00:00:20 ◼ ► So what, three plus years late. Because, and I call the show the talk show, and I like to think
00:00:26 ◼ ► it is like a real talk show, but the whole point of actual most actual talk shows is that when you
00:00:33 ◼ ► have a guest with something to promote, if it's on the Stephen Colbert show or something like that,
00:00:38 ◼ ► and there's a movie, they'll have the actor come out right before or right when the movie first
00:00:43 ◼ ► hits theaters or in that would have made my publisher really happy. I can say the bright
00:00:49 ◼ ► side of that. I tell you though, the bright side of the publisher was very happy with you because
00:00:55 ◼ ► your link to the book was by far the best publicity that the book had. There was a huge bump
00:01:05 ◼ ► in pre-orders right after you linked. And I tell you a funny story about that is that I didn't know
00:01:11 ◼ ► that was going to happen. And my wife and I were in the car. We were driving down the coast towards
00:01:19 ◼ ► Santa Barbara for just a weekend getaway. And maybe we can look back at the date. Maybe it
00:01:24 ◼ ► was a Friday or a Saturday or something like that. So we were going into a part where I was
00:01:29 ◼ ► going to lose cell phone coverage. And I wasn't looking at my phone anyway, because my wife and I
00:01:33 ◼ ► were enjoying the conversation, enjoying our company, enjoying the beautiful scenery. And then
00:01:39 ◼ ► you link to my book. It's all Holy cow, wait a minute. I got to look at it. I got to read this,
00:01:46 ◼ ► what he said, and then be looking at what the feedback would be. And then it's like the
00:01:51 ◼ ► cell phone coverage dropped out from the hour. And it was a pretty agonizing hour, not knowing
00:01:57 ◼ ► what was going on in the virtual world when all of this beautiful scenery was going by in the
00:02:02 ◼ ► real world. And I couldn't pay attention to it. Thanks for that, John. I don't know. I don't know
00:02:07 ◼ ► where I'm not quite sure what to say. I cannot explain it. The way my mind works is inscrutable.
00:02:15 ◼ ► And I really did plan on having you on the show shortly after before around when the book came out.
00:02:21 ◼ ► And somehow felt overwhelmed because the book I really am not I'm not just saying this because
00:02:26 ◼ ► you're on the show right now. But I partly it was because the book is so good. And I didn't even
00:02:33 ◼ ► know where to start. And I'm going to tell you, here we are three and a half years later, I still
00:02:37 ◼ ► don't quite know where to start. But based on the piece I just published last night that I've been
00:02:43 ◼ ► working on for a while, let's let me just take my best stab right now at delineating the origin of
00:02:49 ◼ ► the iPhone and putting it into a timeline go. And I your tweets in response to the stuff that I you
00:02:57 ◼ ► know, it started a month ago, I'm assuming most people listening to this read my piece or at least
00:03:02 ◼ ► follow during fireball closely enough that they saw it because it was pretty big. But basically,
00:03:06 ◼ ► a month ago, there was a story came out about Facebook having two competing VRXR OS's for years
00:03:14 ◼ ► with hundreds of people working on this other one and then pulled the plug on it late last year.
00:03:19 ◼ ► And the executive in charge of it left to go to Google to head up AR VR XR and I offhandedly a
00:03:26 ◼ ► short post on during fireball compared it to the famed bake off at Apple in the early days of the
00:03:33 ◼ ► iPhone project between sort of a ground up Linux embedded OS sort of thing to make a phone versus
00:03:41 ◼ ► what we now know as iOS famously a sort of let's take Mac OS 10 and strip it down to make something
00:03:48 ◼ ► new that both performance wise can run on a tiny little cell phone of 2006 2007 era hardware,
00:03:56 ◼ ► which would be a hell of a thing to do with Mac OS 10 at the time, and redo the whole UI to work
00:04:02 ◼ ► with this new metaphor. Long story short, we all know how it turned out. But it was anyway,
00:04:06 ◼ ► my linking to it was a bad comparison. And we could start there. I think it's not all that bad,
00:04:12 ◼ ► because how many operating systems get started at all at companies that could realistically
00:04:21 ◼ ► finish it. And so it was an interesting story and an interesting occurrence at Facebook.
00:04:30 ◼ ► Obviously, they bet the whole at least the whole name of the company on on a future that is
00:04:39 ◼ ► different than their past. And Facebook just being an app and their future maybe being something more
00:04:46 ◼ ► like a platform kind of makes sense that you would want your own operating system. And so
00:04:51 ◼ ► the change in the direction of that is interesting. There is this story that maybe we're, you know,
00:04:59 ◼ ► going to get to the bottom of it a little bit more given your looking into it, and maybe some
00:05:05 ◼ ► of the stories that I can tell, but I think it's a perfectly interesting and valid analogy. Or maybe,
00:05:11 ◼ ► and maybe that's an analogy that it's maybe less of a comparison and more of a contrast.
00:05:16 ◼ ► But maybe I can thank you because that's what then led to us talking right now. I can't think
00:05:23 ◼ ► you really too much. But I do think it is an interesting comparison. And it would be interesting
00:05:28 ◼ ► if you could find people someday to come on and talk to you about the effort that went on
00:05:34 ◼ ► inside Facebook matter what led to their decision being what it is particularly of meta turns out to
00:05:40 ◼ ► be as successful as the iPhone was. Yeah, maybe here. Let me just take a break though, before we
00:05:45 ◼ ► get rolling and figure out how we're going to do this. Let me take a break right here and thank our
00:05:52 ◼ ► first sponsor and it is our good friends at remote. Do you employ or pay workers in other countries,
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00:07:44 ◼ ► promo code, the talk show. We can talk about remote work later too. That's been in the news
00:07:51 ◼ ► with Apple and is an interesting comparison. Oh, for sure. Particularly given my great preference
00:07:57 ◼ ► to work in person with people and trying to balance that out, given how the world has changed
00:08:04 ◼ ► over the last couple of years. Even just today, I was, and it's a Saturday that we're recording,
00:08:11 ◼ ► I went in extra to spend some time with Imran Chaudhry, my colleague, and he's one of the
00:08:18 ◼ ► co-founders at the company I'm working on now. And that's about all that I'm going to be able to say
00:08:24 ◼ ► about what I'm doing at Humane. That could be maybe a future topic for another visit with the
00:08:32 ◼ ► factor of how long it would take me to have you invite me back on. I can't maybe really speculate
00:08:39 ◼ ► how long that would be, but we have plenty to talk about now. I'd never known about it, the future,
00:08:44 ◼ ► but the past, what could I tell you about the book? Maybe even the process of writing the book.
00:08:50 ◼ ► I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is that you're a writer. What is your idea
00:08:56 ◼ ► about whether you might write a book of your own someday, or is it just daring fireball? Is there
00:09:02 ◼ ► something about the format, the kind of blogging format that just fits you better as opposed to
00:09:09 ◼ ► something more long form? That's a tough question. I mean, I've obviously thought about it, but one
00:09:13 ◼ ► of the things I wanted to, and rereading your book and revisiting all of this, which now, you know,
00:09:20 ◼ ► let's face it, it's history, right? And it's like you get to a certain age, and I swear this
00:09:25 ◼ ► digression is going somewhere, but when you're young, let's just say right out of college, 22,
00:09:37 ◼ ► it feels like ancient history. And even if you were technically alive, like for me, like Nixon
00:09:42 ◼ ► resigning from the presidency, and I was like, I don't know, one and a half years old, it happened
00:09:47 ◼ ► in my lifetime, but it feels, I don't know, it felt like true history, like history with a capital H,
00:09:53 ◼ ► not like lived history, you know, and you hear about things like the creation of Unix, and like,
00:10:00 ◼ ► why did they pick 1971 as the epoch date for time? It's because that's like when they first had it
00:10:05 ◼ ► running, and it's like, sure, in 1991, that was 20 years ago, but the original version of Unix
00:10:11 ◼ ► felt like ancient computer history 20 years prior. But now, here I am in my late 40s, and
00:10:19 ◼ ► it feels like stuff that happened 20 years ago. I know it wasn't recent, but boy, it sure feels
00:10:25 ◼ ► more relevant than it did. And so here I am in the 20th year, going into the 20th year later this
00:10:33 ◼ ► year of writing Daring Fireball, and the— Well, that's an amazing milestone. Congratulations.
00:10:45 ◼ ► even commemorated one anniversary, I think the 15th or something on Daring Fireball. I'm not one to
00:10:50 ◼ ► make a show of stuff like that. Not out of—it's not that I'm overly humble, it's just like an
00:10:57 ◼ ► innate sense of that Steve Jobs axiom, and I'm sure he'll come up more times here, but that's
00:11:03 ◼ ► sort of, if you do something good, take a moment to appreciate it. I'm paraphrasing here, but move
00:11:10 ◼ ► That's right. As a matter of fact, that quotation, at least when I worked on the Infinite Loop campus
00:11:18 ◼ ► for all the years that I did, more than 15 years, certainly in the later part, maybe it was even
00:11:24 ◼ ► after his passing that that quote that you're mentioning was painted up on the wall outside
00:11:45 ◼ ► I remember when I joined Apple in June of 2001, I worked on the Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino
00:11:52 ◼ ► in Building 2, and on the second floor, there was a miniature NeXT museum. There was some NeXT
00:12:02 ◼ ► hardware, there was a cube and a slab, and then some Sun hardware, I think, that was running
00:12:09 ◼ ► NeXT step. Once NeXT got out of the business of making its own hardware and making software for
00:12:14 ◼ ► other platforms, so there was maybe six or eight machines there. And of course, this was 2001,
00:12:20 ◼ ► so Steve had been back at Apple for years by that point, but not long after that, the word came down,
00:12:32 ◼ ► Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just close by, or I think maybe, as I'm thinking about
00:12:38 ◼ ► it now, somebody at Stanford took it, but he was just like, "Clean that stuff out. We're making
00:12:43 ◼ ► new things. Just don't worry about the past. These computers running this ancient software with little
00:12:50 ◼ ► cards and exp—what place does that have in a company that is focused on innovating and making
00:12:59 ◼ ► new products that are going to, at that point, trying to dig Apple out of a hole of having only
00:13:07 ◼ ► 5% market share in desktop computing." And thinking about that from the point from June of 2001,
00:13:23 ◼ ► the real solution, the real jumping-off point for Apple, the moment where Apple ceased to be
00:13:31 ◼ ► what it was and started being what it has become—new products, new platforms, and a whole
00:13:38 ◼ ► different order of success. I have the quote in front of me. "I think if you do something," this
00:13:44 ◼ ► is from Steve Jobs, "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go
00:13:49 ◼ ► do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long, just figure out what's next." I believe
00:13:54 ◼ ► that's the part of the quote that's on the wall. Last time I was at town hall for a media event,
00:14:08 ◼ ► media events are now on the new campus. It's never going to stop seeming weird to me that the old
00:14:13 ◼ ► campus was infinite loop and the new campus is a building that's a loop. So I always want to say
00:14:19 ◼ ► infinite— Well, there is a loop of six buildings. I wish I had a count. I wish I had a nickel for
00:14:27 ◼ ► every time that during the day, either solving a—trying to work through a hard problem that I did
00:14:32 ◼ ► laps around the outside of that loop. Yeah, it is aptly named. It was really a beautiful place to
00:14:38 ◼ ► spend 15 years of my working career, for sure. But that quote really does sum up so much of
00:14:46 ◼ ► the culture that Steve tried to bring to Apple that people like me, an individual contributor,
00:14:59 ◼ ► a couple of times. And as I tried to write in my book, those few times affected me very greatly,
00:15:05 ◼ ► had a huge influence on the way that I did my work. And so quotes like that, it's part of the
00:15:12 ◼ ► culture, it's part of the lore, it's part of what we were shooting for, part of what inspired me to
00:15:18 ◼ ► do the work that I did on the products we were trying to make. Yeah, it definitely expresses its
00:15:23 ◼ ► sentiments. The other thing I know that I think it was Steve Jobs who got rid of was the icon garden.
00:15:29 ◼ ► They had some of the original Mac, like, 1984 icons somewhere in the infinite loop. Not really
00:15:36 ◼ ► sculptures, but two-dimensional things stuck in the grass, and they got rid of them. Yeah,
00:15:40 ◼ ► so they got rid of those things. The numbers outside of the building are the last vestige
00:15:45 ◼ ► of that. They never replaced those. But even back in 2001, you'd go into the reception area
00:15:52 ◼ ► of infinite loop 2, and then there was a glass door, a set of glass doors that, I mean, you've
00:16:00 ◼ ► probably seen them, John, but other visitors will have as well. But the glass right at a
00:16:07 ◼ ► RAM maybe chest level had some stenciling on the glass of those old one-bit icons. And yeah,
00:16:14 ◼ ► just maybe 2002, 2003, they just come in one morning and that day they were scraped off and
00:16:21 ◼ ► never put back. Again, not focusing too much on the glorious past, but trying to make a better
00:16:29 ◼ ► future. I don't want to keep moving on. We can do this. We can talk about you writing your book
00:16:34 ◼ ► next. First, starting, dodge the question of, do I think I have a book or books in me? Where I was
00:16:39 ◼ ► going is I always thought maybe, and let's put aside the idea of best of collection from Daring
00:16:45 ◼ ► Fireball, which is sort of a cop-out, right? You can put that in a book. People might enjoy it as
00:16:50 ◼ ► a book, but that's not writing a book. That is, it's a different thing. So I've always had the
00:16:55 ◼ ► idea and it always, in some self-effacing way, felt like real writers are book writers. And not
00:17:05 ◼ ► real writers, that's even too dismissive. But for whatever reason, I've always, even before Daring
00:17:11 ◼ ► Fireball became a thing, I always felt like a columnist is the scope of my aptitude. And it's
00:17:22 ◼ ► not Stephen King, whose book on writing is one of the best writing books I have ever read. One of his
00:17:28 ◼ ► things though, is that if you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write. You have to
00:17:32 ◼ ► read to be a writer. And I read voraciously, of course. And I do read, I read a tremendous more
00:17:38 ◼ ► amount of short form writing on news and stuff like that, stuff that I link to, then I do read
00:17:44 ◼ ► books. And I read fewer books than I used to. And I can't explain why and I feel a little guilty
00:17:50 ◼ ► about it. But long story short, I don't know. I don't know if I have it in me. I don't know.
00:17:56 ◼ ► And I guess the big thing is that whenever I do write something, it's because I feel like I've got
00:18:00 ◼ ► this idea in my head and I need to get it out. And one of Stephen King's analogies is that all
00:18:05 ◼ ► of the things he's written, he imagines them as like fossils in the sand or in the dirt.
00:18:10 ◼ ► Writing is like digging out the fossil. He doesn't know how big it is because it's in the ground. And
00:18:15 ◼ ► then he digs it out. And of course, for Stephen King, a lot of these are like 500 page novels.
00:18:19 ◼ ► I feel the same way though about articles that I wrote, like the one I wrote on the origin of the
00:18:25 ◼ ► iPhone. So I've got to write this. I don't know how long it's going to take me. I don't know how
00:18:29 ◼ ► long it's going to be. Is it a thousand words? Is it 3000 words? Is it somewhere in between? I don't
00:18:34 ◼ ► know. I just have never started digging on an idea where it feels like this is a 60,000 word
00:18:39 ◼ ► book broken into chapters. But maybe I approach it wrong. And this, I would love to know the way
00:18:44 ◼ ► you approached your book is maybe it's, you shouldn't, maybe you shouldn't think, I shouldn't
00:18:49 ◼ ► think about writing a book, but instead think about an idea for a book that is composed of
00:18:55 ◼ ► chapters and chapters are more like articles, which is what I write and think more about
00:19:00 ◼ ► the practicality of writing chapters as opposed to just sitting down, start to finish writing a book.
