Tech Won't Save Us - 15 Years of the iPhone w/ Brian Merchant

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss the impact of the iPhone after 15 years, including its effects on how we work, how we use technology, and what it’s meant for Apple.Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of  The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:In 2011, Cory Moll tried to unionize Apple stores. In June 2022, a store in Maryland became the first to vote to form a union.Apple’s claims about privacy are, at least to some degree, a clever marketing campaign.Paris previously wrote about some of Apple’s environmental messaging.The previous episode with Brian on the iPhone is episode 78 (Sep 16, 2021), and I also spoke to Jenny Chan about the conditions at Foxconn factories where iPhones are manufactured on episode 27 (Sep 17, 2020).Support the show

It was genuinely valuable from a marketing standpoint to sort of like have Steve Jobs bequeath this unto the world like Moses with a tablet. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week's guest is someone who I think you're going to be quite familiar with, and that's Brian Merchant. Brian is a tech journalist, author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform, Watch Worlds Burn, an anthology of near-future science fiction that comes out in August. Now, Brian's been on the show a few times before, but you might remember our conversation from September of 2021, that's episode 78, where we really dug into the history of the iPhone. How it was made, the innovations that went into it, the supply chain from the mining to the manufacturing that makes this product possible. That was a really important conversation and I think shed a lot of light on the iPhone, obviously drawing from Brian's book, The One Device, not to say this was all new or anything like that, but to really give people some more insight into what it takes to make this product that so many of us are reliant on. In this week's episode, we are extending that conversation. The iPhone came

out 15 years ago yesterday, June 29th, 2007, in the United States. Of course, it came out a little bit later in Europe and in some other countries. And so instead of digging deep into the history of the iPhone this time, we wanted to talk about the impact that it's had in those past 15 years, the ways that it has changed the way that we interact with technology, the impact that it's had in those past 15 years, the ways that it has changed the way that we interact with technology, the ways that it has altered the economy and the way that many people work, and what it has meant for Apple itself as this company that has benefited so much from selling this incredibly profitable product. We get to a ton of interesting aspects of the iPhone in this discussion, whether that's how it enabled certain new economies like the gig economy,

the surveillance and tracking that it helped make possible, and how Apple surrounds this device with a kind of environmental framing to make us feel guilt-free when we buy it. But I'm sure that there are plenty of other impacts as well. So after you listen to the conversation, if you think that there are others that you want to mention, feel free to reply to the tweet that I make about the podcast on social media and share your thoughts on what the iPhone signifies after 15 years. Obviously, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you want to think more deeply about the impact that the iPhone has had. And if you want to support the work that goes into

making these shows every single week in ensuring we have this critical analysis of the tech industry and that it's available free for everybody, you can join supporters like Sarah from Vancouver by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Brian, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Always good to be here, Paris. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you too. You know, whether it is about the iPhone, as we've talked about before, or the metaverse or Amazon or any number of other topics. It's always such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Always happy to be here. There are always multiple unfurling dystopias that need to be unraveled, I think. So I'm always happy to join that ritual whenever I can. No, I appreciate it. But now, I think this is a special episode because you've been on the show before to talk about the history of the iPhone, where it all comes in, the supply chains, what went into making it, which is a really important conversation and one that I think the listeners really enjoyed. And so I wanted to kind of build on that with this conversation. And of course, if kind of build on that with this conversation. And of course, if listeners want to check that one out, that's episode 78 back in September of 2021. But actually this week, as we talk, it is the 15th anniversary of the release of the iPhone.

That was on June 29th, 2007 in the United States. It came out a few months later in some European countries, November 9th, 2007. Up here in Canada, where I am, it came out a few months later in some European countries, November 9th, 2007. Up here in Canada, where I am, it came out a year later. So we had to wait until the second version of the iPhone, I guess, which was fine. Because what I wanted to ask you, you know, in the beginning, when the iPhone came out, June of 2007, what was the response to it? Was it immediately this thing where a ton of people were excited to get their iPhones? It was immediately this kind of mass product, or was it something for Apple enthusiasts and early adopters that those kind of people got in on, but it wasn't this massive thing to start? Yeah. I mean, I would say that it was immediately reconfiguring. It was immediately

a great reconfiguring event in the tech space. It was certainly sort of important to a number of those like sort of diehard niche consumer electronic consumers that had already sort of been won over and won back over to Apple through the years of the iPod. And it's sort of reemergence as like sort of like the cool computing concern. I'm old enough to remember the actual sort of like cultural climate around the drop of the iPhone. And I had friends who were into it, but I would say, yeah, it was pretty niche. It's your friend who was a little bit tech savvier, a little more into gadgets, was the guy who could, you know, talk a little bit about various software programs. It wasn't this sort of seismic consumer event. I mean, there were people

who waited in line to get it. And that was sort of made a big deal of at the time. But that was also largely because there was a lot more scarcity. There weren't a million Apple stores for people to line up around the world. And so we don't see, I mean, right now it's so diffuse, right? They announce a new product. Sometimes they'll get lines and people camping out for the occasional marquee product, but it was a very different world then. In the sense that it was game-changing was among sort of competing developers and people who are eyeing this space as a potential direction for future markets,

specifically Google's Android team. They had already at this point assembled their sort of effort to build a smartphone. And at the time, it was sort of a more BlackBerry, you know, hard button type thing. That's just where the whole industry was at the time. That's where most of the smart money was for the future of this particular mode of computing. You know, laptops had hard keys, the BlackBerry had hard keys, cell phones had hard keys. The BlackBerry had hard keys. Cell phones had hard keys.

