00:00:00 ◼ ► Let me just say right off the bat that I'm not sure I've ever seen a book that spoils itself
00:00:06 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt By that you mean it's easy to judge it by the cover and dismiss it or what?
00:00:13 ◼ ► Jon Moffitt Well, not dismiss it, but the cover is very opinionated. And reading the book, I think
00:00:30 ◼ ► I've never written a book, so I don't know how titling and subtitling a book goes into projected
00:00:37 ◼ ► sales and stuff like that. And I can imagine that there's some idea that with that subtitle,
00:00:43 ◼ ► the book might spark more interest right off the shelf than if it was just called After Steve with
00:00:49 ◼ ► no lost-its-soul part. Or After Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company, right?
00:01:09 ◼ ► or at least in this case, in my experience, and I literally only have one experience because I've
00:01:17 ◼ ► really deep thought about what the structure of the book should be and what the book should be
00:01:24 ◼ ► about and what story it was going to tell. So, the contract didn't dictate that it wasn't based on
00:01:32 ◼ ► the title. So, it's interesting to think about like, "Oh, well, the title is designed to get
00:01:37 ◼ ► sales." Honestly, in my mind, that's a bit of an afterthought. The title is more designed to
00:01:43 ◼ ► reflect the reporting in the book, but also be provocative enough that people look at it and say,
00:01:48 ◼ ► "Well, that seems interesting. It at least made me think or have some feeling." Some people have said
00:01:56 ◼ ► the book made them angry or riled them up. And they said that that would be the case in their eyes.
00:02:03 ◼ ► Whether you loved Apple or had issues with Apple, which I'd rather people feel one way or the other
00:02:10 ◼ ► after reading it than just kind of set it aside when they're done. I get the feeling. Yeah,
00:02:16 ◼ ► I'm sure you're hearing it more than me as the author, but I've heard that there are people who
00:02:21 ◼ ► are not happy about the book. Just a general sense, but I don't know that, again, that's not a
00:02:26 ◼ ► condemnation of the book. Maybe any properly written book about this era, about a secretive,
00:02:40 ◼ ► people did not want to be public and therefore, of course, it's going to make them angry.
00:02:50 ◼ ► Right. Right. I mean, yeah, you're writing about a corporation that really has what I call a corporate
00:02:58 ◼ ► emerita, right? That everybody who kind of goes in and out of Apple believes that you don't talk
00:03:02 ◼ ► about Apple. And you can certainly, if you're an alumni of Apple, you can become a pariah if you
00:03:11 ◼ ► violate those kind of basic principles. And so you're kind of as a reporter or writer, when you
00:03:17 ◼ ► unearth things, I just always felt like, well, that's just not appreciated because it violates
00:03:22 ◼ ► the very kind of foundation of the way they think about how they reveal information to the world.
00:03:32 ◼ ► you currently are a reporter for the New York Times, but previously you were at the Wall Street
00:03:38 ◼ ► Journal. Correct. Correct. And much of this book is born out of my reporting while I was at the
00:03:46 ◼ ► Wall Street Journal. And when you were at the Journal, your beat exactly was, was it Silicon
00:03:53 ◼ ► Valley in general? I mean, I know you personally from a couple of Apple events. I know we were
00:03:58 ◼ ► introduced, I think by Steve Dowling. We met when you did a talk show at WWDC several years ago.
00:04:05 ◼ ► I was talking with, I think it was your audio producer, a little bit about some of the app
00:04:11 ◼ ► experience, because I think he was, am I correct? And remembering that he did a documentary about
00:04:16 ◼ ► app developers and some of the challenges that they'd run into and dealing with the 30% fees or
00:04:23 ◼ ► something like that. Anyway, I recall being there for one of the talk shows and having a chance to
00:04:28 ◼ ► talk with you before you did the big show. And it was such a thrill to be there and see just how
00:04:35 ◼ ► packed the house was for that. I mean, people just really turned out for it. It was fun to see.
00:04:39 ◼ ► Yeah, it'll be interesting to see when or if that ever happens again. That was the documentary for
00:04:45 ◼ ► those. I'll just toss it out there before I forget app, the human story by Jake Shoemaker. And yeah,
00:04:51 ◼ ► he for years shot the video version of the show. And I say it in the past tense, but it could
00:04:59 ◼ ► happen in the future tense at some point again, but I do remember that. But what was your purview?
00:05:09 ◼ ► Apple reporter. The Times has an Apple reporter. Reuters has an Apple reporter. I mean, there
00:05:13 ◼ ► are, you know, there's a sensibility here among large papers that these large companies have such
00:05:20 ◼ ► outsized influence over our lives in the world that you really need at least a single reporter
00:05:27 ◼ ► devoted to it. And in the case of Amazon, the Journal has a couple of reporters. And in the
00:05:31 ◼ ► case of Facebook, I think there are probably about four people that hand off coverage of Facebook at
00:05:37 ◼ ► the Journal. And I think that's just a reflection of its its impact on society. Yeah, Bloomberg,
00:05:42 ◼ ► of course, has Mark Gurman, amongst others who cover the Apple beat. I kind of knew that. But,
00:05:47 ◼ ► you know, I feel like it's worth clarifying. But so here's my next question. And it's a meta
00:05:51 ◼ ► discussion. You are a full time reporter for a major publication, and your beat is Apple. But
00:06:00 ◼ ► you have the idea that you would like to write a book about Apple. How do you draw the line between
00:06:19 ◼ ► it was, you take a sabbatical, essentially a book leave. I took mine in summer of 2020,
00:06:27 ◼ ► and took about seven months off. And that's when I really rolled up my sleeves and did a lot of the
00:06:32 ◼ ► reporting that's in this book. Now, there's other reporting that's in the book that anybody who may
00:06:37 ◼ ► have read stories over the years from the Wall Street Journal can tease out is based or was in
00:06:45 ◼ ► articles that the Journal had at the time when I was covering Apple. Like for example, there's
00:06:49 ◼ ► a guy inside Apple called the blevenator, Tony Blevins, who's just a master negotiator. And I
00:06:55 ◼ ► wrote a profile of Tony Blevins while I was at the Journal. And there's a few pages that highlight
00:07:02 ◼ ► some of his work at Apple. So it does kind of blend and overlap. But really, the writing and
00:07:10 ◼ ► the bulk of the reporting took place in that seven month period that I took off on on book leave.
00:07:14 ◼ ► And how, again, I'm fascinated by stuff like this. And I don't want to spend a ton of time about I
00:07:20 ◼ ► want to talk about the actual content, but I'm curious what because there is a ton. Here's my
00:07:25 ◼ ► favorite thing about the book. The book is clearly deeply researched. And I mean, do you have a count
00:07:33 ◼ ► of how many actual sources I think maybe in the forward you mentioned how many how many people
00:07:37 ◼ ► Jared Ranere: It's, it's 200 plus and that's that spans former and current Apple employees,
00:07:45 ◼ ► friends, family of the two central characters, Johnny Ive and Tim Cook, advisors to Apple
00:07:51 ◼ ► consultants. I mean, it's, it's, it's a real cross section of, of the world in and around the company.
00:07:58 ◼ ► And it shows it really does. And it is a, a nourishing read, in terms of how deeply reported
00:08:08 ◼ ► it is, I think, you know, as we mentioned at the outset, I think that you and I could possibly
00:08:13 ◼ ► quibble about the punditry aspect of it, the the whether or not Apple has lost its soul. But I don't
00:08:20 ◼ ► think and I think this is what I'm saying to my list, the listeners of the show, if if, if the
00:08:25 ◼ ► idea of how Apple lost its soul, immediately turns one's mind like, Hmm, is this book a hit piece,
00:08:33 ◼ ► I would say it is not it is in the, you know, reasonable people might reasonably disagree about,
00:08:40 ◼ ► like I said, the punditry aspect of it, but the reporting aspect is fascinating. And there's
00:08:45 ◼ ► so much new stuff in here. And firsthand stuff that it's sort of, again, I know, you're not going
00:08:51 ◼ ► to give up confidential sources. So I'm not even gonna ask, but there are some anecdotes that are
00:08:55 ◼ ► relayed in here, where it's like, who could, you know, there could not have been that many people
00:08:59 ◼ ► in that meeting. Who spoke to trip about this? It's, it's pretty, it shows. Yeah, well, it was
00:09:08 ◼ ► designed to be to be a real narrative nonfiction. Yes. So, you know, to have real arc and to bring
00:09:16 ◼ ► the reader forward, and to have broad appeal. So, you know, my hope is that there's something
00:09:21 ◼ ► in here for, for people who follow Apple closely and for people who don't, I mean, you know, if
00:09:29 ◼ ► your listeners because, you know, I know, most of the people who follow your your words on are real
00:09:34 ◼ ► Apple enthusiasts, if their family members don't understand why they're enthusiastic about the
00:09:40 ◼ ► company, or don't really understand Apple, I'm hopeful that there's something in here for them
00:09:44 ◼ ► as well. And so it's really designed to have broad appeal. What what tools do you use, like when
00:09:51 ◼ ► you're conducting 200 interviews and collecting this and trying to organize all of this information
00:10:00 ◼ ► you you've collected through your reporting into a narrative? What what's like what what what app?
00:10:06 ◼ ► What software do you use to collect the notes and and sort of start organizing this or? And what do
00:10:14 ◼ ► you use to write? I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn that on its ear a little bit and say that there's
00:10:20 ◼ ► there's very much an aspect of this is very analog. And part of that was the consequence
00:10:24 ◼ ► of the pandemic. It was when I was reporting this, it was a little difficult. So for example,
00:10:29 ◼ ► when I went to Robbersdale, Alabama, to visit Tim Cook's hometown, it was really hard to, you know,
00:10:35 ◼ ► to reach out to people ahead of time. And there was some weariness at that point, you know, mid
00:10:39 ◼ ► pandemic about seeing people. And I, I literally drew a map of people who went to high school with
00:10:47 ◼ ► Tim Cook. And then, you know, I drove around to their to their houses and like knocked on their
00:10:52 ◼ ► doors and asked if they'd be willing to talk to me and left notes in their mailboxes. So there's
00:10:58 ◼ ► an analog aspect of this. And then there's to your point, like, how do you keep track of everything
00:11:03 ◼ ► else? I used Evernote a good bit, you know, because I had it at the ready and I was able to
00:11:11 ◼ ► that'd be a great sentence in chapter 20 or something like that. And you just want to be
00:11:16 ◼ ► able to punch that in really quick. And then, you know, Google Docs and Microsoft Word actually
00:11:24 ◼ ► became a primary tool during this. And Scrivener is where I did the bulk of the writing. Scrivener
00:11:35 ◼ ► Trenton Larkin Scrivener, I am familiar with Scrivener and have never really used it personally.
00:11:45 ◼ ► it's super, it seems super useful for organizing a big writing project, you know, that it maybe it's
00:11:51 ◼ ► not an outliner in a traditional, this is a product that just does outlining, but it does sort of let
00:11:58 ◼ ► you sort of outline in a lowercase o sense of the word outlining. You know, this makes a chapter,
00:12:08 ◼ ► right? This Ted, and then that's a story. And then this chapter comes before this chapter, because
00:12:13 ◼ ► that's, you know, it happened this way chronologically is, is that a good way of putting
00:12:18 ◼ ► it? That's, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. The one thing that I found most beneficial
00:12:24 ◼ ► of using it was I, at the outset of this, I went back and read like, every clip from major and even
00:12:32 ◼ ► minor outlets about Apple over the span of a decade. And then I realized, crap, I got to go
00:12:36 ◼ ► back further and read clips about Johnny and Tim as well, like profiles of them over the years. And
00:12:41 ◼ ► I was able to put those in kind of a window off to the side. And then I could open and access those
00:12:47 ◼ ► really easily. And you can have a split window where you're looking at the at the at the old news
00:12:52 ◼ ► clip at the same time, you're looking at at what you're writing. So you can you can refer pretty
00:12:58 ◼ ► quickly to to kind of source material in a seamless fashion. All right, let me take a break
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00:14:42 ◼ ► There's I, what, let's start with the, the, the sort of structure of the book is sort of a,
00:14:58 ◼ ► Correct. I like to think of it as like, it's like three biographies in a way. It's like
00:15:10 ◼ ► some material that's very familiar to so many real listeners, but then also hopefully ample
00:15:16 ◼ ► fresh material and a fresh look at both Tim and Johnny themselves. The, after Steve Jobs died,
00:15:22 ◼ ► there was, and you know, it's, you mentioned all the, you know, the previous examples, Disney,
00:15:35 ◼ ► So, Sony would be the other one that, you know, I mean, these are all intimately familiar to
00:15:39 ◼ ► Jobs himself just because of his, you know, knowing the leaders of Sony, admiring Edwin
00:15:48 ◼ ► land and upgrading Polaroid for throwing him out of the company. And then in the case of Disney
00:16:03 ◼ ► not really coincidentally, but the way that with Pixar, like one of my, one of my recurring themes,
00:16:11 ◼ ► like to me, it's, it's the story of this whole last few decades of what we now call big tech
00:16:17 ◼ ► is the sort of computerization of everything like computers are so powerful and so profound that
00:16:24 ◼ ► just about everything that could be a computer is becoming a computer and something like making an
00:16:29 ◼ ► animated movie has gone from being this incredibly labor intensive hand analog thing, right? Like
00:16:36 ◼ ► where the classic Disney animation from the 20th century was drawn by artists at a desk on actual
00:16:43 ◼ ► cell. You know, it was very analog to purely computer driven, but that, you know, famously,
00:17:01 ◼ ► Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny you say that I actually read an article for, if you'll forgive
00:17:07 ◼ ► a brief digression about people mistakenly turning Sabbath mode on their ovens and getting locked out
00:17:13 ◼ ► of their ovens because your oven's essentially a computer now too. So for those who don't know,
00:17:18 ◼ ► Sabbath mode is designed for observant Jews to be able to kind of maintain a temperature through
00:17:24 ◼ ► the Sabbath and through the Holy holy celebrations. And then there were, there were, I guess,
00:17:29 ◼ ► people who weren't Jewish who accidentally pushed the button and all of a sudden couldn't get back
00:17:33 ◼ ► into their oven. So computers are everywhere. I've mentioned that recently when I was talking
00:17:39 ◼ ► about the Apple's new studio display, which itself is like an iOS computer or like an Apple TV,
00:17:49 ◼ ► which is kind of mind blowing, but, you know, it's easy to understand why, but a couple of weeks
00:17:54 ◼ ► ago, my review unit, the audio was glitching out. It, it, you know, it has these great speakers,
00:17:59 ◼ ► but everything I was playing was just like that. It, you know, like that type of audio.
