Leadership Styles and Corporate Culture

I love having ya on, but it always it I don't know. Feels like having you on it's a heavy show, right? I gotta bring my a I gotta bring my a why is it so heavy? Uh I don't know. I feel like you're a difficult guest. Yeah. Well, I try. Uh last time I was on with December December twenty twenty three. It's always a it's a bit of a sp uh you gotta bring your A game 'cause you're gonna call me out on anything I'm wrong about. I sure am. And I wouldn't have it any other way. And I thought I'm not one for anniversaries. I'm sort of the anti-Casey, right? I don't really mark anniversaries of my own stuff. And I feel like that is something that I have as a person an affinity with Apple the corporation where they're not into marking anniversaries that much either and they're kind of doing it and I kind of even feel like all the fifty stuff they're doing is sort of begrudging. Right. They're more into the fiftieth. Yeah, their story is like in their public facing words, it's like we're not a company that looks backwards, but we're totally gonna do it But even so, they're not really celebrating history, they're just like having concerts. Yeah, the unleash thing in New York, and I guess they're having so says German Paul McC artney tomorrow in Cupertino, which is a huge g I mean if that's true, and you know, uh it if German hears it's Paul McCartney, it's probably it's such a boomer thing to do, like we gotta get a beetle, that's the way we're gonna celebrate the modern apple, because the only time that is relevant is the time of the boomer's youth. How funny would it be if he gets up there? I mean it's not going to happen, but it would be absolutely hilarious if he gets takes the microphone and rather than play any music he just gets up there and rants and raves about the Apple records Apple computer thing. I don't think Paul McCartney was ever instrumental in that. I think that was more of a yoko thing. But who knows. It is part of Apple history though. No, but I guess the one thing I thought is well, fifty is only gonna come around once. I joked on dithering in a episode that'll be out before this episode, but was and was also recorded before that we're not gonna get a chance to Well speak for yourself. Well, I said probably and then Ben threw me under the bus as a couple of years younger. He goes, Well, you less likely than me. I don't know. I mean I feel like I don't know. I feel like I got a chance at it. I got some longevity genes in my family. My dad's eighty eight, doing well. I don't know. I mean I only have to get to a hundred and three, so it's possible. Easy. If we're both still around, I say we definitely do it in 50 years. Yeah, well it'll have a holo podcast . I mean can we make it a date? I mean then it'll if I and uh the other thing too is if I have it on the calendar I've got dementia in my family, so I'll my brain will be putting by then so it's gonna be a tough show for you. You can really gonna have to carry me. Well it might be good fun. Not I don't know. We'll see. I mean I guess that's a little putting the horse a little ahead of the carriage. But I do feel though that if I'm going to do anything special for the fiftieth, a podcast would be better than writing. I don't feel like writing about it. Podcast is more I don't know, this is why I like podcasting. I have m more mixed feelings about podcasting than you do, clearly. I feel like that's one of the ways where you and I are like we're oddly similar and then we're very different. And your position in the Mac media has evolved to primarily a podcaster who occasionally writes and I'm a writer who occasionally podcasts. You podcast it all the time, first of all. And second of all, the horse is always in front of the carriage. The expression is putting the cart before the horse. So you wanted me to call you on everything, and I just wanted to just want to make sure I don't disappoint you. I knew I was getting that one wrong. I knew I do you're right that uh most of the time I spent doing podcasting and you spend a tremendous amount of time podcasting I think you podcast more than I do because you do multiple episodes of Dithering a week plus the talk show. Yeah, but the talk show's consistently now down to three episodes a month , and you guys are very consistently I mean remarkably consistently fifty two or once a week. So I guess it's two ditherings a week, right? Yeah, two ditherings a week. So only adds up to fifteen minutes. You're a podcast and up a storm, but I know you want to hold on to your identity as a writer. I've never thought of myself as uh if I thought I think of myself as anything as is as a programmer, honestly. But I also think of myself as a writer and a podcaster. I'm all the things at the same time and, if I had to hang my hat on one of them, it would probably be programmer just because I've spent more cumulative hours doing that than anything else that I've done. Second place is probably writing, and then third place is podcasting, but it's catching up now. Because I did a lot of writing back in the day to spend a lot of time doing those really long articles and not so much time like typing things into the final article but all the research that led up to it and that really adds up. But yeah podcasting is catching up rapidly. Yeah. Even with the podcast and your role on AT P is it's not just okay, hit record and then stop and that's your time on ATP. What was the one recently Pass Keys was one of the recent topics and Casey was like, I'll let Marco go first, but then I want to talk to John to find out what's actually going on with the topic. Right. So all of the time that you have spent looking into and considering the state of pass keys in today's world arguably counts towards your time podcast. And implement I implemented them well, with the help of some of my LM friends, implemented them on ATP dot FM as well, so that also is some like real world experience with actually dealing with pass keys. Okay. Like moments. Really? Why? Yes. How come? Security things like is I'm using a library for it. It's a PHP website and I'm using a PHP library and that library has issues filed against it in GitHub and the author hasn't been incorporating them, so I'm manually applying patches to make sure we're up to date with security stuff yada yada. And not this is that important. Like our website is a podcast website where there's not really any super secure stuff, but I want to make sure that it's as good as it can be. So yeah. Right. So what could leak emails, email addresses? And that would be bad, right? You wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to have an episode where you tell all of the subscribers to ATP we leaked all your email addresses. But that is amongst the things that could leak in a security breach mo how many people have an I do and I wonder about that with mine. I've had comments at Daring Fireball for public email f honestly, I think that's the I think I started using it when the site started in 2002. So probably the whole run , so twenty four years. And my real ad address is Gruber at Daringfireball dot net. And both are real and it is a separate in inbox, but I've really thought of late like why in the world I've told you my my my mother's thing with the email, or at least you've heard it on ATP. My mother's thing with the email, she has two email addresses. She's got like a an Apple one from her Apple ID and then she's also got a Gmail one. And she's very fastidious about I forget which is which, but she's very fastidious about using one of them when she does shopping on Amazon.com or whatever. And Of course they both get spammed, but in her mind, if if I never give this one to like Amazon or some other website that I use, no one will know about it. And they totally will 'cause it's like they're already spamming you there. It's really not worth it. I mean what else could happen with the security of ATP? You guys could have It's not the worst thing that would happen. So I get it. It sort of lower stakes, but I also get that you're fastidious and you wanna you're John Syracuse, you're gonna keep your passkey support up to date. Yeah, or at least try to. I mean like that's the whole thing. Like why don't you just write the library yourself? Well I'm not really ready to take that on. Like I do want I do want to use libraries. I don't want to roll everything my own from scratch. But if you're using a library, it's okay, well, how much do you trust this library? How good is this library? How many bugs are in this library? Is the library up to date? And it's that cycle. Yeah. It is off topic of Apple's 50th. I should just have you ATP guys on this show more often because I often have commentary on your episodes. There was one where Marco was talking about his whole amazing forty eight Mac Mini transcription service for overcast, which is really amazing. It's like a Hall of Fame segment on ATP. But then he mentioned I even forget what it is, but year and I remember years ago when he did it, there was some component of the back end of Overcast where Marco was like, you know what, I need to write like a whole new thing and I've always been intrigued by the Go programming language. I'm gonna teach myself Go to write this. And then he wrote it in Go and then three or four years later he needed to add a feature and he hadn't touched Go since and now he's forgotten Yeah, it's crawler. It's the thing I think it's the thing that crawls the piece of the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. And he was well I re I remember we talked about when he wrote that in Go, I think we talked about that on ATP all those years ago, and he's like, I'm looking for a language to do this in in, I don't want to do it a PHP, let me try this, that, and he ended up writing and go. The good thing is he wrote it and go and it seems to be working. You don't have to touch it for a long time, but if he ever does need to touch it, he's now forgotten about it entirely. And by the way, if you have comments on the show, you should write into the show. You'll totally get put to the front of the queue as a as a friend of the show as we have some follow up here from you know, we don't even have to use your last name, we can just say we have some follow up here from John and we'll just say what you have to say. And then the comment starts. When I created Markdown Now I did the same thing to myself with a much m incredibly less complicated thing than Marco's crawler, but I wrote the Daring Fireball link Shortener, which is at like DF4, the digit four dot US, which was the best short domain I could get at it. You wanted to spell doofus, I know. Yeah, I couldn't remember why I put the I just liked four's my favorite number and I couldn't get DF.us so I took it. I actually if you recall for a year or two I actually was using a Unicode glyph. It was like DF and then like a unicode star dot something and I forget what country those were. And that kind of worked, but it was like it what where it really broke where they really broke down as I could tweet with those URLs and they worked, but what happened was there uh it was at a time when there was a vast proliferation of Twitter clients. It was the heyday of the open Twitter API and Twitter clients were springing up left and right and various Twitter clients used various different ways to parse or detect URLs and g guess what many techniques to parse URLs did not anticipate the punicode encoding of URLs. And so rather than fight it and stomp my feet, I was like, well, like this was a clever idea to put an actual star in the URL. And I thought with tiny URLs, I didn't need it because the canonical URL is daringfireball.net slash something something . So the fact that people couldn't verbalize or type by hand the tiny URLs. It's like if you've already got the tiny URL, you just copy and paste it. But it was the fact that the clients wouldn't parse it and wouldn't make it an active clickable link, so I gave up on it. But anyway, I wrote my own link shortening or expansion service that runs at DF4.us and I did the same thing Marco did where I thought, you know, I've always wanted to to learn Ruby. Everything I've ever programmed myself is almost the that I can still understand is in Pearl or PHP a little bit. But for the most part Pearl is the only programming language that's ever stuck with me. And I thought, well Ruby looks like Pearl and it looks kinda fun and people are saying good things, but I certainly don't need Rails. Rails seems way too complicated, so I wrote it in Sinatra. Do you ever remember Sinatra? I do. It's super tiny and it's very clear and it appealed to me greatly. And it had a little I think you could even use regular expressions, so that appealed to me for the routing. And you could just uh if the URL looks like this and it matches this pattern, do this and it would go. And it was very simple. And then I wrote it and then I completely forgot all of Ruby. And the next time I needed to touch it, I was and I also forgot entirely how Sinatra works. I don't remember how the goddamn thing starts. I don't remember how it stops. And I all I remember though is that it was much like PHP in that once you have it set up and running on a server, you never need to do anything. And that's how I forgot how to stop the Sinatra server, how to start the Sinatra server because it just runs and runs and if the server ever restarts automatically because the hosting provider does something, it just starts back up and runs and I've completely forgot it. And I was like, Well that was pretty stupid. Well, hopefully you'll never have to touch it. I mean if it's working, don't touch it. No, and then I I did touch it at some point just to stop doing all the f smarter stuff I was doing. Like I had a little bit of analytics and to see where stuff was coming from and I updated it just to take everything out and just redirect to Daringfireball.net something. I all I did was make it stupider. And I guess now I've waited long enough where I don't really have to worry about it where I could just throw the project at a LLM and just say, tell me how to ch change this to do whatever I need changed. No problem. You could even have it port it to a different platform or language. Real easy . Anyway, even though we haven't really gotten sidetracked yet talking about Apple history, every time you're on the show I feel like we get sidetracked talking about Apple history, so who better to have to actually talk about Apple history than me and you? Yeah, I just saw you on the Verge podcast. What is it? The Version Version history with David Pierce and Neilai Patel talking about you say you watched it? What were your thoughts we were talking about? I watched most of it. It was making me feel old. Because I feel like David Pierce . Was he alive when Smack came out? I don't know how old David is, but I don't think I don't think he was. And if he was alive, he was much like when the Apple O cneame out , you and I were alive, but we certainly don't remember it because we were I don't know, four years old, three or four years old. So I feel like I don't know. I've had the same thought recording that episode. And I know Neelai's a little younger than me too, but I felt like with David it was like hey, he's talking about this a little too prehistoric E as opposed to just old E. Right. Yeah, and I think it's also difficult if you weren't there at the time to get an idea of what the Mac actually meant because in hindsight you map all these things onto it and like it's just uh n I'm not entirely sure. I mean that's great because you have such a age range on the show, it made for a good episode but you're Yeah. But every time I heard him talk about it, I was like I turned into a a crusty old man. I was like, That's not the important thing about this and then just I was like, What are you doing? Also I think doesn't David Pierce do the installer at the Verge too? I think so. Yes. That segment. I sent him on my apps for the installer. I thought it would be perfect for the because I make obscure little apps that no one has ever heard of that do some neat technical thing. That's perfect for the installer. He never featured me. I'm still kind of bitter about it . We'll have to fix that Good thing for no, I'm not sounding on switch glass or front and center, those are too obscure, but hyperspace is perfect for the verge. It's like ah, people need to say disk space anyway, whatever. I don't think you've been on this show since hyperspace came out, or were you last on right when hyperspace came out? Yeah, hyperspace was twenty twenty five. Oh, okay. So no not even close. So what's hyperspace? You could talk about it. And thank you. And I honestly made it for myself because I am as I can frequently complain about an ATP and complained about again in the most recent episode, I have a four terabyte SSD in my Mac and I am right up against the edge of filling it. Like I'm constantly trying to move things off of it and just save space any way I can. And so essentially I wrote hyperspace for myself. Because if you can find files that are identical, like they have the identical contents, APFS lets you have those bits only on disk one time. And so it'll find all the files that are identical and say if these are not already like space saving clones of each other, turn them into that. And the files stay completely separate and independent. It looks exactly the same. There's no weird stuff. It's not a simlink, it's a hard link. Editing one file doesn't affect the other files. It just saves you space. So if you find five files that are the same, you can get rid of the data stored for four of them and just keep the data there once. And yeah, that's what I've been doing to my own disk with this program because I need a bigger disk and I've been waiting to buy a new Mac. So yeah. That's what it does. And it doesn't make you p like there's other things that find duplicate files. Oh you found duplicate files. Do you want to delete all but one of them? No, I never ask you to remove any files. All the files stay there. You don't have to pick. You don't have to pick amongst your children. Ooh, I we kind of want this in both folders. I want No, you never have to remove any. It just gives you the disk space without changing what is on your disk. It's nice. And if you're old enough to really even remember when file systems were less complicated, it sounds too good to be true. It doesn't it's like, oh, so what's it doing? It's like making soft links or something. Or aliases or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. Or aliases or something. And nope, it's not. They are separate files. And if you so you're like, well then what happens if you open one of the five copies of the same five instances of the same file where the bytes are only on disk once, and then you make a change and then you save it. Well then that instance gets it that initial save will take some time because it will write out the in that now it's suddenly taking up its own bytes on the disk. Yeah, and actually it's it really depends on what the program does in terms of saving. If you modify the file, I believe it diverges at the block level, so it doesn't even overwrite the whole file, but most applications will write an entirely new file when you hit save, like even if you just appended a word at the end. So that's really up to the program. But either way, the whole point is it's entirely transparent. And the reason you know it's entirely transparent is for years now, every time you hit command D to duplicate a file in the finder it does this. It makes a space saving clone. You don't need to know that. You just need to know, huh? I just duplicated a twenty gig file and it happened instantly. This SSD must be fast. No, but it didn't gigs. It just said, oh yeah, here's another file pointing at the same data. And it's the same deal. If you modify that file, don't worry about it. They're independent. They