So it just kind of seemed like that was the next evolution in the step. Somebody inside Apple, one of their biggest VPs, fought tooth and nail to try to get the iPhone to have hard keys. So when it debuted at the Macworld keynote in January of 2007, that was truly sort of like within various companies like Google, they basically, you know, famously said, like, all right, well, we're back to square one, and they had to, they restarted their whole program. So on those two different levels, it was both sort of immediately game changing, and, and less so than we might remember, because

on a consumer level, it was a small. And when people got it, it didn't really, you know, it had only the apps that Apple offered, right? It was not, it was still completely a closed ecosystem. There wasn't even like an app store. You got the apps that it packaged on the device. Some of them were kind of cool. You know, people like to show maps. You could already do like the pinch and zoom on maps and you could walk around the city and see what was, I mean, it was very slow. Also, this was pre 3G. So you either had to have an internet connection, which was already kind of slow, or you had

this like really haltingly sort of staggered experience looking at these apps and the very limited mobile browser that was on there. That's a long way of saying that yes and no, things started to change immediately, but also slower than we remember. I think that makes sense, right? Because the iPhone is not actually the first smartphone to ever be out there, but it comes to kind of shape what smartphones look like, what they act like, how they transform many of the other aspects of society around us that, you know, we'll discuss in this conversation. But I wanted to come back to or to stay on this point for just a minute, right? Because in the book, in the one

device that you wrote about the history of the iPhone and many of the aspects of that history that people forget or don't know about, you talk to a former iPhone engineer, Evan Dahl, who basically told you that there were two pieces that made the iPhone what it was, right? The first was the multi-touch screen or interface or what have you that really came from Wayne Westerman's Fingerworks, which was acquired by Apple. And then also the work of John Harper, who was an engineer at the company and who worked on the core animation team, which really created like the kind of software aspect of that, that you could really interact with in a way that made sense to

people, basically. Would you say that that is the right assessment of the iPhone of what made it successful? Or do you think there are other pieces of it? So, yeah, I mean, I think that was, it was pretty crucial that they got that language, that sort of digital vernacular, right? Where you are actually interacting with the screen, with your fingers in a way that felt new enough to be exciting and both to be usable in a highly utilitarian sense. The thing that he doesn't mention, those are two very core things. The other element would be the UX designers who were Boz Ording and Imran Chowdhury, the guys that really sort of made sure that that language was creating that sense of delight. It's become so rote now at this point that

like the idea that anybody would like experience delight, like scrolling through their iPhone, uh, is just a totally foreign concept at this point. It's more likely to like elicit, you know, exasperation or a sense of doom. But back then when you flick through your, you know, your contact list, and it was and it really scrolled and the physics kind of matched up to how like a Rolodex would work, or when a page reached the end, and it kind of bounced back up, all of these things, they were really novel. And they did a lot to generate that sense of excitement among a new sort of wave of consumers, It really was sort of a

pleasure to use. And I think that that element is a little bit understated these days in sort of onboarding all of these consumers and people who would go on to sort of inaugurate the use of the smartphone as sort of a fundament of daily life. And they really did have to get that right. I think I quote in the book, or maybe I didn't end up quoting it in the book, but Imran, one of the chief designers told me a story about how he would show the device to his toddler and he'd let her hold the prototype iPhone.

And when she could navigate it, I think she was two years old or something, he knew that they had succeeded. So like right there, that kernel of like when, when a toddler, when literally a toddler can do it, that's when it's ready. That's when he knew he had a hit on his hands. So I do think that that those three sort of elements are really what set the table for, for the success. I also point out in the book that the success did not actually come in any meaningful way. I mean, we just mentioned how like, yeah, Apple had these core consumers who wanted to buy this thing, and it was a very cool sort of luxury product. But it really didn't

generate mass interest beyond those circles, beyond the gear heads and the gadget folks until they got to the next iteration, which was the app store. And they let developers in and famously documented in the book that Steve Jobs did not want to do that. He really thought that that would ruin the sanctity of the phone. And if it dropped a call, it would be the worst thing in the world. It was all about having the seamless design and doing the things that they had approved and that they had made sure could operate up to their standards. And he was really hesitant to do that. And one exec who worked at the time who told me that they were looking at the sales figures before and after that they did that. And he says it just shoots up their internal figures of usage and adoption just skyrockets after they break down that walled garden, even

just a little bit. They still have to approve all the apps. It's nowhere near an actual open ecosystem and it never has been. But it was basically on the strength of people being able to create apps that other people, you know, wanted to use to find a wider audience that it really took off. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of important points there. I think I want to come back to the App Store point. So I want to put a pin in that for just a second. But even your description of how like the interface and the UX of the iPhone are really key to being able to achieve that mass adoption and bring people on.