00:19:05 ◼ ► I, to go back to Stephen King, he, I found his book extraordinarily helpful to those of you
00:19:13 ◼ ► listening who are unfamiliar with the book. It's, it's wonderful, highly recommended the first,
00:19:20 ◼ ► and he breaks it up into two parts. The first part of the book is autobiographical. He tells the
00:19:25 ◼ ► story of how he and, but really more almost like a memoir because he doesn't from start to finish,
00:19:32 ◼ ► tell the story of his life, but tells enough of his earlier life to understand how it is that
00:19:39 ◼ ► he became a writer and how it was something similar to this fossil analogy that he uncovered.
00:19:50 ◼ ► In some ways he couldn't help himself. And so it can have been some respects. It's, it really is
00:19:56 ◼ ► the right job for him. And he also did address the subject matter that he uses as his raw material
00:20:05 ◼ ► for his writing and how for a long time, he felt that there was something either cheap or coarse
00:20:17 ◼ ► around writing the sorts of books that he did. He almost felt sorry for it. Sorry about it.
00:20:24 ◼ ► Felt that he needed to apologize. And he's saying, you know, he said that it was really
00:20:30 ◼ ► later on in his life that it's just like, Hey, now look, this is what I have. This is what,
00:20:41 ◼ ► And, you know, and I think that in some ways that is that that's the answer for you. I mean, look,
00:20:48 ◼ ► daring fireball is something that probably I have read every day since you start, since I discovered
00:20:57 ◼ ► it shortly after you started writing it. And so sort of second guessing yourself on what you
00:21:03 ◼ ► should write, you know, seems to me not to be a question really worth thinking about for as long
00:21:09 ◼ ► as there's something that comes along that you say you have to do. It's like, you have to write this
00:21:14 ◼ ► story on the origin of the iPhone. Then you're probably doing as well as you can. I mean, you
00:21:19 ◼ ► know, if you can find inspiration in things and there's something that's going to get you out of
00:21:24 ◼ ► bed in the morning and work creatively, then, you know, who's anybody to second guess what that is?
00:21:31 ◼ ► I don't worry about it. I've never felt too bad about it. My dad seems to want me to write a book.
00:21:36 ◼ ► I'm glad he doesn't listen to the podcast. But it's sort of like, you know, I tell this story.
00:21:43 ◼ ► I've told it often where my dad has always been very supportive, both my parents, very supportive
00:21:49 ◼ ► of what I do, but they don't really get it. They don't, you know, I've been doing it enough years
00:21:54 ◼ ► now that they trust me now and they see that I'm successful. But in the early years, they really
00:21:59 ◼ ► didn't get it because the web is just not of the, I mean, they go to the web, but this just never
00:22:04 ◼ ► seems as real to them. At some point, several years into writing Daring Fireball, I got to
00:22:09 ◼ ► start writing occasional back page columns for Macworld, which for Apple punditry was always the,
00:22:17 ◼ ► you know, that's the prime spot, right? There's only one back page column on Macworld and Macworld
00:22:24 ◼ ► was always the sort of, you know, the gold standard of Mac. Oh, it's very prestigious. Sure.
00:22:30 ◼ ► And it really, really impressed my dad. I mean, he was just like tears in his eyes blown away,
00:22:37 ◼ ► like, oh, and I'm thinking like, I should have bought more copies of this for him, you know?
00:22:47 ◼ ► doesn't he understand that you've built something way better, you know? You know what I mean? Like,
00:22:53 ◼ ► building Daring Fireball by that time was more of an accomplishment than getting on the back page of
00:22:57 ◼ ► Macworld. But being in print, I still do love print. I always will. And that sort of dates me.
00:23:04 ◼ ► I'm, you know, student newspaper guy coming up through college. I do love print. I love typography.
00:23:10 ◼ ► I don't think typography ever looks as good on a glowing screen, no matter how many pixels it has,
00:23:15 ◼ ► than it does printed on paper. I love it. I love the tangibleness of it. I do love it. So,
00:23:23 ◼ ► you know, never say never on me writing a book or collecting stuff into a book or something. I just
00:23:27 ◼ ► said that to somebody on Twitter again today. Never say never, but I don't know. But, yeah,
00:23:34 ◼ ► I mean, it's finding the right medium for the message that you're trying to convey to people
00:23:42 ◼ ► is a trick. To me, I like having constraints. And when I left Apple in May of 2017, I didn't know
00:23:58 ◼ ► what I was going to do. And as I was contemplating leaving, I had a friend get in touch. Her name is
00:24:10 ◼ ► Kim Scott. And she is the author of two books that have gotten some mindshare out of the world.
00:24:25 ◼ ► when I was really thinking about, well, what's next for me? Her book Radical Candor came out,
00:24:32 ◼ ► and she invited me to the book release party, which took place in Palo Alto. And so I wrote
00:24:40 ◼ ► over there after work one evening, and she introduced me to her editor. And her editor,
00:24:47 ◼ ► you know, started questioning me. Well, hey, Ken, what are you doing? You know, maybe you should
00:24:52 ◼ ► write a book. And I found out later that Kim Scott, it was a total setup that she had been
00:24:58 ◼ ► like a blind into her editor about it. So it really was blind. It's a blind date. Yeah,
00:25:04 ◼ ► it actually actually totally was. And fortunately, the fellow, his name is Tim Bartlett. He's he's an
00:25:13 ◼ ► absolutely marvelous, marvelous editor and so smart, so, so good at his job. And he said,
00:25:24 ◼ ► well, you know, you if you want to write a book, just send me a proposal. And I got the wheels
00:25:28 ◼ ► turning. And, you know, I'd really already decided, but not not yet announced that I was going to be
00:25:34 ◼ ► leaving shortly thereafter. And, you know, it just kind of like all the planets aligned. So within
00:25:43 ◼ ► just a few days of leaving Apple, I had sat down and started started keyboarding started didn't
00:25:53 ◼ ► quite put pen to paper I was I did the whole thing electronically. But this gets me back to then
00:25:59 ◼ ► Stephen King. The other thing I wanted to say about the other half, the second half of the
00:26:03 ◼ ► on writing book, which is Stephen King's advice on how to do the job of writing. And again, he
00:26:12 ◼ ► made it very personal related what he did. And the that whole section is and I have to say that I
00:26:21 ◼ ► didn't actually read the book. I had Stephen King read it to me. And he's a marvelous reader of his
00:26:36 ◼ ► All right. I just didn't know I just wasn't being unclear. No, no, no, no, no. I wasn't quite sure.
00:26:46 ◼ ► Not not that well, I doubt sincerely, although Stephen King is an avid user of Apple products,
00:26:55 ◼ ► I doubt very sincerely that he has ever, ever heard of me. But so I had the audio book to be
00:27:03 ◼ ► perfectly clear. And so listening to him, he said that what he did, he had a process is that he
00:27:10 ◼ ► wrote 2000 new words every day, he'd get up in the morning, and he would set about putting those 2000
00:27:17 ◼ ► words down. And he said, Well, you know, if if he had a good day, and and the writing was easy,
00:27:24 ◼ ► he finishes up 10am. And then he can go get a cup of coffee, have a walk, why did you do some
00:27:30 ◼ ► shopping? That's it, he's done. He satisfied his obligation, and the pressure is off. Now,
00:27:37 ◼ ► other times the writing is more difficult to do. And he says, you know, he's particularly as he
00:27:42 ◼ ► started getting older, that he was still at work at four and five in the afternoon, but the goal
00:27:48 ◼ ► was to set down 2000 new words a day. And that seemed to be a really wonderful discipline. And
00:27:56 ◼ ► so like I said before, I like to have constraints. And and so I said, Well, I'm not nearly as good as
00:28:03 ◼ ► Stephen King, but I set myself the ambitious goal of writing 1000 new words a day. And,
00:28:07 ◼ ► and that's what I did seven days a week. Yeah, I wasn't working anymore. And so this was the job
00:28:15 ◼ ► that actually worked out pretty well. I actually have a spreadsheet on my machine, I don't have it
00:28:21 ◼ ► up here now. But I would write down every day, how many how many words I did. And it was, I was
00:28:30 ◼ ► pretty good. And with within 100 days, I had about 110,000 words, because sometimes I, you know,
00:28:39 ◼ ► you kind of kept going. And that formed the core of the whole of the whole book. And you know,
00:28:47 ◼ ► the interest, you know, the part of it is that I kind of knew what I wanted to say. And so the
00:28:53 ◼ ► writing was kind of easy, because it was going back over my memory and trying to tell this
00:29:01 ◼ ► firsthand account of what what happened. So I, you know, I have a lot of sympathy in a way,
00:29:08 ◼ ► for you trying to write this story, like on the origin of the iPhone, because you're not just
00:29:14 ◼ ► going back over your own memory, you're trying to disclose and uncover facts that either don't exist
00:29:20 ◼ ► or are locked away in somebody else's memory. And you have to try to piece together all of these
00:29:27 ◼ ► accounts, I didn't set myself that nearly as difficult a task as that, in some ways, I marvel
00:29:34 ◼ ► at what you're able to do with with a story like that. How do you get this idea in your mind that
00:29:41 ◼ ► you want to write this story on the origin of the iPhone? What do you do? Well, here, let me say
00:29:46 ◼ ► this. Let me just go back before I forget, while we're sticking our fingers and pages and going
00:29:50 ◼ ► back to them as we continue forward. I did I did write a post when Daring Fireball turned 15,
00:29:56 ◼ ► in August of 2017. And I ran, I don't think I mentioned this in the article. Now, I will put
00:30:01 ◼ ► this in the show notes. But my friend Jim crude all had suggested I do this at some point when
00:30:06 ◼ ► we had gotten together, then he was just like, I wonder how many words you've written, you know,
00:30:09 ◼ ► at Daring Fireball. So I wrote a little script to do a word count. And it five years ago, I guess
00:30:17 ◼ ► that would be four and a half years ago, I had written 1173 full columns, that's the full length
00:30:25 ◼ ► articles, and 25,486 link list entries where I linked to somebody else in the full columns I had,
00:30:34 ◼ ► and it's amazing how even it worked out 1,048,000 words. So let's call it a million, a million
00:30:40 ◼ ► original words, and 200,000 extra words that were in block quotes. So in other words, when I quote
00:30:47 ◼ ► from somebody else in one of my articles, which I obviously, you know, anybody familiar with my
00:30:50 ◼ ► style knows that's sort of fundamental to the whole format is a lot, but in the full articles,
00:30:56 ◼ ► you know, a million original words, linked list entries, 950,000 original words, but of course,
00:31:03 ◼ ► in those entries, 2,000,000 total words, including block quotes, but that added up to two over just
00:31:09 ◼ ► over literally, it was I honestly did not plan this combined original words 2,001,516. So just
00:31:20 ◼ ► two million on the button for 15 years. Sounds like a lot, and it did, it was, it was, it's sort
00:31:25 ◼ ► of like a lot. It's sort of what made me like, okay, I'll publish it, I'll commemorate this
00:31:30 ◼ ► milestone. But then you think about Stephen King's productivity, if he gets 2,000 a day,
00:31:36 ◼ ► that's only 1,000 days. Like three, that's under three years. But I just look at my own bookshelf
00:31:44 ◼ ► full of Stephen King novels, and I don't have all of them. And there's only one Stephen King, productivity wise.
00:31:51 ◼ ► Well, look, he's special. I mean, obviously, he has an incredible talent that, and a genius for
00:31:59 ◼ ► doing what he does. And so I don't seek to compare myself to him. How could I? Having written one,
00:32:08 ◼ ► let's see, it turned out to be 80,000 words in the final, or in this version, I think it even
00:32:16 ◼ ► got edited down something like 77,000 words in the final book is what I recall. I actually have
00:32:22 ◼ ► this spreadsheet here. And yeah, probably about two out of every three days, I got to a thousand words.
00:32:29 ◼ ► And so, you know, any aspiring writers out there, if you wanted to, you know, write a book of the
00:32:33 ◼ ► magnitude of creative selection, you can do a thousand words a day, you could have it in three months.
00:32:46 ◼ ► but you know, kind of figuring out what you want to say is another. I mean, so do you find
00:32:59 ◼ ► this burning desire to, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth. You said you had this,
00:33:03 ◼ ► this idea in your mind that you wanted to write this origin of iPhone story. It's like, well,
00:33:13 ◼ ► you know, how do you, how do you go about putting something together when you don't have all of the
00:33:18 ◼ ► information right in front of you? Well, this was it. I don't want to talk too much. I want
00:33:23 ◼ ► to talk about your stuff. Not me, but it does, it intertwines, obviously the creation of the iPhone,
00:33:30 ◼ ► obviously intertwines with your stuff very much. Just so anybody who is not familiar with your
00:33:35 ◼ ► work, your role on the original iPhone is you were the directly responsible individual,
00:33:41 ◼ ► the that's the term right inside Apple, DRI? DRI, yeah. For the keyboard. And we can get to
00:33:49 ◼ ► a little bit of that story. You tell the whole story here, but it, you know, long story short,
00:33:53 ◼ ► very fair to say the, you created the original iPhone software keyboard. And so obviously,
00:34:00 ◼ ► and you were, well, you joined obviously to, you know, you joined Scott Forstall's iOS software team
00:34:07 ◼ ► early because, you know, the keyboard was there when the iPhone was announced. So you were there
00:34:14 ◼ ► from very early stages. I probably should have, if I were a better host, probably would have
00:34:26 ◼ ► Basically my burning desire for this came out of, well, it's long nagged me that I never put the
00:34:35 ◼ ► whole story together. You know, Apple's people famously, because it's a prerequisite to work
00:34:41 ◼ ► there. You keep your mouth shut on what you're working on when you're working there. It's a
00:34:45 ◼ ► tight-lipped company, secret, whatever you, whatever adjectives you want to apply. And then
00:34:50 ◼ ► as time goes on and people leave, they can be freer or feel freer to talk about what happened.
00:34:56 ◼ ► And nobody's going to be too sensitive about, you know, stuff that happened 15 or 20 years ago.
00:35:01 ◼ ► Andy Hertzfeld, legendary engineer on the original Macintosh team, put together a great website
00:35:09 ◼ ► called folklore.org, collecting stories of the creation of the original Macintosh. And then that
00:35:16 ◼ ► got collected into a terrific book, which, you know, based on the website called Revolution in
00:35:22 ◼ ► the Valley, which is just a terrific book. I have the book in my hand right now. I keep it right by
00:35:27 ◼ ► my desk. It's marvelous. You know, and he, again, what a memory he had. I mean, it's just unbelievable
00:35:35 ◼ ► how much stuff. And that's, you know, obviously, you know, that was a time when a lot of the
00:35:41 ◼ ► digital artifacts didn't survive. There wasn't really email at the time, right? Like 1982,
00:35:46 ◼ ► working at Apple on the prototypes for the Macintosh. There wasn't like email you could
00:35:51 ◼ ► save. There weren't text messages. A lot of the stuff he had was like, you know, printouts of
00:35:56 ◼ ► paper and graph paper and stuff like that. But by the time it came out, it wasn't spoiling anything.
