Upgrade - 30: Boarding a Sinking Ship

Episode Date: April 7, 2015

Jason and special guest John Siracusa discuss the iPhone 6 Plus, reactions to "Becoming Steve Jobs," Apple's lost decade, and what lessons can be learned by business successes and failures. Plus, Accidental Tech Podcast's aftershow philosophy and a tantalizing hint of "Robot or Not?"

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 30 today's show is brought to you by one password from agile bits put passwords in their place by citrix go to meeting make it easy to meet with your team wherever you need to wherever you are MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. My name is Jason Snell. I normally don't read this part of the show because Mike Hurley does, but Mike is on vacation. And so he couldn't take it. Two episodes in a row where he and I spoke to each other in person, face to face, across a table, and he just couldn't take it. He cracked up and had to be sent away for some rest and relaxation to get his head together. So instead, I have a guest star visiting me,

and I believe this is the first time that he and I have shared a tech podcast together, although we've been on many episodes of The Incomparable and other things together. It's your favorite from ATP. It's John Syracusa. Hi, John. I'm pretty sure we did a 5x5 special about an Apple event or something. Oh, that could be. We were both there.

That could be. That's possible. I just think it's funny. We should just talk about Miyazaki just in case, though. Oh, yeah, we could do that. There are some people who are very angry when Mike and I talked about movies that he hasn't seen that I made him watch.

And they're like, I didn't sign up for this. And it's like, well, we put it at the end. You could tune. Just stop it. Did you put it after the song? Oh, wait. Yeah. We do have a song.

We have a little song. We could have done that. We haven't done. We don't have a post-show kind of thing like you guys do. I should ask Marco this and and not you but is there a philosophy behind the atp where when the theme song goes is because on the incomparable i i always consider like anything i put after the the music is like literally uh not essential like like this is all optional material after this point yeah we got an interesting email i guess we'll probably

talk about in the next atp but someone emailed and said they thought their podcast client wasn't working like it works with every show but with atp for some reason it's like it's jumping around or he thought he had finished an episode but it sounded like it was starting again so a maybe this person has some weird problem with the apple podcast app or b they're confused by the fact that when they think they've finished an episode and they've heard the song that they go back to the episode there's still more there's still more to play yeah so there is a philosophy it's basically it's a tech podcast we talk about tech stuff we do all the sponsors and all the tech stuff that we want to cover before the song then the

song comes and afterward is kind of talking about the show that we just did, but also any sort of non-tech stuff. So if we just want to talk about cars, it's going to be in that part. If we want to talk about our feelings being heard on Twitter, it's going to be in that part. Sometimes it's carryover tech stuff because we're talking about the tech stuff we just did in the main part of the program. And so it's like, well, you just continue talking about tech.

Why was that even there? Or if we didn't get to a tech topic, it'll be out there. But it's all kind of like more casual,ive and it's like a grab bag so there is a philosophy but it's super loose yeah i get it and i i get why people would be confused but you know what you don't want to do is create what uh you know what something that dan benjamin started and that i do and then we occasionally do on on relay as well which is the the after dark bonus track b side kind of thing because Because that's like, then you're really saying it's like, this is for super fans only. And what I like about ATP and

how you guys handle it is like, look, there's the show. And then there's some other stuff we're also going to talk about that you get to listen to. But it's not in the show. It's not the sponsors. It can be off topic. That's why I find it funny when people complain to you guys about what you do in the post show. Because it's like, literally bonus people we could have just ended the show when the music stopped i think some people don't know that part of the show exists because they just hit stop after the song and i always wonder about those people but there is extra extra stuff for the live listeners we have all sorts of bs that would probably go in you know the bonus track type of thing in uh in incomparable parlance but that we just don't even release. So that does still exist, but it's only

for the live listeners, and there's very few of them. Right, that's true. Relatively speaking, very few. They have their own bootlegs and things like that, too, which is pretty serious. Pretty serious stuff. On this show, we usually do some follow-up. I have one item of follow-up. Would you like to hear it? Go for it. Well, this is hashtag

Mike was wrong, because in previous episodes, Mike has been talking about being right. And he's like a pusher. But what he's pushing is iPhone 6 Pluses. And I just wanted to mention that I wrote a piece on six colors. It'll be in the show notes, which I should say you can find at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 30 or in the podcast client you're listening to right now called Two Weeks with the iPhone 6 Plus, where I wrote about the fact that I've been using it for the last two weeks. When I was in Europe, I used it because I had an unlocked 6 Plus that I had access to. And in the end, I decided that the only thing I really liked about

it was the fact that the battery life was better. And otherwise i found i when i came back and i switched and literally john i'm standing in the line at customs at the airport and i i and i've got the i've got my iphone 6 turned on and i'm using it and um and i found myself like grasping it with two hands like almost like i'm like uh huddling near a fire to stay warm or something like that and i And I realized over two weeks I'd built up this gesture that was me kind of clutching the phone in order to not drop it because it was so huge that I needed the extra hand in the other corner. So what I'm saying is I learned something about myself, which is I do a lot of one-handed phone checking and stuff with

my thumb. And it totally doesn't work on the 6 Plus because I can't even reach the bottom right corner with my thumb on the 6 Plus. And then even Mike said that he does a lot of kind of like gymnastics to get the phone in the right position to press certain things in certain places on the phone. It's like, it's too much. It's too much. So I appreciated my time with the 6 Plus. It was great having an unlocked phone in Europe because there is some great you can buy. I bought for 20 pounds. I bought a SIM card that was unlimited data for 30 days. And I was only there for 14 in the UK and Ireland where I went. And that was all great. But I have to say that I, for myself, I think I made the right decision in getting the 6 Plus and not the, or getting the 6 and not the 6 Plus. and getting the 6 Plus, or getting the 6 and not the 6 Plus. I read your thing already because I had a sneak preview. As soon as it was posted, it appeared, and it would appear on Twitter and my Slack feed.

Yes, I already read it, and I've heard Marco on ATP talk about his experiences with the 6 Plus, also in Ireland, and I've never had the opportunity to try one. I've held one in the store, but I've never lived with one for any period of time. I would imagine that what would happen is like, even with my six, which is bigger than my series of iPod touches that preceded it, I tend to use it like a little iPad sometimes, mostly because my actual iPad is an iPad three and it's really slow. So if I'm doing anything like playing a game where the frame rate isn't quite so good on my iPad three or doing a web page that's JavaScript heavy or something. Sometimes I use it like a little iPad. You know, I'm laying down on my bed and I'll put it on my chest like a little iPad and

hold it with two hands. It is a very small iPad. I would imagine a 6 Plus would be a little bit closer to being like an iPad and maybe make me use my iPad even less. But if I had an iPad Air 2, I don't know if it would contend. And like you said, I don't, you know would contend and like like you said I don't the biggest issue for me is how big the darn thing is just portability wise

wrapping my hands around it sticking it in my pockets as Marco was finding the difficulty of just sitting uncomfortably it doesn't fit in your pockets in the normal way and you have to change how you sit or like you like he said I think putting it on the table yeah I found myself putting it on the table too which is weird because I don't do that and i found myself putting it on the table because

it's like wow i could i could put the you know this back in my pocket but that's that's now i'll just leave it you have to stand up to get it into your pocket and putting your tables dangerous because that's more susceptible to spills uh and uh you mentioned that mike had dropped his a bunch of times although i don't know if he also dropped his 5 and 5S or whatever. I thought that was a weird thing where he actually admitted. I mean, to Mike's credit, he admitted all the flaws and things that he had learned to live with with the 6 Plus. And dropping it is definitely one of them. I said to him that I was using the Maps app to get to my friend's house in London where I was staying. I got off the tube.

I've got the data plan because I bought the card in a vending machine at the baggage claim. And it was five pounds. I knew what the cost, the regular cost was. It was five pounds more. And I was like, well, this way I'll have data and I can be sure of the right way to go to get to my friend's house. So I'm out there and I'm looking at the map set

and I realized that I can't reach my thumb across it. And I'm trying to like move it into a different position. And I'm holding my suitcase with one hand. So I'm trying to like move it into a different position and and and uh i'm holding my suitcase with one hand so i'm trying to do this one-handed and i realized i just couldn't do it i had to stop and and put the suitcase down and and do all of that and i told this story to mike and he said oh yeah um you know you've got you'll get more confident in holding it in those weird positions where it feels like it's about to drop but it also sometimes you drop it that's not like a good

thing at all you'll get you'll get more confident and then you'll drop it more that uh yeah yeah yeah i didn't think it was a very strange statement for him to make like well you drop it but you got it in a case and it's fine my six is taking a tumble many times but not out of my hand it's always like i'll put it on my nightstand and then somehow it will get knocked off my nightstand by myself or a pillow or a child or it'll be it's always being knocked off of things into cracks between furniture i guess i'm always sort of balancing it precariously on the edges of the side of sofas and ends of tables uh none of them have done any damage other than to put a tiny little nick in my leather case in the corner and it's really annoying me but uh i'm resisting buying

a new whatever the heck it is 80 leather case just because i was a nick in the corner i should say there's also a funny thing that doug beal in the chat room just mentioned which is uh georgia dao uh from imor pointed out that she has a case that she stuck this little like um elastic hand strap on the back and everybody who's an iphone 6 plus user was like checking it out well you know you can like pass your your your fingers through it and hold it like yeah yeah i was thinking having it like a any kind of handle or a knob or a strap or a loop or a you know a thing to put one or two fingers through those are all good things yeah and uh and you know i i i thought it was funny that everybody was uh cheering that hand strap thing because it was a combination of being a very clever hack to hold the phone better and to be complete failure because you have to stick a thing on the back of your case.