You know, I remember early on there was discussions about how, like, yes, Android had a similar smartphone interface, but it didn't have that same degree of like usability as the iPhone one. And that kind of developed later, right? How Apple was able to kind of bring in, as you were talking about, how it made it really easy for a bunch of people to use, even really young people who wouldn't have interacted with any kind of computer or device like this before, which was really essential. Before we move on to the App Store piece, because I do want to expand on that and to

talk about it more and the impact of it, I wanted to finish this part of it, I guess, by talking about the toll on the iPhone team that we often forget about when it actually came to putting the iPhone together and to developing this product, right? Like we often think about how Steve Jobs is presenting it on stage. It seems like this thing that just kind of arrived and then everyone was dealing with. But in the book, you talk to Brett Bilbray, who you say wasn't a core member of the iPhone team, but was working at Apple. And he remembered how hard it was on the people on that team who were working on that product, saying that a bunch of the people he knew died of heart attacks from cancer that was related to the stress

from the job. He said, 36 people I worked with at Apple have died. It is intense. You know, what was the kind of human toll of the creation of this product? Yeah, you know, it was extremely intense. And in a way that, you know, it's sometimes a little tricky to talk about because these are guys and it's almost exclusively guys who are making really good money. You know, they're in an otherwise privileged set of circumstances. at least the 80s when a lot of these like small sort of crews of startups or hackers or they really sort of valorized this sort of working around the clock kind of ideal like they really they pictured sort of a a situation where you're you know staying up till 4 a.m., there's pizza boxes lining the hallways, it stinks. These are all almost like badges of honor, theoretically, that if you're working on something really exciting, really sort of, what was it? It was going to put a dent in the universe,

as Steve Jobs famously put it, that then those sort of circumstances would be requisite, that you would have to do that. And it's not clear whether some of these folks, I mean, it is clear that a couple of the guys were deeply uncomfortable with that. And it was harder on some than others, those that had families. One, his partner was gravely sick and he had to spend his time in a small windowless room on Apple's campus, like trying to make a consumer electronic product. So it really did sort of cause a lot of tensions, a lot of stress. A lot of people talked about the divorces that ruined their personal lives. But it is a really strange sort of configuration because, you know, it was sort of part of the culture in a way that is different, that it seems legitimately different culturally than, I mean, maybe it's one of the great inventions of Silicon Valley as sort of a

culture that it can sort of impart those expectations onto its workforce without, you know, necessarily making it obvious that that's what's happening, that they're really just extracting as much value, a thousand percent more value than the average worker from these people and leaving them drained oftentimes because it's so ingrained in the culture. I think that's changed a little bit. You don't really hear these stories quite as much for good reason. I mean, it just, in hindsight, like, could we have had an iPhone like six months later without people's marriages falling apart, without anything? I don't see why not.

Like, I mean, he was afraid of leaks and of various sort of like corporate competition and arbitrage and whatever. But most of that at that point was probably paranoia. Hello to Blade, devil's advocate. There was an executive who said the fact that they were able to do it without any advance leaking out, you know, without word spilling or the design. Now, you know, every time there's going to be a new iPhone, we know what the specs are because some vendor on the supply chain in China or elsewhere leaks it. So we all know, but it was genuinely valuable from a marketing standpoint to sort of like have Steve Jobs bequeath this unto the world,

like Moses with a tablet, you know, it was like, there was like, from, you know, a corporate perspective, there was a real dollar value that he put in the hundreds of millions of you know everybody it got everyone's attention it won a press cycle not just once but you know two or three times and it really was like a notable event which isn't to justify it or any of that behavior but it is one of those things that i think once people actually experienced that and once sort of word got out i mean there's only so you, you could go like, wow, that was crazy, right? But you're at the end of the day, your life is still ruined by those choices you made, and you're going to be less likely to do it again. And they're now even

the monopolization of so many of these big tech companies, there are just fewer opportunities for that sort of freewheeling kind of thing to happen. There's more, you know, expectations that it won't happen among the workforce, which is good. So yeah, it was kind of a kind of like maybe the tail end of that trend from you can market at the beginning when Apple was flying the pirate flag over there, the office that was making the Mac, you know, back, you know, decades ago, and then to sort of these, the iPhone, P1 and P2, you know, the purple project that was so secretive and so consuming. That was an era where you really were expected to sort of work these long, stress inducing, hair falling out, you know, neglecting your family's sort of round-the-clock

shift. I think it's really fascinating that you make that comparison, right? The early Apple, which is like, you know, tearing down the hierarchies and giving power to the individual and all this kind of stuff, like the narrative that Steve Jobs was weaving back in the 80s, you know, pulling from brand and the whole earth catalog and all these sorts of things, right, to Apple as like the major monopolist that it has become today, where it is like, at least until recently was like the largest publicly traded company in the world. Like it's very much not of that stature anymore. Or, you know, it doesn't have that attitude, even though it will still want you to believe that about it very commonly. Yeah. And I'm almost surprised we haven't seen more like weird management literature, you know, type books sort of emerge around this whole thing.