00:18:05 ◼ ► And I unplugged it from the computer. I did everything I could other than unplug it from
00:18:11 ◼ ► the wall, but that's ultimately what I had to do. And then you plug it back in and it actually
00:18:15 ◼ ► boots up, you know, like, like when your Apple TV starts up, it doesn't take a long time. It's,
00:18:19 ◼ ► it's not like a full version of iOS takes, but still you don't think of a monitor as being this
00:18:25 ◼ ► thing that has to boot, right? The computer boots and you see it boot, but now the display itself
00:18:31 ◼ ► boots. And my analogy was my, my refrigerator, you know, if that's how Apple is going to make this,
00:18:35 ◼ ► they should, and they don't want to put a power button on it, which is a very Apple like thing
00:18:41 ◼ ► to do. They should be damn sure. It doesn't need to be yanked out of the wall socket. You know,
00:18:47 ◼ ► like my refrigerator is also a computer. I've got a little touch screen in there. You can control
00:18:52 ◼ ► how much ice it makes and set the temperature and stuff like that. And, you know, we've had this
00:18:57 ◼ ► refrigerator now for over five years. I've never had to pull the, pull the plug on it. You know,
00:19:02 ◼ ► that's, that's what you expect from a refrigerator. Yeah. Well, you're lucky you haven't had to pull
00:19:08 ◼ ► the plug. I bet it will happen at some point, you know, that, that, that's, that's where we're
00:19:11 ◼ ► headed, I guess, with the computerization of everything. So how, how, how quickly did you
00:19:18 ◼ ► narrow the idea down to telling the story of Cook and Johnny Ive? It's a bit reductive, but
00:19:27 ◼ ► I've seen other people argue, but it's also, I think the, the most effective way to understand
00:19:43 ◼ ► there's certainly stand-ins for the two, the two poles inside Apple that make Apple so successful
00:19:50 ◼ ► as a company. And that's this, this creative aspect of the company that's been such a force
00:19:55 ◼ ► and come up with so many revolutionary product ideas and revolutionary advertisements and
00:20:01 ◼ ► everything else. And that's where Jobs spent so much of his time. And then the operational side
00:20:05 ◼ ► of the company that's, that's been able to take the handoff of the designs and engineering and
00:20:12 ◼ ► make those products come to life. Not just like, you know, one perfect product, but like a hundred
00:20:18 ◼ ► million plus products coming off a factory line. I mean, that's, that's a remarkable achievement
00:20:24 ◼ ► and very few companies can do that. And almost none can do it at the level that Apple does.
00:20:29 ◼ ► I've heard from a few friends who've, who've made the, I forget what they call it. I think
00:20:37 ◼ ► the internally there's some kind of name for it, but the, the San Francisco to China flights,
00:20:43 ◼ ► you know, and there was a story, remember the story a couple of years ago where one of the
00:20:48 ◼ ► airlines seemingly thoughtlessly leaked that, you know, like that Apple has like a standing order
00:20:56 ◼ ► of like a hundred business class seats every day on the, on the flights across the Pacific ocean.
00:21:04 ◼ ► There's a rumor at one point that they were buying out entire planes so that you couldn't have people
00:21:09 ◼ ► sitting behind their staff and like looking over their shoulders. I never got to the bottom of
00:21:14 ◼ ► whether that rumor was true or not. And forgive me for like flaming it, but, but it is interesting
00:21:18 ◼ ► to think about like the fact that they could reserve extra seats just to protect the secrecy
00:21:40 ◼ ► and other facade of, you don't need to worry how we made this. Here's the thing. And it is,
00:21:48 ◼ ► you know, in the same way that the devices themselves at their best are wonderful little
00:21:55 ◼ ► objects that, that you can look at in the minutest of details and appreciate these fine things,
00:22:13 ◼ ► a hundred people a day flying across the Pacific ocean, it's, and I know that they don't necessarily
00:22:17 ◼ ► use those seats every day, but it's, there's a lot of people who work at Apple in California,
00:22:32 ◼ ► we're obviously going through a strange time and that's not, that's not as easy to pull off and,
00:22:37 ◼ ► and so there's a lot of demand in China for, for people who are bilingual and can provide,
00:22:44 ◼ ► provide some of the same engineering expertise on the ground that they once got. They, they want,
00:22:50 ◼ ► once we're able to send people over to do a lot of that work. So there's been some reshuffling
00:22:58 ◼ ► Pete: And it's, when you think about it, I know that you can easily do the back of the,
00:23:04 ◼ ► back of the envelope math. I forget what it is, but you've got it in the book where it's like,
00:23:07 ◼ ► how many iPhones they sell per minute, you know, just all day, every day around the world. It's,
00:23:13 ◼ ► you know, like, I don't know, like a couple hundred every minute or something like that.
00:23:20 ◼ ► in front of me, but I think the analogy I compared it to is that, you know, they're selling
00:23:24 ◼ ► at this point, like thousand dollar devices at the rate McDonald's sells Big Macs, which is just
00:23:29 ◼ ► crazy, right? Like a Big Mac costs five bucks. I mean, it's, it's nuts that they're able to,
00:23:42 ◼ ► it's like the old adage. I know, I know I've heard Bill Gates be credited with it, but it's probably,
00:23:47 ◼ ► you know, something that's been floating around forever, but that we, we tend to underestimate
00:23:53 ◼ ► how much, overestimate how much we can do in a year, but underestimate how much we can do in a
00:23:57 ◼ ► decade. And just reading your book and sort of looking back at it and thinking about it,
00:24:24 ◼ ► Matthew: It was, it was total mess. I mean, if, if anything, that, that may, I mean, for all the,
00:24:31 ◼ ► all the praise that's been lavished on Jobsford, coming up with the string of hits that he came
00:24:49 ◼ ► Tim Cook is emblematic of that. You know, I think one of my favorite stories in working on the book
00:24:55 ◼ ► was that when Jobs interviewed Tim Cook and he was about to leave and take this job for Apple,
00:25:00 ◼ ► his boss at Compaq brings him in and says, and says, "Tim, like, I was planning on retiring in
00:25:05 ◼ ► the next couple of years, but I'll walk out the door right now if you'll just stay and take my
00:25:10 ◼ ► job." And I asked him, I was like, "Why would you do that?" And he goes, "Well, I'm a shareholder,
00:25:14 ◼ ► and he was the best, best hire I'd ever made. And I knew that if we kept him, the share price would
00:25:19 ◼ ► increase, and that was better for me than staying in my job." But I think that just testifies to how
00:25:24 ◼ ► skilled he was in that period of his life at bringing efficiency to a supply chain. And that's
00:25:31 ◼ ► certainly what he brought into Apple immediately. And that's why Jobs ultimately tapped him to
00:25:36 ◼ ► lead Apple after his death. Do you think in the world where Tim Cook wavered on that decision
00:25:45 ◼ ► and maybe took him up and stayed at Compaq, is Compaq's fate different in that universe
00:25:52 ◼ ► because Tim Cook was there? Like, is he that good? Or was that, I tend to think no, because I don't
00:26:01 ◼ ► see, he could have helped them operationally, but I don't see how Tim Cook's presence leading
00:26:05 ◼ ► Compaq would have saved them from the fate of the ultimate fate they have, which is sort of
00:26:10 ◼ ► irrelevant. Well, yeah, and the stagnation of the PC market, right? I mean, if you think about it,
00:26:18 ◼ ► what was the PC markets I'm doing in many ways was the revival at Apple itself from the iMac
00:26:26 ◼ ► all the way to the MacBook Air and the way those two products in particular in the computer world
00:26:31 ◼ ► changed people's perception of what a computer should be, you know? One, you know, in the iMac
00:26:39 ◼ ► showed that a computer could actually be kind of fun to have, and then the other later showed that
00:26:44 ◼ ► you didn't have to lug, you know, I don't know, a cinder block around on your shoulder every single
00:26:49 ◼ ► day. Yeah. I remember the, were you there for the keynote where they introduced the Air and Jobs
00:26:56 ◼ ► pulled it out of the Manila envelope? No, I was actually writing about the Olympics in that day
00:27:04 ◼ ► and age. That was a different lifetime for me. It was just a pinnacle of showmanship, and it's like,
00:27:12 ◼ ► in hindsight, it's like, well, so big deal. Everybody's laptop today could fit in a sufficiently
00:27:18 ◼ ► large inner office mail Manila envelope, but at the time it seemed ridiculous, right? It was like,
00:27:26 ◼ ► laptops are not this thin. And I guess the other thing that sticks out about that sighting, if you
00:27:31 ◼ ► want to cite the iMac and the MacBook Air, which I think is a good one-two punch of the evolution
00:27:40 ◼ ► of Apple's design, to me, there's a big difference between the two, which is that the iMac ultimately
00:27:46 ◼ ► was very trendy and that translucent candy colored plastic look, it obviously became a sensation.
00:27:56 ◼ ► I remember like going to Target and you'd, you know, there'd be like an $11 alarm clock and it
00:28:01 ◼ ► was made out of clear blue plastic. Why? Why? Like everything you could make, you could buy like a
00:28:08 ◼ ► coffee maker and it was made out of clear blue or pink plastic or something like that. And it was
00:28:14 ◼ ► like, there's nothing inside this device that is good to look at, you know, like part of the appeal
00:28:19 ◼ ► of the iMac was that it was supposed, you know, the internals were worth showing off, right?
00:28:23 ◼ ► But it was ultimately trendy. And, you know, I think that's what the doctor ordered for Apple,
00:28:35 ◼ ► marked a turning point of Apple, you know, having, you know, having a hit product that they'd sorely
00:28:41 ◼ ► needed, but it wasn't that long until the MacBook Air. When did the first MacBook Air come out?
00:28:53 ◼ ► You know, so about a decade, a little bit less than a decade, but with the i, with the MacBook
00:29:00 ◼ ► Air, they kind of hit with that aluminum, which you go into in the book about the tooling that
00:29:07 ◼ ► they had to invest in to get these one piece aluminum cases. I'm not going to say it's forever.
00:29:15 ◼ ► I'm not saying that 20 more years from now, we'll still have computers that are made out of aluminum
00:29:20 ◼ ► that look like that. I mean, you know, everything changes in the computer world, but it's much more
00:29:24 ◼ ► of a timeless design that is sort of the opposite of trendy. It's like a classic Rolex watch or
00:29:33 ◼ ► something where, or a Porsche, you know, Porsche 911, where, okay, you know, the cars evolve
00:29:38 ◼ ► constantly and they're way different than they were 30 years ago, but you can just see there's
00:29:43 ◼ ► a sort of just a visual DNA, oh yeah, that's a Porsche 911. I mean, to this day, I mean,
00:29:51 ◼ ► that's still the signature look of the MacBook product line, whether you have a Pro or an Air,
00:30:01 ◼ ► Well, and the other thing is, you know, and again, not accusing anybody of copying per se,
00:30:10 ◼ ► you know, there are certain brands like ThinkPad that have a very distinctive look that's very
00:30:14 ◼ ► different, you know, with their black plastic type look, but for the most part, like if you're
00:30:19 ◼ ► watching TV and the people on TV have a laptop in front of them, like the sports people in the booth
00:30:25 ◼ ► or whatever, it doesn't matter what brand it is, if it's an Apple or not, it probably looks like
00:30:29 ◼ ► a MacBook Air. Yeah, absolutely. To get back to what, like compacts or HPs look like that a lot
00:30:35 ◼ ► right now, right? Am I crazy? No, no, they all do. That kind of like silver finish and everything
00:30:42 ◼ ► else. So yeah. I always thought that that was something that Jonny Ive was moving to from the
00:30:52 ◼ ► get-go. Like, it's not like he ever told me this. I don't think he would, but it seems to me though,
00:31:01 ◼ ► and listening to Jonny's public remarks and talking and the way he talks about products,
00:31:09 ◼ ► it seems to me, and seeing what he seems to want to be doing at Love From, which we really haven't
00:31:16 ◼ ► seen much come out of that yet. So we don't know who's to say where that's going. I guess maybe we
00:31:21 ◼ ► can touch back on this towards the end of the interview and see what you think. But it seems
00:31:25 ◼ ► to me like he's interested in building things that are not transient in terms of their relevance.
00:31:32 ◼ ► And that's why he does things like design chairs. Every designer seems to at some point design a
00:31:40 ◼ ► chair. Yeah, I know. I think he's looking to reach beyond the confines of the world that he was
00:31:50 ◼ ► resigned to live within for such a long time. I think that's acquired a little bit of the
00:31:55 ◼ ► restlessness that he was dealing with in his latter years at Apple was working with the same
00:32:02 ◼ ► form factors he'd been working with for a long time and having a desire to move on to something
00:32:08 ◼ ► else. And that's probably part of the reason he poured a ton of time into like a camera. And it's
00:32:13 ◼ ► part of the reason right now I love From. I'm sure he's invigorated by working with Ferrari and
00:32:20 ◼ ► working on leather goods and anything that they're doing on the auto front. I'm not clear on what
00:32:26 ◼ ► they're doing on the auto front, but I know he's gonna be able to have some influence over that.
