Version History Hall of Fame

Hey, David Pierce here. Before we get into it, yet another reminder at Version History Podcast on TikTok, on Instagram, and on YouTube. Those are our new channels. That's where we're doing all of our stuff, all of our clips, all of the mini episodes that we have planned that I probably wasn't supposed to tell you about yet. All of the full episodes are going on YouTube. Everything version history you can find at Version History Podcast on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Time for the show. And Apple is still mostly a company making nerdy computers for nerdy computer users. But Steve Jobs just won a power struggle inside the company. And he has this big idea about how to change computers forever. From the Virgin Box Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today on the show, it's the story of the Macintosh. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. And the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball . We build PCs with long-lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger. And built-in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies. Built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs . What's up y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven times And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom . And this is and mom, a community Tap in with us . All right, we're back. We have a Macintosh. It's time to talk, Macintosh. Um, if you're just listening, A, go to YouTube. This is the most visual episode we've done, maybe ever. Yeah. But this like beige brick of a computer just brings me joy. We have a big mechanical keyboard. We have a mouse, a very early mouse. We have we have a Macintosh. This is not, I should say, a nineteen eighty four Macintosh. I don't know when it's from, but it's not the original. So all the people who just raced and then it's Fat Mac, is it a 512K? What do we got here? It's it's it's also impossible to use because it's single tasking. This is Neilai Patel, by the way. Neelai's here. I love this thing. You can immediately see why this thing was a sensation when it was released. You really can. Also, joining us remotely, daring Fireallbs, John Gruber. John, welcome. Thank you for doing this with us. Thanks. I wish I were there just to play with the Mac. I know it's I I normally don't feel that bad for remote guests because like, you know, it's warm in the studio and it's but this is like you just have to stare at this this whole time, and I I feel very bad for you. I I'm curious actually for both of you, but Neila, you go first. Do you have personal life Macintosh experience? Aaron Powell Oh yeah. My job in middle school, I worked at a computer store, an Apple computer store that was walking distance from my middle school. It was called Core Tech Technologies, which was a great mom and pop computer store. It was like two guys in Wisconsin who were like Apple nerds and they bought a computer store and I worked in the basement and I fixed these old Macs. And I've taken apart dozens of these Macs. Oh wow. Like over the years. And they I only years later did I realize they were just letting a child screw with the power supplies and CRTs, which is extraordinarily dangerous. Uh but I survived. I survived for my eighth grade job. Oh, I thought you meant dangerous for the computers. You mean dangerous for you a lot of voltage. That's a lot of voltage to screw with. And I was just doing it. And so yeah, th this era of Macs was like all over the place. And uh I I worked in computers for repairing them. And my school had a bunch of them, but they all had the SCs and SC thirties. I think that was that era of Macs. That was when they were new. This I think is obviously the iconic Macintosh. They're actually very different than the ones that got popular. Yeah. Yeah. And this I I learned ends up being this is in in terms of like mainstream popularity, this is kind of the one before the one. Yep. In a in a bunch of ways. John, what about you? Were you a Macintosh guy back in the day? Uh not for like the first I didn't get one until 1991 when I went off to college. Okay. And then in my high school we had one, probably an S E , but I don't even remember it. And I took I don't even know if it was called AP, but it was like a programming class. We had a pro we had a really great computer teacher, Mrs. Donna Spatz, if she's out there. Thank you for for my career. Wonderful high school teacher, middle school. We had a lab full of Apple IIs and one Mac . And then I took a class like my senior year, so it would be like 1990. So I really missed like the first five or six years of the Mac intosh. And it was just me and one other kid. So it was sorta, you know, it was sort of like uh even though it was a public school, it was just sort of like a cool thing that that she set up for us to have a programming class with just the two of us, and she was like, Which one of you wants to use the Mac ? And believe it or not, I was like, not me. I wanted the two GS because it was color and the Apple II was my jam. But I remember touring the Mac and she was so impressed with HyperCard for obvious reasons. And again, this is a lot later than at the time, it felt like the Mac was already off and running, and I was deeply intrigued, but it just didn't seem like what a quote unquote computer it was to me. I mean, to talk about themes that have recurred throughout the the last decade, two decades in in in our coverage of iPads and iPhones and stuff like that. But it just didn't seem like what a computer was. Like a computer was something that turned on instantly and gave you a blinking command line and you know you go from there. And I wanted the color screen. And in high so in hindsight it seems crazy. And I remember I remember thinking this is awesome. And I just remember thinking that's not what I want my programming class. And then I went to college and got one and you know the rest is history. Yeah I think uh it it turns out I think a lot of people around that time went through about that same thing of not complet ely getting why this thing needed to be like this. And then a a little bit later it's like, oh no, it actually was it should be. I'm looking at it right now. Like more things should be like this right now. Yeah. More computers should weigh a hundred pounds. Yeah. And have handles. And be beige. Like honestly, the country might be in a better condition if more computers looked and felt like this. You're you're not wrong. All right. So let's let's sort of rewind all the way back to the beginning here, which I think is like the early eighties . Um and I think the the way at least I understand Apple of this era is uh Apple has gone public, it has the Apple II, which is which is a hit, it's going well. The other project going on at Apple is the Lisa . And the Lisa is a a fascinating story that is not really our story for today. But John, can you very briefly just describe sort of what the Lisa was supposed to be at this time? Because this was not quite a like bet the company kind of computer, but this was before the next big thing is sitting in front of us. The LISA was going to be the next big thing, right? Aaron Powell I guess you know there was the famed meeting where the Xerox Parks team where they'd sort of invented the what we call the graphical user interface and overlapping windows. I don't even know if there's overlap, but you know, Windows, icons, a mouse pointer , WYSIWYG, word processing, a lot of the concepts of GUI computing. Famously, famous, famous meeting w not what and you know, it's misunderstood that Apple came in and then ripped off all their ideas. They were like, come in and take all the ideas you want . It was like an invitation to borrow ideas. They were like, we've been working on this and wondering why it's not taking off and we'd really like it to. Uh and then, you know, a bunch of the people who worked at Park, like Larry Tesla, ended up working at Apple . But the the Lisa was Apple's first attempt to bring those ideas to life in an actual computer, to make a graphical user interface as opposed to a command line interface on a computer. And I forget what the retail price on Elisa was. It was like $1,000. It was out of control. Yeah. It might have been more. Yeah, which is like $25,000, $30,000 inflation adjusted today. It was a big bet. It was Steve Jobs baby. He will denied through most of his life that he'd named it after his daughter Lisa. Yes. But it's like, dude, it's also named Lisa. Like, I don't, yeah. This is a very difficult thing to deny. Uh and you can see what he's trying to get to. And my sense of it is Apple's very good at completing its thoughts, right? At having a philosophy of the things that it makes. And in making the Lisa, they realized how incomplete all those philosophies were. And so then the thing is too expensive and it's too big and too complicated. And when they take the second shot with the Mac, a bunch of very smart people get to finish all those thoughts. They get to say, oh , this thing needs to have a very strong point of view about how the windows work, about what applications should do, about what the system is going to provide for you and what the applications will build on from there. Yeah. I think it is it is maybe too simple, but only slightly too simple to say the Lisa's price killed it. Like there there's i it it had other things that were going wrong, but like I would say too, from from the stuff that I've read, it's not just that the price killed it, but the price, it's almost like the price was both a cause just because it was so, so, so high, but also the high price was an effect of how mismanaged and unguided the whole project had gotten. And you you go back and read the biographies of jobs and the histories of Apple, and you can see you you know, you can read it from multiple points of view and multiple perspectives that the the team was too big. It it Apple actually bet too much on it and it was you know famously I mean it jobs was run out of the company by the end of nineteen eighty five. So he was already wearing his welcome thin in the company he founded and sort of working his way towards the eventual exile. And yes, he was on he was leading at some