Upgrade - 252: The Hippie Gets a Haircut

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

This week the Summer of Fun goes old school, as two of Jason's colleagues from back in the 1990s compare Apple's many transitions over the years to the ones Apple and its developers and users face today. Also, we wonder what happens to the movies and TV shows that aren't available via streaming, and if that means that important cultural works are in danger of fading away.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 252 today's show is brought to you by lumen 5 bombus and text expander from smile my name is mike hurley and i am joined as always by my summer of fun podcast summer fun mr jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley and i am joined as always by my summer of fun podcast summer fun mr jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley it's good to be here for the summer fun it's july can you feel it it's july i can feel it jason we promised on our last episode some super special guests for today's episode would you like to introduce said special guests okay yes we have two special guests and this is going to inform what we're talking about today. First off, these are both RelayFM hosts who I have multi-decades of history with,

host of the Parallel podcast, and my former colleague at Mac User Magazine back in the day, Shelley Brisbane. Hello. Hello. It's nice that you invited the old people here on the show. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, we're gonna show Mike how it was done back in our day when podcasts were just rants on the sidewalk. I'm just sitting here on my lawn waiting for somebody to try and get on it and see what I might do. Now, Shelley, you and I work for Mac User. We had a columnist, this fellow, Andy Inatko is what i think you pronounce that yeah it is it's hard to pronounce her spell and he is the host of the material podcast here on relay fm as well as a regular uh panelist on mac break weekly and a visitor to wgbh boston's public radio hello did

i get it all right there andy yeah yep i talked about for half hour about technology on NPR here in Boston about once a week, and it usually comes out pretty much okay. I do gesture a lot with my hands, even though it's simply radio. But over the past couple of years, I'm kind of winding that down. Oh, it's just calm down. I've been in the audience for that, so that's pretty good. That's a nice thing. So we have my pals who I have known since the 90s here. And we're going to talk.

Jason, can I say my usual line? It's traditional. Sure. That I've known Jason for so long that he is the man who taught me how to boldface in HTML. It's true. It's true. That was back when we were still learning what a web browser was.

So we are going to talk about Apple and the many transitions in Apple's history. But before we do that, I think we should answer a Snell Talk question, Mike. We should. Just because we have guests, we do not issue from tradition around here. It's the summer of fun, but it's not the summer of no tradition, Jason. So we're going to go with a hashtag snow talk question from gordon and i thought i was looking through our list and i was like let me pick something which can which kind of fits in with today's episode so i went for something which is uh pre-os 10 and the

idea of the question comes from gordon what is your favorite app that you still use regularly that dates back to the pre-os 10 days. Mine is Graphic Converter. Jason, do you have an answer for this? I actually do have a few answers. I'm wondering if perhaps I should defer to my guests if they have favorite apps that date back to the pre-OS X period. Andy and Shelley, do you have favorite apps from the olden times? I do, actually. I like Graphics Converter.

I still use it. Graphic Converter, pardon me. I still use it. But I startled James Thompson when I met him about a year ago, and I said, James, I really love Drag Thing. And he was like, really? As in, that's been a long time, and that's a 32-bit app. I don't use it all the time, but I use it on a laptop that I have because that's how I like to see my icons. That extra squeak was about, really? It's a 32-bit app. It won't be updated and will stop working in the fall.

Exactly. And he made me aware of that. And I'm trying to let myself down easily, get some other solutions that are more modern. But I always enjoy drag thing. All right. That's a great one. Andy? I feel like there's one that Jason and I both absolutely adore.

And as a sign of my friendship, I should leave that for Jason. I had you go first for a reason. I got another one in my back pocket. Okay. In that case, it has to be BBEdit, which is the, it's BBEdit as a program, technically a programmer's text editor, but it has been powering tech writing and all kinds of writing behind the scenes for eons. I used it today. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm pretty sure that when Jason taught me that, oh, here's how you boldface something, it was HTML code I typed into a BBEdit document to create that formatting. And up until fairly recently, it was what I wrote every single one of like two or three weekly columns on because

it's a text editor it gets out of your way it's 100 reliable it is fine-tuned extremely sleek efficient code and the people who create it are awesome people and it's like every time that i every time that i use it i feel like i'm smart for choosing to use BBEdit. And I'm pleased. I'm also pleased that it's sort of like when you have that rice cooker that you've used since college, that it's like, okay, everything's okay. This is definitely my MacBook because look, I've got BBEdit on it, just like every MacBook and PowerBook I've had. It is a touchstone of reality for a lot of people who write on the max yeah i wrote a column last week where i referred to bb edit as the app of

theseus in that it has gone through so many transitions as we're going to talk about here that uh there's nothing left from what was there at the at the start but it's also never had one of those schisms where there's a new version and it's completely incompatible with the old version and doesn't do what the old version did it's never done that it's always just kind of kept evolving with the times which is delightful rather than that simile i would use the that the the old japanese wooden temple i said this temple has been here for for 800 years like wow the wood looks fresh well yeah because every time a piece of wood rots out, we replace it. So basically, it's nothing in that older than 50 years.

And it's like, but it's always been this temple. It's always been there. It's never blown up. It's never caught on fire. It's never – no one has ever – there's never been a change of command that said, you know what? Let's turn this into a coffee house. And it will be like a coffee house with like a wine bar on it. And then they had to go back to being a temple

because that was a terrible idea. It's been like consistency often. My answer is going to be, and this is an app that had a little bit of a schism, but it is essentially doing the same thing with the same author. And that's Default Folder from St. Clair Software, which I remember downloading as shareware in college.

And I still use it. And actually one of my more proud moments of the last couple of years is I was using it at one point a few weeks ago and thought to myself, hey, you know, there's something default folder doesn't do. I actually had an idea for a feature in default folder. And I emailed John, the developer of default folder, and said, is this, could you do this? Is this possible? Am I missing this feature? And I had one of these stranger things. It does happen occasionally when you write about this stuff, which is the next day, John sent me a beta build with my feature implemented. Okay. And it's great. And the nice thing is that I've heard from several people afterward when it

was rolled into the official kind of beta releases of default folder saying that they actually wanted that feature and are glad that it's there. So that's nice. But default folder, for those who don't know, lets you set when you choose open or save in a document in any app, you can set what the default folder is that you're saving into. And you can set it per app, you can override it, there are a bunch of things where you can click on like a finder window that's behind and it will switch to that finder window and a new feature you may not be aware of is it can now actually use a script to determine based on current conditions where you want to save something it's a new feature i i whoever thought of that feature must be genius. So that's mine.

I didn't even know that this thing was still in existence and I've got the webpage open. I didn't either. I remember using it a long time ago, but I just assumed it was gone. Thank you, webpage. I think I will try it for free for 30 days. Thank you so much to Gordon for the hashtag Snell Talk question. I'm pretty proud of my choice for this week. It's a good one.

Good choice. It's very fitting for our panel here today. You can always send in a question for us to open an episode of Upgrade with the hashtag Snell Talk. So Jason, you mentioned transitions. Transitions is one of the big discussion points that we're going to talk about today because Apple are, you know, we've been talking about this over the last couple of weeks as we move into Catalina with Catalyst apps and then looking forward to SwiftUI and what that could do for Apple's platforms, as well as looking at the introduction of iPadOS, there is a lot of stuff going on right now. I mean, that's not even beginning to mention the fact that we could be moving from Intel to ARM in the near future. So as a way to kind of

provide maybe a little bit of context and background for these upcoming transitions, it might be a good idea to look at the past because Apple has been through many transitions from personnel to architecture to software. So you wanted to assemble our group today to discuss that, right? Yes, the don't don't call them the group of elders we're not going to use that word uh you said it we are no really more of a council really yes that's right we were consulting with the those who've seen well it turns out mike if you stand around and long enough and just watch you become a witness to history sometimes it's boring history sometimes it's exciting history but it's history and uh shelly and andy and i have been standing roughly near the corner of technology and liberal arts for a few decades as the parades have gone up and down the street and uh and i feel like that gives us a

perspective that you know again i don't feel like i've been i've been standing on this corner for 25 years but i really have and and every now and then we go through one of these transitions and I realize I'm talking to somebody like you, Mike, who has not even, you know, didn't even do the PowerPC to Intel transition, let alone the, you know, transition to PowerPC or the OS 9 to OS 10 transition or any of these other transitions. And I realize, oh, you know, a lot of people don't have the context of what Apple has done in the past when they've had to go through something like this. I've got a list here. So I think we should go through them.

