00:01:32
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That's the way we're going to celebrate the modern Apple, because the only time that is relevant is the time of the boomer's youth.
00:01:40
◼►
How funny would it be if he gets up there?
00:01:42
◼►
I mean, it's not going to happen, but it would be absolutely hilarious if he takes the microphone, and rather than play any music, he just gets up there and rants and raves about the Apple records, Apple computer thing.
00:01:56
◼►
Like, he even remembers that at this point.
00:01:58
◼►
I don't think Paul McCartney was ever instrumental in that.
00:02:04
◼►
I think that was more of a Yoko thing.
00:02:10
◼►
No, but I guess the one thing I thought is, well, 50 is only going to come around once.
00:02:15
◼►
I joked on dithering in an episode that will be out before this episode, and was also recorded before, that we're not going to get a chance to, probably not going to get a chance to talk about their 100th anniversary.
00:03:29
◼►
Podcast is more, I don't know, this is why I like podcasting.
00:03:34
◼►
I have more mixed feelings about podcasting than you do, clearly.
00:03:38
◼►
I feel like that's one of the ways where you and I are like, we're oddly similar, and then we're very different.
00:03:43
◼►
And your position in the Mac media has evolved to primarily a podcaster who occasionally writes, and I'm a writer who occasionally podcasts.
00:03:53
◼►
You podcast all the time, first of all.
00:03:55
◼►
And second of all, the horse is always in front of the carriage.
00:03:58
◼►
The expression is putting the cart before the horse.
00:04:00
◼►
So you wanted me to call you on everything, and I just wanted to make sure I don't disappoint you.
00:04:07
◼►
You're right that most of the time I spend doing podcasting, and you spend a tremendous amount of time podcasting.
00:04:11
◼►
I think you podcast more than I do because you do multiple episodes of Dithering Week plus the talk show.
00:04:15
◼►
Yeah, but the talk show is consistently now down to three episodes a month, and you guys are very consistently, I mean, remarkably consistently,
00:04:23
◼►
consistently 52, or once a week, so I guess occasionally...
00:04:26
◼►
But you do like two Ditherings a week, right?
00:04:37
◼►
If I think of myself as anything, as a programmer, honestly, but I also think of myself as a writer and a podcaster.
00:04:43
◼►
I'm all the things at the same time, and if I had to hang my hat on one of them, it would probably be programmer just because I've spent more cumulative hours doing that than anything else that I've done.
00:04:50
◼►
Second place is probably writing, and then third place is probably writing.
00:04:52
◼►
And then third place is podcasting, but it's catching up now, because I did a lot of writing back in the day.
00:04:56
◼►
I spent a lot of time doing those really long articles, and not so much time typing things into the final article, but all the research that led up to it, and that really adds up.
00:05:05
◼►
But yeah, podcasting is catching up rapidly.
00:05:06
◼►
Yeah, even with the podcast, and your role on ATP is...
00:05:11
◼►
It's not just, okay, hit record, and then stop, and that's your time on ATP.
00:05:19
◼►
Past keys was one of the recent topics.
00:05:22
◼►
And in case he was like, I'll let Marco go first, but then I want to talk to John to find out what's actually going on with the topic.
00:05:30
◼►
So all of the time that you have spent looking into and considering the state of past keys in today's world arguably counts towards your time podcasting.
00:05:39
◼►
And I implemented them, well, with the help of some of my LM friends, implemented them on ATP.fm as well, so that also is some real-world experience with actually dealing with past keys.
00:05:49
◼►
Like, I was just working on them just before we connected here.
00:05:52
◼►
I was applying patches to our past key library for the website, like moments before.
00:06:00
◼►
It's a PHP website, and I'm using a PHP library, and that library has issues filed against it in GitHub, and the author hasn't been incorporating them, so I'm manually applying patches to make sure we're up to date with security stuff, yada, yada.
00:06:11
◼►
Like, our website is a podcast website where there's not really any super secure stuff, but I want to make sure that it's as good as it can be.
00:06:19
◼►
You know, I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
00:06:22
◼►
You guys don't store credit cards, so what could leak?
00:06:25
◼►
Emails, email addresses, and that would be bad, right?
00:06:27
◼►
You wouldn't want to have an episode where you tell all of the subscribers to ATP, we leaked all your email addresses.
00:06:34
◼►
But that is amongst the things that could leak in a security breach, how many people have an email address that isn't out there to some degree?
00:06:44
◼►
I try to make the point on ATP that people who think their email address is super secret and no one can know it, and it's like, man, everybody knows everyone's email address.
00:06:52
◼►
I do, and I wonder about that with mine.
00:06:55
◼►
I've had comments at Daring Fireball for public email.
00:07:01
◼►
Honestly, I think I started using it when the site started in 2002, so probably the whole run, so 24 years.
00:07:08
◼►
And my real address is gruber at daringfireball.net.
00:07:13
◼►
And both are real, and it is a separate inbox, but I've really thought of late, like, why in the world do I even have two inboxes for these?
00:07:30
◼►
She's got, like, an Apple one from her Apple ID, and then she's also got a Gmail one.
00:07:35
◼►
And she's very fastidious about, I forget which is which, but she's very fastidious about using one of them when she does shopping on Amazon.com or whatever.
00:07:45
◼►
And the other one she doesn't ever use for those things.
00:07:48
◼►
So she really does not need two email addresses, but she basically says the one that she doesn't use for public stuff is to avoid getting spam.
00:07:57
◼►
But in her mind, if I never give this one to, like, Amazon or some other website that I use, no one will know about it, and they totally will.
00:08:05
◼►
It's like they're already spamming you there.
00:09:44
◼►
The good thing is he wrote it in Go and it seems to be working.
00:09:46
◼►
You don't have to touch it for a long time.
00:09:48
◼►
But if he ever does need to touch it, he's now forgotten about it entirely.
00:09:51
◼►
And by the way, if you have comments on the show, you should write into the show.
00:09:54
◼►
You'll totally get put to the front of the queue as a friend of the show, as we have some follow-up here from, you know, we don't even have to use your last name.
00:10:00
◼►
We can just say we have some follow-up here from John and we'll just say what you have to say.
00:10:03
◼►
And then the comment starts, when I created Markdown.
00:10:08
◼►
Now, I did the same thing to myself with a much incredibly less complicated thing than Marco's crawler.
00:10:16
◼►
But I wrote the Daring Fireball link shortener, which is at like df4, the digit4.us, which was the best short domain I could get.
00:11:23
◼►
Many techniques to parse URLs did not anticipate the puny code encoding of URLs.
00:11:31
◼►
And so rather than fight it and stomp my feet, I was like, well, this was a clever idea to put an actual star in the URL.
00:11:38
◼►
And I thought with tiny URLs, I didn't need it because the canonical URL is daringfireball.net slash something something.
00:11:45
◼►
So the fact that people couldn't verbalize or type by hand the tiny URLs, it's like if you've already got the tiny URL, you just copy and paste it.
00:11:54
◼►
But it was the fact that the clients wouldn't parse it and wouldn't make it an active clickable link.
00:13:05
◼►
And all I remember, though, is that it was much like PHP in that once you have it set up and running on a server, you never need to do anything.
00:13:14
◼►
And that's how I forgot how to stop the Sinatra server, how to start the Sinatra server, because it just runs and runs.
00:13:21
◼►
And if the server ever restarts automatically because the hosting provider does something, it just starts back up and runs.
00:13:54
◼►
And I guess now I've waited long enough where I don't really have to worry about it, where I could just throw the project at an LLM and just say, tell me how to change this to do whatever I need changed.
00:15:01
◼►
I've had the same thought recording that episode.
00:15:04
◼►
And I know Nilay's a little younger than me too, but I felt like with David, it was like, hey, he's talking about this a little too prehistoric-y as opposed to just old-y, right?
00:15:15
◼►
Yeah, and I think it's also difficult if you weren't there at the time to get an idea of what the Mac actually meant.