00:32:31 ◼ ► Yeah. And you know, and his pal Mark Nusen designed a car quite a while ago, which is sort
00:32:38 ◼ ► of a fascinating design and it kind of looks appley you can kind of see how Johnny Ive and
00:32:46 ◼ ► Mark Nusen are of a like mind. You could see why they're such close friends and collaborators.
00:32:52 ◼ ► But it's, you know, and that's obviously, I mean, how much of that do you think you got into in the
00:32:58 ◼ ► book with Project Titan at Apple? Probably not enough to satisfy your listeners. But because
00:33:06 ◼ ► much of what I've focused on in delving into Project Titan was the waywardness of the project
00:33:13 ◼ ► and the struggles and the political infighting that occurred that help explain why that project
00:33:20 ◼ ► still, you know, still is still struggling to shake itself out. And a lot of that is rooted
00:33:26 ◼ ► in the tension between some of the engineering vision for it led by Dan Riccio and then Johnny
00:33:33 ◼ ► Ive's own ambition to really pursue full autonomy. I mean, there was a bit of a breakdown after that
00:33:39 ◼ ► and a lot of political infighting and this giant organization that got built up and spun up really,
00:33:45 ◼ ► really quickly by Apple standards with a lot of external people. And that was a difficult thing
00:33:51 ◼ ► for the company to deal with. I think it still is. I mean, because it still is an ongoing concern.
00:33:57 ◼ ► It still is an ongoing division. As Tim Cook says, autonomy is an area of interest. I think
00:34:03 ◼ ► something to that effect. One of the most interesting things Tim Cook has ever said publicly
00:34:11 ◼ ► was at one point before the watch came out and somebody asked like, "Hey, there's rumors you guys
00:34:15 ◼ ► are making a watch. What do you think of that?" And he goes, "The wrist is an area of interest."
00:34:19 ◼ ► And it was like, that's like you kind of gave it up there, like which is on Apple-like, but it
00:34:26 ◼ ► wasn't like he said it offhandedly. He was very deliberate about it. But it's sort of like in the
00:34:31 ◼ ► way that whenever there's a new area that they're going into there, they can be a little bit freer
00:34:41 ◼ ► Osborne effect, right? Like if they've got like a brand new revolutionary iPad in the works,
00:34:47 ◼ ► they're not going to talk about it until it's ready to ship so as not to decrease interest in
00:34:52 ◼ ► the iPads that are currently on the market or the iPhone or whatever product. But when they don't
00:35:01 ◼ ► The car thing is such a fascinating story though, because it's so secretive, but we know there's so
00:35:08 ◼ ► much turnover, right? Like one of the things that can't really be held completely secret is when,
00:35:15 ◼ ► you know, thanks to like LinkedIn and just it's human nature, right? Like just because you worked
00:35:21 ◼ ► at Apple doesn't, you know, there is a code of Omerta, but if you leave and go to another company,
00:35:27 ◼ ► people find out, right? And there's been so much turnover within the Titan division at the
00:35:32 ◼ ► executive level that it's, and unlike any other division at Apple that I'm aware of, I've never
00:35:46 ◼ ► external hiring either for many other projects. And for people at Apple, that was a real struggle
00:35:51 ◼ ► was all of a sudden you had a division that was a thousand people strong, many of whom were not
00:36:02 ◼ ► people who had grown up at Apple and understood how Apple pursued product development and kind of
00:36:17 ◼ ► a product in that arena should be. And those who had been working in autonomy for a long time and
00:36:23 ◼ ► knew the problems and said, yeah, but you can't just say, we'll fix this or we'll get around this,
00:36:39 ◼ ► story and the overarching doubts continuing even today as the company is, you know, it's super
00:36:45 ◼ ► successful, the most profitable company in the world. There seemed to be firing on all cylinders
00:36:51 ◼ ► with their existing product line, but the what's the next big thing, right? And when Jobs died,
00:37:00 ◼ ► the argument was, you know, he was the one who drove them to make these new things at this
00:37:07 ◼ ► incredible pace with this incredible panache and to debut with something like the iPhone that just
00:37:13 ◼ ► blows people away. And then just a few years later to turn the iPhone technology into the iPad,
00:37:19 ◼ ► which has obviously gone on to be an enormous hit and a huge part of people's daily lives.
00:37:24 ◼ ► Can they do it? You know, can they keep doing that without them? And part of my writing has been to
00:37:32 ◼ ► sort of remind people that even when Steve Jobs was alive and well and firing on all cylinders,
00:37:38 ◼ ► Apple didn't come out with new products very often. It is still, it was always a rare thing,
00:37:43 ◼ ► right? Like what did they have in the Jobs 2.0 era at Apple after they reunified with Next? The iMac.
00:37:56 ◼ ► four I would point to and I would point to those largely because of their cultural significance,
00:38:01 ◼ ► right? I mean, when you talked about like the way the iMac was such a cultural sensation that
00:38:06 ◼ ► there were alarm clocks designed like that, you know, with the iPod, it really changed the way
00:38:12 ◼ ► people listen to music. iPhone obviously is indispensable to everyone's life to this day.
00:38:17 ◼ ► And then the iPad is become an extension of the iPhone and is how many people begin their days
00:38:36 ◼ ► the operating system in there. But I also get it though, that from most people, they don't really,
00:38:43 ◼ ► you know, people go into the Apple Store not to buy a Mac OS 10 machine, they go in to buy a Mac
00:38:48 ◼ ► Book, right? That's what it's the overall product. And I think Apple has always gotten that. So in,
00:39:12 ◼ ► when they were thinking about the Apple Watch, and the book is into this in some detail, they,
00:39:16 ◼ ► their aspirations were for it to liberate you from your phone. And as they were thinking about,
00:39:25 ◼ ► That was when they began their earliest conversations about having a Bluetooth headset.
00:39:30 ◼ ► So AirPods are really an extension of Apple Watch. I mean, they're kind of interconnected. So
00:39:35 ◼ ► that is, yeah. And when you look at what they've done over the past decade, that is the
00:39:44 ◼ ► Yeah, AirPods is, I have to remind myself that it should count as a major launch because I do think,
00:40:01 ◼ ► iPod from 2001. And that there was pressure within Apple to have black headphones, because that was
00:40:09 ◼ ► sort of the, you know, if you're only going to include one set of earbuds with with a mobile
00:40:15 ◼ ► music player, Sony was sort of the state of the art and the Sony look was black. And Johnny,
00:40:22 ◼ ► I've and his team pushed for no, we're going to do this thing, it's going to be white, it's going
00:40:26 ◼ ► to be a white device, and we're going to have white headphones. And then right, and then that becomes,
00:40:33 ◼ ► you know, significant, obviously, when they develop the silhouette, I mean, that becomes like,
00:40:42 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And that was a long running ad campaign, too. And I just I always think of it,
00:40:46 ◼ ► because it was print, it was TV, it worked just as well, like at a billboard in a subway station,
00:40:53 ◼ ► as it did in a 30 second spot during, you know, a football game or, or something like that. But it
00:41:00 ◼ ► really was distinctive, where you had these bright primary colors for the background, black silhouette
00:41:05 ◼ ► of a person, and then these iconic white headphones, you know, with the cable, but it's
00:41:10 ◼ ► funny thinking about how AirPods to me have been so normalized, like when I see a show now, but we
00:41:16 ◼ ► were just what I don't know if you watch the Ozark on Netflix, my wife and I are addicted, and it's
00:41:21 ◼ ► coming to a close. But there's a one of the main characters was listening to music for a whole
00:41:27 ◼ ► episode. And she was like on like a long road trip. And, but she's using wired earbuds with
00:41:33 ◼ ► her iPhone. And I'm like, that's that does not seem like 2022. Get that, get that woman some AirPods.
00:41:39 ◼ ► Right, right. It's funny, because Apple has been deemed for like having too much AirPod exposure
00:41:45 ◼ ► and the morning show and some of their other programming, right. But it but in a way, they're
00:41:50 ◼ ► they're a better reflection of reality than then say, like Ozarks are where you've got this wired
00:41:56 ◼ ► headset, because that you just don't see that that often if you're commuting anywhere in any kind of
00:42:00 ◼ ► major metropolitan city, right? Or especially for a younger character, you know what I mean? Like,
00:42:05 ◼ ► you know, maybe the older you are, the less likely you are to jump on the newest thing. But I don't
00:42:11 ◼ ► know, you just don't see them too much in the city anymore. I mean, wired headphones, it's it's pretty
00:42:17 ◼ ► pretty interesting. The watch is something though, that you get into a great length, you had an excerpt
00:42:25 ◼ ► from the book that ran in the New York Times last weekend, I believe over the weekend talking about
00:42:29 ◼ ► that. So let's get into to that aspect. And I do you think is it fair for me to say that,
00:42:38 ◼ ► that your take is that there was some fundamental tension as to what the what the purpose of the
00:42:53 ◼ ► That's probably overstating things slightly. I mean, Johnny was also involved in some of the
00:42:58 ◼ ► human interface aspects of the fitness rings and everything else. So it'd be short checking him to
00:43:06 ◼ ► say that he's solely saw it as a fashion item. But when it came to marketing the product,
00:43:12 ◼ ► that was where his emphasis and priority was, in part because he really believed that if it was,
00:43:24 ◼ ► that it would never be accepted by anyone. And it was interesting to come into the whole thing
00:43:29 ◼ ► because, and into the reporting process, because I was inclined to believe that that was foolhardy
00:43:34 ◼ ► and, you know, mistaken emphasis on his part. And I came out the other side after talking with a lot
00:43:41 ◼ ► of people, both from the world of fashion and from the world of Apple, people who were sympathetic to
00:44:00 ◼ ► the fault in all of it was leaning too far into that. And I don't know if leaning too far into
00:44:07 ◼ ► that was a consequence of maybe the, of the watch not being functionally sophisticated enough to put
00:44:14 ◼ ► the emphasis elsewhere yet. I mean, if you remember, here was a time piece that didn't tell
00:44:18 ◼ ► time half the time. That's a lot of times in one sentence, but you know what I'm saying? Like you
00:44:23 ◼ ► had to flick it towards your face in order to see what time it was because the battery power was so
00:44:29 ◼ ► insufficient that they really needed to manage that. But with the fashion thing, the reason I
00:44:33 ◼ ► came around to believing that Johnny had some point in emphasizing it is this scene that a
00:44:40 ◼ ► lot of people directed me to in Devil Wears Prada, which I had watched but not paid that
00:44:45 ◼ ► close of attention to, where Anne Hathaway's character gets upbraided by the Anna Wintour
00:44:50 ◼ ► character. And she's, she's just savage because she has on a blue sweater and she's dismissive of
00:44:58 ◼ ► fashion. And she's told, well, look, that's cerulean blue. If you knew anything about fashion,
00:45:04 ◼ ► you would know the only reason that that's being sold at the Gap or wherever she had bought it
00:45:09 ◼ ► was because it was introduced on Runways two years earlier. And that set the tone that this was going
00:45:15 ◼ ► to be the it color for the foreseeable future. And that's, that's something that a lot of people
00:45:21 ◼ ► that Apple pointed to and just said, like, this is why we needed to put the emphasis there because
00:45:26 ◼ ► otherwise, people would say, you know, in the fashion world might have dismissed this as a
00:45:29 ◼ ► computer on the wrist, and it would have never taken flight. So I'm sympathetic to that view.
00:45:35 ◼ ► I think there's there's validity to it. I love that scene from that movie. I've I think I've
00:45:39 ◼ ► seen it on I know I've seen the movie, but I've seen that scene pulled out on YouTube a few times
00:45:44 ◼ ► and it's it it's it makes you think it makes you realize that it's there's more to it. Like that's
00:45:50 ◼ ► obviously the Anna Wintour Streep's characters point is that this is not as superficial as you
00:45:57 ◼ ► think there's there's a real thing here. And there's an expertise she gets into like that
00:46:01 ◼ ► being an expert, you know, the expertise it takes to reproduce a color exactly and to to
00:46:06 ◼ ► weave a certain fabric a certain way. One of the things I think you get into in the book was is,
00:46:12 ◼ ► is the idea of was the watch ready to launch when they launched it, and that it seems and I think
00:46:19 ◼ ► you just touched on this a little bit with with talking about why did Johnny Ive want to lean into
00:46:25 ◼ ► the fashion side of it and how it looks was out of a concern that how it worked wasn't good enough yet.
00:46:38 ◼ ► one of the central engineers who was who was the lead engineer on the project pulls Jeff Williams
00:46:45 ◼ ► aside just on the cusp of them pushing to try to get this thing out the door and announce it and
00:46:51 ◼ ► says, "Hey, Jeff, you know, let me ask you a question. If you came to work today and you forgot
00:46:57 ◼ ► your iPhone, what would you do?" And Jeff said, "Why turn around and go get it because I need it
00:47:02 ◼ ► all day." And he said, "Well, if you forgot your watch, what would you do?" And Jeff coped to the
00:47:07 ◼ ► thing that he would he would go and get it, he would go and get it at the end of the day, you
00:47:11 ◼ ► know, and the engineer looks at him and says, "Well, that's that's the point. This this product's
00:47:15 ◼ ► not ready. People don't need it yet." And for people who had been raised in in the jobs world,
00:47:22 ◼ ► that was a fundamental aspect of what they needed to do was create a product that people
00:47:29 ◼ ► immediately recognize there was some need for. And there's a real sense among some people inside
00:47:34 ◼ ► Apple that that this product was not there yet. I think in hindsight, that's true. I believe that.
