Upgrade - 277: Who Killed the Butterfly Keyboard?

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

This week we try to solve a technology mystery. What if there was a murder, but no body? What if there were victims, but no crime? We all want answers: Who killed the butterfly keyboard, and why?

Support for Upgrade is provided by Instabug and Setup. For the last four years, we've been trying to figure out a mystery. And it's taken us to all sorts of interesting places, places I never expected to go. It started just south of Market Street in San Francisco on a spring day in 2015. But four years later, in November 2019, the story we'd been following all this time changed. Later, in November 2019, the story we'd been following all this time changed. It was no longer a debate about sound, stability, feel, travel, or any of the other terms we'd debated all that time. Just like that, those conversations were over, and we were left on the cold autumn streets of New York City with a smoking gun, but no dead body. This is the story of the death of the butterfly keyboard.

Who killed it? And why? Yes, that's all very interesting, but will I be dissatisfied with the butterfly switches on my computer? From RelayFM, it's Upgrade, the story of technology told week by week. I'm Jason Snell. Here's how the story ends. It's November 2019, and I'm walking into a building in Tribeca in New York City. You might think that Apple's headquarters in New York City is in the showy glass cube on Fifth Avenue, Apple's retail store. But it's not.

It's this nondescript building down the street from a diner just off Broadway. Vanity Fair calls it a capacious loft in a Civil War-era five-story former mansion in Lower Manhattan. A reader of the Tribeca Citizen described it as basically what you'd expect would happen if Apple decorated a Tribeca apartment, complete with glass staircase. It's true, the two main levels of this building are connected by a staircase that wouldn't look out of place in an Apple store. There's beautiful furniture, gorgeous brick walls. Apparently Apple hosted a party here back in March for publishing executives, trying to convince them what a good idea it was to join its Apple News Plus service. Vanity Fair said that one

attendee asked if they were at a party or awake. Such is the state of publishing in 2019. In any event, I am not a New York publisher. I report about technology, mostly Apple technology, and I've been invited here to hear about something. Now, you have to understand, Apple generally doesn't tell you what you're going to hear about. You Now you have to understand, Apple generally doesn't tell you what you're going to hear about. You can get a sense, based on who gives you the invitation, about what general product category is involved. But as I'm walking out of the cold into the lobby of Apple's building, I don't know anything for sure. There will be an announcement, and later today I'm coming back to interview someone, but that's it. Rumors

have been swirling for some time that there's a new Apple laptop coming, a 16-inch MacBook Pro, and that it might have a new keyboard design. That's a big deal for Apple Watchers, because the company's current line of laptops use a keyboard that a lot of people don't like. More on that in a minute. So I'm sitting on a leather couch with eight other media types, listening to a presentation that starts with Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller and then moves on to a couple of product marketing managers. It's just after 830 in the morning. We're the first group of the day. And that means we're the first people to learn that the rumors are true.

There's a new 16-inch laptop. Yes, it's got faster chips and longer battery life and an upgraded audio system. It's got faster chips and longer battery life and an upgraded audio system. But what everyone hears, the thing we all write down in our notebooks or tap into the notes app on our phones, is that the butterfly keyboard is dead. It's an X keyboard. This new laptop has replaced it with something different. Or, to be specific, something familiar. Something called a magic keyboard.

That night, my producer Mike Hurley and I are giddy with the news. And then, Mike, oh, I left one out. The most important one. I know, it's a little drama here. The keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard. They talked about the keyboard a lot. While the death of a human being is a tragedy, the death of a computer keyboard should be cause for neither celebration nor grief.

And yet, here we are, excited about a keyboard being replaced with a different keyboard. A keyboard! It's hard to explain why, but let me try. We have to go back a little further to where this story really begins. It's March 2015 in San Francisco at the Europa Buena Theater. Apple is holding a special event with the title Spring Forward, and I'm sitting in the audience. Again, we don't know what Apple's going to announce, but the rumors are swirling. After about half an hour of retail updates, Apple TV news, and the announcement of a health study, it's time for a product announcement.