point the Lisa team and it the Lisa team was this big bet. And if I think it's fair to say, long story short, that they were like, we gotta get this guy out of here. He's driving us nuts. And they're like, what if we let him run this take over Jeff Raskin's smaller Macintosh project just to get him out of our hair and lead a much smaller team? But it was sort of like the fact that the Macintosh team was so much smaller, but almost every single person on it is like a Hall of Famer. It is wild. Hall of Fame hardware engineers, Hall of Fame, multiple Hall of Fame software engineers, Hall of Fame graphic designer, uh Chris Espinoza, employee number six, who was hired at like child uh against child labor laws and is still working at Apple continuously today, right? It was like this much smaller team, and so it was this unbelievable chance to refocus and like, hey, let's do something people could actually afford and that, you know, might actually reach people and just focus, focus, focus, focus. Yeah. My favorite part of this, by the way, uh there's all these famous photos of the Mac team and they have pirate flags up in the office. Yeah. Yeah. And Jobs has this line, which is a absolutely famous Steve Jobs line, which I love, which is it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And it's like, dude, you ran the Navy. You got your ass kicked out the Navy. Yeah, you got thrown out of the Navy. Like, what are you talking about? Like the Navy was your idea. And then he is like, no, we're pirates now. And that is the eharly myt-making magic of Steve Jobs. Well, yes, but also inside of Apple, it it was kind of true. Like I think, John, your your characterization is is kind of right that they they wanted him off the Lisa project for a bunch of reasons that I think are kind of his fault and kind of not his fault, personality issues, all kinds of stuff going on. And basically the way I understand it is he just needed something to do. And yeah. And so the way that this started is so Steve Wozniak had been working on this thing that he called Annie, which was basically a $500 game console. And that was never gonna go anywhere. Wozniak just like liked to do things. Um but then this guy, Jeff Raskin, who you mentioned, um, pitches the idea of doing a cheaper, simpler computer, right? The learn all of the lessons from Lisa, start with price, and be like, okay, what does a $500 computer look like? And what can we do and how can we make it? Um so he gets approval, he decides he doesn't want to call it Annie um and decides to call it Macintosh. Um and they they it's it's obviously Macintosh is an apple, which makes sense, but he spelled it with an A because they wanted to avoid a trademark fight with the company Macintosh Laboratory, which they didn't wound up paying Macintosh Laboratory a bunch of money anyway. But all uh that's fine. Um the goal was like start with the price and work backwards, which again is I think this lesson from the Lisa that wound up being really important. It's like they wanted it to be $500. Spoiler alert, it wasn't. They failed this spectacularly. Um, but they wanted it to be five hundred dollars. So they started with this relatively cheap, even for the time underpowered Motorola processor that they could just get. And it was cheap. Um, they built out the first prototype. This is like 1979. So all of this stuff is kind of happening concurrently, which I didn't really realize. There's like three sort of different computer companies happening inside of Apple at this point. There's the Apple II, there's the Macintosh, and there's the Lisa, all happening kind of competitively next to each other, which is a very strange way to think about this kind of product development. And I feel like is not how most companies are run. Um but basically so jobs sort of looking around for something to do, uh finds the Macintosh, gets really interested in the Macintosh and decides essentially that he's gonna take over the project. Um not everyone on the team, as I understand, was super excited about this prospect. I had not realized, John, to your point, that uh this was already like you said, Jobs was starting to wear his welcome thin at the company that he founded. Uh, he drove a lot of people really crazy in those last years. Um but he so he shows up and immediately starts clashing with Jeff Raskin. And Raskin wanted to make this simple five hundred dollar computer with no mouse, no icons, no graphics, like run away from everything the Lisa did and do something else, just like a blisteringly fast five hundred dollar text machine. Um he eventually did build this thing much later at Canon, um a computer that no one remembers. So we'll see. It's called the Canon Cat. Okay, listen. Shouts to the Canon Cat. I have a picture. Would you like to see a picture of the Canon Cat? Yes, I would. Here's the Canon Cat . It is frankly a it's an awesome looking computer. It is. It has a signature that says cat on it. There's just a lot going on. You could dial phone numbers, like genuinely a very cool computer that has been completely memory holed. In a weird way, I forget what's what are the name of those keys under the spacebar? They were very important to the interface. They're called leap keys. Leap keys. I was gonna say jump keys. Leap keys . And in a in one way, like obviously the leap keys under the spacebar didn't have staying power, but the idea that the space under the spacebar would be useful, every single person watching this show on a What I love about this, by the way, and not again, you cannot disrespect the canon camera. I'm so sorry. Uh spoiler alert, this is the Canon Cat episode. Well you're you're it's like throw this thing off the table, reveal the Canon Cat. Your point about there being three different computers happening inside of Apple. This is an era of computing when literally any idea required you to build the whole thing from the ground up again. Yep. Right. We didn't have operating systems really. We did not have standardized hardware, really. We did not have standardized input really. Like it was all up for grabs. And so any idea you wanted to try, you're like, well, I have to invent the computer from scratch again. Yeah. And you just see this happen across the whole industry. Everybody's like, uh yeah, this is called the Texas Instruments computer. It's totally different than the one Atari makes for some reason. Yeah. And it's just down the line. Like we didn't even have IBM clones yet. Right. So you just see that there's this explosion of new ideas about what a computer could even look like and certainly how it could work. And you get this famous, I believe it's Alan Kay quote, where he's like, people who really care about software have to build their own hardware, which also is repeated throughout Apple's history. But in this case, it's like, no, literally, if you have a software idea that is new, you're gonna have to build your own computer. Yep. Because every other computer is so tightly integrated with the software that you can't try new things. Well and there's a there's a very practical outcome of this too, which is that the LISA was running a lot of these graphical user interface ideas. And so the Macintosh team, you would think, would just essentially run LISA software. Like they've done the thing already. Um, but I think both for practical reasons and for um jobs being petty reasons, decides no, we're gonna rebuild something very similar from scratch. And John, this is this is what you're talking about. This group of all-star engineers comes in and builds a series of like truly remarkable bits of software to run on this thing that is incredibly power constrained, incredibly memory constrained. Like it's a crappy computer. Like even for the time, it is not an impressive piece of hardware. And they have to do this unbelievable amount of work to make any of it possible. And they just do it over and over and over. They just do it. It's nuts. It's you know, I w I I guess we should uh throw out some numbers. The original when the Macintosh shipped it in 1984 it cost $2,500. And again, inflation adjusted, that's like up to like seventy five hundred today. Yeah. And so and I I keep tossing that up. I have those numbers in my head because I keep tossing them out when I write about the Vision Pro, which I do think compares I I do think the analog to the nineteen eighty four Mac is is the optimistic story for the whole vision platform. I was gonna say that's the meanest thing you could ever say about the Macintosh. Yeah. No, I think I think it's sort of a tale of shipping ahead of its time and needing a few years to build up a library and then all of a sudden when the hardware and the price kind of catches up to where it should have really been at the start. There's actually a library of software and/or in the case of Vision Pro content. But it was $2,500. It had 128 kilobytes of RAM. But they up until late in the game they really were trying to ship with sixty sixty-four kilobytes of RAM. Yeah. And they realized that they needed twenty-two kilobytes just to just to l fill up the screen with pixels . Right? Yeah there is so little left . It's like, uh, we're gonna have to go to 128. But really that 512K and they called it the Fat Mac, and it didn't get fatter physically. It was the same footprint. It was just like 5 12 kilobytes felt so luxurious that they called it the FatMac. I'm reasonably sure that this one sitting here is a fat Mac. It might be. It's very possible. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so the to the price thing, actually, one of the first things jobs did, he wins this fight with Jeff Raskin. Raskin ends up leaving Apple. Um, and again, everybody else at Apple is very happy to just like let Steve Jobs have something to do. I don't think anybody thought this project was gonna really go anywhere. So they're like, sure, knock yourself out. Go have fun over there with your friends, which is cool. Like I would like that job. Yeah. Um But uh the first thing Jobs does, right, is he he demands that they do the graphical interface. And from that comes, we have to to up the more expensive processor, we have to double the memory, and so all of a sudden this idea of a $500 computer is like immediately out the window. They kept pushing it that idea for a while because everybody likes to have insane goals, I guess, but it was it was very clear immediately that as soon as this became Steve Jobs' version of the Macintosh, that it was not going to be a $500 computer anymore. You just couldn't do it. You literally couldn't do it. Um he also tried to change the code name of it, which I thought was very funny. He he would this was when he was obsessed with the idea of the bicycle of the mind. Do you remember this? Yeah. This is like one of the jobs isms. He wanted to call it bicycle, and the team hated that. So it stayed the Macintosh. Um they tried to rename it a bunch of times, apparently, that it was like this was always supposed to be a code name, it was eventually going to be something else, and it just sort of kept being Macintosh, which is actually I think the best way to successfully name a product. Yeah. It just' gsive it a name and then discover you kind of can't get rid of it. That is always how good names come from. Absolutely. But yeah, so they're they're making this thing and they immediately set out to make a bunch of changes. And the first one I think is like this very visual thing here , they made it vertical. This was like a brand new idea that I had I had really sort of forgotten the idea that like computers used to be these horizontal things that's out on your desk and the disk drive would go over here and the screen would go over here and they were they were like flat sort of television shaped things. Uh and this one they were they just decided to stack it. Crazy idea. And they they were just like they wanted it to be a little more approachable. The idea is like having it feel a little smaller It worked. It works. It's just still one of the best form factors for computer ever. Yeah. The other thing, and it really does put that design ahead of its time, probably by a full decade, a decade plus. I forget when PowerBooks first became sort of semi affordable, but it's about nineteen9 4, 95, like with the PowerBook 100 and etc. The laptop was ultimately what the PC was going towards, right? But that this design at the time was considered portable. There is a handle. There's a handle in the back. Yeah. Right? It's twenty-five pounds or something like that. But they s Apple sold in a case that you could put it in. We have the cases at my computer store. They would have to do like a carry-in case. Yeah, you could just drop it in a case and you're gonna I'm imagining like a bowling ball bag. Yeah, kinda that's awesome. Yeah. So bowl you know everybody who bowls recreationally, bowling balls are technically portable. Listen, with enough work, anything is portable, you know what I mean? Right. But they they had the right idea. It's just a at least a full decade ahead of its time. And CRT technology was not going to get you there. No, definitely not. By the way, that's the other big decision they made, right? I mean there's two right here that you can look at. One, they have the black and white CRT when everyone else was trying to do color, and then they have the the three point five floppy drive, which they got crushed for because they abandoned the big floppy disks with this thing. So okay, we I made I made us get these out because I I had straight up forgotten that floppy disks used to honest to god be floppy. That's the Apple II days. And this is this is the the big five point five inch one and then Apple goes at this, which is much importantly smaller. And the thing that I learned is actually what Apple was debating was whether to do the floppy disk or to do a really expensive hard drive. And then in the middle of this development, Sony basically builds this thing. Yeah. And all of a sudden they're like, oh well, that's great. That solves all of our problems. And they switch to it. But it is, it's a full I mean, this is like a classic Apple story, a full format break. Yeah. That made a lot of people very angry, as Apple always does when it makes a full format break. Um but again, I think uh these things in general were pretty clearly the right call for a variety of reasons. Um one other thing that I enjoyed is very early on in this process, Steve Jobs demanded that they remove the cursor keys from the keyboard because he wanted everybody to use the mouse. And he was like, I'm not even, I'm not even gonna give people other options. This computer has a mouse, you will use the mouse, you will like it, you can shut up. That's like the the true Steve Jobs way. Um so he's like he is very much bullying people into this being the computer user experience that he wants. And I just I think that's so fascinating. He's like, this is the future and I will force you into it. And years later, Apple would remain haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs' bad key board ideas. And sometimes I think about that too, like when we all got very upset and and formed very strong opinions during this stretch where Apple made the left and right arrow keys on MacBook's full height so that instead of an upside down T, left and right were full height because what's that extra space doing anyway? And I know it's actually a good question and as opinionated as I am about every little thing Apple does, I actually preferred the upside down T and I'm glad they went back to it. But I totally get that well, that extra space isn't doing anything. And then there's the counter-argument that it kind of is doing something because when you're not looking at the keyboard, you can feel that space and know your hands are on the arrow keys. And it's like every time I got upset about those full height arrow keys, I would take a deep breath and think about the fact that the original Mac shipped with no arrow keys at all. And how mad I would be trying to edit text today if you just duct taped over my arrow keys. Oh and just said you k you gotta use the mouse. There was a kid there was also an argument and I think it you know totally it was just jobs being jobs and nobody else would have said no arrow keys, period. But I think that the rest of the team kind of got on board with it because there was this whole philosophy of hey, let's make people learn to do things the gooey way, right? That there was no command line shell with the Macintosh. When you booted it, you didn't. There was no booting dot dot dot and the you know any kind of text screen. The first thing you saw was an icon of a Mac itself smiling, hopefully, not frowning . That was the idea. But even when the machine failed, it's actually kind of interesting. When the machine did fail, when there was something wrong with the disc or something had gone corrupt, you did get you you still didn't get text on the screen. You got an icon of a frowning Mac, right? And there was this philosophy of, hey, let's make people do it the Macintosh way. And so if we give them the arrow keys are going to you know, if we give them a command line that runs Apple II programs or something like that, nobody's gonna write Macintosh word processors. They're just going to say run the Apple II word processor, right? And this is very much what I mean about they learned all the things they needed to learn with the Lisa in like big ways. So the LISA's ten thousand dollars are gonna sell it to enterprises. The enterprises are demanding I mean it's it's businesses. You have to do what your clients want. Yeah. And so they're demanding all this backwards compatibility and all this weird stuff in the Macintosh team is like no arrow keys. Right. Like you're gonna do it our way. And I I think they had to learn that they needed to be this opinionated to protect the thing that they were trying to push forward. And that is, I mean, I w it's like there are very few companies that are like, we're going to take our all-stars and let them get so worked up that they take the arrow keys off because they hate working for the business customers who are potentially the only people who will pay this much money for a computer. And yet it happened, which is kind of remarkable. It was an incredible like burn all the boats behind you kind of move trying to do this. Um and we should we should here pivot to software because this is mostly a software phenomenon, this computer. But first let's take a quick break and then uh I have to tell you about quick draw. We'll be right back . Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. And the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball . We build PCs with long-lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger. And built-in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies, built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell P Hi, I'm Maria Sheripova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology . This week on the show, clinical psychologist and founder Dr. Becky Kennedy and I unpack what it really means to raise kids today. I think parenting is the most important job in the world and the one that has the most impact on your world and the world. It is non-stop . Check out Pretty Tough new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. All right, we're back. So let's talk about the the Macintosh's software. Jobs describes the Macintosh in such a perfect way, and I just want to read you a quote. He says, we realized that we could build a super cheap computer that would run Bill Atkinson's amazing QuickDraw and have a mouse on it. In essence, build a really cheap implementation of Lisa's technology that would use some of that software technology. Like QuickDraw and the mouse or the Macintosh. It's n like it's it's that was that was the idea. Like we built a thing that could run QuickDraw for cheap. Uh QuickDraw was, at least as I understand it, basically it's the thing that let the Macintosh have multiple windows and have them overlap . This sounds very normal. This is what windows are, but this d did not exist before. And the idea of having two windows that one that would go underneath the other that sort of understood each other was like brand new software and felt like magic to them. And this is like going back to John what you were talking about about this Xerox park visit, this this is the kind of stuff that they had been thinking about and and learning ever since how