The Challenge of Transitioning Users

. From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode six hundred and twenty four and it is the summer fun baby. S fun june twenty second, twenty twenty six. Today's show is brought to you by Fitbod Mercury Weather or Bys at the summer over here and Squarespace. My name is Mike Curley and I'moined by Jason now Hi, Jason H' Mike. And then we're going to talk about the weather. I'm actually gonna talk about the weather later on in today's episode of Boys Hot here in London, but we don't have any time for that V final time Justin wants to know Jason What should I tell people or how should I respond when they ask where Donongle Town is in the state of California? I went on a cruise this weekend and had a man staring at my shirt for a while before he approached me to ask where it was. He said he had lived in California all of his life and had never heard of the town Well, I mean, first off, you could just say It's a joke And that's probably the polite thing to do is, oh, it's a joke. It's about how Apple made a bunch of changes that required people to buy a bunch of new cables and adapters and stuff U what I instantly thought of when I saw this question was you should say it's right by the Apple store But it's got to be by the coast though, right support town Yeah Yeah, I know and it's got a beach US beach Tsea So it it's by it's in the it's by the bay. Thunderbolt dooc So I would imagine that it's probably in And it's a little like, you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was set in Sunnydale, which is not a real town. And even though it sounds like Sunnyvale, it was very clearly like Santa Barbara is what it actually was. U so Dongle Town is Um, Somewhere in Southern California. it's like I don't know. It's some it's a beach town in southern California that somewhere down like I don't know where U, you know, kind of south of L.A. before you get to San Diego. Okay, very nice So that's somewhere. There you go. So now next time Justin someone else sayays it's down there Its's Soun California and just sort of like like north part of Orange County, maybe or just like is it south of Long Beach? I don't know. you know, because the truth is it disappears into the fog and only reappears every few years likeo R the toown of state mind It is, and it's by the Apple store. again, there's a ye,'s an Apple store If you'd like to send in a question to help us open a future episode of the show, please go to upgradefeedback. com just like Justin did. We have some follow up, Jason How Jamie wants to know, how was Julio's graduation? Is this is this daughter Jamie or a different Jamie? Unknown Unknown, unknown We had a great time. Say you had a good time with Jamie. That might be ye, I had a great time with Jamie. Hi, Jamie And Jamie loves it when we mention her on upgrade. Hi Jamie, it's our video. Hi Jamie Yeahah, we did well, we obviously did upgrade last week on the wrong day, which was weird, but we have made and I was in the wrong place. I was in our our Airbnb and Eugene It was an incredibly hot day. They had to callall off or mo you basically cancel and move some of the graduations that were gonna to be held outside to later in the day inside because it was like one hundred degrees Um just extraordinarily hot. Fortunately U And unlike Jamie's graduation The all campus graduation was at the stadium at nine AM So we it only lasted an hour and it wasn't hot then, it was still early in the morning. and the way it generally works and on the West cooast especially is cools off overnight. so it was't hot in the morning And then And then the afternoon graduation was in the basketball arena So Yeah, we had a great time. veryery proud of our our second child graduating. Ibie. The most to me, honestly, the most emotional moment is one of the graduation speakers was listing things that some of their parents may have done for them and one of them was pay for their tuition. And I had that moment where I realized, o, Past tense. We did it We paid, we put our kids through college. Y And now we're done with that. We did it. twentywenty five years ago, we made an estimate of what would be required for our children as they were being born, becausecauseuse we started with Jamie and then we added an account for Julian when he was born Um to go to college and I am happy to say that we nailed it U withith Julian, we really nailed it. like I think there's only a couple thousand dollars left in his account. Oh, I see what you mean. like you got it spot on the money. I thought you were just saying like you've paid for it now, it's all done No, we managed to do that. So that's, you know, we were putting money away for twenty five years to do that. But now it's over. Like the whole process is over. We did successfully pay for our kids college. And having some family members who have been crushed by student debt over the years, I am very happy to have been able to do that for my kids so that they don't have to worry about their student debt when they're trying to first make their way in the world as adults. So yeah, it was great. Great time Nice drive Um You know, the drive from Northern California to Oregon is beautiful. There's, you know, you have to go past Mount Sasta. I went past Mount Chasta this time and was like thinking of the California Bear trophy and thinking soon Soon It will be MacroS Sasta, but not yet. Jason sent me a picture of it. I did. it really is remarkable because it's so tall and out on its own that like you're just driving nowhere near it and suddenly on the horizon, you see this giant snow kepped volcano and you're like, oh There it is And then for the next four hours it is it is with you until it fades into the distance again On a completely different note. Yep. I don't want to do lawyer up today, so this is in follow up Essentially, Brazil has now taken on the Europe model for alternate app marketplaces with varying pricing structures for third party payments and the Core Technology Commission and all that stuff Did I scan like I could kind of scan through it and look through Apple's documentation? It seems basically akin to what has now proposal in Europe for a little bit. so Just another another one Just another one Just another one on the pile Troughom aroundoundu time. Yeahha. I have a quick round up today of various reports from the sheriff Mark Garman over the last week. a few little bit stuff, little details So the airPods with cameras are now set to debut in late twenty twenty seven Yeah. he didn't describe why Yeah What he said was they were initially thinking it might have been as early as the end of this year and now he said that they're not. Yeah. And he didn't really say why U But u for some reason. And I honestly wonder if they feel like that tech could get better or they're doing okay or quite honestly, given his reports about what they're working on And the fact that they got a bunch of stuff that they want to ship that they've not been able to deliver because Siri hasn't been good enough. and now presumably it looks like it is good enough as of this fall that they may have just said, this is too soon. Let's push it off. We have too much already. But for whatever reason, uh, you know, because German didn't give one they seem to have pushed this product off. The best that he gave was the deadline slipped in part because of Apple's prolonged struggles with artificial intelligence software. But that doesn't say why it would have every twenty six to twenty seven. Yeah. But it may be that the pipeline is so, I mean, like there is an argument to be made that even you know companany like Apple Too many products at once is too much. It's overload. And it's not just overload on the mind of the public. which is important because you're trying to market this stuff, but it's overload on your factories and your marketing team and your advertising like you can't ship eight new products at once, right? Like it's very hard So this may be a product that for whatever reason, they're like, we can wait on this one. This is not the world is not crying out for the the airPods with with cameras in them Um However I've been thinking about this, I think you have too U, and German confirmed I think you know, this has been the speculation for a while that, but like They're not for taking pictures video or anything. They're sensors clearly are about U s basasically visual intelligence and I have been using visual intelligence or or whatever you want to call it, The camera feature of the the Si feature of the camera. whatever and the betas for the last week I've already used it far more than I ever bothered to use visual intelligence and I feel like the results are better and it's not just the results are better. I feel like there's an automatic aspect of it that I really like. Visual intelligence seems so weird. like you sort of took a picture and then it was like What would you like to do with this picture? And I was like, I don't know. You tell me and now it seems like it just sort of I pointed, you know, I basically held up my phone to a tag on a shirt I bought and held down camera control and it popped it up and it said, well, here's the deal with that with that tag. It's made of, you know, whatever. it's made of rayon and it and you shouldn't put bleach on it And don't iron it. And I'm like, great, that's all I needed to know. And I'm like, okay I see where U seeing what's around you and using it as a feed for for AI stuff is a is a viable thing if you can make it work right. Yeah, the way that they've implemented it in twenty seven is the like the camera button is replaced with the Siri icon. And so as you say, if you just press The camera button it will just starts It will just take a guess at what you want to know, but it also has the buttons that it used to have, like the little question bubble thing. so you can ask a specific question if you want to, but otherwise it's going to take best guess that it can. And you know, I would say as well like the quality of the responses that I'm getting make me see more about why this product might exist Like my mind is not being blown by what Apple is telling me. L sometimes it's just It's not at all understanding what I want from it or it's just kind of, I've had it hallucinate with me today a little bit. I have some quotes on a monitor on my desk And there's a quote from Johnny Ive, and it attributed it to Steve Jobs and I asked where it got that information and it says the post it note says it doesn't And I said, no, it doesn't. It's like, oh yeah, no sorry it' Steve Dropss's quote. I'm like, oh, you're just, you're just going with this. you're just like making it up. But the fact that it does those kinds of things and also does the things I like is like, well, yes, then it is doing what I expect of these systems that like they can give you some information, but also they're not going to give you the right information. So now I kind of can see like, all right their system for kind of looking through imagery and king things out and trying to tell you what they are. It feels kind of state of the art ish where before We saw twenty seven. My feeling was like, what is the point of doing this? I don't believe you can do it and I'm not as well versed in the state of the art in order to say that, but I will say that it certainly doesn't feel like it's dumb and behind and pointless. And that's like step one, regardless of whether it's at the cutting edge or even just in the average. like in this in this generation, getting too acceptable on average is sort of, I feel like the goal in some ways. And I know that everybody's like, o, Apple should aspire to be better. It' like, yes, of course, but you got to stand up. after you've taken a fall before you can start moving forward. And this is this is a little bit of that, I think The iPhone Air two is coming in the spring of twenty twenty seven. It looks like they may add an ultra wide camera and improve battery life So the battery life thing and German even mentioned this in one of his pieces and I think it's really interesting where he's like What I'm hearing is that they're going to improve the battery life, but it's really unclear how Um, which I thought which is he's putting out there what been thinking, which is like, okay, well canan't really make the battery B bigigger So how do they improve battery life? And maybe they're just hanging it all on the next chip? and the next You know, the next chip set? I think the combination of IOS twenty seven and the next chip set They might just be able to get more battery out of the same battery. R Well, then that's not, I mean, in that case, it's a little bit disingenuous to sell this as they've improved battery life because they're really just saying The next generation will, of course, improve battery life. Yeah, but it's marketing, right? They' just say like it has a longer battery. That's kind of all anyone will care about Except this isn't marketing. this is people talking to Mark German I think that's effectively what it is is that the watchword is whoever's talking to Mark German about this is trying to say, these are the selling points for thing. And we're going to sell it as we added a camera and we improve battery life, evenven though the improved battery life is say, well, what do you mean you improve battery life? It's like,,, we don't have answer for that. The answer is because our chips are better at it which is great. It's a real answer. It's not a fake answer, but it's also not We solve this by building a better battery necessarily. But it's not the two biggest criticisms. The iPhone Air two Now has whatever. It doesn't matter what the iPhone air wanton because the iPhone air original might also get a bit better battery because of IOS twenty seven. It might But they just won't selling that one anymore. They just won't be talking about that. And also you would hope that the processor will help prorocessor being more efficient is undoubtedly part of it. Yeah for sure and Mark also has a really long write up in his newsletter Poweron about all the trials and tribulations of the industrial design team over the last few years I know you probably want to say some stuff about this column. I do We'll hold that for one second. Okay the thing that I The thing that is may me the most detailly and I've seen reporting in a few places so I just want to know it here for completenessness sake This is Mark Goerman. Turnus knows a major design shake upp is needed and is getting ready to put his firm imprint on the team, I'm told That's one reason he stepped up to oversee the design team last year, a move that ultimately signalled his ascension to the top job. already spent a considerable amount of time with the Industrial Design Group, a contrast to Cook's historically limited presence So first off, that