00:36:01 ◼ ► It was, you know, the classic Mac OS, I think. I forget if it was even still alive or if it was,
00:36:17 ◼ ► - So, yeah, the classic was already even dead. And not that it would have mattered if he had
00:36:22 ◼ ► published it five years earlier. Nobody was thinking it was secret what happened in 1983
00:36:27 ◼ ► or 1984 by that time. And now that the original iPhone is in our rearview mirror, we've had drips
00:36:35 ◼ ► and drabs and things like your book and interviews with participants and stories that have leaked.
00:36:41 ◼ ► And we on the outside know much more about how it happened than certainly the day that Steve Jobs
00:36:49 ◼ ► held it up on stage when it seemed, you know, like almost a technical marvel, you know, almost
00:36:54 ◼ ► too good to be true, both on the hardware and software side. Is this real? Is this really
00:36:59 ◼ ► happening? We know so much more about it. But what's always nagged me is that so much of it
00:37:05 ◼ ► is vague or conflicting, like what happened in 2006, what happened in 2005. And I'm not saying
00:37:13 ◼ ► that my one 2000, 3000 word article put it all together. There's still so much more to dig there.
00:37:20 ◼ ► There were iPod projects going on. There were pure research into multi touch projects going on
00:37:29 ◼ ► with Boz. What's his last name? Boz Orting. Yeah, Boz Orting. And I know Greg Christie,
00:37:36 ◼ ► whom I've met a few times, you know, was worked with with Boz on some of those ideas, as just like,
00:37:41 ◼ ► hey, is this multi touch something we can use for anything? And we know that there were ideas that
00:37:46 ◼ ► they would build a tablet first, and then it's like, no, let's build a phone. And then it's like,
00:37:50 ◼ ► well, wait, should we use the multi touch stuff with the phone? We know all these things,
00:38:01 ◼ ► you know, it actually motivated me was Tony Fadal tweeting about it, like the day later. And,
00:38:08 ◼ ► and I guess I, he said in a tweet that he tried to reach out to me about correcting the description
00:38:14 ◼ ► of him being responsible or spearheading the Linux OS part. And I think it's a sensitive thing for
00:38:21 ◼ ► him. But I didn't want to just take his word for it. And Oh, Tony Fadal says, it's not true. Well,
00:38:25 ◼ ► then I should just publish a correction say it's not true. But I thought, you know what I this has
00:38:29 ◼ ► been bothering me for years. Let me try to dig into this. Let me get something off my chest. And
00:38:35 ◼ ► I started collecting talking to a few people. A few other people like noticed Fidel's tweet and
00:38:42 ◼ ► sent me a few comments, people, a couple of people who still work at Apple. So I can't mention them,
00:38:47 ◼ ► but who've been there long enough. Lots of people have been at Apple a long time. It's sort of one
00:38:51 ◼ ► of the secret sauces at Apple, you know, that there's a long institutional memory. And I just
00:38:58 ◼ ► thought, let me just see what I can collect and start putting it into an outline and collect some
00:39:02 ◼ ► stuff. And it like time went on and I wanted to correct it quickly, because I felt like what I
00:39:10 ◼ ► and it always bothers me when something I actually put on daring fireball is wrong. And I often say,
00:39:14 ◼ ► my goal is to be right, always and have everything I write be tracked. I know I'm going to make
00:39:19 ◼ ► mistakes. And so what I try to do is make as few mistakes as possible, but be open to the fact that
00:39:25 ◼ ► I might be making a mistake anytime, recognize it, and correct it. And it bothered me that those
00:39:31 ◼ ► posts I put up in January and you tweeted about them too. But there was if you just took them at
00:39:37 ◼ ► face value, it was misleading about Fidel's role and misleading in terms of the scope of the bake
00:39:44 ◼ ► off between these two OSS. Facebook's was clearly a years long thing with hundreds of employees
00:39:50 ◼ ► working on the one they ended up abandoning. Whereas the bake off period at Apple was very
00:39:55 ◼ ► short. I knew that I knew that. And yet I still published it just as a huh, that's a previous
00:40:02 ◼ ► OS bake off story for a secret project that was coming up. And that's good enough. And then I just
00:40:07 ◼ ► had all these notes. I had all these notes, a bunch of good sources, some of them public,
00:40:11 ◼ ► like your tweets, some of them private. And I thought, how do I organize this together? I just
00:40:17 ◼ ► felt like I just had like a shoebox of slips of paper. It's like, what do I do? And the stupid
00:40:23 ◼ ► idea that hit me, the obvious idea that hit me. And I think you'll sympathize with this, where in
00:40:28 ◼ ► hindsight, once you have it, Oh, how did we not think of this all along? You can't remember not
00:40:33 ◼ ► having it, but I thought the whole thing should hinge upon putting together a timeline. And
00:40:37 ◼ ► that's the middle of the article I posted last night is just here as best as I can figure is
00:40:43 ◼ ► a timeline of certain events along the way, starting in like 2004 with the agreement to do
00:40:49 ◼ ► the rocker phone with Motorola to 2005. And my favorite, and you, I was so glad to see you tweet
00:40:58 ◼ ► it 2006 colon hard work. It really did. John, you nailed it. You really did. You weren't there,
00:41:10 ◼ ► but, uh, you, you, you were able to divine what 2006 was all about. Right. Sure. But it does seem
00:41:17 ◼ ► like that as a rough timeline, 2004 is this timeline where, and maybe all along it's in
00:41:24 ◼ ► the 2000s, some somebody at Apple is thinking we should make a cell phone because cell phone is a
00:41:29 ◼ ► computer type thing. The iPod in 2001, obviously showed that Apple can make handheld things that
00:41:35 ◼ ► are actually extremely compelling. There's this pressure, which was obviously true that is circa
00:41:43 ◼ ► 2004. Okay. The iPod is exploding in popularity, which is good. And the part of that hand in hand
00:41:56 ◼ ► very good. And from a consumer perspective, I think it's turned out to be good. It was the
00:42:00 ◼ ► first step towards making digital music without any sort of physical media, a business, as opposed
00:42:07 ◼ ► to just something you've pirated over the internet. Right. But by 2004 cell phones were getting good
00:42:15 ◼ ► enough that, you know, and I think, I don't think I quoted in my article, but in one of the books
00:42:20 ◼ ► and I, you know, again, like a conspiracy theorist, for the last five weeks, I've had like six books
00:42:26 ◼ ► each of them with eight bookmarks in it at the points that are relevant to what I was trying to
00:42:31 ◼ ► put together. At one point though, Eddie Q spoke to someone, I think it was in the Becoming Steve
00:42:36 ◼ ► Jobs book, but just said simply, look, it was obvious, you know, why carry two things in your
00:42:40 ◼ ► pocket? Everybody at Apple, even people at Apple had an iPod in one pocket and a cell phone in the
00:42:45 ◼ ► other. And if they were only going to get rid of one, it seems like they're probably going to get
00:42:49 ◼ ► rid of the iPod if the, cause the iPod wasn't making phone calls, but the phone could play music.
00:42:54 ◼ ► And so what are we going to do? Steve Jobs felt like Apple couldn't do Apple phone, the Apple
00:43:01 ◼ ► way where Apple made the decisions and said, this is what we want to make. Here it is. It's finished
00:43:06 ◼ ► ready for the world because cell phones all had to go through, as he called them the orifices,
00:43:10 ◼ ► the carriers and the carriers notoriously dictated all sorts of nonsense to every single company that
00:43:17 ◼ ► made phones at the time. You know, Nokia, Ericsson, Sony, whoever else was making popular phone,
00:43:23 ◼ ► Blackberry at the time, everything had to be approved through the carriers. Apple didn't want
00:43:28 ◼ ► to do that. Steve Jobs didn't want to do that. So, okay, fine. We'll let Motorola make a phone
00:43:32 ◼ ► and we'll work with them to get iTunes working on it. And it turned out almost famously bad.
00:43:39 ◼ ► I mean, the rocker is just famously bad. It's not a good phone. It seemed bad at the time.
00:43:50 ◼ ► failed at the introduction and it was like Steve Jobs wanted to demonstrate that you'd be,
00:43:55 ◼ ► if you played music and you got a phone call, it would like duck out the music and you'd take the
00:44:02 ◼ ► phone call. And then when you're in the phone call, the music would resume and the music didn't
00:44:07 ◼ ► resume. And I just remember writing that it seemed like he almost wanted to just throw the damn phone
00:44:13 ◼ ► on the ground and onstage in front of everybody and say, ah, forget it. You know what? We're
00:44:16 ◼ ► building our own phones. Stay tuned. But he didn't, he, you know, he was a pro and he stuck with it.
00:44:22 ◼ ► But then I rewatched the video this week and I was like, nope. He, he thought about throwing that
00:44:26 ◼ ► phone on the ground. He really was. He really did. Yeah. He broke character. Right. He really.
00:44:31 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It, it, for sure. It's interesting because you wonder what's going on
00:44:39 ◼ ► in that moment. It's like, when did he decide that, okay, we're, we're actually doing this
00:44:44 ◼ ► thing ourselves and you, it, you can almost, you can almost see the wheels turning in his mind.
00:44:50 ◼ ► It's like, it's right, right now. Right. That's, this is it. You know, we just need to do better
00:44:56 ◼ ► ourselves. And you know, it, it, you know, the, the iPod is, is all gave, I think I gave Apple
00:45:07 ◼ ► the confidence that the company could do it at that. You know, you kind of, you kind of look at,
00:45:20 ◼ ► that the company could attract, that there were these amazing designers and these highly skillful
00:45:27 ◼ ► engineers and these excellent marketers and, you know, all of the lawyers and then the supply chain
00:45:33 ◼ ► and the operations and everything like that goes into making a great product. But really,
00:45:40 ◼ ► you know, what, what did Steve add? And, uh, you know, I think it's, you know, maybe clear and
00:45:46 ◼ ► obvious to say, but I think still worth saying that he provided the vision. He provided that
00:45:51 ◼ ► we're going to go and do that, that that's the product that we're going to make. And to just
00:45:56 ◼ ► Marshall all those resources and point the point everybody in the same direction and give them a
00:46:02 ◼ ► clear idea of what they wanted to do or what he wanted everybody to do. And, uh, you know, I,
00:46:10 ◼ ► I think one of the great things, you know, going back and looking at, you know, you say,
00:46:14 ◼ ► you mentioned looking at old videos, going back and looking at Steve say, when he was at the all
00:46:20 ◼ ► things digital conferences with the Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher up on stage over many years,
00:46:32 ◼ ► we make great products. They ask him, what do you do in the morning? Well, I have a team of people
00:46:40 ◼ ► And so that's what he brought to the company. That's the momentum that he brought to the overall
00:46:47 ◼ ► effort. So that then people like me, you know, eventually, you know, there's a problem like
00:46:52 ◼ ► making a software keyboard for this new phone that we're going to make that, you know, it was just
00:46:56 ◼ ► very, very clear to me that that's my piece in the puzzle. And so I just set about trying to actually
00:47:02 ◼ ► deliver it so that there could be a whole product. And that, you know, that Steve was like gathering
00:47:08 ◼ ► up all of these pieces and, you know, and figuring out, Oh, what the jigsaw looked like and, and how
00:47:16 ◼ ► all of these pieces would come together and what the final picture would look like. And of course,
00:47:21 ◼ ► one of the major things that he did as well was, you know, sometimes you wind up with a beautiful
00:47:26 ◼ ► piece that's, you know, excellent and marvelous all by itself, but it doesn't fit into the puzzle.
00:47:34 ◼ ► And so he had this, this intuition about, you know, what would be the pieces to keep and how
00:47:43 ◼ ► should they be arranged so that the final picture would be, would be wonderful. And so in a way,
00:47:50 ◼ ► you know, you think of, think about, you know, what was Steve's job is it's like, he was like
00:47:53 ◼ ► an editor. He was just a great editor of of, of everybody's work. He'd give out the story
00:48:00 ◼ ► assignments and then the work would come back and he would figure out, well, okay, well, how do we
00:48:04 ◼ ► make a you know like either a magazine or a newspaper, you know, edition out of it. And he was
00:48:13 ◼ ► an absolute genius at it. I always think of him as, as being analogous, his role being analogous
00:48:19 ◼ ► to a film director in terms of the film director doesn't have to put their hands on the camera,
00:48:26 ◼ ► didn't write the script, doesn't show up as an actor on camera, doesn't build the sets,
00:48:34 ◼ ► may not even edit the film. There's an editor who edits the film after it's been shot, but is there
00:48:42 ◼ ► every step of the way to say, this is what I want it to be like, or this isn't good enough,
00:48:46 ◼ ► or that's great. That's, that's an amazing idea, but what if, yeah, I've always thought that,
00:48:52 ◼ ► but let's, let's take a break. And then I want to ask you about how you got started on the iPhone
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00:51:24 ◼ ► dot com to find out more. One of my favorite parts of your book, Ken is, is that you almost didn't
00:51:31 ◼ ► work on the iPhone. It sounds to me like, so long story short, when did you, when did you start at
00:51:37 ◼ ► Apple around 2001? In June, I was on my birthday of June in June of 2001. All right. So June, 2001
00:51:48 ◼ ► Mac OS X is brand new. And the first thing, the first project you worked on at Apple was what
00:51:56 ◼ ► became known as Safari or WebKit. I mean, I guess before you'd even, there was a difference between
00:52:02 ◼ ► Safari and WebKit. Which one would you actually, so yeah, so when I joined, I joined the same day
00:52:10 ◼ ► as Don Melton and he and I had worked at a company called Easel, which interestingly was founded by
00:52:21 ◼ ► Andy Hertzfeld, the fellow who did folklore.org. That's how I got him to sign the copy of the book
00:52:28 ◼ ► that I have on my desk here that Andy of course was one of the instrumental developers in the
00:52:36 ◼ ► original Mac OS in, in the eighties. And so, you know, Easel unfortunately didn't succeed,
00:52:52 ◼ ► top executives at Easel was a fellow named Bud Tribble who went off with Steve Jobs when Steve
00:53:00 ◼ ► left Apple or was ousted from Apple. However you want to characterize that in 1985 to found Next.
00:53:08 ◼ ► And so Bud was our VP of engineering at Easel. And when it was clear that Easel didn't have a history
00:53:16 ◼ ► anymore, he I pretty sure he just got on the phone and called Steve and said, Hey, we've got all of
00:53:23 ◼ ► these wonderful engineers. Maybe you want to hire some. So Apple actually held a job fair for Easel.
00:53:31 ◼ ► On the infinite loop campus. So, uh, I mean, it was really like, uh, you know, like, uh,
00:53:36 ◼ ► like we were a high school and, uh, up on the fourth floor, which, uh, of infinite loop two,
00:53:42 ◼ ► which at that time was a game room. It was a pool table and a couple of the old, uh, coin operated
00:53:47 ◼ ► arcade machines. Uh, yeah, there was a bunch of hiring managers that, uh, uh, struck up
00:53:53 ◼ ► conversations with a whole bunch of us. Uh, and so I was very interested in going to Apple because
00:54:00 ◼ ► at that point, uh, Easel was, um, the fourth company that I had worked at in the preceding
00:54:08 ◼ ► two years. Now, if you think about, you know, the, the kind of the.com era, there were these
00:54:12 ◼ ► startups came and these startups went and you, you know, to me, Apple seemed like a, well,
00:54:19 ◼ ► I'd always loved the company. Uh, and it just seemed like, you know, okay, this couldn't be
00:54:23 ◼ ► as Mac OS 10 is out and you know, the company of Steve is back and the, the companies probably got
00:54:28 ◼ ► a good future ahead of it. And it was actually making money, uh, which was more than you could
00:54:34 ◼ ► say for any of these previous startups that I had worked for. So I was really enthusiastic about
00:54:39 ◼ ► finding a job somewhere and I'd actually had a good lead on working for the system preferences
00:54:46 ◼ ► team. And, uh, you know, before I could, uh, get even get an offer, uh, Don who, uh, again,
00:54:55 ◼ ► I had worked with at easel, Don and I were the, uh, two directors of engineering reporting to bud.