And you guys contributed to this list as well. Going way back, I like this one. I hadn't really thought about it. Originally, the Mac was a self-contained item. It was the original Mac and then the 128 and, you know, it became the 512 and there was the Plus and the 128 became the 512, and there was the Plus and the SE. But there was that moment where Apple made a box that you could attach a color monitor to, and that was a Mac 2.

And I remember it was a little bit later. Color Macs were out, but I hadn't used any of them. I remember that first time that I used a Mac that was capable of conceiving of colors and didn't have a built in display. And it was definitely a very weird kind of transition. Yeah, particularly because one of the reasons why there are a lot of reasons why a lot of people and users in the industry didn't take the Mac seriously at first. Well, A, because you couldn't word process a document longer than nine pages. OK, but it really did look it didn't look like any other computer.

It looked like, as intended, an appliance, a friendly little pal that's on your desk. And when you had to – it was interesting to finally react to a Mac that was a box with a TV-looking screen on top of the box. that was a box with a TV-looking screen on top of the box. And because that's what all computers since that I'd ever used looked like. And not only that, but it's felt like the face that I'd been looking at for the previous X number of years was this like 500-pixel wide black and white Bloxy face. And when you're looking at a color image, it's like when a friend that you've known your entire, you've known for 10 years, but has never, ever not had a beard suddenly comes back from vacation and he's shaved. And it's like, I know that's still Doug, but this is a very weird

form of Doug that I'm going to have to get used to. Well, and for most people, the screen got bigger because you could attach a radius display to an SE30, something like that. But for most people, I think the nine inch screen on the plus sized, which is the first Mac I had, was what people thought of as a Mac screen. And so even if you just had the 13 inch RGB on the Mac 2, you were looking at a bigger image, you were looking at a color image. And of course, the big deal of expansion, those little handle held Macs could be expanded in sort of weird and kludgy ways. You could even get a hard drive in a Mac Plus, which I always thought was going to break at some point because somebody would put it down wrong. But with the Mac 2, it was meant

to be expanded. You open it up and there were slots and you didn't have to have Torx wrench and you didn't have to do all these crazy things and, you know, pray to the gods of hardware repair if you wanted to put memory or a drive in your computer. It did definitely change the context in that one of the criticisms of the Mac in the earliest days was that it was this appliance. Ironically, I mean, this is sometimes I think the iPad is similar to the concept of the original Mac. That's why I always felt like Steve Jobs was trying to push to that same place, which is, I want this to be just a thing that you carry around and you don't feel that it's super technical and it is that computer for the rest of us. And the Mac was criticized, as so many Apple products are, for being not quite what everybody expects from the category. And it was all-in-one. It had had a had a mouse it was strangely shaped all of these

things and the mac 2 when that came in it was almost like apple saying all right we hear you do you want you want a computer box that you attach things to we can give you that too but uh the original and that definitely my first mac was a an se so i definitely was somebody who was entering the mac through that little nine-inch diagonal screen, black and white screen, which I think about it now and I can't even believe what a wide world it opened up to me in that teeny tiny little square, little rectangle. And then Mac 2, yeah, we had a, at my college newspaper, we had a Mac 2. And eventually we had a Mac 2 FX, which was pretty, I remember how it sounded because the hard drive ticked and it was so fast. But, you know, but for me at home, you know, in my dorm room and all that, it was still that nine inch screen. I used to encounter Mac 2s in unexpected places. Once the Mac 2 came out, I saw it on a trade show, a supercomputer trade show of all things,

as a front end to a very large computer doing data visualization. And I saw it at an office in IBM because we have to figure out how this Mac thing works. But it didn't really make any sense until the Mac 2 came along. And so it felt like, and obviously Apple did this intentionally, they did all the things that you have to do to make a computer expandable and accessible to all the things that it is with, that other computers are. And it felt like that gave people permission to acquire Macs, even if they weren't going to make them their primary computer. It was a computer that could live in the same environment with other kinds of machines. Yeah. I think the first time I saw Mac two, I pretty sure was before it was even released because I was a freshman in college and I used to hang out in like the graduate school's graphics lab, computer graphics lab. And they had one in

like Los Grandes boards stage where it was literally it was a table with Mac two boards, like just all wired together that they were writing code either. I don't I don't know if they were developing code for it for Apple or whether they gave they were given an early version of it so that they could see what it could do. But it was weird to see this thing that dominated dominated like it looked like a real computer, even though it didn't have a case on it, as opposed to, oh, this is this is my this is my friend, the Macintosh. This is my Mac Plus.

And, yeah, it really was a moment where Apple realized that they weren't going to get to that – they weren't going to get the Mac to that stage where it's so affordable that everybody can buy one. It's not going to be like the Apple II where families could sort of afford to have one in the house as the home computer. There was always – they were never going to get to that price point. So if they couldn't go down, they had to go up and really sell it as for desktop publishing. A nine-inch screen is not that great for laying out a newspaper. But, hey, we'll give you not only processing power to lay out that page, but the ability to just plug in a huge display as opposed to, like Shelley said, crack open that case, clip.

It was a couple of these displays. It was literally like a spring clip that you would clip onto the CPU to get at the address lines. Some of them, you would send them your motherboard. They would send back a new motherboard that had professionally soldered in stuff. So the ability to simply unplug this, plug in that, you're good. It felt like it wasn't a bad transition, but it really was like the hippie gets the haircut and doesn't like switch to a three-piece business suit but realizes that perhaps I should start wearing shoes instead of sandals everywhere. So now one of the funny things about living through some amount of history is that you do get to witness this thing you don't realize when you haven't lived through much of it, which is this flattening of history. And I don't want to take the time right now to talk about it, but it's not like there weren't other transitions that happened in the early days of the Mac.

System 6 to System 7 was an enormous one back when there was really no ability to run more than one app at once unless you use multi finder and it was this whole complicated thing and system 7 really was a dramatic change but i want to forward a little bit uh to a time when i actually was at mac user so in my the beginning of my professional career um at mac user we had a column for a while in the letters column, which I edited, called Ask Dr. Power Mac. And it was literally just Stefan Samoji, who worked at MacUser back then, reassuring people about how terrifying the 68,000 to PowerPC processor transition was going to work. transition was going to work. And for those who don't remember those olden days, but maybe if you remember the Intel transition, it was a similar thing where there were computers with new chips and old software written for old chips. And Apple did, I think, a tremendous job in that era of figuring out a way to translate the instructions for those old apps so that they worked on power pc processors

so you have an old version of word built for the 68 000 series and you brought it over to a power mac and it ran and it was a little slower sometimes depending on the computer you were coming from but it actually ran and it that was i would the biggest, certainly it was the first one I saw, but it was a big hardware transition. It was one of the first that Apple had to do on that front. And the lesson I took away from that was that there was a lot of fear, but that when handled correctly, people would end up being surprised that it wasn't as bad as they thought. I don't know if you have different recollections of that PowerPC transition, but I just remember it being a lot, we wrote a lot of words about

something that ended up being not nearly as painful as we feared. I think so. And I think for somebody out there who was buying Macs, maybe not a Mac user reader, but somebody who was out there buying Macs, they weren't thinking about it in the same way or to the same extent that we were. And Apple, at the same time that they made the, when they made the PowerPC transition, they transitioned to vastly different hardware. So it wasn't like, well, your LC will now run a PPC chip. It was, here's the PowerMac 6100, here's a 7100 and onward. And so I think for some people that experience was hidden. Sure, you'd get the dialog box that would say this is a 68K app, but it felt like there was less of a requirement that you'd be involved in it unless you were just super curious about it or maybe you had a specific piece of software that wasn't going to work. But I don't even remember a lot of that. It seems like that was a relatively smooth transition. It mostly just worked.