If you've got an even bigger strap, perhaps it could fit all the way around your wrist and then you'd have like a little screen on your wrist. I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. That's a crazy idea. Well, at that point, I think you just get an iPad and you get that and you go full on with the with that uh velcro ball thing that mike and i were talking about i think it was in the wired article about the you know one of the things where apple was opening uh up to the press and they mentioned how one of the early uh apple watch prototype things was literally taking an iphone and putting a velcro strap on it strapping it to your wrist yeah with a with a like

an emulator of right watch on it a little picture of a watch on your eye yeah pretend that i wonder if they like skin tone around it like it's gonna be the apple watch six plus just watch mike will be telling everybody's got here they've got to get that they're like gauntlets really you just put them on this huge glass things on the top of your forearm then you don't then you don't drop it because it's tied to your body and you can defend against uh attacks with swords by just putting up your forearm that's true that's true it's like you're becoming an iron man at that point really yep uh i should mention steven hackett also wrote a thing and marco uh arment is in in the

process i believe of writing something too about the six plus thing so i think it's great that you know not everybody has the chance to test drive a different phone model for a couple of weeks and so so I think that's one of the reasons we write this stuff is to say, well, look, here's what we noticed when we did this. I think since not everybody can do that, that if it informs people a little bit about what their choices are, and they're definitely going to be able to hear both sides of the argument because it didn't work for me, but I know it works for Mike and Stephen Hackett. I'm yet to hear exactly I think Marco is sort of he sees a little bit more of the pros and cons of both of them so I'm looking forward

to his. Did you hear that ATP episode where he talked about the the UL trip and everything? I have heard the I've heard like half of it. Yeah because he talks about the 6 Plus extensively in there this is going to be sometimes there is a blog post that he comes on ATP and talk about.

And sometimes you talk about it, something ATP and it becomes a blog post. And I like that. I like it when the, you've talked about that before. It's like the podcast that's sort of your, your thought process.

It's like before there's a draft, there's you talking about it on the podcast. And I do that a lot. Yeah. I actually listened to the first like half hour of ATP. And then I skipped to the Twitter stuff in the, in the, in the,

in the post show because I knew we were going to be talking and I had that as one of my things I might want to talk about so I have to skip back and maybe I'm that guy who wrote to you. So I don't understand ATP it skips all over. He thought it was something wrong with his podcast app. I don't know.

He may be right. Maybe he does have a problem with his podcast and I don't want to do tech support over email. I think you guys have just confused him. I hope he should use Overcast. That's what Marco should say. Yeah, I can solve that for you. Yeah. So anyway, that's the follow-up.

We'll leave the rest for when Mike comes back. Let me take a break for our first sponsor. You know how this works, right? You do this every week with Marco. I'm there when it happens, if that's what you mean. And he has to read the sponsor. Well, I'm going to do that now. Good luck. Thank you. Thank you. Here I go. This episode of Upgrade brought to you by 1Password from Agile Bits. 1Password, I use it. I love it. It's an essential

piece of software that lets you store your passwords. I mean, the way it works is instead of having, I used to have the same password on every single site. The problem is if a site gets hacked and they figure out the passwords that were on that site, they now have your password on every site in the world. So now I use one password. It's on my Mac. It's on my iOS device. If you use Windows or Android, you can find it there too. They've actually even got a super cool thing where there's an HTML file hiding within their password file

that you can open in a web browser and put in your password and look up your passwords that way. It automatically generates passwords for me. So I have a different strong password on every single site. They're all stored in the one password database. And all I have to do is remember a single password, one password, if you will, and everything unlocks and I can get online super easy with just that one password that only I and perhaps my loved ones know. It saves a lot of time. The browser plug-in lets you get access to the login screen right inside your browser. You don't have to go launch another app and look it up painfully.

They just enabled TOTP, which is in iOS, and Windows with Mac and Android coming soon. This is time-based, one-time passwords, another layer of two-step security. They're always making changes. I'm on the beta stream for 1Password. There are new builds all the time. They are working endlessly to improve 1Password, which I think is also really cool. So I definitely recommend it. If you're not yet a 1Password user, you should think about changing that. So go to agilebits.com,

A-G-I-L-E-B-I-T-S dot com slash 1Password, O-N-E-P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D to find out more. And you can also find 1Password, of course, on your app store of choice. So thank you so much to AgileBits and 1Password for keeping all of my passwords and logins secure and for supporting upgrade, put passwords in their place with 1Password. Mike's going to have some comments about that, I'm sure. Like, Jason, the ad read you did there, I would have done it much better than that. And he's probably right. But I do love do love one password so that made that a lot easier to read so uh have you been reading the steve jobs the new steve jobs book the becoming steve jobs i just started it i'm about 10 through 10 well you know so that's a couple chapters maybe

yeah i don't know all i know is kindle percentages now i have yeah i know recollection of pages i know well you can see the chapters as you go through the chapters i just finished it i i finished it on the flight back from from ireland um and uh i think it's pretty good actually um and i say that as a preface because i have lots of criticisms of it and i'm looking forward to your book report when you're when you're done with it um you know I I I don't know if you formed any initial thoughts about it going in or or if you if you are are you expecting much or have you been have you accepted the hype that this is going to be the cure to the uh Isaacson book well I I'm only 10 through but I do have an opinion immediately of the book, and now it has to, like, if it changes as the book goes on, I will change my opinion,

but already I feel like I have this book's number. And it's not, I like it better than the Isaacson book so far, but there's, you know, having just read 10% of it, what I'm reading now is the early parts about Apple, his childhood, starting the company with Woz, doing the Mac project, getting Scully. You know how many times I've read that story? I know.

I've read about a million magazine articles on it. I've read tons of books about it. From every conceivable angle, I've watched documentaries about it. Just like, I've seen that story books about it I've just from every conceivable angle I've watched documentaries about it just like I've seen that story a lot right so the odds of there being something new in there are slim that what the Isaacson book one of the few things that had going for is that it had a lot of you know it was it was the authorized one and it had a lot of inside access to people who previously didn't have access to but not much is new in there so all i've got to go on so far in the book is sort of like tone and purpose and the tone and purpose

bother me a little bit because the book is kind of being presented as a reaction to other books or popular narratives which i guess is one way you can go with it. It's not really what I'm looking for. What I was looking for out of the Isaacson's son is like, Isaacson book is sort of a definitive biography where you just get all the facts and lay them out documentary style. If you do have an agenda, I want you to hide it better, like really well, you know. Again, my favorite biography ever is uh the power broker

which definitely has an agenda but it's just so massively supported by just fact after fact interview after interview like it is you know that it's not just asserted and in this book a lot of it is like here's what happened which of course I know all the stuff already. And then a line from the authors saying, people always say this, but really Jobs is like that. Just asserted. And then more events took place. And it's like, well, wait a second. Those events don't support that at all. Like, they could.

You know, that is a plausible interpretation of events, but you can't just say it. People always say that Steve Jobs is really mean. But actually, he's kind of like, it doesn't fit. So it reads like, that's why people are on it as like a defense of Apple, that it is, you know, some people say mean things about Steve Jobs, but actually he wasn't that bad. And then more events.

And it's like, it just, it's not apologetic so much as like a book with an agenda not particularly well supported by the facts because the facts are the same as the facts and everything else right especially in this early part of the story is just it's a different interpretation not really delved into just used as like a it's like a premise they'll just lay that out in a one sentence thing or at the end the one sentence thing that says even though these are the same events that everyone else has recorded they're really not that bad and it shows that he's not really that bad guys well wait a second you just came to a different conclusion with the

same facts but then you didn't explain how you came to your conclusion so i think um i think one of the problems here and again you've only read the beginning of it so far is that this is a book that's got its strong areas and then it's got the obligatory parts so like you can't tell the steve jobs story right except well you can but it's harder to to make that case if you don't tell that early part but uh but these uh these guys didn't know steve jobs then so you they step through it and i think what they do is they throw in some things that they feel like they're going to prove later um yeah well we'll see but like so so far like they they go through the facts and then they they boldly assert that uh that what they have just retold demonstrates something about steve jobs that it does not demonstrate at all like and they and they frame

it in a way of like when other people have told the same story they have concluded this but really steve jobs is like x what why how how you just told the exact same stories everyone else what is leading you to believe that he's really like that and if they explain it later in the book then obviously you know well my opinion might change but they're not they don't allude to future events they just sort of say you know they'll go back and tell an old story and they'll say well you know what about the time when he was crying in the parking lot? That shows something. No, that perfectly fits with the narrative. Like, it's like they're reframing the exact same things in a more sympathetic light, merely by saying that merely by saying that we, the authors, are more sympathetic to to this scenario.

