Mac OS, but the rest of it's going to have to wait
01:50:29 ◼ ► for another podcast on another day. But so great to talk to John about this stuff. He's seen it all. He's been there.
01:50:38 ◼ ► Yeah. So remember, this is design.fm. That's where you can go to back hard kickstart the campaign.
01:50:45 ◼ ► Jason, people, I'm sure they love this conversation and they're like, I want more of it. When are they
01:50:51 ◼ ► going to get it? It's going to happen as we launch the show. So I would say late summer,
01:51:00 ◼ ► early fall. We hope we still got a bunch of planning stuff to do. We hope to launch the feeds for it in
01:51:07 ◼ ► advance of the new episodes dropping. But we have to work out the timing and there's some technical
01:51:13 ◼ ► things and all of that. So we'll mention it here when it's up and running, both for supporters and for the
01:51:37 ◼ ► design in California. So the feed will include what you just heard as a full episode and then
01:51:44 ◼ ► it will go on out from there. And there's going to be a lot more because we've got a lot to talk
01:51:49 ◼ ► about this one. So before we do, before we finish today, Jason, I do want to do a couple of ask
01:51:53 ◼ ► upgrade questions. Great. This comes from Tyler who says, do you think part of the reason Golden
01:52:00 ◼ ► Gate is the name for Mac OS 27 could be a reference to it being Apple's golden anniversary this year?
01:52:07 ◼ ► I guess it could be right. I didn't know this. That's why I liked what Tyler wrote in. It's like,
01:52:17 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, maybe it's just one of the arguments for Golden Gate is also why not this year?
01:52:23 ◼ ► Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, what a fun thing to do. Why not do it this time rather than next year,
01:52:29 ◼ ► where it would feel like a missed opportunity? I mean, technically, the 50th anniversary is in 2026.
01:52:33 ◼ ► So it should not have been the name of Mac OS 26, but they already did that. So now they're on to
01:52:37 ◼ ► this and it's fine. Yeah. It's if, if not, we all can, uh, it'll be a good way for us to remember
01:52:42 ◼ ► when the golden anniversary was, except then it'll be Mac OS 27. And we'll have to remember that it came
01:52:51 ◼ ► It's great. And Harvey wrote in to say, will the designed in California member feed be called
01:53:01 ◼ ► Jason and I had a really great production meeting on Friday. This was the thing that came up. We need
01:53:08 ◼ ► a name for the member feed. We have some ideas that aren't very inventive. I don't think I want to be
01:53:14 ◼ ► super inventive. We won't call it assembled in China. It doesn't make any sense really. But if you have a
01:53:19 ◼ ► suggestion for a name for our feed, write in at upgradefeedback.com. I would like to see them.
01:53:27 ◼ ► Yeah. And in fact, if I can guide you slightly further, there's the name of the version of the
01:53:34 ◼ ► show that goes to backers without ads. And there's also going to be an additional feed for backers.
01:53:52 ◼ ► And MPU too. So, so we, we, we really have two things that we have to decide on name and branding
01:53:59 ◼ ► for. So people can keep that in mind too. We know, no guarantees, but, um, you know, look,
01:54:04 ◼ ► Tyler surprised us with the, with the golden gate theory. So you can surprise us with great ideas
01:54:13 ◼ ► but it's a great idea that we, we, I don't think we will use, but it is fantastic. Um, so if you have
01:54:23 ◼ ► suggestions, you can write them in at the same place that you can send in your feedback, follow
01:54:27 ◼ ► up and questions that is upgradefeedback.com. Thank you to our members who support us with
01:54:32 ◼ ► upgrade plus. Uh, Jason, I want to talk to you about a problem I'm having with my laptop, uh,
01:54:40 ◼ ► You can find a video version of this show by searching for the upgrade podcast on YouTube.