Yeah, I think Shelley's absolutely right. I think most humans, most civilians, they didn't really notice a difference. They just noticed, I think that eventually they noticed that some of their software was running slowly and some of their software was running super well. And they didn't really realize that what they were running was 68,000 Motorola software in emulation, and some were being transitioned into Intel native apps. And that's exactly how well Apple did it. This could be a case study in how to manage fears that anybody's going to be feeling in any large moment of transition. be feeling in any large moment of transition. If you can do everything you can so that they don't notice anything, even though there's a titanic change happening under the floorboards, that's exactly the way to do it. So sometimes I think in principle, it's always a good idea to

inform people and tell people and make sure that things are done out in the open. But oftentimes I find myself over explaining a transition or over explaining a concept that when I finally like slap myself in the head at eight and a half minutes in my little monologue, realize that actually this is not going to affect your lives at all because it's going to affect the lives of everybody working at Apple who is going to have to work on this and make sure that it works properly. But if they do their jobs OK, you're just going to notice that some of your apps are going to be slow, some are going to be fast. And after a year, all of your apps are going to be fast. It's really this chain, right, where it starts with Apple, it goes to the developers of apps,

and then it goes to the user. And if executed properly, does provides the tools and the infrastructure and the developers are able to do their updates and you know if it all goes well the user doesn't notice anything right like that is the goal is you oh here's a new update and we mentioned you know bb edit earlier here's a new update and and they don't need to know the users don't need to know that oh well behind the scenes i had to do a whole lot because apple changed this thing and that thing and all that in the end the user just wants to use the thing and and if if the developers get the tools to um do their updates properly it can be an invisible transition which in my mind is the best transition to have yeah it's it's you have to get a column out and maybe

you'll pop into my mind that, oh my God, Apple's going to be changing their web renderer for Safari from KHTML to something else. It's like, actually, nobody who actually reads this is going to notice. Nobody who reads this should care. And maybe you're just going to be scaring people into thinking that the rug is about to be pulled out from under you. And that process was made easier by the fact that Apple was so involved in making PowerPC a chip that they could use for their computer, their operating system. And it wasn't like Apple said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to buy a chip from somebody and I'm going to write my operating system to run on it. They were much

more intimately involved in the hardware side than that. And so that made it easy for them. I mean, it doesn't diminish what they were able to accomplish for the user, but it does indicate that they had that it was smart of them to make the choice they did about how they developed that hardware. Yeah. And I'm just remembering that I think they made the announcement shortly before that year's Mac hack developer conference, which was which was WWDC before Apple thought to actually hold the WWDC. WWDC before Apple thought to actually hold the WWDC. So I was in a hotel room in Dearborn, Michigan, with about 200, 300 super, super hardcore developers, including many who worked for Apple, and got to hear so much opinion and so much talking about how this transition could possibly be made. I think they actually had a piece of Intel hardware, maybe, and they were banging on it

and trying to figure out how to make it work. And it was a weird time because Apple was really trying to make the developers feel as happy about this as they're trying to assuage any guilty feelings that the users might be having. It's interesting when we talk about chip transitions, and we'll talk about, in our next segment,

I want to talk about a lot of these sort of Steve Jobs comes back to Apple transitions, because that was definitely he was, he was making change everywhere he could possibly do it. And including ultimately PowerPC to Intel. But I think it's interesting when Andy, you mentioned PowerPC, there was the PowerPC alliance, which was Apple, IBM and Motorola, the AIM alliance. which was Apple, IBM, and Motorola, the AIM alliance. And that goes back to a thing that has been part of Apple's DNA since the beginning, which is trying to go its own way. And so going from the Motorola 68000 to the PowerPC, it was very much like we're going to go to this new chip architecture that we're helping drive.

Whereas the Intel transition was interesting because that was basically their partners let them down. You know, IBM had let them down on the power pc side and they ended up just taking chips off the shelf from intel and as we think about apple going to arm it's funny how that happens they're going back the other way now where it's like oh yeah we've been let down again maybe we should uh take more control over this so i i definitely am seeing parallels there but um but uh mike has reappeared so maybe it's time for us to take a break now before we go get into some ceo transitions and steve jobs coming back to apple today's episode is brought to you by bombas you might not think about socks often and if you're anything like me you're you're a busy person surely you don't have tons of time to think about what goes on your feet right but let me tell you why i think you should think about bombas.

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Once again, that's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash upgrade. Our thanks to Bombas for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. I wrote in our notes the CEO transitions. It is definitely a thing, but most people don't think of most of them because there was sort of the, you know, John Scully came in and Steve Jobs left Apple.

And then after Sculley got kicked out, there was a disaster parade of failed CEOs. And then Steve Jobs came back. And then obviously, Steve Jobs got very ill. And just before he passed away, he handed the keys to Apple to Tim Cook. But CEO transitions can be meaningful. They aren't always meaningful. I was definitely a young editor at Mac user back in the day watching that parade of problematic CEOs walk through. And, you know, it was sort of like, well, maybe Michael Spindler will be the answer. And the answer was no. No, no. Bill Emilio, well, only in the sense that he found Steve Jobs.

That sometimes CEO transitions aren't meaningful. But Steve Jobs as a personality and a person with a strong philosophy, definitely transitioning to him and away from him are moments that you can draw a line and at least try to intuit what they brought to the table as the CEO. And I had a list here of the Steve Jobs returns transitions that happened in a very tumultuous time in the early part of this century, primarily in late 90s as well. The clones got killed. Apple obviously brought in OS X, which how steve jobs got imported into the organization because it was based on the next os so the classic os transition to os 10 ending in a funeral by the way at wwdc where steve jobs had a funeral with an os 9 box in it and put it down below the stage

the imac transition which sometimes doesn't get enough credit, which is when Apple took all the old ports that were standards on the Mac and basically kicked them to the curb and said, we're just going to do USB now. Then a little bit later, the Intel transition. And I think from a developer standpoint, one of the things that also happened is as a part of the OS X transition, there was really this transition to Apple's own tools, which were based on next tools. And this is essentially interface builder and Xcode, which over the course of a time with the OS 10 and Intel transitions, all the stuff that was happening with like a code warrior from Metro works, which was the definitive power PC development environment all kind of faded away because Apple wanted you on its own

development tools. So Steve Jobs did all of that. And I know that's a lot to kind of cover, but I think it's interesting. What I would say about Steve Jobs is the advantage of having somebody like Steve Jobs who knew the company well, but was outside the company and felt no ownership in current products. I feel like in some ways, that's the best case scenario for something like this, where you get somebody who knows you well, but doesn't have any ego invested in any of the details to come in and say, no, we're going to kill the Newton and we're going to kill OpenDock and we're going to move to this new operating system and we're going to start doing Intel builds of it in case we need to dump the PowerPC and we're going to move to this new operating system and we're going to start talking start doing intel builds of it in case we need to dump the power pc and we're going to get rid of mac

serial and scuzzy and like and steve jobs was able to do that and you know that was a tumultuous five years but apple came out and the mac i think came out stronger for it yeah absolutely i think the one of the key things that steve did was to take a look at Apple as a single organism as opposed to thinking of it as a company that makes this product line. They make the Newton product line. They make this product line. One of the most important things that he did, I think, was simply here is what we are here to do, and we're not going to do anything that has nothing to do with that. are here to do. And we're not going to do anything that has nothing to do with that. Famously, at one of his keynotes, he collapsed the entire Mac product line into a grid of two boxes by two boxes. We are going to have portable Macs. We're going to have desktop Macs. The Macs can be either consumer grade or professional grade. One, two, three, four. That's all we're going to do. We're not going to have the Centris 6152C

with the special option of a DV. It's going to be simplified. They tried doing everything. That didn't work. So let's focus on the stuff that we can do. And you're absolutely right about the iMac being important too. Not simply because of the fact

that they made so many groundbreaking changes, like the first computer to absolutely commit to USB and absolutely commit to optical drives. But remember that this came at the tail of so many indistinguishable, unremarkable beige boxes. And Apple had gone from being this exciting product development company this exciting design company to something just made other boxes that you saw at sears roebuck that was no that didn't look really any different or any more exciting than anything else out there and so you suddenly see that it was such a true return to form that we are going to quote the original classic mac by having here is a one friendly

box with a big handle deep into the back of it. So you can pick it up and carry it some places, but it's going to be like it was inflated out of latex and it's going to be colors. So freaky. We have to invent new names for them. And it was so influential just from industrial design that you could buy waffle makers in a range of iMac colors. Not from Apple, of course, but it was so influential. Even if it were successful or unsuccessful as a computer, as a statement to the world, especially to investors and people

who are supposed to support this stuff, that Apple has not given up. There is something that you liked about Apple, even if you didn't always necessarily invest in their hardware, that thing is back. We are not going to become another indistinguishable tech company like Gateway or Compaq. We are going to do something that only we can do. I think it's worth pointing out that those transitions toward Steve Jobs and toward the iMac and USB and all those things, while in hindsight, were absolutely right, were very bloody when they were happening. And, you know, Apple had started to go to clones because it seemed like if they wanted the Mac operating system to spread,

they had to do it. But that went away. And there were people that were worried about that. Well, is Apple going to be able to survive just making all the hardware itself? OS X, what became Mac OS X took a lot of years because even though that was you know the based on next step early on it was four years before they i think three or four years before they actually got an os out there the imac okay it's it's really cool looking uh but it's got a hockey puck mouse what is this crazy usb thing and i don't think anybody who said that uh was particularly enamored of the old Apple specific ports. It was just that it was unclear to people that that was the direction that was needed, that they needed to go. And so while, as I say, in hindsight, it all was right. And then Steve made mistakes along the way,