will diverge as needed. It's a one of the great features of APFS. I just want to say I think hyperspace is the perfect name. I sometimes you hear a name for an app or a product and you just know it's the best possible name out there. There's no the it in the infinite number of names you could have come up with for this Yeah. I mean it really does. It relies on knowing my deal and the whole hypercritical branding and my website is hypercritical.co. So you need to have that i and my Star Wars fandom. There's a lot of context as with everything I do. There's a lot of surrounding context that is required to get it, but honestly the only people who are going to be interested in the things that I'm doing probably already have that context, so I think it's fine. It's extra charming if you listen to ATP and you know anything that you are a Star Wars fan. But if you're not and you just come across this app in the app store or however else you come across it because you actually have the same need, because maybe you have a four terabyte S SD that is at three point nine five terabytes full. It still sounds like a good name for that app's purpose. And even if you're like young and you don't really have a particular affinity for Star Wars or no The only thing I waffled on a little bit and you can relate to this is Star Wars spells hyperspace all one word with no capitalization. But of course I am an old school Mac user and I love intercaps like Mac Paint, Mac Wright, and Mac Bro w so it's like, oh, Capital H hyper, Capital S space, or like the Star Wars way. In the end I went with the Star Wars way because I felt like I wanted to lean more in that direction, as evidenced by the amazing icon by icon factor That is one of the ways that the whole Apple world and the industry, right? It wasn't really an Apple thing for camel case titles. It was sort of the whole industry. It there was a time of peak camel case naming when you could almost just not even memorize them and just if it could be camel case, just do it and you were probably right. And now it's probably m if you never do it , you're probably right more often than wrong. I mean Camelcasing has sorta fallen out of favor. programs Mac write, Mac paint, the third powder ones, Mac draw. Photoshop bucked the trend by having a lowercase S. Uh but how many times have you seen Photoshop spelled with a capital S? And Macworld Macworld famously for a long time had the capital W spelled more often than the correct spelling. And it was further complicated by the fact that we by convention in the community would abbreviate or not abbreviate I don't uh Yeah abbreviate m M W S F Macworld San Francisco. I was g I think it's might be that might be initialize. We initialized uh the name MWSF for Macworld San Francisco and m wn y for Macworld New York and the U.S. M W B O S, but it did happen every once in a while. Which complicates it because then you think well that's what the W is. It's for a capital W in the magazine's name, but it was definitely not a cap never was a capital W in the Mac magazine's name. Also further complicated from the debut of Macworld in nineteen eighty four because in the initial I don't know how many years they put it on the magazine cover in all caps that were all the same height. CSS text transform to deal with it, but every time I see one of your article titles I want to copy it into the ATP show notes, I'm like, oh, it's all caps, but then you copy and paste and it's like, oh don't worry. I'll get the capitalization from the pasted text. Exactly. Because I'm courteous, but you can't really copy and paste from a printed magazine. Although I would probably try at this point. Have you ever done that? Never. Never. I've never done that. The closest I've come is especially in years past when I've really spent like a whole week full time on an iPad Pro to write a review of a new iPad Pro Plus magic keyboard. Then I'll go back to my Mac. Oh no I will I never I've never actually touched the screen, but I've gotten a like horror movie close to actually touching name. the You don't want the nano texture. Yeah. No, definitely not. Alright, random thought. I was going to take a sponsor break, but before we do, how do you square? This seems like nobody has talked about this. German says they're coming out with touch screen max, possibly at the end of this year. This might be one of those times where the M five MacBook Pro higher end models with the M five Max and M five Ultra or no the Ultra it's the Max and the Pro . God dip the Pro chip for the Pro Laptops. Only came out earlier in March. And maybe they were originally supposed to ideally come out in November, and he said 'Cause there've been it was like the M th ree or something was only out for ten months before the M four ones came out. Some one of those years. Yeah, the M five Pro and Macs of the rumor is that they were delayed because of that like chiplet architecture that like the XMC wasn't, so they got delayed and got pushed into this year. Right. That they should have all debuted at the same time as the baby MacBook Pro with just the regular M five chip in November, and that this come this November there's going to be at least one MacBook and possibly not called MacBook Pro, who knows, that has a touch screen. So my question is as a lover of the nanotexture on my studio display and I don't have a MacBook Pro with the nanotexture but it's the only reason I'm even tempted to upgrade the one that I already own is to get nanotexture. I have no other reason but I want the nanotexture and occasionally while using my MacBook Pro as a laptop carrying it around traveling I'm in a scenario where I see any glare at all now, I'm offended because I know that if it was nanotexture I'd never see glare. How is that how does square that with the idea of a touchscreen Mac, other than that the touchscreen one won't come with nanotexture? I don't see how they can possibly make a nanotexture one that has a touchscreen. Well, yeah, so that's the one option is hey, no nanotexture on the touchscreen max. The other option is that as if you've been a student of nanotexture from Apple, I think every single one of their nanotexture finishes has been different. The Pro Display XDR is different than the iPads, is different than the MacBooks. Right. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make a fourth nanotexture that is suited for being a touch screen. And all these have different compromises in terms of how do they deal with the reflectivity, how do they deal with finger grease? do H theyow feel in the case of the iPad with a stylus underneath it? So I don't I leave that open as a possibility as well, that they have come up with a compromised nanotexture that is viable as a touchscreen, that is not impossible to get fingerprints off of, and that works on a touch screen laptop. But it is definitely simpler to say that they just won't do nanotexture on the touch ones. Alright. And I guess the counterexample is the iPad Pro with nanotexture that is obviously. But it's glass, not whatever the hell they may and I I guess somebody's corrected me at some point that the MacBooks do use glass, but it's not glass like an iPad. Uh I think it actually is probably the same. They could do the same surface treatment, isn't it? I don't know, but I look at my wife has one of those and it I don't like to I don't like to look at it. I because she touches it all day long and see you know, every once in a while I'll just subtly pick it up and clean it and boy does it need to be cleaned. So I don't know. I guess the answer to my question is they just forge ahead and do it and if you like nanotexture and you want to touch your MacBook, you just do it and you have fingerprints all over your screen. Yep. But I can't see how that's possible that somebody would care about nanotexture because they care about the screen and want to touch the screen and put fingerprints all over it. But I'm married to one of them. So guess there's all kinds of people in the world. Alright, let me take a break and thank our first sponsor. It's our good friends at Century. S-E-N-T-R-Y. Century. Not Century. They always want me to emphasize that. And I can see why. It's hard to figure out what actually happened in your app when your logs, errors, and performance data all live in different tools. With sent ries application logs, everything is connected. Your logs link directly to the errors, traces, and replays that they relate to, so you can follow the full story in one place. 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They have a free dev plan that you can try out and listeners of the show using that code talk show can s get eighty bucks, eighty dollars in century credits. Go to Century dot IO slash talk show. What's your earliest memory of an Apple computer? Probably Apple twos that were in like a basement room of the father of a friend of mine's house. I think it might have been like my babysitter's father had Apple IIs had a bunch of Appleos Tw set up like in his basement to like r teach a course on computers that my parents had me attend. You know, it was like when you had like rows of desks and each one had an apple two on it, maybe three rows. They were desks were all touching like long tables, not even desks but like long tables. And then with the front like a chalkboard or whatever. That using the Apple twos in that room to I don't remember what we did with them. I can picture the room in my head and I I know I was there and I took whatever class it was. Not sure what I came away with. That's probably my first Apple hardware memory. Apple anything memory. I think for me I'm not entirely sure. I'm pretty sure though it was at my elementary school they had a they called it the gifted program. If you scored above a certain number they'd invite you and then once a week I think it was once a week, I don't know. You'd think if I was gifted I'd remember, but I think once a week and they changed the days it was like the other teachers all hated it because they didn't want you to miss the same classes. So they would change the day of the week and whether it was morning or afternoon. But for a half day once a week the kids in the gifted program went to the gifted room and the teacher we had a different curriculum for half a day. But one week it would be like Wednesday morning and then the next week it would be like Thursday afternoon and and I always hate oh man did I hate when we had to skip gym. Usually I was like, Oh, this is so fun. We're yeah, but I really hated when we had to miss Jim. I was like, This sucks. Especially if it was like a fun day like we were playing a good sport like kickball or something. I was like, Oh man, this sucks. But ordinarily it was a lot of fun. But the gifted classroom had an Apple II E and most of the other classrooms in my elementary school that had computers, in fact, all of none of them had apples. They had TI ninety nine four A's. And I was happy to get time on any computer, right? Like they could have imported one of those weird Russian computers that the guy made Tetris on. And that I didn't even I couldn't even read the prompts because it was written in Russian, but I'd still want to touch it and play with it and try to figure out how to make it do things. But that Apple II and the gifted class room was like it was different. And it was like this is clearly I could see why there's only one of them in the whole school. This is ten times better than the other computers. I didn't have that impression of the Apple Twos because the next my next computer memory, sort of my contemporary computer memory, is the first computer that I had in my house, which was a Commodore Vic twenty that my parents rented. And we connect and we connected to our television set. That's how you used it. And to me , the Vic twenty and the Apple II were like of a piece because they were both like real chunky, dark background, light text. You know, if anything, the Vic twenty seemed more advanced than the Apple II, just because it was on my bigger TV, so our TV was bigger than the Apple II monitors that they had, but they just both seemed like computers. Those are my impression of computers. It's a keyboard, it's a black screen, there's text on it, you type stuff, there's a prompt. I mean and whatever we were doing the Apple II is was I don't know if we weren't playing games or we were probably doing basic programming, but it just seemed uh that's what computers were before I saw the Mac, which was a command prompt and you type bas ic programs. And granted the Vic twenty and the Apple II were different and the Apple II was a much more vibrant ecosystem, but I didn't. I was a little kid. I just I was be by my parents, I was being not forced, but encouraged to quote unquote learn computers because that was gonna be the future. And I what learning computers entailed, which they didn't. This guy's running computer classes. And I kinda see I'm I was so young then, I didn't retain anything from that. But I do remember making I was excited because the Vic twenty had color and you could do like you could make basically colored squares. Like you could type a character, but instead of a character coming out, it would just be a square the size of the character that could be in a color by hitting like F two or some crap. I remember doing that. And right and of course writing ten print John twenty go to ten. Alright. Or Kmart sucks as I used to like to do. No, this all came up when we rehashed the Commodore sixty four, which was the successor to the Vic twenty. The Commodore sixty four versus Apple II debate. I guess like a year ago. Jason Snell and I and others were tweeting about it or blogging about it. A year ago was that the Commodore sixty four was a bigger deal in Europe than it was here for various reasons. And the whole computing world was so fractured, right? There were little fiefdoms all over the place. And it really wasn't until the IBM PC and DOS that there was ever a monoculture. And I think to the rest of the industry, including Apple, everybody just had it in their heads that well every three or four years a new computer comes out with no compatibility with what came before it and that's just the way it is. And nobody had ever really foreseen a world where no remember the DOS computers from nineteen eighty three? Yeah, those are gonna work exactly the same way for thirty years. Or more with emulation. But yeah, that that was appropriate for the time because things were changing so fast. There's no way you could say, well, we've just decided this is it. What we done on the Altair. That's what we're gonna do forever. It's like, no, just you need to scrap it all and start over because things are advancing so rapidly. There's no way you get and that's kind of what screwed Apple in the end is that they were successful early with the Mac and cemented a bunch of decisions that turned out to they expired. Those decisions expired around the late nineties and it was a cruel crisis for the company, almost killed the entire company. And and Microsoft went through the same thing, but they navigated it a little bit bet Right. But they clearly did, right? Because their success was unabated up through then. Whereas it helps when they had such a massively dominant position at that point that they had a lot of runway to finesse the transition and they did a pretty good job of it. And the most important thing was that they started NT well before it was time to transition. So N T was a separate project that they put money behind that they did. And you had Windows ninety five and ninety eight and they were parallel until they finally said, You know what, we can cross this over in two thousand and give our consumer windows the base from NT, which has tried and tested some shims to make stuff run. So they they did a good job of the transition. Apple did not. Yeah, and I think that's why Windows 7 was such a shock, because it seemed up through XP, which I think came out in two thousand one, that it just seemed like Microsoft every two to three years came out with a major new version of Windows that was v of varying uh compatibility, you know, right? Like NT was the real OS but they did it and in a way that you could install NT and all of your old shit was still there and worked through compatibility. So it was a real OS, but like an old DOS program from nineteen eighty three still ran exactly the same But I will admit though that like in my elementary school years, while I liked the Apple IIe in that gifted classroom the best, they were I know what you mean and I c largely agree that all computers were basically the same and they just had different keyboards and whatever. And for the most part, most like I I know there were advanced ways of writing basic programs where you could have oh this is only gonna work on integer basic on an Apple II. But for the most part, if you bought like a magazine or something with a program that you could type in, it would work on any computer with basic, and all the computers had a basic programming prompt when you turned them on. So you could just and I yeah, there were weird things like the Commodores had the weird box drawing characters on the keys, which is cool. And maybe that wasn't compatible across, but for the most part, every computer was a computer that you turned on and wrote basic programs. Yeah, and well the interesting part about that is that's what they're kind of selling the computer as. Here's a computer, you can write your own programs, you can get Byte Magazine and transcribe them and curse when you've made a typo on some line. But then once there became software for them, those software programs are not necessarily written in basic. A lot of the software programs, especially the good ones, are written in like assembly or other things to make them perform well. And so it was kind of like you weren't doing the real like the real thing. You were doing a thing that was a toy thing that you Right exactly, right. No, and I remember being bothered by that as a kid, because I could tell that the way that Jordan Metchner had written Karataka was not with basic . And I was like, well, how did he do this? How did how in the world how is this game made? It's obviously we're and I never thought it and then it made me start thinking about things like well how in the world do they make Atari cartridges? How what is go how does that work? What is inside? And then I I remember like finding and I don't think I ever broke one, but I remember like going through the box of Atari twenty six hundred cartridges we had and taking out like my least favorite one was like some kind of off brand, not even Atari or Activision, but one of those third party that you never heard of. And it actually had just like Phillips head screws and you could take it apart and look inside the cartridge. And it wasn't very edifying to look inside. Just a bunch of chips. Yeah. And then I remember I I'm pretty sure I remember trying it where you could still plug the part with the contacts into the twenty six hundred. The cartridge itself was I was like, oh, it's sort of just a packaging and all the tricks people had about blowing on them and ever. The cartridge was just a chip inside the actual plastic, obviously that's very obvious to me now. At the age of like eight or nine, it wasn't obvious at all. But I never thought of the until then until I started playing games on an Apple II like Karateca, like g ames that obviously were not written in BASIC. It occurred to me like, well wait, this is a computer where you can type stuff in BASIC, but that's not how this was made. But how they made this, somehow they've put it on a floppy disk , and it's this is more akin to what they've done on a cartridge, even though a cartridge isn't a disc. how an actual computer worked. But it was hard because there was no friggin' internet. And it was the type of question where even the teachers who were more computer enthusiasts and