The Vergecast - Bonus: Ctrl-Walt-Delete special edition - iMac 20th anniversary

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

Ctrl-Walt-Delete returns for a special episode all about the iMac 20th anniversary. Walt Mossberg and Nilay Patel reminisce on the introduction of Apple's iMac, and how it influenced the open web and computers going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Control Out Delete, a thoroughly retired podcast from the Verge. I am Eli Patel, the editor-in-chief of the Verge. I'm joined for the first time in quite a while by my friend Walter S. Mossberg. How are you doing, Walt? I'm fine for a poor pensioner. Yeah. I'm sure you're really scraping by. I'm just a retiree scraping by.

I've learned a lot about how little you get from Social Security. Let me just tell you. Yeah. So this is in the Vergecast feed. this episode. We're doing it separate from the regular Vurchase, but Walt and I had a show called Control Alt Delete for a while. Walt retired, as you may or not know, but this is true. This last week was the 20th anniversary of the IMAQ, and Walt and I got into a pretty friendly spar on Twitter about the success of the IMAC and where it came from and what it was doing. And Walt, when you retired, you promised we were going to, you were going to pop back around every now and again. And this figured like a great time to have you pop back around. It's also,

a pretty newsy time in tech. There's developer conferences going on everywhere. So I figured we would just do another little short bonus control-walt delete, and hopefully we'll do some more in the future. So thank you for coming on. It sounds great. You're paying me for this, though, right? Yeah, yeah, it'll be in your social security check.

I mean, you know, big money, I hope. Yeah. I mean, you know. Absolutely. So, well, okay. So 20th anniversary of the IMAC. Yeah. I have your review, the IMAC, from July 3rd.

30th, 1998, the very first one, the Bondi Blue. I think your opening to this is relatively famous in tech writing. Here's the headline. Apple introduces IMac, a fast and potent PC, the first lines. These words are being created on the coolest-looking desktop personal computer I've ever used. It's a handsome, two-tone devil, sort of a blue-green and off-light, tapered at the rear with a crisp, built-in-inch monitor, and internal speakers. It takes up very little space and looks like part of the decor in your home, not an invader from some techies workshop. That, I think, sums it up.

That is how we all think of the iMac in history. It's the computer that brought style to the tech industry, that moved computers sort of out of the basement and into the living room, that brought design to the forefront. It was the kickoff of the revitalized Steve Jobs Apple. It certainly, you know, Johnny Ive became a presence in the world because he designed this computer. Is that how you think of it, too?

Or do you think of it bigger? I agree with all of that. I would go further, you know, lots of people know this and have written it, but some people, some younger listeners may not remember this. It saved the company. You know, it came out 10 months,

just 10 months after Steve Jobs had come back to Apple to rescue it. And it's famous among those who are old enough to remember that Apple was, depending on who you believe, it was 60 or 90 days away from having to file bankruptcy when he came back. And, you know, he got, there's a whole long story. It's not worth going into it.

But he got some kind of temporary bridge money. And, but they obviously had to have a product that was going to be a hit and a success that was modern and different and would stand out from everything else. And so famously, he killed almost every product they had. And they went to work on this, the IMAX. a consumer laptop which came out, which was similarly, you know, it was colorful and all that called the iBook. And then they had a pro desktop and a pro laptop.

And even the pro desktop was, even though it was a tower, it was also, you know, had design applied to it. You know, it was kind of translucent. If I remember, it had those big handles. It was kind of cool. So the, but the IMAQ was the key. It was the start of it.

The one thing, Looking back on that review now 20 years later that I wish I had said that you and I actually were talking about in our Twitter discussion was that, and we did agree on this, although we, you know, you had to go off on a crusade about the open web. That's what I'm here for. I know. I understand. And I support the open web. I do. I do support the open web.

Happy to talk about it. But what I wish I would have put in that review was that this was, I believe, I believe. it's fair to say that this was the first personal computer built from the ground up for the internet era for the internet people for it may sound incredible to people who weren't around them but if you bought a Windows PC or even a Mac preceding this one it didn't come with the any Ethernet even though broadband was beginning to happen and some of them still didn't even have dial-up modems I mean most of the Some by 1998, or many of them finally had dial-up modus, but particularly Windows computers.