00:47:41 ◼ ► I've mentioned that I think it needed another year. But because and I really do think that the
00:47:47 ◼ ► as they called it the series two, even though they never called the original the series one,
00:47:52 ◼ ► because then it sort of complicated where they came out with a series one that was like an
00:47:57 ◼ ► upgraded version of the series zero for lack of a better, a better term for the original.
00:48:03 ◼ ► But I also understand it was a time of inordinate, unprecedented stress within the company because
00:48:11 ◼ ► of the timeline of Steve Jobs is passing. I think coincidental to that was the sort of 2013 era,
00:48:23 ◼ ► Samsung is taking over this market and it Samsung is on the upswing. Apple can't do it just like we
00:48:32 ◼ ► all predicted Apple can't do it without Steve Jobs. Samsung is the one who's innovating.
00:48:37 ◼ ► You know, that's that's the the famous ad lib by Phil Schiller at WWDC introducing the the Mac Pro
00:48:49 ◼ ► unrelenting pressure externally and the deep skepticism that everyone at Apple face that
00:48:56 ◼ ► they could they could do without Steve Jobs, right, which is got to be got to be exhausting,
00:49:02 ◼ ► right? Because one of the things that I hope that people get out of this book is that these
00:49:07 ◼ ► are people who who had a deep connection with Steve, they worked with him every day. You know,
00:49:12 ◼ ► we all know that Steve Jobs could be an asshole, but these people loved working for him. And that
00:49:16 ◼ ► was why they woke up in the morning. And so there was there was just real profound grief in the wake
00:49:22 ◼ ► of his death. And I just don't think that that's something that we think enough about as we think
00:49:27 ◼ ► about a company is like the individuals and some of the some of the just basic, you know,
00:49:36 ◼ ► Yeah. And I just think, you know, if they aired on the side of pushing the Apple Watch out one year,
00:49:44 ◼ ► maybe before they should have, I think it's understandable. And maybe, maybe it still was
00:49:50 ◼ ► the right decision to do overall. I mean, and you know, in the success the watch has had since then
00:49:55 ◼ ► would would sort of, you know, back that up to some degree. But that it in the same way that like,
00:50:01 ◼ ► when when Jobs first came back to the company, and they did the think secret ad campaign, or think
00:50:06 ◼ ► different ad campaign, which wasn't about pushing products, but was just a pure brand message,
00:50:14 ◼ ► Yeah, it was about redefining the company's image publicly, right? So they're not perceived as a
00:50:23 ◼ ► Right? Or maybe even certainly redefining the then current narrative around the company,
00:50:30 ◼ ► but not really redefining but reasserting what it really was, you know, right? Like the idea wasn't
00:50:36 ◼ ► that this is the new Apple, this is a fixed Apple from from the hiccups of recent years, but we're
00:50:43 ◼ ► we're, we're clarified in our thinking of what it is we're here to do. And this is the way we
00:50:49 ◼ ► should think about it. And in some sense, if they pushed if Tim Cook pushed to get and Jeff Williams
00:51:03 ◼ ► maybe it was worth it to assert that they can still launch a major new product when when they
00:51:09 ◼ ► did and that for morale and for you know, the the the what the what the outside world thinks of
00:51:17 ◼ ► Apple is they can still launch new things. But right, it's certainly relieved and alleviated
00:51:23 ◼ ► a lot of pressure externally, but by the same token, once it was released, when it didn't
00:51:30 ◼ ► measure up to internal and external expectations in terms of sales, then then they also took it on
00:51:38 ◼ ► the chin for that as well, which is, which is unfortunate because to your point with persistence,
00:51:44 ◼ ► that product is improved its capabilities and its functionalities. And you don't see it as often as
00:51:50 ◼ ► you see AirPods when you're commuting to work, but you see it a lot. If you're if you next time you
00:51:55 ◼ ► sit down at a restaurant, look around and see how many people have on a on an Apple Watch. It's,
00:52:08 ◼ ► One of the knocks against the whole idea was the idea that people don't wear watches anymore,
00:52:13 ◼ ► especially you know, the younger people are the less likely they are to wear a watch that watch
00:52:18 ◼ ► wearing was was at an all time low, especially for you know, people in their 20s at the time,
00:52:24 ◼ ► or even younger, like teenagers. And you know, the response is, why would I want to wear a watch? I
00:52:29 ◼ ► have a phone in my pocket, it tells me the time it's almost like the world you know, like for time
00:52:33 ◼ ► telling the whole world went back 100 years to pocket watches. But I get it. I'm always been a
00:52:39 ◼ ► watch where I've worn a wristwatch since I was a teenager. It's I feel naked without a watch on my
00:52:45 ◼ ► left wrist. But you know, I realized that that's a habit and I totally get the idea of why have
00:52:52 ◼ ► another thing to charge? Why have another thing to worry about? If I want to know what time it is,
00:52:56 ◼ ► I just take my phone out and I'm taking my phone in and out of my pocket 1000 times a day anyway.
00:53:00 ◼ ► Right. And I read Yeah, but they almost had to like recondition the world to accept that like,
00:53:08 ◼ ► watches have value. Yeah, yeah. And that you might want to have one like, I think that's part of the
00:53:20 ◼ ► every restaurant you go to, or you go to an airport or something like that. And if you do
00:53:24 ◼ ► look for people wearing Apple Watch, you're going to see a lot of them. And I think it's a lot of
00:53:28 ◼ ► people who weren't wearing a watch previously. Yes, sure. There's definitely people who did and
00:53:34 ◼ ► have switched to an Apple Watch. But I think that to be a success, they kind of had to reinvigorate
00:53:40 ◼ ► the idea that you might even want to wear a watch. Right, which gets you back to fashion, right?
00:53:46 ◼ ► Because that's the industry that had the deepest connection to timepieces up until that point. I
00:53:55 ◼ ► mean, what else could you have leaned on in order to kind of bridge that gap and sell this product
00:54:00 ◼ ► into into a world that had largely abandoned wearing timepieces. And you know, there is
00:54:05 ◼ ► technology in traditional watches. I just actually by coincidence linked to a thing the other day on
00:54:11 ◼ ► during Fireball, some somebody had just a wonderful, wonderful online, almost like a little mini book,
00:54:17 ◼ ► but animated, explaining how a mechanical watch works with all these little animations. It's just
00:54:23 ◼ ► absolutely fascinating. And, you know, it's technology, right? Like having a Rolex Submariner
00:54:30 ◼ ► that can go 300 meters under the surface of water and still remain airtight. That's technology. You
00:54:37 ◼ ► know, I mean, how many people who actually buy a Rolex go 100 meters deep in the ocean? I mean,
00:54:43 ◼ ► probably 0.001. And you know, the one is James Cameron. It's not something people typically do,
00:55:01 ◼ ► when you want to buy a Rolex, you go to a jeweler, you don't go to, you know, a technology store.
00:55:08 ◼ ► Jared: Right. And, oh, yeah, we can pick up when you come back. But I have some thoughts on that,
00:55:13 ◼ ► because I think one of the interesting things was delving into the history of time and timepieces,
00:55:19 ◼ ► because it provided both a lens into the deep thought that goes on inside Apple as they pursue
00:55:25 ◼ ► a product, but then also this kind of weird, I have this weird thing about empires and time
00:55:33 ◼ ► All right, put your finger on that. Let's come back to it after a moment. I'm going to tell
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00:57:51 ◼ ► days that I spent while I was reporting on this was when I went to the Greenwich Observatory in
00:57:57 ◼ ► London because I was trying to walk in the footsteps of the designers as they were trying
00:58:07 ◼ ► with this guy who's got a great book called About Time. His name's David Rooney. He's studied the
00:58:14 ◼ ► history of time for, you know, most of his life. And he was talking to me about how central developing
00:58:23 ◼ ► the mechanism to tell time accurately was to the construction of the British Empire. And it was
00:58:30 ◼ ► just like an interesting thing. So, like all the ships would come into the Greenwich Observatory,
00:58:54 ◼ ► If you think about it, it's really become a borderless country. And I just, I don't know,
00:58:59 ◼ ► it was just something that was like an interesting and slightly unique spin on history, like,
00:59:14 ◼ ► as humans, genera, you know, whatever, whatever was invented before you were born doesn't seem
00:59:19 ◼ ► like technology anymore. Right? Like, I often think about that, like, if you could time travel
00:59:24 ◼ ► and bring, say, Ben Franklin to the present day and show them around. And it's like, you might
00:59:29 ◼ ► think he might be, wouldn't you love to show them the iPhone? And it's like, I always think, like,
00:59:49 ◼ ► and then it just goes, where's it go? Where's the waste go? And it's like, you just say it just
00:59:54 ◼ ► goes out into the city, there's special pipes, it goes to a facility. And it's, you know,
01:00:00 ◼ ► wouldn't that be the most one of the most amazing things? Or even just all of indoor plumbing,
01:00:04 ◼ ► right? You just have a sink, you could just get clean, cold or hot water anytime you want, just by
01:00:09 ◼ ► turning a dial. You just don't think about it as technology. But you're talking about the
01:00:16 ◼ ► shipbuilding history of timekeeping is I've heard too that like the standardization in the US was
01:00:21 ◼ ► driven by the railroad companies. Because it before railroads, there was really no reason
01:00:30 ◼ ► to worry about whether, you know, like, let's say, you know, there's a big clock on Independence
01:00:36 ◼ ► Hall here in Philadelphia. And, you know, if you want to say that's and there's one on our city
01:00:40 ◼ ► hall, too. And if those clocks are four minutes different than a clock in New York City, well,
01:00:47 ◼ ► who cares, right? But then all of a sudden, with railroads, it kind of mattered, right? Like,
01:00:52 ◼ ► if a train was supposed to come in at five o'clock, you kind of needed it to be at the same,
01:00:57 ◼ ► you know, to the people in New York and Philadelphia had to have their watches at the same
01:01:01 ◼ ► time. Right. And that's why, at the outset of the watch project, they were so determined to make
01:01:07 ◼ ► sure that this was the most accurate timepiece that had ever been built. Because if they didn't
01:01:13 ◼ ► achieve that, then they would be violating the legacy of the problem tradition of time and why
01:01:21 ◼ ► it was so important to the development of society. That's it's a curious thing. And I know even now,
01:01:26 ◼ ► years later, people still mention that and we're still sort of circling around this, the
01:01:31 ◼ ► introduction of the original Apple Watch. And there's the fashion angle, which I still want
01:01:35 ◼ ► to get back to. But one of the pillars, as it was announced in September of, I believe, 2014,
01:01:43 ◼ ► and then it shipped in like April, May 2015. But in September 2014, when they introduced it,
01:01:49 ◼ ► one of the pillars was, they reiterated it. This is the most accurate watch in the history of the
01:01:55 ◼ ► world. This is the most accurate watch, the most accurate time piecing. I think Johnny Ive himself
01:02:01 ◼ ► might have narrated part of that in his introduction video. I've heard people like roll
01:02:06 ◼ ► their eyes, like who cares, right? Like who's ever been worried about whether it's the most accurate
01:02:10 ◼ ► watch in the world, but it clearly meant a lot to Apple. And they don't really talk about it anymore.
01:02:26 ◼ ► they weren't fully honoring the tradition of it. And they were deeply aware that this was one of the
01:02:35 ◼ ► most unique products they'd ever embarked on because it was one that was familiar to everyone.
01:02:40 ◼ ► Whereas, you know, if you look at the iPhone, yes, there were mobile phones, but there was nothing
01:02:45 ◼ ► like what they introduced at the time. And so, it changed our very understanding of what a phone
01:02:51 ◼ ► could be. And I guess this had to bridge our understanding of what a watch was and take us to
01:02:59 ◼ ► what a watch could be. And so, they were very aware that they were moving into something that
01:03:04 ◼ ► was pre-existing and that people came to with their own pre-existing notions of what it should
01:03:11 ◼ ► be and what it should do. One of the fascinating things, and it gets to the heart of this,
01:03:17 ◼ ► is it a fashion object? Is it a tech object? Is it a fitness object? And the answer to all of them
01:03:23 ◼ ► is yes, right? It's one of those trick questions where it's all of the above. But what mix do you
01:03:29 ◼ ► think about it? But one of the things that I can't think of anything else that was like it is the way
01:03:35 ◼ ► that it launched with three distinct tiers. They called it at the time the Apple Watch Sport,
01:03:41 ◼ ► which was the aluminum model, which is really the base model. Then there was just plain Apple Watch,
01:03:46 ◼ ► which was stainless steel. And instead of being like $400, $500, it was like $700, $800. And then
01:03:56 ◼ ► the, I guess the most controversial angle of it was the Apple Watch Edition, which was made out of
01:04:03 ◼ ► solid gold and started at $10,000 and sold up to like $17,500 or something like that. Yet all three,
01:04:13 ◼ ► like you could go in and buy a $17,000 gold Apple Watch, and I could go in and buy a $400,
01:04:21 ◼ ► or maybe it was $500 Apple Watch Sport made out of aluminum. And in terms of technology,
01:04:27 ◼ ► they were exactly the same. There was no battery life difference. There's just slight difference
01:04:34 ◼ ► in terms of the screen being sapphire on the higher end models and thus far more scratch
01:04:40 ◼ ► proof. And on the lower end models, ionized glass or something they call it. But it's still like the
01:04:51 ◼ ► I've even been told that the bill of materials costs between difference between stainless steel
01:04:57 ◼ ► and aluminum is borderline negligible. So the profit that Apple's re reaping on that model
01:05:04 ◼ ► alone to this day is outstanding. So yeah. But I'm also sitting here with a stainless steel watch on
01:05:12 ◼ ► my wrist. So you can feel the difference and some people are willing to pay out for it.