00:55:01 ◼ ► Uh, Don was doing the client side of our, our effort, which I won't get into. And I was doing
00:55:08 ◼ ► the server side, uh, code for our effort, uh, at easel, uh, which was, well, basically it was
00:55:14 ◼ ► Linux on the desktop with some online services layered on top and it didn't work. So we were
00:55:20 ◼ ► trying to figure out what was, what, what we should do. And so Don pulled me aside and said,
00:55:25 ◼ ► um, here, why don't you come and take a, take a ride with me? So we went over to the computer
00:55:30 ◼ ► literacy bookshop. So we went to an actual physical brick and mortar bookstore, uh, and he
00:55:36 ◼ ► went in and he, uh, you know, he bought a couple books and he came back out and we got in his car
00:55:42 ◼ ► and he put down the O'Reilly rhino, uh, JavaScript book, right? JavaScript definitive guide,
00:55:56 ◼ ► seats in the front of his car. Uh, and he said, uh, Ken, you want to make a web browser?
00:56:02 ◼ ► And it was like, uh, uh, uh, uh, sure. What did it sound completely crazy? Uh, but he said, yeah,
00:56:10 ◼ ► uh, he was talking to, uh, Scott for stall and Scott with forestall, wanted to bring him on,
00:56:15 ◼ ► start a new project. He was going to make Don the manager and Don in that moment offered, uh, to,
00:56:21 ◼ ► uh, uh, uh, you know, me an opportunity to be his team. So, uh, he and I then, uh, just a couple
00:56:29 ◼ ► of weeks later, uh, in June of 2001 started and, uh, the job was to make a web browser.
00:56:43 ◼ ► basically, why make a web browser? Why should Apple make their own? There was internet explorer.
00:56:48 ◼ ► There were, there was a Mozilla. There were fire or I guess Firefox wasn't named Firefox yet, but
00:56:56 ◼ ► you know, there were other browsers. You could run them on the Mac. Uh, two things. I think if you're
00:57:03 ◼ ► picky about the details, it was absolutely true that none of the browsers on Mac OS 10 felt native
00:57:11 ◼ ► to Mac OS 10 and, you know, just little things like it with internet explorer, there were issues
00:57:18 ◼ ► that it was ported from classic Mac OS to Mac OS 10 and had, you know, text rendering didn't quite
00:57:26 ◼ ► look right on the Mac OS 10 side. And I know that's in some ways that sounds like such a silly
00:57:31 ◼ ► little thing. Like, well, just render the text differently. But in that, those, those, uh,
00:57:37 ◼ ► those transitional years, it, it really made a difference. And if you, and because screens had
00:57:44 ◼ ► so many fewer pixels per inch at the time, the difference was, you know, very noticeable. You
00:57:49 ◼ ► didn't really have to be a super picky font snob to say, oh, the text doesn't look as good, but,
00:57:55 ◼ ► you know, the way the buttons look and things work, it, it, and it was never going to be,
00:58:00 ◼ ► nobody was going to make a true great Mac browser unless Apple did it themselves. And then I think
00:58:07 ◼ ► the other reason is that just web browsers were obviously so important, right? There's all sorts
00:58:13 ◼ ► of other things that maybe there's not a great blank for the Mac. And you could say, well,
00:58:19 ◼ ► but it's not that important, right? It's not so important that there's, you know, and fill in your
00:58:24 ◼ ► product category here. Web browser didn't, you know, seemed like it was, you know, to put it in
00:58:31 ◼ ► the Tim Cook terms, an essential technology that Apple should control, you know, that it was too
00:58:36 ◼ ► important not to have their own. Right. And, and, and, and so one of the other things that, you know,
00:58:44 ◼ ► you, you, you know, we're introducing this, this, this topic, you know, talking about both Safari
00:58:51 ◼ ► and web kit. Well, I can tell you that from day one, both of those were absolutely essential
00:58:56 ◼ ► that a part of our charge was to make a web browser, but that also we needed to make a web
00:59:04 ◼ ► framework that you could use to make a web browser because man, I think it's really one of the
00:59:09 ◼ ► underappreciated aspects of Apple's long-term success in the, you know, the, the Steve Jobs,
00:59:16 ◼ ► 2.0, you know, you know, Steve returning to Apple, you know, starting from that date in the late
00:59:23 ◼ ► nineties, all the way through to today is the success of Apple's software frameworks, giving
00:59:32 ◼ ► not only third-party developers, but just as importantly, the internal first-party developers,
00:59:38 ◼ ► these great software development tools to make great apps. And so the goal was that we needed to
00:59:49 ◼ ► deliver a framework that we could give out to third-party developers to make great web app,
00:59:58 ◼ ► web apps of their own. And they're not really web apps, but technologies that deeply integrated the
01:00:04 ◼ ► web into the overall experience, right? Just to be very clear about that. So it, it, it, it was a part
01:00:12 ◼ ► of the job right from the start to do both Safari and WebKit, but of course we didn't have those
01:00:17 ◼ ► names. I mean, we really didn't have anything. We, we didn't know from day one, whether we were
01:00:23 ◼ ► going to build something ourselves, whether, you know, I didn't know Don and I used to joke that we
01:00:28 ◼ ► sit down, you know, we would get a terminal and we go VI web browser dot C and we just start typing,
01:00:34 ◼ ► you know, the code to write a web browser. I mean, that was kind of the, the joke. Do we do that?
01:00:38 ◼ ► You know, to buy or do we to build, or do we buy something from you know, some existing
01:00:46 ◼ ► web browser vendor and bring that code in house and try to customize it? Or do we go and try to
01:00:54 ◼ ► latch on to some open source that was available and begin our work by customizing that and, you
01:01:04 ◼ ► know, to make a very long story short, what, you know, what we, you know, wound up, we wound up
01:01:08 ◼ ► looking at Mozilla, we wound up looking at opera and we eventually fixed on the work the web
01:01:18 ◼ ► browsing frameworks, K HTML and KJS from the KTE desktop environment on Linux. And we found that,
01:01:27 ◼ ► it was, you know, pretty easy to work with. And it's actually is a one more digression is that
01:01:34 ◼ ► this was a difficult thing for Don and I to, to, to, to decide on. We were actually really
01:01:42 ◼ ► looking back quite indecisive about it. And we had going on, been going on for about six
01:01:48 ◼ ► weeks saying, well, do we build, do we buy, do we do open source, do this investigation in this
01:01:53 ◼ ► framework or that? And right around that time, we were saying, well, this is gonna be a pretty
01:01:58 ◼ ► big job to make a web browser and a web framework. So we need to hire some people. And so we hired
01:02:05 ◼ ► this fellow, Richard Williamson and Richard came on and he again, about six weeks into the effort
01:02:13 ◼ ► and we didn't really have very much to show for what we, you know, that, that time between when
01:02:26 ◼ ► we wanted to give him an update on what we were doing and he was interested to hear about our
01:02:29 ◼ ► progress. And he was like, really not impressed at all. He kind of, he liked the idea of making a web
01:02:36 ◼ ► browser seem like a big project, something worth doing, but he was completely unimpressed. So he
01:02:41 ◼ ► went off by himself for like two days and we're gonna, Don and I were kind of looking at each
01:02:46 ◼ ► other. It's like, well, Richard seems busy. I don't know. He seemed to, you know, maybe,
01:02:49 ◼ ► you know, he's going to come up with something and he did most really quite remarkably. He had
01:02:54 ◼ ► taken this KDE code from Linux and just absolutely jammed it onto the Mac, got X windows running on
01:03:03 ◼ ► the Mac, took this Linux code, got it compiling on Mac OS 10 and brought the browser up under
01:03:20 ◼ ► give us a demo of the thing. And he just starts browsing the web on, on, it was incredible.
01:03:27 ◼ ► It was absolutely, absolutely one of the most awesome displays of just jam tied to hackery,
01:03:36 ◼ ► chicken wire and duct tape to get something that provided us with a vision of the future.
01:03:43 ◼ ► It was really just an absolutely remarkable piece of work. And that just the next day I went, we,
01:03:48 ◼ ► I went home from that and you know, it came in the next day and stood up a Linux box and downloaded
01:03:54 ◼ ► Katie and really did started doing some analysis to figure out what code, what, what files do we
01:04:00 ◼ ► actually need to bring over from Katie and, and K K HTML and KJ KJS to, to get our project starting
01:04:12 ◼ ► in earnest. So if you go and look, I mean, you can on track.webkit.org, I mean, it's a web kit,
01:04:18 ◼ ► it's an open source project. You can go back and look in some of the first, you know, the first
01:04:22 ◼ ► commit is mine of just a couple of files from from the KDE project. And we started on that.
01:04:32 ◼ ► And you know, that development still proceeds more than, you know, 20, 20 years, you know,
01:04:40 ◼ ► 20 years on. It's no longer a fresh transition from K HTML to webkit. It's no, no, no, it has
01:04:49 ◼ ► really had a whole life of its own. Now this story is told in great, in great detail in the book.
01:04:55 ◼ ► But, but one of the things I read, that's one of the parts I reread. And one of the parts that
01:04:58 ◼ ► really struck me is at that point, it's three of you, it's Don Melton, you, and now Richard
01:05:06 ◼ ► Williamson. It's three people who are still like, just sort of, you know, and you do have a firm
01:05:11 ◼ ► mission. The mission is pretty clear. You're going to build a great Mac web browser with a great
01:05:16 ◼ ► engine that could be kitified in Apple's terms, right? And so then, you know, I think about the
01:05:23 ◼ ► ways that Apple has used WebKit, not just Safari, but WebKit since. There was dashboard for a couple
01:05:29 ◼ ► of years where the components were all built in WebKit. There are little parts, you know,
01:05:33 ◼ ► like the help system could now be written, you know, now use WebKit as the rendering engine for
01:05:38 ◼ ► help information. Parts of iTunes could be rendered as HTML. And, you know, Apple News today
01:05:46 ◼ ► is, it's all over the place, which doesn't even get to the point that by the time you got to make
01:05:52 ◼ ► a phone, now you have your own engine. And obviously, an engine needed to be customized
01:05:58 ◼ ► greatly to run on a three and a half inch diagonal touchscreen with pinch zoom and all these other
01:06:04 ◼ ► things, you know, even putting that part of the serendipity of having a great extensible
01:06:13 ◼ ► componentized framework that could do it, you know, it obviously made sense. But at that point,
01:06:19 ◼ ► it's just three of you. You and Don are mostly thinking, well, how can we shoehorn the Mozilla
01:06:25 ◼ ► project into something that we can build on? And, you know, maybe if Richard Williamson hadn't been
01:06:33 ◼ ► available, or if he hadn't taken the job, or you hadn't decided to hire him, or somebody else had
01:06:37 ◼ ► been employee three, maybe WebKit is totally different today. You know, it's entirely possible.
01:06:53 ◼ ► But failure was an option in this case where Apple had web browsers, right. And when Safari debuted,
01:07:00 ◼ ► it was a surprise announcement. It wasn't like, you know, it wasn't completely obvious that Apple
01:07:13 ◼ ► it would be nicer to have their own web browser that rather than rely on Internet Explorer and
01:07:17 ◼ ► these other options that people have that are mostly built on cross platform code bases,
01:07:22 ◼ ► and therefore don't embrace the Mac. And, you know, maybe it can't be componentized easily.
01:07:26 ◼ ► That was the whole problem. Again, long story short, that was the whole problem with Mozilla,
01:07:30 ◼ ► was that it really was, it was sort of the opposite of the framework mentality. It was just
01:07:35 ◼ ► this gigantic monolithic code base that they built to sort of abstract out all the details,
01:07:42 ◼ ► because they wanted it to be cross platform, right, by wanting Mozilla to run anywhere,
01:07:46 ◼ ► they sort of built effectively their own operating system at a conceptual level that everything ran
01:07:52 ◼ ► on. And it was therefore hard to just pick out the, well, we just want the rendering part,
01:07:56 ◼ ► you know, we just want the JavaScript engine. And it was like, no, you kind of got to take
01:08:05 ◼ ► You know, I just was looking at something came across my feed, I know it was Twitter somewhere,
01:08:15 ◼ ► the latest web browser statistics. And so I went and looked and basically everybody uses WebKit to
01:08:23 ◼ ► surf the web these days, whether it's in Safari, either on the Mac or in iOS, or in the fork of
01:08:32 ◼ ► WebKit that happened some years ago, that now powers Chrome. Right. So the entire web, I mean,
01:08:38 ◼ ► it's, it really is remarkable to think that it was just these three, you know, guys who didn't
01:08:43 ◼ ► know anything about the web. Well, it's actually to be fair, Don was the one who did because he
01:08:48 ◼ ► actually had worked at Netscape. So before easel. So it's one guy who knew about the web, two guys
01:08:54 ◼ ► who didn't, and we're learning about it as quickly as we could. And that, you know, some help for
01:09:00 ◼ ► some smart people who did some good work in the open source world. Yeah, now, in the fullness of
01:09:07 ◼ ► time, you know, things have completely changed. I hate to say it, but I think it was me who linked
01:09:12 ◼ ► to the thing about the web browsing statistics, but going by those stats. Oh, we did. But going
01:09:18 ◼ ► by that. That is a way I would have seen it. It is true, but the path from KHTML to WebKit,
01:09:24 ◼ ► and then for years, the first few years of Chrome, it was, they were just using WebKit. Then, you
01:09:30 ◼ ► know, opinions divided on, you know, where it should go. So Google forked it and they have,
01:09:36 ◼ ► I think they call it Blink or Chromium, whatever you want to call their version. But it clearly,
01:09:40 ◼ ► it was a fork from WebKit. So the family tree is clear. And as the years have gone by, I think the
01:09:47 ◼ ► only one left that's not derived from WebKit is the Mozilla engine in Firefox, which is still has
01:09:54 ◼ ► like nine or let's give them 10%. Let's round up to be generous. 10% of desktop browsing,
01:10:00 ◼ ► but mobile browsing is a majority of browsing. And so overall browsing usage, you know, it's got to
01:10:07 ◼ ► be something like 96 or 97% WebKit or Chrome, which is derived from WebKit, including, you know,
01:10:15 ◼ ► Microsoft's own browser edge, which is the most, that's the part that would seem bananas. I think
01:10:20 ◼ ► if time-traveling John Gruber went back and met with Don Melton, Ken Kishenda, and Richard
01:10:26 ◼ ► Williamson while you guys were noodling over his demo, two-day demo of getting Conquerer to run on
01:10:34 ◼ ► the Mac. And I said, by the way, 20 years from now, 97% of all web browsing on all computing
01:10:40 ◼ ► platforms, including those that haven't been, you haven't been invented yet, will be using the
01:10:47 ◼ ► Yeah, it's pretty crazy because actually, you know, I write about it in the book about the
01:10:56 ◼ ► effort to make a Safari and WebKit fast. We used, I had a windows machine in my office and re we ran
01:11:05 ◼ ► IE on windows as the benchmark for how fast we needed to be. And in the beginning of the project,
01:11:15 ◼ ► it was absolutely comical. We were three, four, five times slower than windows than IE on windows.