had things to do, like I my fifth grade math teacher, Matt Mr. Limebach to his credit was a significant computer enthusiast. And so he for math had like programs on the TI9 9 in his room. And if you finished your classwork, you could raise your hand and ask to play it was like a baseball game where you'd have to answer the pitches would come in with a math problem and you'd have to type the answer and hit return before the pitch rich reached the plate and then your guy would run around the bases. Way more fun than regular fifth grade math. I'm on a computer, but it was quote unquote educational, I guess. Yeah, I had to read the same five computer books in the school library a hundred times. They would label the parts the computer, which is very important, and learning the difference between ROM and RAM But I guess where I really remember noticing that I liked Apple computers better was when I got to middle school, 'cause they had a whole lab of apples. They weren't all the same. It was Apple I think mostly Apple IIEs, maybe some Apple II Peslus and Apple IICs , which was the first time I can remember the part of my brain that noticed industrial design. cases than the others and I liked their keyboards better. But the Apple II C was when they sort of took a oh that's totally different and feels more futuristic. Like the Apple and for those out there listening who don't have all these computers memorized. The Apple II C was the one what was it called? The Snow White Design language. Yeah, I think the frog design is responsible for it, but yeah. Because the Apple II was like what, Jerry Manic or something did the case for that? Yeah. So eventually Apple outsourced the frog design, which was a the time very famous design bureau, and they came up with the Snow White design language for the Apple two C and eventually Minimax. Yeah. Eventually Minimax. And there was a time like the Apple two G S the hardware looked a lot more like the Macs. It came with an ADB keyboard that you could just plug into a Mac 'cause it was the same plug. It there was even a Mac like desktop environment for the 2GS. I forget what it was called, but it was always sort of gross. It was like Gapple had ripped off their own computer in a very poor way. I loved the two G S, but I didn't love using the Mac compatibility whatever that was called. When you guys were talking about on the version history, is that what it's called? I keep forgetting. The podcast you were just on talking about the Lisa . And I always forget if this is true and I don't have it off the top of my head now, so just pretend one of us is looking it up and confirming this. But one of the things I recall about the Lisa was did it have rectangular pixels? I think it did. I do. I always I if it didn't it look like it did. And I know a lot of computers back in that day did have rectangular pixels. And basically any time I saw a rectangular pixel display in those days, I dismissed it. I said, well, it's a neat computer and maybe it'll play fun games, but man, you can't have rectangular. It's a grid. Does they have never have they never seen like grit graph paper? They're squares. Like you can't have them rectangular. It's so incredibly limit And so that's just such an incredible nonstop. I think the Lisa did it because their idea was that like vertical space is more important than horizontal or something. They had some other like some rationale about doing it, but it's like that's not the way to do a bitmap display. And so anytime they tried to do anything bitmap that wasn't a game, like the desktop environment on the 2GS or whatever, if it was on in a display mode that had rectangular pixels, it was just like blah. And if it didn't, if it had square pixels, but those pixels were giganti c, like CGA three twenty by two hundred on a fourteen inch monitor. I was like, Well no, that's not it. Three twenty by two hundred on a fourteen inch monitor is not enough. It's not enough for a GUI. So you're like you're playing pretend to be a GUI, but like this was you're talking about like noticing things that was different. This was the distinguishing characteristic to me, which is the original Mac on a nine inch screen with whatever the resolution was, five twelve by th three eighty four or three eighty four or three forty two, I forget. I think it's three forty two on the original. And I always get it wrong because three eighty four would make it a perfect four to three and it's not. It was actually squatter. But anyway, on a nine inch screen, those pixels, those 170 second of an inch or whatever pixels, that's the that was like the minimum threshold. And anytime I saw anyone else doing a desktop environment says, see, we're like the Mac and we even have color. I'm like, no, you are pr playing pretend with either rectangular pixels or pixels to size of boulders or both, you have insufficient data density to do this. All you can do is do like a Monet impressionist painting. Yeah. And that's even before we consider like how it actually worked, which was never the way the Mac worked and how as you noted on the po podcast, like how there is no command line lurking under this, how there is no DOS prompt under there, how you will never see text filling your screen. So that that was the division point for me. When I first saw the Mac it was, the first computer that I instinctively felt was clearly a totally different thing and a better idea. And as a young person, anytime I would see any other piece of technology after that, it would always amaze me that people couldn't see I felt the same way about Japanese animation. Can you not see the difference between Hanna Barbera and Robotech or whatever? Like are you not seeing the same things I'm seeing? Like I know they're both cartoons. Like I know these are both computers and I know you're like, well they both got Windows, but you don't see it? You don't see the difference? It's so clear to me that there's and it was just incredibly fresh. In the beginning it was easy because it was like gooey versus non gooey, but then when Windows got a gooey, it's like Windows three point one versus I remember I'm not the biggest I didn't go on to become a big anime fan, but I remember as a kid being absolutely blown away by star blazers. Remember that one? Oh man. I mean and that's the perfect example where it was a totally different sty le. It's like the other cartoons, like the Flintstones and the Jetsons and whatever, the Pink Panther, it's it even Bugs Bunny. If that was on and I had control of the TV, yes, that's the channel I would put it to. But Star Blazers was like one of the first shows I can ever remember that I made time for. Oh Star Blazers comes on channel seventeen at four o'clock. I need to be in front of the TV at four o'clock 'Cause this incredible show is coming on . And it is not like the other shows. It is Yeah, and even in that case, like there's nothing wrong with Hannah Barber animation, but to not be able to note that the style is clearly different different, like to not be able to instantly say, is this Japanese animation or is it not? If you can't look at two frames of d uh animation from different shows and immediately say yes or no, whether it's Japanese animation back in like the eighties, I just feel like you're not you're blind. Like you can't you're not like how is this and it was my particular sensitivity to these details of aesthetics and design that were like a a screaming siren in my head that were invisible to hold huge swaths of the public, which would lead to a long dark time of me feeling like this better thing exists and nobody cares about it but me, which is it happened to a lot of Apple fans back then. Why am I the only person in the world who can see this? Why is the Apple a niche player in the computer market? Why is the whole world using Windows on PC clones and they all think it's fine? Like it was kind of a sane person in an insane world feeling for a long time there. Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that the square versus rectangular pixels thing epitomiz ed it. I have you ever seen this is something that came up, I don't know if you got to this part, but on the Virgin History podcast. I have to admit, I've seen uh just like two years ago at some point or whenever the fortieth anniversary of the Macintosh was, I went back to Drexel University, which is actually not even that far from my house. I mean I w easily an easy walk. I went back 'cause there was some kind of fortieth anniversary of Drexel. was It like the first university that had a campus wide collaboration with Apple to have every student have a Macintosh in 1984 . And there was all sorts of retro Mac hardware f that was set up. I've seen original Macs over the years many times. I wish I've never seen a Lisa though in my life. I've seen one but not turned on. I've seen them at the MIT swap years ago. I don't even I've never even seen one that was like broken like one of the droids in Star Wars sitting in the jump pilot. The MIT swap is basically for Jawas . Yeah. And I'm not that interested in it. I honestly am not even that I mean if s if somebody told me they had one, like when I went up to Drexel for the fortieth anniversary thing and they said, You know, there's a Lisa in the corner, I would have gone over to see it. I'd be like, Oh, I guess I've always wanted to see one and but there were so many things about it that seemed gross to me. The fact that it was like asymmetric it honestly felt like the Lisa was a weird ripoff of the Mac even though the Mac came second. Yeah, it worked. I just looked up on the Wikipedia page to confirm the rectangular pixel things, and it did have rectangular pixels. But do you remember the Macintosh XL ? Yes, but that was but I don't remember seeing one of those either. That was a Lisa that ran Macintosh system software or the Wikipedia page says there was an upgrade kit for Lisa Computers that included hardware and software kit enabling it to reboot into Macintosh mode and display square pixels. Which is I don't know how they did that , but Yeah, but anyway, like it was the last dying breath of that computer was like well the lease is dead, we'll sell it as the Mac D XL 'cause it's like a really big Mac and the cool thing about the lease is it had a bigger than nine inch screen on it, so that's nice, but that was totally destroyed by the rectangular pixels. But yeah. I mean that the Lisa got run over by Steve Jobs getting booted off that project and going over to the Mac project. But a lot of ideas obviously were pulled from Lisa, but you look at Lisa's screenshots and it's like it's not quite it. You don't you can see that it kind of looks sort of like the Mac, but that you don't all the ideas aren't there. In the same way that when you look at like a ZRX Park like uh the Altio computer, you're like, well, I recognize this is a graphical user interface, but you haven't solved all the problems. You haven't figured out a reasonable way to do everything. A lot of the things they were doing were not gonna work, like the three button mouse and the way the cursor worked and text selection, like they hadn't figured it out yet. Only the Mac figured all that stuff out for good , well enough that essentially everybody just worked like the Mac from that point on. Even Windows said, Well we'll we're gonna do what the Mac does to the degree we can get away with it but given the look and feel lawsuits. And the places they deviated were like for deviation's sake so Yeah. Alright, let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor while I'm thinking about it. It's our good friends at Factor. Factor is a get food at home type service, but not meal kits. It's not like get a bunch of ingredients in a box and then you spend twenty minutes cooking something. These are pre-made meals that just come in ready to heat up and it is a great way to eat healthy. 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They shop, prep, cook, and deliver straight to your door, fresh with dry ice in the package to keep everything cold, so you have more time for everything you love to do this spr I use Factor. I really like it. I really love the taste and I really love the variety. Head to fac tor meals.com slash talkshow fifty off and use that code TOLK SHOW FIFTY OFF to get fifty percent off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September twenty seventh, 2026. Factor Meals dot com slash talkshow fifty off. See their website for more details. So here's where I have to give you, as I call them, being right points, and this is one of the differences in our personal s computing stories. Is you latched on to the Mac early and I did not. I Well that's not a being right point. That is being lucky enough to because I was nine years old, eight years old. I was lucky enough to have parents, grandparents, and uncles who knew that the Mac exists and collectively convinced each other all to buy them. So my my grandfather got one and he convinced and my uncle convinced my parents to get one for me, so that's kudos to them for doing that. But I was my being right point is realizing that this computer was something special. I didn't but I don't we didn't we never had one in elementary school and then in the middle school we still didn't have one and then in my high school the computer teacher Mrs. Spatz, one of the best teachers I ever had, procured one. And I don't even know what model it was. Probably an S. E, but I don't know. And there was one and only one Mac in the computer lab in the high school, and the rest were Apple IIs and including a bunch of two G S. And I've told this story before, but my senior year of high school, she put together like a I don't even know what we called it, but I I went to a public high school but it was very small. We have a graduating class of like seventy students. But it was a really good public high school f considering its size. And she was a great computer teacher and she put together a class for me and another kid named Zach, just the two of us, like an independent study. I don't think it was AP, but it was just computer programming. And that's where I learned Pascal instead of BASIC. And we had like a computer programming team uh f throughout high school. I mean I played sports and I played computer programming. And I remember we won something. We got to take a trip to Houston, Texas from the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for a computer programming because like we won like a local pr team, like four or five of us who got to program together. You'd get like a little sealed book like taking the SAT and it was like go and then you'd open it up and it would be like five programs that you'd have to write from scratch in two hours or ninety minutes or something like that. She was a great teacher and really encouraged that stuff. And we for that senior year it was like the first day of class and it was just me and Zach and she was like, Well there's only one Mac. Which one of you wants it? And she and the thing she wanted to show us was HyperCard. And I did remember thinking, wow, that's really cool. And I think she was anticipating that we would be arguing over which one of us would use the Mac and sort of maybe she was prepared. I was just recalled that she was sort of prepared for maybe you could split times on it. And I was like, I want to be on a two G S because I wanted color. I was an idiot and that was the first time I ever really saw the Mac and I really thought it was cool. But it did not seem like I couldn't break out of the mindset that a computer was really something that you turned on and it just gave you a black screen and what you ran defined what you saw. It seemed weird to me that with the Mac there was not that I wanted a command line prompt, but I wanted like a it just seemed like well this is an interesting mode for a computer to be in with this graphical user interface. But what if you want to do something else? You know, what if you want to do something that's full screen? And it I didn't see the appeal of it. So I was like, Zach, you can have it. And he was like, sure. And I spent the whole senior year on a 2GS. And I guess I made some hypercard stacks during my senior year at some point. But even then, I remember thinking, boy, hypercard's weird because it's like anment environ in an environment. Because you weren't making Mac apps, you were making these hypercard stacks that ran in HyperCard and they were nothing like the other apps. And it was like they're never gonna be able to use a technology like HyperCard to make Right. It just it's that was sarcasm. There's sarcasm tags around that. I gotcha. Mist was written in hypercard. So little did you know that a full color, full screen, complete immersive experience, one of the most popular ever made at that point in the software industry, would in fact be made in hypercard. Yeah, but you know what's weird is that my mindset had shifted at that point. I guess I got enough of a taste that senior year of the Mac where I even then, even though I wasn't using it as my computer in that class, I got enough of a taste of it where what I would want to write were apps, not games. I had already started shifting away from thinking I would ever make games on my own. And it makes sense to me that MIST was an amazing smash hit game that was written in HyperCard, but nobody ever wrote a Mac app that was a smash hit in HyperCard. Because you couldn't. And that seemed weird to me. It was like I kind of got a flavor of what it meant for a Mac app to be a Mac app, and I kind of got the sense of, oh, hyper card is really cool 'cause it's super approachable and I kinda liked the hyper talk programming language. And I like the way that you could show graphics by just dragging a picked file in to the stack and you didn't have to do any there was no complex thing. You just dragged it in and then you had a picture. And I was like, This is cool, but the it's like an environment in an environment. It's it was a good idea. A reasonable analogy is the Newton is to the iPhone as hypercard is to the web. It was a lot of the right ideas a little bit too early and and a little bit too constrained. And like yeah, you can see hypercard is clearly like something like the web made by somebody who's starting from the mindset of writing Mac apps with the Mac toolbox and Pascal. It's like, well if I could come up with an easier way to do that, that would be great. And they got the hyperlinking part right, jumping from card to card. And the constraint environment is even right. It could be all be in a browser window type of thing, but like the details were a little bit off and it wasn't quite the right time. And same thing if you squint at the Newton, you're like, I can see all you got most of the pieces there, but like you're years too early, you don't have the tech for it yet, and you've gone down a couple of blind alleys with like the handwriting recognition and the stylist and stuff. But uh I remember being super into hyper card as well. Although your story about which one of you wants to use the Mac and you went to the two G S because it was color, it's not the first time your foolish love of color would screw you over. I know. I made the I I still this is y you want me to tell the story. So when I went to Drexel the next year, every freshman had to you you didn't have to buy a Macintosh, but it was like strongly suggested. Because you'd have coursework that required to have so everybody and they had phenomenal education discounts. I mean they were like I think they were like half price, honestly. And the three options my freshman year, they had three packages and it was like the cheap one was the max So it was a Mac classic, and that was obviously not what I wanted. The Mac L C which was the low cost that's what the L C supposedly stood for, color computer, with a twelve inch, not thirteen inch display, which is what I chose, and the S E thirty, which is in my opinion the best Macintosh