01:05:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I have the titanium one because I'm an idiot. But I do, I like the way it looks. I just
01:05:25 ◼ ► like the way that the titanium looks and I buy one and keep it for a few years. So it's worth it. But
01:05:29 ◼ ► this was obviously, it baffled people outside the company. And another weird thing about that
01:05:35 ◼ ► introduction was that they didn't talk about pricing at the introduction. They didn't say
01:05:40 ◼ ► what any of these, I think they said the starting price and that was it. But they didn't even say
01:05:46 ◼ ► which model was the low end one. And I remember in that interim between the announcement and
01:06:00 ◼ ► a pundit in the Apple space because there was lots to speculate upon. It's kind of fun to be
01:06:15 ◼ ► the guy who writes Daring Fireball. But there were a lot of people who thought that the
01:06:19 ◼ ► sport models would cost more than Apple Watch because they had an adjective and they thought
01:06:25 ◼ ► maybe ionized glass. They were so, you know, was even better than Sapphire and that it was meant
01:06:31 ◼ ► for an active lifestyle and therefore it would cost more. And I was like, no, you don't understand
01:06:35 ◼ ► the watch world. The watch world is very simple. Stainless steel is better than aluminum. That's
01:06:39 ◼ ► it. That's more expensive. But I'm curious how much reporting you did on the conflict within Apple
01:06:49 ◼ ► about that launch strategy of going all the way from $400 to $17,000 for the same product.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Matthew 4 My reporting was less focused on conflict internal or any internal conflict over pricing.
01:07:10 ◼ ► It was more focused on two things that I thought were interesting, you know, around the watch
01:07:16 ◼ ► project. And one of which is, you know, the fact that they embarked on all those three different
01:07:22 ◼ ► plus the array of watch band materials that they designed made that they had to have a support team
01:07:39 ◼ ► ability of Johnny Ive to keep the studio kind of, I guess, protected and guarded and really curated
01:07:49 ◼ ► in terms of who had badge access to the studio and this principle that was understood and these
01:07:56 ◼ ► rules that were understood that had been abided by everyone who had access over the years, this
01:08:01 ◼ ► idea that you don't talk about costs in the studio, that suddenly began, those lines began to get
01:08:08 ◼ ► blurry because you had people who were coming into the studio who weren't indoctrinated in that and
01:08:13 ◼ ► it became harder to keep the group that had access and badge access as carefully curated as it had
01:08:21 ◼ ► been in the past. So there's one moment in the book where there are a couple of designers who
01:08:26 ◼ ► are in a meeting with some ops and engineers guys and the ops guys are like, "Well, if we
01:08:30 ◼ ► cut the crown with this system, we'll save this amount of money and it's totally worth it. And
01:08:37 ◼ ► look, you can't see the difference between the two." And the designers are looking at them going,
01:08:41 ◼ ► "No, no, no, that's something Samsung would do. That's not something Apple would ever do."
01:08:45 ◼ ► And it's partly an outgrowth of being so ambitious in terms of how many SKUs they were undertaking,
01:08:53 ◼ ► SKUs being the different array of and variations of the watch they were undertaking at that time,
01:09:00 ◼ ► and how that created some tension and kind of wrinkles in a well-designed and well-ironed and
01:09:09 ◼ ► operating system that they built. Yeah, and compare and contrast with just the original iPhone where
01:09:15 ◼ ► there was one color. I mean, there were like, I guess, storage configurations, right? It was like
01:09:21 ◼ ► 64, 16 gigs or 8 gigs even. I think they even had an 8 gig original phone, but it was like you go
01:09:28 ◼ ► like 8, 16, 32 gigabytes, but that was it. Your only option was how much storage do you want in
01:09:35 ◼ ► it. Every box looked the same. Every iPhone looked the same. Apple didn't even sell cases at the time.
01:09:41 ◼ ► I don't think they foresaw the way the world actually evolved where 98% of people put their
01:09:48 ◼ ► phone in a case and keep it in a case until they stopped using it. It was one thing, right? And we
01:09:53 ◼ ► just make as many of this one thing as we possibly can and go versus the watch just not that many
01:10:00 ◼ ► years later with not quite infinite, but borderline, right? Three tiers of materials, two sizes of
01:10:08 ◼ ► watch, 38 and 42 in each material. And whichever watch strap you want as a customer, you could
01:10:17 ◼ ► configure the steel watch with that strap or an aluminum watch with this other strap or buy a
01:10:23 ◼ ► couple extra straps. And all of it was there at the beginning. It wasn't just here's the one Apple
01:10:28 ◼ ► watch go. Right. Right. And it was probably the right decision, right? If you don't want everybody
01:10:36 ◼ ► to be walking around feeling like a cyborg with the same exact thing on their wrist, like you have
01:10:41 ◼ ► to give them some variety and some choice as to how they want to configure it and personalize it.
01:10:47 ◼ ► By the same token, I don't know that in embarking on that strategy, it was understood what the
01:10:54 ◼ ► consequences of that would be to kind of the internal operations of the company, namely the
01:11:00 ◼ ► design studio, which was really spearheading and driving its project. One of the stories I want to
01:11:07 ◼ ► touch on is we mentioned this before we started recording, but a saga of the last decade at Apple
01:11:14 ◼ ► that isn't really in the book is the saga of the butterfly keyboards. And the maybe to a lesser
01:11:21 ◼ ► degree with the same Mac books, the, the port story, I think fame, you know, maybe exemplified
01:11:28 ◼ ► by the no adjective 12 inch MacBook that just had one port, one USB C port, that was for all data
01:11:36 ◼ ► and power. And I'm curious why, you know, it's not that it's a conspicuous option. It's a nice
01:11:43 ◼ ► thick book full of chock full of reporting, some stuff had to be left out. But I'm wondering
01:11:49 ◼ ► why that didn't play a bigger role in them. I mean, the honest answer is you really do have
01:12:00 ◼ ► you know, tight and close the focus was on Johnny Ive and Tim Cook and what their core concerns were
01:12:09 ◼ ► during this period. And in doing that, you know, I certainly did some reporting on the butterfly
01:12:18 ◼ ► keyboard fiasco. My reporting found, and John, you know, this world honestly in many ways better than
01:12:24 ◼ ► I ever could, it found that, you know, some of the fault for that was, was laid at the feet of some
01:12:30 ◼ ► of the engineers. And it didn't seem that, you know, that it fell at the feet of Johnny and that
01:12:37 ◼ ► he didn't personally drive a lot of that. But more than that, I mean, if you're looking at,
01:12:48 ◼ ► you know, the flaws that Johnny might have had or the mistakes he might have made in terms of form
01:12:54 ◼ ► over function, I felt like that was best revealed through his work on Apple Park and the experience
01:13:02 ◼ ► of employees once they got into Apple Park. So, I thought that there was a way and that, of course,
01:13:08 ◼ ► is a major thread of the book that goes from beginning to end, that there was a way to touch
01:13:12 ◼ ► on it through that because that was such a seminal effort for Apple during this decade. And when
01:13:19 ◼ ► you're making these choices, a lot of what you're thinking is, okay, what are people going to look
01:13:23 ◼ ► back in 10, 15, 20 years from now and say like, that was an important moment during that period
01:13:30 ◼ ► at Apple. And I know that the butterfly keyboard feels important to a lot of people because they
01:13:38 ◼ ► dreaded having to plug and unplug all the dongles in and out of their computer or, you know,
01:13:43 ◼ ► got frustrated that the keyboard didn't work the way that they wanted to. But I think ultimately,
01:13:48 ◼ ► when people look back on it 10, 15 years from now, that's not going to be something that they
01:13:53 ◼ ► think about. But that Apple Park is something that's going to still be big on people's radar
01:13:59 ◼ ► because it's such a unique building. Well, I think it gets to what I said earlier about Johnny
01:14:04 ◼ ► I've been driven to design things that weren't transient, right? And what is more permanent
01:14:12 ◼ ► than a building, right? That's about as permanent as anything a human can help to design and build.
01:14:19 ◼ ► I mean, and I, you know, I mean, honestly, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I, the, it seems like
01:14:27 ◼ ► a safe assumption that, you know, Apple Park is going to be there and look like that long after
01:14:33 ◼ ► you and I are gone, right? Like 70, 80 years from now, isn't that still going to be Apple's
01:14:38 ◼ ► headquarters if Apple is still a concern, you know? Yeah, so long as it doesn't, you know,
01:14:44 ◼ ► fall to fall victim to the same fate that like Sun or some of these other giant companies did
01:14:49 ◼ ► right before they built their giant headquarters. You know, it doesn't seem like Apple's on a path
01:14:55 ◼ ► to stumble in the near future, but you never know long term. I almost think with a building so
01:15:01 ◼ ► striking and such a incredible, you know, it really is a park. It is it's this huge thing that even
01:15:08 ◼ ► if something, if Apple over the next 20 years falls into decline and irrelevance, that it's
01:15:17 ◼ ► more like the classic skyscrapers of 100 years ago, you know, like the Chrysler building. I don't
01:15:22 ◼ ► even know if the Chrysler Company still occupies the building, but the building is still there,
01:15:26 ◼ ► right? The Sears Tower is no longer called the Sears Tower. Sears is not a retailer anymore.
01:15:33 ◼ ► The whole chain has gone away, but the skyscraper is still there. You know, like I almost feel like
01:15:39 ◼ ► that's what Johnny Ive was building, a building that might have more permanence than Apple itself.
01:15:53 ◼ ► some of the physical manifestation of some of the flaws that dogged Apple over this decade, right?
01:16:11 ◼ ► this just does not exist anywhere else. And it took a tremendous imagination to pull it off.
01:16:20 ◼ ► moved in there, including the fact that, you know, chatter would just ricochet down the halls
01:16:25 ◼ ► in such a way that they had to come in and put in sound machines to dampen the noise because that
01:16:30 ◼ ► wasn't anticipated. So yeah. It is, you know, and there was, I know, I don't even know how this got
01:16:36 ◼ ► resolved. But I know that when it first opened, it there was a lot of consternation that it was being
01:16:42 ◼ ► dictated that you had to use a certain type of chair. And, you know, it was like a Johnny Ive
01:16:47 ◼ ► designed chair. And I certainly am picky about my chairs. I think most of us who have, you know,
01:16:53 ◼ ► some sort of desk job, at some point, a lot of people learn to get a get a good comfortable chair
01:17:00 ◼ ► and your body will thank you for it. But the chair that is comfortable for you to sit in for 810,
01:17:07 ◼ ► maybe more hours a day, you know, obviously, some people at Apple during crunch periods are putting
01:17:11 ◼ ► in incredibly long hours. Your comfortable chair is not necessarily my comfortable chair and people
01:17:23 ◼ ► Jared: Yeah, yeah. And the doubt about it, there's almost something like almost like a little
01:17:29 ◼ ► Howard Roark like that, or Frank Lloyd Wright or something like that. Very insistent that the
01:17:34 ◼ ► furniture goes with the architecture, which is a bit impractical to your point when you're there
01:17:44 ◼ ► Do you think I mean, all right, let me take one last break. I have one more sponsor. Let's do
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01:19:12 ◼ ► monetize your membership with Memberful. So, obviously, a big part of this book and a big
01:19:18 ◼ ► part of this post-jobs era at Apple is that Johnny Ive is no longer there, right? It was,
01:19:25 ◼ ► do you think, I'm not sure he would have lasted as long as he did if he didn't have the Apple
01:19:42 ◼ ► he was fatigued and weary after the launch. He walked into Tim Cook and basically said,
01:19:46 ◼ ► you know, I'd like to go and they ultimately came up with an arrangement that he would be there part
01:19:53 ◼ ► time and continue to work on new things. So, Apple Park and the car and augmented reality efforts,
01:20:09 ◼ ► Pete: Right. And do you think, I mean, let's go all the way back to the cover of the book.