but his hit rate, given what had happened to Apple in the mid-90s, was pretty darn high. I think it's also important, as we're praising a lot of this stuff, hit rate, given what had happened to Apple in the mid-90s, was pretty darn high. I think it's also important, as we're praising a lot of this stuff, is that then as now, Apple has the ability to make these choices that inflict a lot of pain on users, such as, congratulations, none of your old Mac peripherals will work with this new iMac. Oh, and by the way, you pretty much have to buy an external floppy drive because good luck storing your data someplace else, on and on and on. They could do this because they always had that last way to end an argument saying, well, are you going to switch to Windows? No. Okay. Well, then that's all we're offering you. And so it's one thing to say, oh, see,

they're the only ones who had the vision to really do this. No, other computers had it. You just didn't have to buy the one machine that this one company was pushing on you. And, yes, they were eventually proven right. was at the size that it was at the time and they were and users really did have options they would not only a certain percentage of them would have chosen to buy a computer that is as cool but also impractical as the original iMac also the original iMac was one of a product line right like the the transition was slow enough that like the pro users weren't buying the original iMac so it was this kind of just the oddity consumer model and they it happened over time so

the the higher part other parts of the market didn't have to respond as immediately but you're both right it was a really tumultuous time and sometimes I look back on it and I think well the advantage of having somebody like Steve Jobs in charge is that he would be like, he'd say, well, I know this is going to bother people, but I don't care. And they'll get over it. Whereas Microsoft in that era seemed, despite all of their power, they were petrified that their product would be rejected by their users. incorrectly because we saw uh you know over the next 10 years that microsoft tried to introduce larger changes to their ecosystem and they were generally just rejected by their user base so they're still struggling today yeah like with this type of stuff right like this is still a thing that is a problem for them well and apple spent before steve jobs came back and after he did i

guess you could you could say they probably spent 10 years or so really branding themselves against Windows. They don't do that in the same way at all today. But at that time, they could say, as Andy pointed out, look, we're the Mac. You have the advantage of this user interface that is comfortable, that is likable, that is something somebody who hates Windows can be comfortable with. And Apple leaned into it. And so did we writing magazines lean into it as well. Yeah. And the other part is that people have an emotion. Apple users have an emotional response to Apple that Windows users do certainly not have with Windows devices. Windows and Windows PCs are really the Toyota Corolla of computing. They're for people who I really just want something where I get in and I begin to the driveway. I turn the key.

It starts up. It gets me to work safely. And then at 5 o'clock, it gets me home safely. I'm not a lover of this thing. I want it to be practical. And I really can't tell the difference between this $18,000 car you're showing me and this $38,000 car you're showing me, despite the fact that the $38,000 car is much more innovative and has much more cool stuff in it. So Windows people are fickle that way because they're just buying a bag of flour. That's really all they're buying.

Whereas Apple – it kind of disappoints us if Apple doesn't do something that's a little bit alarming at times because that's kind of what they're in the job for. Apple doesn't do something that's a little bit alarming at times because that's kind of what they're in the job for. That's their job to do something that makes me think, wow, I don't know if they should have let people into the new spaceship campus before the industrial adhesives and the carpet had finished off gassing because that was a really odd choice they just made to that product. You want them to surprise you and challenge you but also sometimes they make mistakes and it is you know whenever i'm evaluating something that apple does there's this moment of like well i like that they did it we'll see like the the macbook if we take the the 12 inch macbook as an example like uh and the original macbook air was like this too where it's sort of like well i this is an opinionated product design. They've made some very clear decisions and trade-offs that other people would not necessarily make. And it leads to a product that's very interesting. And depending

on your priorities could be exactly what you're looking for, or depending on your priorities is exactly the wrong product to exist at all. And, you know, then you just kind of have to wait and see. And with the MacBook Air, I think that, you know, it turned out that it was in the right direction, but wasn't all quite there. And they needed to take another stab at it before they really got it right. And they finally did get it, I think, exactly right. It just took them, as somebody who had that original MacBook Air, and you could really only use it in a meat locker, because if it got too warm, it stopped working and shut down its course. But they did get there eventually.

And with the MacBook, it's the same way. Among a bunch of other products, people love that little thing. And yeah, it only has one port, and there are a lot of people for whom it's not appropriate. But at the time, it's very hard to say, do I just not like this keyboard, or is this keyboard a disaster? And you can't tell. I can tell. Except for Andy. It's a disaster. Onlyy can tell well now we can tell now we can see it my dislike for the lack of travel on that keyboard blinded me to the all the other problems that existed

so it's it's a it's a tough one um mike should we take another break? I think that sounds like a great idea. Today's episode is also brought to you by our friends over at TextExpander. TextExpander lets you insert words, phrases, forms, templates, and so much more with just a couple of key clicks everywhere you type. You can give your productivity a boost with TextExpander as those snippets will turn into things that you often type and you can use them everywhere you type. Your time is super valuable. Life's too short to constantly retype what could be a snippet. And it's so, so easy. It's even easier than ever before to make your TextExpander snippets as they recently introduced a visual editor, which is even more beautiful and allow you to just simple drag and drop and just moving stuff around. You can really easily and clearly see the snippets that you want to make. Companies use TextExpander for teams, which is like their team solution where you can share snippets with multiple people for support, customer support, for reports and email, anywhere that text is needed to be typed consistently and

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support of this show and RelayFM. All right, so the last transition I want to talk about before we do the tech industry pivot and talk about where we go from here is a mindset and perception transition. I think it actually goes along about the same time as the transition from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. It precedes it a little bit but

i think that it's all kind of of a kind in in this late model um apple that we we deal with now where we've got uh you know those of us who wrote about apple and and used apple stuff in the 90s like the default mode then was that apple was doomed i have a t-shirt that says i've been a mac user since apple was doomed um and boy those were dark days like mac user which we've mentioned several times where we all uh wrote and edited and and did you know went to parties and things like that and he didn't get to go to the parties because he was freelance and remote but um we had them and well you went to the parties in boston probably we had parties at macworld expo in boston too anyway it died that magazine died in 1997 because the publishers of the mac magazines knew that apple was about to go out of business and they wanted to share their

loss so that they didn't both take a bath and then you know within six months they realized they had made a horrible mistake but it was too late to back out of it. But that was it. It was a dark time. Apple was falling apart. And then over the next decade, you know, we got the iMac, we got the iPod, and then ultimately we got the iPhone. And the story of this decade is really that Apple is no longer the doomed, you know misunderstood uh edge case niche product vendor for the for the the you know the small group who cares about it and more that apple's huge and powerful and rich and unstoppable and it's a huge shift that i i would say also coincides to the perception of apple is the mac becoming apple is the ip, because that's another huge part of this same story with the success of the iPod leading to the success of the iPhone. And my friend Greg Noss, who I went to college with, so I've known him even longer than I've

known you both, he said to me a few years ago, I remember Apple being that company that was like, it was kind of adorable because they've tried so hard. And now they're like the Death Star. They own everything and can afford everything. And they're everywhere and you can't get away from them. And isn't it funny to, in 15 years, have gone from Death's Door to Apple being seen as the, you know, not the underdog at all, but one of the big guys, one of the big dogs, I suppose. It's interesting when you hang out with civilians as much as I do, because back in the day when we were talking about, well, most people use Windows and some people use the Mac. And so my Mac using friends, of course, were all on board. But most of the

people I knew in my life were like, oh, isn't it cute that you use a Macintosh? It's so adorable, but most of the people I knew in my life were like, oh, isn't it cute that you use a Macintosh? It's so adorable, you know? And then, and now, there's so much awareness of Apple as a company in the broader culture. People know what an Apple keynote is. People know Tim Cook's name, who I would argue, a lot of people knew Steve Jobs, but later on in his tenure. And I think Apple as a phenomenon, as a cultural force, and it frankly more lately is getting sort of wrapped up with a lot of the negativity of tech in general. It is very, very different. It is so weird to have been in this sort of weird underdog place where you were going, hey, I like my team. I like being part of this sort of scrappy upstart.

And what are they going to do next to no really apple's the one that cares about your privacy they're not as bad as the other guys whoever those other guys might be and it's it's it's a very odd transition yeah they're they're uh it's when you grow up with apple as i did and i'm sure you guys did like with with Apple II, 2 Plus or 2E. You hear the story about the two hippies in the garage who are building these computers. And that's sometimes a hard thing to get rid of in your mind when you realize that, no, they own so many markets. They have so much power and so much influence. They are not the scrappy little upstart.