01:11:26 ◼ ► As a matter of fact, it is really quite annoyingly. I had this, this obnoxious click sound
01:11:40 ◼ ► And so it would just go click, click, click, click, click. Cause we, it just was, it's like,
01:11:49 ◼ ► how are we ever going to be that fast when I, you know, when ours was, was just going, uh, the three
01:11:57 ◼ ► took three times as long or more to get through the thing. And, you know, it really, I have to
01:12:02 ◼ ► give Don Melton just a huge amount of credit for saying, you know, it's almost like, you know,
01:12:07 ◼ ► like a Zen master. He said the way we're going to make the web browser faster is by never making
01:12:12 ◼ ► it slower. Right. He just absolutely refused to accept any check-ins into our code base. And then
01:12:19 ◼ ► as the team grew, eventually we had probably about eight or nine or maybe even 10 people on the
01:12:25 ◼ ► project by timely shift. A huge, huge team can just absolutely enormous, enormous Silicon Valley,
01:12:41 ◼ ► what are you going to do? But that's it. I love that story from Don. I don't want to spend too
01:12:44 ◼ ► much time on it, but to restate it, the basic rule instituted by Don Melton was anytime an engineer
01:12:51 ◼ ► wanted to check in code for a new feature or an updated feature, you had to run your page load
01:12:57 ◼ ► test. I think it was, you called it and it's just loading real world web pages from real sites that
01:13:03 ◼ ► people actually use that were popular. And Safari had to be as fast or faster than it was, you know,
01:13:10 ◼ ► preferably faster, but not slower. And if it was slower, then back to the drawing board,
01:13:19 ◼ ► it always gets faster. And it sounds, I think people out there who don't program and certainly
01:13:23 ◼ ► haven't been involved in larger software projects that you might think, well, that must be the norm
01:13:29 ◼ ► everywhere, but the real norm everywhere is we'll fix it later. Right? Like, yep. Like we,
01:13:35 ◼ ► we were told we've got to get support for blank in here. You know, like let's say it's a new CSS spec,
01:13:42 ◼ ► right? CSS 1.1 came out. We only support 1.0. There's these things we need to do. We've checked
01:13:48 ◼ ► them in. Ah, but look, when we use these CSS 1.1 things, it's 10% slower rendering yahoo.com and
01:13:56 ◼ ► then New York times.com. We'll fix it later. Okay, let's go. Cause we've got these other things on
01:14:01 ◼ ► our list. We've also got to support this other new thing and new technology. And we, you know,
01:14:06 ◼ ► we've always been meaning to make printing better, keep going. And then those we'll fix it later is
01:14:10 ◼ ► pile up and next thing you know, it's slow. Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely true. And you know,
01:14:15 ◼ ► there were, and Don just simply refused to have it be the way that we worked. I, I, I remember
01:14:23 ◼ ► there was one time that I was working on some big feature. I actually don't remember the feature,
01:14:28 ◼ ► but I do remember the phone call that I got on like the Friday evening that, Hey, I finished
01:14:33 ◼ ► the work. And as I check it in, no, naturally, you know, another programmer joke, you know, you,
01:14:37 ◼ ► you make a big check in and then you go home for the weekend. The you know, he gave me a call
01:14:44 ◼ ► and said, Ken, I checked out your code and I ran the page load test and slower. It's got to come
01:14:48 ◼ ► back out. And it's like, Don, you always, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, it's just like
01:14:52 ◼ ► huge amount of work and it's all these new features. And he says, I don't care. And it was
01:14:57 ◼ ► absolutely the right thing to do. And, and you would, you would think, you know, if you are,
01:15:02 ◼ ► you know, a developer or maybe you're just thinking this through logically, well, how can
01:15:06 ◼ ► you make the software do more add features and yet still have it be faster than it was without
01:15:15 ◼ ► those features there. Like your, your mention of like CSS one.one, it's actually doing more to
01:15:23 ◼ ► implement a more complex, complicated version of a spec. And the trick was, you know, that,
01:15:31 ◼ ► that the code base was sufficiently large and sufficiently not or insufficiently understood by
01:15:40 ◼ ► us that there was always an opportunity to go into some new area, understand it a little bit,
01:15:53 ◼ ► in subsystem a with optimizations in subsystem B. And as long as the browser was faster,
01:16:03 ◼ ► that was okay as fast or equal, then it was okay. We could proceed. And so it was just a
01:16:09 ◼ ► matter of matter of kind of sometimes shuffling around these, these, these chips around the, the,
01:16:16 ◼ ► the table and trying to think of, you know, like new and interesting ways that we could either
01:16:20 ◼ ► optimize here or there, or it's sometimes gathering up little optimizations to, you know,
01:16:26 ◼ ► to offset things. And we didn't really game the system either. You think that we could, you know,
01:16:30 ◼ ► it's like save an optimization for when we needed it. And then we just very honestly and
01:16:34 ◼ ► straightforwardly tried to do the best job adding features and never letting the thing get slower.
01:16:44 ◼ ► That would be that that would be dastardly if you like, you had part of the code in your purview
01:16:50 ◼ ► and, and, and you had an optimization, but you, it was like, Ooh, but then if I do something else
01:16:56 ◼ ► and it makes it slower, I'll check in my optimization for this other thing that I've had
01:17:00 ◼ ► in my pocket. And then the whole thing feels faster. It's, you know, it just is, it's like,
01:17:06 ◼ ► I'm an absolutely like horrid liar and I get, I get, you know, such like childlike enthusiasm.
01:17:17 ◼ ► would have been able to keep it to myself. And so, you know, it just was the, it was the culture,
01:17:22 ◼ ► it was a good positive culture. And so, you know, and, and put that together with a plan and a clear
01:17:28 ◼ ► goal and there you go. We're watching the, my wife and I are watching the show, Pam and Tommy on Hulu,
01:17:35 ◼ ► which is about the Pamela Anderson, Tommy Lee, both their marriage personally, which is more,
01:17:42 ◼ ► you know, I was around at the time, but the famous sex tape that came out and was sold over the web.
01:17:48 ◼ ► And so, and you know, these, these scenes take place in 1996 of, of the people who stole this
01:18:00 ◼ ► video on the web at the time, or if you did, it wasn't really, it wasn't even VHS quality. It was
01:18:05 ◼ ► so, you know, tiny. So, the way to sell, the way to put a sex tape out in 1996 was to actually sell
01:18:11 ◼ ► VHS copies of the tape, but to do it on the web, you'd send them a check and then they'd mail you
01:18:17 ◼ ► a tape. But the thing that they, you know, I pay attention to stuff, everybody listening to the
01:18:25 ◼ ► show pays attention to stuff like this. The thing they get right is how slow the web was at the time
01:18:32 ◼ ► and they don't cheat. And it's like, you're watching these pages load over modems. And it's
01:18:37 ◼ ► like everybody who went through this modem era knows, oh my God, it was so incredibly slow.
01:18:43 ◼ ► And people would just make their web pages as tiny as they could be. And we'd compress, you know,
01:18:48 ◼ ► use whatever tools we could to shrink a GIF from 15 kilobytes to 13 kilobytes. That was a win.
01:18:54 ◼ ► And it still was so terribly slow. And I remember having a job interview coming out of college
01:19:05 ◼ ► some computers at Drexel University where we had that, but for the most part, when I was in the,
01:19:10 ◼ ► like the comp sci lab, it was at like a Unix terminal, you know, and I'm just staring at
01:19:16 ◼ ► a command prompt. I wasn't browsing the web. And it was like, oh my God, this is so fast.
01:19:21 ◼ ► But then once you got past modem speeds and got, you know, real internet, you, at that time,
01:19:28 ◼ ► you suddenly, it didn't take long where this thing that felt because you were no longer tied to this
01:19:39 ◼ ► rendering the web is extremely slow. It is just, it's just extremely difficult. HTML and what people
01:19:48 ◼ ► wanted to build with HTML and JavaScript and what people wanted to build and did build. And the
01:19:54 ◼ ► other thing too, is it's like, you can't just say, well, we won't, we won't do that because other,
01:19:58 ◼ ► if other web browsers are rendering this popular webpage that was very difficult to render,
01:20:10 ◼ ► incredibly, the combination of computers being slow, slow, not bandwidth, not modems, but just
01:20:15 ◼ ► the actual CPUs being so slow compared to today and web pages being ever growing in complexity,
01:20:23 ◼ ► the speed really mattered. And I remember when Safari was announced that it was, you know,
01:20:28 ◼ ► to me, it was more interesting, like, hey, this is, this really is native. I don't, you know,
01:20:32 ◼ ► and of course, as Steve Jobs was announcing, we didn't know what the underlying rendering engine
01:20:38 ◼ ► was yet. I think it was, you know, like an email to the KHTML team after, you know, which again,
01:20:44 ◼ ► I don't want to get into. It was like the KHTML team found out about this after it was announced,
01:20:48 ◼ ► which is according to, you know, that that's within the rights of the license, you know,
01:20:53 ◼ ► and that's why WebKit was then open source, but it was like, it dropped as a surprise even to them.
01:21:00 ◼ ► But it was, to me, it was like, oh my God, it is native. It looks great. I love this interface
01:21:04 ◼ ► and it renders text well, and the buttons look like Mac buttons, but it was fast, fast, fast.
01:21:09 ◼ ► This is faster than the other browsers. And it was so important. Oh, you know, and again, just,
01:21:15 ◼ ► you know, total, um, you know, I, you know, I give, you know, so much credit for Don Melton
01:21:20 ◼ ► for figuring out the, the, the way that we were going to deliver on that goal, but it just comes
01:21:25 ◼ ► down to Steve. That's what he said. And so he said, this thing has to be fast. And that, and
01:21:31 ◼ ► that was that, I mean, there was no real arguing with Steve when he just said very, very clearly
01:21:35 ◼ ► what he wanted and just an incredible amount of insight into what, where the web was going. I mean,
01:21:44 ◼ ► you know, don't necessarily fit. I mean, Apple is not necessarily known, uh, perhaps with good
01:21:55 ◼ ► internet native, maybe even, uh, you know, it bears so much of its history as being like this
01:22:01 ◼ ► single user system that is, you know, people running Photoshop and illustrator and other
01:22:06 ◼ ► graphics programs by themselves. Uh, and yet Steve did have this, you know, really, you know,
01:22:13 ◼ ► amazing insight into where the future of the web was going, as you just described as people were
01:22:17 ◼ ► coming off modems, uh, and we're going to be getting faster internet speeds, that this was
01:22:36 ◼ ► So Safari ships, webkit ships, it's a hit. It, it takes off on the Mac. It, it's growing,
01:22:42 ◼ ► you're working on it for a few years. Um, but then long story short, you, you kind of ended up
01:22:49 ◼ ► Peter printer, principal in yourself, right? The Peter principle is the, is the adage that
01:22:54 ◼ ► employees in an organization rise to the level of their incompetence. And you think, oh, well,
01:23:01 ◼ ► that's, that's, that sounds, well, you think that sounds brutal. That can't be right, but it makes
01:23:05 ◼ ► sense. Like if you're really good at your job and you deserve to be promoted in a well-run
01:23:20 ◼ ► looking like you need another promotion or deserve another promotion. You've risen to the level of,
01:23:27 ◼ ► of your incompetence. Um, and maybe in your case, again, it's not, maybe not even incompetent.
01:23:33 ◼ ► It sounds like from your book, it was just, you rose to the level of your dissatisfaction,
01:23:45 ◼ ► became a manager and, and very, very quickly just discovered that I didn't like it. Uh, it was,
01:23:54 ◼ ► I just missed coming in every day and worrying about the technology, you know, and, and realizing,
01:24:00 ◼ ► uh, uh, after the fact, rather than having, you know, sufficient foresight to understand it, uh,
01:24:07 ◼ ► you know, before I, I made the commitment that when you're a manager, your job is to worry about
01:24:12 ◼ ► your people, you know, and to make sure that they're productive, that, that, Hey, they have
01:24:17 ◼ ► what they need so that they can do the, the, the work to make the, make the products. And, uh, I
01:24:24 ◼ ► just missed making the technology by mist mist, uh, coming in and having the difficult, interesting
01:24:31 ◼ ► technical problems to solve myself. And, um, I, I just, uh, after, you know, maybe two or three
01:24:39 ◼ ► months, I realized that it was just absolutely not for me. And, and so I'll just continue to continue
01:24:46 ◼ ► with the story is that I just went and told Scott for stall. It's like, Scott, uh, this, uh, I'm
01:24:52 ◼ ► miserable and, uh, I want out and he's like, wait a minute. No, he's like, just three months ago,
01:24:58 ◼ ► you committed to me that you were going to take this team on and that you were going to get some
01:25:01 ◼ ► good things done. Um, and I said, no, I say, well, look, I'm willing to resign over it. I understand
01:25:08 ◼ ► that I made this commitment to you and that now I'm reneging and that I'm willing to, um, you
01:25:15 ◼ ► know, to, you know, to just leave the company over and I'll go find a job someplace else, but I feel
01:25:20 ◼ ► like I let you down and I'm sorry. And he's like, whoa, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait. He
01:25:25 ◼ ► was pretty upset with me, but he said, Ken, tell you what, go away. I'm going to work on this and
01:25:32 ◼ ► we'll figure it out. And this is around 2000. This is early 2005. I believe this is in it's actually
01:25:41 ◼ ► in, um, uh, it's like in July of 2005. Okay. So middle of two, I had made, yeah, I had made the
01:25:49 ◼ ► final decision to, uh, you know, to throw myself on the mercy of forestall, uh, over the 4th of
01:25:57 ◼ ► July weekend. So famously now this is where it's all coming together. We, you know, as I've
01:26:03 ◼ ► pieced together, not that I've I'm like Sherlock Holmes, but you know, that by early 2005 at the
01:26:09 ◼ ► highest levels, Apple had decided let's build our own phone and Scott forestall obviously was very,
01:26:15 ◼ ► very much, uh, aware of that at the time you had no idea, like, so you're, you're meeting with
01:26:20 ◼ ► Scott forestall, uh, and talking about, you know, the three month old promotion you would like to
01:26:33 ◼ ► he recognizes he, you know, you know, he'd like to keep you as a productive, you know, that you're,
01:26:38 ◼ ► you're a good team member to have somewhere. Uh, but meanwhile, in his head is the entire iPhone
01:26:46 ◼ ► OS project, which was still at like the, this sort of germ, germ stage, like webkit was when it's you
01:26:55 ◼ ► and Don Melton and, uh, uh, Williamson, uh, you know, and just like, I don't know, could it be
01:27:02 ◼ ► cage TML? Should we build our own thing from scratch? You know, it's, you know, everything is possible, right?
01:27:08 ◼ ► And so then, then you get, you get a knock on the door, right? Yeah. So then, uh, the, uh,
01:27:17 ◼ ► so then, uh, Henri Lamoureux, who was reporting to Scott said, uh, Ken, come, come over here,
01:27:25 ◼ ► come into my office, close the door. And he said, sign this paper. Um, it's like, uh, uh, okay.