00:15:20
◼►
Because in hindsight, you map all these things onto it, and I'm not entirely sure.
00:15:25
◼►
I mean, that's great because you had such an age range on the show.
00:15:27
◼►
It made for a good episode with your different perspectives.
00:15:29
◼►
But every time I heard him talk about it, I was like, I turned into a crusty old man.
00:15:33
◼►
I was like, that's not the important thing about this.
00:16:46
◼►
And I honestly made it for myself because I'm, as I can frequently complain about in ATP and complained about again in the most recent episode, I have a 4TB SSD in my Mac.
00:16:55
◼►
And I am right up against the edge of filling it.
00:16:58
◼►
Like, I'm constantly trying to move things off of it and just save space any way I can.
00:17:03
◼►
And so, essentially, I wrote hyperspace for myself because if you can find files that are identical, like they have the identical contents, APFS lets you have those bits only on disk one time.
00:17:13
◼►
And so, it'll find all the files that are identical and say, if these are not already, like, space-saving clones of each other, turn them into that.
00:17:19
◼►
And the files stay completely separate and independent.
00:17:29
◼►
If you find five files that are the same, you can get rid of the data stored for four of them and just keep the data there once.
00:17:36
◼►
And, yeah, that's what I've been doing to my own disk with this program because I need a bigger disk and I've been waiting to buy a new Mac.
00:18:21
◼►
And if you, so you're like, well, then what happens if you open one of the five copies of the same, five instances of the same file where the bytes are only on disk once, and then you make a change, and then you save it?
00:18:33
◼►
Well, then that instance gets, that initial save will take some time because it will write out the, now it's suddenly taking up its own bytes on the disk.
00:18:42
◼►
Yeah, and actually, it really depends on what the program does in terms of saving.
00:18:46
◼►
If you modify the file, I believe it diverges at the block level, so it doesn't even overwrite the whole file, but most applications will write an entirely new file when you hit save, like even if you just appended a word at the end.
00:18:57
◼►
But either way, the whole point is it's entirely transparent.
00:18:59
◼►
And the reason you know it's entirely transparent is for years now, every time you hit command D to duplicate a file in the finder, it does this.
00:19:25
◼►
And one thing I've been meaning to, I've been keeping this one in my pocket for when you come back on this show, I just want to say I think Hyperspace is the perfect name.
00:19:36
◼►
Sometimes you hear a name for an app or a product, and you just know it's the best possible name out there.
00:19:42
◼►
There's no – in the infinite number of names you could have come up with for this app, you're never going to come up with a better one than Hyperspace.
00:19:50
◼►
Yeah, I mean, it really does – it relies on knowing my deal and the whole hypercritical branding, and my website is hypercritical.co.
00:19:57
◼►
So you need to have that and my Star Wars fandom.
00:20:00
◼►
There's a lot of context – as with everything I do, there's a lot of surrounding context that is required to get it.
00:20:05
◼►
But honestly, the only people who are going to be interested in the things that I'm doing probably already have that context.
00:20:10
◼►
It's extra charming if you listen to ATP and you know anything that you are a Star Wars fan.
00:20:16
◼►
But if you're not and you just come across this app in the App Store or however else you come across it because you actually have the same need,
00:20:23
◼►
because maybe you have a 4-terabyte SSD that is at 3.95 terabytes full, it still sounds like a good name for that app's purpose.
00:20:33
◼►
And even if you're, like, young and you don't really have a particular affinity for Star Wars or know that they don't call it warp speed or whatever, it's hyperspace.
00:20:42
◼►
The only thing I waffled on a little bit, and you can relate to this, is Star Wars spells hyperspace all one word with no capitalization.
00:20:48
◼►
But, of course, I am an old-school Mac user, and I love intercaps like MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacPro.
00:20:53
◼►
So I was like, oh, capital H, hyper, capital S, space, or like the Star Wars way.
00:20:58
◼►
In the end, I went with the Star Wars way because I felt like I wanted to lean more in that direction,
00:21:01
◼►
as evidenced by the amazing icon by IconFactory that shows a spinning hard drive going into hyperspace.
00:21:07
◼►
That is one of the ways that the whole Apple world and the industry, right?
00:21:11
◼►
It wasn't really an Apple thing for CamelCase titles.
00:23:23
◼►
The closest I've come is, especially in years past, when I've really spent like a whole week full time on an iPad Pro to write a review of a new iPad Pro plus Magic Keyboard.
00:24:34
◼►
Yeah, the M5 Pro and Max, the rumor is that they were delayed because of that, like, chiplet architecture, that, like, the SMC wasn't ready with that.
00:24:40
◼►
So they got delayed and they got pushed into this year.
00:24:43
◼►
That they should have all debuted at the same time as the baby MacBook Pro with just the regular M5 chip in November.
00:24:50
◼►
And that come this November, there's going to be at least one MacBook, and possibly not called MacBook Pro, who knows, that has a touchscreen.
00:25:01
◼►
So my question is, as a lover of the nanotexture on my studio display, and I don't have a MacBook Pro with a nanotexture,
00:25:11
◼►
but it's the only reason I'm even tempted to upgrade the one that I already own, is to get nanotexture.
00:25:16
◼►
I have no other reason, but I want the nanotexture.
00:25:20
◼►
And occasionally, while using my MacBook Pro as a laptop, carrying it around, traveling, I'm in a scenario where I see any glare at all now, I'm offended.
00:25:30
◼►
Because I know that if it was nanotexture, I'd never see glare.
00:25:32
◼►
How to square that with the idea of a touchscreen Mac, other than that the touchscreen one won't come with nanotexture?
00:25:40
◼►
I don't see how they can possibly make a nanotexture one that has a touchscreen.
00:25:43
◼►
Well, yeah, so that's the one option is, hey, no nanotexture on the touchscreen Macs.
00:25:48
◼►
The other option is that if you've been a student of nanotexture from Apple, I think every single one of their nanotexture finishes has been different.
00:25:58
◼►
The Pro Display XDR is different than the iPads is different than the MacBooks.
00:26:02
◼►
I don't see any reason why they couldn't make a fourth nanotexture that is suited for being a touchscreen.
00:26:08
◼►
And all of these have different compromises in terms of how do they deal with reflectivity, how do they deal with finger grease, how do they feel in the case of the iPad with a stylus underneath it.
00:26:15
◼►
So I leave that open as a possibility as well that they have come up with a compromised nanotexture that is viable as a touchscreen, that is not impossible to get fingerprints off of, and that works on a touchscreen laptop.
00:26:27
◼►
But it is definitely simpler to say that they just won't do nanotexture on the touch ones.
00:27:19
◼►
But I can't see how that's possible that somebody would care about nanotexture because they care about the screen and want to touch the screen and put fingerprints all over it.
00:27:29
◼►
But I'm married to one of them, so I guess there's all kinds of people in the world.
00:27:34
◼►
Let me take a break and thank our first sponsor.
00:27:36
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00:27:41
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00:27:44
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00:27:51
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00:27:55
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00:28:02
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00:28:19
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00:28:22
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00:28:28
◼►
So if you're a developer, Sentry is used by millions of developers behind some of the biggest apps out there, like Claude, Disney+, and Duolingo.
00:29:09
◼►
What's your earliest memory of an Apple computer?
00:29:12
◼►
Probably Apple IIs that were in, like, a basement room of the father of a friend of mine's house.
00:29:21
◼►
I think it might have been, like, my babysitter's father had Apple IIs, had a bunch of Apple IIs set up, like, in his basement to, like, teach a course on computers that my parents had me attend.
00:29:31
◼►
You know, it was like when you had, like, rows of desks, and each one had an Apple II on it, maybe three rows.
00:29:35
◼►
The desks were all touching, like, long tables.
00:29:38
◼►
Not even desks, but, like, long tables.
00:29:39
◼►
And then at the front, like, a chalkboard or whatever.
00:29:41
◼►
That, using the Apple IIs in that room.
00:29:44
◼►
I don't remember what we did with them.
00:29:46
◼►
I can picture the room in my head, and I know I was there.