01:20:23 ◼ ► how Apple became a multi-trillion dollar company refers to the Tim Cook thread of the book. And
01:20:29 ◼ ► then the flip side of that is how it lost its soul. Jobs called Johnny Ive his spiritual partner,
01:20:36 ◼ ► they were essentially creative soulmates. Ive walks out the door in a way they literally lost
01:20:43 ◼ ► their soul in that essence. But in a metaphorical way, the reason Johnny left was he grew disillusioned
01:20:51 ◼ ► inside this company that he loved because in the Jobs era, it was a place where art was really
01:20:58 ◼ ► designed to lead to commerce and increasingly in the Cook era, it's become a place where
01:21:12 ◼ ► but you start to have people coming into the design studio, which people on campus called
01:21:18 ◼ ► the Holy of Holies, and raising concerns about cost. You have limitations in terms of the
01:21:25 ◼ ► projects you can undertake because Apple's so big after jobs stuff that they really need to
01:21:31 ◼ ► only embark on and pursue products that have the potential to be at least a 10 billion dollar
01:21:37 ◼ ► business. And that becomes a metric internally and that's why they explore these giant categories
01:21:42 ◼ ► like healthcare, auto, and energy because they know that they've really saturated the electronics
01:21:50 ◼ ► market and they need to move into something else to satisfy Wall Street. So, those are the tensions
01:21:56 ◼ ► that take place internally that they're dealing with. Somebody put this in, I mean, this is not to
01:22:02 ◼ ► knock Apple, this is a manifestation of the kind of growth that many Silicon Valley companies have
01:22:08 ◼ ► been wrestling with. You can look at Google and see some of the same challenges there as well,
01:22:14 ◼ ► but as you get bigger and bigger, it's hard, I mean, it's impossible to be the same nimble
01:22:20 ◼ ► company you once were and to pursue some of the things and take some of the risks that you might
01:22:26 ◼ ► have done in the past. It's, the phone is such a fascinating product and I, you know, it, and I
01:22:36 ◼ ► think we touched on it earlier when we talked about the scope of the manufacturing effort in China to
01:22:43 ◼ ► make this many, you know, hundreds of millions of these things a year and it's so labor intensive,
01:22:49 ◼ ► right? It's not like an iPhone is assembled by robots yet, I mean, maybe someday, but right now
01:22:55 ◼ ► it's incredibly labor intensive and it's effectively these city-sized factories to fill these
01:23:03 ◼ ► boats with enough iPhones to satisfy demand. It's just unbelievable. It really is, I think,
01:23:09 ◼ ► without question, the most successful consumer product in the history of the world. I don't know
01:23:15 ◼ ► what else you could compare it to. I mean, it's like you have to go back to like the East India
01:23:19 ◼ ► trading company, you know, centuries ago to find anything that's that successful, but then again,
01:23:25 ◼ ► you know, and it's like, so that's, it's sort of like the ultimate goal. I've always said that the
01:23:29 ◼ ► iPhone introduction in 2007 was the canonical ideal Apple keynote, right? Everybody went, goes into,
01:23:38 ◼ ► before the iPhone went into every keynote hoping, I hope that Steve Jobs has the biggest surprise
01:23:43 ◼ ► of all time and, you know, ready to, ready to blow our minds with something that's been kept under
01:23:49 ◼ ► wraps and will change the world. And, you know, you can't do that every year. You know, you can't
01:23:55 ◼ ► do it twice a year or three times a year or however many times they have these keynotes. It doesn't
01:23:59 ◼ ► work that way. Ideas like that don't come along very often, but here's the one where the actual
01:24:04 ◼ ► keynote blew everybody away and then turned out to be a product that people loved and changed their
01:24:11 ◼ ► lives and became this true. I mean, just almost unfathomable juggernaut of financial success,
01:24:19 ◼ ► right? I mean, I know a lot of times people misspeak when they're talking about millions
01:24:23 ◼ ► and billions or even trillions, because it's like your brain files them all under like gazillions and,
01:24:29 ◼ ► you know, it's easy to misspeak, but you're, you're off by a, you know, a factor of a thousand.
01:24:33 ◼ ► If you misuse millions for billions, but you start looking at the money, it doesn't make sense to a
01:24:38 ◼ ► normal human being. You know, like that must clearly be part of Tim Cook's genius is that he,
01:24:50 ◼ ► we haven't spent a lot of time talking about him, but that's, that's his great gift is,
01:25:00 ◼ ► that's why Apple has been able to go from making on the order of 20 million iPhones a year around
01:25:05 ◼ ► the time of job staff to 200 million a year. And that's, that's a staggering increase over,
01:25:11 ◼ ► over the span of a decade. Right. And, you know, and you start thinking about, you know,
01:25:30 ◼ ► have every quarter, lots of new people to the iPhone, but it's clearly sort of maxed out in
01:25:39 ◼ ► terms of how big it could get. And it, and like, to your point, it leaves Apple in a very different
01:25:46 ◼ ► position than they were in pre iPhone as to what can move the needle for the company. Right. And
01:25:56 ◼ ► it's funny looking back at the, the iPod era of 2001 to, and I know they kept selling them after
01:26:04 ◼ ► the iPhone came out, but effectively in hindsight, the iPhone was the end of the iPod, right? Because
01:26:10 ◼ ► everybody just plays their music and podcasts on their phone. It was only, that's only like a seven
01:26:17 ◼ ► year period, which is kind of mind boggling because it felt like a whole era. But it's like
01:26:23 ◼ ► the biggest the iPod got in that era, by today's Apple standards is not even that big, even though
01:26:29 ◼ ► we all felt it was this cultural phenomenon. You know, it was sort of more like, you know,
01:26:34 ◼ ► like what AirPods are today. It's a nice business, but it's probably about as small as it could be to
01:26:40 ◼ ► actually be worth Apple doing. Right. Right. The interesting thing, like, as we talk about this
01:26:46 ◼ ► and talk about the scope of, of what they're manufacturing is the schedule that they have
01:26:52 ◼ ► to keep to do it. It's very, very precise. And you know, we were talking about Johnny Iovin,
01:26:58 ◼ ► what does it mean for art no longer to lead commerce? I mean, there was a moment, you know,
01:27:03 ◼ ► after the iPhone was born, they're still making iPods and he had an idea for how to talk to
01:27:10 ◼ ► somebody who he was telling, he was lamenting, because he had an idea for a design change to the
01:27:17 ◼ ► iPod that was like two weeks too late to meet the schedule. And that meant that like, he couldn't
01:27:25 ◼ ► introduce it for a whole year, by which point it might be stale and not work. And those are the
01:27:30 ◼ ► type of sacrifices that all of a sudden you're having to make. It limits your creativity when
01:27:37 ◼ ► you're doing things at scale in the way that Apple has to do them because of how big it is.
01:27:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I love that story. That's one of the, I have that one highlighted in my copy of the book,
01:27:47 ◼ ► but I loved it because I'd never heard that before. But, and I can't, I can't say that I know
01:27:53 ◼ ► Johnny Iovin well. I've met him a few times, but I think I understand his, to some degree,
01:27:59 ◼ ► his frustrations under post-iPhone, post-Steve, Apple with the size. And I think that, you know,
01:28:09 ◼ ► like, is there possibly, I, the feeling I got from that anecdote in your book is that it wasn't just
01:28:15 ◼ ► that he came up with the idea too late. It was that he came up with it at literally the worst
01:28:20 ◼ ► time on the entire calendar. Like, you know, at least if he had had the idea three months later,
01:28:27 ◼ ► it's like, well, we've only got nine months to go. Whereas it was two weeks after the point of
01:28:31 ◼ ► no return for this is where it's locked in for September launch. And literally then 50 weeks
01:28:37 ◼ ► before it could be brought to bear and the next one around, you know, it must be frustrating.
01:28:47 ◼ ► And you also, I know this is not a new story, but like the story about with the original iPhone,
01:28:52 ◼ ► where when Steve Jobs introduced it at Mac world expo in January of 2007, it had a plastic screen
01:28:59 ◼ ► and shortly thereafter jobs, you know, carrying around prototypes, realized his keys were
01:29:07 ◼ ► scratching up the screen. We've got to get it to glass. The thing was already announced,
01:29:11 ◼ ► had to ship in June and they made it happen. You know, with Corning, he calls the Corning,
01:29:18 ◼ ► talks to the CEO, says all of your glass sucks. And which of course, who does that? Right. Except
01:29:25 ◼ ► for Steve Jobs. And instead of hanging up on him, the Corning CEO is like, well, we do have this
01:29:30 ◼ ► thing called gorilla glass that we're working on. And then they make it happen. Right. And there's,
01:29:35 ◼ ► there's Tim Cook, right? Like coming into that, you know, Tim Cook's role in that early 2007 is,
01:29:43 ◼ ► it's not like a minor change. Like, Hey, let's change the color of the plastic a little bit,
01:29:49 ◼ ► you know, or the color of orange underneath the mute switch. Let's, let's, let's go with
01:29:54 ◼ ► a different shade of orange or something like that. It's an altogether different material for
01:29:58 ◼ ► the screen on a device that was all screen. And they made it happen. I feel like that's exactly
01:30:06 ◼ ► what Johnny I've just profoundly missed about the earlier days, you know, that you could come up with
01:30:15 ◼ ► an idea like that and make it happen because the scale that Apple was operating at was so
01:30:20 ◼ ► much smaller. Right. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. I mean, that's, there was a nimbleness
01:30:28 ◼ ► that afforded them time to make changes or pursue something that in later years, they just couldn't.
01:30:37 ◼ ► I mean, I don't know what you, the HomePod, it's like a great example of this, right? Like,
01:30:49 ◼ ► be hard to sell enough speakers to add enough zeros to what they make on an annual basis
01:30:57 ◼ ► for a product like that to be worthwhile. Yet at the same time, they had to kind of jump into that
01:31:02 ◼ ► because Amazon was there. So there were competitive reasons to jump into it. But from a pure business
01:31:07 ◼ ► standpoint, there was no real reason to be in that business. Yeah. And then they got out of it
01:31:12 ◼ ► in a very un-Apple-like way where they were just like, you know, just sort of, well, we're gonna,
01:31:17 ◼ ► we're gonna stop making the big HomePod. And now if you'd like one, just, you have to get the HomePod
01:31:22 ◼ ► Mini and that's it. And it just sort of, it was just sort of like a sad little wah wah, you know.
01:31:28 ◼ ► And it's unlike Apple not to stick with something, right? Like you mentioned that with the Apple
01:31:34 ◼ ► Watch where, okay, maybe the first one was arguably underpowered, maybe almost inarguably
01:31:41 ◼ ► a little bit underpowered, didn't have quite the battery life it should have. And they just were
01:31:45 ◼ ► already hard at work on the next years and the next years and the next years. And every September,
01:31:51 ◼ ► there's a new one with better battery life. And eventually it was only a handful of years before
01:31:55 ◼ ► they got to what they clearly wanted to do all along, which is keep the time on the watch
01:32:00 ◼ ► all the time, even if it's like in a reduced power state where the second hand doesn't rotate,
01:32:06 ◼ ► but you can at least glance at it and see the time no matter what. They didn't do that with HomePod.
01:32:11 ◼ ► And I, you know, I don't think you have to, you don't need lots of sources inside Apple to sort
01:32:16 ◼ ► of figure out that they just sort of looked at it and at some point Tim Cook's side of the
01:32:37 ◼ ► inside the company, right? Getting the Siri team and the software team and the design team to kind
01:32:41 ◼ ► of all work harmoniously to make something that was fully thought out. Yeah, I was told repeatedly
01:32:47 ◼ ► in my reporting was just a real, a real challenge. One of the things that comes across I and
01:32:52 ◼ ► Tim Cook, to me, is inscrutable from the outside in a way that Jobs wasn't. I mean, clearly when
01:33:05 ◼ ► Steve Jobs was on stage doing an introduction, you know, he was in showman mode and had a different
01:33:13 ◼ ► persona. And certainly, you know, the fact that he could be abrasive, Kurt, however many other
01:33:23 ◼ ► adjectives you'd like to describe how he worked internally and demanding, right? It's clearly
01:33:29 ◼ ► demanding, but it would come out on stage sometimes. I mean, I love the story of the keynote.
01:33:35 ◼ ► I forget which year it was, but it was towards the end of Jobs's career there. But they had some kind
01:33:41 ◼ ► of demo at, I think, WWDC because it was a big, big, big room with thousands of people. And the
01:33:47 ◼ ► Wi Fi demo didn't work for like the new iPhone that he was introducing. And his persona on stage
01:33:56 ◼ ► changed. And you could kind of see the real Steve Jobs, or at least that other side of the real
01:34:01 ◼ ► Steve Jobs. And then they went on with some other demo and he came back out and said, "We've figured
01:34:07 ◼ ► out what's going on. It's you people out in the audience. There's 400 pocket Wi Fi networks set up
01:34:14 ◼ ► for people who were live blogging the keynote. I need you to shut them all off." And do you remember
01:34:21 ◼ ► this? Oh my God, this is real. And if you're sitting next to someone who has one, make them
01:34:28 ◼ ► shut it off. If you guys want this demo to continue, you're going to shut off these Wi.
01:34:45 ◼ ► one of my favorite moments in the book is, you know, in his dealings with Trump and how masterfully
01:34:57 ◼ ► gearing up to go in for a meeting with a bunch of other CEOs. He was seated right to the right
01:35:02 ◼ ► of Trump in preparation for that Apple leak to Axios that he was going to confront Trump over the
01:35:09 ◼ ► immigration order. And then, so all the Trump administration people are coming in going like,
01:35:16 ◼ ► "Oh my God, this is going to be such a disaster. Like Trump's going to load on camera and chew out
01:35:28 ◼ ► And they go through this entire meeting, nothing happens. And as he's kind of breezing his way out
01:35:34 ◼ ► the door, Tim Cook says someone quietly to Trump, "I wish you would put more heart into your
01:35:39 ◼ ► immigration strategy and immigration policy." And then that becomes a headline in Axios later.
01:35:45 ◼ ► In the day that he "confronted" Trump and everything else. And it was conveyed and relayed
01:35:52 ◼ ► back to, you know, a workforce in Cupertino that was really agitated about this. But I think there's
01:35:58 ◼ ► just some artfulness to Tim Cook's ability to kind of navigate situations like that. And it flows
01:36:08 ◼ ► Jay Famiglietti And he really is just unflappable. But you hear these stories. There's the famous one
01:36:22 ◼ ► Jay Famiglietti Yeah, Sabikhan. And somebody's got to get to China to figure this out. And
01:36:26 ◼ ► five minutes later, he turns to him at the same meeting. He's like, "Why are you still here?"
01:36:30 ◼ ► And he's like, "Oh, I get it." And he just gets up, pulls his chair back, gets in a car,
01:36:36 ◼ ► heads straight to SFO to get on the next flight to China and doesn't even have like a bag packed.
01:36:41 ◼ ► He's got like what? Like his MacBook. That's it. He's just gonna buy clothes at the airport or when
01:36:46 ◼ ► he lands in China. But that's, he's like, "Oh, I get it. I understand how important this is to you.
01:37:04 ◼ ► upbraiding a bunch of journalists around their Wi-Fi all in is diplomatic of the same character
01:37:12 ◼ ► he was, you know, reprimanding staff behind the scenes. But with Cook, you're talking about
01:37:21 ◼ ► bringing new people in to present to him because he was known to take a deck and flip through it.