01:27:34 ◼ ► And it's like, uh, okay. So I signed the paper to some paper was an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement,
01:27:42 ◼ ► you know, that of course, everybody at Apple is already under an, uh, a non-disclosure agreement,
01:27:48 ◼ ► blanket non-disclosure. So this is the super double secret non-disclosure agreement specifically
01:27:54 ◼ ► about this project, uh, that he was going to tell me about if I signed. So I sign and I hand the
01:28:01 ◼ ► paper back to him and he says, yep, we're going to make a cell phone. And that was it. And so then I
01:28:07 ◼ ► was on the team and, and it turns out there was about like maybe six or eight other, um, intrepid
01:28:13 ◼ ► engineers, you know, none of us had any experience making cell phones. Now we eventually brought in
01:28:21 ◼ ► another team member who did, but of the people who made the iOS, the first version, none of us
01:28:28 ◼ ► said ever worked on a cell phone before, uh, at that point is, has the bake-off been completed
01:28:36 ◼ ► or is the bake-off, you know, with, Hey, what if we just build our own OS from scratch based on
01:28:42 ◼ ► Linux and it's not cut down from Mac OS X is that still going on coincident in July? Yeah. So to be
01:28:48 ◼ ► yeah. So to be clear about that, what I, what project I signed up for was the effort to shrink
01:28:56 ◼ ► down Mac OS X, right? To take the desktop OS and to shrink it down so we could run it on this phone.
01:29:04 ◼ ► Right. And, uh, then that project was being run by Scott and Scott had deputized, you know,
01:29:09 ◼ ► on read to be the day-to-day manager since Scott had lots of other software responsibilities and
01:29:15 ◼ ► design responsibilities as well. So, um, so that was part of the effort. So I got to see
01:29:23 ◼ ► what became UI kit from a very, very early point. Uh, and you know, just one of the little,
01:29:29 ◼ ► you know, sort of isms that is, you know, fixed in my memory about the, uh, about the Apple
01:29:40 ◼ ► which was called project builder, which actually came from next. So that was the, the, the
01:29:47 ◼ ► development environment, the IDE for, uh, the development that we were using. And the way that
01:29:54 ◼ ► software works is that whenever you created a new file, it had added this header at the top,
01:29:59 ◼ ► which the name of the file and the person who created it and the date. So I remember that UI
01:30:06 ◼ ► view dot M and object to see file for the basic fundamental view abstraction in UI kit was made
01:30:16 ◼ ► in may of 2005. Uh, so it's not, you know, around two months later I joined, but you know, UI kit
01:30:24 ◼ ► was already underway and, but not really much more than two months of work had been done to, to,
01:30:32 ◼ ► to make this shrink down Mac OS 10 version of the phone operating system. So that's when I joined,
01:30:43 ◼ ► that's when I can give you my, my best at it at a station that this is the, you know, the state of
01:30:50 ◼ ► things in, you know, at that moment, July of 2005. And, and at that point, is your team committed
01:30:58 ◼ ► to knowing that it's going to be an entirely touchscreen UI and it's not going to, yeah.
01:31:04 ◼ ► Oh yeah. Yeah. There was, there was, um, uh, we had prototypes, uh, and I think you, you linked to
01:31:12 ◼ ► one of the tweets that I, uh, that, that I, I made of a photograph of one of these prototypes,
01:31:18 ◼ ► you know, these little plastic touchscreens that we, uh, you know, everything at Apple has a code
01:31:24 ◼ ► name. And so the code name for these things were wallabies. So these little wallaby prototypes that
01:31:30 ◼ ► are like, like, um, you know, kind of like a, a, a, a chunky, uh, three and a half inch diagonal
01:31:37 ◼ ► screen with a kind of a big thick plastic bezel on it. And it was just a touch screen. It didn't
01:31:44 ◼ ► have any compute on board. So we had to take these, these wallabies and tether them to a Mac.
01:31:51 ◼ ► And, you know, there was this whole USB thing and there was this bare circuit board. I had a
01:31:56 ◼ ► bare circuit board on my desk for a year and a half, uh, to interface between the Mac to the
01:32:03 ◼ ► wallaby to get everything, you know, get that, that touchscreen hardware up and running. And
01:32:10 ◼ ► this wallaby then showed up on your, uh, on my Mac as an external display. So I could be running
01:32:18 ◼ ► a prototype version of an iOS app on my Mac and then moved, dragged that window over, uh,
01:32:29 ◼ ► the, to the external display and then pick up the display and start interacting with it using touch.
01:32:37 ◼ ► But, you know, things were so, uh, provisional things were so, you know, we were trying to
01:32:43 ◼ ► scrambling so much that there was not even any touch recognition software. We were just using
01:32:50 ◼ ► mouse events, right? So it was just like, you know, mouse down on that button, you know, the
01:32:55 ◼ ► mouse up. And, uh, it was months later by time we, we actually started, uh, uh, addressing the,
01:33:04 ◼ ► the multi-touch capabilities of the, uh, of the screen in, in, you know, in the iOS software.
01:33:27 ◼ ► double secret, uh, NDA. The team is very small. It is very secret. It is obviously got the
01:33:35 ◼ ► attend. You must know at this point, that's got the attention of Steve jobs, literally the,
01:33:39 ◼ ► you know, highest levels in the company. Um, and yet the Motorola rocker hasn't even been announced
01:33:46 ◼ ► yet that gets announced in September. So I don't want to spend time on a rocker, which you didn't
01:33:51 ◼ ► work on and which was a dud, but what was that like knowing that you're already on this team
01:33:56 ◼ ► and it's, you know, starting to pick up steam and it's getting, it's gone from, you know, in months,
01:34:02 ◼ ► it's gone from one empty UI view dot M file to, Hey, we've got some stuff running and we've got
01:34:10 ◼ ► some ideas here. And meanwhile, then in September, there's the, you know, the phone and, and the thing
01:34:17 ◼ ► watching the video again this week that I always forget is that when Steve jobs introduced it on
01:34:22 ◼ ► stage before he called it the rocker and said it was from Motorola, he said, I want to show you the
01:34:28 ◼ ► iTunes phone and, you know, and to his credit, he was trying to sell it, you know, I mean, and what
01:34:36 ◼ ► better way, you know, certainly saying we we've partnered, you know, if the first words out of his
01:34:40 ◼ ► mouth were we've partnered with, with Motorola on their new phone, the rocker to have iTunes running
01:34:46 ◼ ► on it sounds way less exciting than Steve jobs in a big keynote in Moscone hall saying, I want to
01:34:52 ◼ ► show you the iTunes phone because outside Apple by that time, again, it was a perennial idea that,
01:35:01 ◼ ► Ooh, everybody hates their cell phone. Wouldn't it be great if Apple made a cell phone? Well,
01:35:07 ◼ ► honestly that, that it sounds simplistic, but that's honestly an inside Apple. That's the
01:35:11 ◼ ► same thing. Everybody at Apple hated their cell phones too. Everybody did. They were all terrible.
01:35:15 ◼ ► Yeah, we did. Yeah, we, we, we did. I mean, I can reach on the shelf behind me here. I have a, a,
01:35:23 ◼ ► a, a handspring phone with a flip up display there and a nice little chicklet keyboard. Yeah. We,
01:35:31 ◼ ► you know, that was the phone that I had at the time. It's got, you know, the little knobby
01:35:34 ◼ ► antenna coming out of the top, you know, and, you know, it, it just was, wasn't good enough.
01:35:48 ◼ ► we always had a sense that, you know, and really thinking of two minds, I mean, I look,
01:35:55 ◼ ► I'll speak for myself and I, I wouldn't be surprised if other people felt the same way,
01:36:00 ◼ ► but I can't be sure. So I'll just, you know, speak for myself and saying that, you know,
01:36:05 ◼ ► we really were of two minds in that it's like, yeah, we want a better phone and we think that
01:36:10 ◼ ► we're going to make it, but gosh, we're really far from it. And, um, you know, we, we, we might fail.
01:36:17 ◼ ► So that's the, really the two minds is we want something better, but we might fail. And so it
01:36:24 ◼ ► just kind of seemed, and, you know, we're not going to be ready anytime soon. So it just sort
01:36:28 ◼ ► of seemed, you know, prudent that someone like Steve is trying to run a big company and he's,
01:36:33 ◼ ► he's kind of in some ways hedging his bets. I mean, and, and hedging them in a couple of
01:36:49 ◼ ► how is he going to preserve the, the best possible future outcomes from Apple, given what he knows
01:36:55 ◼ ► right now and some hopeful speculation about what we're going to be able to do. But, you know,
01:37:02 ◼ ► it really also does speak to the reality that we had no idea how successful the iPhone was going
01:37:10 ◼ ► to turn out to be. We weren't even going to be sure that it was going to be successful at all,
01:37:22 ◼ ► uh, a couple of months later, we were hiring, we were maybe up to, you know, 10 to 15 software
01:37:28 ◼ ► engineers and maybe, you know, eight to 10 designers. And that was the iOS effort. You know,
01:37:36 ◼ ► a couple of executives, a program manager, and that was it. So it was a small handful of people.
01:37:41 ◼ ► And so it was a bad and the rocker was another bad. But a real bet is a bet you can lose, right?
01:37:49 ◼ ► If you know, you're not going to lose, you're not actually wagering. Like if you, you know,
01:37:53 ◼ ► I don't know, this might be a terrible analogy, but if you know that a horse race is fixed and you
01:37:58 ◼ ► place a bet on horse seven and you know that horse seven is supposed to win, you're not really
01:38:02 ◼ ► gambling. I guess there's a bit of a gamble of, well, is the horse going to go along with it or
01:38:07 ◼ ► whatever, or like, you know, like pulp fiction, like a fixed prize fight. What if the guy who's
01:38:12 ◼ ► supposed to, you know, take a dive actually knocks the other guy out because he bet against it the
01:38:18 ◼ ► other way. I mean, so it's a small bet, but it's a different kind of bet, but the real bets, I know
01:38:23 ◼ ► this sounds highfalutin like I'm giving people life advice, but if you guys only set out to build
01:38:29 ◼ ► a phone that you knew you could make, it's July, 2005, you've just joined the team and you're
01:38:35 ◼ ► whiteboarding the whole idea. And you're saying, and if every single step of the way was, well,
01:38:40 ◼ ► let's only put things on this idea that we know we can do. A hundred percent sure we can definitely
01:38:47 ◼ ► build this. You don't get the iPhone, right? Like the only way you get the iPhone is to have things,
01:38:53 ◼ ► and again, to bring it to your story, you're committed at that point to a complete touchscreen
01:38:59 ◼ ► display and nobody has any idea how you're going to enter text yet. And it's basically,
01:39:03 ◼ ► we'll have to figure, we'll bet that we can figure that out. Yes. Right. It was, it was a total bet.
01:39:10 ◼ ► There were, there were some early ideas and the fellow who made the company called Fingerworks
01:39:26 ◼ ► of responsibilities on his plate to make that part of the system work. But Fingerworks previously also
01:39:33 ◼ ► had made a hardware keyboard of their own based on multi-touch software, you know, kind of a full
01:39:49 ◼ ► an absolute genius. He was also sort of planning on making the software version of the keyboard,
01:39:57 ◼ ► but it was just too much. And that keyboard wasn't coming together fast enough. And it's kind of one
01:40:06 ◼ ► of the, again, I mentioned before one of the real secrets of how Apple has made, you know,
01:40:14 ◼ ► made products in the past and the culture of making products that has continued over the
01:40:45 ◼ ► it doesn't need to lag very long before something is done, you know? And, and I think this is,
01:40:53 ◼ ► you know, I, you know, I I've heard, and I have no inside knowledge about it. But I've heard,
01:40:59 ◼ ► you know, the same thing happened at Pixar and has happened over with Pixar movies over the years
01:41:05 ◼ ► that, you know, a director was changed midstream that like Ratatouille didn't start with Brad
01:41:10 ◼ ► Bird directing it. He was brought in later because the director who was on there was just not making
01:41:15 ◼ ► quick enough progress. And at that point, they knew well enough what progress on one of these crazy,
01:41:22 ◼ ► you know, difficult, you know, creative technical projects should look like there's a certain amount
01:41:29 ◼ ► of messiness that goes on and a certain amount of we're going to figure it out as we go. But beyond
01:41:36 ◼ ► a certain point, there's a recognition that this has gone off track. Right. But then, and with like
01:41:41 ◼ ► with the Pixar movie, there's also like, there's like a window, like, Hey, this is our Thanksgiving,
01:41:46 ◼ ► you know, whatever year, you know, Disney needs a big family movie at Thanksgiving in this year.
01:41:52 ◼ ► You know, 18 months from now. This is it, you know, there is no plan B. Yeah. Yeah. And, and,
01:41:59 ◼ ► and so at Apple, there was always a, you know, it was always a schedule that we were moving toward.
01:42:04 ◼ ► And of course, at that point, you know, Mac world was a, was a big event. And, and so there was
01:42:10 ◼ ► always kind of like in this back of our mind, I don't know that I ever could really say for sure
01:42:14 ◼ ► that I knew it was going to be January of 2007, way back in the summer or fall of 2005. But that,
01:42:24 ◼ ► you know, it was always a feeling that, well, somebody has some date in mind and that they're
01:42:30 ◼ ► using that date as a, um, as a measuring stick, right. Counting back from that date, are we going
01:42:39 ◼ ► to make it? And everybody's asking every, every day, are we going to make, are we on track? Are
01:42:43 ◼ ► we going to make it? Are we going to make that next milestone and so forth. And so the, you know,
01:42:48 ◼ ► in the fall of 2005, there was just a termination that the software keyboard project was not
01:43:00 ◼ ► my whole Apple career is that just one fine day on re called everybody out into the hallway and
01:43:05 ◼ ► said, stop what you're doing. And, and, and to be clear, calling all of the software engineers and
01:43:10 ◼ ► designers working on iOS and said, okay, stop what you're doing. Everybody's starting from now
01:43:15 ◼ ► as a keyboard engineer. We need to figure this out. We need something different and better than
01:43:21 ◼ ► what we have now. And so all of us then it's like, well, no. Okay. It's like, uh, go get a
01:43:28 ◼ ► cup of coffee, go back in your office and sort of close all of the windows that you had open in
01:43:34 ◼ ► project builder. And it is, I do whatever you want, get your whiteboard out, get a notebook,
01:43:39 ◼ ► you know, open up a new file and start figuring out what, uh, what keyboards, um, uh, we, we might
01:43:47 ◼ ► be able to make. And, you know, it was just absolutely extraordinary is that the team was,
01:43:52 ◼ ► was a bunch of generalists. I mean, if you could just imagine that there were instead a team
01:43:58 ◼ ► stocked with people who either came from Nokia or Motorola or, you know, some other company that
01:44:03 ◼ ► their cell phone engineers, they might not have been so able to, you know, so easy to pivot, you
01:44:09 ◼ ► know, onto some brand new projects, some new areas that they've never thought about, uh, just on a
01:44:16 ◼ ► moment's notice, but we were all just generalists. So it's like, okay. Um, we all had different
01:44:22 ◼ ► backgrounds and things, but we were not, we, we didn't have a particular area of focus other than
01:44:34 ◼ ► very short order, uh, there was a stream of new demos. We were inviting each other to, uh,
01:44:52 ◼ ► text using a touch screen. All right. Let me take a break. Let me, I don't want to interrupt you.
01:44:57 ◼ ► Well, I do actually, cause I want people to come back after the break cause it's such a good,
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01:47:25 ◼ ► So effectively there's, there's a bake-off on keyboards. It is sort of an intramural kind of
01:47:32 ◼ ► like a science fair contest. Yeah. One of it's one of my, I don't want to spoil. I don't want to,
01:47:36 ◼ ► I don't know. I want people to, who haven't read your book to read the book. I don't want to spoil
01:47:39 ◼ ► so much and we can talk about things that aren't in the book, but I love this part of the story
01:47:45 ◼ ► where it basically, you guys were supposed, everybody on the team was supposed to implement
01:47:52 ◼ ► their keyboard is like part of a, like a framework again, to use the framework where it could be
01:47:59 ◼ ► plugged in and within the same demo on the same device, everybody's keyboards could just, you know,
01:48:04 ◼ ► if there's 10 keyboards to demo and you're presenting them to Scott Forstall, you could
01:48:09 ◼ ► just go through on the same device, one, two, three, four, and you know, whoever's number four
01:48:14 ◼ ► is can introduce it and say, look, it's like a wheel. And you do go out from the middle and your,
01:48:19 ◼ ► yours didn't fit in the framework. No, no, because, yeah, so I, I was a bad student and I didn't
01:48:28 ◼ ► complete the assignment. But because, well, you know, you know, I, I wound up, rewriting from
01:48:36 ◼ ► scratch, like three or four times, by that point. And, it's, it's, it was like, well, you know, I,
01:48:46 ◼ ► I think maybe if I rewrite it once more, I could, I could maybe get something that really works.