00:30:13
◼►
You'd think if I was gifted, I'd remember.
00:30:15
◼►
But I think once a week, and they changed the days.
00:30:18
◼►
It was like, the other teachers all hated it because they didn't want you to miss the same classes.
00:30:23
◼►
So they would change the day of the week.
00:30:26
◼►
And whether it was morning or afternoon, but for a half day, once a week, the kids in the gifted program went to the gifted room and the teacher, we had a different curriculum for half a day.
00:30:37
◼►
But one week, it would be like Wednesday morning.
00:30:40
◼►
And then the next week, it would be like Thursday afternoon.
00:30:42
◼►
And I always hate, oh, man, did I hate when we had to skip gym.
00:30:46
◼►
Usually, I was like, oh, this is so fun.
00:30:49
◼►
Yeah, but I really hated when we had to miss gym.
00:30:53
◼►
And I was like, this sucks, especially if it was like a fun day, like we were playing a good sport like kickball or something.
00:31:15
◼►
And I was happy to get time on any computer, right?
00:31:19
◼►
Like they could have imported one of those weird Russian computers that the guy made Tetris on.
00:31:23
◼►
And I couldn't even read the prompts because it was written in Russian.
00:31:28
◼►
But I'd still want to touch it and play with it and try to figure out how to make it do things.
00:31:32
◼►
But that Apple II in the gifted classroom was like, it was different.
00:31:38
◼►
And it was like, this is clearly, I could see why there's only one of them in the whole school.
00:31:43
◼►
This is 10 times better than the other computers.
00:31:45
◼►
I didn't have that impression of the Apple IIes because my next computer memory, sort of my contemporary computer memory, is the first computer that I had in my house, which was a Commodore VIC-20 that my parents rented.
00:31:55
◼►
And we connected to our television set.
00:32:25
◼►
And whatever we were doing, the Apple IIes was, I don't know if we weren't playing games or we were probably doing basic programming, but it just seemed that's what computers were before I saw the Mac, which was a command prompt and you type basic programs.
00:32:36
◼►
And granted, the VIC-20 and the Apple II were different and the Apple II was a much more vibrant ecosystem, but I didn't know that.
00:32:42
◼►
I just, I was, by my parents, I was being, not forced, but encouraged to quote unquote, learn computers because that was going to be the future.
00:32:51
◼►
And what learning computers entailed, which they didn't know, they just chucked me, oh, this guy's running computer classes.
00:32:56
◼►
And honestly, I was so young then, I didn't retain anything from that.
00:33:00
◼►
But I do remember making, I was excited because the VIC-20 had color and you could do like, you could make basically colored squares.
00:33:06
◼►
Like you could type a character, but instead of a character coming out, it would just be a square the size of the character that could be in a color by hitting like F2 or some crap.
00:33:17
◼►
Or Kmart sucks, as I used to like to do.
00:33:21
◼►
No, this all came up when we rehashed the Commodore 64, which was the successor to the VIC-20.
00:33:26
◼►
The Commodore 64 versus Apple II debate, I guess like a year ago, Jason Snell and I and others were tweeting about it or blogging about it.
00:33:34
◼►
It was weird though, the way, I don't know, maybe some people did.
00:33:38
◼►
And I know that there were things that came out that I wasn't even aware of a year ago was that the Commodore 64 was a bigger deal in Europe than it was here for various reasons.
00:33:50
◼►
And the whole computing world was so fractured, right?
00:33:56
◼►
There were little fiefdoms all over the place.
00:33:59
◼►
And it really wasn't until the IBM PC and DOS that there was ever a monoculture.
00:34:05
◼►
And I think to the rest of the industry, everybody just had it in their heads that, well, every three or four years, a new computer comes out with no compatibility with what came before it.
00:34:44
◼►
And that's kind of what screwed Apple in the end is that they were successful early with the Mac and cemented a bunch of decisions that turned out to they expired.
00:34:53
◼►
Those decisions expired around the late 90s.
00:34:55
◼►
And it was a cruel crisis for the company.
00:34:58
◼►
And Microsoft went through the same thing, but they navigated it a little bit better with the transition from DOS and Windows to the NT base of Windows 2000.
00:35:15
◼►
I mean, yeah, it helps when they had such a massively dominant position at that point that they had a lot of runway to finesse the transition.
00:35:22
◼►
And their most important thing was that they started NT well before it was time to transition.
00:35:26
◼►
So NT was a separate project that they put money behind that they did.
00:35:29
◼►
And you had Windows 95 and 98 and they were parallel until they finally said, you know, we can cross this over in 2000 and give our consumer Windows the base from NT, which has tried and tested some shims to make stuff run.
00:35:39
◼►
So they did a good job with the transition.
00:35:43
◼►
And I think that's why Windows 7 was such a shock, because it seemed up through XP, which I think came out in 2001.
00:35:52
◼►
That it just seemed like Microsoft every two to three years came out with a major new version of Windows that was a varying compatibility, you know, right?
00:36:03
◼►
Like NT was the real OS, but they did it.
00:36:06
◼►
And in a way that you could install NT and all of your old shit was still there and worked through compatibility.
00:36:12
◼►
So it was a real OS, but like an old DOS program from 1983 still ran exactly the same way, just in a window or something.
00:36:24
◼►
I mean, eventually they did, but it was a struggle.
00:36:27
◼►
But I will admit, though, that like in my elementary school years, while I liked the Apple IIe in that gifted classroom the best, they were I know what you mean.
00:36:38
◼►
And I largely agree that all computers were basically the same and they just had different keyboards and whatever.
00:36:44
◼►
And for the most part, most like I know there were advanced ways of writing basic programs where you could have, oh, this is only going to work on integer basic on an Apple IIe.
00:36:56
◼►
But for the most part, if you bought like a magazine or something with a program that you could type in, it would work on any computer with basic.
00:37:03
◼►
And all the computers had a basic programming prompt when you turned them on.
00:37:56
◼►
And I remember being bothered by that as a kid because I could tell that the way that Jordan Metzner had written Karataka was not with basic.
00:38:05
◼►
And I was like, well, how did he do this?
00:38:20
◼►
And then I remember like finding and I don't think I ever broke one, but I remember like going through the box of Atari 2600 cartridges we had and taking out like my least favorite one.
00:38:31
◼►
It was like some kind of off brand, not even Atari or Activision, but one of those third party that you never heard of.
00:38:37
◼►
And it actually had just like Phillips head screws and you could take it apart and look inside the cartridge and it wasn't very edifying to look inside, you know, just a bunch of chips.
00:38:49
◼►
And then I remember I'm pretty sure I remember trying it where you could still plug the part with the contacts into the 2600.
00:38:56
◼►
The cartridge itself was I was like, oh, it's sort of just a packaging and all the tricks people had about blowing on them and ever the cartridge was just a chip inside the actual plastic.
00:39:07
◼►
Obviously, that's very obvious to me now at the age of like eight or nine.
00:39:12
◼►
But I never thought of until then, until I started playing games on an Apple to like Karatica, like games that obviously were not written in basic.
00:39:21
◼►
It occurred to me like, well, wait, this is a computer where you can type stuff in basic, but that's not how this was made.
00:39:27
◼►
But how they made this somehow they put it on a floppy disk and it's this is more akin to what they've done on a cartridge, even though a cartridge isn't a disc.
00:39:38
◼►
And I was like, oh, and I know that's where I started learning the basics of how an actual computer worked.
00:39:44
◼►
But it was hard because there was no frigging Internet.
00:39:46
◼►
And it was this type of question where even the teachers who were more computer enthusiasts and had things to do, like my fifth grade math teacher, Mr. Leimbach, to his credit, was a significant computer enthusiast.
00:40:01
◼►
And so he, for math, had like programs on the TI-99 in his room.
00:40:07
◼►
And if you finished your classwork, you could raise your hand and ask to play.
00:40:11
◼►
It was like a baseball game where you'd have to answer.