statement right there. let's let let's look at that a little bit It feels very much to me like somethinghing that's being told to Mark German by people in the industrial design group because they feel like John Turnis is giving them a little love and attention. Yeah. They feel like they didn't that they that they always deserved and didn't get from Tim C they were not not be given so And they just assumed he's not a design guy, et. So the way the way it's framed is I would say the way so much of of Mark German's coverage of this issue is framed which is why we always say here at the uppgrade program, consider the source, consonsider the source It is obvious that many of Mark Germman's greatest sources at Apple over the years are designers. In fact, I would go so far as to say, it is obvious to me that the design group is one of the, if not, the biggest source of leaks at Apple because I can also point to the Tp Mickel book and even Ykari Kaine's book as being so focused on design aspect of the company. And so taking the point of view of the, you know, that the heart of Apple The heart of Apple is design, say, designers Um, that it's very clear to me that the designers, not all of them, I I look. I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying like A lot of them one of the great sources for people reporting about Apple is people talking in the design. It's also the group that probably has the majority of stuff to leak Because they see everything. They see everything. Yeah, physical and exactly digital Exactly. So Consider the source here This is this thing about John Turnus and him being put in charge, like Did they feel like really excited that the guy who was going to be the CEO was first going to be given oversight over the design team. That was a shot in the arm for them. This is What this looks to me like is that they're like, okay, we have a little morale problem in the design group And John Turnis is going to kind of try to turn it around. And what they're saying here is they turn it around. Now, the framing of Mark Germman's column is Oh, thank goodness, John Turnis is going to save Apple because he's finally listening to the designers. But I'll say again John Turnis is going to turn around Apple because he's finally listening to the most important group at Apple, the designers, say the designers Because the designers are the ones who are the sources here. This is just like you cannot look at Mark German's coverage over the last year of Apple Stuff and not think that his sources are designers in the industrial design group and the software design group. If it's not Allan Dye, it's people who know Alan De. And part of it is I'm not saying these sources are lying to Mark German. it's not true, but they have a perspective. and I would say that because this is the information Mark German's getting, his analysis of these situations tends to follow perspective and what bothers me about I'm getting I know I'm getting a little l out here, but like what bothers me about it is It's so self important Of course it is because the people who work in that group think that they're the most important, because so many people think that they're important cogs at Apple and they don't get the love that they should and all of that. I get it. But like this narrative that Apple lost its way because like German's newsletter says something about how like Oh, the laptops look pretty much like they've done for fifteen years and that's a sign of Apple's failure. It's like, have you seen all the other laptops that are out there? L Everybody just does Apple's laptops too. I'm not sure that's a sign of failure. Maybe it's a sign that you're bored and you wish that there was something more exciting and dramatic to write about, but it's not necessarily a sign of failure at all. And in fact, there have also been a lot of design failures. and I personally believe that what happened is I believe an alternative narrative about what happened, which is that Johnny I've stayed long before his sell by date because he was bored because of optics and they put him in charge of stuff he should never have been in charge of. And that Allan Dye is a great example of somebody who comes from a high fashion kind of sensibility who's maybe disconnected from the concept of Apple as making functional projects for products for regular people But if I was in the design group I would look back at the era of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive and say, yeah, we ruled then why are we not You know, why are we not the rulers of Apple now because this bean counter Tim Cook came in and he made it all about operations It's a different company in a different world. This doesn't mean that design isn't important. indndustrial design and software design. they're incredibly important I would say that a lot of these leaks say to me not, o Apple has a problem because they're not listening to designers. They say to me, Oh, the design group is a problem at A that they're malcontents who think too much of themselves and don't think as much about the work of the rest of the company. and they're really mad that they're no longer completely centered in the company's culture and structure. And they're fed up with it. and they're going and they're leaking things to Mark German and they're leaking things to Tripp Mickel at the New York Times or for his book. And like that is the narrative that they're pushing What's funny is, while Mark Gurerman is still writing the narrative in his newsletter that his Apple's kind of lost his way, there's now this little shiny bit in the middle, which is, a, but John Turnus will turn John Turnis, he gets it. He gets it on a level. by the way, John Turnnis is a hardware guy. He's not he's a noti. He's not the we of the designers. He's a noti. He's a hardware guy. but o, but he gets it. He's showing them love. Yeah, you could say, oh, this is a this is a real shift in strategy and a redemption of Apple from the dark Tim Cook era where the designers weren't listened to. I view it as being, huh, John Turnis is a pretty good manager because he's gotten these people who seem so angry and discontented to feel like they're being listened to and that they're part of the company again That's smart management. I'm not sure that this is anything more than managing those people to feel better about their role at Apple, which is an effective bit of management. I'm not sure this is an enormous shift in the strategy of how Apple operates as much as it is making the designers feel more a little more loved and appreciated. But anyway, so as with so many things, and I'm trying not to be mean here because I think Mark German has great sources and does incredible work as a reporter. but like analysis in that column about how like he's just taken what the designers say. and I'm sorry. I just have to roll my eyes at the analysis in it. I think it doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny. So congratulations, I guess to the designers for getting John Turnist to tell them nice things and maybe their leaks will be nicer in the future. who knows Isn't it good though Both potential scenarios. so let's take it on its face On the face of it, ers cares more about design. if we just take it at face value.ure. orr if we jump into your analysis of it, Thonnas is a good manager of people Aren't these both potentially good things I I think they're both true to an extent I just think it's People who are being managed are never going to say, Oh, thank goodness, he cares about us and he's giving us he's shining some light on us. They're going to say, ye We should be in it It's not it's not that They shouldn't. And I will admit when German reports that really limited his interaction with designers. He handed them off to Jeff Williams. He kept them at armms's length I I understand why he might have done that Um because he felt like it was not his area of expertise at all and he didn't speak their language. And he's like, let other I think he's a I think Tim Cook is a delegator And one of his strengths is he recognizes aspects of his job that he doesn't know anything about. and they said, I can't handle the designers because I don't know anything about them. So somebody else handle the designers And while that is admirable, having a CEO who understands it better better for the products. It is fundamentally better. So I would say to your point, yes and yes. I think yes, it is true. This is a sign maybe that Again, maybe functionally, if you ask people across the organization, they might tell you that design was never on the outs. It's just that they weren't getting the ego boost from attention from the CEO that they desired. But I think there are knock on effects. They They probably felt isolated because they were isolated to a certain degree. I think that's true honestly, the Allan Die situation where They all the executives seem shocked and appalled that Allan De left Apple. Whereas Everybody else seems to have thought that it was a relief that he was gone suggests to me not just like Are they fooling themselves? but that That's how disconnected they were. They didn't understand it. Design because they weren't even they'reiter like I don't want to know about it. Just let Allan is because I think that's how the Johny Iy relationship work with Tim Cook. Yes. Not with Steve Jobs, but with Tim Cook, I think he was like Johnny, you're the geni here. I don't know nothing about this. You just do it. And when Johnny left, he's like, getet the lieutenants to do it, but I still don't want anything to do with it because it's just little to do with it The operations guy is going to lead it And he was honestly for me. And honestly, if you're Tim Cook and and you got a reputation for being a logistics guy and an efficiency guy Do you want to step into it with design? All you can do is mess it up I think eually all you do is don't use that material. It's hard to make. Its like don't want to hear that from you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. so so yes, I think I understand those methods, but do I think it's better if you have a CEO who actually cares about design and understands it at a level becausecause in this case with Turnus, he's been working with that group on hardware, the industrial design group on hardware all along, right? He's He's not a designer. he is a hardware guy But he understands the relationship and the value that they provide. And I see no evidence that John Turnis thinks that the design group is stupid and they should feel bad and that we don't need them anymore because we'll just engineer our hardware the way we want it. I don't think he thinks that at all. I think he understands What makes Apple productroducts special? He's been there twenty five years. I keep saying this, but like in my brief interactions with John Turnis and looking at his background, I think he's one of us in a way. He gets why Apple productucts are great.. And that's part of it. So I think it is a net positive, but I also want to point out that it's also as somebody who managed people. I look at this and I'm like, this is somebody who got a little love and a little attention. And you know what? they should You should give your your employees love and attention.. you as a top level manager And I'm going to just, I'm just going to say it You have needy people And you're like, Geez, I wish they were not so needy But what you do is find a way to give them that. And like you might roll your eyes in the background and be like, you don't why do I have to do this for you? But the fact is different people take need attention in different ways part of understanding people, having empathy for them is understanding this is what they need. And at Apple, a company that's full of engineers and software developers The designers probably feel a little bit like outliers. Even though they are software designers and industrial designers, they're still designers, right? Their clocks probably tick a little different. than the engineers do And so I'm sure they need attention in a way that that some of the other rank and file at Apple don't need attention. And I just look it made me smile when I saw this line about Turnis because it made me feel like, oh, yeah, I see what he's doing there. He's making them feel valued because they didn't feel valued for a few years under Tim Cook and he wants them to feel valued. And It can bestest ones are when both are true When we want you to feel valued, we want you to be engaged And you are valuable and you need to be engaged. It's all good. I think it's a positive story. I just I also I mean, I had we had a mutual friend text us on Sunday morning and say, W If you ever wondered Mark German sources were fed entirely by this design group. This I mean, this is exhibit A. But again, I think it's a positive. I think a lot of the design story is moving in a positive direction now Yeah right. Now German Germman adds on a layer, which is like, oh, but they're in trouble because there's a brainrain and you know, who knows and they're going to keep losing people and all that. And like I think that they I think Grban reports a lot of gossip on the inside of that group that's like very worried about people departing and all of that. I just I'm a lot less interested in that narrative. But anyway, I think it's good for John Turnis that he's giving them enough of a a feeling of attention that they feel better about their place in Apple how John Turnnis values the indndustrial Design group. I really value our listeners. And so I would like to take a moment to apologize because I said this would be a quick room roundup In fact, I lied, I lied to you all. it was a qu round up. I mean, you knew I was doing this, right? I had a feeling. I I didn't know for sure, but I knew it was definitely a coin flip away. and I know how coin flips can be with you. so I almost I almost changed the rundown this morning. I was like, Jason's just gonna to talk about This Mark Grban report for a while. like that,'ll we'll just slide it in there. We're going to give people their money's worth in this episode That's for sure This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Fitbod. If you're looking to make changes to your fitness, getting started can feel tough. That's why I want to tell you about FitBot. It is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that is made for you. Because everybody has their own path that they take when it comes to personal fitness. 