Like, we are not going to in the same way that something that's going to be sensational would demonize him for the same events they'll say and this shows that he's an egomaniac and a jerk and uh every misery in his life he deserves right uh that's that's going in one extreme this is going the other extreme and saying despite all these terrible things that he's done he was a human person with feelings too and we shouldn't be so mean to him uh and he really wasn't as bad as everyone says because he really loved his kids or whatever that's like i don't know i'm not impressed so far but so far it hasn't set its foot wrong in the ways that the isis book has particularly because this book didn't have the kind of access the isis book has so automatically i'm inclined to say well you just you're writing another steve jobs book so far that's fine like

the second coming of steve jobs is another steve jobs book like that's fine uh i don't fault them for saying you had this one chance to write the definitive biography of steve jobs and you blew it because they didn't and they don't so if just ends up being another steve jobs book that's fine too their assets are brent schlender's relationship with jobs which begins um later right so he doesn't he can't bring those assets to bear here. And then their other assets are that they got people from Apple to talk who haven't really talked about personal stuff about Steve. And that's all at the very end.

So they're really limited in what they want to do. They want to tell this whole story, but they've got these very narrow kind of angles into it based on one reporter's kind of weird relationship with Steve Jobs and through their Apple access at the end. And so there are lots of kind of weird holes. And I think as it goes, it tells, they do have this take. And when there's a little bit more to back it up, you know, they, they do have this take and, and when there's a little bit more to back it up, I feel like they're at least making a, an argument that, um, I mean, the thesis of the book is very clearly like a lot of the people who think that Steve Jobs was a

monster are thinking about back when he was in his early days, when he was truly monstrous, but that later he was not quite so monstrous and you mellowed out a lot and was not the same guy and learned a lot. And so there's a story arc to his professional life as well as his personal life that he learned and he grew and he changed. And he did some terrible things when he was in his 20s, but he wasn't that same guy the last 10 years of his life. And there's some evidence there. They seem to even assert that when he was young at his very youngest like the crying in the parking lot story they're saying even the people who say he was a monster when he's young see he actually went out to the parking lot

and cried and that it totally fits with the narrative of people calling him a monster it is not an aberration it's not a counterexample that's part of the whole thing keep reading it because i think that it i think that uh they are a little more even-handed with that in in presenting that he was totally messed up and actually they have a really interesting thesis which is that he never had a mentor he was basically he was a spoiled child he was always right he was always uh allowed to do anything and then the people he surrounded himself first what is it mike scott and then John Scully. They're like – his argument is these guys were terrible mentors. They were not capable of mentoring Steve in any way. And then it extends to sort of saying that the person who really gave that connection to him was Ed Catmull and also John Lasseter to a certain extent.

And they were people where there was actually a better relationship and fit and they helped him improve and become a better manager. You know, again, I think they do an OK job of making that case. I don't know whether I entirely buy it, but I think it's an interesting take on on Jobs. But again, they can't tell that part until they get to that part of the story. And so for me, I mean, that's I think that's why there's that that first little the little prologue where it's like, hey, this is when I knew Steve Jobs because then they can't do that for a long time. So they have a little flash forward. Yeah, there's a little bit of the gonzo journalism thing where the story is a little bit about the author. Yeah.

It's in first person. There are two authors, but one of them is in first person. The weird collective singular first person dual author. But it's like, let me tell you about my meeting with jobs and what it was like in our relationship and it's like well i don't really care about one half of that relationship right i don't really care except maybe to the extent that is it it's illuminating about his character but i don't know like it so far not not a lot of uh insights in the book and and even the part that you're talking about like with the mentor like oh he needed to have a mentor and he didn't have one or whatever as an explanation

like of what happened that's fine but because the book is framed as a a comeback against the popular narrative that explanation reads more like an excuse like see he wasn't a bad guy he just didn't have a good mentor like that's and and it's because the book is framed uh like as a sort of as a sort of defense or a balancing off of everything else that that it it comes off more apologetic like and because that's not you know like boohoo he didn't have a good mentor like that doesn't his behavior is what his behavior is and there's nothing you know you can explain the circumstance surrounding it but you can't you can't use that to fight back against what you consider unflattering unflattering narratives like because everyone agrees on the facts it's just the interpretations

and it's not as if you know you didn't have this extra piece of information let me tell you this piece and that will change things and every new piece of information that gets added just fits into the exact same puzzle piece that ever the same picture that has been drawn by every book. It's just piling on some more information. It's remarkably consistent and it's all just how you interpret it. How do you balance the good against the bad? Because he was a complicated person. He wasn't all good and he wasn't all

bad. He did good things. He did terrible things. How do you balance it out? I don't know. I'll finish the book. We'll talk about it in ATP. I am the type of person who feels like he can give a book report on a book after reading the first chapter, which is obviously what you should not do. Well, so I also think it's it's worth mentioning. I do wonder sometimes if Apple endorsing this book does this book any favors because. Oh, no, that's the worst. Right. Right. Because it's setting it up as being an apologetic, you know, hagiography of isn't this, which I don't think it is.

But again, they got the Apple access and they got people. In fact, even in the book, I think Eddie Q condemns the Isaacson book in this book, which is kind of funny. And they should. And they should. That's fine. Like I condemned that book, too. But it's kind of like what I said about a regulatory agency.

It's an ADP a while back. If you are a regulatory agency and the companies you regulate are applauding something you do, chances are you're not doing your job well. So I'm not saying that a biography is supposed to be a regulatory agency. But if you're writing a biography about the famous leader of the world's biggest technology company, the world's biggest company, period, and that company heartily endorses your book, you should be thinking to yourself, wait a second, what did I miss?

Like, because there's, you know, there should be something in there that like they shouldn't be wholeheartedly endorsing your book. They should be endorsing maybe some parts of it because other books have been worse. Like they can condemn the Isaacson book, but once they're sort of like in the press endorsing your biography,

it really undercuts like your credibility, whether it's fair or not. Like it could be a perfectly balanced book. It just seems like, yeah, that if I was the author of the book, I'd be like, maybe just, you know, not so much on the how much you love the book because it makes me seem like a shill. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing. So the other thing that's bothering me and I've got a little list here, which I'll go through really quickly is and, you know, this is anything that you see that's reported that's something you know a lot about. You see the mistakes and you think, oh, that's really oversimplified or they got that wrong a little bit. I don't think these mistakes necessarily make the book's overarching value less or more and the point they're trying to make stronger or weaker.

overarching value, less or more, and the point they're trying to make stronger or weaker. Other than to say that it gives me pause, that there are so many little problems I have with it that I feel like, were they afraid somebody was going to leak it if they hired a fact checker or something? Because there are a lot. Not only, yeah, I mean, they capitalized Macworld with a capital W, which really bugs me. And they say that St. Quentin Prison is in San Rafael and it's really not. And they say that there was a black iBook and it was a black MacBook, you know, Mac nerd stuff. But they say, at one point they assert that the clone strategy failed because clones were cheap and tarnished Apple's mystique as a maker of premium hardware, which I think is an interesting argument because my recollection of the clone era is that Apple's hardware wasn't very good.

And so when you let other people make clones, then people had no reason to buy Apple hardware. There were cheap clones. There were nice clones too. That sentence was probably off by itself in the book though. Is this quote right from the book, the strategy strategy failed to the availability of cheap clones tarnished apples mystique as a maker of premium hardware period i bet the next sentence moves on to the next topic like they just flat out say oh yeah no it's a statement of fact that i just failed

and and the availability of cheap clones tarnished apples mystique yep moving on like is that it like that that's the story of the clones if you had if you had to summarize the story of the clones, that's not how I would summarize. No, I think. But I think it feeds their feeds the narrative they want to tell in a very simple way. But I think it's not true. And that it's also a snowball as these mistakes and things that I dispute. Some of them are factual errors and some of them are assertions that I think are wrong. But, you know, the more of them I see, the more momentum I get of like, okay, that's not right and that's not right. And that happened to me when I read this. They talk about how the BOS is designed to, it says, to also be able to use the existing Macintosh OS and thus operate like a Mac clone. BOS is a separate operating system. It could run on Mac hardware.

It did not use the Mac OS. Right, so that's where you have to sort of decode from like non-tech person speaking. Like, I think what they're getting at is that both ran on power pc i'm pretty sure that's what they're getting at but it is so mangled it just comes out backward yeah and you can kind of decipher it like the the great one in the isaacson book because the idea that they bought next and then never used the next operating system like as such a pivotal not just like a techie detail like oh who cares about the tech that's just a pivotal a pivotal part of the yeah this is a little part of the entire acquisition of next it's like if you got that

wrong that's not a little thing that is the most important acquisition apple has ever done to find the entire future of all their products including the phone including the watch including the ipad and you're like they never use that these guys did get that part right. Because also it fits their thesis to say this was the key acquisition, not just for Steve Jobs, but because that technology was the bedrock of all of the future Apple products. Yes, that's right. It's not asking for them to be tech geniuses to figure that out. If you know anything, it's the basics, right?