ever made. And I d it was more expensive, so I'm not entirely sure my parents would have sprung for the difference. But just so much more powerful than that L C. Just so much more. It's like massively. The SC30 was the top of the line compact Mac. The best one you could buy for any amount. It was a Mac 2X in a box and you're like all I see is that monochrome screen. Little did you know that you could connect a color monitor to it with a card, but that would be a good one. I was it was l hard enough to buy a uh I think that's that S C thirty was way more expensive than the L C although the EDU discounts were amazing. You're right. They were amazing back. It's not like now where you got like, oh, fifteen percent off if you're a college customer, then it was ridiculous college discounts. And speaking of colleges and Macs, I remember when I was looking at schools where I was gonna go . I didn't know what I was looking for in a college, but the one thing I knew was that I was judging, not so secretly, like just right out in the open, judging every school based on what is the max situation here. Did they use max? Do the students use max? Do the classes use like with Drexel? Like they would have got hi if I had looked at them, they would have got high marks for saying, Oh, they encourage students to use Macs. They have classes that require you to have the Macs. They have amazing Mac labs. That's the only criteria I was judging schools by. I ended up going to a school that failed. I got an F on all those categories, and it's just as well because what I learned at Boston University was Unix, which was like my second love in computing, but they had no Mac situation at all. It took me a while to even find where the Macs were hiding. I eventually did find them and ended up like getting a job and maintaining the Macs in a lab, and they also had next cubes and stuff in the lab, so it was pretty amazing. They were there, but everything you saw when you go on the tour or the giant computing centers is all X terms and V V Yeah. No, Drexel was great. And it I knew I liked computers and I was so happy that they kind of made it so you had to get a computer and so my parents had to buy me a computer. But I remember getting the pamphlet, they sent like a very Drexel sent me a very nice it might have even been Apple produced. I don't know. It was very nice glossy magazine style catalog that outlaid the three Mac s to choose from. And it was easy to rule out the classic because it was A black and white and obviously inferior to the SE 30. So it was just a question of the L C versus the SE 30. And I thought, well, I want color because I want to play games. And I didn't really look you know, it was like oh sixty eight oh twenty versus sixty eight oh thirty. What the hell's the difference? Big difference. Yeah, yeah, and it didn't even come with the right keyboard, it came with a a particularly shitty keyboard, actually. Actually one of the worst keyboards at Apple. Yep. And they were squishy mechanisms. Yeah. And then I won my and the S E thirties at Drexel in 1991 came with the Apple extended keyboard too. And I believe that I've since learned this again, we could look this up, but I think when the SE thirty first debuted in nineteen eighty nine, it didn't come with an extended keyboard too. It was an option. We discussed this over messages a while ago. We're trying to look up the original price for it. Like you had to pay. But then the extended two was like, I don't know what it was. That's what we're trying to was it two hundreds? Or a hundred and sixty and nineteen ninety dollars? And that's the somehow I also got that keyboard with my SC thirty as well, 'cause I also I got my SC thirty on the EDU discount. That's my origin story for the SE thirty is I my sister went off to college. She's four years older than me. She went off to college when I was entering high school, and she gets a college discount. That's like I was craving this. I'm like, I know about Apple college discounts. You're going to college. We're going to go to your college bookstore, which is where you get computers, you go to the college bo okstore. And I'm gonna see what their pri at that point I had encyclopedic knowledge of like how much is one megabyte RAM dim going for this week based on the ads in the back of Macworld magazine. I knew everything about it. She went to University of Connecticut and then went to their college bookstore and I'm like, look, Mom, we can get an SC thirty with a forty megabyte hard drive or whatever and a an Apple extended to keyboard for X amount of money. And here's the deal. We'll get that with this amazing discount and then we'll give my sister the computer we have at home and then the computer we bought at her bookstore, that will be my computer that I'll use at home. And so th she went to college and we bought an S C thir ty from her college bookstore, but she didn't get to use it at college. That was brought back home and she got to use our original Mac one twenty eight that had been logic board upgraded to a plus, which was a thing that Apple used to offer back in the day. So she's using a Mac Plus for four ye ars starting in like what nineteen eighty nine? She's using a Mac plus at college and I'm using the S E thirty at home. And you feel no guilt about this whatsoever? Like managing up parental moves I've ever done in my entire life. Like I cannot believe I pulled that off. At the age of like sixteen or something like that. Yeah, well freshman freshman high school. Like it going out of eighth grade, this is parental manipulation at its finest. I had already been honing the particular parental manip ulation deal which was my birthdays in December. So I would always essentially combine Christmas and birthday to get a present that was more expensive than all of my siblings. I'm like, well it's not just my Christmas present, it's also my birthday. That worked in to varying degrees, but I did the my story with that is I I wanted to get an external eight hundred K floppy drive back before the SE thirty was out, so I would have two floppy drives so I didn't swap as much with my motherboard, upgraded Mac plus and I had to pay for half of that . I believe it was four hundred and fifty dollars and I had to pay for like two hundred of it or something like that. And combined Christmas and birthday, and that was my one present. So but I saved it up for the SC thirty. The Apple Extended Keyboard 2 model M3501 originally retailed for $163 when it was introduced in October 15th, 1990, and adjusted for inflation. That's approximately four hundred dollars today. So Apple still sells equivalent keybo ards. The magic keyboards for iPads are roughly four hundred dollars. For an SE thirty in today's world where you can at education pricing get an entire MacBook Neo for five hundred dollars. Yeah. Well the S E thirty was like what eight grand in today's money starting and that's before you even upgraded anything. So it was in line with the prices that they had. Yeah. Well I but I you know, it was a mistake. I I mean it wasn't the worst mistake. I it I regret it, but I did use the hell out of that L C for years and years and loved it and turned it into a career effectively. I was like, oh this is this is by far and away the most interesting thing at this entire university is the computer they just gave me. But it I guess to go back in the eighties, it's fascinating to I guess I think the there's different ways of defining eras at Apple. But to me, the cleanest way is just by Steve Jobs. So I would say era one is nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty five when he got booted out of the company. Then there's the era when he was exiled from the company, nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety six. To me seems like a continuous era. And that's sort of even though the original Macintosh is famous as a Steve Jobs product, when he left, it was what? I don't even know if the Fat Mac had come out yet. I mean a FatMac was coming, but I'm not even sure if it was out yet. I guess maybe it was, but it hadn't even turned into a line of computers yet. Then there's the Steve Jobs comeback era, ninety seven through his death in twenty eleven, which feels like a continuous era, and then I would say the fourth era is the Tim Cook post Steve Jobs era. That's how I would look at Apple. And because of how old we both are, the time dilation effect makes the between Steve Jobs leaving and him coming back seem like eight thousand years. Yeah. Tim Cook seems like five years. And it's because just because of the age we happen to be, like those early eras seem so long. We did some the math recently on ATP of like how long the Mac has been on each processor architecture, and it like it doesn't fit with my memory of things because you know not at all. It's it's so weird how that is. But yeah, things have stretched out, and especially if you look at like the graph of Apple's net worth and it's like, well Steve Jobs saved the company yeah and then Tim Cook like quadrupled it. It was just so like he did this amazing growth from the iPod to what and like the Steve Jobs to the Jobs two era on the graph of like Apple's net worth is like, what are you making the big deal about? It's clear that this guy did all the work and it's no you don't understand. It was like look at you have to chop off the Tim Cook era and now look at the graph. Doesn't it look more impressive now? Yes it's it did the Steve Jobs ninety seven to twenty eleven run if you Bezos chart it and take off the numbers, it had a similar trajectory, but then when you think about how much harder or how much more unusual it is to keep that going through other orders of magnitude. It suddenly pales, you know, it's one of those like the animations that zoom out from the molecular level to planets to solar systems to galaxies. It's like at a certain level you realize that when Steve Jobs died in twenty eleven, Apple was like the in their entire financials were just I don't know a week of sales now. I don't know. Yeah, I mean i th the thing is that he had lit the fuse. Like he lit the fuse for the iPhone in two thousand seven and unfortunately died in twenty eleven, but that fuse was lit and that rocket was burning. And so is uh not to say that all Tim Cook had to do was not screw it up, but like that the rocket ship that produced the Tim Cook era was already it was ignited when Steve Jobs died, which is, you know, a nice place to be for Tim Cook. We all said that Steve Jobs died or whatever, and it was difficult to take over and fill his shoes and stuff like that, but he wisely essentially didn't process and the Tim Cook era has uh changed, I think, towards the tail end, maybe not like Game of Thrones, but in some similar ways there's some disappointment on my part or whatever, but the jobs to era like yes that the cause that era didn't in a natural way Yeah, and you know, it's hard because we and you and I were both mid career commentating on Apple w while it happened. We were very close and observing it. Not that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, but it was uncomfortable the last few years 'cause you could see that he wasn't well. Right? I mean we knew that he had And we could see how gaunt he was. It was made it uncomfortable, but also I think clearly focused his mind. And I don't know that the iPad would have happened when it did otherwise. It was in some ways again, it's like it's just a big iPhone. I don't know why not make it. But it was like uh all I know is everybody I know who was there at the time was that when he came back from the his first long medical leave that all he wanted to do was make the iPad and that was Yeah, I've always felt like the iPad was kind of I don't get a lot of people agreeing with you on this, but I feel like as the iPad is what he wished the Mac had been. Like a technology to make something as friendly and as simple and useful as the iPad didn't exist when the Mac was made, but that was he was he was going for. Like all the idea of the Mac, the i not Raskin's idea of the five hundred dollar thing, but like Steve Jobs' idea of we're gonna make this and this is gonna be or even just the Apple too, like the cu the computer for the rest of us. The idea is computers are too hard to use, we're gonna make them friendly and approachable to people. And their take on that was kind of like Bill Atkinson's hypercard take on what would eventually become the web. It's like you I know what you're going for, but you don't quite have it. Like you're missing some stuff and it's not your fault because you literally can't do it yet. But the iPad, I just remember that keynote of him like sitting down on the couch is like finally. this This is a computer that anybody can use that is incredibly powerful, that does all sorts of things and you cannot break it and it is so friendly and it is like it really fulfilled so many of the ideals of the Mac because the Mac had gone on to not be that. He left the company. The reason the Mac exists at all, the reason we're on this podcast is like desktop publishing, Photoshop, stuff that Steve Jobs was not responsible for for the most part, but that made the Mac a thing. And that was complicated and powerful and we had power users. They called them power books and power max, not just because of the power PC. That was not the original vision from anybody for the Mac whether Raskins five hundred or Mac Dollar Mac or Jobs is one, but that's what the Mac became. And I felt good about seeing d do the iPad. Even though the world had passed by and even though I was more interested in the Mac than the iPad, that they basically had done it, that Apple had produced the computer for the rest of us, which is the thing that we give to toddlers now, so they can safely play in a computing environment with their applications that they touch. Right. There was the famously the story that the original Macintosh did not have any capacity for expansion cards. And then it kind of secretly did like what Burrell Smith Burrell Smith did. Right. So that's why an original Macintosh could be upgraded to a Fat Mac . But the fact that they had to sneak it in was so Steve Jobs that he didn't want any expansion cards, and at the time, so antithetical to the entire rest of the personal computing industry. Including the Apple II. Apple II had very cards at the Wazoo. WAZ was always it to make it even better, that's what I would want. Oh, that's the computer I'll make. I'll make a computer that is just sitting here with these slots where you can make your own things that uh I've never thought of and you can add them to the computer. And no better way of saying the difference between the two Steves. Where Steve Jobs was already looking at no, we're gonna seal this up and we're going to use again already with the special screws so that people could cn't even try to look inside . And it was too soon, right? It was too soon to have a computer that didn't have expandability. Yeah, the computer industry was moving too fast at that point. Right. I just think of how much I used to know about SCSI and some of it w I actually did understand no no, this is why you have to terminate the SCSI here, otherwise it's not gonna work. And then there were other things that did just seem like voodoo. Like what order you have to turn the devices on for your thing successfully. Yes. Exactly. And you'd sit down at somebody some other Macintosh like at a print shop or some place where it wasn't yours but you had to go there to print something in color or whatever and there'd be like a sticky note on the computer telling you to turn on the devices in this order. And you had to know how to turn them on. You couldn't just leave them running because nobody left their computers running. Yeah, there was no dis there was no disc sleep. No. They're on and spinning and loud. Shut down with something you did every day. You'd shut down. Some people some snell still does that. It I haven't shut down my Mac in I know. I I shut it down when I go on vacation for more than a few days. I'm not sure I've ever I've owned this MacBook Pro since w early twenty twenty one. No no, I guess I don't know when the hell they came out. But whatever in twenty twenty one when I bought it. I'm not sure I've ever shut it down. To be honest. I I think it's been effectively running continuously for five years. Or sleeping often, but no, you used to shut down and you'd have to turn not just your computer on, but all of your various SC I would do that multiple times a day with my computer set up because every time I was done using the computer I'd shut everything down and then an hour later I'd go back in and use the computer again, turn everything on, wait for the internal boot process just over and over. That's how you use computers. That's it seemed totally normal. That's what kept the Mac alive in those periods was that it blossomed into a platform that was in many ways contrary to that Steve Jobs original vision from nineteen eighty two. Yeah, it it's still the vision of his like creative professionals who will be able to do things that they couldn't you know, like that the this can this would empower creative professionals to do a thing. That was in there as well. But the simplicity in the computer for the part of the computer for the rest of us thing, if you watch the old Steve Jobs like talks when like when he was very young and everything, they were still stuck on the idea that people would write programs. Like you mentioned it with the basic stuff. And that no matter how easy you made programming back then, that was just never gonna happen, right? You wanted to empower them to do things that, you know, well, this computer can do anything. Don't you see? You can write any, it's a general purpose computer. You can write program to do anything. If you have a problem with your business, you can write a program to solve the problem for your business. And the answer is no you can't because not everyone's a programmer. And that vision was it encompassed in the Mac in in a different way. HyperCard mostly encompasses it of like, oh look, you're not gonna write a Mac toolbox app. We understand that, but HyperCard can give you a way to make a hypercard stack that can run your business. They were leaning in that direction. But like it t that turned out to not be that's was never going to happen. And if you were heavily into computers in California in the seventies and you're at the homebrew computer club, you're like, yeah, everyone's gonna write program s, man, and just it it isn't it was never gonna be the reality. Well you don't understand everyone else is an old fogey now, they're all squares, but when the new kids are born, everyone will be a programmer and I guess thankfully that is not the case. I mean maybe maybe we're starting that phase again with the LLM things, but back then the answer was that everyone is not going to be a programmer. No, it definitely wasn't. And uh you never know, right? It's like I don't know, like when HBO first took off , it was like, Man, this is how everybody's gonna watch T V. You pay a couple of bucks for a specific channel and there's no commercial interruptions. And HBO is still around, it's probably changed hands more times than any T V channel in history , but uh it's never been the case that more than like ever like five percent of the US population, five or ten percent had HBO, right? Like it just it's just not something that most people are like, oh yes, that would be nice not to have commercials interrupt the movie that wasn't meant to have commercials. But no, I'm not paying extra for it. And that was the story of the rest of us, right? It's like people could look at the Macintosh and say, boy that, is a neat looking computer. And you're like, look at the fact that the screen is white and the characters are black and that's how it will look if you print it out. That's amazing. All these other computers have a black screen with white text, like part of the WYSIWYG was the fact that it was black pixels on a white background and they're like, Yes, I get that, and then they'd go buy a PC, right? 