00:40:13
◼►
The pitches would come in with a math problem and you'd have to type the answer and hit return before the pitch reached the plate.
00:40:20
◼►
And then your guy would run around the bases.
00:40:22
◼►
Way more fun than regular fifth grade math.
00:40:25
◼►
I'm on a computer, but it was, quote unquote, educational, I guess.
00:40:29
◼►
Yeah, I had to read the same five computer books in the school library a hundred times that would label the parts of the computer, which is very important in learning the difference between ROM and RAM and what the keyboard was.
00:40:39
◼►
This is the extent of the material available to me about computers at this point.
00:40:43
◼►
But even Mr. Leimbach wasn't going to be able to explain to me how a disk drive worked.
00:40:47
◼►
But I guess where I really remember noticing that I liked Apple computers better was when I got to middle school because they had a whole lab of Apples.
00:40:58
◼►
I think mostly Apple IIEs, maybe some Apple II Pluses and Apple IICs, which was the first time I can remember the part of my brain that noticed industrial design.
00:41:10
◼►
Like, I always thought Apple's computers had better cases than the others, and I liked their keyboards better.
00:41:17
◼►
But the Apple IIc was when they sort of took a, oh, that's totally different and feels more futuristic.
00:41:23
◼►
Like the Apple, and for those out there listening who don't have all these computers memorized, the Apple IIc was the one, what was it called?
00:41:38
◼►
So eventually Apple outsourced the Frog design, which was at the time a very famous design bureau, and they came up with the Snow White design language for the Apple IIc and eventually Mini Macs.
00:42:30
◼►
The podcast you were just on talking about the Lisa, and I always forget if this is true, and I don't have it off the top of my head now, so I'll just pretend one of us is looking it up and confirming this.
00:42:38
◼►
But one of the things I recall about the Lisa was, did it have rectangular pixels?
00:43:11
◼►
And so that's just such an incredible nonstop.
00:43:13
◼►
I think the Lisa did it because their idea was that, like, vertical space is more important than horizontal or something.
00:43:18
◼►
They had some rationale about doing it, but it's like, that's not the way to do a bitmap display.
00:43:24
◼►
And so anytime they tried to do anything bitmap that wasn't a game, like the desktop environment on the 2GS or whatever, if it was in a display mode that had rectangular pixels, it was just like, blah.
00:43:34
◼►
And if it didn't, if it had square pixels, but those pixels were gigantic, like CGA 320 by 200 on a 14-inch monitor, I was like, well, no, that's not it.
00:43:42
◼►
320 by 200 on a 14-inch monitor is not enough.
00:43:46
◼►
So you're, like, you're playing pretend to be a GUI, but, like, this was – you talked about, like, noticing things that were different.
00:43:51
◼►
This was the distinguishing characteristic to me, which is the original Mac on a 9-inch screen with whatever the resolution was, 512 by 384 – 384 or 342, I forget.
00:44:37
◼►
And that's even before we consider, like, how it actually worked, which was never the way the Mac worked, and how, as you noted on the podcast, like, how there is no command line lurking under this, how there is no DOS prompt under there, how you will never see text filling your screen.
00:44:50
◼►
So that was the division point for me.
00:44:52
◼►
When I first saw the Mac, it was the first computer that I instinctively felt was clearly a totally different thing and a better idea.
00:45:01
◼►
And as a young person, any time I would see any other piece of technology after that, it would always amaze me that people couldn't see.
00:45:08
◼►
I felt the same way about Japanese animation.
00:45:10
◼►
Can you not see the difference between Hanna-Barbera and Robotech or whatever?
00:45:15
◼►
Like, are you not seeing the same things I'm seeing?
00:46:27
◼►
Yeah, and in that case, like, there's nothing wrong with Hanna-Barbera animation.
00:46:30
◼►
But to not be able to note that the style is clearly different, to not be able to instantly say, is this Japanese animation or is it not?
00:46:37
◼►
If you can't look at two frames of animation in different shows and immediately say yes or no, whether it's Japanese animation back in, like, the 80s, I just feel like you're not – you're blind.
00:46:46
◼►
Like, you can't – you're like, how is this?
00:46:48
◼►
And it was my particular sensitivity to these details of aesthetics and design that were like a screaming siren in my head that were invisible to hold huge swaths of the public, which would lead to a long, dark time of me feeling like this better thing exists and nobody cares about it but me, which has happened to a lot of Apple fans back then.
00:47:07
◼►
Why am I the only person in the world who can see this?
00:47:10
◼►
Why is Apple a niche player in the computer market?
00:47:13
◼►
Why is the whole world using Windows on PC clones and they all think it's fine?
00:47:18
◼►
Like, it was kind of a sane person in an insane world feeling for a long time there.
00:47:23
◼►
And I would say that the square versus rectangular pixels thing epitomized it.
00:47:28
◼►
Have you ever seen – this is something that came up – I don't know if you got to this part, but on the Virgin History podcast.
00:47:34
◼►
I have to admit, I've seen – just like two years ago at some point, or whenever the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh was, I went back to Drexel University, which is actually not even that far from my house.
00:48:34
◼►
I mean, if somebody told me they had one, like when I went up to Drexel for the 40th anniversary thing and they said, you know, there's a Lisa in the corner, I would have gone over to see it.
00:48:43
◼►
I'd be like, oh, I guess I've always wanted to see one.
00:48:45
◼►
But there were so many things about it that seemed gross to me.
00:48:49
◼►
The fact that it was, like, asymmetric, it honestly felt like the Lisa was a weird ripoff of the Mac, even though the Mac came second.
00:48:56
◼►
I just looked up on the Wikipedia page to confirm the rectangular pixel things, and it did have rectangular pixels.
00:49:05
◼►
But I don't remember seeing one of those either.
00:49:07
◼►
That was a Lisa that ran Macintosh system software.
00:49:11
◼►
Yeah, so the Wikipedia page says there was an upgrade kit for Lisa computers that included hardware and software kit, enabling it to reboot into Macintosh mode and display square pixels.
00:49:21
◼►
Which is, I don't know how they did that, but.
00:49:24
◼►
Yeah, but anyway, like it was the last dying breath of that computer was like, well, the Lisa is dead.
00:49:29
◼►
We'll sell it as the Macintosh XL because it's like a really big Mac.
00:49:32
◼►
And the cool thing about the Lisa is it had a bigger than nine inch screen on it.
00:49:35
◼►
But that was totally destroyed by the rectangular pixels.
00:49:38
◼►
But yeah, I mean, the Lisa got run over by Steve Jobs getting booted off that project and going over to the Mac project.
00:49:44
◼►
But a lot of ideas obviously were pulled from Lisa, but you look at Lisa's screenshots and it's like, it's not quite it.
00:49:50
◼►
You can see that it kind of looks sort of like the Mac, but all the ideas aren't there.
00:49:54
◼►
In the same way that when you look at like a Xerox PARC, like the Alto computer, you're like, well, I recognize this is a graphical user interface, but you haven't solved all the problems.
00:50:02
◼►
You haven't figured out a reasonable way to do everything.
00:50:05
◼►
A lot of the things they were doing were not going to work like the three button mouse and the way the cursor worked and text selection.
00:50:13
◼►
Only the Mac figured all that stuff out for good.
00:50:16
◼►
Well enough that essentially everybody just worked like the Mac from that point on.
00:50:20
◼►
Even Windows said, well, we're going to do what the Mac does to the degree we can get away with it, given the look and feel lawsuits.
00:50:25
◼►
And the places they deviated were like, for deviation's sake, so they could try to avoid lawsuits, which didn't really work, but they would win them anyway.
00:50:40
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00:50:46
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00:50:51
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00:50:55
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00:51:10
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I love so many of the meals that I have gotten from Factor.
00:51:14
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I love the breakfast stuff, especially, but it's all really good.
00:51:18
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00:51:22
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00:51:39
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00:51:51
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00:51:57
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00:52:00
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00:52:08
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00:52:14
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00:52:17
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00:53:00
◼►
That is being lucky enough to because I was nine years old, eight years old.
