Upgrade - 624: The Memory Guys

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 624, and it is the summer fun, baby. Summer of fun. It's June 22nd, 2026. Today's show is brought to you by FitBard Mercury Weather. Oh, boy, is it the summer over here and Squarespace. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike.

Then we're going to talk about the weather. I'm actually going to talk about the weather later on. Today's episode, well, boys, it hot here in London. But we don't have any time for that. It's snow talk time. Justin wants to know Jason. what should I tell people or how should I respond when they ask where Dongle Town is in the state of California?

I went on a cruise this weekend and had a man staring at my shirt for a while before he approached me to ask where it was. He said he had lived in California all of his life and had never heard of the town. Well, I mean, first off, you could just say it's a joke. But, and that's probably the polite thing to do

is, oh, it's a joke, it's about how Apple made a bunch of changes that required people to buy a bunch of new cables and adapters and stuff. What I instantly thought of when I saw this question was you should say

it's right by the Apple store. But it's got to be by the coast, though, right? The port town. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And it's got a beach, US Beach type C.

So it's by, it's by the bay. A Thunderbolt dock. So I would imagine that it's probably in And it's a little like, you know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was set in Sunnydale, which is not a real town.

And even though it sounds like Sunnyvale, it was very clearly like Santa Barbara is what it actually was. So Dongle Town is somewhere in Southern California. It's like, I don't know. It's a beach town in Southern California. Somewhere down like, I don't know where. You know, kind of south of L.A. before you get to San Diego.

Yeah. Okay, very nice. That's somewhere. There you go. So now next time Justin someone asks, say, it's down there past LA. It's Southern California, just sort of like north part of Orange County maybe, or just like, is it south of Long Beach? I don't know. Because the truth is it disappears into the fog and only reappears every few years, like Brickadoon.

Longwood Town is a state in mind. It is, and it's by the Apple Store again. There's an Apple Store there. If you'd like to send in a question to help us open a few. future episode of the show, please go to Upgradefeedback.com, just like Justin did. We have some follow-up. Jason, how, Jamie wants to know.

How was Julia's graduation? Is this daughter, Jamie, or a different Jamie? Unknown. Unknown. We had a great time. Say you had a good time with Jamie. That might be a helpful thing. I had a great time with Jamie. Hi, Jamie. And Jimmy loves it when we mentioned her on Upgrade.

Hi, Jamie. It's our video. Hi, Jamie. Yeah, we did, well, we obviously did upgrade last week on the wrong day, which was weird, but we have made, and I was in the wrong place. I was in our, our Airbnb in Eugene. It was an incredibly hot day. They had to call off, or move, basically cancel and move some of the graduations that were going to be held outside to later in the day inside, because it was like 100 degrees. Just extraordinarily hot. Fortunately, and unlike Jamie's graduation, the all-campus graduation, the all-campus graduation,

was at the stadium at 9 a.m. So it only lasted an hour. And it wasn't hot then. It was still the early in the morning. And the way it generally works on the West Coast especially cools off overnight. So it wasn't hot in the morning. And then the afternoon graduation was in the basketball arena.

So yeah, we had a great time. Very proud of our second child graduating. Unbelievable. To me honestly, the most emotional moment is one of the graduation speakers was listing things that some of their parents may have done for them and one of them was pay for their tuition. And I had that moment where I realized, oh, past tense, we did it. We paid, we put our kids through college. And now we're done with that. We did it.

We, we, we, 25 years ago, we made an estimate of what would be required for our children as they were being born. because we started with Jamie and then we added an account for Julian when he was born to go to college and I am happy to say that we nailed it with Julian we really nailed it

like I think there's only a couple thousand dollars left in his account oh I see what you mean you got it spot on the money I thought you were just saying like you've paid for it now it's all done no we managed to do that so that's you know we were putting money away

for 25 years to do that but now it's over like the whole process is over we did successfully pay for our kids' college. And having some family members who have been crushed by student debt over the years, I am very happy to have been able to do that for my kids so that they don't have to worry about their student debt when they're trying to first make their way in the world as adults. So, yeah, it was great, great time. Nice drive. You know, the drive from Northern California to Oregon is beautiful.

You know, you have to go past bounce. Shasta. I went past Mount Shasta this time and was like, thinking of the California Bear Trophy and thinking soon, soon it will be Macawes Shasta, but not yet. Jason sent me a picture of it. I did. It's a, it's a, it really is remarkable because it's so tall and out on its own that like, you're just driving nowhere near it and suddenly on the horizon, you see this giant snow capped volcano and you're like, oh, there, there it is. And then for the next four hours, it is, it is with you until it fades into the distance again. On a completely different note,

I don't want to do lawyer up today, so this is in follow-up. Essentially, Brazil has now taken on the Europe model for alternate app marketplaces with varying pricing structures for third-party payments and the core technology commission and all that stuff. I did a scan, like I kind of scanned through it and looked through Apple's documentation. It seems basically a key.

to what has now been the proposal in Europe for a little bit. Just another one. Just another one. Just another one on the pile. So we're a roundup time. I have a quick roundup today of various reports from the Sheriff Mark Gorman

over the last week. A few little bits of stuff, little details. So the AirPods with cameras are now set to debut in late 2027. Yeah. He didn't describe why. Yeah. What he said was they were initially thinking it might have been as early as the end of this year. And now he said that they're not.

And he didn't really say why. But for some reason. And I honestly wonder if they feel like that tech could get better or they're doing okay or quite honestly, given his reports about what they're working on. And the fact that they got a bunch of stuff that they want to ship that they've not been able to deliver because Siri hasn't been good enough. And now presumably it looks like it is good enough as of this fall, that they may have just said, this is too soon. Let's push it off. We have too much already.

But for whatever reason, you know, because German didn't give one, they seem to have pushed this product off. The best that he gave was the deadline slipped in part because of Apple's prolonged struggles with artificial intelligence software. But that doesn't say why it would have gone from 26 to 27. Yeah. But it may be that the pipeline is so, I mean, like there is an argument to be made that even, you know, company like Apple, like, too many products at once is too much.

It's overload. And it's not just overload on the mind of the public, which is important because you're trying to market this stuff. But it's overload on your factories and your marketing team and your advertising. Like, you can't ship eight new products at once, right? Like, it's very hard. So this may be a product that for whatever reason they're like, we can wait on this one. This is not, the world is not crying out for the, the airport. with cameras in them.

However, I've been thinking about this. I think you have too. And German confirmed, I think, you know, this has been the speculation for a while,

but like, they're not for taking pictures or video or anything. They are sensors. They clearly are about basically visual intelligence. And I have been using visual intelligence

or whatever you want to call it, the camera feature of the Siri feature of the camera, whatever, and the betas for the last week, I've already used it far more than I ever bothered to use visual intelligence and I feel like the results are better and it's not just the results are better.

I feel like there's an automatic aspect of it that I really like. Visual intelligence seems so weird, like you sort of took a picture and then it was like, what would you like to do with this picture? I was like, I don't know, you tell me. And now it seems like it just sort of,

I pointed it, you know, I basically held up my phone to a tag on a shirt I bought and held down camera control and it popped it up and it said well here's the deal with that tag it's made of

whatever it's made of rayon and it's uh here and you shouldn't put bleach on it and don't iron it and I'm like great that's all I needed to know and I'm like okay I see where uh seeing what's around you and using it as a feed for

for AI stuff uh is a viable thing if you can make it work right yeah the way that they've implemented it in 27 is the camera button is replaced with the Siri icon. And so as you say, if you just press the camera button, it will just take a guess at what you want to know. But it also has the buttons that they used to have, like the little question bubble thing.

So you can ask a specific question if you want to, but otherwise it's going to take the best guess that it can. And I would say as well, like the quality of the responses that I'm getting make me see more about why this product might exist. Like, my mind is not being blown by what Apple was telling me. Like, sometimes it's just, it's not at all understanding what I want from it, or it's just kind of, I've had it hallucinate with me today a little bit.

I have some quotes on a monitor on my desk, and there's a quote from Johnny Ive, and it attributed it to Steve Jobs, and I asked where it got that information, and it says the Post-it note says it, but it doesn't. And I said, no, it doesn't. It's like, oh, yeah, no, sorry. It's Steve Jobs' quote. I'm like, oh, you're just going with this.

You're just, like, making it up. But the fact that it does those kinds of things and also does the things I like is like, well, yes, then it is doing what I expect of these systems that, like, they can give you some information, but also they're not going to give you the right information. So now I kind of can see, like, all right, their system for a kind of looking through imagery and picking things out and trying to tell you what they are, it feels kind of state of the art-ish, where before we saw 27, my feeling was like, what is the point of doing this? I don't believe you can do it.

I'm not as well-versed in the state of the art in order to say that, but I will say that it certainly doesn't feel like it's dumb and behind and pointless. And that's like step one, regardless of whether it's at the cutting edge or even just in the average. Like in this generation, getting to acceptable on average is sort of, I feel like the goal in some ways. And I know that everybody's like, oh, Apple should aspire to be better. It's like, yes, of course. But you've got to stand up after you've taken a fall before you can start moving forward. And this is a little bit of that, I think. the iPhone Air 2 is coming in the spring of

2027. It looks like they may add an ultra-wide camera and improve battery life. So the battery life thing, and German even mentioned this in one of his pieces, and I think it's really interesting where he's like, what I'm hearing is that they're going to improve the battery life, but it's really unclear how. Which is he's putting out there what we've been thinking, which is like,

okay, well, they can't really make the battery bigger. So how do they improve battery life? And maybe they're just hanging it all on the next chip and the next, you know, the next chip set. I think the combination of iOS 27 and the next chip set, they might just be able to get more battery out of the same battery. Right. Well, then that's not, I mean, in that case, it's a little bit disingenuous to sell

this as they've improved battery life because they're really just saying the next generation will of course improve battery life. Yeah, but it's marketing, right? They'll just say it has a longer battery. That's kind of all getting one would care about. Except this isn't marketing. This is people talking to Mark German, but I think that's effectively what it is,

is that the watchword is, whoever's talking to Mark German about this is trying to say, these are the selling points for this thing. And we're going to sell it as we added a camera and we improve battery life, even though the improved battery life is, well, what do you mean you improve battery life? And it's like,

we don't actually have an answer to that. The answer is because our chips are better at it. Which is great. It's a real answer. It's not a fake answer. But it's also not like, we solve this by building a better battery necessarily. But it's fine. These are the two biggest criticisms. The iPhone Air 2 now has whatever. It doesn't matter what the iPhone Air won. Because the iPhone Air original might also get a bit better of battery because of iOS 27. It might. But they just won't be selling that one anymore. They just won't be talking about that. And also, you would hope that the processor will help. The processor being more efficient is undoubtedly part of it. Yeah. For sure. And Mark also has a really long write-up in his newsletter to power on about all the trials and tribulations of the industrial design team of the last few years. Man, man, man. I know, you've probably wanted to say some stuff about this column.