They are a huge giant. They take big steps and they disrupt every situation that they walk in simply by being there. The only time that I've ever directly confronted another tech journalist to tell him specifically that his reporting was completely out of line and unworthy of him was a major, major reviewer who I think he – a major, major columnist who reviewed the – I think it might have been the first titanium power book. And if it was a 1,200-word review, 300 words were about what the actual product was and the actual hardware was and the actual plan for the hardware. And the rest of it was, but none of this matters because they're going to be out in business in three months. Well, of course, at $2,000, it would be stupid to invest this much money on a platform that won't be around in a year from now. stupid to invest this much money on a platform that won't be around in a year from now. And now, would you dare tell – they can keep any product they want alive for however long they want it simply by force of will. That is the absolute goal of any corporation, to be able to control its own destiny. And Apple is one of the few companies that absolutely controls its own destiny. It does not do anything it does not want to do. And conversely, anything that it does not do, they could do it if they wanted to. If they're not doing it, it's because they don't want to do it.

That's how big they are. Right, and I would argue, getting just a little bit to what I said before about them sort of getting wrapped up in the criticism of tech, I would get wrapped up. I would say that Apple, whatever the merits of their approach to privacy and user information, whether you absolutely agree that they are protecting your privacy 100 percent of the time or whether you have mistrust for them, they operate in a slightly different way than other companies who are in the same business. business and I think that there is a tendency for people, politicians particularly, to say here are all the bad actors, here are all the actors that we want to regulate and Apple's included because Apple is a big dog, not so much to do with what Apple is actually doing or how they're doing it, but because they are not at all a scrappy underdog. In fact, they're probably the first company many people think of when they're trying to wrangle this big thing called tech that people are now much more suspicious of than they were even 10 years ago. So when we do the tech industry pivot, which we're about to do, I think these are the things to keep in mind. It's sort of like Apple's going through transitions now and will be going to them soon, possibly, in a different place.

As Andy said, as a company at the height of its powers that can do whatever it wants, essentially, in terms of spending money for certain. And also, this is a company whose priorities are different as well over half of its revenue comes from a single product line. And it's not the Mac, it's the iPhone. And so then we end up with these transitions that are going on. So when you think about something like Catalyst, Catalyst is on one level a developer technology that users don't necessarily need to care about, but it is Apple's attempt to figure out a way to get all of the work that's been done building software for iPhone and iPad to benefit the Mac because the Mac uses an incompatible method of developing apps. There's Swift and Swift UI behind that, which is the way

to create a new method of writing software that is more easily deployable across all of Apple's platforms down the road. And another one that I'll throw in there is this rumored transition, at least in part, to Macs running ARM processors designed by Apple, like the ones that are in iOS devices. And I think that is what struck me when Andy said, you know, they can spend money to do what they want. One of the transitions we haven't talked about but it feeds into this idea of the mac transitioning to arm is apple transitioning to designing its own processors for the iphone and the ipad uh where originally it was taking things kind of off the off the shelf arm designs and now it's got this that that's a case where

it spent a lot of money and has been very successful in building its own thing, which it controls completely, as opposed to having to rely on a partner like Intel that has proven to be problematic in terms of their capability to drive their technology forward. powers making these transitions. And we don't know how they're going to turn out because we don't have the power. We have the power to look in the past from our vantage point on this corner, but we don't know what's in this new parade that is about to start marching in front of us. So I would love to know what you both think about the transitions that are in process and ahead for Apple and how Apple is most likely, knowing what we know about Apple and transitions, how it's going to handle it. The ARM thing is interesting to me because Apple, obviously their position in the marketplace and the amount of money that they have is what makes it possible for them to control their destiny in that way. They couldn't have done that when they made the 68K to PowerPC transition, even though

they were part of the PowerPC alliance. They couldn't have done that when they were putting Intel processors into Macs, which were a very small portion of the computer market overall. But now they can, and it totally makes sense that they do. And frankly, unless the chips end up being a bad fit for Macs, unless Catalyst and Swift UI don't work in terms of making apps properly cross-platform. I just don't see a downside. It seems like owning the means of production, so to speak, and being able to design those chips can only go wrong if they make some catastrophic mistakes. Yeah, I'm really excited about the switch to ARM.

I don't, at this point, understand how Apple could make ARM processors that can do what they need a professional Mac to do. So I believe that it would be a two-chip sort of family. One of the reasons why iPhones are so amazing and iPads are so amazing is that they design a CPU to work intimately with every other piece of the hardware that's on that device and also every other thing that's running on that operating system and every other API that developers are using. And so a generic solution is never going to be as efficient as a bespoke one. A generic solution is never going to be as efficient as a bespoke one. So when you have a generic Intel processor, as amazing as these things are, they are not specifically tuned to run iPadOS. And they're not specifically tuned to run on a phone. augmented reality when it's designed for the exact type of ways that iPadOS handles user interface. That's where you get super speed and super power. That's why Apple can sell a $300 iPad that is as responsive as many $1,000 Windows Intel notebooks. So I'm really keen to see how they can design a MacBook, a consumer-level MacBook that, yes, of course, will hopefully be lower power, longer life, all that sort of stuff.

But also what new features they can introduce to the operating system and the hardware that takes advantage of that level of intimacy. As far as the other stuff, I haven't seen a lot of evidence externally that Apple is as passionate about the Mac as they are about their iOS devices. And internally, I also don't feel as though I've heard a lot from inside Apple that they feel as though that their flagship, their standard of how good Apple can be at developing technology, I don't think they feel as though they express that through the Mac. I feel as though they express that through their mobile devices. And I think that's true partly because every time that they trump on how much thought and how much work they've done in making this amazing new Macintosh, it's usually about, and look how great this is going to be at developing content and apps for iOS devices,

as opposed to we are going to make the greatest laptop a student has ever used or a regular consumer has ever used. So when I look at Catalyst, when I look at the move to SwiftUI, I'm hopeful that it's not a way to tell iOS developers that, oh, and by the way, if you want to bounce off a Mac copy of that app, by all means do that. And you won't be running in a virtual iPad. It will actually have drop-down menus and stuff. I hope that it's to make sure that if a developer invests time, thought, and creativity in developing something for one platform, they could apply a new fresh set of creative decisions to making that into a Mac app without having to learn Objective-C if they didn't learn Objective-C or learn how another set of APIs for user interface works. So I'm a little bit hesitant about it, but it looks like a very, very impressive move forward.

Well, I would agree with a lot of what Andy said. And as he was talking, I was thinking about the degree to which iOS is still a growing, evolving thing. And I, as a Mac-first person, still think the Mac is the easier system to use, not because it's simple, but because the hooks are there. It's mature. It does all the things you want to do. To use iOS productively 100% of the time would involve, for me, a lot of jumping through hoops. And that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with iOS. It means iOS is still growing and developing and evolving, and there's lots of room for that to happen. So that's where their energy is going to be.

And I'm not saying that's right. As somebody who would prefer to see the Mac continue to grow and develop and evolve. I'd like to see them evolve together. But I think it's natural that making iOS do as much as the Mac can do and finding ways for it to do more and different things than the Mac can do is kind of where Apple's, you know, real creativity and real brainpower has to be. And that's where we're going to continue to be wowed from here on out. And I've said before, I think the arm chip thing is a no-lose situation for them. It'll be interesting to see how they do that

on the desktop and on the laptop. But I just, I feel like there's so much more to happen for iOS, including those technologies like augmented reality and others that are really in their infancy. There's just there's like so much out there. I feel like sometimes it's hard to see more than the thing you want in the next year, the little feature that would make your life better. But I feel like

in iOS, because there are so many new technologies that really haven't become usable in a practical everyday sense, because there's so many that are still out there growing that I think they still have the ability to surprise and amaze us with iOS. We talk about transitions. I think there was an invisible transition that happened a couple of years ago. And Mike and I have talked about this a little bit on this show before. The idea that Apple seemed to have come to the conclusion that the Mac was going to just kind of get pushed out on an ice flow. And as long as it could float, it would be alive. But that, you know, it and its user base would just kind of like get older and fade away. And a couple of years ago, they seem to have made an internal transition where they've said, okay, instead, what we're going to do is we're going