And so the BOS thing, you can kind of tell that someone somewhere, like the right idea was in there and it just came out wrong and the thing and assertions about the clones they don't understand they weren't there they weren't in the thing whatever like yeah yeah they said they said john rubenstein's company uh powerhouse systems did mac clones which i think is i think they're thinking power computing i don't think powerhouse systems ever made a Mac clone. I think they were PCs that ran Next Step, but that's in there. Oh, they talk about fitting your narrative. They suggest that Steve Jobs was waiting in the wings for that appearance at Macworld Expo and that Gil Emilio gave a long droning speech and everybody was just impatiently waiting to get to Jobs and

Jobs had to wait, which is, I don't know if that's true or not. The story I always heard is that Jobs made them wait as a power move. He got there late and Emilio had to stretch and look bad and really be boring because he couldn't speak extemporaneously to save his life. But they don't tell it that way. They tell it this opposite way that it's like, you know, come on, get out of the way, old man. Steve Jobs coming through. opposite way that it's like you know come on get out of the way old man steve jobs coming through and that's that's not my understanding is my understanding with steve jobs was kind of being a jerk and didn't show up this is a great example like so that i've read that that version of events as well and then here is this other version i don't know which one of those is true find the

people who are there and ask them for crying out loud like you know what i mean just yeah because those are completely opposite stories of the same events. Right, and if only there was some way we could determine which one of those stories is more likely to be true, rather than reading, because I've read many variations on what happened in that particular keynote, and usually there is one source who says, yeah, he totally made Amelia wait,

and the other one's like, yeah, Amelia just went on to, and surely there was more than two people there. surely you can get one more than one and then zero sources here this is just like again i never i never want to get the impression when i'm reading one of these books that the person writing the book simply read one of the other seven books i've read on this topic and like summarize it like a book report like there's no sourcing there's no footnotes there's no person they talk to they They just say this is what happened. And it's like, yeah, I read that in a magazine article once too. Well, I've got one better for you. This is another statement of fact, which is they essentially say the iPhone proved to be original iPhone proved to be a tougher sell

than many would have imagined. People had expected something that would support video games and reference books and fancy calculators and word processors and financial spreadsheets right out of the box. The phone they got couldn't yet do that. Now, this is the narrative of the iPhone wasn't any good until the App Store because the App Store was really great. And that was a lesson Steve had to learn that he had to turn it around and bring the apps. That's the story they want to tell. But I have no recollection at all of people being cool on the iPhone when it came out because it didn't run third-party apps. We wanted it to run third-party apps but my memory of that first nine months of the iphone or whatever it was

we were pretty happy with the iphone yeah the best part is like so video games maybe uh reference books borderline fancy calculators maybe but word processors are you kidding me people played games on their phone they played snake right you played the little like you know what i mean no one expected a word processor on your phone before the iphone and the iphone was released like well it's great but it's not a word processor were people doing word processing on their motorola razors no that's crazy talk like it reveals their their it's they now believe that like they've rewound history and said i always knew that phones would always be like this and you know it's just it doesn't make any sense people were going crazy for the iphone the fact like they've rewound history and said i always knew that phones would always be like this and you know it's just it doesn't make any sense people were going crazy for the iphone the fact

that it could do any of the things it did uh and i think only the tech nerds were like boy it would be great to write applications to the song but the world at large didn't even think about i remember in the in the mac world uh the mac world uh the keynote when it was uh when it was announced uh cable sasser and john gruber did a podcast and at one point cable said can we write apps for this phone because that would be awesome the only people who were thinking about writing apps for this were mac software developers and stuff like that the general plus usa today wasn't like well this phone is great but if you word process on it forget it if it only had apps like no other phone then uh well phones did have apps you could download again you could download the snake

game or whatever but but financial spreadsheets and word processors come on no they're trying to fit it to a narrative i mean those and honestly those things bothered me more as i read this book the idea that they are really kind of rewriting parts of history to fit their to fit their thesis and to fit their narrative then then the factual stuff like like i said later in the book they say that the the the iphone 3g had a faster processor and that's not true they say the ipad 2 had a flash the ipads never had a flash um you know you think that's like they mean like flash memory then you try again you're trying to decode it like they can't possibly mean like a light that blinks because they but that's that's what that's what they do they also suggest that the reason

that the ios didn't support flash is because adobe angered steve earlier by support by either not supporting next or by uh building some software for like for windows or something like like i don't think that was really the motivator might be true but if it is get a quote from somebody says yeah we were in a meeting with steve and he said we're not gonna put ready to go I don't think that was really the motivator. That might be true, but if it is, get a quote from somebody who says, yeah, we were in a meeting with Steve and he said we're not going to put Flash on iOS. We had it ready to go. You have to source it. You can't just say Steve Jobs was at it.

Because Steve Jobs has been mad at Adobe at many times, reportedly, over many things. But is that why he decided to do this feature of this product? You have to source that. You can't just say it. And the last one, which just made me laugh that I put it in the notes here, is that it is one of the most baldly factually incorrect things and i just wonder again did anybody it would have been so easy for them to hire a mac nerd essentially to just fact check this and clear this stuff out in or look stuff up in wikipedia exactly because they say on october

17th several hundred people attended a memorial service at the memorial church on stanford university's campus the iphone 4s had been introduced two days earlier in the company's first public event after Steve's death. The event took place the day, now this is me talking, the event took place the day before Steve Jobs died. It did not take place after Steve's death. It was not the first event after Steve's death. They introduced it with an empty chair in the front row for Steve, and he died the next day. That was, it's just, it's so basic and that is not a far off historical event. That's a couple of years ago and they just got it wrong.

And, you know, I don't know. It doesn't speak well to the rest of the book. Again, I think that this book is fine, but making all these mistakes, I just, I'm a little baffled by it. And I wonder whether they were just terrified that it was all going to leak and they didn't want to share it with anyone.

But it's like simple stuff that doesn't really matter to your overall thesis in a lot of cases. But you could have done a little extra work and made these mistakes all go away and have people query you on like what's your reasoning for saying that the clones were like this? Or what's your source about Gil Emilio spending a lot of time on stage because he loved the spotlight which is not true yeah or saying like do you have different sources than this than the did you just did you just read this in another book or magazine article or did you talk to somebody about this because like you said his relationship started around the next year so everything before the next year he has to be getting from somewhere and is he just getting it from other books and magazines articles

if it's that's fine but if he's going to have different conclusions or certain different facts about it, like I keep thinking maybe just take the part that is relevant to you and release it as a really long magazine article or a couple of magazine articles. Why do you need to make a book out of it and pad it out with the stuff that you weren't around for by just summarizing other people's work? And to some degree, like if you go back and read all these books, you know, you read Infinite Loop and Second Coming of Steve Jobs and Revolution of the Valley. And, you know, what is the other one? East of Eden. And just like there's a million of these books you know you read infinite loop and second coming steve jobs and revolution of the valley and you know what is the other one east of eden and just like there's a million of these books around that time accidental empires right they all talk about the same series of events from different angles and they're contradictory like some like they're dancing around the truth uh and i tend to value more the ones that have direct quotes from people who were there not because their their version of events is necessarily correct but because at least i'm getting one actual perspective so if i i feel like if i can get all the firsthand perspectives of an

event no one of those accounts of the event will be completely accurate but if i know all of them i can kind of get a picture of what they're circling you know what i mean like that's the only way to know what really happened no one person is going to tell you but if you take together everybody's event and keep in mind what their motivations were uh how how that event affected their lives and how you know like that's the only way to know the truth of history you can't and that's why you maybe you need a thousand pages to do a biography of Robert Moses. You have to just get every possible angle and build the truth by sort of coloring in the area that's not the truth and coloring in all the people's biases and all the people's reports. And what's left is the truth in the middle. Yeah, I feel like I said this after the Isaacson book,

and I feel like I have to say it again after this book, which is it is going to be source material for hopefully another Steve Jobs book that may not be a popular book. It might even be scholarly. I don't know. But I feel like there's like a true story of Steve Jobs book yet to be written. It's definitive. And it's going to have to end up taking the material from these books that was actually reported. So in this case, it's going to be the firsthand accounts from the Apple people and the firsthand accounts from the first person, one of the two writers, and use that as raw material. Use the raw material from Isaacson where he's reporting what people are saying and from these other books and other contemporary reports and putting it together into something that puts it in a whole. Because for now, what we end up with is these books where

we can pick and choose some things that seem like they're facts, or at least they're a particular person's take on it. But I don't feel like there's a book that I can point to and say, ah, that's the one that's definitive, because they're not definitive. They've got little bits that might hint at the truth. but then there are a lot of other little bits where i i feel like this is a fun story but i've i've literally read this story a dozen times before yeah they need to get to these people before they die too yeah so that's one angle and the second angle is after these people die you'll probably be able to maybe get access to like all their emails and correspondence like that's where you, you know, in the case of like the Robert Moses book,

a lot of the times you're going through like public records, public speeches, letters written to people, like that are only revealed after everyone involved is dead because you're not going to see someone's personal letters until like the family releases them or whatever. The same things with personal emails. So you need to get the people, interviews with the people while they're alive.