'Cause it was less money and it's and it was what they had at their desk at work and if they brought a floppy disk home from work they could put it in the PC at home and it would work and that was it. But there was an us who it was the computer for, right? The people who noticed things like the pixels obviously should be square, not rectangular. And also noticing like that there was no a Scooby-Doo reveal where you take off the mask. There was nothing underneath it. Like from your perspective, the base level was what you were seeing. This computer was the GUI . It wasn't like a program that you ran on top of DOS. There was nothing underneath there. You and because there was nothing underneath there, there was no user serviceable parts. And I don't mean that from a hardware perspective. I mean if you edit needed to do something to quote unquote fix your computer, you did it by dragging crap around in the finder. Right. There's no point where you were firing up a command line or editing registry keys or anything like that. There was Res Edit, but that was a GUI app. Right.. Exactly This was the base reality, was the GUI on the Mac. And it was relentless and 100% consistent and totally convincing. And no one seemed interested in even doing that because they thought the uh we just need to have Windows and a menu. And I thought, no, there's more to it than that. It's it's the fact that this is the base reality on this computer on your computer. The base reality is DOS. And that you have to know that's the base reality. Hell, if you don't have it auto-booting into Windows, you have to type when to even get to Windows. And then you're gonna be down there playing your DOS games or messing with all sorts of config files and stuff like that. The fact that the Macintosh was thought through all the way to the bottom, so that like any kind of diag nostic mode you would boot into, I forget some of the things like if you had to boot up with the debugger, the programmer switch that you had the interrupt switch, that brought up a dialogue. A graphical dialogue. Well granted you typed commands that set memory addresses and stuff, but like it was still a GUI. It wasn't like oh and all of a sudden some black text goes over. That was one of the one of the startling things about Mac OS ten was like when it would kernel panic and you would see like Linux text going across the sc reen before they had the nice kernel panic screen. It was like we're not in Kansas anymore. Like the world did move on, but for what seemed like a very long time there, the Mac proved that you could have a computer where the base reality was the GUI and you never needed to deal with the command line. And that was important back then because every other computer required you to deal with that crap to make your computer work. And now our phones are running Unix, but you never on the phone have to deal with command line crap. It's there, but you never see it. And so that the phone and the iPad are the current versions of the base reality is what you see here. You will never be asked to do command line stuff and on the phone we won't even let you. I just remembered for years then at the height of like when the whole industry had settled down to Mac versus Windows or Mac versus DOS. I guess it it spans the era where it started as an argument about uh command line interfaces versus graphical user interest. And then it turned into like the side that was had previously been arguing that uh command line interfaces were a man's computer and graphical user interfaces were baby computers. Even when it became Mac versus Windows, they conveniently forgot that they were on that side before. But there even then you'd boot up a Windows PC and you'd see streams of DOS diagnostic messages Yeah, all sorts of stuff like that. And most people I knew, including me when I had jobs in college that involved PCs, would set it so that it wouldn't launch Windows automatically. It would start at a DOS prompt in case you wanted to do something in DOS first and then you would type win. And I which I always thought was I don't feel like I'm winning using this computer at work. Yeah. I've always thought that was in the Mac PC war is all those PC users typing win over and over again. Yes. They were gonna win . And it I and I remember thinking too, the people who made this, they were just lazy. They weren't even thinking about the fact that it was Win. They just didn't make you type Windows. But as much as Steve Jobs was wrong about some of the stuff like the expansion cards and who knows what would have happened with the Mac if things had gone differently personality-wise with the other executives and John Scully and if Steve Jobs had somehow never gone into exile outside Apple. Who knows? But parts of what made the Mac in that era were clearly f led by him and they were different from the Lisa, the square pixels instead of rectangular pixels. It's it's kind of like when Tim Cook took over because so he gets booted out in eighty five, but he's lit the fuse on the Mac. And his ideas about the Mac and lack of expandability were wrong, but his taste about the the base reality of the Mac should be that consistent gooey and his taste about how it should be artistic and clean or whatever. He's gone. But he has instilled the entire Mac team with that ethos to such a degree that I feel like the run from after he's booted out until a couple years before he comes back is the best run of the Mac. Everyone hates on that. Like, oh in the nineties they made too many Mac miles and John Scully was bad and blah blah blah. No, that's the era of the Mac 2FX, the SE thirty. Like those that that is the heyday of the Mac . And it's powered by essentially his decisions and taste. He's gone, but his decisions and taste leave on and that Mac team there's no way in hell that Mac team is going to allow the Mac to be sullied with all the stuff that we think is bad. And then combined with Jean-Louis Gasset saying, you gotta add slots, man. We gotta make a big, powerful computer, we're gonna have separate monitors, a single-page display, a dual page 21 display. That's all stuff that didn't seem like Steve Jobs was interested in, but was required to make the Mac become what it would eventually become. And he needed to not be there for that because I think his ideas were bad and would not have been successful. But the fact that that he so w set the foundation so well , allowed the Mac to go on to success without losing its spirit for such a long time before he even came back. He's gone for years, and the Mac is so thoroughly still like, but no matter what, there's gonna be no command line Even the diagnostic messages were graphical. So you'd boot it up and it and it showed the happy Mac so early in the boot process because it was like in the ROM. Like it wasn't even gotten to the point where it could read from a disc, but it would show you the happy Mac and a graphic, you know, and not like in a mode that looked different from what you were going to see. The pixels weren't fatter, it was the full resolution. It showed a perfect little happy Mac icon. And if something went wrong, and unfortunately due to the rather shaky dependability of floppy disks and even hard disks of the time, oftentimes something would go wrong while you were starting up. It wouldn't just dump a bunch of text on screen. It would show you a sad Mac with X's for eyes. And some nice sound. Whatever the sad noises before eventually the Macs had like uh breaking glass sounds, the later ones remember that. Yeah, I do remember that. I I 've used them so much during that era that I'm familiar with and with all of the sickening feelings that come from seeing such things. But I mean can you even imagine Apple today having a Mac that is in a bad I maybe there is there still a Mac with X's for I's that comes up if something like a kernel panic or something. I don't think so. I think they've gotten rid of all that stuff long ago. Although they still uh it's one of the things that has carried over. Obviously the Mac is and all of Apple's platforms are now Unix based and uh as opposed to the old Mac days where the base reality was the GUI, the base reality is now obviously Unix. But Apple works really hard even today to make sure that is hidden from you. Again, phones are running Unix, do you think anyone who has an iPhone knows anything about Unix? No, you never see it. Even in a totally dead state, starting from zero, the first thing you see on that screen is a white Apple logo. You do not see text, you don't see a memory check, you don't see BIOS, you don't see Unix stuff, you don't see firmware, you don't see any of that. Same thing with the Macs. When they boot, there they try to keep screen flickering to a minimum. They try to be smart about resolution. Everything you see is graphical before it even finds the boot disk, the diagnostic modes. Like they've done all sorts of trickery to do that. It's not ROM chips anymore, but like they've done everything they can to maintain that. Which like why? Does that make a Mac or any better to use? Like would it kill you to have on this really fancy Unix workstation some Unix y stuff but like the Mac ethos is no. You will never see that crap when you turn this thing on and it's graphics from the moment one and if you want to dive down into the terminal it's there, but you never have to see it. Maybe slightly less so in the Mac these days, because if you end up doing it default to write command, you feel like, well, I had to do this, but I think that's more of like on the classic Mac you wouldn't have been able to do this at all, so just be glad you have any way to do it. But in general, you don't ever have to see that if Which does make it it's it's just kind of odd that not odd because somebody was eventually programming on the Mac and on the Lisa, but it was weird that having eighty characters of monospace type on the screen defined the pixel dimensions of the screen, and that's why d Monaco nine I think Monaco ten fit eighty columns too. But Monaco nine is the classic that era monospaced Mac font. And you just almost never saw it. Whereas if another company had made the first graphical user interface, most of the programs you ran would have been things that just were in Monaco nine just command line interfaces running in a window. And you almost never saw Monaco. If most users it was one of the least seen fonts that they encountered because you didn't need monospace fight type and the fact that all the other fonts on the system were proportional was for a time a unique thing on the Macintosh. There were no proportional fonts on other computers. Yeah, I think I recall even seeing some programming stuff done in proportional fonts back then, because of course you could. There's no nothing stopping you other than it's not traditionally done. Although speaking of programming for the Mac, that reminds me of uh something from the pod I I I just watched this podcast As all podcast listeners do, I feel like I need to participate in the podcast that I'm listening to and interject, but you can't because it's recorded and you're hearing it, it's already happened. But here I am. I'm this is the privilege I have is I can now interject in real time and say the point I would have brought up in that section. You hit all the major points, but the one point that was missed by all three hosts was so there's no the the original Mac didn't arrow keys in the keyboard because Steve Jobs wanted everyone to use the mouse. And they didn't they were afraid if you didn't use the mouse they would just use the arrow keys. Well now you don't have any arrow keys so you got to use the mouse to move the insertion point and you're gonna learn how to use this computer. The most important feature of the lack of arrow keys on the original Mac was it prevented software developers from writing programs that required the arrow key. Because you just can't write you can't write you could. There's nothing stopping you on the Mac to write a program that looks like a DOS program. But guess what? There's no arrow keys in the keyboard. What the heck are you gonna do? Make people use VI keys? No one's gonna do that. It was to prevent software developers from their old habits of saying no, you cannot write a program like Lotus 123 for DOS. You can't port Lotus 123 from DOS here. We're not you don't need the our users don't have arrow keys on their keyboards. Do you understand? It's a no-go. So like the users, that's one thing, but it was developers. Prevent developers from potentially bringing shovelware to the Mac. I think it was called Apple Works. It was the suite of like a word processor spreadsheet database for the Apple II platform that Apple itself made and I think it was like you'd launch the program and you'd use the arrow keys to be like do you want a new document, a database, or a spreadsheet? And it was like up down return . Because how else were you going to pick? I don't know. So when I got Mac right, putting the insertion it placing the insertion point with the mouse seemed like second nature to me. And I I remember when I got my first Mac keyboard with the arrow keys, I'm like, oh, I guess this is easier. Macintosh, and then that was motherboard logic board upgraded to a plus, which was a thing that Apple offered officially. You could take in your 128 and say, I'll give you like 1100 bucks and rip out the guts, and they would replace the logic board, the analog circuit board, and the floppy drive, the but they would leave CRT and the front case in there. And then you effectively have a plus for less money than a plus. But I still had the one twenty eight keyboard that didn't arrow keys on it. So now I'm using the plus. Still no arrow keys. I think the first arrow keys I got on my computer was the SE thirty with the extended keyboard too, and it's like wow. This is makes this makes text editing so much easier . I think I brought this up on version history, but I'll say it again is fr like in recent Apple history, there was and I participated and I made fired my opinion very strongly when Apple shifted their own like MacBook keyboards to have full height left and right arrow keys as opposed to the upside down T arrangement of arrow keys where the left and right are half height even though there's nothing above them. And it's a perfectly cromulant design and there's a lot for all the ways that many laptops are just MacBook Air ripoffs from PC makers. There's a lot of laptops out there that have the full height left and right keys. But of all the ways that you can arrange arrow keys on a keyboard, the difference between the exact same arrangement, but whether left and right are full height or half height with a gap above them is one of the most minor agreements. But we went nuts when Apple went to full height left and r right arrow keys like eight or nine years ago. And then they were like they but it's one of those ways where Apple still shows us that sometimes they'll listen and they like were never mind and we'll went back to the half-height ones. But when you look back at the early Mac keyboards, A, the first one didn't have any arrow keys at all, but then B, there were the goofy ones like my LC, whatever shit ass keyboard that had l right up down what order it went in, but whatever order it was not the order you thought, 'cause you had to look at the keycaps and go where is the left and where is the right. I think it went left, right, up, down. The thing about the full height carrow keys, like that wh ole cycle of change is so emblemat ic of the Apple of that day because all right, so it's Johnny Ive is there. You can see why they do the full height left and right. You can see why they do it, because it looks nicer. It's uniform, it looks nicer. What do you using? Absolutely. Right. So that's the it's a form over function there. And there's like, well, the function, like I'm sure people argued, oh, you can feel for the keys when it's half light, blah blah blah. And they're like, well we're just gonna do this and people complain and so they switched it back. So you could look at that and say, okay, they did a little form of a function thing, you understand why they did it. It did actually look nicer. Arguably the left and right keys felt better, but it turns out feeling for the gaps is more important. But the bigger picture of this is hey, you could have full-size inverted T without jamming them up like that. If you give up the perfect rectangle of the keyboard, tons of PC laptop keyboards did it. You just move that inverted T down a little bit, and guess what? You get the best of both worlds. You got gaps that you can feel for. You got full size left, right, up and down anarchies, just like on a desktop keyboard. Isn't that great? And that's well come now. We're not gonna break the rectangle of the keyboard. We'll go back and forth on this half-height archite thing, and it's like why is this even an issue? Like, half-height keys suck. Why are you doing this? It's like we cannot break the rectangle. Like we will go, we can only go so far here in the Johnny I've design ethos, like it becomes unharmonious as an object if we ever break that rectile and PC makers are like screw it we'll put we'll move those keys down half a row, we'll move them down three quarters of a row, move them down a full we don't care. We don't care if it's symmetrical. We don't care about beauty. If you buy a big enough lap PC laptop you can still get a numeric keyboard over there. Yeah, no we,'ll put you anywhere. Whatever. We don't care. And then the butterfly keyboard, like the original IBM butterfly keyboard that folded out. Do you remember that one? Right. Laptop and it would go from the But with the laptops that have a numeric keypad , your hands are so far off center and they're like, Well, so what? Yeah. And it's Yeah, no P the PC market would try everything, but like it's just it's just part of the Apple ethos of there is some wiggle room between form and function, but there's also a line that we won't cross and that's the keyboard is a rectangle. I'm sorry. When Apple came out with the full height left and right arrow keys, I was instantly disappointed because I I knew that I like reaching for the gap, and I thought I don't think I'm gonna like that. But I at least thought maybe, and I had the thought you did, which I think is almost certainly true, that in a at the height of Johnny Ives personal influence within the company, the way that the keyboard just looks when you're looking down at it was given more value than elsewhere. And so I wasn't surprised by the change. If they made a keyboard where the whole arrow key arrangement was full height keys, and you there I'm looking at a MacBook Air as I talk to you right now. There is room for those keys. 