to bring the Mac kind of into the fold in terms of our product development and our software platforms. And that's the root of Catalyst. It is the idea that SwiftUI will let you build apps that will run on the Mac. You'll be able to do a version that will run on iPads and Apple Watches and wherever else you want to put them. Apple Watches and, you know, wherever else you want to put them and that they're going to, you know, that's where the new Mac Pro came from and other kind of things where they seem to have changed their tune a little bit, which I find kind of fascinating because, you know, the story of this current era of technology really is about sort of what cards you've been dealt. And so from Microsoft's perspective, they missed the boat in terms of the mobile revolution. And so are building toward the future from Windows. And so we see touch interfaces on Windows, and we see convertible PCs, which, you know, Apple isn't doing because Apple's cards dealt it this hand that is the iPhone, this incredibly successful product, possibly the most successful individual product of our lifetimes, forward and

backward. But it also has the Mac, which is like a joker kind of where it's like, why I also have this thing over here, but this is not our strategy. Our strategy is this, this over here. And, and I'm always fascinated at seeing how Microsoft and Apple approach this kind of thing because they're approaching, I think, maybe the same thing from two completely different sides because it's where their strength lies and they have to build from there. And I am fascinated by the idea that I really wonder what they thought the endgame for the Mac was before, because it seems now like they're going to give the Mac the big hug where the Mac is not going to, it's going to feel more like iOS than it used to, but it's still

going to be part of the, of the whole picture when the alternative was for them to just sort of say, well, the Mac is what it is and it'll just kind of go on, but it's not going to be interesting. Um, and we're not going to focus on it. And, uh, I don't know if that's good or bad, but it does seem like they made that change. I think in the end, it means the Mac will survive a lot longer, but it may not be what we think of as the Mac. Yeah, I think the problem is that you look at what's been happening in Windows hardware and software and how they've created entirely new categories of laptops and how what Google has done with chrome os which was it was it was as laughable and funny and and ridiculous a product as the original mac was but it felt it feels like it's it's it felt this it made the same trajectory where like oh well now that it doesn't stink the core concept is actually really really good good. And in many ways, it's actually outperforming for me stuff that I've got going on my $2,000 MacBook. And you wonder, well, okay, that's great. Now let's turn to macOS. What is better about my Mac today than it was five years ago? And are they doing incredible new form factors like a two-in-one yoga-style convertible where I can actually tent it up and use it just as a display with the keyboard out of the way?

No. Well, have they done really incredible user interface revolutions and tweaks? Like, no. Mostly when they add new features during the keynote, they mention how they are now your iOS gestures and your iOS window tiling. And this other feature that we've renamed from, we've kept the same name from iOS is now available on macOS. I have to say that it's a very frumpy looking and frumpy behaving operating system at this point. I know that they've made amazing changes under the hood, mostly long needed improvements to architecture. So it's not as though it's been stagnant.

But I can't remember the last time there was something about the operating system that got me really excited about what I will be able to do with this Mac that I was not able to do before. Whereas I've had on other platforms many situations like that. I feel like that about the iPad all the time. Yeah. And on the Mac, it's the mac and it's and it's it's fine but i do wonder if apple is actually cutting off interesting areas of exploration because it's got the mac and the

like apple doesn't make a convertible right they make an ipad with a keyboard case but no pointing device well now it's going to be like limited pointing device support and then make a laptop with a screen that you can't remove but But Microsoft and partners are tinkering in the middle zone. And because of these, these barriers that Apple has formed between their product lines, there just sort of isn't something there. And it's, I feel like it's kind of a shame. Like I would, I've said, I would love to see an iOS laptop. I would love to see a Mac convertible. I'd love to see a Mac with a touchscreen, but I'm unclear on what transitions Apple considers good ideas and what ones they consider kind of bad ideas slash heresy.

I don't know. Yeah. And even the new hardware that they have tends to hark back to old hardware. I mean, you could be very simplistic and say the Mac Pro harks back to the cheese grater, which, as I say, is entirely too simplistic. But the Mac Mini that everybody is so fond of that came out last year, it's a better version of the previous Mac Mini, though the computers that have had problems have been the laptops, where they've actually tried to innovate in some way or move people forward in terms of their expectations of laptops. And there have been a lot of problems,

whether you talk about the keyboard or whether you talk about the balance of ports. I don't feel like Apple is having a good experience with laptops and the computers that they do seem to be, you know, doing well and firing on all cylinders are things like the iMac and the Mac mini that are actually quite old designs. Yeah, I just don't feel as though Apple is, I don't think that Apple is embarrassed about the Mac. I don't think that they're trying to ignore it. I just think that you can always tell when somebody is passionate about something and somebody is simply responsible about something where they definitely, I think that Apple is passionate about iOS. I think that they are, they've got their egos invested in it, that this is what we haul out to show people how we are doing something that no one else could possibly do.

And this is being done as well as anybody can possibly be doing it, if not better. Mac is like, and we have a laptop. And it works really, really well. It's very, very secure. It's designed very, very well. It's a very nice design. But they're not going to point to that to say – when they invite someone into their rec room, that's not the display case they lead people to. They lead people to the display case of iPads and the iPad and the Mac.

Oh, well, yeah, we have a couple of those, too. All right. I want to do before we go. I have a special upstream topic that is something that I've been holding for a while. And I think that you would be perfect people to talk to it about. But before we do that, we do have one more sponsor, if Mike Hurley is out there. Of course I am. Of course I am. I'm playing the role of the listener, the advanced listener of this.

Oh, excellent. Excellent. Thank you for doing that. You're all doing a great job, by the way. He'll be sending in his Snell Talk question in a moment. I'll be writing out the episode, don't worry. Today's episode is brought to you by Lumen5. Snappy videos on social media are a fun fast way to digest your favorite content and if you're producing content of any kind this is probably

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All right, Mike, it's time for Upstream. We usually do that at the beginning. My favorite. And now it's at the end. It's because it's a special summer of fun. Everything's wild in the summer of fun. It's all here, but it's all in a different way. And this is a topic. I think I originally was going to do this with John Syracuse, and we ran out of time,

and it's been sitting in our show document for a long time. I think I originally was going to do this with John Syracuse and we ran out of time and it's been sitting in our show document for a long time. But I think it is a fun topic. And I know that Andy and Shelley are people who have opinions about this. And Mike, you probably do, too. And it started with Harry McCracken back in April. My colleague from he was my he was the PC World editor in chief when I was the Mac World editor in chief. He linked to a story about why 2.7 million Americans still get Netflix DVDs in the mail.

And what Harry said was, when streaming emerged, I thought it would lead to just about everything ever done being readily available, but I've been gravely disappointed. And I thought about this for a while, about how we think about, and when I do episodes of The Incomparable,

this comes up a lot, where we do episodes about, like last week on this show, we talked about Kiki I do episodes of the incomparable this comes a lot up a lot where we do episodes about like last week on this show we talked about Kiki's delivery service which is not available for streaming it is not available for digital purchase you have to buy the blu-ray or the dvd that's how you get it and there are a lot of movies that are out of print or they're only available on disc and and while there are places that are collecting movies that are either out of print or going out of print like my friend monte ashley always talks up scarecrow video in seattle which is basically not just a video store but a museum of film and tv and other video things there's just so much stuff that's not available on

netflix or another streaming service and i'm'm starting to wonder if you're not on streaming, if you're just lost. And Miyazaki, again, is an example. A lot of classic movies, a lot of great old TV shows, a lot of movies that don't have a clear rights holder, stuff from Broadway. way there's so many things some of it is caught up in rights issues but it becomes uh really difficult when i want to talk about a movie or a tv show and everybody says well i can't i can't listen to that episode i can't listen to your conversation because i can't click one button and watch whatever that thing is and it frustrates me because there's a lot of great stuff up there that are out there that is not streaming and i I worry that it's all kind of fading away. And I'll also mention as an aside, I actually saved a bunch of VHS tapes from my teenage years of primarily of David Letterman shows. And found out that by the time I had a setup where I was going to digitize those and put them up somewhere that all of them were basically on YouTube already. And thanks to the guy named Don Giller, who basically has digitized.

The great Don Z. Don Z. He has digitized like everything. Literally. Let's make sure people are clear about this. Literally everything. And I mean the literal version of literally. literally everything and i mean the literal version of literally like it's so much so that when people on staff at the letterman show and for and now former members of the staff

need a clip they come to don z there was a that documentary about uh bathrooms over broadway i think it was but uh about the the letterman writer who did all the uh uh who did all the uh the the the record dave's record collection would have like really weird institutional and business musicals. They had clips from the show that they got, they could only get from Don Z. That's how exhaustive it is. Yeah. Sorry.