I do. We'll hold that for one second. Okay. The thing that is maybe the most detaily, and I've seen him reporting in a few places, so I just want to know it here for completeness sake. This is Mark German. And Ternus knows a major design shakeup is needed and is getting ready to put his firm imprint on the team, I'm told. That's one reason he stepped up to oversee the design team last year, a move that ultimately signaled his ascension to the top job. He has already spent a considerable amount of time with the industrial design group, a contrast to Cook's historically limited presence.

Okay. So first off, that statement right there. Let's look at that a little bit. it feels very much to me like something that's being told to Mark German by people in the industrial design group because they feel like John Ternis is giving them a little love and attention

that they feel like they didn't, that they always deserved and didn't get from Tim Cook. But they would not get, yeah, not be given. So then they just assumed he's not a design guy, et cetera, so. The way it's framed is, I would say, the way so much of Mark German's coverage of this issue

is framed, which is why we always say here at the upgrade program, consider the source. Consider the source. It is obvious that many of Mark German's greatest sources at Apple over the years are designers. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is obvious to me that the design group is one of the, if not the biggest source of leaks at Apple, because I can also point to the Tripp Michael book and even Yucari Kane's book as being. so focused on the design aspect of the company and so taking the point of view

of the, you know, that the heart of Apple, the heart of Apple is design, say, designers, that it's very clear to me that the designers, not all of them, I'm not, look, I'm not saying all of them, but I'm saying like a lot of them, one of the great sources for people reporting about Apple is people talking in the design. group. It's also the group that probably has the majority of stuff to leak.

Because they see everything. They see everything. Yeah. Physical and digital. Exactly. So consider the source here. This is this thing about John Turnus and him being put in charge, like, did they feel like really excited that the guy who's going to be the CEO was first going to be given oversight over the design team? That was a shot in the arm for them. This is, What this looks to me like is that they're like, okay, we have a little morale problem in the design group. And John Ternis is going to kind of try to turn it around. And what they're saying here is they turn it around. Now, the framing of Mark German's column is, oh, thank goodness, John Ternis is going to save Apple because he's finally listening to the designers.

But I'll say again, John Ternus is going to turn around Apple because he's finally listening to the most important group at Apple. The designers say the designers. because the designers are the ones who are the sources here. This is just like you cannot look at Mark German's coverage over the last year of Apple stuff and not think that his sources are designers in the industrial design group and the software design group. If it's not Alan Dye, it's people who know Alan Dye. And part of it is I'm not saying these sources are lying to Mark German. It's not true.

But they have a perspective. And I would say that because this is the information Mark German's getting, his analysis of these situations tends to follow that perspective. And what bothers me about, I know I'm getting a little out here, but like what bothers me about it is it's so self-important.

And of course it is, because the people who work in that group think that they're the most important because so many people think that they're important cogs at Apple and they don't get the love that they should and all of that. I get it.

But like this narrative that Apple lost its way because, uh, like, German's newsletter says something about how, like, oh, the laptops look pretty much like they've done for 15 years, and that's a sign of Apple's failure. It's like, have you seen all the other laptops that are out there? Like, everybody just does Apple's laptops, too.

I'm not sure that's a sign of failure. Maybe it's a sign that you're bored, and you wish that there was something more exciting and dramatic to write about. But it's not necessarily a sign of failure at all. And in fact, there have also been a lot of design failures. And I personally believe that what happened is, I believe, an alternative. narrative about what happened, which is that Johnny Ive stayed long before his sell-by-date because he was bored, and they kept him because of optics, and they put him in charge of stuff he should never have been in charge of. And that Alan Dye is a great example of somebody who

comes from a high-fashioned kind of sensibility, who's maybe disconnected from the concept of Apple as making functional projects for products for regular people. But if I was in the design group, I would look back at the era of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive and say, yeah, we rule then why are we not, you know, why are we not the rulers of Apple now? Because this bean counter Tim Cook came in and he made it all about operations. But it's a different company in a different world. This doesn't mean that design isn't important. Industrial design and software design. They're incredibly important. But I would say that a lot of these leaks say to me, not, oh, Apple has a problem because they're not listening to designers. They say to me,

oh, the design group is a problem at Apple, that they're malcontents who think too much of themselves and don't think as much about the work of the rest of the company. And they're really mad that they're no longer completely centered in the company's culture and structure. And they're fed up with it. And they're going to, and they're leaking things to Mark German and they're leaking things to Trip Mickle at the New York Times or for his book.

And like that is the narrative that they're pushing. What's funny is, while Mark German is still writing the narrative in his newsletter, that is Apple's kind of lost his way. There's now this little shiny bit in the middle, which is, ah, but John Turneris will turn it around. John Turnus, he gets it. He gets it on a level. By the way, John Turner is a hardware guy.

He's not, he's a not we. He's not we. He's a hardware guy. But, oh, but he gets it. He's showing them love. And yeah, you could say, oh, this is a real shift in strategy and a redemption of Apple from the dark Tim Cook era where the designers weren't listened to. I view it as being, huh, John Turner is a pretty good manager because he's gotten these people who seem so angry and discontented to feel like they're being listened to and that they're part of the company again.

That's smart management. I'm not sure that this is anything more than managing those people to feel better about their role at Apple, which is an effective bit of management. I'm not sure this is an enormous shift in the strategy of how Apple operates as much as it is making the designers feel a little more, a little. more loved and appreciated. But anyway, so as with so many things, and I, I'm trying not to be mean here because I think Mark German has great sources and does incredible work as a reporter, but like the analysis in that column about how, like, he's just taken what the designers say. And I'm sorry, I just have to roll my eyes at the analysis in it.

I think it doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny. So congratulations, I guess, to the designers for getting John Ternis to tell them nice things. And maybe their leaks will be nicer in the few. future. Who knows? Isn't it good, though? Like, both potential scenarios. So let's take it on its face. On the face of it, Turnus cares more about design. If we just take it at face value. Sure. Or if we jump into your analysis of it, Turner is a good manager of people. Aren't these both potentially good things? I think they're both true to an extent. I just think it's the people who are being managed are never going to say, oh, thank goodness, he cares about us

and he's shining some light on us. They're going to say, yeah, we should be in it. It's not that they shouldn't. And I will admit, like, when German reports that Cook really limited his interaction with designers,

he handed them off to Jeff Williams. He kept them at arm's length. I understand why he might have done that. because he felt like it was not his area of expertise at all, and he didn't speak their language. And he's like, let other, I think he's a, I think Tim Cook is a delegator.

And one of his strengths is he recognizes aspects of his job that he doesn't know anything about. And they said, I can't handle the designers because I don't know anything about that. So somebody else handled the designers. And while that is admirable, having a CEO who understands it better is better for the products. It is fundamentally better. So I would say to your point, yes and yes. I think, yes, it is true. This is a sign maybe that, again, maybe functionally, if you ask people across the organization, they might tell you that design was never on the outs. It's just that they

weren't getting the ego boost from attention from the CEO that they desired. But I think there are knock on effects. They probably felt isolated because they were isolated to a certain degree. I think that's true. Honestly, the Alan Dye situation where they, all the executives seem shocked and appalled that Alan Dye left Apple, whereas everybody else seems to have thought that it was a relief that he was gone suggests to me not just like, are they fooling themselves, but that, that's how disconnected they were. They didn't understand it.

Design, because they weren't even thinking. Alan does that. Because they're literally like, I don't want to know about it. Just let Alan is, because I think that that's how the Johnny I relationship work with Tim Cook. Yes. And not with Steve Jobs, but with Tim Cook, I think he was like, Johnny, you're the genius here. I don't know nothing about this. You just do it.

And when Johnny left, he's like, get the lieutenants to do it, but I still don't want anything to do with it because it's just not my area. I want so little to do of it. The operations guy is going to lead it. Yeah. And he will sit before me. And honestly, if you're Tim Cook and you've got a reputation for being a logistics guy and an efficiency guy. Do you want to step into it with design? All you can do is mess it up. I think.

All you can do is mess it up. Don't use that material. It's hard to make. It's like they don't want to hear that from you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, I think I understand those methods, but do I think it's better if you have a CEO who actually cares about design and understands it at a level? Because in this case, with Ternis, he's been working with that group on hardware, the industrial design group on hardware all along, right? He's not a designer. He is a hardware guy, but he understands the relationship

and the value that they provide. And I see no evidence that John Ternis thinks that the design group is stupid and they should feel bad and that we don't need them anymore because we'll just engineer our hardware the way we want it. I don't think he thinks that at all.

I think he understands what makes Apple products special. He's been there 25 years. I keep saying this, but like in my brief interactions with John Turnus and looking at his background, I think he's one of us in a way. He gets why Apple products are great. Yeah.

And that's part of it. So I think it is a net positive. But I also want to point out that it's also as somebody who managed people, I look at this and I'm like, this is somebody who got a little love and a little attention. And you know what?

They should, you should give your employees love and attention. Yes. As a top level manager, I'm going to just I'm just going to say it you have needy people and you're like geez I wish they were not so needy but what you do is find a way to give them that and like you might roll your eyes in the background and be like you don't why do I have to do this for you but the fact is different people take it need attention in different ways part of understanding people having empathy for them

is understanding this is what they need and at Apple a company that's full of engineers and software developers, the designers probably feel a little bit like outliers. Even though they are software designers and industrial designers, they're still designers, right? Their clocks probably tick a little different than the engineers do. And so I'm sure they need attention in a way that some of the other rank and file at Apple don't need attention. And I just, it made me smile when I saw this line about Ternus because it made me feel like, oh, yeah, I see what he's doing there. He's making them feel valued because they didn't feel valued for a few years under Tim Cook. And he wants them to feel valued. And it can, the best ones are when both are true. When we want you to feel valued,

we want you to be engaged. And you are valuable. And you need to be engaged. It's all good. I think it's a positive story. I just, I also, I mean, I had, we had a mutual friend to text us on Sunday morning and say, who, if you ever wondered if Mark German's sources were fed entirely by this sign group, this, I mean, this is Exhibit A. But again, I think it's a positive. I think a lot of the design story is moving in a positive direction now. Right. Now, German, German adds on a layer, which is like, oh, but they're in trouble because there's a brain drain and, you know, who knows and they're going to keep losing people and all that. And like, I think that there, I think German reports a lot of gossip on the inside of that group that's very worried about people departing and all of that. I just, I'm a lot less interested in that narrative. But anyway, I think it's good for John Turnus that he's giving them enough of a feeling of attention that they feel better about their place in Apple. Like how John Turner's values the industrial design group, I really value our listeners. And so I would like to take a moment to apologize because I said this would be a quick rumor round up. But,

In fact, I lied. I lied to you all. It wasn't quick from a roundup. I mean, you knew I was doing this, right? I had a feeling. I didn't know for sure, but I knew it was definitely a coin flip away. And I know how coin flips can be with you. I almost changed the rundown this morning.

