Apple: trying to think different for 50 years

[MUSIC PLAYING] IRA FLATOW: Hi. I’m Ira Flatow, and you’re listening to Science Friday. And if you know me, it’s no secret that I’m an Apple fan, a refugee from the PC side. Hard to believe the company was founded 50 years ago this spring. Their registration is dated April 1, 1976. But the company turned out to be anything but a joke. It’s become a dominant force in computing, mobile devices, and media.

Joining me now is longtime tech journalist, author, and correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, David Pogue. His new book is Apple– The First 50 Years. David, welcome back to Science Friday.

DAVID POGUE: Well, thank you so much.

IRA FLATOW: Always good to talk to you. For most companies you wouldn’t be writing an anniversary book, and we wouldn’t be doing an anniversary story. But Apple is special, right?

DAVID POGUE: They really are. And one of the ways is that their mission, love them or hate them, has never changed. Samsung started out as a dried fish vendor, and Nokia was a paper mill. But Apple, with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, their goal was to take advanced technology and bring it to the masses. And that’s still kind of what they do.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go back into the Wayback Machine. Let’s go back to 1976 for the lore about the company that was founded in a garage. How much of that is true?

DAVID POGUE: It wasn’t founded in a garage.

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: Next topic. No.

DAVID POGUE: [LAUGHS]

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about that.

DAVID POGUE: Well, it really starts with Wozniak, Steve Wozniak, who was this painfully shy, prank-loving, hyper engineer. In high school, he would download the user manuals for minicomputers. And on paper, because he couldn’t afford any parts, he would try to see if he could redesign them to be more efficient and use fewer chips over and over and over again. And he became– in an era where there wasn’t such a thing, he became a circuit designer.

And so he came up with a computer himself that he wanted to give away. He wanted to give away the plans of what we now call the Apple I. It was just a circuit board, but it was one of the very first machines that would have a screen. You could hook it up to a TV.

At the time, computers were just punch cards or lights showing you the results of your calculation. And he met this buddy, four years younger, Steve Jobs, who said, no, dude, don’t give that away. We could style this. And so that is the beginning of their long-term collaboration.

IRA FLATOW: So the Woz was the brains behind the hardware, and Jobs was the marketing person.

DAVID POGUE: Yeah, and that happened over and over. Apple was actually their fourth business venture together. They had tried three earlier things, one of which was making blue boxes. These were the tone generators that could let you make free phone calls. And Woz built one just to have pranks and have fun with, and Jobs was like, we should sell this.

[LAUGHTER]

And so they did.

IRA FLATOW: Well, on paper, Apple has a third founder, Ronald Wayne, right? What happened to Ronald Wayne?

DAVID POGUE: Yeah, it’s an amazing story. He was a much older guy in his 40s that Jobs knew from his work at Atari. And at a point when the two Steves were having arguments with each other, Ron Wayne stepped in and said, look, meet at my apartment and we’ll work through this together. And he sort of engineered a democratic rapprochement.

And they decided to found this company, Apple Computer, on April 1, 1976. And Ron Wayne was cut in for 10%, which today, of course, would be worth many billions of dollars. But the thing people forget is that Jobs was this long-haired, stringy, stinky teenager. He didn’t wear shoes. He had this strange diet. He didn’t believe in hygiene.

And they had just gotten a loan for $15,000 for parts to make what we now call the Apple I. And Ron Wayne did not have a good comfort level with that. He’d been burned on entrepreneurial ventures before. So 12 days later, he unsigned himself from the partnership.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

DAVID POGUE: They him $800.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

DAVID POGUE: And today he said, everybody wants to know do I regret it. And he said, at the time, with the information I had, it was a good move, and I’ve never starved.

IRA FLATOW: So what was it about this long-haired hippie freak that actually made Apple so successful?

DAVID POGUE: Jobs– there’s no one like Jobs, never has been. This guy, John Sculley, his CEO, told me that he was bipolar. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the earlier engineers on the first Macintosh, told me that, he would cry all the time. He would laugh hysterically all the time. He could rip you apart. He could put you on a pedestal.

He said any adjective you can use to describe a person you could apply to Steve Jobs. So really kind of a razor blade when it came to achieving his vision. He would just cut through red tape and the old way of doing things and objections from his colleagues. He was single minded.

IRA FLATOW: So how much of the Apple story, then, is the Steve Jobs story?