01:48:52 ◼ ► Either the dictionary was too slow or the, you know, the touch handling was no good. And I figure
01:48:56 ◼ ► I really need this one more rewrite. And I could either take my current version and, and figure out
01:49:03 ◼ ► how to get it integrated into that framework that you mentioned, or I could do this rewrite.
01:49:13 ◼ ► but what then just happened is that there was going to need to be a step where I was going
01:49:18 ◼ ► to need to get, you know, take the, the prototype out of Scott Forstall's hands, you know, to go
01:49:24 ◼ ► over to the Mac and, you know, run a new command and then hand the thing back to him. So it was
01:49:28 ◼ ► just with the, you know, the, the, the, you know, the people organizing the demo wanted to,
01:49:32 ◼ ► to avoid that. And so I went last and, you know, it kind of got down to the end of the demo and,
01:49:40 ◼ ► you know, Kim Vorath who was running the, the, the, the project said, well, Scott, that's it,
01:49:46 ◼ ► that's all the keyboards in the demo. And I was like, wait, wait, no, no, no, I still have mine
01:49:51 ◼ ► to go. And you know, it was, you know, it's so funny how, you know, history kind of turns on,
01:49:58 ◼ ► well, if Scott had gotten a phone call right at that moment, or he decided, no, I've seen enough,
01:50:03 ◼ ► he could have just left the room and I never would have gotten a chance to show my demo, but I did.
01:50:07 ◼ ► And he liked it right away. And you know, he, you know, the, the Forstall is just, you know,
01:50:14 ◼ ► is so smart and just is so quick to get down to the to what question should he ask that would
01:50:27 ◼ ► tell him the most information. And so I talked to him years later and he said, Ken, he wanted to
01:50:36 ◼ ► know, he can't even see it. Like ask me what is, what is going on in the software here? And I said,
01:50:42 ◼ ► Oh, well, I'm looking at your touches and I'm trying to figure out what you wanted. He says,
01:50:46 ◼ ► like from that moment was sold. He said, you had figured out how to make software a part of the
01:50:55 ◼ ► text entry experience because of course, for the most part, you know, there's some low level
01:51:00 ◼ ► software going on, say in the, you know, the MacBook pro keyboard sitting in front of me to
01:51:06 ◼ ► marry up the keys to the software that processes them. But it's, it's not sophisticated software
01:51:13 ◼ ► in terms of what it's doing. It's just they're processing events from the hardware. Whereas the,
01:51:19 ◼ ► you know, the breakthrough that, that I came up with on that earliest keyboard was to say,
01:51:24 ◼ ► no, I'm actually going to look at what you might mean, look at what you did and try to match those
01:51:30 ◼ ► things up to give the desired result. And that was enough for him. So I got the job. I became the DRI.
01:51:37 ◼ ► But as you've mentioned in the book, part of the scary part about going last in any sort of like,
01:51:44 ◼ ► Hey, we've got an hour to demo projects to, to Scott Forstall. If you're going last, the risk is,
01:51:49 ◼ ► well, what if Scott was late because of something else he had to do? You know, as you said, he was,
01:51:54 ◼ ► he was at least a little busy as I, as I inserted into my timeline, which I think is fascinating in
01:52:01 ◼ ► hindsight, 2005 was also when Apple announced the move from power PC to Intel processors for the
01:52:07 ◼ ► Mac, which guess what was a big deal. Yeah, there's lots going on. So Scott could be late,
01:52:13 ◼ ► but he still has to leave at the end of the scheduled time for the next meeting because
01:52:17 ◼ ► he's got something else or Scott could leave early. Cause maybe his phone goes off and somebody
01:52:21 ◼ ► says, Hey, is Steve wants you. And you know, when Steve would, Steve would call, no, Steve would just
01:52:26 ◼ ► call him directly and just say, Hey, come here. I got to talk to you about something. And guess what?
01:52:30 ◼ ► When Steve jobs call Scott Forstall and says, I need to talk to you about something. Scott
01:52:33 ◼ ► Forstall goes and talks to Steve jobs. Right. So you, and I, again, it's, you know, like I said,
01:52:40 ◼ ► maybe, you know, you don't hire Williamson, maybe web kits, not based on cage TML, you know, maybe
01:52:46 ◼ ► Steve jobs call Scott Forstall. Maybe we have a different keyboard. I mean, and again, it's not
01:52:51 ◼ ► like, Oh, you were just a rando off the street who this was your own, you know, your, your only
01:52:57 ◼ ► screen test. You were an employee on a small team. You might've had a chance to show him the keyboard
01:53:02 ◼ ► subsequently. Sure. But it's still, it makes these things just, yeah, it really does. It just,
01:53:09 ◼ ► I just remember in that, that moment of, of, you know, you never really, you know, you want to
01:53:18 ◼ ► make a scene in a demo with Scott or, you know, never with Steve, but not even with Scott,
01:53:25 ◼ ► you know, it's, it's, it's a high stakes, it's a high stakes moment. And so, you know, sort of
01:53:30 ◼ ► pressing and pushing to say, no, no, no, I have this other demo to show felt like it was a little
01:53:35 ◼ ► bit of a risk, but it was a risk that paid off. You tell the story of demoing it for Phil Schiller
01:53:41 ◼ ► the first time. And at the time your, your, your keyboard had, instead of having a discreet
01:53:47 ◼ ► onscreen key for all 26 letters of the alphabet, there were groups. So like, K W E was one key.
01:53:55 ◼ ► I think that's what it was. Cause you know, Q W E of course the first three. And then you would
01:54:01 ◼ ► press that key for any word that with a Q W or E and press, you know, other keys that either had
01:54:09 ◼ ► two or three letters on them. So they were bigger touch targets. And then the dictionary would figure
01:54:13 ◼ ► out, well, out of all these possibilities, the first letter is either a Q W or an E the second
01:54:19 ◼ ► letter is either a J K or L or whatever. What's what's the most likely possibility, but it looked
01:54:26 ◼ ► weird. And I think that basically your demo for Phil Schiller with the first keyboard was like two
01:54:31 ◼ ► minutes. Like you're braced for like, Oh my God, it's Phil Schiller. He's, you know, he's got this
01:54:35 ◼ ► reputation. He's got strong opinions, you know, good taste. This could be a night, you know,
01:54:41 ◼ ► maybe not even a nightmare, but this could be like an hour long slog of arguing over details or
01:54:46 ◼ ► defending my actions. And instead it's two minutes. And he was like, man, but, but, but what comes
01:54:54 ◼ ► away from me in the book and it's what I love about your attitude and what I think made you so
01:55:01 ◼ ► successful and maybe typical for the Apple mentality is rather than take it personally,
01:55:07 ◼ ► like, huh, huh, how about that? I've been slaving over this for so long, laboring over this for so
01:55:15 ◼ ► long. And he just took two minutes and walked away, but you took it and thought, huh, something
01:55:20 ◼ ► didn't impress him. And it's like, well, he's Phil Schiller. He cares about how things look,
01:55:27 ◼ ► that's, that's off, right? It's off for Apple for something to look weird. Right. And it,
01:55:40 ◼ ► I can't believe it was only two minutes. This is so important. And instead it spurs you to think,
01:55:45 ◼ ► huh, and it gets your gears turning to, and then I think you said it was Greg Christie,
01:55:54 ◼ ► do a great. No, it's, you know, Greg Christie is, I love the guy to death, but he had met him a few
01:56:00 ◼ ► times. He's just, he, he is, you know, he is a wonderful, you know, the warm supportive person
01:56:11 ◼ ► to, to work for once you get to know him, but he is very, very gruff on the exterior. And, and,
01:56:18 ◼ ► you know, he's from New York and he's very, very direct in his communication style. So we were
01:56:23 ◼ ► sitting in a meeting one time and he's just, oh, come on, Ken K, you just put, make one key for
01:56:27 ◼ ► every letter. And that's it. And so, you know, you, do you went and described, you know, how
01:56:37 ◼ ► that earlier software worked, whereas it's done with this group, you know, this, this key that
01:56:42 ◼ ► had this group of letters on them. And that when you press that key, so it was a nice big touch
01:56:47 ◼ ► target. So you could, you could, you could hit the key reliably. You're going to get, you were going to
01:56:52 ◼ ► get one of those three letters. And so look, all I did was I chopped up the graphics so that it looked
01:57:02 ◼ ► like you were getting, you were tapping only one of those keys, but underneath the software was
01:57:07 ◼ ► doing the same game. And as a matter of fact, it even did more because when each letter was on,
01:57:13 ◼ ► you know, when three letters was on one key, you were only going to get that letter because the,
01:57:18 ◼ ► the keys were large enough targets to hit. And once I made the key smaller, I started taking
01:57:23 ◼ ► into account keys that were letters that were above and below. And so I made, you know, the kind
01:57:29 ◼ ► of these dynamic sets of keys, but creating the illusion that you were only tapping one key. And
01:57:35 ◼ ► that was enough. That was enough to, you know, give people an impression that it, the, the
01:57:42 ◼ ► keyboard was something that they could understand the first time that they approached it.
01:57:46 ◼ ► I love the story of the keyboard. I think it makes such a great example. And again, the book is,
01:57:53 ◼ ► as you said, 80,000 words. It goes into much detail, but sometimes you need a smaller example
01:58:00 ◼ ► or a concrete example to exemplify a principle. And I have always thought, again, not saying this
01:58:06 ◼ ► just because, you know, you and I are pals and you're on my show here, but I do think that the
01:58:12 ◼ ► iPhone keyboard exemplifies everything Steve Jobs said on stage about why make the whole phone a
01:58:19 ◼ ► touchscreen, which is look, you know, once you put hardware buttons on it, the hardware is there
01:58:25 ◼ ► forever or until you make a new device. Whereas we know how to make something that changes with
01:58:32 ◼ ► new ideas that we haven't even had yet. It's called software. Right. And the keyboard itself
01:58:37 ◼ ► exemplifies that. But the other thing I really love about the iPhone keyboard in hindsight
01:58:42 ◼ ► is that it, it looks at first like the most obvious idea in the world, starting in a world
01:58:50 ◼ ► where Blackberries and Blackberry type phones were at that point, the, the, the best-selling
01:58:57 ◼ ► smartphones, right? If you wanted to do a phone that did like email and messaging, you were getting
01:59:02 ◼ ► a Blackberry or a phone that looked like a Blackberry, which had an actual 26 keys for all
01:59:07 ◼ ► letters of the alphabet and punctuation and a space bar. And you actually click them with your
01:59:12 ◼ ► thumb. And at first glance, that's what the iPhone keyboard looks like. It just looks like a
01:59:17 ◼ ► touchscreen version of that, which is like the most obvious thing to do. It doesn't look clever
01:59:22 ◼ ► at first. It looks like the most obvious thing possible. And all of the other differences,
01:59:33 ◼ ► you actually do get to engage one of your senses touch, right? So your thumbs are covering the keys,
01:59:40 ◼ ► which is, you know, not, not what you want, but it's what has to happen with thumb typing.
01:59:45 ◼ ► But because you can feel as you move from the S to the A that you're on the next button to the left,
01:59:55 ◼ ► Never going to get that right. Yeah. And it really is way down in your nervous system. When you,
02:00:02 ◼ ► you're feeling the edge of something on your finger. I'm not even sure that like your cerebral
02:00:08 ◼ ► cortex is getting involved. Right. I mean, it's like, pull your hand off the hot stove.
02:00:20 ◼ ► That's right. And, and that, that deep tactile sense is so baked in so much of our nervous system
02:00:27 ◼ ► is given over to the sense of touch on our, on our hands and on our fingertips. And so taking that
02:00:33 ◼ ► away on the, on the glass needed something to replace it. And that turned out to be auto
02:00:40 ◼ ► correction software, but we didn't know that there was, it was, it was something that we needed to
02:00:45 ◼ ► discover through this, you know, sort of arduous seeming, I mean, it wasn't that long. It wasn't
02:00:50 ◼ ► like it was a years long research project, but I'll tell you in the day to day going through it
02:01:00 ◼ ► we didn't want to get canceled. We wanted this phone. And so it seemed like it was a lot of
02:01:06 ◼ ► pressure. It wasn't like you were working on an obscure part of the, of the OS, right? I mean,
02:01:13 ◼ ► everybody, no matter, no matter what you were going to use the iPhone for, you were going to
02:01:18 ◼ ► encounter this keyboard. And there was a state of the art, which was the Blackberry style hardware
02:01:23 ◼ ► keyboard, which is obviously what it was going to be compared against. And the other factor that
02:01:28 ◼ ► complicates that is that the, you know, crack berries or whatever you'd call the, the, the
02:01:32 ◼ ► addicted, the people who are addicted to their Blackberries develop the ability to type very fast
02:01:38 ◼ ► on their Blackberries, right? So, you know, it's not just, oh, everybody has hardware keyboards.
02:01:44 ◼ ► It's everybody has these hardware keyboards that people can learn to type fast on. And so it sets
02:01:50 ◼ ► the bar, right? And then we get back to like Internet Explorer on Windows rendering speed
02:01:59 ◼ ► versus Safari. Well, there's the bar because here it is. It's on, it's on your desk. I have a PC set
02:02:04 ◼ ► up running the latest version of Windows with IE and here's how fast they rendered the New York
02:02:09 ◼ ► Times homepage. And here's Blackberry. Here's how fast some people can type on it. What can we do?
02:02:15 ◼ ► And then you come up with these ideas that, that are impossible on a physical keyboard, like
02:02:21 ◼ ► when you press the S key on the iPhone keyboard and a popover appears above your thumb or finger,
02:02:28 ◼ ► however you choose to type. I shouldn't say thumb because my wife is a, is a finger typer.