I was like, Jason's just going to talk about this Mark Urban report for a while. I was like, yeah, we'll just slide it in there. We're going to give people their money's worth in this episode. That's for sure. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at FitBod. If you're looking to make changes to your fitness, getting started can feel tough. That's why I want to tell you about FitBod. It is an easy and affordable way to build a fitness plan that is made for you

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are thanks to FitBod for their support of this show and Relay. Are you ready, Jason Snell, for the prices

to all go up. Price, number go up. Number go up, Mike. Tim Cook has given a rare interview to Rolf Winkler at the Wall Street

Journal to prepare people for the fact that the prices of Apple products are going to increase due to RAM and storage pricing and available

and the crisis surrounding it. That has all been brought on by the advancement of AI infrastructure building, which is a thing Tim does not in any way address in this interview. None of his... It's like those memory guys, oh, they got us and they're passing on. What does it say? There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices, and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases.

We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. that's the bottom line, he says, because Tim Cook said so. The memory guys. The memory guys. Those those rascals. Those rascals. Oh, man. Remembered things?

Mm-hmm. We knew this was coming, right? I mean, this has been obvious. They warned about it in the quarterly earnings call. They said, this is not sustainable. And I think

it's fair. Ben Thompson has made this point a bunch that Apple's holding in an inflationary period Apple holding the line on prices for five years means that in some ways the stuff that they're selling has never been cheaper because the prices essentially have gone

the actual prices have gone down over the last five years because there's been inflation and Apple has not raised their prices. Which is true. So I think it might have been inevitable that at some point they were going to hike them and then the memory thing happens is like, well, they're obviously going to hike them now.

I think for me, the question is how? Yeah. Right? What levers do they pull here? Because there are a bunch of different things they can do. They could just raise the price on every single skew at every single level. That's possible. And they may do that.

They could do what they've been doing, which is drop base level skews, drop the base model and start selling the higher model. That's what they did with the Mac Mini. I think that's probably not enough, although I think it's possible to do it in some circumstances. And they've done it before with iPhones too, right? Where like the start in price increases, but all they did was remove the base storage tier. Right, right. They took the $999 and made a $1099, but it was really the $1099 tier was now still the $1099 tier. It's just the $999 went away. These are all tricks they can do, although they pulled some of those levers before.

And then my other question is, how do they deal with it across product lines? because, for example, the MacBook Neo, the price is incredibly relevant to what that product is. And they have products above it in the line that are, and also the margins on, I know this is going to be a little bit contradictory, but like the margins on the MacBook Neo are probably not enormous, but also the percentage-wise changes that you could make are not enormous

because it's not a very expensive. product. So I guess my question is, do you raise the price of the MacBook Neo? Or do you keep the price of the MacBook Neo where it is, but raise the price of the MacBook Air, which makes the Neo actually seem even better, but also if you don't like the Neo, you can say, well, you can still buy a MacBook Air. It's just more than it used to be. And then that allows them to raise, I guess that's part of what I'm thinking is, are we going to see them raise prices across the board, or is it going to be one of those cases where Apple is more likely to, you know, to raise prices on the higher expense items because the people who buy those tend to be a little

less sensitive to price change and that's where you have your biggest margins or is it the reverse I don't know or what if you do it to everything but you scale the amount of increase based on the starting price right so like the the iPhone 18 is 18 19 be 19 yeah I don't anymore. 18. Yeah. The iPhone 18. Yeah.

Yeah, we're on 17 now. Okay. The regular one goes up by $50, but the pro goes up by $150. Yeah. Or $100. I mean, maybe, maybe. These are the calls and we don't, you know, the problem is we don't see the other side of the spreadsheet. We don't actually know what the margin is on the MacBook Neo.

I would argue that it would be very hard to raise the price in the MacBook Neo, but, if everybody is raising the prices, then they can get away with it. But on the high end, I mean, this is the, that rumored M6 touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro is the best example of this,

right, because that product is totally going to cost a fortune. And the reason is it doesn't, it doesn't even have a price. And it's basically the very, very top of the line. That is a product that they're going to be able to sell and say,

look, people who are already spending thousands of dollars on the computer, you'll have to spend more. And I know that's frustrating if you're like, yeah, but I wait many years to buy a computer so that I can save up the money to buy this expensive computer and then use it for many years. And now you're making it even more expensive.

Like, yeah, but that's kind of the rationale. It's a version of what I've been saying all along since the iPhone 10 came out, which is Apple keeps kind of exploring, are there prices above which nobody, you know, nobody will buy a product? And what they found is that there's a large portion of Apple's installed base that is, it doesn't mind spending even more and even more and even more. people were mad. What was the original iPhone? Was it like $6.99? And people were furious. It was $6.99 with a contract, which I get. But like, it's been, you know, you could buy an iPhone 17 Pro Max with all the storage in it for like almost $2,000. Oh, so. Yeah. It was, what, $6.99 and then dropped to $4.99 after two months. Yeah, that was. Yeah. So, so what I'm saying is just like the, the, the prices have been going up for a long time now at the high end. And they split the line into two. And what they found is, like, people still, you could, there are people for whom an expensive phone does not appeal and they will not buy it. And I, and that's why it's great that they split their line in two. But what they're trying to do is say, yeah, but for the people who are willing to spend more money, we want the money.

We don't want to just sell the iPhone 17. We want to sell the iPhone 17 Pro Max with lots of storage for $2,000 because we make so much in profit on that phone. And we don't want to lose that person and say, no, no, no, just buy the $7.99 phone, you'll be fine. We want them to spend $1,000 more. more on us. That is the challenge with them is like, do you do it? I just, I'm, I wonder what they're going to do. I wonder how their approach is going to, is going to work here. And if it's going to be something that happens now, or if it's just going to happen when products get announced in the fall. I don't know. It launched at $4.99 for the 4-9-9 for the 8-gabyte, and then

they dropped the prices later on. Right. But the point is that it was, it was a fairly low price, by today's standards. But it was at the time was ridiculous because nobody paid money for phones. They just got the contract. Exactly.

Exactly. And now Apple, and especially when the iPhone 10 came out, like Apple has just been turning up the heat and just raising that price. Not the price to get into an iPhone. The price of buying the biggest and best and best configured iPhone just keeps going up.

We'll get those details locked in our head when we get to the iPhone for design in California. Don't worry. Some people will buy it. Yeah. And Apple wants, this is the bottom line is like, if you're willing to spend $1,500 on a new phone, Apple wants you to spend $1,500 on a new phone. They don't want you to save money and spend $800. They want you to spend all of your money.

Give us all your money is what Apple says. So that might factor in, right, knowing who this audience is. But I don't know. I mean, they do have a lot of ways to approach this. And it's going to be, I don't have a prediction. I just, I think it's going to be fascinating because it will tell us some things about how they view their products and their markets for their products based on how they approach it. But it is important to note that the competition is not immune to this at all. They're doing the same thing.

So that was, I think, another thing that Ben Thompson said was that the place the iPhones out on, like, the competition's like cheap, cheap phones and that, like, everybody's going up in price. So, like, you're not dealing with tomorrow's prices on the iPhone and yesterday's prices on Android phones. That's not how it works. Yeah, my prediction is the prices will increase across the line inconsistently. Like, there will be different things. They do for different products and different product lines. And there will not be, like, oh, they put it up by 10% on everything. Like, I just don't think, I think it's going to be, they are going to apply what they want to apply, depending on how it works for them.

And everything's going to go up by 50 or 100 or 150, right? They're not going to do percentages anyway. It's going to be like steps. So maybe the Neo goes up 50 and the air goes up 100 and the pro goes up 150. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I want to read some quotes from this interview that you gave.

Okay. Unfortunately, price creases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases. but the situation has become unsustainable. This is a hundred-year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years. That is a really important data point, right?

That the operations guy is like, no, this is nothing like this has ever happened before. That is, I got a little bit more nervous reading that. Like, I know that this thing is out there and I know it's a problem. Like, I know. Like, I'm very plugged into video gaming too in the same way that. I care about tech. I care about gaming. And it is a bloodbath in gaming right now,

where it's the only time ever that consoles have increased in price at a time when they were supposed to have decreased in price by now. You know, like the PlayStation 5, the same PlayStation 5 model that came out years and years and years ago is now hundreds of dollars more expensive. Yeah. It's never happened before. Switch 2 went up and like they all went up.

Yeah, I think I've never seen anything like it in any area over 40 years is quite a quite a statement. Yeah, it's a worry. that's quite a statement. And this is from the CEO of the company that basically weathered all sorts of issues in COVID. Yeah. Yeah. They just, they swallowed the chip shortages in COVID. Like, they just took care of it. And they've swallowed this so far as well, right? Where like their competitors haven't. Yeah, because they were prepared, but not, they were not prepared for the 100 year flood. Which, by the way, given everything, everybody, a hundred year flood doesn't mean what it used to mean. It means like it probably will flood soon. So, and that, you know, yeah, you got to listen to the guy who's been doing this for a long time, that this is a wild moment that even the most prepared. Apple was like the the ant not the grasshopper, right? But it didn't matter because the winter was so bad.

He says, we're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution. Obviously more capacity is needed. But also says, like, in about the idea of building their own facilities, we can't do everything. We know what we're good at.

It's like, I don't really know what the balance sheet solves then. Yeah. Well, so this is it. He's laying it out here. I think I got to read on this, which is Apple doesn't make their own factories. Apple hands bags of money to companies who build factories to increase capacity and then provide that capacity to Apple. Right?

This is how they've done it in so many different areas. Apple says, hey, if we sign a contract for you to provide us with this chip, RAM processor, whatever, and we give you billions, of dollars in cash. Can you do it? And the response is something like, well, we're going to have to build a factory to do this because we don't have the supply right now. And Apple's like, uh-huh, yeah, you build a factory and you give us everything you make in it for three years and we'll give you $2 billion or whatever.

And that's how they do it. So they don't want to own the factories. They don't want to be in that business. They don't want to amortize the cost of the factory over time. But they are a big buyer who needs a lot of stuff. and they can throw that weight around to say, and as a chipmaker, because TSM has benefited from this,

Intel is probably going to benefit from this, and other Apple partners have probably benefited from this. You're using Apple, I mean, Foxcon in China, right? Like, you're using Apple to fund the development of your infrastructure in exchange for supplying Apple with the product

for some amount of time. And that, like, I can't, speak for those companies, but it strikes me that historically that's been a pretty good way to grow your company is to let Apple write you a giant check, build your factories, you know, sell the proceeds, you know, sell the stuff coming out of the factory to Apple. And then at the end of the day, as that becomes a legacy node, Apple moves on to the next factory, but you've got, you've now got a factory that you can reposition to sell to other providers or update or whatever.