DAVID POGUE: Really a lot. To this day, there would be no Apple, what it is, without Jobs. When Jobs died, he told Tim Cook, as you take over the company, don’t ask, what would Steve do. Just do what’s right. But in fact, they really do stick to the principles that Jobs believed in– total secrecy when you develop something, ultimate focus on very few projects, rounded corners on everything, every key, every phone, every laptop, every power adapter, rounded corners. All these things that jobs believed in, they still believe in.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. And people talk about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right, his ability to make you believe in a product.

DAVID POGUE: He was unbelievable. He did it to me.

IRA FLATOW: He did?

DAVID POGUE: (CHUCKLING) Yeah. One time I reviewed a new version of iMovie that they had come– I used to be the tech critic for The New York Times. And so I didn’t like it at all. It had hardly any features. You couldn’t really edit your movies anymore. You couldn’t add music or do crossfades.

And so apparently Apple’s research showed that all people did with this program anymore was do quick cuts and upload something to YouTube. So he called me at home, railing. He’s like, you have no idea what the [MUTED] we do here at Apple, do you? I’m like, what are you talking about? He goes, you don’t what people use this for. Nobody edits videos anymore.

And I said, Steve, I do. I have 100 tapes of home movies, and someday I’m going to edit them. He’s like, you’re not going to edit them. Those things are going to sit in a drawer until you’re 60. And he was right.

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS]

Oh, so many stories. Here’s a story I want you to recount because I know that Apple– Steve did not invent the computer mouse, but he brought it to the mainstream on the Macintosh. Tell us the story of how he discovered the mouse and why it was so different and successful.

DAVID POGUE: Yeah. When Jobs came along, the Apple I, the Apple II, and the Apple III, and the Lisa– these are four of Apple’s first computers– they were all text based. So you would memorize commands. You would type them out.

And midway through designing the Lisa, Jobs, in exchange for the opportunity to buy Apple stock, was granted a visit to Xerox’s research department, the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, where they had crude, early versions of the mouse. It had three buttons. And it was a sharp-edged acrylic box, but it was a mouse.

They had windows. They weren’t overlapping and you couldn’t move them around, but they were windows. It was black text on white, which was different from everything that had come before. And they had copy and paste within one app. Jobs went nuts. He’s like, why aren’t you marketing this? This is the future of computing! This is crazy!

So he went back to Apple. They rethought the Lisa computer, and they finished and polished and completed what Xerox PARC had built. They reduced the mouse down to one button and made it much more comfortable. And instead of two 90-degree rollers, which the original mouse had, which made it like an Etch A Sketch, they replaced it with a ball so you could make diagonal lines without jaggies.

In the end, this Lisa computer is the one that introduced the graphic interface as we know it. Apple added icons and a desktop and trash. And it was a huge failure because it was $10,000. But then they took what they did on the Lisa, brought it to the Mac for a fraction of the price, and here we are today.

IRA FLATOW: And the rest is history, as they say. So how much of their success has been the tech and how much of it has been the business aspect, the timing, the marketing, the vision?

DAVID POGUE: I think it’s a third thing. Apple really didn’t invent much. Apple introduced Wi-Fi and CD burning and laser printing and cheap, easy networking and the mouse. But it didn’t invent any of these things. So really, especially during the Steve Jobs years, Apple’s genius is identifying fledgling new technologies that could be perfected and polished and made palatable to the masses, and then yes, marketing the hell out of it.

IRA FLATOW: Yes, but so how do you go from that idea where somebody else has done something to your totally different idea, like the iPhone, which has got– it’s got no buttons on it. It’s a totally different idea.

DAVID POGUE: Yeah, and it was controversial in house. At the time, Jobs’s big business was the iPod, right? They were selling hundreds of millions of music players a year. And everyone was saying, someday they’re going to merge the music player with the phone and we should be ahead of that.

The first inclination was to add phone circuitry to the music player. So there were all these prototypes of an iPod, complete with the scroll wheel, that was also a cell phone. But meanwhile, there was this other sort of Skunk Works project that had developed the multi-touch, all-glass screen, all-glass phone. And in the end, they sort of had a bake off between the iPod cell phone and this much more difficult, advanced, multi-touch screen concept. And Jobs said, OK, we’re going for the multi-touch screen.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. And then they moved into the iPad. Was the iPad an idea before the iPhone?

DAVID POGUE: Yes, that’s exactly right. This multi-touch technology that the Skunk Works team had come up with was originally intended for the iPad. And Jobs had gone to dinner with a friend of his wife’s who worked at Microsoft. And he’s like, oh, Jobs, you got to see what we’ve come up with at Microsoft. It’s a tablet. It’s an inch thick. It only has 15 buttons and a stylus, and it’s the future of computing.