And then after everybody dies, you need to get all all the correspondence and then you can build a true history around this type of thing yeah i like a stanford university oral history project that goes and interviews and for all we know they did this but goes and interviews all the people who are involved in apple in the first decade of the 21st century and says we're going to put this under lock and key until 50 years from now or until after you die. And or whatever, you know, whatever, whatever circumstances you want. I actually got to get their business correspondence, all the paper before there was email and all you know, can you imagine how much stuff is in emails, even just in the short amount of

time that email existed for Apple's life? Like that is going to be way more illuminating than interviewing the same three people who are willing to talk for the umpteenth time. Right. I actually did a story in my college newspaper. We did a story about the guy who was one of the founders of the university. And when he died, his oral history interview was released. And he said many unkind things about lots of people. It's kind of fascinating.

And that's the kind of thing that you don't ever want to say when you have to deal with the consequence. You wait until everybody's dead, and then at least the historians can make some sense of it all. I don't know. Well, I think I'm happy that I read it. I wish it was better. I appreciated their argument, which is basically like people who feel like Steve Jobs was always that one guy and didn't grow as a person in his time away from Apple and came back and then was successful. Their argument is, yeah, he did grow. I suppose you could look at his first tenure at Apple and his tenure at Next and then his second tenure at Apple and say, hey, this guy obviously figured some things out. They try to explain what those things are. I think everybody can judge for themselves whether they're successful or not.

Yeah. I think I might come to a different conclusion of it. It's clear that the results were different, but I'm not entirely convinced that the results were different because the guy changed that much. He did change. He made different decisions and acted in different ways and surrounded himself by different people. But a lot of it has to do with circumstances. Yeah. I think,

I think, you know, I think their thesis, and I'm not entirely sure I buy this. They really want you to believe that, that, um, not just failing it next,

but, but being around Pixar, but not being deep down in it because he couldn't be, because he wasn't a filmmaker, um, Pixar but not being deep down in it because he couldn't be because he wasn't a filmmaker that that experience gave him that secret sauce that he didn't have before and I'm not sure I buy it but I mean Pixar is magical so that's what they're

kind of going for but I'm not sure I really buy it well see like even if you had an interview with Steve Jobs himself and where he said you know what really changed me was going to Pixar and now you know if he just repeated that word for it, even that doesn't mean that's the case. That just means that that's what he believes, right? So you really have to get all angles of it.

And like the stories for both, you know, the Jobs one and two errors of Apple are so similar in so many ways, they're just framed differently because now it's like, you know, he came back as the CEO and picked the whole board himself, right? So he would never get fired again.

If the original Steve Jobs was in the same position that the second round Steve Jobs was in, maybe he would have been just as successful. Like, maybe he was just set up for failure because he brought in the adult supervision because he didn't, you know, maybe he didn't trust himself to do all this stuff. But he was just, he was always going to be, he was, both of us were in charge of him, right? To use his language, right? And he was always going to be he was bozos were in charge of him right to use his language right and he was never going to succeed in that thing and that that i think is one of the most fascinating things where how many people uh have you know this how many potential steve jobs's are crushed by the fact that they never get into the position where their assets are allowed to result in good outcomes. They're only ever put in.

And it's the same guy in both positions. You know what I mean? And this one person happened to have, you know, there's no second act in American life. So whatever he had a second and third act. And we got to see. It's kind of like running the trial that, you know, that we get to run the trial three different times. I'm going to put the same guy in three different situations. And's see what what happens and what's different right now he's not obviously the same guy but like the entire like the transformation premise that his time in the

wilderness changed himself fundamentally that it was that that made it when he was when he came back he was able to uh do things better uh i think there's some of that but i think there's some of that, but I think there's an equal amount of same impulses, same guy, and maybe now wise enough to know that for him to succeed, he needs to put himself in a different situation. Yeah. And it's also untestable. Yeah. So that makes it easy. Well, you know, the Steve Jobs clones that they have underneath the giant circular ring, those will sprout in a couple of decades. Once we break through to the parallel universes, we'll be able to see all the different outcomes and find the perfect universe.

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first meeting will be up and running in minutes. GoToMeeting.com for your free 30-day trial. And thank you so much to Citrix and GoToMeeting for sponsoring Upgrade and a good friend. One thing, John, that I thought about and I thought that I do all these podcasts like Upgrade with youngins who don't remember back in the olden times. One of the things that when I read a book about Steve Jobs that I realize is the narrative takes us away from Apple. And I think in the public consciousness, there's this thought that Steve Jobs left Apple and it all went to hell and then he came back. And it's almost like they can compress it like it took a year or something and then he turned around. But it was like a decade. It was more than a decade that he was gone. And although they ended that period of

time, Apple did, on the brink of complete oblivion. And there's a fun section in the book about Fred Anderson taking over as CFO and walking in the door and thinking, oh my God, what have I done? But that missing decade when Steve Jobs wasn't there, that's when I became a Mac user. That's when I became somebody who devoured all the Mac magazines. And that's when I decided I wanted to write about Apple for my profession. So it couldn't have been all that terrible, and I feel like that decade has now just been kind of like thrown into the

trash as a failure. I assume you became a Mac user during the same period, unless you're right at the very beginning, you know, because Jobs was out of there in 85. How could you not know this about me? I had the original Mac in 84. Did you have it in 84? Did you get it right then? Yeah. Oh, okay. Alright. I assume that a lot of original Mac owners were actually like, well,

it was 85, or well, it was the 512. But you're right, you had the 128, so it was 84. Okay, so you came in there and then Steve Jobs abandoned you or was sent away. I mean, so at that, what was I, 9 or 10 that year? So my recollection at that what was i nine or ten or that year so my recollection of that period was you know i got the first mac and then i got issue number one of mac world that told the story of the first mac they gave me they gave me a backstory for that picture of the team yep they they gave me the backstory in this amazing machine that i had and at that point like from my kids perspective there was this amazing team of people and steve

jobs was not elevated to the degree that he is now in that story it was all about the mac team and yes he was the leader of the mac team and he was the figurehead and you know but it was like it was it was like a team effort and they made this amazing thing and this amazing thing went out into the world and from my perspective as a kid then this company kept making new versions this amazing thing went out into the world. And from my perspective as a kid, then this company kept making new versions of this amazing thing. I don't know if I even noticed that Steve Jobs had been kicked out of the company because corporate, you know, politics are not interesting to a 10- or 11-year-old.

Yeah, who cares? All I knew was that I was reading Macworld, right, and eventually reading Macuser, and every issue they would have some new technological development relating to the Mac that I would be excited about. And they, you know, they added color with the Mac, too. And they kept making new machines. And, like, that's what interested me.

And it was, I was too young to think what comes after the Mac. Is there, you know, I didn't spare a thought about, by the time I was old enough to care enough about Steve Jobs having been gone, I read all those stories. And it's like, well, you know, he was a loose cannon and it could never last uh and you know Jean-Louis Gasset is my guy because he wanted to add slots and I think that's cool right you know what I mean like this it seemed fine to me only later that I as the company starts to go around the tubes you realize wait a second this is a company that is iterating on a great idea but is losing losing the plot like it doesn't it doesn't understand what what it is that made the mac great and when faced with any kind of challenge like say windows had no idea to do it just flailed wildly just you know eventually almost became bankrupt and then i'm just begging

for them to buy bos or something anything to to rejuvenate this company but for a long stretch there when i was a kid it was all about the mac the next mac that was going to come out and every new mac was amazing like the the se was amazing the mac 2 oh my god color like the power books the power books right exactly that was that was not steve jobs thing the keyboard pushed back the trackball in the middle. It's like, what? That defined the laptop. And just all the crazy frog design things. I think it was the whole issue of Macworld where they had frog design do like, this is what the Mac of the future could look like. I was eating that stuff up.

It was like, yes, that's cool. I hated that issue so much. But yeah. I know. Because the way it was framed was like, hey, Apple's design stink now. So we hired frog design. Macworld is here to fix apple for you if apple made computers out of out of uh latex foam they could look like they could

look like this mac mac user we did a story that was the things from the apple archive that were the products that were like the concept products that never existed but at least they were like from apple and similarly they were like wow that's weird probably knowledge navigator was one of the first things I remember seeing go. Apple has no idea what it's doing. No knowledge ever came out. It's like, seriously, guys. But the guys who wrote Becoming Steve Jobs, they're business reporters. So they say basically that, you know, the IBM PC came out and then Apple was irrelevant and Apple remained irrelevant for a decade.