Like that's their That's their game. That's what they do. So using their balance sheet to help to be part of the solution, maybe that is handing a lot of money to Intel or somebody else to build a factory and increase capacity and provide, and the key part here is and provide Apple with that capacity.

The detail that I found the most interesting from this article is this. So this is the worksheet journal. I'm just quoting from it because this is a back and fall between them and cook. China has national champion companies. memory and storage, but due to national security rules, American companies would likely require licenses to work with them. When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said, I think everything needs to be on the table. I think we should look at all supply. I find this very interesting. Yeah. That, you know, he sees it as there is a way to help, but we're not

allowed to do it. And he is speaking out on this. And then I'm drawing a link here myself. This is my conspiracy time. I make this link too. I make this link too. Go ahead. The next day in a true social post, President Trump said that Apple, along with other companies, is going to work with Intel to produce chips in America. I think there is something coming soon, which is that the restrictions for American companies using Chinese RAM is going to be lifted temporarily. And to get that in exchange, these companies need to invest in Intel. Because it is very weird to me that the next day

Trump will just say this about Intel just says it? This is a this would be the obvious quid pro quo. Like you're Tim Cook and you're talking to Donald Trump and you say, look, this memory story is just killing us. But China has memory. But we're not allowed to do it.

Can you do it? And then Trump says, how would that work and what's in it for me? Yeah. And Cook's like, we'll invest more in Intel, you know, you're like, or or Trump might even say something like, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't want you to invest in Chinese. Like, no, no, no, it's a temporary thing for the shortage. Meanwhile, we'll make an investment in American manufacturing for the long term, but in the short term, we need relief.

And that has been, in this administration, that seems to be a winning strategy for negotiating with the White House, is to say, let us do this temporarily. and then in a future time, we will have it in the U.S. but right now we can't do it in the U.S. and we're dying here and we're an American company. Please help us by letting us import these things from China. But we won't do it forever. We'll just do it for during this crisis. And we've got a solution in the future.

That's like a, I feel like they've done that, that this administration has done that so many times now that this seems pretty obvious to me that that's the potential, quid pro quo here. I don't know enough about Chinese ram manufacturing to understand how significant a help this would be. I don't either. And then my other thought was that Trump would say something like, well, okay, you can use

that, but not in stuff you ship to the U.S. And that might be, Apple might be fine with that of saying like, yeah, we're going to put the Chinese ram chips and the ones that are bound for Europe and rest of world. And in America, USA, we're going to use the good. ones that aren't from China that we trust better. And I mean, I'm not seeking a lot, an argument analyzing the logic of that statement. I'm just saying I could see that being a statement. Yeah. It's just like, I don't know. I mean, the fear is that anything coming from China could have stuff in it that is, you know, doing nefarious things, I think, is the, is the fear.

And then the secondary fear is you're benefiting China, which, you know, the U.S. has this very weird relationship with where sometimes they're very friendly and other times they're, entirely adversarial and, you know, I'm not sure it's coherent, but that's how it is. So I could definitely see Tim Cook saying, you know, here's a lever you could pull that will save us. And here's what we'll do in return and that there's a transaction to be made there. Because this White House seems to be nothing, if not transactional. Yep. This is not a great time to be introducing the most expensive iPhone ever, is it? No. Like, no. It's going to be not be great. No, no. But, yeah, yeah, it's, look, that was always going to be a fairly low volume product anyway, and it was always going to be very expensive.

And I could make the argument that the people who were okay buying a $2,000 iPhone will be okay buying a $2,200 iPhone or a $2,300 iPhone. Okay, I can make that. But it's not great, right? It's not great because everything else is drifting upward and this might have to go up at it. at a higher price and, you know, that, it's bad timing. There's no doubt about it. It's really, really bad timing. And I do wonder if they may, because there's a bunch of products we're expecting, right,

including Macs, iPads, that kind of stuff. I wonder if it makes sense for them to release other products at higher prices before September to take some of the blow out of the iPhone. I don't know if it would realistically, but I wonder if maybe the story might be a bit more understood if they start doing it now. That's the argument. The argument is if you raise the prices

on the current iPhones, then the new iPhones don't get painted with the brush stroke of the prices going up because they're actually the same prices as the raised prices over the summer. I don't know if Apple wants to do that. Apple historically has really hated raising prices. That's why they do stuff like drop the low-end skews instead,

is that they hate just saying all prices are going up. In the U.S., they repriced in other countries, but they hate doing it in the U.S. In their home territory, they like to keep it pretty solid. But that would be, I mean, I guess I'm sure they had that argument of like, what is the cost of repricing everything now versus just repricing in the fall when we introduce new models? I can see both sides of it.

It adds complexity now. Does it really solve anything? Or, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I can see the argument on both sides, and I don't have enough data to say so. But like, those are your choices, right? Is do you benefit by just repricing everything now with the current models?

So when the new models come out, the pricing is not as much part of the narrative? or does it really not matter because the pricing's still going to be part of the narrative because the price is the price and people are still going to point back to what the old one sold for a year ago, even if it's sold for more in the summer.

iPhone 17 Pro going up in the summer is not going to change that many stories about what the iPhone 18 Pro costs versus what the iPhone 17 Pro cost at introduction, right? That narrative is there if people want it. And so, I don't know. I don't know. It's a tough one. This is Apple in a space we haven't seen them before.

That's why I keep saying, I don't know if I can predict what will happen, but whatever happens will be very interesting because it will tell us some things about the decisions they made. I was already expecting that September was going to be full of interesting conversation, right? That like just from John Turner's to a folding iPhone to everything else going on. Now this? All I know is that the rest of the year is going to be full of interesting things to talk about. I don't know if I'm going to like talking about all of them, but they will be interesting nonetheless.

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I'm interested in the forecast of where I will be. And Mercury does that. and the widget is awesome. So I love it. Yeah, it's really great. I love it a lot too. I also met the developers at WWDC. Yes.

It's really lovely to speak to them. And they love their app so much. And it really comes through it in the app itself, but also in talking to them about it as well. So that was really wonderful. When the weather gets serious, Mercury offers storm on hurricane tracking. It also has information about heat alerts and finding out. But also has maps, live positions, forecast, past, cones and intensity.

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Our app slash upgrade. Try it out. Get all the standard features for free. Our thanks to Mercury Weather for their support of this show and all of Relay. There's some breaking news for you, Jason. Zoe and the Discord. Just let us know that beta 2 is out now. Oh, good.

So we have that to look forward to. But that's not what we're talking about. Jason, it is the summer of fun. Summer of fun! During the summer of fun, we do fun things. we're also... During June, 2026, we do Kickstarter-related things. Indeed. So what if we take those two beautiful flavors

and we just put them together? So today, we have a summer of fun and designed in California collaboration. We're going to be joined in a moment by John Syracusa to talk about... This is actually going to be the first in a series that we're going to do about the operating system crisis

that Apple found itself in. that led to OS10. Yeah, this is actually, yeah, the first episode of a future design in California series, because the one we've been releasing in the upgrade feed, as you probably have heard,

dear upgrade listeners is about the rise of the Apple 2. This is later, this is about what happened when Apple realized it needed to do a new OS and it tried a bunch of things and failed. And it's the crisis that ultimately led to OS10. So I wanted John to be,

involved with talking about it because he is, I think you in the episode refer to him as a subject area expert. Absolutely. On OS10. And like me, a user of the classic Mac OS. So this episode, we found ourselves talking more about sort of the dire straight that Mac users were in that led to the fact that they had to make a new operating system because things were just so bad.

And like, I mean, the story is. We laugh about it as you'll hear about all the ways that the Mac was unstable and why they had to do something new. So it's a different kind of episode for us. And we wanted to show, and we thought this would, since we're releasing those other episodes on Thursdays, we thought we would just use this as a summer of fun. Get it in for the Kickstarter campaign. And then as another teaser, plus John's really great at it. We do hope that some of our series we will be bringing in sort of subject matter experts to chat with us about it.

And as you will hear, one of the great things about that is, I've still got my script that I'm reading. But, like, there's little marks in it where it's like, John is going to talk now. Yeah. And John talks now. And he did. And he had great stuff to say. And it's a thing that we're going to do. And so we wanted to give you an idea of what it would sound like.

Also, something that's not happening in the 1970s. Yeah. Because obviously, we've really front-loaded on that from the Apple at 15 and straight into the one to too, which by the way, the final episode of our Apple 2 series will be out on Thursday. And we promise that's it for this feed. We're not going to stick more design in California in this feed. Kickstarter is over, the podcast is happening. I won't say no more ever.

That's probably not a fair thing to say. Because I would not be surprised to see future summer of fun designed in California like things. Crossovers. It's possible. So I don't want to say never. who are like, why are you releasing this thing in the other feed? We know. And we have to do it because we are doing a Kickstarter campaign.

But it will be over next week. And we would love your support at design.fm if you haven't yet. But, and this will be another preview of what we're planning to do when we launch that podcast, which is going to happen. Because we made our goal, but we would like to continue to grow. And thank you to the 2,000 people. who have supported us already but we would love more support if possible

and we did a bunch of, we made a bunch of announcements. The poster, the show, the art that A4 show art that we promised at that tier level, we're gonna,

everybody gets two different ones now. We just doubled what's in that one. So if you were thinking about that tier, now you've got another reason to think about it because there's a, there's going to be, you get two different pieces of art.

Only one of which will probably be signed by both of us because there's only so many things we can sign. Yeah. And we're going to do more theme song variations by Chris Breen. We're going to get, we're going to commission more art. We've got Sam who worked on the Atomic Blonde graphic novel with Anthony Johnson.

He drew it. He's doing art for us for this project. We have some great original art by Katie Shuttleworth. That is in an incredibly adorable thing. that we're working on for, can I see it? I am waiting on a quote, a feasibility quote. Yeah.

And then we can share in. And then we can show you our enamel pin, which is like, it's so good, gang. We love it. We love it. Fingers cross, because also, like,

the company that I got quotes with for pins before, I have now quintupled the amount of pins that I originally asked for in my initial quote. Right. That helps. So I think now they're like, they're just like, let's just check we can do all of this. And so we'll be back with that shortly.

That's fair. That's fair. But we're doing enough volume on the art prints that we can just double the prints. And give people the art that's on the Kickstarter project and some original art for the show, both, which is awesome. So yeah, so it's all still rolling. We love your support. And it was so fun talking to John. And this is just the beginning because there are, there's more episodes in that series to come as well. A lot of Mac users don't remember a time before Mac OS10.

But before OS10 arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us from the Mac's launch in 1984 through the funeral of Steve Jobs held for MacOS 9 in 2002. The original MacOS evolved a lot across those 18 years, and perhaps its single most important update,

System 7, arrived 35 years ago in May, of 1991. It seems like a footnote now, but so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in System 7. Take it from someone who was there. I wanted System 7 so badly. I downloaded a load of floppy disk images across my college computer network so I could install it. And I wasn't disappointed by what I got. System 7 really did show the way to the future of the Mac. This was Jason Snell writing in May of this year for Macworld about System 7 and its demise. Hello and welcome back to Designed in California. My name is Mike Hurley. I am joined by the aforementioned and quoted Jason Snell. Hi Jason. Hi, Mike. Good to be here. Well, yeah, System 7.