00:53:04
◼►
I was lucky enough to have parents, grandparents and uncles who knew that the Mac exists and collectively convinced each other all to buy them.
00:53:12
◼►
So my grandfather got one and convinced and my uncle convinced my parents to get one for me.
00:53:17
◼►
So that's kudos to them for doing that.
00:53:19
◼►
But I was my being right point is realizing this computer was something special.
00:54:44
◼►
And then you'd open it up and it would be like five programs that you'd have to write from scratch in two hours or 90 minutes or something like that.
00:54:52
◼►
She was a great teacher and really encouraged that stuff.
00:54:55
◼►
And we, for that senior year, it was like the first day of class.
00:55:31
◼►
But it did not seem like I couldn't break out of the mindset that a computer was really something that you turned on and just gave you a black screen.
00:55:39
◼►
And what you ran defined what you saw.
00:55:41
◼►
It seemed weird to me that with the Mac, there was not that I wanted a command line prompt.
00:55:48
◼►
But I wanted like a, it just seemed like, well, this is an interesting mode for a computer to be in with this graphical user interface.
00:55:56
◼►
But what if you want to do something else?
00:55:57
◼►
You know, what if you want to do something that's full screen?
00:56:27
◼►
Yeah, they're never going to be able to use a technology like HyperCard to make a full screen experience on the Mac that would become wildly popular.
00:56:40
◼►
So little did you know that a full color, full screen, complete immersive experience, one of the most popular ever made at that point in the software industry,
00:56:50
◼►
Yeah, but you know what's weird is that my mindset had shifted at that point.
00:56:54
◼►
I guess I got enough of a taste that senior year of the Mac where I, even then, even though I wasn't using it as my computer in that class,
00:57:03
◼►
I got enough of a taste of it where what I would want to write were apps, not games.
00:57:07
◼►
I had already started shifting away from thinking I would ever make games on my own.
00:57:12
◼►
And it makes sense to me that Mist was an amazing smash hit game that was written in HyperCard, but nobody ever wrote a Mac app that was a smash hit in HyperCard.
00:57:47
◼►
And I was like, this is cool, but it's like an environment in an environment.
00:57:51
◼►
It was a reasonable analogy is the Newton is to the iPhone as HyperCard is to the web.
00:57:58
◼►
It was a lot of the right ideas, a little bit too early and a little bit too constrained.
00:58:03
◼►
And you can see HyperCard is clearly something like the web made by somebody who's starting from the mindset of writing Mac apps with the Mac toolbox and Pascal.
00:58:12
◼►
It's like, well, if I could come up with an easier way to do that, that would be great.
00:58:15
◼►
And they got the hyperlinking part, right?
00:58:17
◼►
Jumping from card to card and the constrained environment is even right.
00:58:21
◼►
It could all be in a browser window type of thing.
00:58:23
◼►
But like the details were a little bit off and it wasn't quite the right time.
00:58:27
◼►
And same thing if you squint to the Newton, you're like, I could see you got most of the pieces there, but like you're years too early.
00:58:50
◼►
This is you want me to tell the story.
00:58:53
◼►
So when I went to Drexel the next year, every freshman had you didn't have to buy a Macintosh, but it was like strongly suggested because you'd have coursework that required to have.
00:59:03
◼►
And they had phenomenal education discounts.
00:59:05
◼►
I mean, they were like, I think they were like half price, honestly.
00:59:09
◼►
And the three options my freshman year, they had three packages and it was like the cheap one was the Mac Classic, which was a real dud of a computer.
01:00:24
◼►
But it's not like now where you get like, oh, 15% off if you're a college customer.
01:00:28
◼►
Then it was ridiculous college discounts.
01:00:30
◼►
And speaking of colleges and Macs, I remember when I was looking at schools where I was going to go.
01:00:34
◼►
I didn't know what I was looking for in a college.
01:00:36
◼►
But the one thing I knew is that I was judging not so secretly, like just right out in the open, judging every school based on what is the Mac situation here.
01:03:18
◼►
We're going to go to your college bookstore, which is where your computer is.
01:03:21
◼►
You go to the college bookstore, and I'm going to see what their – at that point, I had encyclopedic knowledge of like how much is one megabyte RAM DIM going for this week based on the ads in the back of Macworld Magazine.
01:03:32
◼►
She went to University of Connecticut and went to their college bookstore.
01:03:35
◼►
And I was like, look, Mom, we can get an SE30 with a 40 megabyte hard drive or whatever and an Apple extended two keyboard for X amount of money.
01:03:44
◼►
We'll get that with this amazing discount, and then we'll give my sister the computer we have at home.
01:03:51
◼►
And then the computer we bought at her bookstore, that will be my computer that I'll use at home.
01:03:56
◼►
And so she went to college, and we bought an SE30 from her college bookstore, but she didn't get to use it at college.
01:04:03
◼►
That was brought back home, and she got to use our original Mac 128 that had been logic board upgraded to a plus, which is a thing that Apple used to offer back in the day.
01:04:11
◼►
So she was using a Mac Plus for four years, starting in like, what, 1989?
01:04:15
◼►
She's using a Mac Plus at college, and I'm using the SE30 at home.
01:04:18
◼►
And you feel no guilt about this whatsoever?
01:04:21
◼►
It was one of the most amazing managing up parental moves I've ever done in my entire life.
01:04:27
◼►
Like, I cannot believe I pulled that off.
01:04:29
◼►
At the age of like 16 or something like that?
01:04:50
◼►
That worked to varying degrees, but I did.
01:04:53
◼►
My story with that is I wanted to get an externally Android K floppy drive back before the SE30 was out.
01:04:58
◼►
So I would have two floppy drives, so I didn't have to swap as much with my motherboard.
01:05:01
◼►
I created Mac Plus, and I had to pay for half of that.
01:05:05
◼►
I believe it was $450, and I had to pay for like 200 of it or something like that, and combine Christmas and birthday, and that was my one present.
01:05:13
◼►
My look up here says the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 Model M3501 originally retailed for $163 when it was introduced in October 15, 1990, and adjusted for inflation.
01:05:35
◼►
It is funny to think of a $400 equivalent keyboard that was an add-on for an SE30 in today's world where you can, at education pricing, get an entire MacBook Neo for $500.
01:07:23
◼►
And because of how old we both are, the time dilation effect makes the, between Steve Jobs leaving and him coming back, seem like 8,000 years.
01:07:56
◼►
So like he did this amazing growth from the iPod and like the Steve Jobs, the Jobs 2 era on the graph of like Apple's net worth is like, what are you making the big deal about?
01:08:06
◼►
It's clear that this guy did all the work and it's like, no, you don't understand.
01:08:08
◼►
It was like, look at, you have to chop off the Tim Cook era.
01:08:14
◼►
The Steve Jobs 97 to 2011 run, if you Bezos chart it and take off the numbers, it had a similar trajectory.
01:08:25
◼►
But then when you think about how much harder or how much more unusual it is to keep that going through other orders of magnitude, it suddenly pales.
01:08:35
◼►
You know, it's one of those like the animations that zoom out from the molecular level to planets, to solar systems, to galaxies.
01:08:44
◼►
It's like at a certain level, you realize that when Steve Jobs died in 2011, Apple was like their entire financials were just, I don't know, a week of sales now.
01:08:55
◼►
I mean, the thing is that he had lit the fuse, like he lit the fuse for the iPhone in 2007 and unfortunately died in 2011.
01:09:01
◼►
But that fuse was lit and that rocket was burning.
01:09:03
◼►
And so not to say that all Tim Cook had to do was not screw it up, but like that, the rocket ship that produced the Tim Cook era was already, it was ignited when Steve Jobs died, which is, you know, a nice place to be for Tim Cook.
01:09:16
◼►
We all said that Steve Jobs died or whatever, and it was difficult to take over and fill his shoes and stuff like that.
01:09:20
◼►
But he wisely essentially didn't screw up that part of the process.