And Jobs thought that was such an ugly, clunky, terrible solution that he came into work on Monday and said, these people have no idea what they’re building. We’re going to do a tablet and we’re going to do it right. So in the middle of that project, the iPhone project came along. And Jobs said, let’s put the tablet on the shelf and do the phone first because that’s the more urgent business case.

IRA FLATOW: We have to take a quick break. We’ll be back with more on the Apple story in just a minute.

It’s interesting how they parlayed all their tech work with the iPod and the iPhone into what we have now, which is a real media empire, with Apple Music and Apple TV. Natural extensions? Whose ideas were those?

DAVID POGUE: That’s all part of Tim Cook’s idea. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, Cook became the new CEO. And both as an author and as a fan, I’m mixed emotions. I did love those Jobs years where roughly every three years they would come up with another world-changing, historic platform– the iPod and then the iPad and the iMac and the iPhone and iMovie. That doesn’t happen anymore.

They have minor hits with the watch and the AirPods. But those are essentially accessories to the iPhone. Instead, Tim Cook took the company in this new direction of software and services– hugely successful. He’s tripled the revenue and the headcount of the company, much more successful financially than it was under Steve Jobs. But I do miss the inventions of those super cool, new things.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Speaking of inventions, every so often there’s a rumor that they’re going to enter a new field, like cars or solar panels. Any truth to any of that? And do they actually have little Skunk Works that work on those things behind the scenes?

DAVID POGUE: They do. And that’s one of through lines of Apple through all 50 years, that they’re always supporting these little percolating side projects, the vast majority of which we never hear about because they don’t pan out. But the car was a big one, Project Titan. They spent 10 years, $10 billion on this thing, something like 1,200 engineers that they poached from Tesla and Ford and Mercedes.

And the idea was to come up with a beautiful living room on wheels, so self-driving, electric. The prototypes look kind of like a beautiful, white, symmetrical, modern-day version of like a Volkswagen bus. And in the end, after a decade, they didn’t have the self-driving working flawlessly, and they were pumping money into it. And the profit margin on cars was slim. So Tim Cook killed it. That was the biggest one. But there really are little projects all the time.

IRA FLATOW: So there are a lot of other things that just didn’t go anywhere.

DAVID POGUE: Yeah. (CHUCKLING) I got to see when I was researching this book, I got to see the Apple fax machine.

IRA FLATOW: The Apple fax– there’s a new idea!

DAVID POGUE: Product Paladin, I saw one. It was amazing! It was built around a Macintosh. So it had this beautiful screen and a keyboard, so you could type out messages. But yeah, it didn’t–

IRA FLATOW: After Steve had passed away, did Apple build something that Steve said, I don’t ever want to build this?

DAVID POGUE: Oh many things, yeah. First of all, he never wanted this whole catalog of iPhones. He always was a believer in very simple model lineups. And also look at the size of the iPhone today compared to the original one. The original one was the size of a bar of ivory soap. It was tiny. And now these things almost require two hands.

And Steve famously wanted to sell you songs, $1 per song, radically changed the music industry with that idea, with the iTunes Store. And he hated the idea of renting your music, of a Spotify model, paying a monthly fee where you have to pay every month to keep listening to music. But Tim Cook started that business. And of course it is a huge business. It’s bigger than Spotify now.

IRA FLATOW: Right. The book is entitled The First 50 Years. Any crystal ball you can gaze into for the future?

DAVID POGUE: [LAUGHS]

There have been a number of leaks to journalists about the next step, which is clearly going to be glasses. So there are two forms of smart glasses already on the market from companies like Google and Meta. They’re a kind with no screen, just microphone, camera, and speech recognition. And then there’s a kind with a little screen that hovers in front of one eye so it can give you a translation of a sign you’re looking at or driving directions without requiring your hands. So we understand that Apple, whether or not it sees the light of day, they’re working hard on coming up with smart glasses of their own.

IRA FLATOW: Are they going to call that the Borg model?

[LAUGHTER]

DAVID POGUE: I do.

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS]

Well, David, thank you for taking time to be with us today. David Pogue is long-time tech journalist, author, and correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. His new book is Apple– the First 50 Years. It’s a great read. Thank you David. Good to talk to you again.

DAVID POGUE: Great to join you, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: This podcast was produced by Charles Bergquist. And if you think Science Friday is insanely great, why not rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening.

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