This is not our System 7 episode, but it's sort of like what came after why Apple struggled in this era to make OS updates. And since we are going to be talking actually about the origins of OS 10, Mac OS 10, which had led to Apple's entire OS strategy for the 21st century, who better to have our first ever guest on Design in California. Please welcome the man who wrote all those reviews of OS10 in the early days. It is John Syracuse. Hi, John. Hi, guys.

I'm excited to be here to talk about one of the most terrible but also exciting times in Apple's history. Would you consider yourself a domain expert in OS 10, John? Yes, absolutely he is. I just wanted to, I believe it. I just wanted to know if you believed it as well. Yeah, this is fun because we've recorded a bunch of episodes about things that happened in the 1970s when, you know, I still wore short pants and went to elementary school and things like that. And now we're going to talk about an era that we lived in, you and I, John, and went through. And, yes, it was traumatic.

But, you know, it ended up being good. It was super formative. So let's get started talking about the origins of OS10 and how that happened. because it is a wild story. If you go back and you think about 1984 and the original Mac, that is a legendary creation myth almost about the Mac. They were inspired by all sorts of different attempts to completely redefine how computers looked and worked in the earliest days.

The original Mac team ended up shipping a product that fulfilled those dreams. They made their dent in the universe. They changed how people viewed what a computer could be. It was really a design and technical achievement for the ages. It's a Hall of Famer. Put it in the Hall of Fame. But the thing is, innovation in the computer world kept going forward after the Mac came out. By the mid-90s, just as Microsoft finally went in on an all-MAC-inspired interface, which they called Windows 95.

Long-time Windows users were actually really mad. They're like, it's just like a Mac. What are you doing? In this era, the Mac operating system found itself increasingly out of date on the technical side because they had built this amazing thing, but they built it in the early 80s. Remember, they shipped it in January 84. They were building it in the early 80s. It was amazing, but also kind of bodged together.

And Apple looked around and realized Microsoft was shipping a Mac style interface. The Mac suddenly seemed to have an expiration date on it. Apple needed to fix it or replace it and fast, or else there would be no Apple or Mac left to fight on with Microsoft. This is the story that we're telling here. It is the death. And, yes, spoiler alert, rebirth. of the Mac. So let's start at the beginning. In the late 70s and early 80s, Apple started

planning its next generation computer. There were plenty of candidates for that title, each of which has their own unique story, which we will get to undoubtedly on this podcast. The one that ended up making the biggest splash was the Macintosh, a groundbreaking computer that introduced the graphical user interface to the masses. There's a whole story to be told about the Mac, and I'm sure John would like to tell it right now. Let me talk about it on 20 Macs for 2020. I think it's been called a little bit. We did a little bit. Let's stay on target. Let me tell you.

That was maybe one hour of 20 Macs for 2020. Design in California, that's going to be 40 hours. We're going to stretch that baby out. I think that's right. There's so much. We're all about the detail here. Like I said at the beginning, the original Mac operating system was amazing. But it was from the early 80s.

It was designed for limited hardware. As a result, you know, it wasn't designed to run more than one program at once. It could barely hold anything in memory. It didn't have a lot of memory to begin with. It had this tiny black and white screen. It was built to be. the original Mac and then they iterated it over time. But internal features were groundbreaking and brilliant,

but they were often hand-built and hard-coded and limited. And you could argue that some of the things that made the Mac so amazing also meant that in the long run it was going to be a bear to evolve it in the years after it shipped. All right, but why? Was it that rigid? Like, what about the system meant that it was going to be difficult to evolve? The way I like to think of original Mac OS is that it's this incredibly built hand-built, bespoke operating system

where they were making art in a way out of their software and they built this computer that they envisioned and they shipped it. But I do get the sense a little bit that there was a what now kind of moment thereafter where the fact that they made it was a miracle, but then you have to drag it forward. And it was based on a lot of assumptions of early 80s, late 70s computer operating systems. and, you know, part of the point was to get it out the door and ship it.

I don't know what John thinks about that, but I think that's one of the issues. It was just kind of an unfortunate timing. Bad time. Something that, I mean, I know today everyone feels like technology. Boy, it's changing my leaps in bounds. Things are changing so fast. But back at the dawn of the personal computer age, things were changing so much faster in the specific realm of personal computers that year over year, it's like the entire world was wiped out and remade and new. Like we are excited when new Macs come out

and a little bit faster than before, but the pace of change in the early years of the PC was just ridiculous. So a couple years in either direction and either the Mac wouldn't have been possible or they would have had a better foundation. And I guess it also probably has some ties to the origins of the Macintosh project

with Jeff Raskin at being an affordable computer. Remember there was the Lisa, which was $10,000 in 1980s money, right? And that was trying to do the same thing. And then Jobs took over the Macintosh project and that was supposed to be less expensive and it did end up being significantly less expensive than Elisa,

but still it was pretty expensive. But the idea of it being slightly less expensive is in contrast to, you know, like next computer or something. We're like, we're just going to, whatever it costs is what it costs. That was not the story with the Macintosh. It was like, we want this to be a thing

that people can actually buy. And in that time, in 19, you know, the early to mid-1980s, if you wanted to do something that looked and behaved like the Macintosh, was on the ragged edge of what was even possible. Yeah.

Kind of like the original iPhone. It's like, can we literally do this at all? And just incredibly smart people had to do incredibly clever things to just barely get this thing to work. And then a little more memory would have helped. But memory was expensive then, kind of like today. So they, you know, they couldn't even get more of the 128 in there. And it was just like, it was a miracle that it was possible.

But push it forward three or four more years. And they could have made more forward-looking decisions. Because the lease it was more technologically advanced and had more capabilities than the Mac. But it's like, if you want a machine that's 20, $2,500 in 1984 that has a GUI that works like the Mac with only 120 kilobytes of ramping, Steve Jobs is stubbornly sticking to that, even though we'll sneakily make it easily upgradable to 512, you get the Mac.

Here's your foundation. And the Mac was a victim of its own success eventually, because it did eventually take off. And it's like, you remember all the decisions we had to make in 1984? Guess what? We're stuck with them real hard now because it's a big industry and people using it for desktop publishing. And like, that's what it is.

It wasn't like someone made a mistake or it was like a, you know, even Steve Jobs' stubbornness. It was like, this is where we're at this time. So that's why it's looked back on it so miraculous because like the iPhone, people would think, you know, how is that even possible? Like when Bill Gates saw it, he didn't know how the cursor works. He's like, what do you even? How? How?

Why? Well, they were focusing also on bringing the state of the art forward with the GUI, you know, and the things they did, quick draw, all these stories that we will tell in great detail in the future. But, like, they had their moments. They picked their spots of where they wanted to bring the state of the art forward, but also to John's point, some of the fundamentals were kind of old world. Not that there weren't other computers that could do better things with memory and all of that, but like you have to make your decisions when you're shipping that product. And what made it revolutionary were the things that we all know. But they were building on a, again, kind of a hand-built foundation and also a foundation that was from, you know, 1982 decision-making.

And then by the early 90s, the Mac did take some steps forward. They added color support, although I would argue it was like color in the sense of coloring in a coloring book where it was really black and white, but they're like, but there could be color on it a little bit. It was not an interface designed for color. And so that color additions were at the edges in the basic UI. There was multitasking, kind of, but it was also kind of hacked on. there was Switcher, and then later there was Multifinder, which was just this idea where you were taking a single-tasking system and letting it run multiple programs if you had enough memory, but it was not made for it. It was an add-on. And the big moment was what Mike quoted earlier, the arrival of System 7.

I think that was the most monumental update in the history of the classic Mac OS. It added a whole bunch of features that the Mac hadn't supported in the first seven years. you know, it had native multitasking, run a bunch of apps, it's fine. There was a process dock. You could see all the running apps. You could pull the process dock off and make it a little floating palette, showing you all your apps that were running at any given time. There was virtual memory.

There was file sharing. The idea that without any extra software, you could say, I would like to put my hard drive on the network so someone else can look at the files. That was System 7. QuickTime was in System 7. Global support for color, a little more colorful interface was there. If you're a modern Mac user, like I said in the thing that Mike quoted at the beginning, I think if you saw System 7, you would feel much more at home than you would in System 6.0.8.

Yeah, System 7 gets forgotten for people who weren't adolescents when it came out. Like so many things, things that happen to you when you're an adolescent seems so much more important and big and time slows down then. It just so happens I was an adolescent then. But System 7 was just such a huge deal because the Mac had become successful, you know, almost despite itself. It had advanced. People were using it. And the addition of color to System 6 and everything was not that great.

And when System 7 arrived, it was an important point for me because I was so steeped in the original Macintosh story and had been using it since 1984. And the original Mac had so many features that, like, embodied the spirit of the Mac team. Like, it was clever. It was whimsical. Everything in it was clean and tasteful. There was very sort of artful solutions to, like, thorny technical and interface problems. You're like, wow, these people are so smart. came up with such great ideas and it's so cleanly self-contained.

And years passed and it was like, all right, the world is moving on. Hardware is advancing rapidly. So one of the decisions you made for the original Macs are just no longer relevant because everything is getting so much faster year over year. And System 7 was proof to the external world that, hey, Apple still got it. Because what System 7 added was a boatload of new features that had the same character as the things we love from the original Mac. And it was like, oh, they can still.

do it. Like, because, you know, I know it's only like six years or whatever, but you're worried like, hey, they did this original Mac and so far, it's got a little bit better, but like, as the original Mac team gone, Steve Jobs is, can they still, can they still do this stuff? But System 7 was like, yes, we can still do it. So I'm, forgive me for dwelling a little bit on System 7 because it's like one of my favorite operating systems ever. And I also, by the way, I chipped in with my friend and my French teacher. So we split the cost three ways and bought a single copy of System 7 between me, my friend, and my French teacher, and we each took turns with the floppy disk. So the French teacher got them and he installed systems on his

computers and he gave me the floppies and I installed them and I gave it to my friend. It was a big, big moment. For the French teacher. Big moment. Yes, you're lowing, yeah, if he's out there. Grand moment. Anyway. So, like, here's some examples of showing that they still had it. Okay. Consider the way fonts and desk accessories were handled before System 7. So fonts and desk accessories existed in the original classic MacAWest. That's accessories were the things in the Apple menu like calculator or control panel or whatever. And then fonts, you know, or fonts.

There was an app called Font DA mover. And by the way, it was font forward slash DA mover, forward slash in the name of an app, take that Unix. DUMUILA. Mover, which was a truck icon and it looked like transmit with a two-pane thing. And you would open font D-A mover and it would show in the left-hand side, here's your system. You've got these fonts.