'Cause the arrow keys even with the very large trackpad they have today there's plenty of room underneath the arrow keys for a a row of height. A row of I mean even remember one of my first power book reviews for Ars Technica I was reviewing uh like the seven take a picture of the seventeen inch power book and it used the same keyboard as the twelve inch? Yes. You remember that? Yes. Yes. I mean part of that is part of that is part saving but it's like you have like a dinner plate, you have a lunch tray here and you it's the same keyboard as the twelve inch. You could fit a numeric keypad you could, fit full size arrow keys that are offset into an adver you could fit a pack you could fit so much more on there like nope, same keyboard as the twelve inch. And think about what it would look like. It would look terrible. And there's a lot of th it's just it was not gonna it was not gonna fly. All right. I'm going to take a break here. Thank our third sponsor today, and it's our good friends at Notion AI. Notion AI is the all-in-one AI, powered by your work and all in one place. It automatically captures meeting notes, instantly finds the exact content you need, drafts detailed docs for you, and lets you chat with the best AI models. Notion AI just became twice as powerful for teams, making it the best AI tool for work. I can't emphasize this enough. And the Notion is a great notes app, a personal information manager, if you want to call it that to go back to like a term from the eighties. And you can and do a lot of people do use it by themselves, but I think where Notion really sings is in use in companies and team type settings. And instead of having your notes and your documents over here and then using AI chatbots in a separate app over there and dragging things over and saying here, these are my notes for this or that. With Notion AI, it already knows all of the context of everything that's in your Notion database and data store, all right there. So for meeting notes, man , every idea, every decision and every next step just gets captured automatically in notion. Somebody takes the notes in notion from a meeting and they can be put to work right away. You can capture anything and turn it into organized searchable notes. Everything from group meetings to one-on-one conversations, lectures, even podcast episodes. 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Check out Notion, the best AI tool for work right now at Notion . com slash talkshow. That's all lowercase letters. They want me to emphasize that. Apparently their system doesn't work if you mix in uppercase. Notion.com N O T I O N dot com slash talk show all lowercase letters to try the powerful all in one Notion AI today. And when you use that link, you're supporting the show. Notion dot com slash talkshow. You mentioned Res Edit earlier. But I don't know I don't know if I can pick one f best Mac app of all time or Apple app of all time. But I would put Res Edit in the Hall of Fame, for sure . And perhaps as something that was a f in the spirit infused from Steve Jobs' original vision, but maybe he wouldn't have liked the way that Resedit was used by everyone. I certainly had a lot of fun with Res Edit. It was as close as you could get to seeing some of the machinery behind things, but of course it was another gooey app. And the closest you got, I think there was like when you opened an application, the list of resources with their like one the four letter codes or whatever, the thirty two bit codes. That was a a Mac window with the scroll bar, but it just had and it was a list window, but it just had text. I think it was like Geneva twelve or something, or whatever the heck it was, or Geneva ten. It was just text. And it was one of the few places on the Mac that you could see a list of text with no icon stuff next to it. And it was like, whoa, now we're really getting down to it. And when you opened up the resources they had little icons for your ICL eight resources for your icons or whatever and WND for your windows and stuff, like there was icons for other parts of it, but it was like as nerdy as you could get. And of course it was just the resource fork. There was a code resource where like the compiled binary was if it uh you know, I didn't I didn't have disassembler. But if you just wanted to change what every single sprite looked like in Crystal Quest, res edit it, you could do it. You just make a copy of Crystal Quest, modify it. I made my own custom versions of all sorts of games using the magic of Res Edit, or try to do like local cheats on games by changing values in Res Edited. But yeah, I still felt like I was at a remove because at that point I didn't understand programming. Like I I knew a little bit of basic, but I didn't really get it. And unlike your school, my high school did not have any programming classes. The closest I got to a computer class in high school was I took an elective where we basically played uh flight simulator on Apple IIs, which was terrible. And this is like in the early nineties. I'm on an Apple II in the early nineties, like it was incredibly terrible. So I didn't programming. But Res that it let me at least tinker with my computer in a way that made me feel tech nerdy and that would impress it to my friend Yes, yes. It shows a picture of like the pubic library. It says it used to say public. I changed it. Changing the public library to the pubic library is impressive to your school friends at that time. And basically using Res Edit to mangle games was impressive to people at the time of like, well, you're really hacking your computer there, whatever language we would have used at the time. So I did spend a lot of quality time with Residentit, E but if I had to pick my favorite Mac program, it's two way tie. First is Mac Paint, which I just spent a tremendous amount like when we first got the Mac it might as well have just been a Mac Paint machine, that's all I did was Mac Paint. Like just forever and ever and ever. Just every ounce of that program, every feature, everything you could possibly do with it, I just use Mac Paint forever. And then the second is Finder. The classic MacFinder. If I had to pick one, I would probably pick the Finder just because it like many programs have come after Mac Paint that have bettered it in terms of graphic excellence, in terms of making making bitmaped art. Nothing has come after the Finder that has done a better job of providing an interface to the stuff on your computer than the original classic finder. That's one of the things that was lost in the transition. A couple things we lost. We lost being able to name files whatever we wanted, and we lost the classic Mac Finder that has attributes that seem not to be valued or understood by anybody in the modern area and yet are embodied by tons of stuff on the phone. I mean the freaking springboard is a hundred percent a spatial finder, albeit a very bad one. But like those attributes are those attributes are valued by people, but they don't know what it is about them that they like and anyway, it's a complicated topic, but if for my favorite Mac programs it would be uh two way tie, Mac Paint and Finder, with Finder probably edging out a little bit. That's a good list. I mean I guess I would probably say the the classic Finder, because I think that it embodied all of the idea But I put Res Edit up there and part of it is that the difference in the modern era and it's fine that everything now is a bundle and so there's no separate data fork and resource. I've always liked that. I've always thought that was a very clever idea. Like when I learned about that on Next, I said, Oh, that those that's smart. That's a really smart way to do it because at that point I understood like resource forks were a brilliant solution at the time of the early 80s, but now we're at the point where we don't have to do that. We can use the file system. So I've always thought that was a good idea. Yeah, but it could have been that the Mac had done something similar but still had an app like Resedit where instead of browsing the bundle as a file harky , it would still open the bundle within one unified view. And I get it, because some of the things it's like, oh, if you have a bunch of images in your app and they're just image files in the picked resources. Yeah, you can just open them in an actual image editor like Acorn or Pict This is the days before uh code signing where you could actually mess with the contents of titles without invalidating the entire application. You could mess with it while it was running. And but the way that like Res Edit had its own self contained mini Mac paint for the icon editor. And it wasn't any kind of fancy embedding of the actual Mac Paint code, they just re-implemented it, but used the same principles and conventions. And yeah, I think even the way that the tool palette was arranged was obviously informed. They obviously, whoever I think Resedit came second uh because Mac Paint was so close to an original app but they looked at the Mac Paint palette and they're like, well we'll put the pencil up in the top left, you know, and it worked the same way. If you knew Mac Paint and then you opened Res Edit, you already knew how ed toit the icons and that was like such an amazing instantiation of the principle of what system wide consistency was meant for. Oh, you spent tons of time playing with Mac Paint and now and you never even heard of the resource fork, but now you've leveled up in your nerdery of the Mac system and you've got Res Edit running and you've opened up an application and you're perusing the resources and you found some of the icons that are used like the app's finder icon or the icons the app uses for various things inside the application UI. Well guess what? Now you already know how to edit and hand edit the pixels of the icon because it works just like Mac Paint. Because intellectually, especially as I got older, we'd read all sorts of articles about like here's how the Mac GUI works. As you noted, like having standard controls, you learn how to do something in one program, the other program is familiar to you. That was a revolution compared to like if you learn Lotus One, two, three, it does not help you with the next DOS program because they right those people did not talk to each other and there was no standard set of interfaces and like intellectually I understood that but then as I got older I realized that when I was young like I was the person in my house who knew how to use the computer. Like from day zero. Like my parents bought the thing and they put it in the house, but I was the one who figured out how to use it and I I dealt with it entirely. And that that thing of oh, so you use Mac Paint and when you go to Res Edit, oh it's just like MacBoan, like the familiarity,. oh Oh scroll bars, you're gonna see scroll bars everywhere. Windows, how do Windows work? Like that consistency. When you're young, I feel it's kind of like picking up a second language or something. When you're young, your brain is like, oh yeah, no, I see, I see it's I see the consistency. You don't think of it in that way, but when you're a little tiny kid with like your little spongy brain, you're just like you pick it up so quickly and everything is so consistent and I remember being frustrated with the adults of my life, I'm like I would show them how to use something in one program, and then a second program, they'd be baffled . Like it's the same thing. It's like everything, it's all the menus always work the same. The scroll bars always work the same. Windows always resize this way. This is how folders work. This is how file it's the same everywhere. Like, how do you not see this? How do you not trans ferring these skills? And it's just I think part of being young and having a malleable mind, like you see it with kids today who grow up with phones. If there is that consistency, a young mind will pattern match it and pick it up and latch onto it, and it will become second major and even if that consistency does exist when you're an adult it's harder to say like I've learned one app and now I'm gonna transfer those skills to another like 's just something that's you know it's part of it getting older, but I do remember ha feeling that frustration. Like I appreciated the consistency, but it's not working on old people as well. 'Cause they just get set in their way like they'd never even seen a computer before. So it just it was what was intuitive to me was not intuitive to them. While you're ranting right there, I booted up Infinite Mac the emulator 'cause I wanted to double check my memory of the original Finder menus and have to laugh at how much faster Infinite Mac is to boot system one than a real Mac is a good I just started mini V Mac and it booted in about 1.5 seconds, which is not the authentic experience of having an original Mac. Right. One of my favorite little things about the Finder was the menus. File, edit, view, and what's the last one? Special. Special. Special. The special menu. I friggin' love the special menu. And again , it's like a little thing that Apple wouldn't do today. 'Cause it's oh hopefully 'cause they're better at it. Because you see what they do it, it's like we've got commands that don't fit in file edited view, what the hell do we call them? It's like a junk drawer and they're like, Oh we'll just call it special and put crap in there. And it's like today I would hope they would think harder about that, but back then it's like, look, we got a ship. We gotta call up the menu for this stuff. It was the three commands in the special menu in system one point oh clean up, which would move your icons around if you'd made a mess of the current icon arrangement in the current window or the desktop. Snap them to the grid, I guess. Empty trash and erase disk. That's the only thing. No shutdown back then Yep. And I remember reading I don't know when they started and how long it was, but it was something I had to read in a magazine. But that beta versions of Mac OS, they would put a funny word and replace special. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. But I read it and so like every beta of whatever version the programmers on the system software team would put a funny word. I think they all started with S. I think that might have been part of the gimmick. Maybe not, I don't know, but they would just replace 'cause they knew that the word special was a weird junk drawer. But it calling it special somehow worked. You know, if it would have been called the junk drawer menu. Or if it's like ETC or something Yes. That would be wrong. And you we would look back and say that was a mistake. That was a rare mistake in the original Macintosh. The fact that it was called special, you can say that it's wrong that there wasn't a more elegant way to come up with a set of menus where those commands would fit. But somehow instead it just feels right. It feels like no, they weren't really file commands, they weren't edit, they weren't view commands, they were special command And yes, part of it is the bias of I got I fell in love with the Macintosh with a special menu. And so of course it 's like a quirk that I just happen to love. But it's the right kind of quirk. Yeah, it was part of the whimsy that really infused the Mac back in the day. Right down to the resident icon with the Jack in the Box thing.. Yeah Like the whole Reset which should be the least whimsical application on the entire application was totally like the whole theme of it with the little head poking out and going to the side. It was like hacking is fun. Yeah. And but I can't help but feel like you said , and I do this I totally agree with you that I almost feel like what happened after Scully got forced out of the company is when things really started going cycling. It got dark because they weren't able to actually do anything. They had these bold plans for next generation operating systems and none of them could come to f fruition. And meanwhile, th they're not exactly fiddling while Rome burns, but they were making operating systems that next generation operating systems that would never ship while the Macintosh kept the company alive and stagnated. And while their competition Microsoft was moving ahead rapidly. Yeah, and then so Jobs lit the fuse on the iPhone and then he died. Scully left the uh Newton before he left. And that wasn't quite that wasn't a lit fuse. Right. Again, ahead of its time, amazing technology, great ideas, but it was not a rocket ship that would carry Apple up into the next era. It just wasn't. It was too early. Did you have a Newton? I think we've talked about this. I did I never owned one until I eventually got one at the MIT swap and I have a bunch of them, but I did play with them when they originally came out. In fact, in some of the college bookstores and stuff that I would play with uh the first time I ever picked one up, I picked the thing up and I wrote my full name, John Sarracusa, in cursive on the Newton and it correctly translated it to print. I'm like, this is amazing technology. This is the most amazing because my handwriting is not good and I wrote curs like back then we learned cursive in school and I had to use cursive for school, so I knew how to write cursive. And then I wrote my name in cursive and it figured it out, and it was like the most amazing computing feed I'd ever seen in my entire life. It was pretty much downhill from there, but that first moment I was like, holy cow, they did it. I've read about this in a thousand magazines and it actually works. You write in cursive and it figures out what you wrote. How can it do that? I think I got I think Drexel had them at the student bookstore too. And they were so they were crazy expensive for something that you that absolutely could not replace your Mac in any way. There's no way it was like a businessman, it was like an eighties businessman briefcase like sharper image, like a fantasy thing that just was ahead of its time, but the tech wasn't ready for it yet. There were some fascinating Apple like choices. Like the fonts were very good, the SB font, the Pitmap font that was like the main system font of the Newton OS was good. The fact that the Newton hardware used Gil Sands as like the word Newton, like in the way that the Macs of the era were using Apple Garam ond as the hardware, the branding, and the Newton stuff used Gil Sands. Looked really good and felt right. I think they made the right choice with that weird is it green? Yes, it's green if you see it super dark green. Yeah. Super dark green. But at a basic level you didn't have to be Steve Jobs. You didn't have to be the most insightful oh, this is what's wrong with the product visionary to see it. It was like, what do I do with it? It's what in the world do you do with it? Like it was a product that was uh all computers, including the Macintosh, including Windows , all computers were basically waiting for the internet to actually become the computers quote for the rest of us because that's the thing that made everybody else on the planet finally have a reason to have a computer because all people like to communicate with other people. And that's what the internet enabled. They turned computers into communication devices as opposed to the way that me and you could use a computer as a I'm gonna go spend thirty six hours non stop playing with res edit it 's a udio that is not connected to the internet with a fixed set of software and you just spend forever in front of it God knows what we were doing but we were there forever. Yeah the even even before the internet connection stuff, like the category of what I forget if Scully coined this or not, but he certainly used it a lot of personal digital assistant, PDA before it was public displays of affection. Personal d or maybe after. P personal digital assistant . You're an important executive. You have meetings. You wear a suit. You need something that goes with you that's digital, that can be your assistant. You can take notes in it. You can transfer your business card to other people using the IR port on the remember that like our TV remote has the IR port. That's how we can we wirelessly communicate. You can stick in a PC MCIA card to do some kind of networking stuff. Like but it's like it's you don't want to have your Mac with you. It's not a laptop. It's just like a combination of an executive's notepad and something from Star Trek, and it's got handwriting recognition, and you can draw pictures, and if you draw a triangle, we'll see that you're trying to draw a triangle, it will turn into a perfect triangle, and it's got a stylus. Isn't this amazing? And it's like you're almost there. A digital thing that is your assistant that you carry with you is in fact going to be the most important consumer product of humanity. But it's not this one. It's not you're close, but it's not this one. And even without the internet, the Palm digital assistant said, Hey Newton, free like