Because what he essentially had to do is Steve Jobs had to convince everybody that it was that way again. Apple was already, you know, decades old. It was a mature tech company. It had kind of an ugly 90s where it wasn't so successful and it was losing out to Microsoft. But then it got the iPad, it got some new Macs that people liked, and it was definitely back on its feet. It was a huge corporation. But in order to sort of elicit these sort of myth these mythological trappings and inspire its workforce to tap into that mythology, it had to pretend again. You saw people putting, this is the fight club on thecy where even people at the company couldn't know about it. And, you know, you couldn't. So it was like, we're really up to something that's game changing. They're almost competing against Apple itself as well as their actual competitors. He had to sort of foster this almost in hindsight, like silly kind of atmosphere where there was sort of like an us against them mentality and there was some

manufactured reason why they had to be like burning the midnight oil like you know going back to the roots of the of the hacker era etc like it really i'm surprised we haven't seen more like you want to make a product like the iphone like you have to do all this kind of stuff because it was, you know, in hindsight, it seemed very, in some ways concerted the moves that were made to sort of emulate those, those conditions and get those results out of folks. I think it's fascinating that you describe that, right? Because like you were saying that at Apple, there was this pressure to, you know, work these long hours in order to achieve this product and how, in some ways, this was this pressure to, you know, work these long hours in order to achieve this product and how, in some ways, this was kind of something that was part of the Silicon Valley culture in a

really unique sort of way. The idea that this was part of what you did at a company, that it was part of how you built a company, et cetera, et cetera. And I feel like the iPhone plays an important role in extending some of those ideas about work into the broader economy, right? Because at this period, at the end of the own kind of cloud service. And Microsoft does the same. I believe that one's in the early 2010s, Microsoft's. But, you know, there are these means of making it easier for people to like start businesses are emerging. And there are these few developments within the same period of time with the emergence of cloud, the kind of mobilization of the internet, it going mobile and the use of the app stores that creates this on one hand app economy where you have this idea that, you know, everyone needs to kind of be entrepreneurial and create

their own app. And this is the way that you make the world better and can address a whole range of problems if you just an app will solve it. Right. And then on the other, like the flip side of that is the gig economy that is really made possible because of this development where on one hand you have the app developers who are pushing themselves in this kind of culture that you're talking about you know work as long as possible to churn out this app that will hopefully be a big hit get noticed in the app store make make a lot of money. And then on the other hand, many of the most popular apps are relying on this increasingly kind of precarious labor force

that are told that they are also entrepreneurs in this way, starting their own businesses by offering their labor through these apps, but are being like exploited and mistreated in ways that would have otherwise been not as acceptable. Like I'm sure you still would have seen it in the economy, but it would have been more difficult to pull off in a way if it didn't have like the smoke screen of like new technology. Absolutely. The first thing I do want to note that when I said it's like that culture of like working, you know, insane hours all the time, it's not that that's gone. I just don't think that it's quite as valorized or as mythologized as it once was. I mean, you'll still 100% have plenty of companies and startups that will demand you work long hours. And in the face of evidence that it's a good idea

to do otherwise, Elon Musk just said that he wants everybody back in the office. Otherwise, you're not working. So it's still like it's still there. It's just I think it's just like a little bit less pronounced. But I think what you've hit on is 100 percent right. a lot of sort of values and ideologies around work from Silicon Valley into the broader economy was really operating from that assumption. And I think it's an interesting way to look at it. And you get different pieces of it from, you know, Uber is kind of like, you know, you can, there is early language, I think, around the Uber app that is like, you know, you're just being an entrepreneur by even using Uber.

Right. Like it makes it easy for you to sort of go out and start, you know, making your own way. You just hit the button and you and then it sort of makes it imbues sort of the entire enterprise from the onset with like very Silicon Valley esque sort of attitudes about work, where if you're not making enough money, it's just, you're not, you're not working hard enough. You're not going long enough. You're not like playing the games that they set up for you well enough. And Lyft almost sort of like is the other part of that equation where it's like, whoa, like work is fun and goofy. Put a mustache on your car and now like anything goes. Like now you won't even notice that we're exploiting our workforce because it's all so fun and silly and you can do it, you know, in your spare time. So those two pieces, like I really feel like we're kind of

instrumental in maybe a way that's not totally dissimilar from like, you know, a product launch having sort of like a sticky sort of element that people can glom onto the Yeah, people had these two different ways. I mean, I'm also old enough to remember when Uber and Lyft launch, like, well, like Uber was like, kind of like, austere and cool and black and silver. And it's like, Uber, like, okay, like, if I'm going to drive for Uber, like, I'm going to be part of something that's like cool and serious. And maybe I'm a businessman just by pressing this button. And Lyft was, you know, was much wackier and it made it seem harmless and kind of almost silly to be part of this whole thing. And I think, you know, it ended up as such that people weren't really interrogating what that meant.