to how to make this stuff feel lively and graphical and interactive in new ways. Bill Atkinson, um we were looking at I think Mac Paint on this thing. If you open the about page, it just says Bill Atkinson. Like Mac Paint version 1.3, written by Bill Atkinson. And there's a picture of him. There's a little picture of him. Yeah. This is what you mean by all-stars, John. Like there there's this is fundamentally a handful of people who just sort of achieved software miracles over and over and over in the course of building this thing. And including Susan Kerr, the graphic designer slash icon artist who uh uh nearing the end of the project drew little icons of everybody on the team. And if you look at them, they're uncanny and you think like and they're like thirty-two by thirty-two pixels, black and white. Thirty-two pixels on both dimensions, and she absolutely captured every single person. And I'm ninety-eight percent sure that the Bill Atkinson icon there is Susan Kerr's picture of him. And then you look at a picture of Bill Atkinson circa nineteen eighty-three and it's like, Yeah, that's him. It's a you could absolutely pick him out of a lineup. Like that's better than most police sketches. Like you could take that icon and if he had committed a crime , the cops would be like Nope, nope, nope, nope, that you, you, you're the guy. It's that good of a picture. It's really amazing. Susan Kerr is like a total legend of of design and software. And my the f my favorite thing that I learned in this is the original deal was that Susan would come and design some icons and fonts in exchange for an Apple II. That was the trade. That's really like, we'll give you a computer. These are expensive. Come do some stuff for us. She ends up coming on board full time and like does a vast more work, but I really liked that as the first trade. They're like, You need a computer, make us a font. John, in terms of all stars or Susan Care for sure, Bill Atkinson feels like the all-star. Yeah, probably this whole project doesn't happen without him, right? Yeah, I think so. And I think because I think fundamentally what Quick Draw solved was, and Atkinson did other things. He wrote all of Mac Paint, right? He wrote the application too. But what Quick draw solved, and we can talk about the fact that even at $2,500 , which is seven seventy-five hundred dollars inflation adjusted today, the original Macintosh was very expensive. But for what it did , it was compared head to head against the Lisa that Apple sold for four times as much. And quick draw effectively was the way to make a computer that went and and even after they knew what the price was going to be, Jobs was still describing it as super cheap. It was super cheap for a bitmap display that could do overlapping windows. And if you think about it, like what Quick Draw solved, I think it's fair to say would be: okay, it takes so much RAM just to just to show the w you know, and again, it's binary. It's you know the black and white display translates very well to computer think. It's a what every pixel is a one or a zero. But you've got three hundred, I think it's three eighty-four by five twelve, or maybe it was less. I know it's five twelve across, but you've got that many pixels. But then if you have overlapping windows, don't you have to store the RAM for each one of those windows? So three windows would be like three times the RAM. And like Quick Draw effectively solved that problem by allowing the ones in the background to not be in memory and yet when you resized a window it would refresh right away and you could see the contents. And again, they're doing this with almost no memory. Like all of this is up against these impossible physical constraints. Aaron Powell I feel like I need to point out for our younger listeners, John said black and white, and he he means it. This thing cannot display shades of gray. Correct. The pixels are black or they are white. Those are your choices. I never even thought about that. And so these memory constraints are like oh man, we drew a box. If we want to put another box on the screen, we're going to need more memory. And we don't have enough. It can't be black and white. Like that's what they're up against. That's what they're up against. It's an incredibly slow computer by today's standards, the Mac the Motorola sixty eight thousand chip. And yet so much of what you do, what you guys could do right there with that Mac in front of you, feels fast, right? When you move the mouse around, the mouse moves like a mouse today, right? There's no lag between moving the mouse. It doesn't feel like y it's lagging behind. There's a great story that Hertzfeld's folklore.org has about the first time they showed it to Bill Gates and uh Gates was just of moving the mouse around and watching how the on-screen cursor had no lag at all. And he was like, You're cheating here. You've got a graphics accelerator for the mouse. And Hertzfeld was like, No. And he goes, You have to be cheating. And he was like, No. And then Hertzfeld was going to explain how they're doing it and jobs her overheard. He's like, shut up. And Microsoft never figured it out. No right. God, yeah. To this day. Hirschfeld is like the engineer's engineer and and all-star. But he just won't you know and he knew Bill Gates would understand the elegant explanation for how they solved the problem. But so much it you pull the menus down, you go up to the file menu, the menu pops right down. There's no lag. There is so many things that are laggy by today's standards, but there are so many things that are not. One of the actual the really interesting things about this, the no lag, this thing is basically only running one application at a time. And it's funny that there are parts of this, and eventually, you know, like Apple tore itself apart, and Steve Jobs has to come back and have to reboot the whole operating system because this thing is running one application at a time. It's actually faster in some ways than computers of today. Like it has less lag in what it's doing than computers of today because it's only doing the one thing. And it's like d just direct connection between the hardware and the software. That's very much in the Macintosh. And so they did Hertzfeld and his team built a bunch of these like mini apps, which are essentially desktop widgets that was a a way you could do very basic things that felt like multitasking uh and you could actually have them next to each other on the desktop. But if you wanted to run a proper app, you could literally only do one at a time. If you ran two regular apps at once, the whole thing would just collapse. Desk accessories. That's what they're calling. Desk accessories, that's right. They're the things in the Apple menu. It's also worth pointing out these metaphors that they're using to communicate how the computer works are all new. This all sounds so simple now. Yeah. Right? But the idea that on your desk in your nineteen eighties corporate office you would have a calculator and a notepad and whatever else. Apple's like, Oh, we'll have those on the Mac too. They're your desk accessories. And like Steve Jobs is out there being like, how do you open a file on a computer? It looks like a file, you guys. And it's like, no computer has ever worked like this before. No one has ever been like, we should use these metaphors to make the computer operate in this way and we should make it super visual so everyone can understand it. And also there's no arrow key, so you have to deal with it. And th this is very opinionated design. Yes. Very much so. I know that we have younger listeners who are like, what are you talking about? And I'm just gonna I'm gonna make this comparison. My my friend made this comparison to me in college and I I've thought about it a lot since. I was like Van Halen sucks. And he was like, no dude, you don't understand. Eddie Van Halen invented all those guitar solos . They just sound cheesy to you now. Because they're played. Like all music is Eddie Van Halen guitar solos. And I was like, well, but I still think Van Halen sucks. And I'm confident that that is like what many, many of our younger listeners they're like, What are you talking about? Like it's a disc, it shows up. No one had these ideas before. No, they they just hadn't come up. And the idea that one tiny little team had all of them and almost all of them were correct is the remarkable part of this first Macintosh. Yeah. So can I tell you briefly about one feature that didn't make it? Um, do you guys know about Mr. Macintosh? Yes. Okay. This I did not. I just want to know more about it. So Mr. McIntosh, I'm just gonna read you uh an excerpt from this is from Andy Hertzfeld's website. Um Steve Jobs, one day, they're they're in the middle of building this thing, and Steve Jobs just comes roaring into the room and goes, Mr. McIntosh, we've got to have Mr. McIntosh. And the team goes, Who is Mr. McIntosh? And here's a quote. Mr. McIntosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while when you least expect it and then, w inks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won't be sure if you saw him or not. We'll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. Macintosh, and no one will know if he's real or not. I have two things to say about this. One , drugs are fun. And two, famously, he was on drugs, like did a lot of LSD in his head. Yeah. And two, yeah, you know Steve Jobs saw Mr. McIntosh, like with both his eyes. Uh and two , this is the funniest possible, least Apple-y feature I can think about. Least modern Apple. Sure. Apple of that time is all about weird Mr. Macintosh. That is true. So but as it turns out, this is a very thing I think because the team loves this idea. And they set out to build Mr. Macintosh and they go, they go, well, wait, this sounds awesome. We're in. What does it do? And Steve Jobs goes, one out of every thousand or two times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you'll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu. He'll wave at you, then quickly disappear. You'll try to get him to come back, but you won't be able to They end up not implementing this only because there's no memory on the computer for it. Right. They're like we can't