Tim Cook drops the news that this is a new, smaller MacBook laptop, and leaves the stage to Phil Schiller to explain the details. Among them is that Apple has taken it on itself to design an entirely different keyboard. And it's not just any keyboard. It is an all-new keyboard. As you move to a thinner design, it took an entirely new kind of invention to make it a beautiful keyboard. It would take Apple a year and a half to bring this keyboard to other Mac laptops, and the new MacBook was a thin, light, low-powered, and high-priced laptop that didn't appeal to Apple's most exacting and technical users. They'd get their moment to experience the new keyboard eventually, but not yet. That was a time bomb, ticking down for 19 months. But for those of us who got one and tried it out, the

early reviews were not encouraging. I tried very hard to be even-handed, but in the end, I said I was not a fan. The biggest problem was something called travel, which is the amount of key moves downward when you press on it. Apple's old keyboards move twice as much as the new ones. Now, of course, Apple accentuated the positive. So the team studied how current keyboard technology works. Here's a slow motion video of a customer typing on a standard keyboard.

And as you see, as the keys get pressed, they're a bit wobbly. In fact, if you press them on the side, they start to bottom out. The butterfly mechanism is built of a single assembly, and it's supported by a stainless steel dome switch. And that all adds up to a key that is much more precise and accurate. In fact, it's four times more stable than that scissor mechanism. It is 40% thinner, allowing us to make a thinner keyboard. The keys are much more precise, much more accurate, even if you strike them on the side. It is a beautiful keyboard. I got to be honest. At that moment in March of 2015, I had never, ever, ever heard anyone

seriously criticize a keyboard for having keys that were too wobbly. But Apple had decided that keeping keys stable, even when you hit them off center, was a priority. So it invented an entirely new mechanism to replace the scissor switch design that had been used on laptops for years.

The new mechanism was shaped a bit like two overlapping wings, and so they called it the Butterfly. Who doesn't love butterflies? I was far from the only person who tried the MacBook keyboard who didn't like it. Marco Arment's post on the matter simply said, The MacBook's keyboard is not good. I can type on the MacBook, but I'd rather not. But maybe the MacBook was an outlier. That reduced key travel, those new switches. They were all in service of a thin laptop that was the most extreme and iPad-like Mac Apple had ever made.

In my review, I struck a note of hope. I wrote that I was hopeful that Apple saw the keyboard as what it was, a pretty serious compromise in order to get the computer thinner, rather than some breakthrough new keyboard that will be replicated on every other Apple keyboard in the next year or two. We know how that turned out. Support for Upgrade is provided by Instabug. Go to instabug.com slash upgrade to sign up today and install their SDK. If you do, you'll get a free Instabug t-shirt and a 14-day free trial. Instabug is an SDK that takes complete care of your beta testing and user feedback process, allowing you to debug, fix, and improve your app faster and easier. It takes just a minute to install, giving you seamless two-way communication with users or testers.

Your users will be able to shake their phones to send you feedback with screenshots that can be annotated and a log of touch events so you can focus on what's needed to fix the problem. Instabug also features automatic crash reporting. Every crash is reported with a complete stack trace and reproduction steps, helping you fully understand what happened. And all of your crash data can be viewed together with charts, helping you get an overview of performance at a glance. Instabug also features in-app chat so you can easily communicate with your users to get more feedback and let them know what's going on. You also have the ability to run user surveys too. You can integrate with all of

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Who remembers keyboard trivia? I mean, apparently I do. Now, I've already told you about the MacBook keyboard from March. In October, Apple introduced an entirely different keyboard called the Magic Keyboard, and it didn't use butterfly switches. It used traditional scissor switches. It had a millimeter of key travel, twice that of the keyboard in the MacBook. The problem was, it wasn't for a laptop. It was an external Bluetooth keyboard. After just a few months, people

were already a little skeptical of the butterfly keyboard. When discussing the keyboard on John Gruber's podcast, The Talk Show, Serenity Caldwell of iMore referred to it this way. Let's see. It's just called a keyboard. No, it is a magic keyboard. It's a magic keyboard.