02:02:34 ◼ ► It, there, there's no way to do that in hardware to, to confirm, hey, you, you know, I, you know,
02:02:39 ◼ ► the keyboard thinks you just hit an S, you know, and there it is S I mean, right. How many,
02:02:44 ◼ ► at this point, honestly, I, you get up past billions and it's hard to know how many trillions,
02:02:51 ◼ ► possibly whatever comes after trillions of key presses on iPhone keyboards and Android keyboards
02:03:00 ◼ ► that use that same design of when you, you know, it looks like a QWERTY keyboard and your finger
02:03:05 ◼ ► or thumb hits the letter and a popover shows up above. So you actually can see what it thinks you
02:03:10 ◼ ► hit. How many key presses have been made at this point? It's, or how many have been made while
02:03:15 ◼ ► we're recording this show around the world? Yeah. Oh, a lot. You know, that's, it's one of the
02:03:21 ◼ ► danger aspects for me of this show is that people are going to have a better idea that, that it's me
02:03:28 ◼ ► to blame for all of that. I wanted, I got to bring this home soon, but I want to, I want to tell you
02:03:36 ◼ ► a story that I heard from somebody at Apple who would know. But I can't say who, but years ago,
02:03:42 ◼ ► basically part of the drama of you guys putting a stripped down version of OS X on a cell phone
02:03:51 ◼ ► in 2006, 2007 is that at that time, Mac OS X wasn't that fast on PC hardware, right? And
02:04:02 ◼ ► especially go back to 2002 when Mac OS X first shipped to the public, it was dreadfully slow
02:04:24 ◼ ► and it was slow because Aqua was so ambitious with the drop shadows and all the text anti-alias and
02:04:31 ◼ ► the transparency and everything that made it quote unquote lickable and made it look, wow,
02:04:37 ◼ ► made it slow to like hit the file menu in an app and watch the menu drop down. And what I was told
02:04:45 ◼ ► was that Apple starting even before Mac OS X had shipped, had a lab where they had a bunch of tests,
02:04:53 ◼ ► like drop down menus and applications, dragging, you know, the latency between dragging an icon
02:04:59 ◼ ► and, you know, does it track the mouse one to one and measuring it down to like the hundredth of a
02:05:04 ◼ ► second and comparing it against Windows XP. And I think a lot like the early days of Safari getting
02:05:12 ◼ ► blown away by IE on Windows, Mac OS X, the difference is Mac OS X actually shipped like that.
02:05:18 ◼ ► And for years, and every major version of Mac OS X got faster and faster, but they still had this
02:05:23 ◼ ► benchmark of, is it as snappy as Windows XP? And the answer was no. So there was this bar, which
02:05:30 ◼ ► to me is not just for Apple, but anybody, when you have a bar above you, you know, it's such a better
02:05:36 ◼ ► motivator than once you're the bar, you know? But what I was told, here's what I was told though, is
02:05:43 ◼ ► when Windows Vista shipped, and I forget what year that was, but 2006 or seven or something like
02:05:51 ◼ ► that, the people who, you know, who were aware of this benchmark for testing the speed of the OS
02:05:58 ◼ ► didn't know what to do because Vista got slower than XP and it was less snappy. And the decision
02:06:06 ◼ ► was made, well, we're going to keep testing against XP. That's our benchmark. And I think it
02:06:12 ◼ ► speaks a lot because it was sort of like being able to cheat and say, well, now we're not as slow as
02:06:17 ◼ ► we used to be because we'll run against this new version of Windows, which is slower. But one of
02:06:22 ◼ ► the big, this is where I'm going with it, is to me, a big difference between the original iPhone
02:06:28 ◼ ► and the first version of Mac OS X is that the first version of Mac OS X, like if you dragged
02:06:34 ◼ ► a window around, it dragged the whole window without an outline. Like, and for people who
02:06:41 ◼ ► are younger or never used classic Mac OS, when you dragged a window in Mac, in a classic Mac OS,
02:06:46 ◼ ► what you dragged was just an outline of the window to show where it would go. And then when you let
02:06:51 ◼ ► go, the window would redraw in the new spot. And so it didn't actually, you weren't seeing the
02:07:03 ◼ ► but you saw this shearing, you know, it, the video couldn't, the performance couldn't keep up with
02:07:09 ◼ ► it. And when you scrolled, it scrolled live, but the contents of a complex document or a webpage
02:07:16 ◼ ► couldn't keep up. It scrolled slow, even though it scrolled with visual fidelity. It looked cool,
02:07:32 ◼ ► and you'd noticed it most in Safari, is like when you would scroll in Safari, the scroll view would
02:07:41 ◼ ► it would just render a checkerboard. Yeah, that's my idea. Was it really? Was that in the book?
02:07:47 ◼ ► Did I miss that? I don't know. I don't think that didn't make it in the book. I don't think it was
02:07:51 ◼ ► my idea. Well, then I'm asking the right person because it was sacri, instead of making, putting
02:08:00 ◼ ► that as the top priority, visual fidelity and making, make it as fast as possible. The second
02:08:05 ◼ ► priority, the top priority was always keep up with the finger. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. And,
02:08:11 ◼ ► and this, uh, uh, I did write this in, in the book, um, that directive came from, um, uh,
02:08:21 ◼ ► and, and was best exemplified by, uh, the demo that Imran Chaudhry would give. Uh, and, and you
02:08:29 ◼ ► have to kind of understand a little bit about the way the team was organized, how design and
02:08:35 ◼ ► engineering collaborated with each other is that there was this software engineering team working
02:08:40 ◼ ► on iOS. So the iOS software team, and then there was the human interface team, the HI team who had
02:08:48 ◼ ► broad responsibilities for iOS and Mac OS, and, you know, the, uh, a whole lot of projects.
02:08:56 ◼ ► And so, uh, and at the time, uh, the, there was a, uh, a clear mandate that if HI asked for
02:09:06 ◼ ► something, it was the, the duty of the engineering team to do their best to deliver it. And it just
02:09:14 ◼ ► was no question as to, you know, the, the engineers want X, the HI team wants Y, and now there's going
02:09:22 ◼ ► to be some sort of, uh, reconciliation, whether we do X or Y or both. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
02:09:28 ◼ ► What the HI team asks for, they get to the extent possible within the bounds of physics. Right? And
02:09:38 ◼ ► so this demo that Imran would give is that he would take a, just a blank sheet of paper on an,
02:09:45 ◼ ► uh, on a clear table. And he would put the piece of paper down and then put his finger in the middle
02:09:51 ◼ ► of the piece of paper. And he would move the piece of paper around, glide the piece of paper around
02:09:57 ◼ ► on the, on the tabletop. And he would say, piece of paper is not jumping. It's not skipping. It's
02:10:04 ◼ ► tracking my finger. Exactly. That's what the pixels need to be like on the iPhone. It needs
02:10:13 ◼ ► to feel like those pixels have a physicality to them that they're just pinned under your finger
02:10:20 ◼ ► and that you can control them. If there's ever any lag or skip or judder, it breaks the illusion.
02:10:28 ◼ ► And we don't want that. It's, it just is not part of the design that we're aiming for. And so we
02:10:35 ◼ ► couldn't deliver that in the, in the web browser with, you know, with full fidelity, scrolling the
02:10:40 ◼ ► content. And so I just came up with this idea. It's like, okay, well, there's going to be this
02:10:46 ◼ ► under under layer underneath the web content that if we can't draw there, you're just going to see
02:10:53 ◼ ► this checkerboard. And I actually have to pretty, you know, pretty sure that, you know, that, that
02:10:58 ◼ ► even at that time Photoshop had a similar sort of idea. It says, I'm just going to do that. I'm just
02:11:05 ◼ ► going to do that for the web browser. So yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you appreciate that. But it was,
02:11:17 ◼ ► Well, the Photoshop idea to me was always, and I know, I don't know, maybe, you know, again,
02:11:23 ◼ ► I think for most of us, we, we never read the manuals. Maybe they explained it somewhere,
02:11:32 ◼ ► and as a budding UI designer and lover and fast, somebody fascinated by it, it was like,
02:11:39 ◼ ► how do you render nothing? Right? And it's like, what, what color, what color is water?
02:11:45 ◼ ► And I remember one time in school, like a science teacher asked that once and the kid and the kid he
02:11:49 ◼ ► picked was the, he, I think he purposefully picked a kid who he thought would give the,
02:11:54 ◼ ► the answer he wanted, which was that the kid said white. And he said, no, it's not white. And he put
02:11:59 ◼ ► something colored behind the glass of water, you know, and if it was red, then you could see red
02:12:04 ◼ ► through there. You know, it's clear, but how do you render clear? You can't render clear on a
02:12:13 ◼ ► you can't just show white because white might be the actual background you want. So the checkerboard
02:12:18 ◼ ► was the sort of nothing. Right. And I love that. It's kind of right. I mean, it's, it's like,
02:12:23 ◼ ► you know, of course you can, none of these little hacks are ever perfect because what if the webpage
02:12:28 ◼ ► is a checkerboard? So, I mean, you know, there's, there's always, there's always one, you know,
02:12:34 ◼ ► you know, one ideal case, I mean, you know, where, where it could frustrated, it could,
02:12:40 ◼ ► it could ruin the illusion, but it is just an illusion. It's just like, you're, you're saying,
02:12:45 ◼ ► you know, this is, this is, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a trick and, you know, trying to figure
02:12:52 ◼ ► out what the right set of tricks are, what the right trade-offs are. You know, you mentioned
02:13:01 ◼ ► that there is this, this decision which, which I'm glad that you, that, that, I guess I'm not
02:13:06 ◼ ► surprised that communicated to you that, you know, the iOS, it just keeps up with your finger the
02:13:12 ◼ ► whole time. It's like, that's something that we didn't want to get, give up on. And so we
02:13:18 ◼ ► came up with a hack. It's, it's a good hack, but, but it's some, some bit of, of, of where, where
02:13:25 ◼ ► the, the, you know, one part of the illusion breaks in order to keep another one stood up.
02:13:31 ◼ ► And, you know, trying to design and, and trying to figure out what, what the right set, set of
02:13:38 ◼ ► trade-offs is, I think is a big part of what has made, you know, Apple products so joyful to use
02:13:46 ◼ ► over such a long period of time is because there's people there who care about it and have been
02:13:53 ◼ ► Recognizing that trade-offs are often not just between good and better, but sometimes between a
02:14:00 ◼ ► thing that's good and a thing that's bad, right? So with the Mac OS X style, where nothing was ever
02:14:06 ◼ ► checkerboarded and everything was always WYSIWYG, it looked cool and at the time was revolutionary
02:14:14 ◼ ► for a computer, but it felt slow. Whereas you'd never wanted to see the checkerboard, the
02:14:21 ◼ ► checkerboard itself. I'm talking about how cool I thought it was. You're saying it was a clever
02:14:25 ◼ ► idea you had, but you certainly, you never wanted to see it, right? And Apple worked hard year after
02:14:30 ◼ ► year to get it to the point where I forget at what point the checkerboard never stopped showing
02:14:35 ◼ ► up in Safari. And it was always capable of rendering everything in real speed. It was only
02:14:39 ◼ ► a handful of years. Surely there's a lot of people out here listening who don't even remember having
02:14:46 ◼ ► an iPhone. Because it was just a few years, because you couldn't wait to get rid of it.
02:14:51 ◼ ► You hated it. But if you had to make the choice between a thing that was like, "Ah, we give up
02:14:55 ◼ ► on painting in real time," but that checkerboard is going to track your index finger one-to-one
02:15:04 ◼ ► Yeah. It was just, and I think part of the trade-off was we need to sell people on this
02:15:16 ◼ ► notion of a touchscreen operating system. And so, we decided to make the guarantee that it's going
02:15:24 ◼ ► to feel like a physical object to you. And that was just going to be part of what made people feel
02:15:33 ◼ ► comfortable about it. I mean, when you're making systems, so often I've felt over the years that
02:15:41 ◼ ► if I don't do a good enough job, people are going to take that product and they're going to want to
02:15:46 ◼ ► throw it out the window. Certainly felt that with the keyboard. And it says, "What can I do to avoid
02:15:52 ◼ ► that?" And so, throughout the development of projects, things aren't good. The funny thing
02:16:00 ◼ ► is that if the project was good at any time, the executives and the marketers and the operations
02:16:06 ◼ ► people would figure out how to ship the thing early if you were done ahead of time. And so,
02:16:12 ◼ ► it never really is that. It's like during the middle of a development cycle, things aren't good.
02:16:26 ◼ ► them aren't. But it's like A is implemented, B isn't. And so, that also means that C is broken
02:16:32 ◼ ► because it depends on B, even though the rest of it is there and waiting for B to be finished.
02:16:38 ◼ ► And you just wind up with this whole set of Gantt charts that if you were to model it that way,
02:16:48 ◼ ► where there's all of these dependencies and the system just doesn't work. It doesn't feel like
02:16:54 ◼ ► it's come together until you start to get closer and more things get done. And so, there's always
02:17:01 ◼ ► this game that you play as you're going and saying, "Well, what am I going to be able to
02:17:13 ◼ ► And we wind up saying, "Well, it's a good enough stopgap. We're going to be able to ship now."
02:17:17 ◼ ► And so, it's this whole multi-dimensional game that you're trying to play to figure out, "Well,
02:17:56 ◼ ► Stop stammering. Stop stammering. You were already kind enough at the beginning of the show.
02:18:23 ◼ ► And yeah, we've got a lot of interesting work. And it's interesting and fascinating enough that
02:18:36 ◼ ► You took a meeting on a Saturday. So, it's engaging. But that is good. You have something
02:18:42 ◼ ► to promote for Humain. They're hiring. We will put a link, I promise, in the show notes.
02:18:59 ◼ ► It's your pandemic project. It's a word game for the iPhone. Surprise. It's very enjoyable.
02:19:05 ◼ ► It is sort of the anti-wordle because wordle has no clock. And the whole point of UpSpell is you
02:19:15 ◼ ► You get two minutes, you get a tile of letters like Scrabble, and you make words out of the
02:19:20 ◼ ► letters. And then when you think you have a good word, you push it up. That's the up. And then
02:19:25 ◼ ► those tiles get replaced by other tiles, and you try to make another word, and you push it up,
02:19:29 ◼ ► and you try to make as many words as you can in two minutes with every time you use a word,
02:19:48 ◼ ► And last but not least, your book, Creative Selection, is—we've only scratched the surface,
02:20:00 ◼ ► would spoil the whole book. It's nowhere even close to it. But if you thought this conversation
02:20:04 ◼ ► was interesting and you haven't read Creative Selection, my God, go run, don't walk, or just
02:20:12 ◼ ► go to your Kindle or your iBook store and get it. But the website for it is creativeselection.io.
02:20:24 ◼ ► Cannot recommend this book highly enough, and I deeply, deeply thank you for your time here, Ken.
02:20:34 ◼ ► It's easier—the second—it's easier for me to get you on the second time, or—because I had—now
02:20:59 ◼ ► Jon mentioned that he had this crazy signal channel that was the only thing he was using
02:21:04 ◼ ► the app for because he had a couple of friends. Well, it was the watch channel that we have,
02:21:23 ◼ ► Yeah, I think we should go back to signal. Here's why. Because the watch channel—here's why.
02:21:27 ◼ ► And me piping up about it here secretly before, or in joke-wise before, got it to move to iMessage.
02:21:36 ◼ ► But now let's just be explicit that I think we should move it back. Because it's not the sort
02:21:40 ◼ ► of thing any of us on it need to stay up to date on. I don't need instant alerts. It's like, "Hey,
02:21:46 ◼ ► let me check what's up with the guys on the watch channel." And so I think it's better segregated,
02:21:52 ◼ ► whereas everything else I have on iMessage is generally stuff I do want to see right away.
02:21:57 ◼ ► So it's sort of spoiling my iMessage. And then the other thing, selfishly, is that we're busy
02:22:02 ◼ ► enough on our little watch channel that it gets me looking at signal, and I publish my signal number
02:22:08 ◼ ► for readers of Daring Fireball to contact me securely and privately, which is great for that.
02:22:26 ◼ ► Right. I had a message pending from somebody, and I wish I had seen it sooner. It didn't
02:22:32 ◼ ► ruin—you know, I didn't lose, you know, a sponsor or anything, you know, along those lines. It
02:22:36 ◼ ► wasn't like I lost business. But it's like, "Oh, I would have answered that 48 hours ago,
02:22:52 ◼ ► Thank you, Ken. This was absolutely a blast. And I do look forward to having you on again.
02:22:59 ◼ ► Let me just say, before we go, my thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace, aka ReSquarespace,