physically put Mr. Macintosh into this computer. This is tremendous. Otherwise they would have done it. It's amazing. Right. I do think it's important to note that for the whole team, I think the reaction was, oh, that's a great idea. We should try to do this. Not oh Steve is, you know, uh taking too much LSD or something like that. They weren't like, Oh my god, Steve's having one of those days. They were like, Oh yes, we need to have Mr. McIntosh. Yes. I love Mr. Macintosh. Um but anyway, so the the this team keeps building, they build a lot of software. Um we're actually looking at Mac Paint, which I think ends up being probably the most important piece of software on the original. I would say Mac Write and Mac Paint, right? The the two they ship with. Because you gotta be able to do something with the computer. Right. You can't just gaze at the floppy disk icon like John Harley was doing with hearts in his eyes. Like you gotta do stuff. And so what do you do? You gotta draw pictures and you're right. But I also think And those things were tremendously important. But it's the draw pictures that immediately tell you this is something different you've never seen before. Right. If it's like if I just want to write text on a computer, you you had other choices. This looked different, but you're still you can fundamentally write text. But the idea of like I can make shapes on this computer is so like transformatively immediately new that I think it's like it's the most Macintoshy of the things that they make, I guess is kind of the way I think about it. That's right. Yeah. And there are so many ideas in Mac Paint one point oh that are still present in uh Photoshop and Photo Mater and Acorn and you name it, you know, any kind of paint application today. The paint bucket tool, right? Like, oh, if you draw a box but you want to fill it with a pattern. How do you do it without the laboriously clicking pixel by pixel to make the whole pattern? Just you use the paint tool, click once and it'll fill in the whole region. That that's a standard tool in every paint app today. Every single one. That's true. The idea of a palette of command of tools is a standard idea. That that's right there in Mac Paint 1.0. It's totally familiar to anybody using any paint app today? And it did not exist in ones previously. You know, you'd you'd like hit you know that you'd you'd get like a template to put on your keyboard and be like hit F three to switch to this tool, hit F7 to switched to this tool, and you'd have to memorize them and they'd be different for every app. The idea that you have like a little floating subwindow, you know, they they had just invented or just brought windows to a personal computer and they invented little subwindow pallets. Totally. Yeah. So but I think one thing though's interesting to me about this moment is Apple is building a bunch of software for itself, but also is very clear that it needs other people to build software for it. So Apple goes out on the road, starts showing people this new device, and is trying to convince them to build software for it. One very funny fact about this is um at the beginning the only way to build Macintosh software was on a Lisa . So there are there are people on the Macintosh team who claimed afterwards that they were the best salespeople that the Lisa ever had just because it would cost you ten grand and you could then build Macintosh software. But what really happened is a lot of folks got excited about this. Like the I think it it gives good demo. You know what I mean? Like it it there is something that immediately grabs people about it. Um but then people heard about the the really bad memory and the fact that this whole thing had been sort of sped up into production and there was a lot of stuff that wasn't finished, uh, and all of a sudden this big pipeline of software they're trying to build kind of starts to disappear. Uh and so that this question of like what is going to be available to do on this computer at launch becomes very much up in the air. Um but now we're we're sort of barreling through 1983 at this point, and we're just getting ready for launch . Apple has has actually decided to like make a big deal out of this thing. They're going to launch it for real. They're going to now have three computer lines. We're just doing this. Um, and Apple starts to think through: okay, how do how do we we want to launch this? This has been delayed a bunch of times, but they they set a date on it. It is going to be January 24th. It's a it's a shareholder meeting. They're like, this is when we are going to launch this product. And they do a bunch of things. They give Macs to a bunch of important people. Uh Mick Jagger got one and was apparently just utterly uninterested in it, which is very funny. Uh Ted Turner got one. Michael Jackson got one. They this is like a very normal you know, if they were doing it now, it would be a bunch of like Mr. Beasts would have gotten one. Like, this is just what they were doing. Andy Warhol loved it. Yeah, that's right. Um Apple also, a thing I did not know, decided it wanted a fan magazine, so it funded the entire first year of Macworld to go along with the Mac This is all content marketing. I did not know what you would do now. Yeah, I had no idea this was the Macworld or something. This is Netflix being like we run a site called Todo om. Yeah. But differently, you know. Yeah. Very much so. But then the big moment is two days before launch, January 22nd, 1984, is the Super Bowl. Uh and Apple decides to run an ad, which I think you could make a strong case becomes the most famous tech ad in history. Maybe one of the most famous We have created for the first time in the old history. This is this is the famous 1984 ad. Everybody's walking. It's the big brother ad vanced force. They apparently had a very hard time casting the person who who could run and throw this hammer as successfully as she does. I don't think that's the message of the episode. And you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen eighty four. That ad still hits, dude. It's good. They even hired like one of the two guys who did all the movie trailer voiceovers. Yeah, like it w the way that in the in the eighties, every single movie trailer, comedy, drama, any kind of movie, started with that guy or the other guy saying in a world. Yeah where is that Ridley Scott? Is that who directed that? Yeah Ridley Scott directed. I mean it looks and it looks like a better it looks like a trailer for a great movie adapt It really does. So a bunch of things like there are a bunch of like apocryphal stories about this ad, including that it only ran once ever during the Super Bowl. That's not true. Uh it ran a bunch, including apparently once before the Super Bowl in a super obscure market. Like Sacramento. Just to see. Yeah. At eleven thirty at night. So the story I heard about that is they ran it then so they would qualify for the advertising of the stuff that's what I mean. Yeah. But they knew people couldn't record it because almost nobody had DCRs at the time. And they ran it at like two o'clock in the morning or something too. Yeah. Yeah, like two o'clock in the morning in Sacramento or something. But it counted. Sunston are in Sacramento being like this computer is gonna be super good. And he's like telling everybody the next day, you can't believe it. And everybody's like, dude, you're so baked. Yeah. Um yeah, they eventually ran it in movie theaters. They ran it on T V. It was like this is a huge ad. Um apparently also right before it launched. Uh one story I saw was that Apple's board didn't even want to run the ad and actually tried to sell the advertising slot, but it was so close to the Super Bowl that they couldn't sell the ad slot. So they're like, well, all right, whatever. I guess we'll run the ad. And they run the ad and it obviously becomes like this absolute icon of advertising. I do I do want to point out that here in 2026, running an ad like this, where the core assumption is that everyone has read a book. It's a good point. Like fundamentally, it's like everyone's gonna get it because everyone has sat down and read and knows what it's about and understands why there's this guy talking about a garden of pure ideology. It's a very different time. Be like the Hunger Games. That's like the only one you could get away with now. You'll see why the Hunger Games won't be like the Hunger Games. Didn't quite hit the same way. Um but anyway, I think this ad is really interesting. A because it's a giant immediate success. It got covered on the news. Like it was a big deal, this ad. But it also takes this thing that had been sort of a lark and then kind of a skunkworks, and now it is like a it's a thing. Yeah. They have just absolutely exploded the excitement for this computer with two days left to launch it . And then we get to January 24th, 1984 at Deanza College, which is just down the street from Apple HQ. At this point, everybody knows this computer is coming. This is very different from Apple now, which like is is as secretive as it could possibly be. Like they said we're gonna launch Macintosh. They had been like out doing interviews. Like this is this is out in the world. Everybody knows it's coming. So the anticipation is through the ro of for this thing. And at this point, it's important to note that the computer barely works. It is not finished. They're not going to ship it for some time. This this is like a classic Steve Jobs thing, like tape and bubb legum, they're gonna make this demo work. So Jobs gets up on stage and he makes this argument that IBM with its PC is about to take over the world and we cannot let that happen. And then he plays the 1984 ad again just as a reminder of what whole IBM is this this whole thing is done at IBM. Yeah. Which is the big bad of this industry according to Steve Jobs. And he plays the ad again, and then and then we get the reveal. And this is where it like turns sort of uproarious in the room where people are like, oh my god, you have invented the future. This is the moment the Macintosh speaks . Now we've done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently. But today , for the first time ever , I'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself . Hello, I am Magintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag . And accustomed as I am to public meeting, I'd like to share with you a maximized sort of the first time I be a main frame. Never trust a computer you can't listen. Wow . But right now I'd like to sit back and listen. It's just doing a tight 30. Can I introduce a man who's been like a father to meet these top ? Okay. Can I just say that the total paternal The tonal shift between Apple computer and Drew's Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984, and then like Borsche belt comedy. It's very high. Like you know what'll save you from big brother? Puns. Never trust a computer that you can't lift. It's such a bad burn, but it's so good. I do but I think ultimately it comes back to the fact that when you turn the machine on, you got an icon of the machine itself smiling at you. It's like there was a philosophy of every single person on that team, including Steve Jobs, who was the guy behind Mr. McIntosh , that computers should be fun and the fun shouldn't should be explicit. It should be right there, a smiling icon, a Mr. Macintosh. And that that's the future that IBM is trying to drain out of computing. That this sh you know that if you're gonna pay all this money for a Super Bowl commercial, you better be talking about megahertz and how much faster your Yeah. Yeah. So fun fact about that demo Mac by the way, it was a fat Mac. It had four X the memory of the thing they ended up shipping because they couldn't run the demos on the actual Mac the the Mac they shipped couldn't do the things they showed in the demo. You know what's just fabulous. It has feelings too . Um all right. So let me let me just sort of breeze through the rest of the history here and and and stop me as you like to go. So the thing ships, the reviews are are fabulous. People largely love the thing. Um Apple sells fifty thousand of them in two and a half months, which was way ahead of expectations, way faster than other Apple computers. This keeps going. John Scully, who at this time is the CEO of Apple, he had come in during this process, he reorganizes the company, puts jobs in charge of the Lisa and the Mac and gives this guy Del Yokam another executive control of the Apple II. Jobs basically immediately dumps the Lisa team. Just shows up and is like goodbye to all of you. Some of the Mac team ends up leaving out of just sheer exhaustion. Like the pace of work over the three years to get this thing done had just been apparently horrific. And the a lot of them are just like, I can't do it anymore. I'm burnt. And then pretty quickly. Like in in a few months , the Macintosh sales start to slow way down. Uh people start using the thing and they discover that it wasn't fast enough. Um business people didn't like the mouse. Turns out they wanted cursor keys. Um and maybe most importantly, it didn't have enough software. Like overwhelmingly, I think the story of that first year of Macintosh is people loved the idea of it, but the actual reality of it was not quite bait. Um and there was this great Alan Kay who you mentioned earlier. Um he referred to the Macintosh as a Honda with a one-quart gas tank, which is just a fabulous metaphor. That's good. Like I love that. So then so by the end of 1984, they're there are now missing sales targets. The software is not coming, enthusiasm for the whole thing is kind of waning. They had shipped the Fat Mac uh for thirty two hundred dollars instead of twenty five hundred dollars in September. Like super fast follow this thing with more memory. hundred dollars for that much memory sounds like a deal right in that wild I know I think it is a deal um but even then they couldn't solve the other problems so they're in this real like hole potentially of like this thing was a super flash in the pan, but we're not sure it's gonna catch on. Uh Apple in April launches the Apple IIC, which was half the cost of the Mac, also had a handle. Uh it was it was exciting and cool, but even the two C didn't quite hit the way that it had. People thought it was underpowered, it didn't have the expansion cards that people wanted. Like IBM is starting to uh reshape what people want from computers in a way that is potentially bad for Apple. Uh all the way to the point where by the nineteen eighty five shareholder meeting, a year later, um Apple is basically promising to make peace with IBM and and play along and be cool and our can't we all just be friends? In in twelve months, the pirate ship has like I don't know, joined with the Navy again. They've just gotten back on board. Um they made another Super Bowl ad the next year, um, which is weird and kind of bad and pisses everybody off. And I think I think I have it. Let me just play this for you. It's called Lemmings. Do you remember this advantage? I was gonna say I think it's Lemmings, right? This one's funny because in the context of bad Super Bowl ads, the I guess a desert and off a cliff. And they're they're whistling hi ho, hi ho. Right. And they're just dying. What a bleak ad, dude. Well I'm just saying, like you would I if I told you today like, oh this is just another bad Geico commercial, you'd be like, yeah, it is On January 23rd, Apple Computer will announce the Macintosh Office . You can look into it . Or you can go on with business as us ual . This computer is a a real bad call for the Macintosh office because this alienates business people. And do you know who Apple really, really, really wanted to buy their computers? Was business people. At the time, this is like a scandal. And like we peg Apple's failures to this ad. And if you just ran this ad in 2026 next to any of the AI slop ads we just saw at the Super Bowl, you'd be like, Yeah, it's just it's fine. Like it kind of sucks, but whatever. I watched the Super Bowl with a bunch of people and it's they kept asking me, like, what does that one mean? And I'm like, just stop asking me, dude. It doesn't mean anything. It it this is nonsense. Yeah. So at this point, jobs is is kind of deeply depressed and starts to have fights with John Scully about everything. He cared about the Mac. Scully basically saw it as a failure and kind of wanted to move on. Scully and Jobs end up at odds. Scully threatens to quit if Jobs stays on the board. The board sides with Scully. Jobs tries to stage a coup, he loses, he tries to poach a bunch of people to go build something else. Uh Apple sues him, he ends up resigning, and then eventually at the end of all of this, he leaves. Yeah. To go wa well literally wander the wilderness for the yeah. I do think one of the funniest l moves in all of this is they took the Lisa and they tried to get it to run the Mac software and they're like, this is now called the Mac Excel , which is just like, what are you doing? Yeah. But meanwhile, at Apple, they start to build the software ecosystem. They put back a bunch of the things that the Mac needed, they give it more memory, they add an expansion port, they give business people in particular the stuff that they want to make their computer work, and it starts to work. Aaron Powell But those are different Macs. That's not this one. No. Kind of lived and died very quickly. But the idea of what the Mac could be starts to take off. With with a lot of the same interface ideas like this a lot of what Steve Jobs wanted stayed in those devices. But he was, I think as Apple has often been so precious about so many things that it it sort of lost the forest for the trees in in some spots. Uh and then the Mac Plus ends up launching in 1986 and it's a huge hit and the Mac is often running for decades, but that's that's a story for another day. A thing that I really had not realized was how quickly this thing rose and fell. Like the the moment of the Macintosh. The first one. The the yeah, the first Macintosh was so huge and so exciting and sort of lit so many people's eyes up with the future of computing. And then it was gone. Like months. It's crazy. To the point where a year later they ran Steve Jobs out of the company. Yes. It's not one year after introducing a computer that you can clearly draw a line from to today's all of today's computers. Absolutely. Whether they're Apple computers or not. Yeah. You know, you can draw this line that this computer, this one computer, was the beginning of the future of all of all of personal computing. Yeah. You could draw it to the phones, you could draw it to our desktops, you could draw it to our laptops. Uh it's and one year after deducing it, they ran the man out of the country, out of the company. Almost out of the country. Almost, yeah. All right. Well, that is actually as good a transition as any into the version hist ory questions because now we get to litigate whether this thing actually mattered or not. Spoiler alert, it does. But let's let's take a break and then we're gonna come back. We're gonna do the version history questions. We'll be right back. In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built the Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for de-platformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh, and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming, a judgmental puppet named Zodles. Zoodles. Zoodles! Who share Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows. This year though, the Empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the low five figures. Web traffic is plummeting. And recently, Shapiro laid off 13% of his employees. Asked by the Washington Post what had happened, Shapiro accused other conservatives of click-hor ring by embracing radical Islam theoriz ing about the evils of Winston Churchill and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. The kids still got it. On Today Explained, the fall of Ben Shapiro . Today Explained drops every weekday afternoon. Pregnant athletes are not fragile. Yeah, that's right. I said pregnant athletes. I am Rabinaj San, VPN head instructor at Peloton, and I PR'd my deadlift the week before my son was born. I was also a quote geriatric type 1 diabetes pregnancy, and so I know there can be a lot of fear and uncertainty about what is healthy movement when you're pregnant. That is why I got trained in pre- and postnatal fitness, and this