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Personalized training of this quality can be expensive, but FitBard is only fifteen dollars ninety nineents month or ninetiney five dollars ninety nine cents a year. but you can get twenty five percent off your membership by signing up today at fitbard dot me slash upgrade Go now and get your customized fitness plan FIT BOD. me slash upgrade. onnce again, that is fitbod. me slash upgrade for twenty five percent of your membership A thanks to Fitbod for their support of this show and rel Are you ready, Jason Snow for the prices to all go up N go up, number go up, Mike. Tim Cook is given a rare interview to Rolf Winkler at the Wall Street Journal to prepare for the fact that the prices of Apple products are going to increase. due to RAM and storage pricing and availability and the crisis surrounding it That has all been brought on by the advancement of AI infrastructure building, which is a thing Tim does not in any way address in this interview. None of it's like those memory guys they got us and they're passing on. what did it say? There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That's the bottom because Tim Cooks Yeah so The memory guys, the memory guys, those gosals, those Rss. Oh man Remember things? This h. We knew this was coming, right I mean, this is this has been obvious. They they warned about it in the quarterly U earnings call, they said This is, you know, this is not sustainable And I think it's fair Ben Thompson has made this point a bunch that Apple's holding in an inflationary period, Apple holding the line on prices for five years means that in some ways the The stuff that they're selling has never been cheaper. because the prices essentially have gone, the actual prices have gone down Um over the last five years because there's been inflation and Apple has not raised their prices Um which is true. So I think it might have been inevitable that at some point they were going to hike them And then the memory thing happens, it's like, well, they're obviously going to hike them now I think that for me, the question is What levers do they pull here? Because there are a bunch of different things they can do. They could just raise the price on every single skew at every single level possible and they may do that could do what they've been doing, which is drop base level SKUs,ro drop the base model and start selling the higher model. That's what they did do with the Mac minini. I think that's probably not enough, although I think it's possible to do it in some circumstances. And they've done it before with iPhones too, right? where like the price increases All they did was remove the base storage t.. the n ninety nine made a ten n ninety nine, but was really the ten ninety nine tier was now still the ten ninety nine ter. It's just the nine hundred ninety nine went away.. These are all tricks they can do, although they pulled some of those letervers before. And then my other question is How do they deal with it across product lines? Be For example The MacBook Neo price is incredibly relevant to what that product is And they have products above it in the line that are and also the margins on I know this is going to be A little bit contradictory, but like the margins on the MacBook NO are probably not enormous, but also the percentage wise changes that you could make are not enormous because it's not a very expensive product I guess my question is, do you raise the price in the MacBook N? Or do you keep the price of the MacBookino where it is, but raise the price of the MacBook air which makes the No actually seem even better. But also if you don't like the No, you can say well, you can still buy MacBook Air. It's just more than it used to be And then that allows them to raise, Iess that's part of what I'm thinking is Are we going to see them raise prices across the board or is it going to be one of those cases where Apple is more likely to raise prices on the higher expense items because the people who buy those tend to be a little less sensitive to price change and that's where you have your biggest margins. Or is it the reverse? I don't know. O what if you do it everything, but you scale the amount of increase based on the starting price, right? So like the iPhone Tain were eighteen, nineteen B night nineteen I don't remember anymore. but eighteen ye. the iPhone eighteen Yeah Yeah, we're at seventeen now Okay. The regular one goes up by fifty dollars Pro goes up by one hundred and fifty dollars. or a hundred or I mean, maybe maybe. these are the calls and we don't, you know, the problem is we don't see the other side of the spreadsheet. We don't actually know what the margin is on the on the Macroook No I would I would argue that it would be very hard raise the price of the MacBook Neo, but if everybody is raising the prices, then they can get away with it. But on the high end, I mean is this is the that rumored M six touchscreen OLE MacBook Pro is the best example of this, right? Because that product is totally going to cost a fortune And the reason is it doesn't it doesn't even have a price And it's basically the very, very top of the line. That is a product that they're going to be able to sell and say, look, the people who are already spending thousands of dollars on a computer you'll have to spend more And I know that's frustrating if you're like, yeah, but I wait many years to buy a computer so that I can save up the money to buy this expensive computer and then use it for many years. And now you're making it even more expensive But yeah, but That's kind of the rationale. it's a version of what I've been all saying all along since the iPhone ten came out, which is Apple keeps kind of exploring Are there prices above which nobody, you know, nobody will buy a product? And what they found is that they there's a large portion of Apple's installed base that is doesn't mind spending even more and even more and even more. Remember, people were mad. What was the original iPhone? Was it like six doars ninety nineents? And people were furious. it was six n n with a contract, which I get, but like It's been You know, you could buy an seventeen P Max with all the storage in it for like almost two thousand dollars Yeah It was it was six n ninetiney nine and then dropp to four hundred ninety nine after two months. Yeah that was a Yeah. So what I'm saying is just like the Prices have been going up for a long time now at the high end and they split the line into two. and what they found is like people still There are people for whom an expensive phone does not appeal and they will not buy it. And that's why it's great that they split their line in two. But what they're trying to do is say, yeah, but for the people who are willing to spend more money, we want the money. We don't want to just sell the iPhone seventeen. We want to sell the iPhone seventeen P Max with lots of storage for two thousand dollars because we make so much in profit on that phone and we don't want to lose that person and say, no, no, no Just buy the seven and ninety nine c phone, you'll be fine. We want them to spend a thousand dollars more on us. That is the challenge with them is like Do you do it Yeah, I just'm I wonder what they're going to do. I wonder how their approach is going to is going to work here And if it's going to be something that happens Now or if it's just going to happen when products get announced in the fall. I don't know It launched at four ninety nine for the four gigabyte, five dollars ninety nine for the eight gigabyte and then they droppp the prices later on. Right, But the point is that was it was a fairly low price by today's standard. it was at the time was ridiculous because nobody paid money for phons. They just got the contract. Exactly. Exactly. And now Apple and especially when the iPhone ten came out. like Apple has just been turning up the heat and just raising that price Not the price to get into an iPhone, the price of Buying the biggest and best and best configured iPhone just keeps going up. We'll get those details locked in our head when we get to the iPhone for designing California Some people will buy it and Apple wants this the bottom line is like If you're willing to spend one thousand five hundred dollars on a new phone, Apple wants you to spend one fif five hundred dollars on a new phone. They don't want you to save money and spend eight hundred do. They want you to spend all of your money. give give us all your money is what Apple says. So U So that might factor in, right? knowing who this audience is Um But I don't know. I mean, they do have a lot of a lot of ways to approach this and it's going to be I don't have a prediction. I just I think it's going to be fascinating because it will tell us some things about how they view their products and their markets for their products based on how they approach it It is important to note competition is not immune to this at all. They're doing the same. So U that was I think another thing that Ben Thompson said was that the place the iPhoneess in I'm in like the competitions' like, phones and that like everybody's going up in price. So like you're not dealing with Tomorrow's prices on the iPhone and yesterday's prices on Android phones. That's not how it works prediction is the prices will increase across the line inconsistently Like there will be different things they do for different products and different product lines and there will not be like oh they put it up by ten percent on everything. Like I just don't think I think it's going to be they are going to apply what they want to apply depending on how it works for them Everything's going to go up by fifty or one hundred or one hundred and fifty, right? They're not going to do percentages anyway. It's going to be like steps. So maybe the No goes up fifty and the air goes up one hundred and the goes up one hundred and fifty. I don't know I don't know. I think I think it I have no I want to read some quotes from this interview that you gave. Okay Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases. But the situation has become unsustainable. This is a hundred year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over forty years. That is really important. a point, right that the operations guy is like, no, this is nothing like this has ever happened before. That is I got a little bit more nervous reading that. Like I know that this thing is out there and I know it's a problem. L I know. like I'm very plugged into video gaming too in the same way that I care about tech. I care about gaming b in gaming right now, where it's the only time ever that consoles have increased in price at a time when they were supposed to have decreased in price by now. You know, the PlayStation five, the same PlayStation five model that came out years and years and years ago is now hundreds of dollars more expensive. Yeah never happened before. Switch two went up and like they all went up. Yeah I've never seen anything like it in any area over forty years is quite a quite a statement. Yeah. worry.. that's quite a statement. And this is from the CEO of the company that basically weathered all sorts of issues in COVID. Yeah They just they swallowed the chip shortages in COVID. Like they just took care of it And they've swallowed this so far as well, right? where like their competitors haven't. Yeah, because they were prepared, but not they were not prepared for the hundred year flood. by the way, given everything everybody, one hundred year flood doesn't mean what it used to mean It means like it probably will flood soon. So and that, you know Yeahah, you got to listen to the guy who's been doing this for a long time that this is a wild moment that even the most prepared Apple was like the the annt, not the grasshopper, right? But it didn't matter because the winter was so bad He says, We're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution Obviously more capacity is needed. but also says like in about the idea of building their own facilities, we can't do everything. We know what we're good at s like I don't really know what the balance sheet. solves Yeah, well, so this is it This he's laying it out here. I think I got to read on this, which is Apple doesn't make their own factories hands bags of money to companies who build factories to increase capacity and then provide that capacity to Apple. Right? This is this is how they've done it with in so many different areas. Apple says Hey If we sign a contract for you to provide us with this chip Ram process or whatever And we give you billions of dollars in cash Can you do it And and the response is something like, well, we're going to have to build a factory do this because we don't have the supply right now And App was like, Uhuh You build a factory And you give us everything you make in it for three years And we'll give you two billion dollars or whatever And that's how they do. So they don't they don't want to own the factories. They don't want to be in that business. They don't want to amortize the cost of the factory over time They are a big buyer who needs a lot of stuff. And they can throw that weight around to say And as a chip maker because TSMC is benefit from from this intntel is probably going to benefit from this U and other Apple partners have probably benefited from this. You're using Be I'm a Foxcon in China, right? Like you're using Apple to fund the development of your infrastructure. in exchange for supplying Apple with the product for some amount of time. And that like, I can't speak for those companies, but it strikes me that historically that's been a pretty good way to grow your company is to let Apple wrrite you a giant check Build your factories. you know, sell the proceeds, you know, sell the the the stuff coming out of the factory to Apple And then at the end of the day, As that becomes a legacy node Apple moves on to the next factory, but you've got you've now got a factory that you can reposition to sell to other providers or update or whatever Like that that's their that's their game. That's what they do. So using their balance sheet to help to be part of the solution. Maybe that is handing a lot of money to Intel or somebody else to build a factory and increase capacity and provide and the key part here is and provide Apple with that capacity My the detail that I found the most interesting from this article is this This is the Wallreet Journal. I'm just quoting from it because this is a back and forth between them and Cook China has national champion companies in memory and storage, but due to national security rules, American companies would likely require licenses to work with them When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said, I think everything needs to be on the table. I think we should look at all supply I find this very interesting that, you know, he sees it as there is a way to help but we're not allowed to do it he's speaking out on this and then I'm drawing a link here myself. This is my conspiracy time. I make this link too. I make this link too. Go ahead. The next day in a true social post, President Trump said that Apple, along with other companies, is