And on the right-hand side, it's like, oh, you want to install fonts? Show them in the right-hand side. And you had an arrow. Put the thing from the right to the left. You want to take a font out, put it from the left to the right. Same thing with desk accessories. A separate app that you ran that I think was modifying resources inside system files, right? That's how you dealt with fonts and DAs.

System 7's solution to this is like, look, we're desktop publishing. That's happening now. People want to use more fonts using font D.A. Movers Barbaric and DAs being these things that you have to shove into the system is weird. So System 7 made a fonts folder in the system folder. And inside the fonts folder were individual files that were the fonts. If you want to install a font, you drag an inch in the fonts folder. If you want to uninstall a font, you drag it out of the fonts folder.

If you double-click the font in the finder, it would open a little window that showed you all the different sizes of fonts that are there. Same thing with desk accessories. They didn't have any embodiment other than the appearance of a word and font DA mover back in the day. Now, there was an Apple menu item's folder in the system's folder, and anything you put in that folder appeared in the Apple menu, including all your desk accessories or applications or aliases or other folders, which would appear as submenus, literally. The control panel, there was a folder in this is a folder called control panels, and every individual control panel was a little thing in that folder that you could double click.

And all this stuff was like, it works like the finder. You've used the original Macs since 1984. You know how to drag files around. You can change everything in your operating system by dragging stuff around. It was do it yourself. You can manage your computer kit for people who had become accustomed to the Mac. Every part of it that used to be like sealed in there or like, oh, this is a thing where you need to use some kind of weird editor to do. It was just a bunch of files.

And it was understandable and extremely human. Like, they wanted people to understand their system and be able to manage it with the tools they had used from simply using the finder. And this was in contrast to use a text editor to modify config.s. And autocex.combat, which was a million miles from drag this font into or out of a folder.

And it meant, I mean, you can look back out of it now and say, that's barbaric. You shouldn't have individual users dragging stuff around in the system folders. and then people would like accidentally delete something in system folder and hose their system. Like it was it was a different time but compared to what came before it compared to editing config. Consist with a text editor. It was miraculous.

And that type of thing you would look at like, oh, it's so obvious. You know, we're so used to the way the Mac work now, but now System 7 is like, hey, we have clever, human, tasteful, clean, uniform solutions to thorny system interface problems. And it was just a revelation. It was like, it felt like the future. It's like, I cannot believe operating systems can be like this. And it, you know, and it was like, it compounded the original Mac because the original Mac was this one singular thing, but you're like, can they do it again?

And the System 7 was like, the only thing I can compare it to is like when the dual G5 came out, where it was like Apple needs a new computer and they came out with that one. And people thought it was fake because it was so good. System 7 blew me away. Loved it. When I say people today would feel more at home in System 7, I mean mostly that the previous OSES feel ancient and charming in, away but weird and old. And System 7, although it is old, it is much closer to what we might

think of, what a modern Mac user would think of as a Mac because it added so much. It really was their early 90s rethink of an OS that had kind of been around for 10 years. Interestingly, System 7, with all its great ideas and everything, coming six years after the original OS, there's probably no other six year gap in the history of the Mac where you could have made in advance like that because the hardware had become so far in that six years from the original Mac that that's why people would feel comfortable with it's like oh you know multiple finders can be running you can copy something in the finder do something else you can run multiple pops why could you do that because the hardware was phenomenally better than the 128 kilobite monochrome nine inch

original Mac like it had just got advanced by leaps and bounds unfortunately for Apple as we'll get into you can have these color mac twos with incredible processors and incredible amounts of memory and And it was just- Yeah, and storage and the speed of storage and just everything having to do with it. But like the underpinning, the basic underpinnings of the operating system had not changed. It was just like now we have so much. The computers got way better. Yeah. Now we have so much more room to play with and we can do all these things we always wanted to do.

But fundamentally, it is just, it's the same as that original Mac, but with a vastly bigger playing field and faster CPUs and everything. And there was a, you know, from System 7 on, there was a heyday of the Mac with, you know, desktop publishing and selling expensive computers with lots of. of RAM and fast CPUs and lots of features and lots of apps and just it was this huge renaissance, but it was all built on this crumbling foundation that it was set in 1984. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. They are the all-in-one website platform that is designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just getting started or you're scaling a business, Squarespace will give you

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of a website or domain. That is Squarespace.com slash upgrade and the offer code upgrade for 10% for your first purchase and to show your support for the show. Now, thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of Relay. System 7 was still lacking a lot of features that were clearly going to be important, even then, clearly going to be important to the future of computing. There was this rickety foundation. In fact, the features that shipped with System 7 were created by a software group. Here's this story.

They're called the Blue Meenies, which is a reference to the villains in the Yellow Submarie. screened the Beatles movie. Can you explain this? I can't explain this. So here's what happened. Apple engineers were figuring out what features they needed to build for the future of Mac OS, and they wrote them down on index cards. And the ones that were achievable that they thought, like, we could do this, we could do this

pretty soon. They wrote on blue index cards. They put their long-term goals on pink and red index cards. The team in charge of implementing the near-term features on the blue cards got the name Blue Meanys and what they shipped with System 7. Another team focused on the most complicated long-term issues. They were on the pink cards. These were so far out that eventually Apple created a joint venture with IBM called Taligent to work on a thing that they called Pink based on, again, the cards.

Because this is like, these are way out far future computer ideas and it never shipped. But there were a lot of OSs in the 90s and joint ventures in the 90s that never did anything. And this is just, I will cover some of them in this podcast, undoubtedly. But so they basically broke things up into what can we accomplish, which is good. And they accomplished System 7. And then there were these cutting edge features that were going to take more time. And they were not, that was a dream deferred, which in the end became a real problem for Apple, that they deferred that dream. But they were right engaging that those were going to be hard to achieve.

You got to give them that. So there was, here's a little bit of the problem with Pink. During that period of personal computing. there were a lot of different concepts of how advanced operating systems might work. People knew how the current ones work, but like there was not a lot of consensus about the advance once. And I also feel like there was a little bit of like a credibility, adults in the room hangover that Apple and its peers had regarding companies like IBM, which is like, yeah, but in

the big serious future, surely it will be beneficial for us to get together with the big serious companies like IBM and work on some kind of common standard. Because at that point, there have been, you know, there's some of. much war, why are we always fighting with our different standards and different applications? And like, why don't we have these future ideas that can be globe spanning? And like, I mean, this is not like, you know, it's like coming up with the web versus doing, you know, Hypercard or whatever. But anyway, like, let's come up with standards for sharing C++ objects and operating system

structures that can be a common API used across multiple companies. And they had all these grand ideas and all of them involved everybody cooperating in a techno utopian future. And a lot of those ideas were either bad ideas or we're just never going to have. happen due to like human nature and competition because it's like that's okay but like that's never going to happen and so it's not as if like oh the people weren't good programmers and didn't correctly do it it was like this is this is just not going to happen like your interests aren't aligned what you're trying to do is a bad idea C++ plus is not the future like it's definitely

the type of project that you embark on when things are going well with your product and you're selling a lot of max the desktop publishers and you're like we should be thinking about the future and so they had all these teams out there thinking real hard about the future. And it's kind of a blessing that they didn't go anywhere because they were never going to go anywhere. They had a lot of smart people doing a lot of clever things. But in hindsight, it's so easy to look back on them. And so yet that wasn't it. That wasn't the way. Actually, in hindsight, the story I'm telling now about how Apple ended up in a quandary and how OS10 came out of it. The truth is, like, OS8 added some nice stuff. They threw some stuff in there. There's a story about that that we'll get to

in a little bit. But, I would argue like from this point forward, that's kind of it for classic Mac OS. They have to essentially toss it, like all their other attempts to kind of bring it forward. They are adding little bits, but the fundamentals of it really can't change until OS10 comes on the scene. I've got a line here from Mac User Magazine in 1996, where I worked. I didn't write this, but this is what they said. The Mac pays a price for Apple's evolutionary approach to OS development. System 7 is built from blocks piled up over the course of a decade,

and that has compromised the OS's stability and performance. For the Mac to move forward, that OS needs to be rebuilt from scratch. This is describing Apple's next-generation operating system project that they were working on in 1996. I guess it's funny because this kind of sentiment is what people say a lot about Windows now. like now, that like a lot of Windows problems is it's just, they're just layering things on top of Windows and eventually you'll find your way back into 95. Windows has its core OS story straight now actually, but what you're talking about is the archaeology of like, you're right, if you keep digging into Windows, you're like, what

it's like when you dig in like the Roman roads in the UK and you're by like what level of different. It's like, oh, it's false. It's like you just keep going. You're like, wow, how deep does this go? There's like 17 roads underneath here and Windows is like that. but that is mostly a problem of like interface and management,

at least their core OS story is okay. But with the Mac during this time, like we said like System 7 was a start of something great. And in the 90s, the Mac was exciting and it was getting lots of applications. But if you were a tech nerd, you were like, okay,

but like I see what's going on in the rest of the industry. Eventually they're going to have to address this thing. And it was like watching a car drive at 60 miles an hour towards a cliff that's seven miles away. And as the years passed, you were like, so. Cliffs coming up.

Are we going to build a bridge? Or like, and you get closer. And the years would pass. And it would be like, we're going the same speed and no bridge is there. And like, no, we have teams work thinking about a bridge. Well, I guess what's actually happening is they're just putting a faster engine in the car that they're in, as opposed to dealing with what's down the line.

We have seven teams working on bridges. And then you'd hear from each team, like one year, it's like, oh, yeah, that team, they disbanded and went on vacation, so they're not going to make a bridge. And the other team made a bridge, but they made it vertically, sadly, instead of horizontal. This team's building it from the other side. But we repainted the car. The car finally is no longer gray. It has color.

What are you talking? So let's go through it because we've been talking vaguely about this Rickety Foundation. Like what in, you're in the mid-90s, what do you want your computer operating system to have? And I know that people who are a little less technical or younger and didn't live through this period might be thinking like, what could they even be talking about? What bizarre, arcane abstract concepts could they be dealing with? Okay, well, here we go. The Mac use something called cooperative multitasking. You're like, great, you can run more than one program at a time.

We do that today. Well, another phrase for cooperative multitasking might be not actually. multitasking more than one program could run at once but any program at any time could take control of the entire computer and not give it back until it was ready which means if you had one misbehaving program or bad behaving program everything else literally everything else on the system would stop I have a great example of this in classic Mac OS if you clicked on an item in the menu bar and kept the mouse button down everything stopped on the whole computer because the system is

waiting for the menu process. It's like, I'm wait, what menu is it, what's it going to be user? And so everything else just stopped. This is a great place to highlight the word multitasking because especially back in this era, what multitasking actually meant

was not doing more than one thing at a time. It meant doing thing one, then thing two, then thing three, then thing one, then thing two, then you're only ever doing one thing at a time, but you're like, now I'm doing the first thing, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, really, really fast. So it seemed like you're doing multiple things, but there was one processor core. So there was only one thing you could never be doing.