week on my podcast, Project Swagger, I am sharing some key guidelines and the story of how I stayed active during my pregnancies. Listen now at Project Swagger. Alright, we're back. It's time for the version history questions. The same eight questions we ask about every product. The first one is Neigh's favorite. It's the time matrix. Makes no sense. The time matrix, which everyone loves and is scientifically proven to make perfect sense to everybody. It maps ideas and time. Was this the right idea at the right time, the wrong idea at the wrong time, or somewhere in between? Um John, do you have a theory here on where on the matrix this device belongs? I think it was the right at the right product at the right time. It was ahead of its time, if anything. And it was the fact that it shipped in nineteen eighty four when it was underpowered, had too little memory , but was so exciting that by like the time 198 7 -8 8 rolled around, it had a library of software and Adobe had introduced Postscript and the desktop publishing I'm just pointing out John has fallen into the trap set by David with his remarkably asinine time matrix . Which is you just said it was too early. So it's the wrong time. I think what the problem was with their institutional expectations for how it should sell. And that's again, that is f inform s my still optimistic take on the Vision Pro that I think Apple sees the Vision Pro this. I don't know you brought this back to the Vision Pro, dude. Everyone 's credibility just kind of wanes for a few more minutes on the broadcast. This isn't meant to sell now. This is meant this is meant to get a platform get some footing for a platform four years from now. This is meant to cost the CEO his job. Yes. No . No, that's the point is that they should they should have had much more realistic sales expectations for the Macintosh and and been looking ahead for years, not months or quarters.. Yeah That's fair. And if they hadn't, if they hadn't shipped this product in 1984 with the amazing engineering talent that that it took to ship it as flawed and limited as it was, then by nineteen eighty seven, eighty, the eight Macintosh that was began to flourish at that time wouldn't have because it wouldn't have had the software library behind it. I do I think that's a good case. I think there there is an the argument that I would make for it being the right idea at the wrong time is I think there is a strong chance that if they shipped the Fat Mac as the first Mac a year later, when when a bunch of this stuff had gotten better and gotten cheaper and they could have sold the twenty five hundred dollar Mac with five hundred and twelve kilobytes of RAM instead of $128, that maybe they immediately solve a bunch of their problems. No, they would have still sold it for $32.99. That's what the price of the Fat Mac when they launched it. And then the commercial would have been this is why 1985 won't be like 1984 . Right. If I'm forced to participate in this time matrix, which you are, then the only argument is you have to run that ad. Damn, that's a real that is I can't I honestly can't argue that. You cannot run the ad with a different slogan than versus why 1984 won't be like 1984. Because even if you talk yourself into this is why nineteen eighty five won't be like nineteen eighty four, you're like, well, yeah, that's uh , of course it won't. And you can't think a different book. You can't be like, this is why Brave New World won't be brave, like that doesn't make any sense. You're stuck. Damn, that's really good. I know Steve Jobs like on one of his many, many acid trips. Like, I got a great idea for an ad. I I need to where's Jeff Raskins? Get him out of here. I don't know what we're gonna launch. I don't know what it's gonna be, but the ad the tagline is gonna be sick. Start from the tagline and work backwards. I still like the idea that somebody looked at uh Alien and Blade Runner and was like, that's the guy who's gonna make the commercial . Alright, no, I'm in for that reason alone. It's the right idea at the right time. I I have no comeback for the greatest tech ad in history. Alright. Question number two. Was this pe ak anything? I have a couple that I would like to offer you. Um was this peak Steve Jobs unveiling? No. I think I think the Macintosh is either first or second. You think you think no, John? No, no. Is it the iPhone? Is the iPhone this is not three devices, this is one device. Is that that's the peak thing? I think it's I think the original iPhone that's not three devices, that's peak. That's number one. I don't even think this is top five. No? No . Not really not no. Uh I mean it's just like off the top of my head, the original iPhone, that's one. Uh the MacBook Air out of the envelope, that's obviously number two. Uh the first iPod, that's actually a very important one. Was it a great intro though? The first iPod, because it was like post nine eleven and you know, it was a great product, but the actual intro was that's that's one where he developed like I'm gonna show you pictures of everyone else's products and say they suck. Yeah. Like it was it was one of like there I'm just saying like in the annals of this history, like there are there are moments where like oh these are his moves. Any of the one more things like I've just again I'm pointing out like the thing about that intro that is peak is the one with the U two announcement. You're really on that. Yeah, first iPad, actually. Um first iPad was a good one. What do you think, John? Any any peak anything ? Um maybe peak monochromatic display? Ooh, that's good. Right? And but but but you know, it goes right back to the iPod where maybe the original iPod was peak monochromatic display. They certainly sold more black and white, not grayscale black and white uh I think I will say but but looking at this it's it's har it's probably not coming through on camera. This display looks beautiful. It really does. It's so crisp. It really is. It's just something else. And the iPod did not have that 'cause it was a cheap L C D, right? Right. You look at this, you're like, oh I guess . So maybe peak monochrom atic display. That's good. Where into that. Where even when the iPod came out, it didn't futuristic, it seemed like, oh, this is a good compromise for a battery operated thing in your pocket. Whereas in nineteen eighty four, this was like this is the nicest computer display I've ever seen. Yeah. Yes. Uh is it peak gadget handles? No. No? Nah. I immediately go to the the the wild colored laptops. That's that's the handle I think was my first. Yeah. Yeah. Or the iMac had a handles. Yeah, the iMac had a handle. I mean you can see a lot of the iMac in this product. Yeah. Like w he he just took another run at it years later. Yeah. The the all in oneness of it, uh, which again was a thing that people hated, right? Like the the the idea of this being a closed, unexpandable system was core to what they were trying to do with Macintosh and was a thing a lot of people absolutely hated about it. Yeah. They're like, let me tinker on this thing. I think they already, even with that first one, already started with the screws that you needed some kind of weird screwdriver that nobody It's so actively hostile. I remember I used to repair these as a little lathe driver. Like we had a screwdriver was this long. You had to go all the way up in the back. That's awesome. Um all right, question number three. If you could time travel back, knowing everything we know now and and be involved in the development of this thing, could you have made it more successful? Are there any changes you could have told 1982 Steve Jobs that might have tweaked the way that it went. Cool it with the jokes. Yeah, like be nice to everybody for a minute. No, I meant the like it's sure as nice to be out of the bag jokes. I don't know. That worked. That went over huge. You know what a thing that we have not actually mentioned really, maybe maybe only in passing, that this thing only runs off a floppy disk. The operating system and all the applications, everything are on a floppy disk. And I know that there was some period of time where they thought about doing a hard drive. There was some period of time where they they you know eventually you could buy an external disk drive. The limitation of this thing was like it's an appliance. Yeah. I actually wonder if Apple oversold it without the applications in the beginning and they didn't lean into the fact that like if what you want is the single best like word processing situation, it'll just do that. They got there eventually. Like just it's Mac Paint and MacWright, the end.. Yeah Like I I do wonder if trying to be like it's a computer at a time when computer to John's point meant you got slots and expansion cards and like the world is your oyster and th this thing is a toaster . You know, like it's it's just a very different paradigm. And I I do wonder if they kind of they got too far ahead of themselves. John, what do you think? Any any other ideas? Uh I would at least pitch arrow ke ys on the keyboard. Yes. That was gonna be mine too. Like give the people the keys, Steve. We got there. Eventually. Swear to god if you missed a letter and a word, you could just go back arrow three times. It's not gonna keep people from using the mouse. Yeah. Yeah, I really do appreciate the extent to which he was like, the mouse is the thing. Screw all of you. Like we're we're this close to just like, what if it just didn't have a keyboard? You know what I mean? It's a good Well that was I mean just as a rule of thumb, if you could use that Macintosh, the one right in front of you, without the keyboard, but with the mouse, or with a mouse without the keyboard, you you could get more done with the mouse without the keyboard. Right? Because you could use Mac Paint. Right? You could you could actually make a painting and save it. You could just draw the words. Help me. Right. Without the mouse, I don't know that you could actually get anything done because there were too many things you just could not do without the mouse. Yeah, totally. Um all right, question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? That's tough. I don't I'm going with no on this one. Like I do I think this is the thing