01:37:27 ◼ ► And if he was unsatisfied with it in the middle of somebody providing a presentation about it,
01:37:31 ◼ ► he would flip the page and literally say, "Next," in just like the iciest, coldest fashion. And it
01:37:38 ◼ ► would cause young staff to like leaf in tears, right? So, it's not like mean, and he's not
01:37:56 ◼ ► Jay Famiglietti An enormous amount of what he's, you know, he's famous for operations, but he's got
01:38:01 ◼ ► his right-hand man, Jeff Williams, who's so Cook-like in so many ways, it's kind of bizarre
01:38:23 ◼ ► politics. And that's both outside Apple, like, you know, having four years of Donald Trump in
01:38:29 ◼ ► the White House and dealing with that as the CEO of America's leading, most profitable company and
01:38:37 ◼ ► a technology, you know. And the way, you know, it's not just Trump's personality he had to deal
01:38:42 ◼ ► with. It was with Trump waging a trade war with China and not having China decide to reciprocate
01:38:51 ◼ ► by punishing Apple. Apple kind of sailed through that, you know, as Huawei was being blacklisted
01:38:57 ◼ ► around the world from, you know, being, you know, like supplying 5G antennas and stuff like that.
01:39:03 ◼ ► Apple didn't really suffer from that. There was no reciprocation towards Apple from China. And,
01:39:07 ◼ ► you know, I think that's to Tim Cook's credit. But then there's the politics inside the company
01:39:11 ◼ ► as well, which is a lot of what your reporting is about. There's, to me, one of the most interesting
01:39:17 ◼ ► stories that I have never heard before is some of the backstory between the Beats acquisition.
01:39:25 ◼ ► What's, what, tell me something, like, what to you in your reporting was most interesting about the
01:39:30 ◼ ► Beats acquisition? For god's sake. For god's sake. For god's sake. For god's sake. For god's sake.
01:39:32 ◼ ► They met, I just didn't expect, and like none of the people from Beats who were acquired expected
01:39:37 ◼ ► was to go into Apple and find out that Apple was already well on its way in terms of building out
01:39:44 ◼ ► its own subscription music service. And so they thought they were coming in, bringing this product
01:39:51 ◼ ► in Beats Music that was going to be the foundation for Apple Music. And Apple was already hard at
01:39:56 ◼ ► work at developing its own version of that. And so they wound up having to fuse the two together.
01:40:03 ◼ ► That surprised me. I just, I didn't anticipate that. I didn't realize that was something
01:40:07 ◼ ► they were at work on because much of their public positioning around subscription music services was,
01:40:13 ◼ ► we think people should buy their music. We don't believe in people just subscribing to music on a
01:40:19 ◼ ► monthly basis. Right. That people want to own their music. And it's, you know, they've, that's
01:40:26 ◼ ► a hard thing for a company to move from because I think they really meant it. And they did build
01:40:33 ◼ ► a phenomenal music store, you know, and rejuvenated the music sales industry at a time when
01:40:43 ◼ ► the competition wasn't really CDs, it was piracy. Right. And, you know, got money, got people buying
01:40:49 ◼ ► albums and buying singles. I mean, they brought back the single, which hadn't really been a thing
01:40:54 ◼ ► since like the 1960s. My mom, I remember growing up, my mom had a bunch of, she was much more of
01:40:59 ◼ ► a singles purchaser in her single life than an album purchaser. So we, we just had hundreds and
01:41:05 ◼ ► hundreds of singles from like the Beatles and the Stones. And that's what our household record
01:41:10 ◼ ► collection was like, but it was she, and my mom's perspective was exactly like what Apple wound up
01:41:15 ◼ ► doing with the iTunes store, which is why would I buy the whole album? I only wanted these two songs,
01:41:19 ◼ ► but you know, to, to admit, not that admit defeat, but admit that times and tastes are changing. And
01:41:24 ◼ ► if they want to stay relevant, I mean, at this point, just a few short years into the Apple music,
01:41:29 ◼ ► era, it would be almost sad if, if they didn't have a streaming music service and were still
01:41:37 ◼ ► only selling songs on iTunes, because that's just not how people listen to music now. And if anything,
01:41:42 ◼ ► it's, I was just gonna say that, I mean, they nearly lost kind of, I don't know, this thing
01:41:48 ◼ ► that they took so much pride in, which was their, their connection to the music industry, you know,
01:41:53 ◼ ► because Spotify was sailing past it at that point. They were almost a beat too late to the party.
01:41:59 ◼ ► They got there literally just in time. Granted, the product was a little bit flawed at the outset.
01:42:04 ◼ ► I think one of the fascinating things about that is it didn't matter, you know, that it was flawed.
01:42:08 ◼ ► People still wound up subscribing at levels that exceeded their own expectations internally.
01:42:13 ◼ ► Pete: But they're, they are number two to Spotify, which must rankle. And, you know, it's,
01:42:20 ◼ ► it's a weird spot for Apple to be in, in my opinion, because it's not, it's not a failure.
01:42:25 ◼ ► It's not something they should move on from. It's not, you know, like the HomePod. It's,
01:42:30 ◼ ► it, but they are number two. And there's a sense, I think, that they should be number one,
01:42:42 ◼ ► Jared: I'm sure they're dissatisfied with that. I mean, you could chalk it up to the fact that
01:42:48 ◼ ► Spotify's numbers are greater as a consequence of Android users being subscribers, and that Apple
01:42:54 ◼ ► has not really shown a full willingness to go beyond the walled garden, but that's still core
01:43:03 ◼ ► to what they believe should be, you know, their subscriber base. And then when you look at their,
01:43:08 ◼ ► their, their long-term strategy, as Mike Gorman's reported over at Bloomberg, there's this increasing
01:43:14 ◼ ► push towards a full subscription offering, an Apple subscription offering in the future,
01:43:20 ◼ ► all I am is on Prime. And then maybe there's some pricing advantage that they can, they can secure
01:43:25 ◼ ► over, over Spotify that it gives them a leg up. But so long as Spotify is still relying on Android
01:43:31 ◼ ► users, they're never globally going to be able to surpass them because Apple has so many fewer
01:43:39 ◼ ► And for reasons that I don't, I think are very hard to put your finger on Apple's foray into
01:43:47 ◼ ► Apple Music on Android has never really gained traction to my knowledge. I don't know what the
01:43:54 ◼ ► numbers look like inside Apple, but it doesn't seem to me like anybody on Android really gives
01:43:59 ◼ ► much thought to Apple Music as opposed to when Apple made the decision 20 years ago to move the
01:44:08 ◼ ► iPod to Windows and gain tremendous, you know, that that's what made the iPod explode in
01:44:14 ◼ ► popularity was going beyond the Mac as, as the, the computer you had to use with an iPod to,
01:44:22 ◼ ► okay, we'll, we'll support any computer and we'll make, we'll make iTunes as good as we can make it.
01:44:26 ◼ ► And people actually liked using iTunes on Windows which I know people find hard to believe is with
01:44:31 ◼ ► all the complaints over the way that music app works now, but it was, it was just, you know,
01:44:36 ◼ ► Jobs described it as a glass of ice water to people in hell and, you know, it, I don't know,
01:44:45 ◼ ► I was going to say, go with the anecdote, but I was going to say it's funny because like
01:44:48 ◼ ► Apple's whole ethos when it comes to like taking on big projects is, you know, taking whatever
01:44:54 ◼ ► conventional wisdom might be out there and, and bringing a whole new perspective to it that allows
01:45:01 ◼ ► them to leapfrog whatever existing products exist, but they still seem so wedded internally to the
01:45:07 ◼ ► walled garden and the walled garden ethos that it's been hard for those who advocate making a
01:45:14 ◼ ► service available on Android to really get that service to be treated with the same kind of tear
01:45:26 ◼ ► There's an anecdote in the book when, when the Beats deal was, I guess, sealed, you know,
01:45:31 ◼ ► or nearly sealed and it came down to the question of titles, you know, what, what would Jimmy
01:45:49 ◼ ► Right. Chief creative, a new title created just for him, sort of like the way that the chief
01:45:54 ◼ ► design officer title was created specifically for Johnny Ive and Phil Schiller objected to it on the
01:46:00 ◼ ► grounds of something to the effect of what are the rest of us not creative. And it's like, that's,
01:46:08 ◼ ► that's the sort of, that's the internal politics that I see as Tim Cook having, you know, I think,
01:46:14 ◼ ► you know, from the outside and having read the book and from my perspective, navigated very well,
01:46:20 ◼ ► but there are big personalities within Apple. Right. And you don't think that because Apple's
01:46:26 ◼ ► ethos is sort of it's Apple that makes the products. You don't put people's names on the
01:46:40 ◼ ► Yeah, certainly. Certainly. I mean, I think the, you know, there's a whole chapter that deals with
01:46:46 ◼ ► one of the biggest egos that Apple ever had, which is Scott Forstall and, and how that ego and some
01:46:52 ◼ ► of his swagger and some of his political, I don't know, their infighting and some of the political
01:46:57 ◼ ► bloodsport behind the scenes during the jobs period when jobs was kind of uber ego and kind
01:47:02 ◼ ► of made sure everybody was balanced correctly, came back to bite Forstall after jobs, after jobs
01:47:09 ◼ ► stuff. Yeah. What's, what's your take on Forstall's ouster? It's clear based on my reporting that it,
01:47:17 ◼ ► it was related to maps, but it was not because of maps and that's a fine line. But, you know,
01:47:23 ◼ ► Forstall famously told Cook that he wouldn't apologize for the maps thing. Right. The rationale,
01:47:52 ◼ ► not embarking on a project because they didn't want to be reprimanded publicly or shamed publicly,
01:47:58 ◼ ► which is, which is like an actually, that's like a sophisticated rationale. It's not like,
01:48:02 ◼ ► no, I don't want the embarrassment of apologizing. It's like, hey, what are the long-term consequences
01:48:07 ◼ ► of an apology and leaning into kind of the Antinogate philosophy of jobs. But ultimately,
01:48:13 ◼ ► when it came down to it, he just didn't, he, he battled so much with his peers and was seen and
01:48:24 ◼ ► perceived to be somebody who was a collegial that in this new Tim Cook era, where there was going to
01:48:31 ◼ ► have to be product developed by consensus, he didn't fit. Not to mention, and I don't know the
01:48:36 ◼ ► answer to this. I mean, he was, he was one of the few people that his peers considered to be,
01:48:41 ◼ ► be the one who thought he could also be CEO. So, so that, that that's another factor there. Like,
01:48:49 ◼ ► you know, if you're Tim Cook and you're taking over the reins and there's one guy at the,
01:48:53 ◼ ► the round table, so to speak, because there's what, 10, 10 to 12 people who meet every Monday
01:48:58 ◼ ► and make the decisions for the company. And there's one guy who thinks he can do the job.
01:49:11 ◼ ► largely in agreement here is that if maps was, if the maps launch mattered at all, it was only as
01:49:18 ◼ ► the straw that broke the camel's back. You know, that, and I think that the, the, there's a common
01:49:25 ◼ ► misconception that that was the whole thing, that maps was so bad and Forstall wouldn't apologize
01:49:30 ◼ ► out of obstinance. And so, you know, he was, he was canned, but I think it was, I think what happened,
01:49:37 ◼ ► I think the fundamental error that Scott Forstall made was that he vastly underestimated how much of
01:49:45 ◼ ► his political clout outside his group was because he was Steve's software guy. And that it was,
01:49:55 ◼ ► it was, I think he conflated Steve's clout and authority with his own and got blindsided by the
01:50:05 ◼ ► fact that his peers at the company at the SVP level didn't like him and didn't like working
01:50:12 ◼ ► for them. I mean, it's been reported elsewhere, but for a long time that, that at some point,
01:50:17 ◼ ► Johnny, I've told Tim Cook, I'm not meeting with him anymore, which seems like a problem.
01:50:25 ◼ ► had to dust up over the year in the Watergate saga because Forstall thought it was his fault.
01:50:31 ◼ ► Then when he found out it was because of the hardware, he kind of, he brought some internal
01:50:37 ◼ ► shame on Johnny that wasn't appreciated. So, there was just bad blood there that had built up over
01:50:42 ◼ ► the years that people could make peace with because Jobs was there to pacify everybody.
01:50:58 ◼ ► I've always compared Steve Jobs's role at Apple to that of a movie director that, you know, that,
01:51:04 ◼ ► that the director maybe doesn't, doesn't write the screenplay, doesn't operate the camera,
01:51:10 ◼ ► doesn't appear on as an actor on the show, but it's the director who is saying, this is what it
01:51:19 ◼ ► should look like. This is good enough. That's not good enough. Do another take. Not good enough. Not
01:51:24 ◼ ► good enough. Okay. That looks good enough. It's the arbiter of whose taste is it? Who's ultimately
01:51:30 ◼ ► saying, okay, this is what we should do. This is how good this effort is. I don't, I don't,
01:51:35 ◼ ► you know, obviously this is not, I don't think that's like a deep insight into Steve Jobs's
01:51:40 ◼ ► role at Apple, but who's that person after Steve Jobs? Right? Was it, I think for a while, it was
01:51:48 ◼ ► pretty clear that in the 2011 to 2015 era, that person was Johnny Ive, right? And that was part
01:51:56 ◼ ► of Johnny taking, after Forstall was ousted, taking over the role of software design in
01:52:06 ◼ ► a strong case to be made that he became the person driving product forward. And that's why the book
01:52:11 ◼ ► spent so much time writing about the watch because, because he did drive that product. And that's,
01:52:16 ◼ ► that's why Apple had a new product category in that period. I think it's an open question of,
01:52:22 ◼ ► of who is that at this point? And does Apple need an individual or can it do it by consensus?