And no, it's amazing. And we'll put Don's blog and there's a New York Times piece about it that he has done this. It is amazing. Of course, technically, copyright violation, right? He doesn't own the copyright on any of this stuff. And yet he's the one who is making sure that it doesn't fade into oblivion because NBC doesn't care, especially about the stuff. You know, maybe David Letterman's production company cares a little bit more.

Maybe not. I don't know. But NBC, for the early stuff, he doesn't care. production company cares a little bit more maybe not i don't know but nbc for the early stuff he doesn't care i'm reminded of another story i read in the new york times back in march about this guy who obsessively taped boxing matches on vhs and for a long time the entire boxing industry would come over to his apartment and borrow his tapes and he would write on little cards and he he passed away like five years. And his wife is still taping boxing matches save stuff for the future. But in the end, when they go away, for whatever reason, they pass away, they decide they don't want to do anymore.

What happens to this stuff? And I don't know, I just find it I just find it kind of disturbing that in this Yes, we are in an era of plenty where there's more great television being made than ever before. And there's a huge amount of content accessible to all of us with the click of a button. I do wonder about all the stuff that's falling through the cracks. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I do believe that copyright is important. I believe that paying the people who create stuff is important. I don't believe that you should be a Johnny No-Wanna-Pay and just simply say, well, because I can get this on a BitTorrent, that means that there's no reason for me to pay for this Blu-ray or to pay for this HBO subscription. I don't believe that at all. However, there are a couple of ethical exceptions, I think, that there are so many pieces of content, like you described, that if not for the fact that

there are people who are pirating this stuff, it would just go away. Like my favorite example of this was, you know, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, like the juggling comedy troupe. So they came they did a production at Lincoln Center of the comedy Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. And it was like all vaudeville, like all juggling, all all all wire walking. Funny as hell. Amazing. All wirewalking. Funny as hell. Amazing.

And it aired on PBS's Live at Lincoln Center once. Because, again, it was an actual production. And they did a special live airing of it. According to the rules, of course, they can only air it once or twice. And now you can't get it. And it's on YouTube. Part one and part two. I'll include the links to them and when you see this you would think that i don't think that whoever it was who digitized this and posted it did anything wrong they did something important and noble because

this thing would have died it would nobody would know it exists if not for the fact that someone someone stole it and uh smerdyakov karamazov sam williams was a was a friend of mine one of the original members the karamazovs and he was actually very he was actually very very pleased that uh dvd copies vhs copies were becoming dvd copies i think he passed away just as youtube was becoming really really big and i knew that he as one of the performers in there, he could not give permission for this, but he was happy that people were able to see this. And so it's amazing to me that how ephemeral this content can be, even something as impressive as the Flying Carmen Marzal brothers doing the comedy Varys. I don't want to recommend it to people. I want people to be able to click a link and actually watch it. Where to begin? I've collected classic films forever, and I love them,

and I have watched them wherever I could. I have bought every opportunity there was. I have looked at all the streaming services to see what was and wasn't available. The thing about a lot of classic movies is they are just plain out of print. There are extremely complicated rights issues having to do with the fact that the companies that made the films had been bought and sold and merged and, you know, concatenated and the whole thing. And so if you give me the name and the studio that made a movie, I can tell you who owned it. And the chances are very small that it's the same people who made it.

And the people who then own it don't necessarily have any interest in cleaning it up and making it the kind of quality that it would need for streaming release. There are people who are out there, you know, doing the Lord's work, restoring films or facilitating the restoration of films, finding films in foreign countries, reels of film, and taking them to the UCLA Film Archive and saying, hey, could you please help us restore this? Oh, if you raise the money, we'll do that. And then they take them back to the rights holder and they say, well, we've done this really cool restoration of your film. Could we now strike a DVD? Well, no, because either the rights are contested or the people who own the film don't feel there's a financial incentive for them to

do it, even if a lot of the work has been taken care of. So basically what I've done is behave like a little squirrel. And every time I see something that I want, I keep it. And it can be DVDs. It can be, you know, I've DVR'd thousands of movies from Turner Classic Movies because that's my preferred, that's a lot of the stuff I like is from there. And you will be shocked at what's on TCM that's not on video because apparently there are contracts that allow things to be shown on TV that allow them to be shown on cable TV, but not streamed because that's not in the contract. Not streamed nor put onto DVD. And sometimes what will happen is TCM will show a movie and you'll think, oh, well, that's a TCM movie. I can see that again.

And then if you ask them, if you said, you know, I saw that movie. I saw Desk Set that I really liked. I'd like to see that again. When are you going to play it? They'll say, well, we're going to have rights to it again in five years, because even for showing it on cable, the rights don't necessarily continue. a lot to do with why I've had a mistrustful relationship with streaming. And I've always believed that instead of having every streaming service so I could have access to everything I wanted in theory, that I was just going to take subscriptions to the streaming services that had what I wanted now and never assume that I was going to be able to watch it ever again. And I think that's the only healthy way to behave for what I want, especially in light, you know, look, to behave for what I want, especially in light, you know, look what's going to happen later this year. We have Warners who killed Warner Archive and who killed the previous incarnation of their streaming service, and they're now going to create some sort of giant bundle thing because they want

to leverage the back catalog that's still saleable, you know, the far more current movies. So if you have an arthouse movie, if it's a great classic, it might end up on Criterion or it might not. And I just never assuming that something is going to be available tomorrow that you saw today is the only way I can, you know, continue to enjoy movies. Yeah, absolutely. It's like you see those blog posts constantly of like, what's coming off Netflix this month, right? Like, and then where does it go? Who knows? Yeah, but see, that's exactly the problem.

It's like there are movies that I love so much that I don't want to ever lose access to them. And that's why so often that's why I buy a lot of DVDs and I buy a lot of Blu-rays because I don't want to lose access to to to airplane. I don't want to ever lose access to John Woo, the killer. Okay. I don't, I don't want to ever have to, or the abyss, which has never been, which is still, we're still waiting for that wonderful 4k restoration. One of my favorite movies ever. And let's also talk about Babylon 5. That's been an amazing epic TV series, but that Warner Brothers just doesn't, seems to actively not care about. They actively are disinterested in it.

They actively are saying, if you take this quarter, I'm going to give you this quarter, move it from this glass to this glass. I'm going to put the two glasses in front of you, and that will cause Babylon 5 to be available to people. They would not even take that effort. They would break the glasses at that point. Right, exactly. They so break the glasses at that point. Right, exactly. They so actively don't care about it.

And so if I don't buy the DVDs and if I don't rip the DVDs into files so I can put it on my file server, it just doesn't, that's no good. And another reason why one of my favorite apps ever is an app called Downy for macOS. One of my favorite apps ever is an app called Downy for Mac OS. And pretty much no matter what is streaming in your web browser, it's a browser plug-in. And you click on this button, and it does everything for you. It will figure out from what service you're streaming from and find the original MP4 file and just download it to a file. And I use this on stuff that is on YouTube that maybe shouldn't be on YouTube. I do that all the time because thank goodness I get this made for TV movie starring the stars

of the producers as in a comedy about a disease that turns people temporarily into rhinoceroses. And that is never coming to DVD. And that's not going to be remade with new cast of characters. At some point, someone's going to notice who some algorithm run by a movie studio is going to notice the thing is up there and it's going to disappear. And that's what I'm glad that not only did I watch this, I also clicked that button and had Downey make me a copy of it. It's not legal, but I believe it's ethically, I don't have an ethical problem with it. And the irony is that Warner Brothers, at least at the moment, notwithstanding what I said about their streaming service, they have been one of the better ones about back catalog. And companies like

Fox, companies like Paramount have, I mean, I'm talking about really ancient back catalog, but even the Babylon 5 thing surprises me and I'm not in that loop. And they've restored all sorts of crazy TV series from the 70s and 80s. It's a politics because it wasn't made by the core tv business it was made by their syndication arm and therefore the core tv business doesn't want anything to do with it that's the that's the story there but you're right i i have been thinking for a long time and i know i've talked about this with mike that in the end i feel like a lot of the older content is going to go somewhere because I do think there's a niche streaming service that could be successful serving older movies and older TV shows. But we aren't there. We live in a world where all the money is going toward creating more original content for new services.