And so the job of the operating system was like, given that I have one CPU, how do I allow programs to access my one CPU? And as Jason has said, cooperative multitasking is like, oh, well, they'll just cooperate. And everyone say, oh, I'm using the CPU now, but now I'm done

with it. Now you can have it. Another one go, oh, me? Oh, great. I'll use CPU and then I'll wait. Okay, now I'm done with it. But what if they never said they're done with it? Yeah, hilariously, This doesn't sound cooperative at all. There's no cooperation going on. It's like when you're using the menu and pulling down the menu bar, it's like, well, I can't give up the CPU until they've picked the menu

because I need the CPU to draw the menu and the cursor go, like, I need, like, I can't give it up. I'm not holding it. I'm not hoarding it jealously. I'm not a badly behaved program. It's like literally, if I give up the CPU, the menu item will stop highlighting. When you bring the cursor up, like, I need to have the CPU to highlight the item that the cursor is over and to make it blink when you release the,

I can't give it up if I gave it up for a second and you can't say well why did it just give it up for like a millisecond so somebody else can use it but if you give it up for a millisecond and somebody else uses and they're like I'm running a Photoshop filter I'll be done in a minute oh now your menu doesn't work anymore so what happened was you'd pull down the menu the menu tracking routine would run and it would give up the CPU when it was done tracking the menu and that's it yeah I mean a good example here when I was digging through

because I've forgotten you know just how bad this was right but then I was reminded an example from one of the magazines of the time was you're downloading a file in a web browser and until the file downloads, you just have to sit there and watch it because that's all it's going to do is download the file. That was what it was like. So what do you do?

The answer is preemptive multitasking, yay, which is each individual program can't take over everything and ruin system performance. So the idea is, and this is basically what we have now, is that you can ask as a program to do a task, But there's like a scheduler, whereas it was more like a relay race with classic macOS. Once you had the baton, it was yours until you let it go. And the result was terrible performance.

Sometimes you'd be using a program and then it would just cease to move. And you're like, why, what is happening now? And the answer is something else is going on. Or you would perform a task. And in a modern computer, you'd think, well, I'll switch. I'll look at the web while that task is running in the background. It's like, nope. You're not going to do that.

You've got to leave that task sitting there. chunking away because it's got the baton right now. Yeah. So preemptive multitasking, like that existed in the 80s when they made it. And basically what that means is the operating system says, you don't get to choose when you're on the CPU. I choose when you're on the CPU. And when I decide you're done, you're done and somebody else gets a chance. And to do that with 80s technology, especially in the early 80s, you needed more RAM and more CPU because you were slicing it up. You were like, okay, a little for you, a little for you. And it would make things feel jumpy and bad. It's like you couldn't have done the original Macintosh. I mean,

made it feel as smooth as it did with preemptive multitasking unless you had the resources of the Lisa, which way more RAM and a bigger CPU. And so it's like, we can't. We can't have preemptive multitasking. But once you build on that foundation, once you build a set of APIs, which is like, use the CPU, give it up when you're done with it or when you want someone else to have a turn and everyone tries to cooperate and you try to be well behaved. That's just the way it works, which is I have the CPU until I'm done with it or until I decide to give it up. And there was a culture in APIs of like, you should give it up pretty much anytime you're not using it, even for a second. Use it, give it up. Use it, give it up. That's what you should do. And if you're a well-behaved

app, you should do that. But that was baked into the programs. There was not even a facility to say, I'm using the CPU and wait, the operating system's going to stop me? I'm in the middle of doing something. Why is the operating system going to take me off the CPU and let somebody else have the CPU? Things would break. Things would not work. They needed to be in that cooperative environment where, like Jason said, the relay race is perfect. I've got the baton. I give up the baton. They may be grabbing the baton and giving up really fast, but the point is they're choosing one the programs are choosing when to do that. And the operating system has no say.

Yeah, exactly right. And it had all of these weird knock-on effects. And we could say, like, well, why didn't they anticipate that they were going to need this and build it into the original Mac even though they couldn't use it then? And the answer is, real art of ship, right? Like, they had to ship. They were not, they were struggling to ship a Mac, not spend a lot of time building a foundation for theoretically what it might become because they needed to ship the product.

But the result is that, yes, you're now on that shaky foundation. So another example of this, and a major one is this concept of memory protection, which we take for granted today. Basically, software behaving badly on a Mac running classic Mac OS could wreck all the other software running on the Mac. It could spew bad stuff into memory, you know, that the other programs thought had its stuff in, but now it wasn't there and it was broken. Back of the day, if one program behaved badly, that was it for your Mac. And when it crashed, everything crashed all at once. And you needed to reboot. And in this era, I remember rebooting my Mac.

I'm not kidding here, half dozen or a dozen times a day due to a hard crash. Like literally, everything stopped moving. And there was nothing you could do, but turn it off and turn it back on. Including the cursor, by the way. Yeah, even the cursor. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The whole thing.

Well, that was the telltale moment, right? You're watching the little pointer move along the same. screen and then it stops and you're like, but what, what, whoa, and it's gone. Today we think of the idea of like force quitting an app. You can force quit an app and then like, oh, that app went bad. I'm going to force quit it and then I'm going to move on. Or maybe the system quits it. But a funny thing that I realized when I was researching that story that Mike quoted at the beginning about System 7 is that System 7 actually added the force quit an app feature. However, you were instructed very sternly. The moment you force quit an app, immediately you should reboot. Oh.

What's the point? It's like, yeah, yeah, you quit. That's good, good for you. You might be able to save something. You might be able to do whatever. But like, get out now. That's why I was useful, because you could save another apps if you're lucky.

Yeah, right. But get out. But you've essentially set a time bomb at the moment that you've done that. Like something bad's going to happen. And this is the technical underpinning of that. Like all personal computers in the era, they were like affordable personal things you could buy. Memory was just a big green field that started address zero and ended at address

whatever, you know, 128 kilobytes, right? And every single thing running on the computer saw and could access all of those addresses. You know what was in all those addresses? The operating system was in the address. Every other application was in the address. Any data that any application was using was in there. And so it was like, okay, everyone's on one big green field. And the operating system would say, this is your area application number one.

And if it had like a bad pointer to your reference and it's like, oh, I'm scribbling over here. What did it just scribble over? Did it just scribble over part of the operating system? Did it just scribble over part of your word processing document in another program? Like, did it just scribble over the thing that controls how Windows closed? Like, any part of memory was accessible to, that's what unprotected memory is. So not only was it unprotected, but everyone was in the same address space. You got addresses 10 to 15.

The next one got addresses 20 to 25, right? Obviously, the numbers are bigger than that. The operating system got addressed from here to here, right? And that's not a way to run an operating. There's no way to run a railroad. Yeah. Because they're using. language is like C where you do reference a pointer that's supposed to be an address to like in your 10 to

25 range or whatever but it turns out that the value in there was 700 and now you're writing memory at address location 700 what was the address 700 I don't know maybe nobody knows maybe something super duper important and so that's why when you would force could it would kill the app that was misbehaving but at that point what's the state of memory now did that thing scribble all over the rest of the memory you needed to get the hell out of it her and reboot because there's no fixing it there's no like we don't know what address has got overrun with this data. You just need to reboot. Yeah.

So I recall from those days that sometimes you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but I'm just going to do this thing. And let me tell you, it led to hilarious consequences. What would usually happen is you'd be like, okay, I force quit that. And I know I need to reboot here soon, but I'm going to do this other thing that I'm in the middle of. And then that app would crash. And you'd be like, oh, no. And so you'd force quit that one.

And you'd be like, I could go over here and look at this. And there would be a whole chain of crashes that would lead to, well, I guess I'm rebooting after all. And then you do restart and it wouldn't restart because it was so busted and then you had to force it to reboot. So, okay, that's bad. I want to say there's one good thing about that. One and only good thing about that other than the performance benefits and the fact that the Mac could ship and blah, blah, blah. If you're working on something like you're in a text editor and it crashes, yeah, you should reboot, right? But you're like, but I was in the middle of writing something and I didn't save.

There were programs that would scan all of memory for like a text string. You're like, I know I wrote this three-word phrase in Aski and this thing. And so we would just look through all of memory to try to find like the text strings from the document used to be working on. Yeah. And you could rescue your document that you didn't save by having it scan the entire RAM of your computer to find whatever pieces of that document happened to be in RAM. And I did that multiple times and I did save my butt. You get little chunks and you'd have to kind of piece it back together, but it would be better than the alternative. And as you can imagine, this is a security nightmare.

No, it's a disaster. can see everything. I feel like Mike is looking at us like, why did people use computers that were like this? And the answer is, well, there was no alternative, really. So this is all of these horror stories. And these are, these are computer ghost stories that we're telling here. This is why Apple had to be motivated to do something. So the next one I wanted to mention is multi-threading, which is the idea that programs could be broken up into separate tasks that operate independently of one another. For example, in the finder in the early days, you couldn't say copy a couple files at once while also looking through a bunch of folders and stuff.

It's like, no, those one at a time, please, one at a time. And this needed to change. Also because in this era, there was a realization that you might have more than one processor on your system. And if you had multi-threading, you could have a traffic dispatcher that could say, this thread could work over there while this one could work over here. And the only way you could do that with multiple processors or what we now have, which is multiple cores, is by not having.

having everything run on a single thread. So programs were very single-minded back then. And the system and all of the system apps and everything else needed to have the ability to spawn processes in different threads and do more than one thing at a time, which we take for granted today. Yeah, and to be clear,

it's because the operating system expected to run on a single CPU and expected to do everything was going to happen on a single CPU. So if you had a second CPU, it would be like, well, that's nice. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Right. They would give extensions.

They would be like, okay, in Photoshop and Photoshop only, plus some extension to the system combined. You're now aware that there's another CPU over there. And you know what you can do with that CPU when I run a Photoshop filter and only when I run a Photoshop filter, I'm going to use the second CPU plus the first one to be faster. But everything else was like, I don't even see that CPU.

I have no, what are you expecting to do with that? I'm a single thread operating system. And it's just, you know, it's useless. You can listen to the Daystar Digital episode of 20Max for 2020 where I talk about how this clone company, with Apple's help, invented a multi-processing plugin. but it was very much like just for Photoshop. But there was this anticipation.