And I think, well, wait, that was the entire period where I fell in love with the Mac, decided I want to read about it voraciously and then write about it. And they're just like, yeah, it's irrelevant. But from a business reporter's perspective, it was kind of irrelevant. But from a user's perspective, we were then the 10% of people who chose to be different. And we loved those new Macs that came out. And the PowerBook was super influential. It goes against their narrative to say, oh, Apple did some interesting things when Steve Jobs wasn't there. But, you know, it makes me mad. Now, somebody recommended Infinite Loop, which I haven't read, which says that they do.

Well, somebody else on Twitter, you also recommended Infinite Loop? Yes, yes. That's always my go-to for like, you want to read early Apple history, the best book I found that encompasses all of the early, I think it ends with the iMac. Yeah, so it gets... Infinite Loop is the best one. It gets the decade where a lot of books that are about Steve leave Apple. It's, it's about Apple. Um, so I'm going to read that one because that, I think that, uh, might be the thing that hits the spot for me. But, um, but I just think it's

really funny that it gets, it gets cast off with a hand wave and it encompasses, for me, the entirety and for you almost the entirety of that time when you become really obsessed with the Mac and care about it. There were so few of us, though. That's why it gets brushed aside because it is not a – like the popular story is Apple comes from nowhere and, as Apple says, ignites the personal computer revolution, blah, blah, blah, and makes a bunch of rich people. That's a popular story just because, hey, you know, like one of the first big tech millionaire type stories, right? And the second story is research and Apple becomes the biggest company in the world. In between there, it's only an interesting story for people who are interested in technology because there were just so few of us. And we were looked upon as crazy people because only we could see the things that were better about this computer. upon as crazy people because only we could see the things that were better about this computer if you put you know for us it's like how can you not see how different this is than than windows

3.1 like are you serious now like you think these are equivalent yes they both seemed to have mouse basically the same right what like and and it was like this this nuanced distinction that made us kind of snooty and weird and it's clear that's not what the world wants and we sort of hung out in obscurity really interested in this one little company making a small number of computers that were increasingly irrelevant and yet that company continued to make very interesting exciting good products right up to the point where it stopped really doing that and then kind of you know crumbled into dust. Business-wise, the company didn't have its act together, but product-wise, it was doing amazing things.

It did. I mean, in the chat room, we have a quote from the New York Times from 1993 pointing out that during Scully's reign, company sales went from $800 million a year to $8 billion a year. I mean, they did grow, but they also became increasingly irrelevant. But I feel like there was a really good period in there where they were doing interesting things. But you know, this is what you said. What's the thing about this? What's the market for becoming Steve Jobs? I feel like there's really two markets there. There's the market of people who just love Apple and want to read about Apple, and they're the tech nerds. And then there's the market that's the business media market, which I think these guys, given their

background, that is really what they're targeting here. This is a book that's going to be read by people who want to learn lessons about how Steve Jobs dealt with adversity and how he built such a creative team and all of that. And for us, Apple nerds, we look at this book and say, one, we say things like, I can't believe that they said that the iBook was black because it was the MacBook, which, you know, again, business people, they don't care. They don't care at all. But we're just trying to glean the stuff that we think is interesting out of it because we think the technology story is interesting there. That's probably not what that book is meant for. That book is by business journalists, and it's trying to make a lot of

money from people who want to get, you to get inspiration from the life of Steve Jobs because they believe that they can be the next Steve Jobs or they can learn how to be a good CEO by reading a lot of business books. And I think that's some of the conflict here. And I realized that as I read that statement, but I still kind of got offended because it's like, hey, you were just casting off this whole period where where i got really excited about this stuff and then wanted to read about it and wanted to write about it and you're like yeah it was irrelevant forget about it but from their perspective it totally was yeah a more tech focused angle would focus on what are the similarities between the apple of that era the scully apple like the the things that apple did well uh the powerbook is a great example it is like the iphone in that it sort of redefined the form factor of an existing

product and it was hot i mean it was like i remember reading stories about famous people spotted with powerbooks like it was like the cool thing to be seen with in 1992 right and after and after that every laptop eventually looked like a power book right there was no in the same way that eventually everyone looked like an iphone roughly speaking and so the thing to compare would be like what what is different how how did things how did they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the scully error and the reverse and you know because it was like the company that jobs had founded had these good qualities i mean again jobs came and took over he didn't fire all the employees and start a new company the people who did all this stuff like johnny i was there right they had him they had him slapping ugly plastic cases around performance

right like yeah well he i mean he did the emate and that that was interesting and he put that little green triangle on the the on the g3 yeah he did the beautiful newton message pad 110 right like he like they were in he did the the 20th anniversary mac like those people were all in the company all these people that did these amazing things they just were not being utilized and like that's that's the story it's not so much uh you know when steve jobs was gone the company couldn't do any good and when he came back they did better how he didn't do the work himself. Those people are already there.

And so it's, again, in the same way that Steve Jobs was set up for failure, you had all these amazing, smart people who were ready to do great things. And then management who, like, they did great things, like, in spite of management towards the end there, not because of. Like, they were not, the priorities were lost. And again, you have Scully as theo didn't quite know what to prioritize the board then also gets a lot i think needs to take a lot of the blame the to use that jobs term again i think the board were a bunch of bozos because um when they got rid of scully um not to not to bring sports into this for a minute so forgive me

but um you know there there are stories about teams that fire their coach and they fire the coach because they know who they're going to hire and then there are those teams usually bad teams that fire the coach and then think okay now uh let's start looking for a coach and i feel like that's what the apple board was like here uh which was okay we got to get rid of scully and then they were like now what uh hey michael spindler sold a lot of computers in Germany. Let's try him out. Do any of you guys know anybody who knows anything about computers? Emilio, he's got a PhD and knows about semiconductors.

He's a turnaround artist. He's a turnaround artist. We've got a turnaround here. We need to get a turnaround specialist to come in. That's all it takes. You don't need to know anything about Apple. You just know how to turn companies around. It's just a ship that's leaking from there.

They do tell that story well. The Apple's a ship, and it's got a leak, and it's my job to get it to save harbor. And then he walks away, and everybody looks at each other and says, what about the leak? Gil. Oh, Gil, Emilio. Fascinating. Fascinating. So I think the board takes some of the blame because they made that moment.

I was like, okay, Scully, it's not working. We need to do something else it's like could they have made apple um could apple have not maybe gone so far down in flames if they had brought somebody in who had a clue maybe maybe not but they didn't bring in somebody who had a clue they brought in well spindler and and amelia to be fair to scully uh the Apple was in essentially a losing position by the time they kicked Steve Jobs out. Like, there was not, they could, even if they had just merely maintained, like, tried to, and they did try to sort of maintain the course or whatever. Like, the IBM PC was a real problem for them, right? Once the momentum started to go, once the conventional wisdom became that the Mac and Apple are oddball and the rest of the world and serious business people are always going to use PCs with Windows and like that narrative is a big problem for the Mac and Apple. Even if Steve Jobs had been there, Apple would have needed to do something dramatic to turn that around.

And so Scully did nothing to turn it around. Scully was like, let's go with it. Fine. We will be the boutique high end. We're going to go after the artists. We're going to go after desktop publishing. Like just, you know, they went in the direction they could go in and they milked that. But they didn't have, you know, as Steve Jobs would say, you milk the Mac for all it's worth

and get started on the next big thing. They milked the Mac by fleeing from the fight that they just didn't want to engage in at all. And they had no next plan. They had no next thing to replace it. So they were just like, they were getting all the getting's good or whatever the expression is right and well they they did do i mean they well the newton was the newton was their attempt at that well so i mean this is the and i don't necessarily believe this

but let me say it just to try it on um as a defense of john scully it's like okay what what was john scully's approach here they created premium price products in specific markets where they did well and that they could charge that extra money and they did well with that and they were profitable for a long time with that well they did they did well but not in big picture like they found their niche their corner of the market and they said we can wring a lot of money out of this market because it's a lucrative corner of the market but they had no sort of end game they had no sustainable business if you're scully you've already the battle's already lost you're never going to be the ibm pc so instead you're like look we can build a business off here in the corner and all that and then to scully's credit he's like hand you know let's do

a handheld computer that's a really good idea that was his vision and like that's the amazing thing like that all right so two things there one like oh the battle already lost. We're never going to be on the MPC. He was in there early enough that that wasn't true. He didn't have to be that fatalistic. In hindsight, we can say, oh, well, they were set up. They needed to do something big. But in the beginning, in 85, when Steve Jobs was just out, the battle's not entirely lost at that point.