going to work with Intel to produce chips in America I think There is a Something coming soon which is that the restrictions for American companies using Chinese RAM is going to be lifted temporarily that in exchange, these companies need to invest in intntel because it is very weird to me that the next day Trump will just say this about Iel just says it This is a this is the would be the obvious quid pro quo. Yeah. likeike you're Tim Cook and you'reking to Donald Trump and you say, look This memory story is just killing us China has memory But we're not allowed to do it. Can you? Can you do it? And then Trump says How would that work and what's in it for me?. And cooks like We'll invest more in Intel, you know, you like or Trump might even say something like Yeah, I don't I don't want you to invest in Chinese. Like, No, no, no, it's a temporary thing for the shortage Meanwhile, we'll make an investment in American manufacturing for the long term, but in the short term, we need relief And that has been in this administration, that seems to be a winning strategy for negotiating with the White House is to say, let us do this temporarily. And then in a future time, we will have it in the US, but right now we can't do it in the US and we're dying here and we're an American company. Please help us by letting us import these things from China. But we won't do it forever. We would just do it for during this crisis and we've got a solution in the future. That's like a I feel like they've done that this administration has done that so many times now that this seems retty obvious to me. That's the that's the potential quid pro quo here. I don't I don't know enough about Chinese RAM manufacturing to understand if how significant a help this would be. I don't either. And then my other thought was that Trump would say something like, well, okay Um You can use that, but not in stuff you ship to the US. And that might be Apple might be fine with that of saying like, yeah, we're going to put the Chinese ram chips in the ones that are bound for Europe and rest of world In America, the USA, we're going to use the good ones that aren't from China that we trust better And I mean, I'm not seeking a lot an argument analyzing the logic of that statement. I'm just saying I could see that being a statement Yeah, it' I don't know I mean the fear is that anything coming from China could have stuff in it that is, you know, doing nefarious things, I think, is the fear. And then the secondary fear is you're benefiting China, which, you know the US has this very weird relationship with where sometimes they're very friendly and other times they're entirely adversarial. and you know, I'm not sure it's coherent, but that's how it is. So I could definitely see Tim Cook saying You know, here's a lever you could pull that will save us And here's what we'll do in return and that there's a transaction to be made there. because this White House seems to be nothing, if not transactional.. This is not a great time to be introducing the most expensive iPhone ever, is it? Like no, it's going to be not be great Um Yeah. yeah, it's it's That was always going to be a fairly low volume product anyway and it's was always going to be very expensive. and I could make the argument that People who are okay buying a two thousand dollars iPhone will be okay buying a twenty thousand two hundred dollars iPhone twenty three hundred Okay. I can make that. But it's not great, right? It's not great because everything else is drifting upward and this might have to go up at a higher price and Um You know, that that it's it's bad timing. There's no doubt about it. It's really, really bad timing and I do wonder if they may Because there's bunch of products we're expecting right? including Macs, iPads, that kind of stuff. I wonder if it makes sense for them to release other products at higher prices before September take some of the blow out of the iPhone I don't know if it would realistically But I wonder if maybe the story might be a bit more understood if they start doing it now That's the The argument is if you raise the prices on the current iPhones then the new iPhones Yeah the new iPhones don't get painted with the brush stroke of the prices going up because they're actually the same prices as the raised prices over the summer. I don't know if Apple wants to do that. Apple historically has really hated raising prices. That's why they do stuff like drop the low end SKUs instead is that they hate just saying all prices are going up in the U.S. they do it. they reprice in other countries, but they hate doing it in the U.S Um in their home territory, they like to keep it pretty solid. But that would be. I mean, I guess I'm sure they had that argument of like what what is the what is the cost of repricing everything now versus just repricing in the fall when we introduce new models Um I can see both sides of it. It adds complexity now. Does it really Does it really solve anything Yeah Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. you could I can see the argument on both sides and I don't have enough data to say so, but like Those are your choices, right? is do you benefit by just repricing everything now with the current models. So when the new models come out, the pricing is not part of is not as much part of the narrative or does it really not matter? because the pricing is still going to be part of the narrative because the price of the price peopleeople are still going to point back to what the old one sold for a year ago. even if it's sold for more in the summer, The iPhone seventeen Pro going up in the summer is not going to change that many stories about what the iPhone eighteen Pro cost versus what the ione iPhone seventeen Pro cost at introduction, right? those that narrative is there if people want it and So I don't know. I don't know. It's a tough one. This is Apple in a space we haven't seen them before. That's why I keep saying, I don't know if I can predict what will happen, but whatever happens will be very interesting because it will tell us some things about the decisions they made I was already expecting that September was going to be full of interesting conversation, right? that like just from John Turnus to a folding iPhone to everything else going on. Now this like All I know is that the rest of the year is going to be full of interesting things to talk about I don't know if I'm going to like talking about all of them But they will be interesting, nonetheless. This episode is brought to you by Mercury Weather Mercury Weather is a thoughtfully designed weather app that shows all of the essential weather details you need at a glance. It has a gorgeous, colorful interface that dynamically adapts to the conditions of a warm orange palette on a sunny day, icy tones on a cold day, or a deep blue on a rainy night Mercury uses a glanceable chart layout to present the hourly and daily forecast in a way that feels intuitive right away There's a really cool feature for frequent travelers. This is Mercury's trip forecast feature that automatically shows the weather at your destination right in your daily forecast timeline. So youll always see the weather for where you're going to be, not just where you are Jason, for me right now. Mercury is very orange, very orange. becausecause right now in London, it is thirty six it's going to be thirty six degrees Fahren Celsius, sorry, for the next few days. That is ninety six degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. So it's going to be really it's going to be rough over the next few days. Luckily I have Mercury with me to show me the highs and lows. It's going to show me the charts up and down It's going to show me the parts of my day where I'll have a bit of respite because you know the lines are going to show me. Oh now it's good to go outside. Yeah go outside I two AM my UV index numbers. I can get everything I'm going to need to prepare for a rough couple of days. And one of the things I love is their trip feature whichich is how I discovered Mercury and it's so great. So I have u the trip feature set. So like when I went to Eugene For the graduation, we were gone Friday to Tuesday. At WWC, I would look on my iPhone at the Mercury Weather widget. And it would show like seventy five seventy three and it's like the Mill Valley temperatures, or it might have actually been because I was in Cupertino, the Cupertino forecast seventy five, seventy eight. And then it got to Friday and it was like ninety five, ninety eight, one hundred, ninety eight. And then I could then see the rest of the week after I got home and it was like sixty eight, seventy and And I was like, wow, okay. And it was great because I knew I knew it was going to be Coolish when I left here, but very hot in Oregon. And then when I got back it was going to be cool again. And I love that. I love knowing like I'm not interested in a forecast of where I'm not going be I'm interested in the forecast of where I will be. And Mercury does that and the widget is awesome. So ye I love it. Yeah, it's really great. I love it a lot too. I also met the developers at WWC. Yes really lovely to speak to them and yes they're just they love their app so much and it really comes through it in the app itself, but also in talking to them about it as well. So that was really wonderful When the weather gets serious, Mercury offers storm and hurricane tracking. 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That is mercurywather. app slash upgrade. tryry it out, get all the standard features for free. thanks to Mercury Weeather for their support of this show and all of relay. some breaking news for you, Jason., Zoe and a justc just let us know that beta two is out now. Okay. So we have that to look forward to. But that's not what we're talking about. Jason, it is the summer of fun. Summer of fun During the summer of fun, we do fun things Also during June, twenty twenty six, we do kickstarter related things. Indeed. So what if We take those two beautiful flavourors and we just them together. So today together. We have a summer of fun and designed in California collaboration Yeah, We're going to be joined in a moment by John Syracusea to talk about This is actually going to be the first in a series that we're going to do. about the operating system crisis that Apple found itself in that led to OS ten Yeah, this is actually Yeah, the first episode of a future desesign in California series because we the one we've been releasing in the upgrade feed as you probably have heard Dar up great listeners about the rise of the Apple two. This is later. this is about what happened when Apple needed realized it needed to do a new OS and it tried a bunch of things and failed And it's the crisis that ultimately led to OS ten So Um I wanted John to be involved with talking about it because he is I think you in the episode refer to him as a subject area expert. Absolutely. on S ten And like me, a user of the classic MacOS So this episode, we found ourselves talking more about sort of the dire strait that Mac users were in that led to the fact that they had to make a new operating system because things were just So bad Like I mean, the stories, we laugh about it as you'll hear about like all the ways that the Mac was unstable and why they had to do something new So Um It's a different kind of episode for us. And we wanted to show and we thought this would since we're releasing those other episodes on Thursdays, we thought we would just use this as a summer of fun. get it in for the for the Kickstarter campaign and then as another teaser plus, John's really great at it. we do hope that some of our series, we will be bringing in sort of subject matter experts to chat with us about it. And as you will hear, one of the great things about that is I've still got my script that I'm reading, but there's little marks in it where it's like John is going to talk now. Andnt talkks you. And he did, and he had great stuff to say. So and It's a thing that we're going to do. And so we wanted to give you An idea Yeah what it would sound like. Also something that's not happening in the nineteen seventies. Yeah. we thought because obviously we we've really front loaded on that from the Apple to fifteen and straight into the one to two Which by the way, the final episode of our Apple two series will be out on Thursday. so you can look. And we promise that's it for this feed You're not going to design in California in this f Kickstarters over. the podcast is happening. I want to say no more ever. That's probably not a fair thing to say because I would not be surprised to see future summer of fun designed in California like things crossovers may It's possible. But I don't want to say those are like why are you releasing this this thing in the other feed? We know And we have to do it because we are doing a kickstarter campaign, But it will be over next week And we would love your support at design. Fm if you haven't yet. But and this will be another preview of what we're planning to do when we launch that podcast, which is going to happen because we U our we we made our goal But we would like to continue to grow And thank you to the two thousand people who have supported us already But we would love more support if possible U and we did a bunch of we made a bunch of announcements. the poster The the the show the art, that A four show art that we promised Um At that tier level, we're going to everybody gets two different ones now. We just we just doubled what's in that one. So if you're thinking about that tier Now you've got another reason to think about it because there's a there's going to be you get two different pieces of art Only one of which will probably be signed by both of us because There's only so many things we can sign. Yeah. And we're going to do more theme song variations by Chris Breen. We're going to get we're going to commission more art. We've got Sam, who worked on the Aomic Bonde graphic novel with Anthony Johnson, he drew it He's doing art for us for this project We have some great original art by Katie Shuttleworth that is an incredibly adorable thing that we're working on. working. I am waiting on a quote. Feasibility quote. Yeah. and then we can share in And then but it's amazing. I can show you our enamel pin, which is like It is so good gang. I really We love it Fingers crossed becausecauseuse also like the company that I got quotes with for pins before, I have now quintoupled the amount of pins that I originally asked for In my initial quote, right. that helps. So I think now they're like, they're just like, let's just Let's just check we can do all of this. and so we'll be back that's fairly. That's fair. But we do we're doing enough volume on on the art prints that we can just double the Yeah the prince and give people the art that's on the Kickstarter project and some original art for the show, both, which is awesome. So yeah, so it's all still rolling. Wed love your support. And it was so fun talking to John and this is just the beginning because There are there's more episodes in that series to come as well A lot of Mac users don't remember a time before Mac OS ten But before OS ten arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic MacOS, which was with us from the Macs launch in nineteen eighty four through the funeral steve jobs held for MacOS nine in two thousand two. The original MacOS evolved a lot across those eighteen years, and perhaps its single most important update, systemystem seven Arived thirty five years ago in May of nineteen ninety one It seems like a footnote now, but so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in systemystem seven Take it from someone who was there. I wanted systemystem seven so badly, I downloaded a load of floppy disk images across my college computer network So I could install it. And I wasn't disappointed by what I got. System seven really did show the way to the future of the Mac This was Jason Snell, writing in May of this year for Mac World about systemystem seven and its demise. Hello and welcome back to Designed in California. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by the aforementioned and quoted Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Hi Mike. goodood to be here. Well. Yeahes, systemstem seven. This is not Our systemystem seven episode, but it's sort of like what came after why Apple struggled in this era? to make OS updates. And since we are going to be talking actually about the origins of OS ten, Mac OS ten, which had led to Apple's entire OS strategy for the twenty first century, who better to have our first ever guested? On desesign in California, please welcome the man who wrote all those reviews of OS ten in the early days. It is John Syracusea. Hi, John. Hi guys. I am excited to be here to talk about one of the most terrible but also exciting times in Apple' history. Would you consider your a domain expert in OS ten, John Yes. Yeah. abbsolutely is. I just wanted to I believe it. I just wanted to know if you believed it as well. Yeah. Yeah. This is fun because we've recorded a bunch of episodes about things that happened in the nineteen seventies when You know, I still wore short pants and went to elementary school and things like that. And now We're going to talk about an era that We lived in you and I John and went through. and yes, it was traumatic But You know, it is good say. It was super formative So Let's get started talking about the origins of OS ten and How that happened because it is a wild story. If you go back and you think about nineteen eighty four and the original Mac, that is a legendary creation myth almost about the Mac They were inspired by all sorts of different attempts to completely redefine how computers looked and work in the earliest days. The original MAac team ended up shipping a product that fulfilled those dreams, they made their dent in the universe. they changed how people viewed what a computer could be. It was really a design and technical achievement for the ages. It's a Hall of Famameer. putut it in the Hall of Fame But The thing is Innovation in the computer world kept going forward after the Mac came out. By the mid nineties Just as Microsoft finally went in on All Mac inspired interface, which they called Windows ninety five. Longt timee Windows users were actually really mad. They're like, it's just like a Mac. What are you doing? In this era, the Mac operating system found itself increasingly out of date on the technical side because they had built this amazing thing, but they'd built it in the early eighties. Remember they shipped it in january eighty four. They were building it in the early eighties It was Aazing, but also kind of bodge together And Apple looked around and realized Microsoft was shipping a Mac style interface, The Mac suddenly seemed to have an expiration date on it. Apple needed to fix it place it and fast or else there would be no Apple or Mac left to fight on with Microsoft This is the story that we're telling here. It is the death And yes, spoiler alert, rebirth the map So let's start at the beginning In the late seventies and early eighties, Apple started planning its next generation computer. There were plenty of candidates for that title Each of which has their own unique story, which we will get to undoubtedly on this podcast. The one that ended up making the biggest splash was the MacIintosh, a groundbreaking computer that introduced the graphical user interface to the masses. There's a whole story to be told about the Mac And I'm sure John would like to tell it right But we talk about it on twenty Max for twenty twenty, I think We did a little bit. We did a little bit. Let'say target let me tell you target it was maybe one hour of twenty Macax for twenty twenty. desesigned in California, that's going to be forty hours. We're gonna to stretch that baby I think that's right. there's so much. We're all about the detail here. Like I said at the beginning, the original Mac operating system was amazing, but it was from the early eighties. It was designed for limited hardware As a result, you know, it wasn't designed to run more than one program at once. It could barely hold anything in memory. It didn't have a lot of memory to begin with. It had this tiny black and white screen. It was built to be the original Mac and then they iterated it over time. But internal features were groundbreaking and brilliant, but they were often hand built and hard coded and limited You could argue that some of the things that made the Max so amazing also meant that in the long run, it was going to be a bear to evolve it in the years after it ship But why? Was it that rigid? Like what about the system meant that it was going to be difficult to evolve? The way I like to think of original MacOS is that it's this incredibly built, hand built bespoke operating system where they were making in a way out of their software and they built this computer that they envisioned and they shipped it But I do get the sense a little bit that there was a what now kind moment thereafter where the fact that they made it was a miracle, but then you have to you have to drag it forward and it was based on a lot of assumptions of early eighties, late seventies, computer operating systems. And you know, part of the point was to get it out the door and ship it. don't know I don't know what John thinks about that, but I think that's one of the issues. It was just kind of an unfortunate timing time. something that I mean, I know today everyone feels like technology, boyys it's changing my leaps and bounds. thingsings are changing so fast. But back at the dawn of the personal computer age Things were changing so much faster in the specific realm of personal computers that year over year, it's like the entire world was wiped out and remade and. we are excited when new Macs come out and a little bit faster than before, but the pace of change in the early years of the PC was just ridiculous. a couple years in either direction and either the Mac wouldn't have been possible or they would have had a better foundation. And I guess it also probably has some ties to the origins of the Macintosh proroject, with Jeff Raskin being an affordable computer. Remember there was the Lisa, which was ten thousand dollars in nineteen eighties money, right And that was trying to do the same thing. And then Jobs took over the Macintosh project That was supposed to be less expensive. and it did end up being significantly less expensive than Eisa, but still it was pretty expensive. But the idea of it being slightly less expensive is in contrast to you know, like next computer or something wherere like we're just going whatever it costs is what it costs. That was not the story with the MacIosh. It was like, we want this to be a thing that people can actually buy. And in that time in nineteen, you know, the early to mid nineteen eighties If you wanted to do, something that looked and behavave like the Macintosh was on the ragged edge of what was even possible K of like the original iPhone. It's like canan we literally do this at all? And just incredibly smart people had to do incredibly clever things to just barely get this thing to work. And then a little more memory would have helped, but memory was expensive then, kind of like today. So they you know they couldn't even get more than one twenty eight in there and it was just like It was a miracle that it was possible, but They push it forward three or four more years and they could have made more forward looking decisions because the Lisa was more technologically advanced had more capabilities than the Mac, but it's like if you want a machine that's twenty five hundred bucks in nineteen eighty four that has a guUI that works like the MAac with only one hundred twenty kilogobytes of ramping because Steve Jobs is stubbornly sticking to that, even though we'll sneakily make it easily upgradable to five twelve You get the MAC. You know, here's your foundation. and you know, and the MAC was a victim of its own success eventually because it did eventually take off. And it's like, you remember all the decisions we had to make in nineteen eighty four? Guess what We're stuck with them real hard now because it's a big industry and people using it for desktop publishing and like That's what it is. It wasn't like someone made a mistake or it was like a, you know, even Steve Jobs' stubbornness, it was like, this is where we're at at this time. So that's why it's looked back on it's so miraculous because Like the iPhone people would think, you know, that's how is that even possible? Like when Bill Gates saw it, he didn't know other cursor work he's like, what do you even how? How? why? Well they were focusing also on bringing the state of the art forward with the gUy, you know And the things they did quick draw, all these stories that we will tell in great detail in the future But like They had their moments they picked their spots of where they wanted to bring the state of the art forward, but also to John's point, some of the fundamentals were kind of old world. Not that there weren't other computers that could do better things with memory and all of that, but like you have to make your decisions when you're shipping that product. And what made it revolutionary were the things that we all know, but they were building on a Again, kind of a hand built foundation and also a foundation that was from you know, nineteen eighty two decision making. And then by the early nineties, the MC did take some steps forward. They added color support, although I would argue it was like color in the sense of coloring in a coloring book where it was really black and white, but they're like, but there could be color on it a little bit. It was not an interface designed for color and so that color additions were at the edges in the basic UI. There was multitasking, kind of. It was also kind of hacked on. There was Switcher and then later there was multif findinder, which was just this idea where you were taking a single tasking system. letting it run multiple programs if you had enough memory, but it was not made for it. It was an add on. And the big moment was what Mike quoted earlier, The arrival of systemystem seven. I think that was the most monumental update in the history of the classic MacOS. It add a whole bunch of features that the Mac hadn't supported in the first seven years You know It had Nata multitasking, run a bunch of apps. It's fine. There was a process dock. You could see all the running apps. Pull the process doock off and make it a little floating paalltette showing you all your apps that were running at any given time. There was virtual memory. there was file sharing. The idea that without any extra software, you could say, I would like to put my hard drive on the network so someone else can look at the files. That was system seven. Quick timee was in system seven global support for color at a little a little more colorful interface was there. If you're a modern Mac user, like I said in the thing that Mike quoted at the beginning, I think if you saw system seven, you would feel much more at home than you would in systemstem six point zero point eight Yeah, S seven like gets forgotten for people who weren't adolescents when it came out. L so many things, things that happened to you when you're an adolesccent seem so much more important and big and time slows down then. and it just so happens I was an adolescent then by system seven just such a huge deal, because The Mac had become successful you know, almost despite itself. It had had advanced, peopleople were using it And the addition of color to System six and everything was not that great. And when systemystem seven arrived, it was an important point for me because I was so steeped in the original Macintosh story and had been using it since nineteen eighty four. And the original Mac had so many features that like embodied the spirit of the MC team. Like it was clever, it was whimsical. everythingvery it was clean and tasteful. There was very sort of artful solutions to like thorny technical and interface problems. You're like, wow, these people are so smart. They came up with such great ideas and it's so cleanly self contained. and years passed and it was like All right. As the world is moving on, hardware is advancing rapidly, so a lot of the decisions you made for the original Max are just no longer relevant because everything is getting so much faster year over year. And system seven was proof to the external world that hey, Apple still got it because what systemystem seven added was a boatload of new features that had the same character as the things we loveved from the original Mac And it was like, o they can still do it. likeike because you know, I know it's only like six years or whatever, but you're worried like, hey they did this original Mac and so far it's got a little bit better. But like As the original Mac team gone, Steve Jobs is can they still can they still do this stuff? But systemstem seven was like, yes, we can still do it. So forgive me for dwelling a little bit on system seven because it's like one of my favorite operating systems ever. And I also, by the way, I chipped in with my friend and my French teacher. So we split the cost three ways and bought a single copy of system seven between me, my friend and my French teacher. and we each took turns with the floppy disk French teacher got them and he installed himself on his computers and he gave me the floppies and I installed them and I gave it to my friend It was a big, big moment for the French teacher. big young moment. Mess you're lowing, you