Because it has the new not butterfly mechanism, but different scissor mechanism than previous keyboards. The not butterfly keyboard. We dodged a bullet there. This one's not the butterfly keyboard. Now, some of us with optimism

still remaining in our hearts took it as a sign that Apple wasn't going to be satisfied with sticking with the butterfly keyboard. This was a weird design created for a weird thin MacBook, and they weren't going to stick it into the rest of its laptops. Oh, I was so much more innocent then. This is what I wrote. The fear I had was that Apple would decide that the work it had done on the MacBook keyboard shouldn't be limited to that product. And the result would be that a new design fit for a tiny laptop would spread across every Mac. If nothing else, the new $99 Magic Keyboard seems to suggest that the

keyboard dystopia I fear won't come to be. Well, the good news is I predicted the keyboard dystopia. to come to be. Well, the good news is I predicted the keyboard dystopia. The bad news is, after reading the tea leaves, I thought it had been averted. A month later, November, Apple announces something completely different. This is a new iPad. It's the very first iPad Pro. And along with it, surprise, surprise, is another keyboard. Apple has created a keyboard so thin it doubles as an iPad cover. It's called the Smart Keyboard. The Smart Keyboard uses the same butterfly mechanism as the MacBook Keyboard, but not in the same way. In the Smart Keyboard, the keys aren't made of hard plastic.

They're made of a fabric-like material that springs back on its own after you press it. It's a lot like the MacBook keyboard, but I'm more forgiving of it, as are most other reviewers. It's an iPad keyboard made of fabric. Sure, it feels weird, but it gets graded on a curve because it's so unusual. So 2015 is the year of new Apple keyboards, but there's no controversy yet. It's not until the fall of 2016 that things get testy. In October, Apple calls the media to a special event at its Town Hall Theater on the old Infinite Loop campus. It's the same place where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod back in 2001. It's a cramped space, long since replaced with the much more spacious Steve Jobs Theater at the company's new Apple Park campus.

On stage, Apple CEO Tim Cook is about to introduce a new line of MacBook Pro laptops. He put the introduction in the context of the company's rich history of laptops, complete with a video featuring swooping views of the original PowerBook and numerous successors, all leading up to a shot of the brand new model. Now, you may not realize it, but this week happens to be a huge week in the history of the Mac and in the history of Apple. This week marks the 25th anniversary of our first notebook. Now, the anniversary Cook is referring to here is the release of the first generation of the PowerBook 100 series

in October of 1991. What's interesting about this is that the PowerBook 100, 140, and 170 weren't actually the first Apple laptops, no matter what Tim Cook claimed. To tell that story, we have to go back two years earlier, September 1989, when Apple's Jean-Louis Gasset introduced a 16-pound Mac with a handle called the Mac Portable.

Beyond software compatibility, there is usage consistency. Everything you do on a desktop machine, we wanted you to be able to do on a portable Macintosh. Not just a little bit of note-taking and spreadsheet work. Everything you do on a desktop, no subset of applications, no Mac junior, no compromise. Now, if you ask classic Mac aficionado Stephen Hackett, the Mac portable was a system that was... Jason, Jason, I think this is too much. We're losing focus on the keyboard now. Okay.

You know, the history of the Mac laptop is much more than the PowerBook 100. There's the portable. There's the eMate. Look, I think we can do those stories another time. I think, look, if we just cut out the Mac portable stuff, stick to the 2016 MacBook Pro for now, I think it's going to make more sense. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, you're right. You're right. This is probably a tangent too far. Yeah. Sorry, Stephen. Oh, okay. Should I go?

Yeah. The most notable feature of the 2016 MacBook Pro wasn't its butterfly keyboard. It was something called the touch bar, a touchscreen strip placed where the function keys would normally be on a traditional keyboard. Now, whether the touch bar has been a success or a failure in the ensuing three years is debatable, but that's a different podcast. Just listen to how Phil Schiller blows past the keyboard to get to the Touch Bar. The keyboard is all new as well. It uses the butterfly switch mechanism that we pioneered in our 12-inch MacBook, but now we've applied it to

a professional notebook. And in this case, there's a new switch mechanism, a second-generation butterfly. It's more responsive and gives an even greater sense of keyboard travel as you press on it. It is a great keyboard. And I could talk all day about it, but I think you're probably looking at that area just above it. That's it. Apple clearly doesn't think going to the butterfly keyboard is an issue. It's an afterthought to the shiny new technology of the touch bar. But on the Accidental Tech podcast, Marco Arment has noticed something.