I mean, people were there were scholars and people doing good work, but like the broader press and sort of, you know, and tech consumers and people who are sort of still sort of hyped from the early fumes of the iPhone were sort of like eager to have that story in a new medium. It has plagued us ever since. I think it's interesting, like to hear you describe that, right? Because in that period that you're talking about with the emergence of these apps, with the emergence of Uber and Lyft in particular, on one hand, there is the kind of ideology after the recovery that the tech

industry is going to be what kind of drives part of the growth and dynamism of the American economy that helps the recovery, even as the very companies that are supposed to be driving that are enabling and are really built on exploiting the labor of people who lost their jobs during the recession and couldn't find anything better, right? And were then kind of preyed on by these companies. But then we had the flip side, like the narrative presented it in an entirely different way where actually this wasn't exploitation, but empowerment. And I feel like when we think about Apple, like it relates into this broader narrative that they have tried to sell us about how their products enable us to be like these

creative people who are like forwarding our projects by using our Macs and our iPhones and iPads and whatever. And it allows us to like be creative in this way that other products and stuff don't and entrepreneurial as well, of course, which which also kind of ties into that early ideology of Apple that Steve Jobs was pushing about empowering the consumer. And so I think it's just so interesting how these things like come together in this moment as the iPhone is emerging. And this ideology is really useful for the tech industry, but also like, because there's so much desperation in the economy and this desire to find something that is going to drive growth in the future, then it's like, okay, everyone needs to like accept this at least until, you know, there's a turn later on, when things kind of finally shift. And we're like,

oh, shit, maybe that was a bad idea. But like, in this moment, it's like, so hegemonic and powerful. Yeah, it is. And it's almost absurd. You know, we see this time and again, through the history of technology, where, you know know some big new mega capitalized company like uber like is touting these huge disruptions and and it i mean it's a taxi company where instead of picking up the phone you press a button on the phone right it was like it uses some gps but it nothing nothing particularly revolutionary but it's a good use case to look at because the two things combined, right? The iPhone had all of these very pleasant, new feelings, sort of stimulating, kind of exciting animations that were small. But they were big enough to sort of feel like now you were inhabiting a space that could be considered the future.

You're pressing this button and it opens up a window and it says, here's a map and watching your driver move on the map. Even if it, as we now know, was often fabricated, it wasn't like in those early days, the driver wasn't, they would just kind of run an animation because they just wanted you to think that there was always a driver nearby. So it was just like a very simple animation, but it still felt like you were kind of interacting with some version of the future. So like the two companies just kind of, you know, Uber certainly took advantage of that, but Apple did too. The biggest things that really wound up driving the iPhone were probably apps like were Facebook and Uber, things that you could actually

do on the phone beyond, you know, waste time or get sucked into your email inbox again, or, you know, use a shittier web browser than the one you have on your laptop. So it needed these use cases that like also presented it as like a vessel for the future. And Uber provided that. And even if like, to me anyways, it just, it does, it seems so absurd and so comical that it's the actual innovations are so tiny. I mean, its biggest innovation, as has been noted by myself, yourself, and plenty of others, is an excuse to get around, you know, labor regulations or laws in various cities where by calling itself a tech company, it was a linguistic innovation more. It was a legal, you know, innovation more than any, any technological innovation, but the iPhone gave it a vector and a very satisfying

vector through which to do that. And it, you know, it did that time and again, and it's continuing to do that today. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's such a great point. And like, especially how these apps that enabled this kind of exploitation were really key to giving you a reason to use your iPhone to access all of these new services that were turning up that you could only get through having your smartphone only use in that way. I think another piece of this that was really interesting to me as I was thinking about the impact of the iPhone was in this moment as well. And I feel like it started maybe to disrupt some of our like techno utopianism or maybe not ours, but the techno utopianism of the moment was the Snowden revelations, which I believe were 2013 about,

you know, the NSA spying that was enabled by these digital technologies by the internet. And certainly how we can see now with our phones as well, how, you know, it's easy to kind of buy the data and track anyone's phone and where they're going and whatnot, if you really know what you're doing. And so Apple really has been talking a lot about like privacy and how it's all about protecting your privacy in recent years, like it's been really key to their message. But the whole kind of infrastructure of the iPhone, and of kind of smartphones and the mobile internet in general, has really been essential for enabling the expansion of surveillance in our lives, the expansion of tracking, which has had a whole load of consequences. But I feel like Apple and many of

these companies are like able to escape their role in like the culpability for that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that long term. Looking back on that now, any tech company has suffered any serious sort of consequences for its role in the various programs. And they were pretty good, at least sort of from a like a public relations perspective, weaseling out of saying like, oh, well, we weren't part of PRISM or this was this. And they were pretty good at obfuscating the whole affair enough to where people just kind of were content to let, in fact, I think weirdly, you know, if Verizon and the telecoms kind of got it a little bit worse than the tech companies,