Some of them, you had to go buy a modem card or an external modem. So this had both of those things. This was ready to go. And they did a famous commercial, which you referenced in one of your tweets, but just briefly, it was hilarious. I watched it again. It was hilarious. There's only a kind of a grainy version of it on YouTube. It shows a race to set up a computer between.

I think a 10-year-old kid or something. Yeah, it's a 10-year-old and his dog. And his dog. And they're sending up an IMac. And a 25-year-old, like, Brown University student setting up an HP, a very specific HP model that was popular. They were bending over backwards to be, they picked a popular model. They said it was a good computer. They deliberately, of course, picked it one that had a slower processor and all that.

But it came in, you know, two or three boxes like Windows computers did, and you had to connect the speakers, and you had to, you know, put the Ethernet in it. And then you had to register Windows and go through all these steps. And they said, we'll help this guy out by even speeding up the video. But the whole idea was you could get from opening the box to being on the Internet with the IMA in like 10 minutes. I forgot, something like that, 12 minutes, whatever it was. And I even in my column did something similar, but I didn't do a. comparison. And the Brown University student, it was like 27 minutes before you finally got on the internet. And the irony is they were both going on the internet, by the way, with Internet Explorer.

Yeah. Because that first time, Apple didn't have Safari at that time. So they shipped it with I.E. and Firefox, maybe, I think. I can't remember. There were two browsers. NetScape, Netscape. I.E. and Netscape both were on it. Yeah. And so it was an ad, but it really was true. And the ad, then they had another ad about steps. It wasn't a race. It's just the announcer. Classic Apple kind of ad, the product is slowly turning and you're seeing how beautiful it is. Jeff Goldblum, I think, did the announcing on it.

And he said, step one, plug in the power cord. Step two, plug in the modem cord. Step three. There is no step three. And there wasn't. Yeah, and that's like a massively influential ad, I think, in, you know, you were saying the iMac was a brilliant product. Everyone else in the tech industry was shipping beige boxes with tons of wires.

Apple came out with this like designed product that was beautiful and they had brilliant marketing. And I think that is how most people think of the iMac, right? It's this beginning of the second Steve Jobs era where the combination of his brilliance in marketing and product design and focus on what's important. kind of change the tech industry. It set the stage for the iPod, of course. Set the stage for the iPhone and the iPad, everything that's come after it. And my point, and this was just my little,

I will say it was a little snarky tweet because I think a lot about competition. I'm shocked. I know. But I think a lot about competition in the tech industry. Right. You know, we run the verge as a consumer publication.

I hope that we do a good job of advocating for the consumer. and I think competition is in the consumer's best interest. It's the force that lowers prices and makes better products and all that sort of thing. The opportunity for Apple with the IMac, and this is what you just said, it was designed for the internet, was to get away from the enormous installed base of Microsoft Windows software, because at that moment in time, I remember I had Macs my whole life. Everything cool came out for the PC first.

It was just the way of the world. I'm just like you. I mean, I owned both, and you owned both, I'm sure. Yeah. But it was clear that, you know, I wanted to work more on my Mac, but the better apps came out for Windows. And, you know, I was younger when the iPad came out. I was like 17 years old, 18 years old,

and all my friends had PC games. So if I had to have a PC just to play the games they were playing. And Mac games still are kind of not a thing, but set that aside. But the opportunity for Apple was to say, well, there's this exciting thing called the Internet happening over here. and everybody wants in on it. And Dell will sell you a PC, and it's loaded with stuff,

it's hard to set up. We're going to sell you this integrated thing, and you plug it in, and the marketing is going to say there's no step three to getting on the internet. And then, in your review, you point out, it came with both, this is hilarious,

both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, two web browsers that no longer exist. But so it goes. But it came with both Netscape and, Internet Explorer, and it came with a setup app that basically, I believe it signed you up for an Earthlink account, was a dial-up ISP back then, and it just put you on the internet. And suddenly the internet was in your house. And that was so powerful, and it was such an opening