01:09:23
◼►
And the Tim Cook era has changed, I think, towards the tail end, maybe not like Game of Thrones, but in some similar ways, there's some disappointment on my part or whatever.
01:09:31
◼►
Yeah, the Jobs 2 era, like, because that era didn't end in a natural way.
01:09:35
◼►
It didn't end with him getting kicked out of the company.
01:09:37
◼►
It didn't end with him retiring or it ended with his death.
01:09:39
◼►
And that was not anything that anyone planned on, and it was a tragedy.
01:09:42
◼►
Yeah, and, you know, it's hard because, and you and I were both mid-career commentating on Apple while it happened.
01:09:53
◼►
Not that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but it was uncomfortable the last few years because you could see that he wasn't well, right?
01:09:59
◼►
I mean, we knew that he had the cancer.
01:10:02
◼►
We knew that he'd been on the medical leaves.
01:10:04
◼►
We knew when it took towards the end when he needed the transplant, and we could see how gaunt he was.
01:10:10
◼►
It was made it uncomfortable, but also, I think, clearly focused his mind.
01:10:18
◼►
And I don't know that the iPad would have happened when it did otherwise.
01:10:22
◼►
It was, in some ways, again, it's like, it's just a big iPhone.
01:10:29
◼►
But it was like, all I know is everybody I know who was there at the time was that when he came back from his first long medical leave, that all he wanted to do was make the iPad.
01:10:39
◼►
And that was pretty much his singular focus until the iPad came out the next year.
01:10:43
◼►
Yeah, I've always felt like the iPad was kind of—I don't get a lot of people agreeing with me on this, but I feel like the iPad is what he wished the Mac had been.
01:10:53
◼►
The technology to make something as friendly and as simple and useful as the iPad didn't exist when the Mac was made, what that was he was going for.
01:11:00
◼►
Like, all—the idea of the Mac, not Raskin's idea of the $500 thing, but, like, Steve Jobs' idea of we're going to make this and this is going to be—or even just the Apple II, like, the computer for the rest of us.
01:11:10
◼►
The idea is computers are too hard to use.
01:11:12
◼►
We're going to make them friendly and approachable to people.
01:11:14
◼►
And their take on that was kind of like Bill Atkinson's HyperCard take on what would eventually become the web.
01:11:19
◼►
It's like, I know what you're going for, but you don't quite have it.
01:11:22
◼►
Like, you're missing some stuff and it's not your fault because you literally can't do it yet.
01:11:26
◼►
But the iPad—I just remember that keynote of him, like, sitting down on the couch.
01:11:29
◼►
It's like, finally, this is a computer that anybody can use that is incredibly powerful, that does all sorts of things, and you cannot break it, and it is so friendly.
01:11:39
◼►
And it is like—it really fulfilled so many of the ideals of the Mac because the Mac had gone on to not be that.
01:11:45
◼►
The reason the Mac exists at all, the reason we're on this podcast is like desktop publishing, Photoshop, stuff that Steve Jobs was not responsible for, for the most part, but that made the Mac a thing.
01:11:54
◼►
And that was complicated and powerful, and we had power users.
01:11:57
◼►
They called them Power Books and Power Macs, not just because of the Power PC.
01:12:01
◼►
That was not the original vision from anybody for the Mac, Raskin's $500 Mac, Steve Jobs is one, but that's what the Mac became.
01:12:09
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And I felt good about seeing the iPad, even though the world had passed by, and even though I was more interested in the Mac than the iPad, that it basically had done it.
01:12:17
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That Apple had produced the computer for the rest of us, which is the thing that we give to toddlers now, so they can safely play in a computing environment with their applications that they touch.
01:12:26
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There was famously the story that the original Macintosh did not have any capacity for expansion cards, and then it kind of secretly did, like what Burrell Smith put in it.
01:12:37
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Yeah, they did the typical thing, which is just secretly ignore your boss and do what you think is right.
01:12:42
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So that's why an original Macintosh could be upgraded to a fat Mac.
01:12:47
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But the fact that they had to sneak it in was so Steve Jobs that he didn't want any expansion cards, and at the time, so antithetical to the entire rest of the personal computing industry.
01:13:03
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Apple II had expansion cards out the wazoo.
01:13:06
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It was almost what defined the platform, was its expandability and the way that Waz had designed it.
01:13:13
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Waz was always designing for himself, and it's like, hey, what would I have wanted to make an awesome computer?
01:13:18
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Well, if somebody could already give me a computer that worked and was pretty cool, and then I could just put cards in on top of it to make it even better, that's what I would want.
01:13:28
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I'll make a computer that is just sitting here with these slots where you can make your own things that I've never thought of, and you can add them to the computer.
01:13:36
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And no better way of seeing the difference between the two Steves, where Steve Jobs was already looking at, no, we're going to seal this up.
01:13:46
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And we're going to use, again, already with the special screws so that people couldn't even try to look inside.
01:14:24
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You've got to turn on ID3 first, then ID1 and ID7, or ID2 and ID7, rather.
01:14:29
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And you'd sit down at somebody, some other Macintosh, like at a print shop or some place where it wasn't yours, but you had to go there to print something in color or whatever.
01:14:39
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And there'd be like a sticky note on the computer telling you to turn on the devices in this order.
01:14:44
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And you had to know how to turn them on.
01:14:47
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You couldn't just leave them running because nobody left their computers running.
01:15:15
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I guess, I don't know when the hell it came out.
01:15:18
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But whatever, in 2021 when I bought it, I'm not sure I've ever shut it down.
01:15:21
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To be honest, I think it's been effectively running continuously for five years.
01:15:28
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Sleeping often, but no, you used to shut down and you'd have to turn not just your computer on, but all of your various SCSI devices.
01:15:37
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I would do that multiple times a day with my computer setup because every time I was done using the computer, I would shut everything down.
01:15:42
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And then an hour later, I would go back in and use the computer again, turn everything on, wait for the interminal boot process just over and over.
01:15:50
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That's what kept the Mac alive in those periods was that it blossomed into a platform that was in many ways contrary to that Steve Jobs original vision from 1984.
01:16:00
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Yeah, I mean, it's still tied into the vision of his creative professionals who will be able to do things that they couldn't.
01:16:05
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This would empower creative professionals to do a thing.
01:16:09
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But the simplicity in the computer, part of the computer for the rest of us thing, if you watch the old Steve Jobs talks when he was very young and everything,
01:16:16
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they were still stuck on the idea that people would write programs.
01:16:56
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But like, that turned out to not be, that was never going to happen.
01:17:00
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And if you were heavily into computers in California in the 70s, and you're at the Homebrew Computer Club, you're like, yeah, everyone's going to write programs, man.
01:17:06
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And just, it was never going to be the reality.
01:17:09
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Well, you don't understand, everyone else is an old fogey now.
01:17:40
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It's probably changed hands more times than any TV channel in history.
01:17:44
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But it's never been the case that more than like ever, like 5% of the U.S. population, 5% or 10% had HBO, right?
01:17:53
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Like, it's just not something that most people are like, oh, yes, that would be nice not to have commercials interrupt the movie that wasn't meant to have commercials.
01:19:27
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This was the base reality was the GUI on the Mac.
01:19:30
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And it was relentless and 100% consistent and totally convincing.
01:19:34
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And no one seemed interested in even doing that because they thought, we just need to have Windows in a menu.
01:19:41
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And it's like, no, there's more to it than that.
01:19:43
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It's the fact that this is the base reality.
01:19:44
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And this computer on your computer, the base reality is DOS.
01:19:47
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And you have to know that's the base reality.
01:19:50
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Hell, if you don't have it auto-booting into Windows, you have to type when to even get to Windows.
01:19:54
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And then you're going to be down there playing your DOS games or messing with all sorts of config files and stuff like that.
01:19:59
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The fact that the Macintosh was thought through all the way to the bottom so that like any kind of diagnostic mode you would boot into.
01:20:08
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I forget some of the things like if you had to boot up with.