This is the thing. It's like, how do you get faster computers? In the mid-90s, we knew one of the ways you got faster computers was by having more than one processor. And again, without multi-threading, it's useless. So they have to do multi-threading. They have to do virtual memory, which System 7 introduced, which is good. Virtual memory is a concept that a computer can have a larger memory space

than its actual RAM that it has. And that lets you swap some of the data that's stored in memory out to the hard drive, which is a lot slower, but you can sort of efficiently manage memory. It also allows apps to have their memory in a kind of a virtual space instead of it being physically exactly what's on the chip. This is good. These are all modern ideas. The Mac needed a memory model with virtual memory as more than kind of a patch in. The way the classic Mac OS did virtual memory, and this gets confused because casual people saying virtual memory mean multiple things. the same time. But virtual memory is what Jason just said, which is, remember I said that everyone

is sharing the same big address space and your RAM goes from like zero to, to 512K or however much memory you have. When you have virtual memory, they say, okay, your RAM, it goes from zero to whatever. That's how much RAM you have. Every bite of it gets, you know, whatever, right? But what we're going to say is what you're going to see as a program and what the operating system is going to see is still going to be one, on the classic macs is it still going to be one giant memory space, but that memory space is going to go from zero to four billion. Yeah. And you're like, well, I don't have four billion bytes of RAM. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

It's like, well, I know. You have the RAM that you have. But I'm saying instead of seeing just zero to that amount of memory, you're going to see zero to four billion. And you're like, well, how is that supposed to work? It's like, well, there's a piece of hardware that you need in your Mac to do this, which is a reason number of million why you couldn't do this in the early days. You need a MMU, a memory management union, which was this thing in your CPU or next to your CPU, they would say, whatever a program tries to look up an address, and it tries to look up address 2 million.

There's no address 2 million in your RAM. You have like a megabyte of RAM, right? It says, okay, I have a table that maps every single address from programs they're using to a physical address in your RAM chips. And I keep that table updated. And without the hardware, you can't do this, because obviously it would be too expensive to, like, try to do this in software.

They need to be special hardware that would say, I need to map from physical to virtual addresses for every single. signal thing. It was still one memory space. Everyone can still see everyone else's junk, but the memory space was way, way bigger. And as Jason just alluded to, the other part of quote unquote virtual memory that people put under that phrase is the concept of, okay, well, now when I have more addresses than physical RAM, what happens when I run out? I'm using more and more virtual addresses and there's no more physical addresses to back them. Then it would say, okay, something that is using physical address number five, I'm going to put that in a file on disk, and now you can use physical address number five,

and I'll update the mapping table. And if someone goes to look for that RAM again, you're like, oh, that used to be an address number five, but we wrote it to disk, and now we'll read it back from the disk and give it to you. Yeah. And so virtual memory is just the concept of a virtual address space, but swapping is where you take things out of RAM and put them on disk, and those go under an umbrella term. But you'll note, none of this solves the underlying problem, but just extends the timeline as we race towards the cliff. Yes, that's right. We've got a new some new seat covers on our car that's racing toward the cliff. I will also say that one of the consequences of all of this decision is,

as veteran Mac users will remember, you used to be able to get info on apps and assign how much memory they could take. It was very common back then. The idea was, oh, your word processor is misbehaving. Why don't you give it a little more memory? But you didn't want to give it too much because they would try to ask for that and then you could end up in a situation where you were running out of memory. So, like, the idea that the user is managing how,

how much memory each individual app uses, which should never be allowed to happen, but that is what we did back in that era. Yeah, before that Inf, get info dialogue existed, that was still happening. Because remember, you've just got one address space, whether it's real or virtual. Every app needs to reserve a little portion of the green field for them. But then you could adjust it. How big is that portion? It used to be that the developer would pick the size of that portion.

They would say, I'm going to pick 50 kilobytes. But of course, that would limit, especially in the days before swapping, that meant you could never edit a document more than 50 kilobytes. Your whole program fits in 50 kilobytes. And so the innovation system 7 is like, what if you let the user change that? Obviously, you couldn't change it below the minimum, but you could make it bigger. And to Jason's point, sometimes you'd make it bigger because like the program was crashing and it was scribbling over something outside of its bounds and you just give it a little bit more room to scribble in because you say, I'm going to reserve four times as much and now it doesn't crash anymore. It's still got the bug. But when it scribbles,

it turns out it's scribbling in its own space that ends up being unused. Or if you wanted to open up a larger document. You would say, it can't open this document. It tells me out of memory. I'll give you more memory and the get info thing. I'll relaunch you and now you will reserve a bigger portion of that green field that we're all sharing. Yeah, it's a wild idea. Also, the opposite is also true, which is if there was a piece of software that thought it wanted to reserve a large amount of memory and it didn't use it. That was not great, ideally, because it was reserving memory that it didn't actually need and maybe you needed it for something else. So it goes both ways. But yeah, this was bad. Don't do this is what I'm saying. And Apple knew it. Apple knew it. Mike, can you even

believe that we used to live like this? It makes me feel like you really needed the internet so you could have something else to do. You know, it's like the computers didn't do much so we had to adjust their memory. This is all I did all day. The dates for the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours just in front of my computer that was not connected to any other computer and I would just be on the computer. All I had was the software that I had, that's it. I also did have that experience. I would sit at my PC and just search the file system. Like that was what I did. It's like, what's in here? Let me find out. We want a video game. Find some computer files. That was all I could do. Because even when we had the internet, I couldn't be on the internet all the time. My internet time

was a lot to too, when does mom not need the phone? You know? And that was all I got. So I do, I do remember those feelings too of like being on the computer is just seeing what the computer can do. So we've listed a whole bunch of reasons why Apple might need a new operating system. And I should also say in the 90s, percolating in the background, there were a lot of big ideas about the future of computing. And that was going to be a challenge too. So those were also written on cards at Apple, right?

New ways of working that go beyond the open a file paradigm. The entire concept of using a standalone app to edit documents. There were all these ideas about like, what if everybody was the document man? And then the stuff you put in it could be written by any program. And there was a lot of that going of that going on. Mac couldn't do any of that, but maybe the next generation could. There was this amorphous feeling like it needed to be flexible enough to enable Apple to build the next big thing,

and the current macOS couldn't do it. So they knew they needed to replace the old macOS with something new. They were challenged by the fact that Apple sales were sagging. Microsoft was becoming increasingly dominant. Apple's customers were loyal, but if the Mac is going to be, think about it this way. I love the Mac. I want to use the Mac. in a Windows world where Windows 95 is a hit, and I'm a real outlier. I'm the only person in my company with a Mac because I'm in the art department,

but everybody else uses a PC. And then Apple comes to you and says, well, we're going to make a new operating system that is completely incompatible with the Mac that you know. It's a totally different thing. It's like a different computer. At that point, a lot of those people,

you know, I'm going to say, well, if I have to choose between brand new, completely unrelated non-Mac operating system from Apple and just using Windows, at this point, why don't I just go to Windows? Your thing is new and weird. Windows is going to be new and weird, but everybody's using Windows and nobody's using the Mac, and now the Mac's not going to exist anymore. And this was a huge problem for Apple because they wanted to maintain their existing markets.

They wanted to give them a bridge to whatever they were going to do next and not make it so alien that they just gave up and started using Windows like literally everybody else on the planet. And that is the premise for what Apple has to do next, which is go on a bit of a vision quest, try to find whatever macOS is going to become or replace the classic macOS. And I wish I could tell you that Apple wrote it all down on some cards,

put it all together, got their story straight, put in a plan, and a couple years later out popped a new Mac operating system. That's not what happened. It took way longer than anybody expected. There were far more twists and turns than anyone ever imagined. And that is an exciting story that we'll tell you next time on Designed in California. Until then, thank you, John. Glad to be here anytime.

Well, there'll be many more times. Don't you worry about that. We got a lot of OS to cover. We haven't even gotten to the next one. All right, so we're on our way to replace classic Mac OS, But the rest of it's going to have to wait for another podcast on another day. But it's so great to talk to John about this stuff. He's seen it all.

He's been there. Yeah. So remember, this is Design. FM. That's where you can go to Backheart Kickstart the campaign. Jason, people, I'm sure, like, they love this conversation. And, like, I want more of it. When are they going to get it?

It's going to happen as we launch the show. So I would say late summer, early fall. We hope we still got a bunch of planning stuff to do. We hope to launch the feeds for it in advance of the new episodes dropping. Yes. But we have to work out the timing and there's some technical things and all of that. So we'll mention it here when it's up and running both for supporters and for the general public to get the feed of when that happens. when that happens.

And then I think our plan is that it'll be the first full series when we launch it. This is the plan right now. Continuing the Mac OS crisis will be the beginning of designed in California. So the feed will include what you've just heard as a full episode. And then it will go on out from there. And there's going to be a lot more because we've got a lot to talk about with this one. What we do. Before we finish today, Jason, I do want to do a couple of ask upgrade questions.

Great. This comes from Tyler who says, Do you think part of the reason Golden Gate is the name for macOS 27 could be a reference to it being Apple's golden anniversary this year? I guess. It could be, right?

I didn't know this. That's why I liked what Tyler wrote in. It's like, it would be weird to me for that to be 100% of a coincidence. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just one of the arguments for Golden Gate is also why not this year. Exactly, yeah. So it's like, what a fun thing to.

do, why not do it this time rather than next year where it would feel like a missed opportunity. I mean, technically the 50th anniversary is in 2026, so should not have been the name of Macro West 26, but they already did that, so now they're on to this and it's fine. Yeah. If not, we all can, it'll be a good way for us to remember when the golden anniversary was, except then it'll be MacOS 27 and we'll have to remember that it came out in 26. It's fine. It's a good, I hadn't thought of this, so thank you to Tyler. It's great. And Harvey wrote in to say, will the designed in California member feed be called assembled in China, which is a great idea.

I mentioned this because Jason and I had a really great production meeting on Friday. This was the thing that came up. We need a name for the member feed. We have some ideas that aren't very inventive. I don't think I want to be super inventive. We won't call it assembled in China. It doesn't make any sense, really. But if you have a suggestion for a name for our feed,

write in at UpgradeFeedback.com. I would like to see them. And in fact, if I can guide you slightly further, there's the name of the version of the show that goes to Backers without ads. And there's also going to be an additional feed for backers. Yes. That is the bonus episodes.

Yep. Sort of like how there's the Cortex, Mortex feed. We have member specials. And then there's... MacPOW US also. And MPU, too. So we really have two things that we have to decide on name and branding for. So people can keep that in mind too.

We know no guarantees, but, you know, look, Tyler surprised us with the Golden Gate theory. So you can surprise us with great ideas that we have not thought of. Harvey also surprised us of a great idea, which is assembled in China. But it's hilarious. I don't think we will use. No, it's not going to happen. It doesn't make sense to use that I don't think. But it is fantastic.

So if you have suggestions, you can write them in at the same place that you can send in your feedback, follow-up and questions. That is upgradefidback.com. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. Jason, I want to talk to you about a problem I'm having with my laptop on O'clock Plus today. And I want to talk to you about the World Cup. So we'll do both of those things. You can find a video version of this show by searching for the Upgrade podcast on YouTube. I would like to thank Squarespace, Mercury Weather, and FitBod for the support of this show.

but most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, take goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, my curly.