for jobs and Apple to see this insatiable demand for connectivity. And they basically sold an appliance that let you be connected that could also run Appleworks and office and all the other software that are shipping on it. But without the web, without that opening, without that demand, that insatiable hunger for the internet, I'm not sure the iMac on the strength of its design or the Think Different campaign or, you know, USB connectivity. I'm not sure it would have been a success. And that is, that to me in this moment as, you know, Facebook is a platform that is having its struggles. Google runs a search platform that is increasingly colonizing the internet with things like AMP pages and what have you. Apple obviously

has an app store and its apps don't. run any, like, we see this sort of these walls coming up. I look back at 20 years ago, the iMac was a product that was able to not only change the entire tech industry, save Apple, it was able to bring people to an open platform for connectivity that was not only able to rescue a company, but provide a much better experience to a lot of people. I actually agree with all that, and particularly the salient points being two that you just repeat because I agree with them. One is that if you have the kind of lagging minor minority platform that people are not building apps for, and suddenly the web comes along, and the web is platform is a device client agnostic, essentially, as long as you have, you know, you have a browser that works on the thing. It's a colossal.

It allows you to basically de-leverage a considerable amount of the app advantage. that Windows had. And that, so you're absolutely right. I think even putting the eye in front of IMAQ was deliberately, people think Apple's always had eyes in front of their products. They haven't. The IMAX was the first one. And the eye was put in front of there, I think, stand for Internet.

I don't think they ever exactly said exactly what it was for, but I think that that was meant as a signal to people that this was an Internet computer. and it was. So I entirely agree with you. And then, of course, the brilliant marketing and design sense helped. I will say that rereading that column, which we've both just done, I did mention that they had claimed that just since announcing the IMac, they had gotten, I don't know, 176 apps that had previously not been available on the Mac had become available or somebody, they had companies, it announced that we're going to make it available for the Mac. Because they could see this thing selling,

and they could see that they could maybe make money off it. So apps still mattered in that day. Very few people called the maps. We used to call them programs. If you were in the industry, you called the maps. But so they, you know, yes, it was an internet computer. It was built from the ground up. having the open internet without those walls was crucial to Apple and to the success of the IMac.

And we don't have to have an argument about that. The only argument I would have for you is A, apps still did matter in 1998. And B, apps on Android and iOS today are not in all cases because it's very hard to generalize about 2.5 million pieces of software. But a lot of them, most of them, are just little focused browsers. They are bringing you Internet content. But they're just, you know, the kayak app is not going to act like Google or act like a game or act like, you know, an email client. It's a client for travel reservations. All the data is coming off the Internet.

It's aggregating it and it's pulling. they have the opportunity to design this software, Chrome, the container through which you're getting this, in a way that is synergistic with the purpose of the thing, whereas a browser, of course, is general purpose. And a lot of techies will load up a lot of extensions to try to get it to be more customized for certain tasks. But why do that when you have an app that already is customized for that task? And so I think it's hard to be absolutist about it. I understand where you're coming from. I just don't think it's an either-or thing. Yeah, no, I mean, it's funny. We were tweeting at one other late at night. My newborn Max was literally asleep on me, and I had just

nothing else to do because she likes to sleep on me. It's where she prefers to sleep. And I'm retired, so I have nothing else to do. Walt and I are just hanging out. We got nothing to do. And we were attracting all these very smart people from the tech media and industry who were chiming in. And John Gruber shined in and said, I actually think Apple builds on top of the open web. And he linked to a talk that he gave. You should go look at that tweet. It's a good talk.

And here's where I think that falls apart. It's largely the same point you're making one. Where I think that falls apart is in 1998, when the IMAC came out, the internet, the whole internet, was its killer app, right? It's the reason that you bought one. Right. Well, simplicity, too. Well, right.