which maybe that's just a testament to the residue of the halo they still retained at that time. But yeah, no, it's a good point. And it's interesting to see how Apple in particular has recognized this in ways that it feels could now sort of benefit the consumer by pointing out that it's better than as smartphones have more and more come to sort of carry the same features. I think it's among those who sort of care about this kind of thing. It's pretty widely accepted that they're all pretty, they all carry the potential to track and to, you know, their

location services, you can disable them, but you'll always find an app that still, you know, somehow manages to track your movements. And Apple's pitch has kind of become like, we will do a better job. And what we will do is, yes, we will track you, but we will store it all on this chip that only is on your phone. We'll call it the secure enclave. Only you will know. We don't see it. No, we don't have we don't get access to that.

That is your business, but it's still going to allow you to have all the services and fun stuff you need. And, you know, it's, it is one of those areas where I wish I had like a little more literacy around sort of the tech, but it isn't. It's like an intensely complex space, like knowing what the secure enclave or what this chip, you know, it's a whole chip now that the iPhone has that is sort of in charge of encrypting your data and running, you know, the facial recognition scans that unlock your phone and storing that data,

you know, that allegedly is all housed on each individual unit. But I mean, it doesn't seem to pass the smell test to me. There are too many times when we learn that bits and pieces of this location data, especially if you're just using other apps too, right? Like, I mean, you're going to probably end up using Google Maps or something or, you know, or Uber or Postmates or something that's going to take pieces of this data. So it has been since the Snowden revelations, kind of this era of sort of acclimating to that fact rather than continuing to protest it. In hindsight, it's kind of interesting to me that like that was one of the great sort of protest moments against technology of the last 10 years in that we wound up not actually wanting, and I'm using the we way too broadly, but the outrage didn't necessarily persist, you know, in a way that sort of resulted in like a meaningful change in the way that companies sort of harvest our data or sell it. I mean, we know that it's traveling all over the web all the time, all this tracking data and third party vendors.

And it's still a mess. So it is interesting to see that that, you know, was one of those beacons, one of those moments that really did cause outrage. And I don't know if it would again. Like what would cause outrage on that level? You know, I guess like Cambridge Analytica was one. We care more about those intrusions, at least superficially, than we do about, you know, revelations about labor conditions at an Amazon factory or, you know. But generally, that serves as like a moment when these terrible aspects of technology become normalized and like just further entrenched in the years that follow. Like we know it's there. There's like a feeling among many that there's nothing you just kind of accept it because it's been happening for a while now. And, you know, over time, things just appear normal, even if they're terrible. And I feel like that conversation about Apple and privacy and surveillance and stuff like that also gets into this larger thing that's that's happening right now this larger kind of scrutiny of the tech companies

that where apple seems to like yes there's this scrutiny on the app store and apple's control over the app store but it's monopoly size and kind of the it's largesse the control that it has over many of the technologies that people use every day, doesn't seem to be getting the same degree of like scrutiny and concern as say Amazon or Facebook or any of these other tech giants, even though it's also massive. I wonder what you make of that. Yeah, I think a lot of it is sort of it's careful marketing strategy, honestly. Like Apple has, you know, we were just talking about privacy. Apple has taken pains over the last 10 years to brand itself as better on security, better on privacy than it's I mean, it's kind of a low bar to clear.

But it's basically saying we're better than Google, you know, we will. And it has made some, you know, substantive sort of moves when it has been advantageous to the company to do so. Sort of like the Facebook example, sort of coming down against collecting certain kinds of, or not letting, you know, Facebook collect certain kinds of data on the app, which is as much of a, sort of a, you know, a corporate strategy against the competitor as it is user-focused. But it has done a better job of presenting itself as more user-friendly. Given its position in the marketplace, it is a little bit less vulnerable to controversy since it sells an iPhone or an iPad, or that's like sort of the bulk of its revenue. And even though we still, you know, hear reports of these nasty working conditions in its factories, that just doesn't move people as much over here as it does learning

that Facebook quote unquote, you know, manipulated their news feed or, you know, let misinformation ramp it on its platform. Apple's abuses, for whatever reason, have been easier for the company to relegate to the shadows, easier for it to sidestep. It has maintained its relative halo in a way that a lot of its competition hasn't. I mean, we're now seeing, again, some moves to the contrary. Apple's the very first retail store in Maryland just unionized. This was something that has been going on for 10 years. When I was reporting the book, I talked to Corey Maul, who was, you know, one of the very first sort of people you could call a labor leader at Apple. He tried to organize some Apple stores in the Bay Area in, boy, I want

to say 2011, maybe 10 years ago, something like that. It was about a decade ago. And he was treated with a lot of derision in the press. And he was in another instance, very much ahead of his time because the conditions are similar as they were today. App store workers, the geniuses and so forth are incredibly productive workers. I forget the stat off the top of my head, but it's something like they generate like between six to 10 times more revenue for the company than like the average comparable sort of worker at another retail store. They are really good at what they do as a rule. They stick around and yet they're also overworked.