You'll remember he was a critic of the original MacBook keyboard. What he's noticed is that Apple has gone out of its way to say that the keyboard in the macbook pro is not quite like the one in the macbook i think it was interesting too like in the johnny i've explanation video that they really hammered on the fact that this was the second generation butterfly key switch like they they really made it very clear this is not the same keyboard this is an improved keyboard which i thought was kind of a tacit acknowledgement of like yeah that first one wasn't very good or was at least controversial. So they really want us to know that this is new and improved. We'll see if it actually is. Now, the 2016 MacBook Pros were

controversial and for a lot of different reasons. They were all more expensive than previous models. The touch bar's usefulness was debatable. They switched from the long-standing USB-A connector that had been used to connect peripherals to Macs since the original iMac to the new USB-C standard, meaning that new buyers would need to buy new cables or special adapters to use their old devices with the new laptops. But the thing that really bugged a lot of people was the keyboard. And what's worse, there was no alternative. Keyboard preference is highly personal. There's no keyboard that can be called objectively better

than another, because we all look for different things in our keyboards. And of course, we're only human. Change is hard to adapt to, and Apple was asking every MacBook Pro user to adapt to a new keyboard style. But people really didn't like the keyboard. A lot of people. It didn't offer much travel. It felt weird. The key layout wasn't quite right. It made a loud crunching sound when you typed. And those people had nowhere to turn. Because Apple's the only company that makes Macs. If you hated USB-C, you could buy a dongle. If you hated the touch bar, you could ignore it.

But you can't replace a laptop keyboard. If you wanted to stick with the Mac, and you wanted a laptop made after 2015, you had to use the butterfly keyboard. Now, if the only flaw in the butterfly keyboard was that it felt weird and sounded different, perhaps it could have survived. Over the years, people seem to get used to the new keyboard. Maybe it was just begrudging acceptance, but that might have been enough. Apple might have managed to whistle past the graveyard. Except it turns out that aesthetics weren't the only problem

with the butterfly keyboard. It was unreliable. It was a keyboard that couldn't type right. And that was its fatal flaw. for support for upgrade is provided by setup setup is one of the best ways to find applications for the mac the curation team only selects apps that meet the highest quality standards in design usefulness and user experience. It's easily one of the most productive tools you can have on your Mac because it packs over 150 apps into one.

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with your workflow. On June 7th, 2017, right in the middle of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, the company posted a support document on its website. Most of these documents are nondescript. They'll tell you what keys to hold down to reset your laptop's power system

or how to tell the difference between different versions of an iMac. This one was different. How to tell the difference between different versions of an iMac. This one was different. How to clean the keyboard of your MacBook or MacBook Pro. If your MacBook 2015 and later or MacBook Pro 2016 and later has an unresponsive key or key that feels different than the other keys when you press it, follow these steps to clean the keyboard with compressed air. As you follow these steps, remember to use the straw included with the compressed air to control airflow,

and keep the end of the straw about a half inch away from the keyboard as you spray. Also remember to not invert the air can while you're spraying. 1. Hold your Mac notebook at a 75 degree angle, so it's not quite vertical. 2. Use compressed air to spray the keyboard or just the affected keys in a left to right motion. Three, rotate your Mac notebook to its right side and spray the keyboard again from left to right. Four, repeat the action, this time with your Mac notebook rotated to its left side. If any keys are still unresponsive after you followed these steps, visit an Apple retail store or Apple authorized service provider for service.

In October 2017, a full year after the MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard came out, the website The Outline posts a piece by tech writer Casey Johnston called Bad Tech. The new MacBook keyboard is ruining my life. The story starts with Johnston standing in the Apple store in Grand Central Station while an Apple genius investigates why every time she presses the space bar on her keyboard, it generates two spaces. The best the genius can offer is an explanation that maybe it's a piece of dust. That was the third time Johnston had heard that explanation. When the problem is a problem and other people are having it and other people are coming and claiming it, and you're pretending like there's some crazy weird one-off or innocuous, like the line that I kept hearing, oh, maybe it's just a piece of dust, is like, you know in your cosmic overlord apple brain that you have done something wrong here. doesn't know it, someone somewhere up the chain knows it. So for someone to be telling me that

my problem is like some sort of non-problem is really kind of messed up. Now, if there's a smoking gun in the death of the butterfly keyboard, it's this. A keyboard that was already not particularly beloved by a lot of people because of the reduced key travel was also clearly unreliable. Sticky keys, double keys, tech notes about spraying compressed air at a 75 degree angle in order to blow out debris. It's as if the butterfly keyboard was designed in one of those perfectly white, perfectly clean rooms where they prepare space probes or create silicon chips. To make it thinner and more precise, we created a sturdy, single-assembly butterfly mechanism.