But it was an appliance. for the internet in that sort of conception from that time, which is an old conception of computers, but so it goes. And if there were parts of the internet that you couldn't get on the iMac, the value proposition falls apart. So if the New York Times at that time had

signed a deal with MSN and the New York Times is only available to MSN subscribers and MSN is only on Windows, that chips away at the iMac. If I don't even, I'm trying to think of Yahoo was only available on a well or whatever. I get what you said, yeah. It's just funny how far we've come.

All of the first websites I thought to think of didn't exist in 1998. I was going to say Google and Facebook, Twitter. None of those were there. So it was a lot of content websites. It was a lot of early just like check out the internet stuff. And all of it was available on this like open platform where Apple could ship you a computer with a browser. And you would have the exact same experience as somebody with a Windows PC. And now, you know, it's great.

The apps on our phone, like the phone is a constrained screen. It's a lot smaller. You can build custom apps. They're native. they run faster, they perform better, all the stuff. But that means a platform like Windows phone, which had some very good ideas about how to use a phone and how the interface should work,

couldn't compete because there was no Instagram web experience. And I think literally every review we wrote of a Windows phone for five, eight years or whatever it was said, Windows phone doesn't have Instagram in a way that nobody could ever write about iMac, it has every website but this one. Every website but the one you need. So you're right on this point. Again, we can have a huge debate about the overall open web versus apps issue, which I think is a little bit of a false debate. But that's not, we've done that before on control, ultimately. We don't have to do it today. I think you're

right about the IMAC. And I'll strengthen the point by saying that Steve Jobs went and did this a second time. In other words, he built an easier to use internet appliance one more time, as he liked to say. And it was the iPhone. It was. The first iPhone had no apps. There were three huge elements. And this is another famous video that this one, I think, most of our listeners have seen. And if you haven't, you should watch it on YouTube. It's one of the best product introductions, along with the IMac one you'll ever see. And the MacBook era was a pretty great one, too. But, When he introduced the iPhone, one of the big points was it had a real web browser in it. And it did.

You could, he called every other smartphone or alleged smartphone's browser a baby web browser. And in private, he was much harsher than that. But in the iPhone web browser, when you went to the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal or any website, you got the whole website. Now, the whole page on a phone screen wasn't really readable, so they did this, what I thought was a tremendously brilliant thing for the time, where if you tap twice, it automatically and instantly fit it perfectly to the screen, and you could read it, and you could just pan around and, you know, read the article. And, of course, it's better even than that now,

because now publishers make things specifically for mobile. But at that time, they didn't, and the iPhone was, to my knowledge, the first phone that gave you the full web on the phone. And that was a big point in what was valuable about, and what was revolutionary about what they were doing in his mind, and they sold it. Their ads sold it partly on that. Yeah.

So he did the same thing again. And it took him another year to do the app store. And that's it. That was the only point I was making is that if you think about competition, which is maybe only I think about it all the time this way, But the opening that the openness of the web provided to Apple was to put the IMac in front of people and say, this is better at browsing the Internet than everything else because we focused it on that. The iPhone was a different, I think it came about at a different moment in time. Like you said, he said it was an iPod.

He said it was a movie viewer. He said it was a phone. All right. It was widescreen iPod with touch controls, telephone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Those were the three. And I remember, first he announced phone and people cheered. Then he announced widescreen iPod with touch controls and people cheered. And then he said, Breakthrough Internet Communicator third.

And I think the Apple people in the audience cheered and everyone else went, huh? And now, obviously, years later, it's the most important thing. By far the most important thing. So, well, I got to ask you, you were, you know, you review the IMAC in 1998. What was it like when Steve Jobs showed you the IMA for the first time? Was he, did they ship you one in a box and not say anything to you? Did you get to talk to Steve? What was that like?

Well, I wish I could tell you I remembered. I think they did, first of all, they never shipped you anything in a box that was big. You know this. I mean, Apple, listeners don't know this, but, you know, most companies, when you have a review unit coming, you might have had a meeting with them and a demo, but when it comes time to get the review unit, they just ship it like anything. But Apple would never do that. I mean, I actually had one occasion where they made a, not a PR person, they made a senior

executive of Apple who was not involved in the product, but happened to be on their way to Europe. They made that person fly through D.C., stop off in D.C., take a, this is before Uber and lift, take a cab to my house and hand deliver whatever. I can't remember which product was for me to review. because that was the way they did it. So I'm sure I got the IMAQ in person in a meeting. I think what happened was that I didn't get it from Steve.