01:20:11
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The debugger, the programmer switch that you had, the interrupt switch, that brought up a dialogue, a graphical dialogue.
01:20:16
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Where granted you typed commands that set memory addresses and stuff, but like it was still a GUI.
01:20:23
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It wasn't like, oh, and all of a sudden some black text goes over.
01:20:26
◼►
That was one of the startling things about Mac OS X was like when it would kernel panic and you would see like text going across the screen before they had the nice kernel panic screen.
01:20:34
◼►
It was like, we're not in Kansas anymore.
01:20:37
◼►
But for what seemed like a very long time there, the Mac proved that you could have a computer where the base reality was the GUI and you never needed to deal with the command line.
01:20:43
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And that was important back then because every other computer required you to deal with that crap to make your computer work.
01:20:49
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And now our phones are running Unix, but you never on the phone have to deal with command line crap.
01:21:24
◼►
And then it turned into like the side that had previously been arguing that command line interfaces were a man's computer and graphical user interfaces were baby computers.
01:21:36
◼►
Even when it became Mac versus Windows, they conveniently forgot that they were on that side before.
01:21:41
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But even then, you'd boot up a Windows PC and you'd see streams of DOS diagnostic messages.
01:21:49
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You'd see the bio screen before anything.
01:21:54
◼►
And most people I knew, including me when I had jobs in college that involved PCs, would set it so that it wouldn't launch Windows automatically.
01:22:01
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It would start at a DOS prompt in case you wanted to do something in DOS first.
01:22:06
◼►
And then you would type win, which I always thought was, I don't feel like I'm winning using this computer at work.
01:22:12
◼►
Yeah, I've always thought that was in the Mac PC wars.
01:22:15
◼►
All those PC users typing win over and over again.
01:22:18
◼►
The psychic energy that was putting out into the world was crushing my beloved Apple.
01:22:35
◼►
But as much as Steve Jobs was wrong about some of the stuff like the expansion cards and who knows what would have happened with the Mac if things had gone differently personality wise with the other executives and John Scully and if Steve Jobs had somehow never gone into exile outside Apple.
01:22:52
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But parts of what made the Mac in that era were clearly led by him and they were different from the Lisa, the square pixels instead of rectangular pixels.
01:23:06
◼►
It's kind of like when Tim Cook took over because so he gets booted out in 85, but he's let the fuse on the Mac and his ideas about the Mac and lack of expandability were wrong.
01:23:16
◼►
But his taste about the base reality of the Mac should be that consistent gooey and his taste about how it should be artistic and clean or whatever.
01:23:24
◼►
He's gone, but he has instilled the entire Mac team with that ethos to such a degree that I feel like the run from after he's booted out until a couple of years before he comes back is the best run of the Mac.
01:23:37
◼►
Like, oh, in the 90s, they made too many Mac miles and John Scully was bad and blah, blah, blah.
01:23:40
◼►
No, that's the era of the Mac 2 FX, the SE30.
01:23:45
◼►
That is the heyday of the Mac, and it's powered by essentially his decisions and taste.
01:23:50
◼►
He's gone, but his decisions and taste leave on, and that Mac team, there's no way in hell that Mac team is going to allow the Mac to be sullied with all the stuff that we think is bad.
01:23:58
◼►
And then combined with Jean-Louis Gasset saying, you've got to add slots, man.
01:24:02
◼►
We've got to make a big, powerful computer.
01:24:04
◼►
We're going to have separate monitors, a single-page display, a dual-page 21.
01:24:08
◼►
That's all stuff that didn't seem like Steve Jobs was interested in but was required to make the Mac become what it would eventually become.
01:24:14
◼►
And he needed to not be there for that because I think his ideas were bad and would not have been successful.
01:24:19
◼►
But the fact that he set this foundation so well allowed the Mac to go on to success without losing its spirit for such a long time before he even came back.
01:24:31
◼►
He's gone for years, and the Mac is so thoroughly still like, but no matter what, there's going to be no command line.
01:24:48
◼►
Even the diagnostic messages were graphical, so you'd boot it up, and it showed the Happy Mac so early in the boot process because it was in the ROM.
01:24:58
◼►
It wasn't even gotten to the point where it could read from a disk, but it would show you the Happy Mac in a graphic, and not in a mode that looked different from what you were going to see.
01:25:11
◼►
It showed a perfect little Happy Mac icon.
01:25:14
◼►
And if something went wrong, and unfortunately due to the rather shaky dependability of floppy disks and even hard disks of the time, oftentimes something would go wrong while you were starting up.
01:25:26
◼►
It wouldn't just dump a bunch of text on screen.
01:25:28
◼►
It would show you a sad Mac with X's for eyes.
01:25:41
◼►
I've used them so much during that era that I'm familiar with all of the sickening feelings that come from seeing such things.
01:25:48
◼►
But, I mean, can you even imagine Apple today having a Mac that is in a bad – maybe there – is there still a Mac with X's for eyes that comes up if something – like a kernel panic or something like that?
01:25:58
◼►
I think they've gotten rid of all that stuff long ago.
01:26:00
◼►
Although they still – it's one of the things that has carried over.
01:26:03
◼►
Obviously the Mac is – and all of Apple's platforms are now Unix-based and as opposed to the old Mac days where the base reality was the GUI, the base reality is now obviously Unix.
01:26:12
◼►
But Apple works really hard even today to make sure that is hidden from you.
01:27:54
◼►
Whereas if another company had made the first graphical user interface, most of the programs you ran would have been things that just were in Monaco 9, just command line interfaces running in a window.
01:31:19
◼►
This makes text editing so much easier.
01:31:23
◼►
I think I brought this up on version history, but I'll say it again.
01:31:27
◼►
Like, in recent Apple history, there was, and I participated, and I fired my opinion very strongly when Apple shifted their own MacBook keyboards to have full-height left and right arrow keys,
01:31:42
◼►
as opposed to the upside-down T arrangement of arrow keys, where the left and right are half-height, even though there's nothing above them.
01:31:51
◼►
And it's a perfectly cromulent design, and there's a lot for all the ways that many laptops are just MacBook Air ripoffs from PC makers.
01:32:00
◼►
There's a lot of laptops out there that have the full-height left and right keys.
01:32:05
◼►
But of all the ways that you can arrange arrow keys on a keyboard, the difference between the exact same arrangement,
01:32:15
◼►
but whether left and right are full-height or half-height with a gap above them,
01:32:21
◼►
But we went nuts when Apple went to full-height left and right arrow keys, like, eight or nine years ago.
01:32:27
◼►
And then they were like, it's one of those ways where Apple still shows us that sometimes they'll listen, and they, like, were, never mind.
01:32:34
◼►
And we went back to the half-height ones.
01:32:36
◼►
But when you look back at the early Mac keyboards, A, the first one didn't have any arrow keys at all.
01:32:42
◼►
But then, B, there were the goofy ones like my LC, whatever, shit-ass keyboard, that had left, right, up, down.
01:32:50
◼►
Yeah, I don't even remember what order it went in, but whatever order it was not the order you thought,
01:32:54
◼►
because you had to look at the keycaps and go, where is the left and where is the right?
01:32:57
◼►
I think it went left, right, up, down.
01:33:01
◼►
Are they going to have to pull up a screenshot?
01:33:03
◼►
The thing about the full-height arrow keys, like, that whole cycle of change is so emblematic of the Apple of that day.
01:33:14
◼►
Because, all right, so Johnny Ive is there.
01:33:17
◼►
You can see why they do the full-height left and right.
01:33:19
◼►
You can see why they do it, because it looks nicer.
01:33:21
◼►
It's uniform, it looks nicer, what are you using that space for anyway?
01:33:27
◼►
And there's like, well, the function, like, I'm sure people argue, you know, you can feel for the keys when it's half-height, blah, blah, blah.
01:33:31
◼►
And they're like, well, we're just going to do this.
01:33:33
◼►
And people complained, and so they switched it back.
01:33:35
◼►
So you could look at that and say, okay, they did a little form over function thing.