And the rest of it is just sort of like floating out there. But I do really believe that. and i want to believe it maybe i'm wish casting a little because it does i feel like we didn't learn the lesson of of every previous transition to a new medium or to a new storage medium or transmission transfer medium whatever you want to put it as of like losing stuff and you'll be like oh those silly people back in the day who uh put their film stock or put their films on uh flammable film stock and then didn't take proper care of it but then there's the oh those silly people at the bbc who uh erased all of their videotapes of doctor who because it wasn't going to be worth anything and by the way those episodes exist now in large part because of fans yep right again it's the youtube

story except back in the 70s it was fans taping shows off of off of uh off air on vhs or beta or even before that fans taping the audio using just audio cassette tapes is the reason any of that stuff survives so it's very similar to today's youtube kind of uh kind of thing and you know but in the end are we not there already that? A lot of this stuff is going to just fade away. And unless you happen to grab a copy and have it in the kind of digital underground, it's just gone. And nothing frustrates me more than coming up with a great movie or TV show to talk about on The Incomparable, for example, and realizing we can't talk about it because nobody can get it. Or at least not, you know, you could get a used DVD of it, but you can't get it on in HD.

You can't get it on streaming and you can't buy it on iTunes. And so it might as well be invisible. I talked to a guy for one of my parallel shows about right about the time that the Warner streaming service stuff happened last year. And we were talking because he had done a film festival on TCM about disability in film. And I said, where did you get some of the films you had? Because they were really incredibly rare, incredibly hard to find. He said, well, the way I got access to see them was I know a lot of collectors. And there was a lot of exchanging back and forth that wasn't strictly legal so that he could view the movies and decide whether they went in the festival.

And then he had to present this list to TCM and say, here's the film I want to show. How many of these can you get me? And I think it was two years before he actually got the festival on the air that it took them to resolve all the rights. There were a couple that he didn't eventually, they didn't at all get to show. And this is TCM. They've got a team of lawyers that does nothing but rights issues. But he still couldn't get those shown.

And he's got another list, which if he ever does this festival again, he's going to add. And so it's incredibly difficult and it's incredibly challenging. Like I say, this is a guy who collects film, who didn't have access to the things he needed to see in order to create a new work of art that would explain film to new generations. Yeah. What percentage of movies before 1922 are considered lost it's it's a stay it's an impressively large number where you'll see not not just some home movie stuff but here's the biggest star of the day on one of the most profitable movies of that of 1921 and you see oh wow where is it like no it's lost oh wow so it's so so i have to go to a university archive no it there is it? Like, no, it's lost. Oh, wow. So I have to go to a university archive?

No, there is no copy known to exist. It's the nitrate film. And it's also that people didn't see their value and a lot of copies got thrown away. And a surprising number of films made after 1930, which is essentially when the silent transition happened, are gone or partially gone. And that's the restoration stories that I find fascinating is when you have people like the Film Noir Foundation that go out and they say, I want to restore this movie. And they scour collectors all over the world. And they'll say, well, I found this reel in a vault in Italy. And I found that the studio had this reel and we combined them together. And we raised a bunch of money and we got the UCLA Film Archive to actually do the painstaking digital restoration. And that's

the only reason this thing is available on DVD or Blu-ray. And then it's, you know, not even to mention things like showing theatrically, which is a whole separate thing. You know, revivals, houses have difficulty getting more than a sort of standard set of classics that we've all seen a hundred times, or those of us who pay attention to classics have seen a hundred times. It's really hard to get those restorations that are theatrical quality also the danger of keeping things in the vault and i will put a link in the show notes the to the new york times piece about the universal audio archive fire oh yeah i read that where all the master recordings were destroyed in in this fire that's the danger of keeping something in the vault and not letting it out

to the world is that if you keep it in the vault you might lose the master but at least you will have saved something but if you keep it in the vault and then the vault burns down you keep it on a uh you're on a archival dvd and the bit rod happens your hard drive crashes your server melts down and the backup turns out to have been faulty uh the more you spread this stuff around the more likely it's not going to become lost forever um and and that is i mean shelly you mentioned about finding movies in weird places i think they found what was it was it the front page ended up being like there's an entirely different version with the better takes and we've been watching the version with the bad takes or was it or was it his

girl friday maybe it was his girl friday i'm not sure i i don't know about that one it might have been and then i would bet it was front page because that's an older no i think that's right and they did the international version in the u.s version the u.s version got the uh got the good takes the international version got the bad takes and the movie that everybody had been watching as a fan a film fan for 50 years was the bad takes the second takes, because the first takes was lost, and then somebody found it. And that's great, because, you know, but that was also sheer luck. And I mentioned Doctor Who before, all the black and white Doctor Who really only exists because they put that on film and shipped it to Africa and the Middle East, and to show on TV there. And those film canisters survived the purge. And that's also ridiculous and luck. And you've lost a lot of, a lot of stuff. So my, my, I think all of our point here is it is a point of frustration that we live in this world of plenty. And yet there's all this stuff that for legal reasons, for intransigent owners of the content reasons, uh, are languishing. And I don't want to live in a world where if it's not available on streaming,

it doesn't exist. But I'm concerned that that's the world we live in already. Yeah. It's about, this is our heritage. This is our culture. And it disappears unless it is honored, unless it is preserved, just as we say. It's distressing. but there is another piece of hope in here in that even 10 years wars episode four that just from all we have are crappy 35 millimeter prints but we're going to source them the best the best cuts from all these prints that we can get from collectors and then we are going to by hand by basically crowdsourcing 100 frames at a time people people getting rid of scratches getting rid of scratches, getting rid of cuts, and then the scholarship of, oh, actually, this doesn't have the original crawl. The original crawl didn't have the series title on it. And the ability to have this actually almost – with the color grading and everything, a really commercially grade 1080 Blu-ray type of release of the original Star wars that has not been modified or messed with uh with

with with future cuts and yep it's illegal nope there's no there's no there's no legally defensive way but again i have this file on my server which is backed up in many places because if i want to see star wars as i believe that it exists which is the way that I first saw it, that is my only option. And I feel like I'm helping to save humanity a little bit just by participating in the piracy. And related to that, the fact that we have such greater capacity than before, because people were transmitting single movies on single VHS tapes and old time radio shows on single half hour cassettes. And now you can put dozens and dozens and hundreds of radio shows onto a Blu-ray disc and transfer it easily. You have YouTube out there. You have you have enormous hard drives, which must be backed up and must be archived offside and all that stuff but you do have the capability of moving large enough volumes of stuff around that it makes it's possible for an individual collector to amass a pretty respectable set of files that they care about i just upgraded my four terabyte nas i'm sorry my eight terabyte nas to a larger nas because i'm slow but with with archiving all of my cds and all my downloaded

files and all the blu-rays and dvds i've, I didn't think I'd run out of space four years ago, but I'm running out of space. And now I have to back up that as well because if this ever went away, I would be very, very sad because this is a video store. This is Netflix for Andy. I would pay $10 a month for Netflix for Andy, but it doesn't exist, so I have to have this box with a Synology logo on it and a couple of backups. We kind of have that. And sometimes what I'll do to watch a movie is I'll just hit random. It's the greatest feeling in the world because I know everything on there is something that I collected for a reason. And, you know, 4,000 films or whatever I have, I might not even feel like watching the first thing it comes up with.

But the idea that I have that many choices that are tailored to my tastes and interests is very cool. It's cost me a lot of money and time to do it, but I'm glad I did. You have to enjoy being a librarian, I find. I kind of enjoy being the curator. I enjoy when I rip a CD to not only say, this, look, this is Joyce DiDonato's picture on the front of the CD. It says, Joyce DiDonato, and the title of the album. The fact that she did one duet on this album

does not make it a compilation of various artists. I'm fixing that. Well, I think we've reached the end of this very special episode. This has been a fun conversation. I want to thank my guests for being here and making it special.y and notka thank you for being here oh always great to be in podcasts with two of my oldest oldest tech

he's not talking about mike i think uh shelly brisbane thank you too thank you thank you for inviting me i rarely get the chance to shake my virtual finger at the sky about old movies and that it pleases me to be able to do that and old max too and if there are kids on our lawn get off yes get off just come on and mike you too you get off our lawn all right well do you want me to do do you want me to just go now or do you want me to do i think you should say I think you should wrap up the show first and then get off my lawn. Okay, so I'll do a job for you, then I'll get off the lawn. Mow my lawn and then get off of it, yeah. Mow the lawn and then get off it.

If you want to find links to this episode, including links to all of Shelley and Andy's wonderful places that you can go and follow online, including their RelayFM shows, you can go to relay.fm. Slash upgrade slash 252. You can find Jason at sixcolors.com as well thank you so much to our wonderful sponsors of this week's episode lumina 5 bombas and text expander and most of all thank you for listening to this summer of fun special we'll be back next week with another special guest so that will be something for you all to look forward to until then say goodbye everybody toodles bye everybody

goodbye