you and I talk a lot about on the verse cast actually. I think I I am very drawn to the idea that we should go back to the idea of comp uters as places that like I think I think desktop computers are potentially do a comeback in a real way. And like we we talk about the 1990s computer room all the time that like computing as a as a space, not a device, I think. Let me just offer you a a situation, but this is my iPhone 17 Pro Max. It's loaded up to the verge. And this is the screen. First Macintosh. I do in fact see the problem. I don't think the youth are going back to the problem. I don't think we're going back this far. Like if if you were like David, are we going back to the like early two thousands really cool looking IMAX, we could talk about it. I'm not sure we're getting back this far . Yeah. And it's really heavy. You know, if you want to move it somewhere. So you really do have to find a permanent home for it. The handle, the bag aside, you kind of have to f find a permanent home for it. And I think it's sort of a deal breaker. Whereas all the kids who are buying up old iPods right now, it's like all you need is a way to get the songs on the damn thing. And then once you do, you've you yeah, you know, you you're actually it actually is usable. Totally. Yeah. Sorry, Macintosh. No, no, no. If someone can get out there like the old iPods and start a movement where they're poop putting SSDs in these things, yes. SSDs an internet connection somehow, I don't know. Yeah. Um all right, question number five. What feature of this should every current version have? What would you lift off of the Macintosh and put back onto modern computers? I have w I have one that I'd like to offer you. Okay. I think this you can only use one app at a time, except for the little desk accessories paradigm, is great. Yeah. And I think John, you actually you you were writing about your Apple scorecard commentary for the year, and one of the things you said is about the iPad , which is that we're we're in this interesting position with the iPad where they have really exploded the amount of stuff that you can do with an iPad, and yet there was incredible power in the simplicity of just giving you one thing to do at a time. And I actually think there is something to that with computers that is like there is a f I don't want is for all of my computing, but there is something to the focus of this that I find very appealing. I I can't disagree with you more. I know. Uh I mean the iPad has a been little bit inch phone like what are we talking about here? I mean that the reason this thing looks like it has focused because it doesn't have the internet connection. Yeah, it can't do anything. It's like would you like to process some words? Have I got the app for you? Like that's it. The thing I would take away from this actually, and we we've talked about it kind of a lot throughout this entire episode, you can see the personalities and care that went into every pixel on the screen. One thing we didn't talk about, by the way, was on the inside of this there, are signatures of a lot of the people who made it. They had a signing party and they all they all signed it and it is it is in the plastic that this thing is made. And that persisted for a long time. Again, taking apart the computers in eighth grade. You y I got to see all the signatures all the time. It was so cool. Um but you can see like the computer has a personality. Mr. Macintosh is in here somewhere just waiting to get out. You know, the the the little uh Susan Care icons, uh the portraits that we're talking about. The'yre all over the system. Yeah. The fact that the windows have pinstripes for no particular reason. This is Steve Jobs, like make it have more texture. Like in like the earliest possible stage of the commuters he's making. Computers do not have this personality anymore. You you s load up a new iPhone, like fresh out the box, it's not smiling at you. It's like it's it's like telling you that the EU regulatory state has required Apple to issue warnings of like all this stuff. Like it is just no it's like it is a series of corporate experiences that you have. Yeah. And this one is just all personality all the time. And like, boy do I miss that. Yeah. And Neela, I'll just I'll just add to that that yes, the the slogan was the computer for the rest of us, but it wasn't the rest of us weren't dummies. They were people who don't understand how computers really work at a low level, but are very smart. The Macintosh was designed for clever, bright, creative people, not for dummies. That's not who the rest of us were. And I think a lot of these things in Tahoe are like, ah, you're too stupid to resize a window. Yeah. Or notice that we can't put the corners in the corners. Yeah. So we yeah, you won't notice. So what do you what do you care? Totally. Um all right. Three more questions about the Macintosh. These are the version history hall of fame questions. It has to pass all three of these tests to get in the version history hall of fame. Question number one: Did this product do something truly new ? Yes . You you've been talking about how the Lisa did it all. Wow . Yeah, but like quick draw is truly new on this like the thing that they actually did. Right? My twenty five hundred dollar computer can run QuickDraw. Yeah, that's the thing. That's that's the thing. Like there's too much in here that is actually new. I'm just saying jobs pretending that he hadn't taken a very expensive run at it already is like very funny. Yeah. I I I tend to agree, John. What do you think? Oh, I think definitely. Uh and I think you could compare it to the fact that were there touch screen computers Yes, of course. You know, but was making it a five hundred dollar or six hundred dollar phone that you could put in your pocket new. Making this a twenty five hundred dollar computer that you might uh f reasonably uh as a small business or a family buy uh taking these concepts and putting them in a computer at a price that yes it was very expensive for the time, but people might buy to put it there? Yes. I think the funnier thing would be if like Apple was the company that had made like the that Microsoft surface table and jobs. It was like we invented the touch screen. And they were the company that did it. That's that's what makes the ignoring the Lisa so funny is that Jobs did that so many times until the end of his life by pretending that Apple had invented these things that other companies had done. But I think with the Macintosh and the Lisa it was the only time it was Apple itself , buddy, they're right there. Yeah. You named that for your daughter. You stolen people from the team. Yeah, agreed. Um , question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? Remarkably good. I think it was. I think uh from a pure software perspective alone, it was remarkably good. Like the actual machine had its issues, but the thing that it did was like it just blew people's minds. Yeah. And there's so many things that are still true today, like I said earlier about the way that Mac Paint on that computer in front of you is so similar to paint applications today. When we were at the break a minute ago, you were you were playing with Mac Paint and you just like it's it's it you just understand it. Like it just it works the way you think it does. Forty years later. Yeah, I agree. Question number three, the last one. Did the Macintosh have a lasting impact? Did it like capital M matter? The thing I've been trying to think about is if Apple hadn't done this thing that looked like this and worked like this, how long would it have been before somebody else did? Right? Is this one of those things whose idea had come or whose time had come and give it a minute and somebody else would have put this thing out. Uh no, I will make a very I'll make an argument that won't make a lot of people really mad. Okay. If Apple, in particular Steve Jobs, had not done this, I'm not sure anyone would have done it in this way ever. I think we uh we would be looking at a different timeline of computer evolution entirely. Aaron Powell Like if if IBM wins, like wins wins, you think we end up we don't end up here? Yeah, I don't think we end up here. Like for a long time. Interesting. I I because you know their their incentives were to sell productivity software on mainframes to businesses. Like they were they were not interested in the rest of us, as John is saying. Like they had no like I think we would have gotten to a place where creatives desired some kind of computer and you ended up with uh was like Amiga made the video toaster, which was like a specialized computer for video editing. Like sure, we would have ended up with these other weird little tools. Uh and I don't think we would have ended up with a general purpose creator that was like made by somebody who wanted to speak to creatives, who's given the thing to John Lennon, right, and and Michael Jackson. Like that's not what IBM was going to do. Yeah. I really think that if not for that this team at that time , like we we wouldn't be here. We would be looking at a very different branch of computer evolution. That's a bold that's a bold question. I know it's gonna make people mad, but I I just I don't see it. I mean if that's even remotely true, then the did it have a lasting impact is the easiest question we've ever had on this show. Right? Like all right, well I just wanna say, John, this does not pretend the Vision Pro getting into the Vionersory Hist Hall of Fame. Under no circumstances will we be applying this to the Vision Pro . But the Macintosh. I expect to talk about the Vision Pro so much. Yeah, the Macintosh. This may be the only time the Vision Pro appears on this show. Uh but the the Macintosh I think deserves to be in the Virgin History Hall fan. So so here we are. All right. We're done here. Thank you both. This has been tremendously fun. Uh thank you to everybody for watching and listening. Uh, if you want to support all of this, read John at Daring Fireball, listen to the talk show, John's equally very long podcast. Uh, read The Verge, subscribe to the Verge, the Verge.com slash subscribe. It's the best way to support all of this stuff. Thank you both. Thank you as always. See you next time