know, if he's out moment moment. Anyway. So like Here's some examples of showing that they still had it. Okay. Consider the way fonts and desk accessories were handled before systemystem seven. fonts and desk accessories existed in the original classic MacroWS desesk accessories were the things in the Apple menu, like calculator or control panel or whatever And then fonts, you know or fonts. There was an app called Font DA Mover. And by the way, it was font forward slash DA Mver. Forward slash in the name of an app, takeake that unix. D move Anyway move FontA Mover, which was a truck icon and it looked like transrmit with a two paned thing, and you would open font DA Mver and it would show in the left hand side, here's your system. You've got these fonts. and on the right hand side, it's like, oh, you want to install fonts? Show them in the right hand side and you had an arrow. putut the thing from the right to the left. or you want to take a font out? putut it from the left to the right Same thing with desk accessory.' was a separate app that you ran that I think was modifying resources inside system files, right? That's how you dealt with fonts and DAs System seven solution to this is like, look, we're desktop publishing. that's happening now. People want to use more fonts, using font DA movers is barbaric and DAs being these things that you have to shove into the system is weird. So system seven made a fonts folder in the system folder And inside the fonts folder were individual files that were the fonts. If you want to install a font, you drag it into the fonts folder. If you want to uninstall a font, you drag it out the fonts folder. If you double clicked a font in the finder, it would open a little window that showed you all the different sizes of fonts that are there. Same thing with desk accessories They didn't have any embodiment other than the appearance of a word in Font theA mover back in the day. Now there was an Apple menu items folder in the systems folder and anything you put in that folder appeared in the Apple menu, including all your desk accessories or applications or aliases, or other folders which would appear as submenus. literally the control panel. There was a folder in the system folder called control panels and every individual control panel was a little thing in that folder that you could double click All this stuff was like It works like the findinder. You've used used the original Mac since nineteen eighty four, you know how to drag files around You can change everything in your operating system by dragging stuff around. It was do it yourself, you can manage your computer kit for people who had become accustomed to the Mac Every part of it that used to be like sealed in there or like, oh, this is a thing where we you need to use some kind of weird editor to do was just a bunch of files And it was understandable and extremely human. like They wanted people to understand their system and be able to manage it with the tools they had used from simply using the Finder. And this was in contrast to Use a text editor to modify config. cis and auto ag. bat, which was a million miles from drag this font into or out of a folder. And it meant, I mean, you could look back at it now and say that's barbaric. You shouldn't have individual users dragging stuff around their system folders and then people would like accidentally delete something in the system folder and a hoser system, right? Like it was a different time, but compared to what came before it, compared to editing config. cis with a text editor It was miraculous and that type of thing, you would look at it like, oh, it's so obvious. I you know, we're so used to the way the Mac work now. but now system seven is like, hey, we have clelever human, tasteful, clean, uniform solutions to Thorny system interface problems and it was just a revelation. It was like it felt like the future. It's like I cannot believe operating systems can be like this. And it, you know, and it was like it compounded the original Mac because the original Mac was this one singular thing. We were like, can they do it again? And systemy seven was like the only thing I can compare it to was like when the dual G five came out, where itone wass like, Apple needs a new computer and they came out with that one. P people thought it was fake because it was so good System seven blew me away. loved it. When I say people today would feel more at home in systemy seven, I mean mostly that the previous OSs feel ancient and chararming in A but weird and old And systemy seven, although it is old is much closer to what we might think of what a modern Mac user would think of as a Mac because it added so much. It really was there. early nineties rethink of an OS that had kind of been around for ten years. Interestingly, systemystem seven with all its great ideas and everything coming six years after the original OS There's Pbably no other six year gap in the history of the Mac where you could have made an advance like that because the hardware had become so far in that six years from the original Mac That's why people would feel comfortable with. it's like o you know, multiple finders can be running. You can copy something and the finder or do something else You can run multiple mops. Why could you do that? Because the hardware was phenomenally better than the one twenty eight kilobyte monochrome nine inch original mat. Like it just advanced by leaps and bounds Unfortunately for Apple, it as we'll get into. You could have these cololor Mac twos with incredible processors and incredible amounts of memory and it was just and storage and the speed of storage and just everything having to do with it. But like, the underinning the basic underpinnings of the operating system had not changed. It was like now we have so much computers got way better. Yeah. Now now we have so much more room to play with and we can do all these things we always wanted to do, but fundamentally It is just, it's the same as that original Mac, but with a vastly bigger playing field and faster CPUs and everything. And there was a, you know, from System seven on There was a heyday of the Mac with you know, desktop publishing and It' selling expensive computers with lots of RM and fast CPUs and lots of features and lots of apps and just It was this huge renaaissance, but it was all built on this crumbling foundation that it was set in nineteen eighty four This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. 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Then when you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade and you will save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or aomain. That is squarespace d. com slash upgrade and the offer code upgrade for ten percent for your first purchase and to show your support for the show O thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all very life System seven was still lacking a lot of features that were clearly going to be important, even then, clearly going to be important to the future of computing. There was this Rickety foundation In fact, the features that shippp with System seven were created buy a software group H's here's the story. They're called the Blue Mis, Wh which is a reference to the villains in the Yellow sububmarine. Can this movie. C? I can't explain this. So here's what happened. Apple engineers were figuring out what features they needed to build for the future of MacOS. and they wrote them down on index cards And the ones that were achievable that they thought like we could do this, we could do this pretty soon. They wrote on blue index cards They put their long term goals on pink and red index cards. The team in charge of implementing the near term features All the blue cards got the name Blue Mis and what they shipped was systemystem seven Another team focused on the most complicated long term issues. They were on the pink cards These were so far out that eventually Apple created a A joint venture with IBM called Taligent. to work on a thing that they called pink based on again the cards because this is like these are way out far future computer ideas and never shipped But there were a lot of OSs in the nineties and joint ventures in the nineties that never did anything. And this is just I will cover some of them in this podcast, undoubtedly. But so they basically broke things up into what what can we accomplish? which is good and they accomplished systemstem seven And then There were these cutting edge features that were going to take more time and they were not that was a dream deferred, which in the end became a real problem for Apple that they deferred that dream But they were right engaging that those were going to be hard to achieve. You gott to give them that. So here's a little bit of the problem with pink during that period of personal computing There were a lot of different concepts of how advanced operating systems might work. People knew how the current ones work but like there there was not a lot of consensus about the advance worldes. And I also feel like there was a little bit of like a credibility adults in the room hang overver that Apple and its peers had regarding companies like IBM, which is like Yeah, but in the big serious future Surely it will be beneficial for us to get together with the big serious companies like IBM and work on some kind of common standard Because at that point there have been, you know, there's so much war. whyy are we always fighting with our different standards and different applications? And like why don't we have these future ideas that can be globe spanning? And like, I mean, this is not like, you know, it's like coming up with the web versus doing, you know, hypercard anyway Like let's come up with standards for sharing C plus plus objects and operating system structures that can be a common API used across multiple companies and they had all these grand ideas and all of them involved everybody cooperating in a techno utopian future. A lot of those ideas were either bad ideas or were just never going to happen due to like human nature and competition because it's like That's okay, but like that's never going to happen. And so it's not as if like, oh the people weren't good programmers and didn't correctly do it. It was like is this is just not gonna to happen. Like your're interestast aren't aligned. What you're trying to do is a bad idea. CFus pllus is not the future. L it's definitely the type of project that you embark on When things are going well with your product and you're selling a lot of Macs to desktop publishers, and you're like, we should be thinking about the future. And so they had all these teams out there thinking real hard about the future And it's kind of a blessing that they didn't go anywhere because they were never going to go anywhere. They had a lot of smart people doing a lot of clever things, but in hindsight, it's so easy to look back on them and say ye that wasn't it, that wasn't the way. Actually in hindsight, the story I'm telling now about how Apple ended up in a quandry and how OS ten came out of it. The truth is Like OS eight added some nice stuff. They threw some stuff in there. There's a story about that that we'll get to in a little bit But I would argue like from this point forward That's kind of it for cllassic MacOS. They have to essentially s it Like all their other attempts to kind of bring it forward. They are adding little bits, but The fundamentals of it really can't change until OS ten comes on the scene. I've got a line here from Macky Uer Magazine in nineteen ninety six, where I worked I didn't write this, but this is what they said The Mac pays a price for Apple's evolutionary approach to OS development System seven is built from blocks piled up over the course of a decade and that has compromised the OS's stability and performance For the Mac to move forward, that OS needs to be rebuilt from scratch. This is describing Apple's next generation operating system project that they were working on in nineteen ninety six. I guess it's funny because this kind of sentiment is what people say a lot about Windows now Like now that like a lot of Windows problems is it's just they're just layering things on top of Windows. and eventually you'll find your way back into ' ninety five. Windows has its COS story straight now actually. But what you're talking about is the archaeology of like you're right. If you you keep digging into Windows, you're like, what it's like when you digg in like the Roman Rads in the UK and you're probably like what level of differents. It's like you just keep going're like Wow, how deep does this go? There's like seventeen roads underneath here. and windows is like that. But that is mostly a problem of like interface and management. att least their PS story is okay. But with the Mac during this time, like I said like system seven was the start of something great and in the nineties the Mac was exciting and it was getting lots of applications. But if you were a tech nerd, You were like, okay, but like I see what's going on in the rest of the industry. Eventually they're going to have to address this thing. And it was like watching a car drive at sixty miles an hour towards a cliff that's seven miles away. And as the years passed, you were like, so cliffs coming up. they are we going to build a bridge? O like and you get closer and the years would pass and it wouldd be like, we're going the same speed and no bridge is there. And like, no, we have teams working thereid What's actually happening is they're just putting a faster engine in the car right supposed to dealing with what's down the line. We have seven teams working on bridges and then you'd hear from each team like one year, it's like, oh yeah, that team, they disbanded and went on vacation. so they're not going to make a bridge other team made a bridge, but they made it vertically sadly instead of horizontally. This team's building it from the other side. But we repainted the car. The car finally is no longer gray. It has color. What are you talking? Let's go through it because We've been talking vaguely about this Rickabie Foundation. Like what you're in the mid nineties, what do you want your computer operating system to have? And I know that people who are a little less technical or younger and didn't live through this period might be thinking like what could they even be talking about? What bizarre arcane abstract concepts could they be dealing with? Okay. well, here we go The MAac use something called cooperative multitasking. You're like, great, you can run more than one program at a time. We do that today. Well, another phrase for cooperative multitasking might be not actually multitasking More than one program could run at once, but any program at any time could take control of the entire computer