01:33:40
◼►
Arguably, the left and right keys felt better, but it turns out feeling for the gaps is more important.
01:33:44
◼►
But the bigger picture of this is, hey, you could have full-size inverted T without jamming them up like that if you give up the perfect rectangle of the keyboard.
02:23:17
◼►
In private meetings, there's, you know, we just have that one.
02:23:20
◼►
The one Tim Cook story we all have is of him being kind of a jerk in typical like internal big company boss way where the guy's going to get.
02:23:29
◼►
And that reads as Tim Cook that I could totally see him doing that, that, yeah, he's not always the affable person in the interviews, that he can be a stern taskmaster internally.
02:23:54
◼►
And I will lastly say, just to bring it up to the present day, that the sort of conservative, always on brand Tim Cook mindset, it has infused the company without ever egotistically trying to redefine the company in his image.
02:24:16
◼►
Or like Scully, who I don't think tried to remake Apple, but really did, I think, getting to that point of why didn't the Newton integrate with the Mac at all?
02:24:26
◼►
It was this is my new platform, and it's going to put the company in new territory and set it up for this knowledge navigator future.
02:24:36
◼►
So why integrate with the old thing that everybody still associates with Steve Jobs, who I ran out of the company eight years ago or whatever?
02:24:42
◼►
Tim Cook has, without ever trying to break the Apple he inherited from Steve Jobs, infused it with his own personality.
02:24:51
◼►
And that happens under good, strong leadership, right?
02:24:54
◼►
It's the natural course of, what, 14 years of CEO ship, 15, going on 15 later this year.
02:25:01
◼►
Of course, the company has taken on more of Tim Cook's personality.
02:25:06
◼►
But I think at this point, it's too much, right?
02:25:10
◼►
It's too much Tim Cook personality infusing the company.
02:25:14
◼►
And to the current moment of LLMs, I think it has made them so gun-shy and conservative about the weird things that can come out of LLMs, and even within the last few years, that them trying to make sure that anything that comes out of Siri and or Apple intelligence remains ever on brand for Apple is a mindset that kind of explains why they're so far behind.
02:25:40
◼►
I mean, that may be part of the explanation, and honestly, I kind of agree with them there.
02:25:44
◼►
There is some brand stuff that they need to protect, and currently the technology doesn't allow them to protect it that way.
02:25:48
◼►
But I think the best example of the way the Tim Cook mindset is kind of hurting Apple here is that in the Jobs 2 era, with the whole company being so aligned behind him, the rest of the company also got to see him be Steve Jobs.
02:26:03
◼►
So it was like, okay, we're not Steve Jobs, so we need to be on message and on point and do what the leader wants.
02:26:10
◼►
But we look up there, and we see our boss, and he says whatever the hell he wants.
02:26:16
◼►
And you would see that embodied in things like, maybe even before Steve Jobs dies, but certainly after, his alkalites that saw Steve Jobs, like Schiller, Schiller would occasionally say something irreverent.
02:26:30
◼►
But it's like he grew up looking at Steve Jobs as his leader.
02:26:34
◼►
And so the aspiration is, yeah, you've got to stay in line and be on message.
02:26:36
◼►
But once you get to the top of this thing, you can say whatever you want.
02:26:39
◼►
Whereas the Tim Cook era is, you've got to stay in line and be on message, even if you're at the top.
02:26:43
◼►
So there's no one below Tim Cook that's saying, I aspire to eventually lead Apple, and when I lead Apple, I'll do whatever the hell you want.
02:26:50
◼►
It's like, I aspire to lead Apple, and I guess I'll be just like Tim Cook and continue to be on message.
02:26:54
◼►
And so I do worry about Ternus or whoever is going to succeed him, because what you need with a new leader is like, look, it's great to speak with one voice and be aligned, but the top of that pyramid can't be in that mindset because it's paralyzing.
02:27:07
◼►
And so I do hope whoever succeeds him is able to say, I am now in the power seat.
02:27:13
◼►
Like, I'm not suggesting Phil Schiller become CEO, he's an Apple fellow, and he's off doing whatever he's doing, but like, he so clearly aspired to be able to be as irreverent as Steve Jobs, and occasionally would sneak out little bits of irreverence, even when Steve Jobs was still around and when he was still at Apple.
02:27:30
◼►
And that's just not something you see from anybody you see in a keynote these days.
02:27:34
◼►
Like, you cannot get them on the record being a little stinker.
02:27:37
◼►
Schiller came on our podcast and was a little bit of a little stinker, and he was still working at Apple then.
02:27:43
◼►
You've had him on the talk show and everything, but think of all your talk show appearances with those Apple execs.
02:27:47
◼►
Like, Jaws is a little bit of a stinker in service of Tim Cook's message, and Phil was a little bit of a stinker on his own, and irreverent to everything that came before him.
02:27:57
◼►
And like, I just don't know how this is going to go, because I really do feel like change in leadership is your opportunity to do something different and to be different.
02:28:03
◼►
And I think we've run the course of what Tim Cook's style of leadership can provide, which is some amazing stuff, but also some downsides.
02:28:09
◼►
But I hope the next leader is different, hopefully in a better way.
02:28:12
◼►
But different, even different in a worse way would be a refreshing change.
02:28:16
◼►
I forget how I know this, and it might be that I know it directly from Phil, and it was off the record, but he'll forgive me, I think.
02:28:26
◼►
But I happen to know for a fact that the can't innovate anymore, my ass line, which I think comes from the introduction of the trash can Mac Pro, was ad-libbed and did not occur in any of the rehearsals.
02:28:41
◼►
Because it was truly felt by Phil in that moment, you could all tell.
02:28:44
◼►
Yes, and Phil, from the live keynotes, one of the rules, they did not have scripts, and there were talking points.
02:28:52
◼►
The slides were obviously made in advance, and they rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed.
02:28:56
◼►
But there was no script, and that was a Jobs rule from on high that he doesn't want anybody up there reading from a script because it plays flat.
02:29:05
◼►
So you've got to speak extemporaneously on stage, but you do need to rehearse.
02:29:11
◼►
And Phil has told me, and Phil was always great on stage.
02:29:15
◼►
I would say second best only to Jobs, and there's no question that we know that when Jobs was on missed keynotes because of his medical problems, it was always Phil who stood in for him, which is the toughest thing.
02:29:27
◼►
Because here, the guy, everybody really wants to see Steve Jobs, he's sick, and everybody's worried about him, and Phil would step in.
02:29:32
◼►
Phil has told me that the hardest part from his perspective was he did rehearse, and he was there for every rehearsal watching everybody else rehearse and giving notes.
02:29:40
◼►
But then he never wanted to give his best performance in a rehearsal.
02:29:44
◼►
He wanted to have it down and feel like, okay, this is good, this is tight, we're hitting all the messages, but I want to stop right now because the next time I give it, I feel like it's going to be the best one, and I want that to be the real one.
02:29:57
◼►
It was his best delivery of the introduction of the Mac Pro, and he added the line, can't innovate anymore of my ass.
02:30:04
◼►
It's hard to see anybody at Apple today doing that.
02:30:09
◼►
Again, even Tim Cook, because Tim Cook could do it.
02:30:11
◼►
You're at the CEO, you can do it, you can check the tone.
02:30:14
◼►
And it's like, nope, I'm never going to do that.
02:30:16
◼►
And people would go nuts, that would be the thing, as restrained as Cook has been in public for all this time, if he did it now, people would go nuts for it.
02:30:25
◼►
If he did it now, I'm not sure if the sentiment has turned so much, but we'll see.
02:30:30
◼►
I mean, I guess in our little bubble of the world, the sentiment has turned, but I bet when he goes on stage at WRC, there'll still be the same amount of cheers as there has always been.
02:31:08
◼►
Yeah, monthly member specials for the past several years.
02:31:11
◼►
Yeah, and I feel like someday we're going to have a challenging summer schedule this year, but we really don't want to break the streak if possible.
02:31:26
◼►
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