It is still winnable without Steve Jobs if you took it. But he's like, no, we're not even going to try for that battle right and then the newton that just goes to show like he wanted to be a technical visionary like he wanted to show off his tech chops and he had a reasonably good idea about the whole personal digital assistant thing and the people at apple were so amazing that they actually did make the game really close to everything that we know would eventually define the future of mobile computing with the newton like they were so ahead of their time they were just they were just a little bit too early and made a couple of few mistakes and the company wasn't really behind them and they really shouldn't have launched when they launched like just you know the

newton was was was close and the fact that newton was that close but so it was such a vague kind of with such not incompetent leadership but was sort of fumbling leadership it just shows how much talent there was sitting there an apple how many talented passionate people who are just waiting to be asked to do something great that they just they just misfired by a little bit and then it went off the side and it ricocheted and just kind of you know fizzled out into an egg creffle egg crackles uh poof of dust just like the drawings on a newton right up martha right and so like you know it just it's it's that's why i think it wouldn't have taken you didn't need steve jobs to turn things around against

the pc you just needed somebody who had a little bit more of a clue about what this the situation would be like yeah yeah it's a it's it's an interesting it's fat this is why i'm fascinated by that period because there's like it's not like it was a total void and there were tumbleweeds blowing through there was interesting things that happened there and they weren't successful really but they were they were interesting and i i literally my first um my first month on the job at mac user as an intern was when they introduced the Newton. So you can, so I was boarding a sinking ship. Let me tell you, let me tell you. And it was fascinating, but that was by the time I got to Mac user, the, I remember my first briefing at Apple was for the

power for the quad was a quadra six 30. I want to say it was a three, it was not a four digit number. So it was not a power Mac. And I was there for the, I want to say it was not a four-digit number, so it was not a Power Mac. And I was there for the Power PC transition, but it was like a Quadra 630, I want to say, which is the weird. It had the TV tuner, and it had like a motherboard that you could slide out the back, which was weird. And I think of that era, and I think that was when things really started to get strange at Apple. That was when they did the Mac TV. They launched all the Performas, 80 billion different Performas.

They were selling them through Sears. It was a confusing time. And the one at JCPenney had a different number than the one at Sears because maybe the bundle was different of like software that they put on them. It was a very confusing time. And that's actually when I entered.

And so I think about that period now. And I didn't get to see as a professional, I didn't get to see even the heyday of the mac it was really all start starting to spin apart in in uh in what was that the summer of 93 yeah and you know thinking about the newton like again how close it was the fact that so the newton didn't quite hit its mark and then like more or less hot on its heels came the palm yeah to show that like you were just off by a little bit but the palm was like the palm was like just so much more primitive and so much smaller and so much cheaper and like the there the business narrative then was see apple you tried to make this big fancy expensive thing you can do a lot

of stuff when really you should have just gone cheaper because the most important thing was small cheap lightweight uh and that was totally the narrative that that apple that apple had had decided to go sort of like everything in the kitchen sink we're just going to make everything a revolution and this is a platform that can replace the mac and it's this amazingly powerful thing and there's data soup instead of files and it's just like why don't you just do something like handwriting recognition we'll just do graffiti on this little dedicated area we're not even like to write on the screen it's like why didn't you just do the stupidest thing like you dummy apple you're always trying to do these sort of highfalutin like amazing everything's got to be a revolution like the mac what dummies you are when steve jobs came back and he you know his first big

breakout product not maybe not the ipod but certainly the iphone they did exactly what the new was trying to do we're revolutionizing everything we are going to make the most amazing thing you've ever seen no we're not going to make you write in a little area no we're not going to make you use a pen it's like the iphone was the newton strategy not the palm strategy it was the newton strategy where they actually did it right and it's like the business narratives love to just find out who the winner is in the market and then retroactively make a narrative that says this is the way you should do things if you're going to do something you should always make the simplest most primitive things possible don't don't reach for the stars because you'll never hit them and it's pointless

and it's like they hit it with the mac they hit it with the iphone maybe they'll hit it with the watch maybe not but like the iphone was just just totally the Newton strategy and not the Palm strategy. And now it was the business narrative around that. I guess the business narrative around the iPhone is Steve Jobs is magic. I don't know. Well, I do think that that one of the good things, and I think I said this when the Isaacson book came out, too, is one of the positive things about all these Steve Jobs biographies and being pitched at business people and being taught in business schools and all of those things is I feel like, yeah, if they take away Steve Jobs' magic, then what can you do? You know, be magic. But I do think like for all those years where they said, look, what Apple did, don't pay

attention to it. The answer is not to do, you know, interesting things. The answer is to go as cheaply as possible. And like the antithesis of what Apple was always about. And Apple's success has made it hard to go down that path and ignore what Apple has done. And so even though I don't entirely agree with a lot of these books or even some of the premises that they have, I think it's interesting that we may end up with a generation of business people who have values that are maybe a little closer to apple in a way that would not have been the case

with anybody coming up in the 80s and 90s when apple was like poison well the lesson should not be like i hope the lesson at this point is that conventional wisdom is often wrong so like don't do like you need to license your operating system well no you don't you need to do what steve jobs does well no you don't what you need to do may be entirely different than what bill gates did what steve jobs did the first time what steve jobs did the second time like that should be the lesson not whatever the most recent successful thing is do that that's what all leaders should do the lesson should be that a wide variety of strategies can and have worked and it really you should really just not look back and say i need to do whatever uh you know facebook did because i want to be the next facebook like hopefully that is a lesson that

anyone with a long view would take and you're right that having lots of these different stories kills the previous narrative like that you have to you have to just make the software because software is high margin and you need to license your operating system and like you know because for the longest time windows was so dominant that it was like bill gates has defined the model the business model for the future of technology microsoft right exactly and that was the only possible either be microsoft would be bought by microsoft and then apple killed that one but now it shouldn't be like oh you got to do the apple strategy no we need someone else to come along and kill the apple strategy by doing whatever

the opposite of apple is and being fabulously successful when we're old grandparents, right? Although I would rather have today's up and coming business people look at Apple and say, hey, Apple cares about design and is trying to build products that people want to buy instead of just assembling technology together. And that's what we should do when we build products. I feel like that would be a good lesson for people who want to be tech people to learn and i think that that some up-and-coming tech people have learned that lesson as opposed to the old lesson because the old lesson was literally like just take a bunch of crap make it compatible sell it for as cheap as you can and and then move on to the next thing that's our bitter mac user perspective but i think but

but i think it builds like because the bill gates lesson really was uh the old owning control mantra from apple like it's really important for you to understand what you what the your power position is in the market like you need to to be the master of your own destiny you need to make sure ibm lets you license ms dos to other people stick that clause in your contract because that will be that will make the future of your destiny, you need to make sure IBM lets you license MS-DOS to other people. Stick that clause in your contract because that will make the future of your company. You need to be shrewd about your business deals and understand where the value is in the future, right? And that argument didn't go away. Steve Jobs did all that in his second run at Apple. He made sure that his business arrangements and everything were set up. It didn't mean his exact same thing, but he made sure that his business arrangements and everything were set up every like it didn't mean his exact same thing but he made sure that he controlled the platform that his deals with

the carriers were so lopsided that he so that he controlled the experience with the whole app store so that apple could control the applications to you know security and viruses and all this other stuff right those that was him playing up the bill gates lessons and then of course the apple lesson is at this point technology is ubiquitous enough that it's like a consumer product and you have to incorporate design right and then maybe the apple watch lesson is you have to incorporate fashion or whatever the next one is going to be i learned the bill gates lesson i learned the steve jobs lessons i learned the apple watch lesson and then i'm going to build in that so they really do it's not like one counteracts the other is you have to learn all the lessons and incorporate them, possibly in a different way.

Like the lesson Steve Jobs learned from Microsoft of like seeing how their position at the top of the market was only possible because of the smart moves they made early on about which parts they controlled and which parts other people controlled. and which parts other people controlled. Apple took that lesson to heart and used it for hardware, saying we don't have to own all the factories, but we have to make sure all our dealings with the people who make hardware for us are such that we are in the position of power always, that we control. If they make our Macs, we'll have this discussion all over again of like, we don't even want Intel making the chips, because that is too much of taking control out of our hands.

So they're sort of using the Microsoft strategy that they did with software and controlling the market through software and doing it on the hardware side yeah and and in reality um the you know the sad thing not to be a little cynical but the the lesson people are going to take most people are going to take from things like this is oh i'm going to just do that which is not you know i'm going to do what steve jobs did which is not they're welcome to try i mean but like i mean you know it's not like these are all possible models that can work but if you're looking if you're just looking to have a successful business almost any of these strategies can work if you execute them well if you're looking to become the next apple the next facebook the next microsoft you will probably need to incorporate the lessons of all the past people and do something and repurpose them

for, you know, the modern age, which is going to be different than the situation was for any of those past people. Let me let me take a break for our last sponsor. It's MailRoute. If you imagine a world without spam, viruses, or bounced email, MailRoute can provide it. You can open your email and see only the legitimate mail you want and need to receive. The way it works, MailRoute servers intercept your mail. You set your MX record on your domain, and you do need to know what that is and how to do it. You point that at MailRoute. MailRoute

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Thank you to MailRoute for keeping my mailbox spam-free and for being a good friend of Upgrade and of RelayFM. Thank you, MailRoute. So, John, at dinner at the UL Conference, I was sitting with, at the big banquet, I was sitting with Mike and with Marco and Tiff and with Georgia and Serenity was, no, Serenity was at a different table, I think.