the Palm 7 will eventually have cell radio in it, but even before that, if you just make it smaller and cheaper and make it play games, people will buy it, and it'll be more popular than your gigantic multi thousand dollar huge thing because it's just a better product design. We made it cheaper, we made it smaller, the battery lasts longer, you can play cute little games on it, you can read ebooks on it. We learned from what you did wrong and we did it a little bit better. And then obviously the iPhone's gonna come and say, No, actually this is it. This is the tech is here to do this now. So thanks for the warm-up, but we got it this time. Yeah, the other thing that and the palm exemplified it, and I had my wife had one too, and she I think she used hers more than me. We both had the handspring visor, which was the hardware created by Jeff whatever his name was. The he found founded Palm originally and then sold it to who was the big company they sold it to? They sold it to some big company, but then secured a license to the OS so they could make their own hardware. And in that early black and white era of POM pilots, the handspring visor was I think clearly the best. But it obviously you know that it came after the IMAC because they had translucent plastic. Yep, I had a bunch of handsprings with translucent plastic. Yep. And even the styluses, or styli, if you prefer, if you're more of a Latin fan, but the styluses were translucent plastic too. But the they even though they were made by a th completely unaffiliated with Appleany Comp. They integrated with the Mac better than the Newton did. One of the craziest parts about the Newton. Everybody remembers the handwriting and Doonesbury making fun of it and yes, and they were very expensive. But the absolute craziest part of it was that it didn't integrate with the Mac at all. Even though it came out in the nineties, it was that mindset from the early eighties of hey, every couple years we're gonna come out with a new platform In the early days it was like, well of course we gotta start all over 'cause have you seen how much the world has changed since we made the last computer? But with the Newton, it was more like we had been in the PC era long enough that now there was cruft and technical debt. And it's like a lot of the stuff about dealing with a Mac and a PC, like we now recognize some of that is just a little bit annoying to deal with. So wouldn't it be great if we could you make a clean break from that and do like the Newton with its like soup of data instead of like access to the file system? Like again, a lot of the ideas that would eventually become embodied more successfully in the phone of like we're not gonna make you deal with that computer stuff. We want you to be able to do the same things, but there's no finder, like you're not there's not files, there's certainly not a command line. And the only way we can do that with the Newton is to have a clean break. And it wasn't so much like we needed totally something totally new because tech has advanced. It was like when you worked at a job long enough and you made kind of big mess and you're like you feel like oh if I could change jobs, I just wouldn't have to deal with this big mess I made. They were like, this is gonna be a new platform and all of our new best ideas are gonna be here and we're gonna leave behind the technical debt. And again, that is a thing that Apple would eventually successfully do with the phone, which left behind tons of the tech debt and old style stuff of the Mac, but the phone didn't say and by the way we don't work with your Mac at all. Like you have to plug it into the Mac to even use it. So yeah, another slight miss, but I understand the motivation to move on from the decisions Right. But it just seemed foolish and in hindsight it's more of a mistake than not waiting and keeping it in the labs until some kind of wireless I mean it came out before Wi-Fi even, let alone cellular networking. So you there was no wasn't just that it didn't have wireless networking. There was no wireless networking in the world to have. And the idea of a palm si zed computer, even if you can argue that the Newton's bigger than a pretty few palm, yeah. Yeah, exactly. A Hockenberry sized palm device. It scre amed for networking. But the one thing it definitely should have had is some kind of fundamental back and forth compatibility with the Mac for moving text and syncing contacts. That was the thing you did with your palm. You synced your contacts. And it worked with the palm. And then you could go out and uh put somebody's new contact information on your palm pilot and then come back to your Mac and connect it and sync and then it would be in your whatever your contacts app was on your Mac. And no, it didn't sync automatically 'cause they didn't neither device had always on the cloud syncing. But you put on a terrible little cradle with that ninety eight pin connector, it will crunch and then yeah, you connect it with the cable and it would sink. Uh US Robotics bought Tom and then eventually Robotics b got bought by three com. And so you might have been thinking of either three com or US robotics. No, U.S. Robotics is I was thinking of the modem company. But they had the right idea and it was a better product, but I don't think anything better exemplifies the dysfunction of what Scully's Apple became then not that the Newton had shortcomings, but that it was such a spiteful silo from the Mac . Like spitefully unrelated to the Macintosh in any way and in any I don't spite. I think it was aspiration. It was aspirationally disconnected. Well, and there was a story there a bit of the spite though, and the fiefdoms that had developed within Apple was like Pogue's book had a I forget what it was called. I don't have the book in front of me, but there was a Macintosh tablet project that had a couple hundred prototypes made . And I actually heard from a Daring Fireball reader who before he even had gotten to that point in Pogue's book, had listened to me talking to Pogue on the podcast and wrote and said, Oh, my dad worked at Apple at the time and had one of those Mac tablets and brought it home and I showed him the page from the book that was a couple hundred pages ahead of where he was. He goes, That was it, we had one of those. And I was like, that's amazing. You know, and he was like, I don't know what happened to it. I was like, oh, we if you still had it, that would be worth something. But that it got shot down because I don't know if it was Larry Tesla or somebody who was uh spent time on the Newton project was like, No, we're the tablet from Apple and it it just the sort of as isolated as the different departments within Apple can be in the modern era, it wasn't with guns pointed at each other, right? Somewhere up the chain, even if you're working on a team somewhere and somebody else is working on a team somewhere else, somebody up the chain of management knows what every both sides are doing and isn't going to have two headsets coming The the end of the Scully era and after he leaves in the dark times with Spindler and Emilio, th that's also the proliferation of all the performers and stuff. Like that that was difficult everywhere, but like I the problem with the the difficulty across the organization was that it was all filled with talented people and there was lots of people with aspirational ideas, but without leadership, they were going in a million directions. And that was I think that was also the time of the ATG, the advanced technology group, which was like one of the parts of Apple that I love, which is we're gonna look into the really like far -fetched stuff, like just deep research that's gonna eventually form inform our future products. I'm not sure uh I think Steve Jobs just totally disbanded ATG when he came back, and I don't know if it was even around to contribute anything to even what would become the IMAC, but I always like the idea Which was a tablety kind of computer and that was glossy and it was made by Apple and they released it to the world to say this is where our heads at. We're thinking like the future is gonna be like this and won't it be amazing? But the company had no was not we were like, okay now who's gonna make the knowledge navigator. It was like that's just a video we made. But everyone in the company was inspired by it. So you get some people went like I think we should make a tablety thing and I think we should make the moon. And then Scully latched onto the Newton so hard it became his thing. I'm gonna show that I'm like Steve Jobs, I'm gonna come up with this amazing Newton , which that's it did not work out for him, both career wise and product wise. But the rest of the company was like, Well, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that, and no one was stopping them, and it was just like everyone was doing everything and there was no direction and they had lots of great ideas and talented people that were just not being it was a failure of leadership. Many times over failure of leadership, which and it and to be fair, it was also an extremely difficult time for Apple because they were not succeeding. Their market share was shrinking, not growing. Windows ninety five was stomping all over their face. Things were not looking up and so they were looking for the next big thing and the Newton wasn't it. Exactly. And the other thing about the market share, it it was th I think they were not unrelated, it was cause and effect. But the fact that the Macintosh system software as it stood wasn't quote unquote modern, that it didn't have preemptive multitasking, it didn't really have a kernel . It all made sense in nineteen eighty four because the computer that they wanted to sell for less than twenty five hundred dollars, not the twenty five hundred dollars it actually sold for, couldn't possibly have had those feat ures. And yada yada yada you get seven or eight years down the line and all of a sudden computers were capable of, you know, had enough RAM to do those things. And everybody knew that Apple would need such an operating system. I mean, you've spent half your career talk talking about it, about those types of transitions that need to happen, and you know it's coming. And meanwhile, while Apple is wasting time uh on things like the message pad, which obviously wasn't ever going to replace the Mac. Even if it had been successful, it wasn't going to replace it. It wasn't intended to. It was like a new type of computing. And any pipe dream that the iPad would ten years ago obvious you know didn't pan out. But in the meantime, uh while Apple is wasting time on things like the what was it, Pink and Talligent and I I think and other operating systems that never uh wound up shipping, the Mac just kept going with what it had and was keep paying all of the bills, right? Like financially speaking, the Apple of the Late Scully era and up until Jobs' return really in ninety seven and And it it's the brilliance of Jobs' strategy upon coming back to the company and taking the temporary CEO job in ninety eight or whatever year it was was basically well we've got one thing that's paying the bills and it's taking on water and sinking. So let's cut everything else out, let's stop doing everything else and fix the one thing that's paying the bills. Then once we've done that we'll go from there. And it it worked. But it before he did that, there's one thing paying the bills and it's taking on water and it needs drastic help. And they were like, Well maybe we'll just make something that's not compatible with it at all and and even after Jobs came back and did the IMAC, it's not as if he says, okay, we're gonna do the iMac to hold up the Mac thing, but then we're gonna find the next big thing, which is gonna be the next big computing platform. No. They did the iPod, which is absolutely not what like it was never envisioned as this is gonna replace the Mac, this is the next era of computing. This is just this is a cool idea we have for a product that we think is good. And thanks to the talent at Apple and Steve Jobs' taste in giving the go-ahead to that particular project and shaping how it looked. It turned out to be wildly success ful. It wasn't the next big thing and in fact at the time it seemed like it was gonna be super popular, but like if you look at the you remember see we used to see those graphs of the iPod? And it just was like a dome. It's like iPod, it's gonna be things forever, and then it's like, oh never mind, phone. And it just goes, uh, and the iPod fades away. And like the iPod was not like you know, Scully was like, I can't figure out how to do the Mac. We're gonna find the next big thing. And Jobs was like, I'm gonna make it a new great Mac. And if you have it meantime, if you have another good idea, yeah, well let's do that music player thing, it might work out. It turns out it did, but it was just a bridge to get to the iPhone, right? Like they were it was he didn't back and say I'm betting the company on my grand vision for a device that's gonna replace the Mac. That's not how he operated at all. The Apple would have got out of business. Yeah. And you know what the iPod did? In addition to everybody knows it synced music and podcast files with your Mac, but you know what else it synced with your Mac? Contacts . It was actually a better contact manager than the Newton, even though people don't think of the iPod as a app that you would have your personal contacts on. But it was actually a better one than the Newton because it synced with your friggin' Mac where you actually had your contacts. Yeah. And I think for most people listening, that era, that Steve Jobs ninety-seven through twenty ten era Because who knew about Apple before that? Just tech nerds. After that, because the iPod was not a Technerd thing, it was an everybody thing. And so when p remember when people used to say they were going to go to the iPod store, Apple opened retail stores, and they said I was about to say that. And it at first it drove me nuts because I'd be in the mall and and I'd hear people say, Let's go to the iPod store and I would want I've already it's what, twenty five years ago and uh I wasn't an old man, but the old man that was waiting to come out of me wanted to yell at the kids But then I think it's the Mac company. This iPod is just a new flash in the pen. What are you talking about? But like the iPod was mass market. And so yeah, that's the Apple that most people know. But then like the serenity would come over me. Serenity now, and I would think well this is good for Apple that there's a lot of it the halo effect. The iPod Halo effect. Yes. to get our beloved platform to be successful. They're going to use an iPod and then they're going to consider using a Mac. And you know what? That kind of worked pretty well. Well, let me take another break here and thank our next sponsor of the show. And it is once again Shocker , our good friends at Squarespace, this podc ast is sponsored once again by Squarespace and Squarespace is the all in one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need or someone you know who comes to you for help as like the resident nerd in their social circle. Send them to Squarespace and send them with my code. They giv youes everything you need to claim your everything from your domain to setting up the way your website looks to tweaking the way it looks to updating the content on the website on a regular basis, like if it's got like a blog or you just have little news items or whatever, you update the website through Squarespace too, not just create it and then use something else. All of it you could do in one place. They have so much new stuff. One of the new things they have is analytics, which they've improved greatly in recent years. The built-in analytics at Squarespace websites is one of the best analytics dashboards I've ever seen where it's not minimal. It has a lot of information, but it is unlike so many other analytics packages, Google Analytics, I am looking in your direction, it is cohesively designed in a way that you don't have to like read a manual to understand the analytics, you just look at it and it's as clear as hopefully the dashboard of your car or something like that. Selling content, selling time, selling products, whatever it is you're hoping to sell, whether it's something virtual like software or whether it's something physical like physical goods, or whether it is your time because you're a consultant or a trainer or something like that. You can set up your Squarespace website to handle that sort of stuff. And one of the other new features they've got is Squarespace invoices where it ties together where if whatever it is that you're serving need uh selling needs an invoice, the invoice you can do through Squarespace too. Your customers get the invoice, pay the invoice, and it comes to you, including the payment processing, all through the Squarespace platform. Where do you go to find out more? Go to Squarespace.com slash talkshow. Head there, squarespace.com slash talkshow and save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. To go back to my earlier point that the e to me, the eras of Apple are defined by Steve Jobs' presence, his absence, his presence, and then his absence again. And the thing that I think people see so fondly about that era that they see as missing despite the unbelievable financial success and stabil ity, both technical stability and financial stability of Apple under Tim Cook since Steve Jobs' di death. But it was the sort of you don't know what's coming next excitement of crazy stuff is going to come out. I was doing the verges did you do the thing where you didn't I can tell you, speaking of feeling like an old person, doing that thing and that I briefly glanced at what the ratings are and I'm like, I can't be voting with these people. They have no idea what they're talking about. Like I should have looked at the ratings for I never look at the results before taking a poll and I just opened it up and I started clicking and I thought if I clicked twenty five times I'd be done. I didn't know. But here's the thing. I started to get a sense when I saw which products they were picking. I'm like, really ? These are this these are it's not like you have every Apple product in here. These are the ones you pick, so I'm like, I'm not on the we need a separate poll just for old people, for old school Mac users, because this is going to be for the Mac And so I just totally dismissed their entire ratings to say, okay, this is what people who think it's the iPod store would rank these products. They had two printers in the list. They had the Laser Writer two and the image writer maybe the image writer two. And they were like at forty eight and forty nine or something. And you could see it that it's young people who are like, printers, what the hell? I'm not doing Yeah, it was kind of well anyway, I'm taking it and before I realized that A I shouldn't have voted at all because it was for us. Yeah. It's like I'm trying to raise the ocean level by pissing in the ocean. But while I was clicking through it, they kept showing me the fat fat nano iPod. Yep. Yeah. And I'm like I I hated that iPod. I guess I kind of see that it was the first one sort of where they were like, Maybe people do want to watch video on their pocket device and that's why it had the weird dimensions it had. But it was such an ugly little d thing and it kept coming up in my comparison and I was like I'm gonna pick the opposite the other device every time. I don't care what it is, I'm gonna pick the other device. Is that why and then I was like is that why it they keep showing it to me. But it's the fat nano iPod while I didn't like it, and it obviously is not the iPod form factor that just about anybody I know of thinks of when they think of a classic iPod . It at least exemplified the hey, we'll try crazy new ideas every year. If that is totally absent in