and not give it back until it was ready, which means if you had one misbehaving program bad behaving program everything else, literally everything else on the system would stop. I have a great example of this in Classic MacOS Cick down an item in the menu bar. and kept the mouse button down Everything stopped on the whole computer Because the system is waiting for the menu process. It's like, I'm wa what menu is What's it going to be user And so everything else just stop This is a great place to highlight the word multitasking, because especially back in this era, What multitasking actually meant was not doing more than one thing at a time? It meant doing thing one, then think two, then thing three, then thing one, then thing two, then you're only ever doing one thing at a time but you're like now I'm doing the first thing, then the second then the third, then the fourth's really really fast. So it seemed like you were doing multiple things, but there was one processor core So there was only one thing you could never be doing. And so The job of the operating system was like, given that I have one CPU How do I allow programs to access my one CPU. and as Jason has said, cooperative multidasking is like,, they'll all just cooperate. And everyone say, Ohh, I'm using a CPU now, but now I'm done with it. Now you can have it. another one go, Ohh me, oh, great. I'll use CPO and then I'll wait, I'm okay, now I'm done with it. But what if they never said they're done with it? Yeah hilariously, this doesn't sound cooperative at all. There's no cooperation going on. but It's like when you're using the menu and playing down the menu bar, it's like I can't give up the CPU until they've picked the menu because I need the CPU to draw the menu and the cursor go like I need like I can't I can't give it up I'm notolding it I'm not hording it jealously. I'm not a badly behaved program. It's like Literally if I give up the CPU, The menu item will stop highlighting when you bring the cursor out like I need to have the CPU to highlight the item that the cursor is over and to make it blink when you release the butt like I can't give it up. If I gave it up for a second and you can't say, well, why didt just give it up for like a millisecond so somebody else can use it? But if you give it up for a millisecond, and somebody else uses it and they're like, I'm running out Potoshopilter, I'll be done in aute Now your menu doesn't work anymore. So what happened was that you'd pull down the menu, the menu tracking routine would run And it would give up the CPU when it was done tracking the menu, and that's it I mean, a good example here what I was digging through because I've forgotten, you know just how bad this was, right? But then I was reminded. An example from one of the magazines of the time was you're downloading a file in a web browser and until the file downloads, you just have to sit there and Watch it Be that's all it's going to do is download the file. That was what it was like. So what do you do? The answer is preemptive multitasking, yay, which is each individual program can't take over everything and ruin system performance. So the idea is, and this is basically what we have now is that you can ask as a program to do a task, but there's like a scheduler Whereas it was more like a relay race with classic MacOS. Once you had the baton It was yours until you let it go. And the result was terrible performance. Sometimes you'd be using a program and then it would just cease to move. And you're like, why what is happening now? And the answer is something else is going on or you would perform a task and in a modern computer, you'd think, well, Ill switch. I'll look at the web while that task is running in the background. It's like, nope, you're not going to do that. You got to leave that task sitting there chunking away because it's got the baton right now. Yeah. Yeah. So preemptive multitasking, like that existed in the eighties when they made it, but and basically what that means is the operating system says You don't get to choose when you're on the CPU. I choose when you're on the CPU. And when I decide you're done, you're done and somebody else gets a chance. And to do that with eighties technology, especially in the earies eighties, you needed more RAM and more CPU because you were slicing it up. You were like, oy, a little for you, little for you, a little for you. And it would make things feel jumpy and bad. like you couldn't have done the original Macintosh and made it feel as smooth as it did with preemptive multitasking unless you had the resources of the Lisa, which way more RAM and a bigger CPU. And so it's like We can't, We can't have preemptive multitasking. But once you build on that foundation, once you build set of APIs, which is like, Use the CPU, give it up when you're done with it or when you want someone else to have a turn and everyone tries to cooperate and you try to be well behaved That's just the way it works, which is I have the CPU until I'm done with it or until I decide to give it up. And there was a culture in APIs of like, you should give it up pretty much any timee you're not using it even for a second. U it, give it up, use it give it up. that's what you should do. And if you're a well behaved app, you should do that. But That was baked into the programs. They There was not even a facility to say, I'm using the CPU and wait, the operating system's going to stop me. I'm in the middle of doing something. Why is the operating system going to take me off the CPU and let somebody else have the CPU? Things would break, thingsings would not work. They needed to be in that cooperative environment where like Jason said, the rel race is perfect. I've got the baton, I give up the baton They may be grabbing the baton andiv it up really fast, but the point is they're choosing when the programs are choosing when to do that. and the operating system has no say. Yeah, exactly right. And it had all of these weird knock on effects. And we could say like, well, why didn't they anticipate that they were going to need this and build it into the original Mac even though they couldn't use it then. And the answer is real art to ship, right? Like they had to ship. they they were not they were struggling to ship a Mac not spend a lot of time building a foundation for theoretically what it might become because they need to ship the product. But the result is that, yes, you're now on that shaky foundation. So another example of this. a major one is this concept of memory protection, which we take for granted today. Basically software behaving badly on a Mac running classic Mac OS could wreck all the other software running on the meac. It could spew bad stuff into memory, you know that the other programs thought had its stuff in, but now it wasn't there and it was broken Back of the day, if one program behaved badly, that was it for your Mac. And when it crashed, everything crashed all at once and you needed to reboot. And in this era I remember rebooting my Mac. I'm not kidding here. dozen or a dozen times a day due to a hard crash. Like literally, everything stopped moving And there was nothing you could do but turn it off and turn it back on. Including the cursor, by the way. Yeah, evenven the cursor. Oh yes. Oh yes. The whole thing Well that was the telltale moment, right? You're You're watching the little pointer move along the screen and then it stops and you're like, but who who whoa and it's gone Today we think of the idea of like force quitting an app. You can force quit an app and then like, oh, that app went bad. I'm going to force quit it and then I'm going to move on. Or maybe the system quits it A funny thing that I realized when I was researching that story that Mike quote it at the beginning about systemystem seven is that systemystem seven actually added the ForceQit an app feature However, You were instructed very sternly. The moment you force quit an app, immediately you should reboot. Oh, what's the point? It's like, ye, yeah, you quit. That's good. goodood for you. You might be able to save something, you might be able to do whatever, but like get out now. That's why that's why it was useful because you could save another apps if you're lucky. Yeah. right. But get out, but you've essentially set a time bomb at the moment that you've done that. L something bad's going to happen. So And this is this is the technical underpinning of that. like all personal computers in the era, there were like affordable personal things you could buy Memory was just a big green field that started address zero and ended at address whatever one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes, right? And every single thing running on the computer, saw and could access all of those addresses. You know what was in all those addresses? The operating system was in the address. Every other application was in the address. Any data that any application was using was in there And so it was like, okay, everyone's on one big green field. and the operating system would say, this is your area application number one. And if it had like a bad pointer reference and it's like, oh I'm scbling over here. What did it just scribble over? Did it just scribble over part of the operating system? Did it just scribble over part of your like word processing document in another program? Like Did it just scribble over the thing that controls how windows close Any part of memory was accessible to that's what unprotected memory is. So not only was it unprotected, but everyone was in the same address space. You got addresses ten to fifteen. The next one got addresses twenty to twenty five, right? Obviously the numbers are bigger than that. The operating system got address from here to here, right? and That's not a way to run a shoppings there's no way to run a railroad because they're using languages like C, where you do reference a pointer that's supposed to be an address to like in your ten to twenty five range or whatever, but it turns out that the value in there was seven hundred And now you're writing memory at address location seven hundred. What was address seven hundred? I don't know. Maybe nobody knows. Maybe something super duper important. And so that's why when you would force could, it would kill the app that was misbehaving, but at that point What's the state of memory now? Did that thing scribble all over the rest of the memory? You needed to get the hell out of there reboot because there's no fixing it. There's no like we don't know what addresses got overrun with this data. You you just need to reboot. Yeah, so I recall from those days that sometimes you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but I'm just gonna to do this thing. and let me tell you it led to hilarious consequences. What would usually happen is you'd be like, okay, I force quit that. And I know I need to reboot here soon, but I'm going do this other thing that I'm in the middle of. And then that app would crash. and you'd be like, oh no. And so you'd force quit that one and you'd be like, I could go over here and look at this and And there would be a whole chain of crashes that would lead to Well, I guess I'm rebooting after all. And then you do restart and it wouldn't restart because it was so busted and then you had to force it to reboot. And so okay, that's bad. Although there's one good I want to say there's one good thing about that One onene and only good good thing about that other than the performance benefits and the fact that the macet could ship and you know, blah bl, blah. If you're working on something like you're in a text editor and it crashes Yeah, you should reboot, right? But you're like, but I was in the middle of writing something that I didn't save. There were programs that would scan all of memory. for like a text string. You're like I know I wrote this three word phrase in AskI in this thing. And so it would just look through all memory to try to find like the text strings from the document you used to be working on. And you could rescue your document that you didn't save by having it scan the entire RAM of your computer to find whatever pieces of that document happened to be in RAM and I did that multiple times and I did save my butt Youd get little chunks and you'd have to kind of piece it back together, but it would be better than the alternative. And as you can imagine, this is a security nightmare It's a disaster. Everybody could see everything. I feel like Mike is looking at us like why did people use computers that were like this? And the answer is well, there was no alternative really. So this is all of these horror stories and these are these are computer ghost stories that we're telling here. This is why Apple had to be motivated to do something. So the next one I wanted to mention is multi threading, which is the idea prorograms could be broken up into separate tasks that operate independently of one another. For example, in the findinder in the early days, you couldn't say copy a couple files at once while also looking through a bunch of folders and stuff. It's like, no One at a time, please, one at a time. And this needed to change. alsoso because in this era, there was a realization that you might have more than one processor on your system And if you had multi threading, you could have a traffic dispatcher that could say, this thread could work over there, while this one could work over here. And the only way you could do that with multiple processors or what we now have, which is multiple cores is by not having everything run on a single thread. So programs were very single minded back then and the system And all of the system apps and everything else needed to have the ability to spawn processes in different threads and do more than one thing at a time, which we take for granted today. Yeah, to be clear, it's because the operating system expected to run on a single CPU and expected to do everything was going to happen on a single CPU. So if you had a second CPU, would be like, well, that's nice. what the how am supposed to do with that?ight? They would give extensions. they would be like, okay In Photoshop and Photoshop only. Photoshop plus some extension to the system combined are now aware that there's another CPU over there. And you know what you can do with that CPU when I run a Photoshop filter and only when I run a Photoshop filter, I'm going to use the second CPU plus the first one to be faster. But everything else was like, I don't even see that CPU. I have what are you expect me to do with that? I'm a single thad operating system and it's just, you know, it's useless You can listen to the Day Star Digital episode of twenty Max or twenty twenty where I talk about how this clone company with Apple's Help invented a multip processing plugin, but it was very much like just for Photoshop. But there was this anticipation. this is the thing,'s like how do you get faster computers? In the mid nineties, we knew one of the ways you got faster computers was by having more than one processor And again, without multi threading, it's useless. So they have to do multi threading They have to do virtual memory, which System seven introduced, which is good. Virtual memory is a concept that A computer can have a larger memory space than its actual RAM that it has. and that lets you swap some of the data that's stored in memory out to the hard drive, which is a lot slower, but you can sort of efficiently manage memory. It also allows apps to have their memory in a kind of a virtual space instead of it being physically exactly what's on the chip. This is good These are all modern ideas. The Mac needed a memory model with virtual memory as more than kind of a patch in The way the classic MacOS did virtual memory, and this gets confused because casual people saying virtual memory mean multiple things at the same time. But virtual memory is what Jason just said, which is meemory I said everyone is sharing the same big address space and your RAM goes from like zero to five, twelve K or however much memory you have When you have virtual memory, they say, okay Y Ram it goes from zero to whatever. That's how much Ram you have. everyvery bit it gets you know, whatever, right What we're going to say is What you're going to see as a program and what the operating system iss going to see is still going be one the classic math is there's still going to be one giant memory space, but that memory space is going to go from zero to four billion. Yeah. And you're like, well, I don't have four billion b. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's like, well, I know, you have the RAM that you have. but I'm saying instead of seeing just zero to that amount of memory, you're going to say zero to four billion And they're like, well, how is that supposed to work? It's like, There's a piece of hardware that you need in your Mac to do this, which is a mion reason number a million why you couldn't do this in the early days, you need a MMU, a memory management union, which was this thing in your CPU or next to your CPU, that would say, whatever a program tries to look up an address and it tries to look up address two million, There's no address two million in your RAM. You have like a megabyte of RAM, right It says, okay, I have a table that maps every single address from programs you arere using to a physical address in your RAM chips. And I keep that table updated and without the hardware, you can't do this because obviously it would be too expensive to like try to do this in software. There need to be special hardware that would say, I need to map from physical to virtual addresses for every single thing. It was still one memory space. Everyone can still see everyone else's junk, but the memory space was way bigger and as Jason just alluded to, the other part of quote unquote virtual memory that people put under that phrase is the concept of, okay, well now that I have more addresses than physical RAM, what happens when I run out? I'm using more and more virtual addresses and there's no more physical addresses to back them. Then it would say, okay, something that is using physical address number five, I'm going to put that in a file on disk. and now you can use physical address number five and I'll update the mapping table. And if someone goes to look for that RAM again, you're like, oh, that used to be an address number five, but we wrote it to disk And now we'll read it back from the day. I to get it back. Yeah And so virtual memory is just the concept of a virtual address space, but swapping is where you take things out of RAM and put them on disk and those go under an umbrella term. But you'll not none of this solves the underlying problem. It just extends the timeline as we race towards the cliff. Yes, that's right. We've got some new seat covers on our car that's racing toward the cliff. I will also say that consequences of all of this decision is, as veteran Mac users will remember, you used to be able to get info on apps and assign how much memory they could take. It was very common back then. The idea was, oh, your word processor is misbehaving. Why don't you give it a little more memory? But you didn't want to give it too much because they would try to ask for that and then you could end up in a situation where you were running out of memory. so like the idea that the user is managing how much memory each individual app uses, which should never be allowed to happen, but that is what we did back in that era. Yeah, before that infoet info dialogue existed, that was still happening. because remember, you've just got one address space, whether it's real or virtual Every app needs to reserve a little portion of the green field for you could adjust How big is that portion? It used to be that the developer would pick the size of that portion. They would say, I'm going to pick fifty kilobytes. But of course that would limit, especially in the days before swapping. That meant you could never edit a document more than fifty kilobytes. Your whole program takes fifty kilobytes. so the innovation systemstem seven is like What if you let the user change that? Obviously, you couldn't change it below the minimum, but you could make it bigger. And to Jason's point, sometimes you'd make it bigger because like the program was crashing and it was scribbling over something outside of its bounds. and you just give it a little bit more room toribble in because you say, I'm going to reserve four times as much, and now it doesn't crash anymore. It's still got the bug. but when it scribbles, its out it' scbbling in its own space that ends up being unused, or if you wanted to open up a larger document You would say it can't open this document. It tells me out of memory. I'll give you more memory in the get info thing. I'll relaunch you and now you will reserve a bigger portion of that green field that we're all sharing. Yeah, it's a wild idea. Also the opposite is also true, which is if there was a piece of software that thought it wanted to reserve a large amount of memory and it didn't use it. That was not great ideally because It was reserving memory that it didn't actually need and maybe you needed it for something else. So it goes both ways, but yeah, this was bad. Don't do this is what I'm saying and Apple knew it. Apple knew it. Mike, can you even believe that we used to live like this? It makes me feel like you really needed the internet so you could have something else to do. You know, It's like the computer didn't do much, so we had to adjust their memory. This is all I did all day. the days before the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours just in front of my computer that was not connected to any other computer and I would just be on the comp all I had was the software that I had. That's it I also did have that experience. I would sit at my PC. I just searched the file system. that was what I did. It wass like, what's in here? Let me play a video game. Yeah find some computer files. That was all I could do. because even when we had the internet, I couldn't be on the internet all the time My internet time was allotted too, when does M not need the phone You know, that was all I got. So I do I do remember those feelings too of like Being on the computer is just seeing what the computer can do So we've listed a whole bunch of reasons why Apple might need a new operating system. And I should also say in the nineties percolating in the background, there were a lot of big ideas about the future of computing and That was going to be a challenge too. So those were also written on cards at Apple, right? newew ways of working. go beyond the open a file paradigm. The entire concept of using a standalone app to edit documents. There were all these ideas about like What if everybody was the document man and then the stuff you put in it could be written by any program. and there was a lot of that going on. Matt couldn't do any of that, but maybe the next generation could. There was this amorphous feeling like It needed to be flexible enough to enable Apple to build the next big thing and the current MacOS couldn't do it. So they they knew They needed to replace the old MacOS with something new. They were challenged by the fact that Apple sales were saacing. Microsoft was becoming increasingly dominant Apple's customers were loyal, but if the Mac is going to be think about it this way. I love the Mac. I want to use the Mac. in a Windows world where Windows ninety five is a hit, and I'm a real outlier. I'm the only person in my company with a Mac because I'm in the art department. But everybody else uses a PC. And then Apple comes to you and says, well, we're going to make a new operating system. that is completely incompatible with the Mac that you know. It's a totally different thing. It's like a different computer At that point a lot of those people, you know, I'm going to say, well If I have to choose between brand new completely unrelated non Mac operating system from Apple and just using Windows At this point, why don't I just go to Windows? Your thing is new and weird. Windows is going to be new and weird, but everybody's using Windows and nobody's using the Mac and now the Mac's not going to exist anymore. And this was a huge problem for Apple because they wanted to maintain their existing markets. They wanted to give them a bridge to whatever they were going to do next and not make it so alien that they just gave up and started using Windows like literally everybody else on the planet that is the premise for what Apple has to do next, which is go on a bit of a vision quest try to find whatever MacOS is going to become or replace the classic MacOS and I wish I could tell you that Apple Wrote it all down on some cards putut it all together. got their story straight put in a plan and a couple years later out popped a new Mac operating system That's not what happened. It took way longer than anybody expected. There were far more twists and turns than anyone ever imagined And that. is an exciting story that we'll tell you next time desesigned in Californ Until then, Thank you, John. Glad to be here anytime. Well, There'll be many more times. Don't you worry aboutother. We got a lot of emesses to col. We haven't even got on to the next one. All right, so we're on our way to replace Classic MchOS, but the rest of it's going to have to wait for another podcast on another day. So great to talk to John about this stuff. He He's seen it all. He's been there So remember this is design. fM That's where you can go with the backhog kickst the campaign Jason People I'm sure like they love this conversation and they like I want more of it When are they going to get it It's going to happen as we launch the show. So I would say late summer, early fall. We hope We still got a bunch of planning stuff to do. We hope to launch the feeds for it in advance of the new episodes dropping. Yes. But we have to work out the timing and there's some technical things and all of that. So you keep what we'll mention it here when it's up and running both for supporters and for the general public to get the feed of when that happens. And then I think our plan is that It'll be the first full series When we launch it. This is the plan right now. continontinuing the macOS crisis will be the beginning of design in California. The feed will include what youve just heard as a full episode and then It will go on out from there And there's going to be a lot more because yeah with a lot to talk about this answer What we do. Before we finish today, Jason, I do want to do a couple of ask out great questions This comes from Tyler who says, Do you think part of the reason Golden Gate is the name for MacOS twenty seven, could be a reference to it being Apple's golden anniversary this year. I guess. It could be, right? I didn't know this. That's why I liked what Tyler wrote in iss like, It would be weird to me for that to be one hundred percent of a coincidence Yeah could be. I mean, maybe it's just one of the aruments for Golden Gate is also why not this year? Exactly. Yeah. So it's like what a fun thing to do. Why not do it this time rather than next year where it would feel like otherest opportunity? I mean, technically, the fiftieth anniversary is in twenty twenty six. so should have not have been the name of MacroWest twenty six, but they already did that. So now they're on to this and it's fine. Yeah It's if not, we all can u It'll be a good way for us to remember. when the golden anniversary was except then it'll be MacOS twenty seven and we'll have to remember that it came out in twenty six. It's fine. It's a good. I hadn't thought of this, so thank you to Tyler. It's great And Harvey wrote in to say, will the design in California member feed be calledght assembled in China which is A great idea. I mentioned this because Jason and I had a really great production meeting on Friday. This was the thing that came up. We need a name for the member feed We have some ideas that aren't very inventive. I don't think I want to be super inventive. We won't call it assembble to China. It doesn't make any sense really. But if you have a suggestion F A name for our feed. in upgradefeedback. comot I would like to see them Yeah. And in fact, if I can guide you slightly further There's the name of the version of the show that goes to backers without ads And there's also going to be an additional feed for backers Yes. that is Bonus episodes. sort of like how there wass the cortex We have more tech actuallyions andP and MPU too. So so we We really have two things that we have to decide on name and branding for. So people can keep that in mind too. We know no guarantees. But u, you know Tyler surprised us with with the Golden Gate theory. so you could surprise us with great ideas that we had. Harvey also surprised us with a great idea, which is assembled in China, but it' it's a idea that I don't think we will use. No it doesn't make sense great to use that I think. But it is Fantastic. So if you have suggestions, you can write them in at the same place that you can send in your feedback, follow up and questions. that is upgradefeedback d. com Thank you to our members who support us of our Great pllus Jason, I want to talk to you about a problem I'm having with my laptop on a cack Bus today. And I want to talk to you about the World Cup. So I'll do both of those things You can find a video version of this show by searching for the upgrade podcast on YouTube. I would like to thank Squarespace, Mercury Weather, and Fitblard for the support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time. Goody just sn to buy my curling.