I talked to Steve about it several times because that's also what happened to me whenever I was reviewing something of theirs. But a team came to my office in Washington, D.C., which is where my office was, and brought it. And I had it. And I had it, I think, for a week, five days, something like that. that and reviewed it. I want to touch on one more thing about the IMAQ and then if there's

anything else you want to talk about, let's do it. If you notice, a bunch of my review is devoted to me being angry that they didn't have a floppy disc in it. Yes, it's like the heart of the review. It's the middle third. Right, right. And I had a big argument with jobs about this at the time in which I basically took the, he took the position that I stayed there, which, and that I'm sure if you look at everybody else's review, it's people raised it and they stated Apple's reason, which was files

in 1998 were getting too big for the size available to store in a floppy disk. And that's true. And in fact, it got ludicrous eventually to a new version of Windows or Mac OS when it was still coming on floppy disk.

It came in like 20 floppies. It was ludicrous. You had to like put one in, take it. You remember this, right? Put one in, take it out. Put one in, take it out. It was stupid. And Apple had invented the three, or Sony had invented, but Apple had popularized the three and a half inch floppy and all that, but it was still too little. And so that was his argument. Not unlike the fact that when they, when they dropped DVDs years later, not unlike dropping the headphone jack. Oh, I think it's like dropping that subject. We'll set that aside. I know you do, but it has some similarities. So when I wrote that, he called me and complained again about it, but not about the rest of the

calm, but about that, you know, and that was fine, but it was just a continuation of the argument we were having before. But the argument was really about timing. I said to him, I get it. I can see why the floppy drive is going to have to be dropped soon, but I was a big champion of the consumer, and I knew a lot of average consumers still dependent upon floppy. And he was saying, well, you can transfer files from email, and I don't think, I don't know if USB thumb drives existed then, but they zip drives and these other higher capacity drives were mentioned. And I just said, look, people are, people buy this.

I made the flat statement in the column that you weren't going to be able to buy the IMAC without buying an external floppy. Yeah. So you really should consider the price to be $100. higher. And that's where I stood on it. And I think every IMAC I ever saw for the next two or three years had, you know, the IMA came out and it set off this wave of redesigning products with clear, translucent

or translucent colored plastic. And everyone had like a translucent plastic floppy drive that was just slightly the wrong color. Yeah. No one quite got Apple's Bondi blue right. It was always... Right, but they sold a bunch of them. Because people still needed floppy drives.

But I think that was, you know, Apple saying, job saying, we're pushing on to the next technology. It's funny, you know, the zip, I have a box of zip drive. I don't have a zip drive at my house, but I still have a box of zip drives. I'm not sure what, or zip disks. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with them, but I can't yet. You're supposed to throw them away. Yeah, clearly. Yet they are.

But, you know, that next round of storage, apart from zip, which was a pretty mediocre technology looking back on it. but everybody had them. Right. It was a bunch of, again, not to beat on this drum, open formats, right? It was files over email. It was DVDs. It was CDs.

Eventually, Apple writeable CDs. I think it... By the way, DVDs was not an open format at first. You will remember there was a giant stupid standards battle between companies that wanted to control the IP, Toshiba versus Sony, I think. And, you know, there was DVD-R minus R and plus. Rossar, it was crazy for a while there. Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things, the IMAC is such a watershed product that I'm

glad we spent half an hour talking about it just now. It was an important product, and it's so important that it was successful because I don't know that any of the consumer or user-centric things that happened afterwards happen without this shock to the system that was the IMA. And I think that's great. So that's that. now for the last five minutes, what are you doing now? You're doing something very interesting with the news literacy project. I just want to, I want you to tell people what that is and what's going on

with it. Sure, thanks. So, you know, I wrote at the time and in The Verge that my, my sense of my retirement was really more of it reinvention. And there were some things I wanted to do that were different. And one of those is I'm on the board of an organization called the News Literacy project and what we do is we basically put it as simply as possible teach kids in middle school and high school how to know what to believe. Not what to believe, but how to how to make judgments about whether a news item that their friend shared or that they see posted on Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter or whatever they're using is fake or true. That's not the whole of it. That's part of it. whether what's the difference between reporting and opinion and satire you would think that people would know that but kids don't know that