There's been cases of workplace discrimination. There's been a lot of what you would consider pretty typical labor issues that Apple managed to sidestep a bit longer than a lot of its competition. So I think maybe that's changing now, maybe given the wave of Amazon and Starbucks and Apple retail workers are now maybe have a way to join that effort. But Apple's been tough to work at, both for the people who assemble the phones, both as we touched on earlier, the people who are designing the phones, and for the people who sell the phone for a decade now. But again, it's Apple, it makes a nice product and you hold it in your phone, you kind of need it. You don't want to think about it every day. Or maybe the fact that you might have to think about it every day, that prospect

makes it easier for you to kind of, to not, it does for me, you know, like this is just the thing that I have to, that is the portal through which I organize and do my day. I can't spend every interaction I have with it thinking about all of the various shortcomings of its parent company. But yeah, Apple has through a combination of making a product that people genuinely like savvy and aggressive public relations strategy and like just the sheer marketplace dominance it still has this power over the press that i think that its competitors have started to lose you know if you want to get into the apple event you may be going to be more inclined to play with kid gloves a bit more with apple you still want to be able to review its products. You still, Apple's still the only company that I, that like reveals a product

that, and it trends on Twitter, just its product demo. You know, there aren't really any other companies. I mean, maybe once in a while Google's or if like Tesla has like, has a cyber truck or Elon Musk has some silly made up product. that's never going to obtain any semblance of real form. Maybe those trend. But Apple is pretty much the only tech company that to this day sets the date. It's not a surprise. It's like, here you go. Everybody, get ready.

Here's when we're going to, you're going to, we're going to show you the new, like barely changed iteration of your phone. And we're going to show you how it has like one more camera module on it than before. This one is going to, we moved the bezel like a millimeter and it, maybe it'll have, you know, I don't know, maybe it can last another three seconds underwater without being ruined. And sure enough, it trends on Twitter, you know, everybody's still watching this thing. So Apple has managed to sort of fortress itself up in a way that has made it a little bit harder to dent its reputation, even though it has all these horrible that we didn't even talk about. It's, you know, continued habit of, you know,

not paying taxes, corporate tax avoidance and, and whatnot. And it's a supply chain is, is still, I haven't looked into it recently, you know, on my own on an investigative level, there's nothing that would make me believe that it's any different today in its practices of using dubiously ethical minds to source its minerals that make up each computer product or the iPhone or labor practices in its factories in China and India and Brazil. It's still all going on apace. All the things that we get mad at Amazon on the labor front for, or the other tech giants on the corporate earnings and tax dodging, it's doing all the same stuff. It's still an know, it's great to see the Apple stores going to unionize and hopefully more of them do. And, you know, I think it's interesting to see if it will dent Apple's reputation, right, as they try to pull out the union busting tactics that we've seen from Starbucks and

Amazon and, you know, these other companies and choosing to take that route rather than say what Microsoft has been saying, where not to say that they're like this great, amazing company, but at least that they said they would recognize the union at Raven Software under Activision Blizzard if that acquisition goes through. But I think on your point about the supply chains, one thing that has stood out to me as I've been watching these recent Apple product unveilings is the environmental framing that the company has really been building over quite a while, right? Saying that there's so many recycled minerals in its products and that its supply chain

is like monitored and so it's not so bad and that they enable more recycling, even though they make it really hard for the products to repair. And it does seem like very much focused around as, you know, they've kind of reached a point of saturation with sales of the iPhone in its major markets, that it's allowing the consumers to look at the products and to kind of without guilt say, OK, I can buy a new one and not feel bad about the mining that's happening or how it's being produced because Apple is saying that it's doing all this recycling, that it's monitoring its supply chain, that it's this really ethical company, right? And so we can believe that.

And I can go out and buy a new MacBook because Apple, Tim Cook just announced it on stage or a new iPhone because whoever was out there saying that it was so nice and or I watched this, you know, verge review of it and they said, oh, look, it's so nice. It's so cool. So I can go buy one. And it does seem like the environmental framing around it is really focused on saying, like, don't feel guilty. Go buy the new product. It's totally OK because we've made this, you know, ethical, right? This ethical consumer product. And so I think this is what I wanna end on. As I was saying, and as you were saying,

the upgrades to these iPhones are getting very minimal year on year at this point. And that's the case for many of the products. Yes, Apple rolled out a new chip in its computers recently, but I'm sure that that will just become very standard soon too. And there's not a whole lot you can upgrade about a laptop other than the chip that's in it, right? And so the future of the iPhone looks like, you know, it's still going to make them a lot of money. Certainly

people are still going to keep buying it, but it seems like Apple needs to have something else as these sales of the iPhone plateau and they don't have like a new big thing. So, you know, we've seen Apple grow from, as you were saying earlier in the conversation, from this like scrappy company in the 1980s that was selling this particular narrative to this massive monopoly now where Steve Jobs, kind of the more countercultural figure who led it, is gone and you have the money manager, Tim Cook, who's in charge of it now. So I wonder just like broadly where you see Apple going from here and like what its future looks like. Yeah. Well, I think that's the $6 million question for everybody who watches Apple,

the entire executive staff at Apple. I think, you know, I think it's pretty clear at this point that they don't know. There's been all these sort of big projects that have kind of surfaced to some extent, you know, these big secret projects. They had the Titan project, they had their own car and they never really have pulled the trigger on anything substantial. I think the last product category that they really entered was the watch. I substantial. I think the last product category that they really entered was the watch. I mean, I may be wrong on that, but that was, you know. I'd say the watch and other than that, like the services that they just keep expanding instead to kind of eat everyone else's lunch and just copy all these other services, right?