Combined with a new stainless steel dome switch, this reinforces the keyboard's balance and stability. The butterfly keyboard proved to be especially vulnerable to hair and dust and crumbs and all the other real-world items that get into keyboards. And you have to wonder, did Apple not know this from the start? Are Apple product designers all just remarkably fastidious? Did Johnny Ive have a strict no-food-in-the-lab policy? Oh, he probably did, didn't he? Yeah, yeah, he probably did.

Anyway, it also turned out that there was no way to replace a broken key on this keyboard. Apple had to replace the entire top of the case. A single crumb could lead to a chain of events that required the laptop to be sent out for major surgery. Now, you're saying to yourself, this sounds ridiculous. Surely Apple, one of the most innovative companies in technology, would step up and solve the problem. And in the summer of 2018, Apple took another crack at it. First, it declared a sort of amnesty for old keyboards by extending its warranty program to cover repairs on all the laptops that were made with a butterfly keyboard. Apple has determined that a small percentage

of the keyboards in certain MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models may exhibit one or more of the following behaviors. Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly. Letters or characters do not appear. Keys feel sticky or do not respond in a consistent manner. Apple or an Apple-authorized service provider will service eligible MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro keyboards free of charge. The type of service will be determined after the keyboard is examined and may involve the replacement of one or more keys or the whole keyboard. Apple didn't stop there. It also released new models with a thin silicone barrier under the keycaps. Apple said it was there to make typing quieter,

but a lot of people were suspicious that it was also an attempt to protect the keyboard from debris. It didn't work. If Casey Johnston helped kill the butterfly keyboard, the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern is certainly in the lineup of suspects. certainly in the lineup of suspects. In the spring of 2019, she posted a story and a video that went into great detail about how Apple's keyboards, including the altered one in the newest models, just didn't work right. Some people who have used all three generations of this keyboard, with models made in 2015 through 2019, have experienced issues. Big issues.

Some keys don't register. Some keys it registers twice so you get a double letter. Sometimes the keys get stuck. And I've had most of those issues with the E key and sometimes the R key on my new MacBook Air. And not to be outdone, Casey Johnston posted a new item on the outline in April of 2019, headlined, Apple owes everyone an apology and it should start with me specifically. headlined, Apple owes everyone an apology and it should start with me specifically. Apple continued to insist that only a small percentage of people were experiencing trouble with their keyboards.

But how would it know, really? Think about it. Apple statistics are presumably coming from counting the number of people coming into Apple stores complaining of keyboard problems. And dividing that by the total number of laptops sold doesn't take into account all the people suffering in silence or taking care of the problem themselves with a can of compressed air from the local hardware store. Let me give you one example. My daughter has a MacBook with a butterfly keyboard. And before she went off to

college, I asked her if she was having any trouble with the keyboard. She said she wasn't, except that, you know, keys would get stuck sometimes, and eventually they'd get unstuck. By Apple's metrics, she's a satisfied customer. Apple changed the butterfly keyboard one last time. And for all we know, it may have actually solved the problem. I haven't heard a lot of stories about the newest butterfly keyboards failing, but the damage had already been done. The word was out.

In newspapers and magazines and websites and spreading by word of mouth, Apple laptops have bad keyboards, and you shouldn't buy them. Did Apple truly fix the butterfly keyboard? Was it even possible to ever really fix it? It didn't matter. It needed to go. And there was a new keyboard waiting in the wings. So, who killed the butterfly keyboard? If all the popular podcasts about crime have taught me anything, it's that it's hard to find a satisfying answer to these questions. Nobody killed the butterfly keyboard.

Everybody killed it. What matters is that it's dead. Wait, Jason, is that the end of it? What do you mean? Well, like after all of this, just saying that there's no answer. I mean, Mike, if you listen to Serial, you watch The Wire, there are no easy answers to anything. If we want to do a tech true crime podcast, we have to nail the ending. There are no easy answers. No, Jason, we can be better than cereal. We can give a satisfying ending. I think saying that there are no easy answers is the easy answer.