We teach why journalism matters, why the press matters. We're strictly nonpartisan. We are not teaching these kids only believe liberal stuff, only believe conservative stuff. That's not the point. The point is this is how you can evaluate whether this was a well-reported stories. Is it all full of nothing but anonymous sources? Does it have at least some on the record sources, have other publications? It sounds fantastic and sensational, and all you want to do is retweet it or reshare it.

But think for a minute. Why is nobody else reporting this if it's so amazing? Maybe it's not true or, you know, maybe it's just to serve somebody's political purpose. So we have a curriculum. It's a digital online curriculum. And by the way, Neelai, it can be used on anybody's device. If the classroom has Chromebooks, we're good. If they have iPads, we're good.

If they have Dells or Macs, whatever they have, we're good. And it's individual teachers can use it, entire school systems can use it, and we're in all 50 states and 90 countries, and we're just getting started. That's what I'm doing. That's awesome. How can people support you in this effort? They can go to check. The name of the curriculum, which we call a virtual classroom, is checkology. And it's not a fact-checking thing, but it means we're teaching students to check things out before they believe them.

called Checkology, and there is a website, checkology.org. So if you're a teacher or a parent or a student and you're interested in it, go to checkology. org. There's a little sample of what it's like. There's some statistics on how it has improved students' understanding of the news. And there may even somewhere there would be a donate button. I don't know. But that's what I'm doing.

That's awesome. Well, that and apparently now making podcasts again with you. I think I am very excited about that. that, and I suspect our listeners will be very excited about that, too. That said, I have taken up far too much of your time. It might be the first person who's ever made you work for free, and I'm just going to hold on to that. I'm happy about that. But I've taken up way too much of your time today. Thank you so much for coming by. Hopefully you'll come back again, visit us again. I will. By the way, we did a whole thing, and we talked about the open, we didn't mention

Dieter. And so one of these days, you've got to just come back on the Vergecast and hang out with me Well, Deeter Bohn, yeah. Dieter's having a week, by the way. He interviewed Sush Nadela. He's an idea. Oh, he's amazing. He just gets better and better. And, you know, from just the tweets I've been reading today, he seems to be staging a coup while you're on parental leave.

So see about that. That would be great. Please take it over, Deeter. I'm just going to hang back with Max. It's going to be great. I'm all about that. But anyway, thank you so much, Walt. How can people get a hold of you to Twitter's best way?

Yeah. Twitter. You can DM me on Twitter. You can use Facebook Messenger. Don't use them for anything serious because neither one of them is secure. But if you do contact me there and you want to discuss something actually serious, I'll probably give you some other way of communicating. Yeah. But that's a good way to start. At Walt Mosberg on Twitter, I'm at Reckless. Thank you so much, Walt. And thank you everybody for accepting an episode of control, delete and the Vergecast feed. Hopefully we'll talk to again soon. Well, we're going to have to keep in touch because I need to, I need news about Max.

That's true. I, you know, I've got to, I've got to figure out, I got to stop putting Max on my public Instagram. I gave myself, you know, the first couple months, she doesn't know. I love taking photos and videos of her. I got to figure out it. They're great. They are the best Instagram stories I see. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. They're really well done. But you've got to stop putting her out in public. I know. So at some point, which is why you'll be using a closed thing like ICloud shared photo libraries or Google

photos shared libraries. I said this on the Vergecast last week, but if you want to feel the walls of an ecosystem just crash down around you. Just have a baby. It's true. All right. Thank you so much, Walt.

We'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Eli. Take care. Thanks, really.