A bunch of people, a bunch of really good people. And John Gruber appeared with one of those little telepresence robots and he actually fell off the stage as a robot. So he'd had too much to drink, I think. But we were discussing a concept that you and I have talked about before, which is the argument about what's a robot and what's not a robot. And so I wanted to ask you briefly before we before we wrap the show, are you willing to to discuss a few posits in the in the robot or not genre? If you insist. But if we're ever going to have our own podcast about this we're just stealing our own thunder or or are we promoting so i'm

just i'm gonna limit it but i you know i i'm excited about the possibility that we could do a podcast in which we determine whether things are robots or not um but i i wanted to so so this is where it started is we had the incomparable draft about we had computers and we had robots. And the computer draft was recorded first and somebody picked Kit from Knight Rider as a computer. And so then in the robot draft, somebody tried to pick Car, the evil Knight Rider Car. And I said that wasn't a robot. And that led to an entire discussion that we had over dinner in Ireland because we were really exciting people. Are you leaving out the most important part of your selection?

Oh, and then later, Steve Letts drafted the 80s Dance the Robot. And I said that was a robot. Let's repeat this again for the audience. You said the robot. The Dance the Robot was a robot. The Dance from the 80s is a is a robot yes i did say that that that led to me yelling at you about not knowing what is a robot and what is not i admit that that was indefensible but i felt like steve i had to give something to steve at that point i

felt like he needed it no that's true that's a strong point on your part so so so without getting too far down here because i i want this to be a promotion from our glorious new podcast that we will do at some point, maybe, possibly, about whether things are robots or not. Leaving the fact that the robot that's a dance is totally not a robot aside, what do you think of this question that, and this was one of the most divisive things at dinner, was that Kit, okay, from Knight Rider, is an intelligent car. So it's mobile on its own. It's got a voice. It can think for itself. It can talk to others. But it doesn't have like arms or anything. It just kind of is a self-driving car that's intelligent. So this is what I want you to think about and tell me is

what makes something a robot versus not a robot? Because I view Kidd as a computer. I just think one of the questions is about vehicles because the argument that I made was if you think Kidd is a robot, then do you think

the USS Enterprise is a robot? Because it too is a vehicle with an intelligent computer that can even create its own sentient beings in its holodeck if it wants to. Yeah. As I think we discussed when thinking about this podcast, Robot or Not, in the first episode, you would imagine that we would have to sit down and hammer out the definition of a robot, and then all subsequent episodes would simply be applying this definition to other things in a

boring way because once we've defined it there's no point in having any episodes if we can come to an agreement on what a robot is it's obvious what what you know so which means we also need to disagree about the definition of what a robot is or there's also then that's like that's intractable like we're going to convince each other or whatever. So do you want me to make a ruling on Kit versus the Enterprise? Well, I mean, I don't know. I feel like that is an interesting debate to have about if an autonomous vehicle that is self-sentient, is that a robot? Because what makes a robot a robot? Is it that it is mobile and intelligent? Or is it that it sort of appears like a human being? Let's do something easy, just as a proof of concept here.

The telepresence robot that John Gruber was driving around the stage at UL. Robot or not? Not a robot. Not a robot. Because all it is is a piece of hardware. It's an iPad on a stick. If you could put John Gruber inside there, and that's the only place John Gruber existed, then we're talking about robots.

Interesting. But John Gruber is not inside the thing. It is merely just an iPad on wheels, and he's sitting comfortably in his house. Okay. That's good. But if John Gruber only existed inside that little stick on wheels, robot.

Inside. Okay. So now let me follow this up just a little bit again just we're workshopping here if john gruber's brain was put in a computer but it was like in a mainframe like they have on television whenever they have to hack something it's a mainframe it was a big supercomputer somewhere that was just large enough to hold the entirety of john gruber but it was like in a big bunker in like underneath rocky mountains but it was connected to the internet to that telepresence robot on stage

in ireland is that a robot or is that just a computer that's controlling a a thing is that is that different yeah that's different because so he made the mainframe the big mainframe thing is not a robot again it was it would have to be the only place that John Gruber exists would have to be in that thing. All right. That it's moving around. I think we're making progress. I think we're making progress. Now, a Roomba robot or not?

Sure. Okay, so it doesn't have to be sentient. No. I mean, yeah. Otherwise, we can only talk about science fiction. Right. Because we don't have any actual sentient machines. That's good.

Is Siri a robot? No. Not really? Good. I think this proves just how brilliant the robot or not is. Is love a robot, Jason? That's an interesting question, John. Well, Webster's Dictionary defines love.

What is love, Jason? Baby, don't hurt me. Love is a robot. Don't hurt me love is a robot don't hurt me no more all right well john it has been a pleasure having you on upgrade this was actually a lot of fun um and you'll be happy to know that in the great tradition of upgrade we have lots and lots of things on the show notes that we didn't get to but that's fine we all that always happens at the bottom we got everything yeah i skipped some i skipped some stuff in the middle because we've been we've been going on oh yeah we talked about the old times we complained about books we did a lot of good stuff so i you know thank you

so much for coming on i i had that thought when when mike said i can't do this i'm going to be on vacation um i have to go to dracula's castle lazy isn't he yeah i mean i some of us take our microphones with us when we go on vacation. What's his problem? Like, he can't do a simple podcast? Like, what else does he have to do with his day? He's on vacation with his girlfriend. And I think that, you know, unlike us who are old married people, you know, he needs to not, like, tell his girlfriend, I'm going to go away for two hours and do a podcast.

So I think. He does like one podcast a month, right? He's not busy at all yeah i he's he's uh he's six he does more podcasts than i do i know which is shocking but it's good because when people say oh my god i can't believe you do four podcasts a week i go you should meet me just four podcasts a day have you checked that he's not twins or triplets well i can't prove that because i only ever saw one of him i have seen him in real life and you know and in fact just did but i i you know you can't prove that there isn't another one if you saw him if you saw him at ool and like you saw him for five

minutes and then you real and then you saw him for five minutes later you realize when you previously saw him he didn't have a beard but now that he does you like wait a second you couldn't have grown that beard that fast you would really recognize if mike didn't have a beard but now that he does you're like wait a second you couldn't have grown that beard that fast you would really recognize if mike didn't have a beard because it is a prominent it is a prominent beard what i'm saying maybe one of the mics has a beard yeah yeah well you i mean that would not be a sufficient you couldn't take that mic as his duplicate if he if he next next time you see this put your hand in there and pull really hard because that could be fake interesting interesting well so i this is this is my point is that if mike does have doubles he didn't bring them with him so far as we know or they they had the same beard that he had they were not beardless he must leave the beardless mike duplicate at home just to record

and sends the beardy one out in public well anytime he wants to briefly have a normal life i'm happy to fill in. Well, I appreciate that. And it was fun to talk about computer things with you, which we've talked about before, just not when we were recording on a podcast. Yes, that is definitely true. That was a nice thing.

So thank you. And of course, everybody should, I don't know why they wouldn't have already done this, but they should listen to the Accidental Tech podcast, which you can find on iTunes or at ATP.FM. Sing a song. Go ahead. And John is on Twitter, S-I-R-A-C

USA, Syracuse. You got it. I know it well. And as always, this episode, always and forever, will be at Relay.FM slash upgrade slash 30, or the show notes are in your podcast app of choice. Mike will be back next week with me.

Thank you once again to our sponsors, 1Password, GoToMeeting, and MailRoute. And thanks to everybody out there for listening. We will see you soon. Is Mike going to be re-energized when he comes back? Or drained of all blood because he visited Dracula's castle. Hmm. I didn't know that he was there. Yeah.

Yeah, he was high in the Carpathian Mountains. Dracula was my senior class play. I know every time he mentions that he's going to Romania, I say, oh, it's a remote region in Romania because that's what Transylvania is. That was one of my lines. Where's Transylvania? It's a remote region in Romania. You think about that when you see your kids doing activities at school and you're like, you're going to remember some stupid part of this activity that you're doing for the rest of your life. So whatever line you have in the school play, be prepared to know that when you're 40. Forever.

That's right. I hope it's a good one. Yeah. It's a remote region in Romania. I don't know how you did it. No, I actually, I think in that play I had the most dialogue, but I wasn't one of the stars. I was like the guy who owned the house where the play takes place. I was like the guy who owned the house where the play takes place.

So as the host, I kept appearing and saying things that were sort of like either expository or just moving the story along. And so I had lots and lots of dialogue to say that I had to memorize. I've never done anything like that before. But yet my character was not particularly interesting in any way. I was not Dracula. I was not Von Helsing. It was setting you up for your career as a journalist yeah that's right i was just the guy there saying hey this is my house and oh transylvania that's a remote region in romania i meant in the way that it was not setting

you up for your career as an actor yeah oh certainly well that was the perfect part actually you could argue that having me have lots of dialogue was maybe not the best choice, but, you know, it was the part I was born to play. Mr. Generic Exposition Guy. No acting required, just read the lines. And so I did.