Yeah. I mean, and that's long been sort of the line about Apple is that now that it's saturated the market with iPhones, they can find ways to, you know, you see them making more cheaper iPhones than they used to with the SE sort of that was a market that they really didn't enter for a long time because they always wanted to kind of be thought of as sort of like the top tier product. And now that it doesn't matter as much, they're trying to reach some of those consumers, too. And, you know, it's one of its few vulnerabilities. It, you know, I think we alluded to it earlier. You mentioned some of the scrutiny over its monopoly practices.

It got into a dustup with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite. And that, you know, was seen kind of as a victory for Apple. It was, it sort of, but it also sort of made them change a few of their policies. Apple wants a cut of everything, you know, that if you do business on its app store, even if it's not just paying for the app, if it's an in-app purchase and Apple takes a cut, you got it. So there are a couple ways that are a little more intuitive to get around that now. But that also looks like one of those areas where if Apple starts leaning on that more heavily, it becomes more vulnerable

because taking 30% of what somebody makes just to put it on basically a loading page so you can get it down an iPhone or an Apple product is pretty onerous and is a pretty gross rebuke to what sort of the original like ethos of computing as it was understood by like the early like Apple founders would be. I mean, a lot of that has reached that arena at this point. So I think it's like kind of a delicate area. I mean, clearly it wants to expand as much as possible, sell as many apps, as many services, get as many people to sort of download its TV,

its streaming competitor on board. You're seeing more packaging of all of these things, but it is just kind of seeming more and more that Apple is transitioning into its sort of role as like a slightly shinier, like general electric, where it's just like selling app services here and selling its hardware here and selling its stuff. It's maybe not that exciting to most people anymore, but it's a little bit better than the competition. So maybe I'll buy it from Apple like I always have. And the cries and calls among the Apple diehards for Tim Cook to like take a swing and make something new have kind of simmered down over the years. Like that was his big critique. He played it safe. But like, wouldn't you, like you said earlier, Apple has been perched atop the mountain of profitable companies in human history. Sometimes it loses a notch or two,

but this approach is working. What it is doing is working. I mean, you can, for the same reasons that Apple has proved relatively untouchable from a reputational standpoint, it has not needed to innovate. It has not needed to sort of fulfill this vacant sort of hollow demand from a small section of its fan base to like take a big swing, make some VR goggles or something like it doesn't even need to do that anymore. It has settled into a routine. It is relatively predictable. I think that as you know, if trends hold, you could squeeze years and years out of this model as it is now. It doesn't have to change much. It just, it apples in a position where it doesn't, even if it is still relying most heavily on the iPhone and these other sort of, iPad is still a section of it, but it's mostly iPhone. It's still driven by the iPhone. And even if it's become kind of a wash and somewhat indistinguishable

from whatever Samsung or Google product, it's still the market leader. It's still setting that standard. It is still sort of out front just enough. And that's just what Apple has been doing just enough like, oh, we're just a little bit more secure. We're secure. You can trust us a little bit. We're the ones that'll kind of like keep Facebook to task when it's unpopular. We'll, you know, we'll keep it in its place, but Google won't do that. You pay the extra buck, pay an extra, you know, 200 bucks for our phone. We'll do that. The phone may be a little bit better or, you know, or maybe it won't be, but we're still Apple. You know, we still will control everything to the extent that it's satisfying to you. So I think that's its pitch now. It has lost the need for a moonshot. It is this monopolist tech company that sits in rarefied position in the industry landscape. And there's no real reason why it has to budge anytime soon. I think what you're describing shows why it's kind of marketing and PR is so important, right?

Because if it's not really doing much innovative, it still has to present that image to people. And so it's marketing, it's keynotes, all these things that you were talking about are so important. And I feel like to close our conversation, I want to read a quote from your book, which I think sums up what you were saying there. And you write, the iPhone project is no longer about assembling a fresh constellation of interaction ideas or inventing new ways to bring mobile computing for the masses. It's about selling more iPhones. Brian, it was fantastic to talk with you as always. Thanks so much. Always a joy. you as always. Thanks so much.

Always a joy. Always a pleasure. Thanks so much, Paris. Cheers. Brian Merchant is a tech journalist and the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone. You can follow him on Twitter at at BC Merchant. You can follow me at at Paris Marks,

and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. If you want to support the work that goes into making it every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.