01:52:27 ◼ ► You know, I think increasingly product marketing has a much bigger voice in what Apple's doing on
01:52:32 ◼ ► the product side of things. But does it, you know, is Jaws that person? I don't know. I think we're,
01:52:37 ◼ ► I think there's still a bit of a shakeout and people may find it unsatisfying in the book
01:52:42 ◼ ► because the book ends in 2019. But I do think Apple needs that type of figure. And even Johnny
01:52:50 ◼ ► was, he wasn't quite, he wasn't the director that Steve was, right? Because he benefited from Steve's
01:52:57 ◼ ► other direction. Right. I, you know, and I know it's again, an overused analogy, but that they were
01:53:02 ◼ ► sort of like Lennon and McCartney where they made each other better and tempered each other's
01:53:08 ◼ ► weaknesses. You know, they, they built up each other's strengths and tempered each other's
01:53:13 ◼ ► weaknesses. And one without the other was, you know, the Lennon and McCartney both had great
01:53:29 ◼ ► designs that people raise an eyebrow about in the last 10 years at Apple, maybe a little bit too
01:53:36 ◼ ► much Johnny and not enough Steve. And, you know, it's obvious that Steve isn't there. So of course,
01:53:44 ◼ ► Tim Cynova Yeah. I think it's a great question. I'd take that even further back. I mean,
01:53:50 ◼ ► the entire history of Apple is built around pairs. I mean, it was, it was Woz at Jobs who,
01:53:56 ◼ ► who created the company. It was Jobs and Johnny who revived it. It was Johnny and Tim, I'd argue,
01:54:04 ◼ ► over the past decade who sustained it and ensured it and endured after Jobs' death. And I think the
01:54:11 ◼ ► question now is, it's Tim and who who lead it forward. I mean, you could, you could make the
01:54:16 ◼ ► case just based on what they've been doing and succeeding in lately that maybe it's Johnny Shrooji
01:54:20 ◼ ► that Steve Jobs had his Johnny and now Tim Cook has his Johnny and that chips and Apple's
01:54:27 ◼ ► sophistication and chip design are going to be key to what it's able to accomplish over the next decade.
01:54:33 ◼ ► Pete: You close the book talking about, we mentioned Omerta and the sort of code of silence
01:54:38 ◼ ► at Apple. And, you know, I think one, you know, you could stretch any, any analogy to the Mafia
01:54:45 ◼ ► is going to, going to wear thin eventually because they're not, it's not a criminal enterprise at
01:54:50 ◼ ► Apple. Although I guess the EC might, might disagree to some degree. But part of it to me is
01:54:56 ◼ ► it's, it's not just fear, right? Like one thing I've learned over my career is it's, I used to
01:55:02 ◼ ► think sometimes when people would leave Apple and go elsewhere, that they still wouldn't talk about
01:55:08 ◼ ► their time at Apple because they wanted to leave the door open to go back. And I know I have many
01:55:14 ◼ ► friends and even more acquaintances, sources who've been at Apple, left and then come back. You know,
01:55:22 ◼ ► it absolutely happens. It's a regular thing. That's how people build a career, you know,
01:55:27 ◼ ► in the industry. But I've, I've learned over the years that even people who I don't think have any
01:55:34 ◼ ► plans to come back, who've, you know, for, if they're young enough, they're just, they've built
01:55:39 ◼ ► something else and maybe taken a position of prominence or, or, or founded a startup or
01:55:48 ◼ ► plenty of money from stocks and, you know, not going back, but they still don't really talk
01:55:52 ◼ ► about it publicly. Cause I think it's, it's not a fear. I think it's, it's a personality, right?
01:55:58 ◼ ► That they're a certain type of person and they respect that, that code of silence. And I'm
01:56:05 ◼ ► curious if you detect that in your, with, with how many sources you spoke to for the book,
01:56:10 ◼ ► if you detect that. Yeah, I mean, they, they, they take sort of a vow of silence, right? And I think
01:56:18 ◼ ► there's a, there's a concern about being ostracized. So whether you want to go back to Apple or not,
01:56:23 ◼ ► you still have lots of friends there. And if you become somebody who's known as a talker,
01:56:28 ◼ ► you run the risk of being ostracized by that community. I think one of my favorite stories
01:56:34 ◼ ► early, early on in, you know, in, in coming into the world of Apple and learning about it
01:56:39 ◼ ► is that Apple didn't really have much of an alumni network or meetings, like in the same way that
01:56:44 ◼ ► ex Googlers have, where they still get together and connect. And, and, and they, somebody spun up
01:56:52 ◼ ► one of these meetings one time and a bunch of the Apple alums are there and they didn't know what to
01:56:58 ◼ ► talk to each other about because it was kind of verboten. Like you didn't, you didn't, you didn't
01:57:02 ◼ ► talk about like what you did at Apple. So like here, the very, the very reason that you're all
01:57:07 ◼ ► connected is because of the company and yet you weren't, nobody was willing to be like,
01:57:12 ◼ ► "Oh, and I worked in finance and here's what I did." So yeah, I mean, it, it, it's amazing the
01:57:18 ◼ ► degree to which people buy into that and how long it's sustained and held. And I think it's
01:57:25 ◼ ► fascinating to watch the company now at like 140,000 plus employees and lots of new employees
01:57:37 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, I think so too. And I think we've, we've seen some cracks in that over the, the
01:57:43 ◼ ► COVID era of things leaking to the press that typically didn't leak before, you know, the,
01:57:50 ◼ ► The Verge had a bunch of stories from Apple's internal Slack messaging group about work from
01:57:56 ◼ ► home policy and stuff like that. And, you know, conversations that never would have typically
01:58:02 ◼ ► hit the press starting to hit the press. And I, I do, you know, it's like I'm turning into the
01:58:09 ◼ ► old man on the porch yelling at the clouds, but it's, you know, it's clearly younger people,
01:58:25 ◼ ► company culture has to, I mean, what, how can a company stay exactly the same? The trick is,
01:58:30 ◼ ► how do you hold on to the parts that you need to hold on to and how do you let go of the other
01:58:35 ◼ ► parts? Jared: 100%. And I think I give full credit to Tim Cook for finding a way to do that because
01:58:41 ◼ ► they're still having tremendous success. What's your sense of the success of Apple University?
01:58:47 ◼ ► Jared It depends on who you talk to. If you talk to old timers at Apple, they think who have like
01:58:53 ◼ ► come back, I don't know, I presume you've talked to some of these people who've come back and
01:58:57 ◼ ► rejoined the company and gone through a bit of an orientation. They, they think it's a little,
01:59:03 ◼ ► I guess, passe or maybe it leans too far into some of the jobs ethos and, and, and highlights
01:59:11 ◼ ► what Apple aspires to be, but it's disconnected from what Apple is in present day, but it still
01:59:18 ◼ ► has value. You know, I, you know, you go through orientation anytime you join a new company and
01:59:23 ◼ ► that's a tremendous resource to have. But I, I, I mean, I would love to give through it and learn
01:59:29 ◼ ► what they teach people. I'm sure there's, there's learnings from it that they can benefit other
01:59:34 ◼ ► corporations as they're trying to preserve and protect the culture that they've created.
01:59:38 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, my, I, my sense, I don't have a great sense of it. I think it's about as successful as
01:59:45 ◼ ► it could be, but that ultimately in a business of tech in a business like Apple's where it's
01:59:53 ◼ ► about technology, every, every new challenge is sufficiently unlike the previous challenges that
02:00:01 ◼ ► it's that, that, that historical perspective isn't as useful as, as I think Steve Jobs had hoped when
02:00:07 ◼ ► he, when he initiated the program. You know, that it's, it's, each new challenge is its own
02:00:22 ◼ ► Jared; Right, right. But it, but it, it does help people who are arriving at the company
02:00:29 ◼ ► understand or deepen their appreciation for some of the legacy thought process of taking
02:00:44 ◼ ► I'm gonna offer, there's one thing I have to, I just have to mention this because I don't,
02:00:47 ◼ ► again, I've never heard this before, maybe it's been out there, but to me, the single most
02:00:51 ◼ ► surprising little tiny detail in your book is that at least at one point, Tim Cook's favorite beverage
02:00:56 ◼ ► was Mountain Dew. Jared; Oh yeah. Yeah, they flew it over to Asia and just, just a habit there for
02:01:03 ◼ ► him, you know, which is, which is wild because he was also a hot nut. He was like eating, you know,
02:01:08 ◼ ► baked chicken and broccoli for most meals. So, there's this inherent disconnect between
02:01:16 ◼ ► Pete; Right. He's hitting the gym every day at four in the morning and he's, you know, he's
02:01:21 ◼ ► obviously very fit. He's been involved, you know, famously eats well, but his favorite beverage is
02:01:33 ◼ ► super high in caffeine. Jared; Right, right. Yeah, yeah, they made sure that they had like a case of
02:01:39 ◼ ► it when they flew over for this big meeting because they knew he would expect it when he was
02:01:44 ◼ ► there. Pete; What else? Can you, can you give me one more story that you're really, that you're
02:01:52 ◼ ► about these, these guys that are worth thinking about. One, like, I didn't expect to find out on
02:01:57 ◼ ► my visit to Robertsdale, Alabama that, that Tim Cook is somewhat of a pariah in his own town.
02:02:02 ◼ ► I'm from the Southeast. Typically, when somebody achieves what he has accomplished from a small
02:02:08 ◼ ► town, everybody is like local boy done good and happy to talk about him. But because he put a
02:02:15 ◼ ► spotlight on racial tensions in the town by telling a story about a cross burning, there,
02:02:21 ◼ ► there's real, I don't know, there's real kind of disdain there for him, which I was surprised by.
02:02:27 ◼ ► That's not something I anticipated. On the flip side, on the Johnny side, I don't have the answer
02:02:32 ◼ ► to this, but I think it's fascinating that people who have worked with him for many years question
02:02:36 ◼ ► whether or not he has like x-ray vision or a different, or different like sophistication with
02:02:42 ◼ ► his eyesight than the rest of us. And there's this, this probably my favorite anecdote in the
02:02:46 ◼ ► book is there's this moment where he and a colleague from operations are flying, traveling
02:02:52 ◼ ► back from China and they show up at the airport and they're sitting at the bar and he looks down
02:02:57 ◼ ► this, this steel bar, this metal bar, and he grumbles, "I can see every seam in this bar."
02:03:05 ◼ ► And the guy looks at him and he looks down at the bar and all he can see is smooth metal. And he's
02:03:09 ◼ ► like, "Your life must be miserable," you know? And nobody really knows, like, you know, does he
02:03:15 ◼ ► see things different? But it goes all the way to the point of like, I think in his studio, he's got
02:03:19 ◼ ► a glass table set up on four freestanding legs and he would just come in one day and be like, "Oh,
02:03:27 ◼ ► the table's bowing in the middle. We need to replace it." And everybody would look at it and
02:03:31 ◼ ► be like, "I literally can't see anything." But he was convinced it was bowing and nobody wanted to
02:03:36 ◼ ► question it because it just seemed like he could see something that the rest of the world couldn't.
02:03:48 ◼ ► Pete; If Johnny Ive said it, I think we can let it fly without getting the explicit label on the
02:03:55 ◼ ► podcast. But I do think that's true though, right? And it's the curse of anybody who has an eye for
02:04:00 ◼ ► something. Like, I'm personally deeply afflicted by a profound dislike for the font Arial, the
02:04:09 ◼ ► Helvetica knockoff. And I see it everywhere. What Johnny Ive can see to just about anything
02:04:15 ◼ ► mechanical, I see Arial everywhere that it's used and every place where it's used, it would look
02:04:22 ◼ ► better if it was Helvetica. And it is, it's a curse. It's a minor curse because it's like the
02:04:26 ◼ ► most popular typeface in the world because you start up anything on Windows and what's the
02:04:31 ◼ ► default font? It's Arial. So, people use it everywhere, but I see it every time. And I can't,
02:04:37 ◼ ► I wish I could, if I could sever that part of my brain as in the TV show Severance, I don't want to
02:04:43 ◼ ► forget what I do when I work, but if you could make it so that I no longer notice when people
02:04:48 ◼ ► use Arial, it would make my life a little better. Jared; You need like a Chrome extension that will
02:04:57 ◼ ► Pete; I've thought about that. I've done that though. I've used Fontbook on the Mac. You can't
02:05:01 ◼ ► do it on iPhone, but I've disabled Arial, which would fill it in with Helvetica, but now they've
02:05:06 ◼ ► changed it in the most, I don't want to go off, but you can't disable Arial anymore. It's like
02:05:11 ◼ ► a system font that can't be turned off. But anyway, Tripp, thank you for the time. And I
02:05:15 ◼ ► really do. I enjoy the book. I don't necessarily agree with all of your conclusions in it, but it
02:05:20 ◼ ► is remarkably deeply reported. And I really do mean it. Not just because you're here as a guest
02:05:26 ◼ ► on the show. People who listen to this show and like this, they really should get the book and
02:05:31 ◼ ► read it because there's just so many little things that have never been reported before.
02:05:38 ◼ ► Really. And the fact that you did so much of this reporting during COVID is even more impressive
02:05:43 ◼ ► because it's like you said, like a lot of this is reporting. People underestimate just how much of
02:05:48 ◼ ► reporting is just actual gumshoe, get your ass to Alabama or just go knock on doors, put slips of
02:06:02 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, it was an adventure by the same token. I had no FOMO because nobody was doing anything
02:06:08 ◼ ► fun while I was sitting there writing this book. And it kind of was. Maybe I still, if I was ever
02:06:13 ◼ ► going to write a book, maybe that was the time to write a book. Yeah, absolutely. Next pandemic,
02:06:20 ◼ ► you can sit down. After Steve is the name of the book. And it's Tripp Meckle. You can buy it
02:06:26 ◼ ► everywhere that books are sold. I would like to also thank our three sponsors today. We had