Look, wait, I'm coming in. I'm coming in there. In here? Yes, in here. I like this episode so far, but you've missed so many angles to this story, Jason. There are so many unexplored chapters. Look, I've been doing my research. Uh-huh. Who killed the

butterfly keyboard? There are many suspects. What about Sir Johnny Ive, who insisted on making Apple's devices as thin as possible? The original MacBook keyboard has his fingerprints all over it. Maybe it was the engineer who decided that the scissor switch just wasn't cool enough

and that there was a new way to make keyboards that had never been tried before but was ready to be discovered. Mike, you know, the venerable scissor switch has its origins in the laptop designs of the early 1980s. But to really understand the complexities of this situation, we need to go back

to the start, the creation of the first typewriter. The year is 1874. No, we're not doing this again. We're not going to 1874. Nobody cares about the history of the typewriter, Jason. I have 10 minutes with Glenn Fleischman talking about the origins of metal type. No, no, no, no.

Let's consider the media. People like Casey Johnston, Joanna Stern, Mark Awaman, they focused on this problem until Apple realized that the situation couldn't go on. Did they coordinate their efforts? Did they use John Gruber's blog as a clearinghouse for complaints, knowing that key Apple executives were watching the blog closely? Did the mainstream media kill the keyboard? Really?

Jason, you'd be surprised what I have learned. This goes way deeper than you think. Let's consider the touch bar. You mentioned it like in passing, but the touch bar and the butterfly keyboard, they go hand in hand. It's like a match made in keyboard hell. If the touch bar was there at the time the MacBook Pro was announced that makes it an accessory to the crime. Look, I've got about 10 minutes about the touch bar here

if you want me to put it in. I don't want it. I'm just saying the touch bar is a suspect and that's just the start. It goes deeper. Oh, you haven't been talking to the escape key truthers again have you there's a reason it's called escape also they're super nice people and i'm now a member of their patreon they've just got like the greatest perks oh boy look consider the sd card slot all right it

disappeared in 2016 which upsets many photographers and people that think they're photographers now in 2019 apple brings back a scissor keyboard and, yes, the escape key. But where's the SD card slot, huh? What's the story there? Phil Schiller said to Marco that he just uses an adapter. A dongle, Jason? You think this whole thing can be explained away with a dongle? I'm disappointed in you. And let's not forget this exchange from an Apple quarterly analyst call. Can we have the next question, please? Our next question comes from Jim Cross with Chris Research and Company.

Hi, Tim. Got a question for you. Maybe Luca will have something. Wondering if you've gotten any reports that the butterfly keyboard in your MacBook Pro is unpopular, maybe, and shouldn't have ever been released? It's Tim. We feel really great about the keyboard.

We're very bullish. As I've said before, my view is there will be a day in the future that we look back and Apple's greatest contribution will be the keyboard. I don'tcribe that one. Maybe you're on vacation. Don't worry about it. No, I'm pretty sure I would have noticed that question. Was that you? Was that you asking this? Did you make a fake analyst call? Now who's getting carried away with conspiracy theories? You know I can't do an American accent.

You are getting, it's definitely you. No, no, Jason. Look, look, forget about that. Are you ready for me to blow your mind? Do I have a choice? The entire premise of this episode, Jason, forget about that. Are you ready for me to blow your mind? Do I have a choice? The entire premise of this episode, Jason, it's wrong. How do you feel about that? Actually, I kind of love that.

If crime podcasts have taught me anything, it's that there's usually a great twist that makes me question everything I thought I knew. Well, I went to an Apple store earlier today, Jason. Do you know what I found? The butterfly keyboard, it's not dead at all. They're everywhere. They're still selling the 13-inch MacBook Pros, the Retina MacBook Airs.

They both have the butterfly keyboard inside. How can it be dead if they're still out there selling them today? Nobody killed the butterfly keyboard, Jason. Nobody. Well, look, in 2020, it's inevitable that Apple is going to introduce new models. Nobody! Nobody!

This Upgrade Special Report was a production of RelayFM. The producer was Mike Hurley. Executive producers were Stephen Hackett and Mike Hurley. Additional voices were provided by Quinn Rose and Adina Hurley. This episode was written and presented by me, Jason Snell, with additional production help from Brian Hamilton. Are we done now? This story is over.

On the next upgrade. Their famous claims just don't hold up. Three Apple nerds who seem to have had every intention of starting a technology media empire. Did John Syracuse really do the research? We found strong evidence that Marco Arment and Casey Liss specifically asked him to. They said it was accidental. But was it? On the next Upgrade.