the Tim Cook era Yeah, I mean the closest he gets is the Vision Pro, but I feel like the Vision Pro is more like his Newton, where it's a product line that he was obsessed with that cost a lot of money and was the next big thing it turned out so far not to be. Whereas jobs would do stuff like the cube where it's like, I just think this is cool and sometimes it's not gonna work and sometimes it is, but you know, we're gonna check it out there. Yeah, and then they got rid of it. They didn't let the cube hang around for two long. Yeah, because jobs jobs only likes winners. So he's gonna be like, this one didn't we'll move on. We'll come back to that idea. We'll try it again with the trash can and that won't work. Maybe we'll get it with the studio. Right. And right, the problem with the trash can Power Mac or Mac Pro wasn't that it was a bad idea, it was that it was the Mac Pro for six years. It's trying to and they couldn't upgrade it. That was the like if they wanted this to be the Mac Pro, like they've been able to upgrade the studio because the studio is basically the trash can Mac Pro in a different shape, but guess what? They've upgraded the studio. You can put different stuff in it, and it gets more powerful. And they couldn't do that with the trash can, so it's oops. I don't know about you, and I wasn't I was already not in the market for I never b I haven't bought a Pro Mac desktop sin ce I think I've only ever bought one in my life, my Power Mac ninety six hundred three fifty, which is a long time ago. That was an amazing computer, but yeah. That was the last time you were in that market. Yeah, I've been Mac Book as my desktop, I think, ever since. And you were obviously uh different but I remember but I excited by m PowerMax and Mac Pro hardware. Um just knew that they weren't really for me. And I remember being excited about the Trash Can Mac Pro. I was like, wow, that's a cool idea. They tried something new. Yeah, and I guess the argument is if you don't occasionally have a dud of an idea, hopefully not like a severe dud, but like uh let's backtrack and you know there was only one fat nano, right? It's like well all right, let's backtrack and go back to the other. One buttonless shuffle. Let's all right, forget about the one the yeah. But didn't they try to say it had no buttons? I forget Yeah no, I said it w th they did the one buttonless shuffle. Okay. Okay. Well I thought you meant one button shuffle, but yes, the one comma buttonless shuffle. I think it might have had a hold it might have had a hold switch on it, I forget. Yeah, I don't know. But it was it's it, you know what? That's too few buttons. But glad they tried it. Just glad also that they recognized that no, that's not the way to make a shuffle. I wish Apple still did that. And that's the sort of thing I sort of hope to see a return to after to I mean you might. If they can ever get their Syriac together, all these rumored home products, a lot of them sound like potential duds in waiting. So you might get your wish to see a bunch of like how about this little thing that sits on your table and it's got a screen and a robotic arm. What do you think? Yeah, and the screen uses the robotic arm and a camera to follow you around like a face and it's like I don't know, seems like it could be weird, but it is different and it's not like anything else. And it's not you try it. It's not trying to be a new platform like the Vision Pro where it's like, this is all new platform, the future of computing, spatial computing, this, that, and the other thing. No, this is just a product that we made that we hope you'll like. It is not a platform. We're not gonna sell apps on it. It's not gonna change the way we use computers. It's gonna hopefully sit somewhere in your house and be a useful thing for you. Maybe, maybe not, kinda like the home pods, like we'll give it a go, but there's nothing about it that is like the folly of the Newton and the Vision Pro, potentially, is just like the idea that I've got I'm gonna come up with the next big thing and m maybe you're too early and maybe you're right about it, but it's not gonna happen in your lifetime. But that's a such a harder bet to to make than hey, let's just try a bunch of products. Let's make a cool Mac. Let's make a cool thing that's not a Mac that might be useful to people and see which one of those stick. Those that's much lower stakes. Yeah, and I kind of feel like there's a I don't think they're giving up on the Vision Pro. I don't think anything they came out with the what was it an M four chip or is it an M five? M five. M five, yeah. So they updated the hardware. But I don't think they're giving up on it. I've heard nothing about layoffs from the team that's there. I think they're still full steam ahead. But there's like a lack of urgency that is obvious. And I feel like that urgency is what Steve Jobs infused the company with. Where sure maybe he would have shipped the exact same one point oh Vision Pro, but there already be a second one out that address some of the problems. The price, the weight, something. There would have been something new out just to get something out. Like, hey, this obviously didn't resonate with the market , but we if we believe in this as a concept, we need to get our act together and ship something different by next year. Let's go. Or scrap it. That's the other choice, which is like I've lost faith in this. I don't think we're gonna be able to do it. We're too early, the tech's not ready, it's too heavy, it's too clunky. But the Apple the Tim Cook Apple did the car project for ten ye ars. And uh luckily didn't ship anything, but it shows their dedication to like we are behind this idea, we think there's something there, we're gonna see it through versus the cube where it's like it's it didn't fulfill my dreams, so can it well we can always make another Mac . Yeah. I don't know. It just seems less it's just less exciting. It's more s it the company is more successful, clearly. Th it's arguably the most successful company in the world, but it's less exciting. Like jobs sometimes he just wanted to do something nutty, just to do something nutty because he was bored. And it's it was kind of made it more fun to watch. And you kinda get this like I just wrote the other day, it's such a little thing. It's so silly. It's not the reason it has nothing to do with the reason the iPhone became the hit that it did. But when Jobs made the first public phone call with an iPhone on stage at Macworld Expo, he called the Starbucks next to the Moscone and ordered a thousand latte four thousand lattes and then said sorry, sorry, wrong number and hung up. I can't see Tim Cook doing that. And there's something about that spirit that I feel like it's still there in the company, but like under Tim Cook, it doesn't come out. It never comes out. Yeah, this is the irreverent spirit of the original Mac team with their pirate flag and everything with some of the things that appealed to me as a kid. It's why I literally had pictures of them on my bedroom wall because they were like as Nail I Patel pointed out of like the pirate flag, better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. Steve Jobs started the Navy, he founded Apple. And now he's like, I'm rebelling against the company that I made because these suits are stifling me. It's like it's your you founded the company , dude. But but that that rebelliousness appealed to me as a kid was like we have to go off into our own corner and we have to do a thing that's different than the Apple II. Even though Apple II's making all the money and paying all of our salaries, we're gonna do this different thing and and we're pirates, then in the jobs two era, he had matured, but his force of will was so dominant in the company, perhaps learning from his mistakes of like never give up an ounce of power because I'd never want to be driven out of my own company again. It was so forceful that like everyone was in line behind jobs. But here's the thing. It was kind of like the whole my complaint about the Tim Cook and what good is having FU money if you never say FU. In the Steve Jobs 2 era, he was such a dominant force in the company that nobody would step out of line, none of his like lieutenants, not even any of his employees, that they were all aligned behind him. But when you talk to Steve Jobs, he could step out of line all he wanted. He could say whatever the hell he wanted. Because he was Steve Jobs. And so yeah, if you interviewed anybody at Apple, they're not gonna say anything. You interview Steve Jobs, you have no idea what he's gonna say. He could say literally anything. He like because he both had and exercised the freedom to be like, who's gonna yell at me? I'm Steve Jobs. I can say whatever you want. Tim Cook is not like that. Nobody under Tim Cook will step out of line and say something and Tim Cook doesn't want them to say. But Tim Cook will also never say anything that is not in line with the Apple philosophy. So any interview with Tim Cook is like, is he gonna say anything exciting? The answer is no. He's not going to, I mean, unless he's literally making an announcement, which he has prepared ahead of time about something, you're never gonna get an off the cuff remark from Tim Cook that reveals something about his character, about his position on technology. It's all gonna be talking points. And it's like you're Tim Cook, who's gonna yell at you? The board of directors? You could do anything you want, but that's not his personality. And so the excitement of the Steve Jobs era was that the one person who had the freedom to do whatever he wants often did. He often did. He would do and say what he was theill sted that guy with his middle finger up to the IBM sign with the leather jacket from that picture? Like he was like that to the day he died. Yep. He didn't really need the FU money, but he had the FU influence and he used it. He had that attitude even before he had the FU money. Yes. The money came later. But it was like before the iPhone, obviously, and Steve Jobs was on the Disney board and he went down to Florida, maybe I think it was Florida where they had a board meeting and somebody showed him an ESPN phone because ESPN was already a Disney property and it was like some kind of collaboration with Verizon and you'd get sports scores on your dumb phone and it had an ESPN logo. And sh somebody showed it to Steve Jobs thinking, Hey, I'm gonna impress we got this tech guy on the board and I'm gonna show him our cool new ESPN phone. He's like, That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. There's a reaction to almost everything, including things that later he would say are brilliant and the best thing ever. But yep. But like Tim Cook is on boards. He I don't think he's on the Disney board. I know he's still on the Nike board. And if Nike came up with an idea as stupid as an ESPN phone back then, Tim Cook is not going to say that's the stupidest thing I ever saw. He's another thing if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. Yeah. He might in private meetings there's you know we, just have that once the once Tim Cook story we all have is of him being kind of a jerk in typical like internal big company boss way where the guy's got to be still here. Why are you still here? And that reads as Tim Cook that I could totally see him doing that, that yeah he,'s not always the affable person in the interviews, that he can be a stern taskmaster internally, but that's internal only and it's telling that's the story we have. We don't have nine hundred of those. Do we have so many Steve Jobs stories inside and outside Apple. In public interviews, not like the stuff he did inside Apple was thousand times worse than the stuff he did in public, and even that was pretty bad. So definitely different leadership styles. Yeah. And I will lastly say just to bring it up to the present day that the sort of conservative always on brand Tim Cook mindset it has infused the company without ever egotistic ally trying to redefine the company in his image or like Scully, who I don't think tried to rem ake Apple but really did I think it it getting to that point of why didn't the Newton integrate with the Mac at all, it was a s this is my new platform and it's b gonna put the company in in new territory and set it up for this f knowledge navigator future. So why integrate with the old thing that everybody still associates with Steve Jobs who I ran out of the company eight years ago or whatever? Tim Cook has, without ever trying to break the apple he inherited from Steve Jobs, infused it with his own personality. And that happens under good strong leadership. Right? It's the natural course of what fourteen years of CEO ship? Fifteen? Going on fifteen later this year. Of course the company has taken on more of Tim Cook's personality, but I think at this point it's too much, right? It's too much Tim Cook personality infusing the company. And to the current moment of LLMs, I think it has made them so gun shy and conservative about the weird things that can come out of LLMs and even within the last few years , that them trying to make sure that anything that comes out of Siri and or Apple intelligence remains ever on brand for Apple is a mindset that kind of explains why they're so far behind. I mean that that may be part of the explanation, and honestly, I kind of agree with them there. There is some brand stuff that they need to protect, and currently technology doesn't allow them to protect it that way. But like I think the best example of the way the Tim Cook mindset is kind of hurting Apple here is that in the Jobs 2 era , with the whole company being so aligned behind him, the rest of the company also got to see him be Steve Jobs. So it was like, okay, we're not Steve Jobs. So we need to be on message and on point and do what the leader wants. But we look up there and we see our boss and he says whatever the hell he wants. And that that's aspirational for them. And you would see that embodied in things like at maybe even before Steve Jobs dies, but certainly after. His alkalites that saw Steve Jobs like Schiller, Schiller would occasionally say something irreverent. He's not Steve Jobs, he's not even Tim Cook, but it's like he grew up looking at Steve Job s as his leader. And so the aspiration is, yeah, you gotta stay in line and be on message. But once you get to the top of this thing, you can say whatever you want. Whereas the Tim Cook era is you gotta stay in line and be on message even if you're at the top. So there's no one below Tim Cook that's saying I aspire to eventually lead Apple and when I lead Apple I'll do whatever the hell you want. It's like I aspire to lead Apple and I guess I'll be just like Tim Cook and continue to be on message. And so I do worry about Turnus or whoever's gonna succeed him because what you need with a new leader is like look it's great to be speak with one voice and be aligned, but the top of that pyramid can't be in that mindset because it's paralyzing. And so I do hope whoever succeeds him is able to say , I am now in the power seat. Like, I'm not suggesting Phil Schiller becomes CEO, he's a Apple fellow and he's off doing whatever he's doing, but like he he so clearly aspired to be able to be as irreverent as Steve Jobs and occasionally would sneak out little bits of irreverence even when Steve Jobs was still around and when even when he was still at Apple. And that's just not something you see from anybody you see in a keynote these days. Like you cannot get them on the record being a little stinker. Shiller came on our podcast and was a little bit of a little stinker. And he was still working at Apple then and you've had him on the talk show and everything. But those of all your talk show appearances with those Apple execs, like Jaws Jaws is a little bit of a stinker in service of Tim Cook's message, and Phil was a little bit of a stinker on his own, in in reverent to everything that came before him. And like, I just don't know how this is gonna go. Because I really do feel like change in leadership is your opportunity to do something different and to be different and I think we've run the course of what Tim Cook's style of leadership can provide, which is some amazing stuff, but also some downsides. But I hope the next leader is different. It hopefully in a better way, but different even different in a worse way would be a refreshing change. I forget how I know this and it might be that it might be that I know it directly from Phil and it was off the record, but he'll forgive me, I think. But I happen to show I happen to know for a fact that the Can't Innovate Anymore My Ass line, which I think comes from the introduction of the trash can Mac Pro, was ad libbed and did not occur in any of the rehearsals. 'Cause it was truly felt by Phil in that moment. Yes, and to Phil from the live keynotes, one of the rules they did not have scripts and there was never there were talking points, the slides were obviously made in advance and they rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed. But there was no script and j that was a jobs rule from on high that he doesn't want anybody up there reading from a script because it it does it plays flat. So you've got to speak extemporaneously on stage, but you do need to rehearse. And Phil has told me, and Phil is was always great on stage. I would say second best only to jobs. And there's no question that we know that worried about him and Phil would step in. Phil has told me that the hardest part from his perspective was he did rehearse and he was there for every rehearsal watching everybody else rehearse and giving notes, but that he never wanted to give his best performance in a rehearsal. He wanted to have it down and feel like okay, this is good, this is tight, we're hitting all the messages, but I want to stop right now because the next time I give it I feel like is gonna be the best one and I want that to be the real one. And it you know, uh that's where it came out. It's like he it was his best delivery of the introduction of the Mac Pro and he added the line, Can't innovate anymore my ass. It's hard to see anybody at Apple today doing that. Again, even Tim Cook, because Tim Cook could do it. You're the CO you can do it like you can do the tone. And it's like no people never can do that. And people would go nuts. That would be the thing. I don't if he did it now I'm not sure if his sentiment has turned so much, but we'll see. I do Yeah. I mean I guess in our little bubble of the world that sentiment has turned, but I bet when he goes on stage WWE there'll still be the same amount of cheers as there has always been . Yeah . And I don't expect any curse words even as mild as ass . All right. Well, see you in fifty years, John. May I guess I'll have you on the show in between, but Yeah, I hope so because again remember about the brain mush thing so Oh my god, imagine how many fucking ATPs you're gonna have between them . Jesus Christ. I don't get it with the fifty two shows. Ever fifty two shows a year for thirteen years or so. And now you've got the extra ones too. So you've probably up to like fifty two . Yeah, monthly monthly member specials for the past several years. But yeah, no, I feel like they Some day four episodes a year. We're gonna have a challenging challenging summer schedule this year, but uh we really don't want to break the streak if possible. Fifty two episodes a year every year. ATP. It's too much. But it is good. All right. I thank our sponsors. Factor, where you can go get some food and sentry where it's like a dev kit you can put in your app and do all sorts of great stuff with the analytics you collect from your app. And the third one, Notion, the all in one AI slash notes database for your teams. And Squarespace, where you can build your new website and register domains online. Thanks to them. And thank you, John, for everything., really I mean it. Fifty years. I'll see you.