[S5E9] Apple: The First 50 Years with David Pogue

Apple, the world's most admired company, is also arguably the world's most influential. In this episode, we interview legendary technology writer David Pogue about his definitive history of this colorful company. Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. But before we get to David and his great book, let's introduce ourselves.

I'm David Short. I'm a product manager.

I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief research officer at a Washington, D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.

And I'm David Kopeck. I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. Apple, one of the largest and most influential companies in corporate history, just celebrated its 50th anniversary. From its romantic beginnings as the visionary project of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to its current global dominance of the smartphone market, Apple has always engendered passionate customers and legendary business stories. Now, prolific and award winning technology writer and CBS Sunday Morning correspondent David Pogue has written the definitive history of Apple. We are privileged to be joined by David to discuss his new New York Times best selling book, apple the first 50 years. David, thank you so much for coming on Business, Books and Company.

Pleasure to be here.

So before we dive into Apple, I want to get into a little bit of the process of developing the book. I know the story that it was 2024, you were hosting the 40th anniversary of the Mac show and your wife talks to you after it. And it's like you should do this book about the history of apple for the 50th anniversary. Now that was just two years ago. And you developed this incredible, I would say encyclopedic level of detail, well sourced, page turner book in just two years. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the process of writing it. I know you did a lot of interviews. I know you went back to executives from the beginning of Company to the modern day. And I know you mentioned the acknowledgments you had a PhD research assistant working with you on the book. But can you just tell us about that process and how in just two years, I know you're a prolific author, maybe one of the most prolific nonfiction authors in the world, Dozens of books written, but still, this seems like a lot. Two years.

Well, if you only knew. Yeah, the idea came to my wife Nikki in a dream. She woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that I should do a book on Apple's first 50. And I, I shut her down. I told her she had missed it. She had, it had come and gone and I was wrong. In the morning I, I looked it up and it was, it was two years away. So the first thing I did, you know, people always ask if I used to any AI to write the book. And, and the answer is in two situations I did. I did have to upscale some old graphics because the photos were too low resolution for publication. And I also asked ChatGPT for ideas on an outline. Because 50 years and so many characters and so many stories. I mean, how, how do I even begin to get my hands around this? And it came up with this really brilliant four part outline. It was like 120 chapters or something. I didn't use the chapter breakdowns, but I did use the four main parts which was Steve, the two Steves, Steve Jobs and Wozniak. And then Steve is gone for part two, the interregnum. And then part three is Steve Returns and then part four is Tim Cook. It made a lot of sense. So then it was mainly worrying how am I going to tell this story? How am I going to find the people? What do I do about the last 15 years? Because Apple has a rule that current employees and executives and designers and engineers are not allowed to speak to press. So that was going to be sort of an obstacle for those last 200 pages. And so I started, I got two really lucky breaks. The first lucky break was because this adventure began with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. They just volunteered this guy Hansen. Sue started saying, you might want to talk to this guy. You might want to talk to this guy. We did an eight hour oral history of this guy who's now dead. But they started literally feeding me the research materials I needed, which was just, oh my God, thank you so much. And then I began emailing Apple PR almost immediately about this project, asking if there's any way I could interview current people. And they didn't exactly say no, but they just wanted more information. What do you have in mind? So I wrote a sample chapter to give them the tone of the book. I sent them an outline and after about six months they finally said, okay, tell you what, you fly out here to Cupertino, you sit here at Apple park and we'll give you hour, hour, hour, hour, hour interviews for four days. I did this with, with Tim Cook's entire executive staff and the engineers and designers and project leaders. It was it was just amazing and so, so, so lucky because otherwise it would have been 200 blank pages at the end there. So, yeah, so the first project was just this massive influx of information. That was the hard part, I thought. But then it took care of itself. And then the second part, of course, was distilling it, organizing it and writing it and illustrating it. The book, as you know, is in color. Every page is in color. So360 photos and documents and prototypes. Cool stuff. So that was, I mean, the really embarrassing truth is I didn't really get around to starting it until like July of 2024. So it was really like a year and a half.

Wow. Wow. And I think what's really cool about you as the author of the book is you're almost part of the story too, because you were one of the only reviewers of the original iPhone. There's this great anecdote in the book where I believe it was iMovie08 comes out and you give it kind of a negative review and Steve Jobs actually calls you and like, it sounds like it was at night. And he's like, why did you give that bad review? It's not bad. And so how did your history with Apple, you worked at Macworld for I think over a decade. I used to read your column on the. In the back of macworld in the 90s. How did, how did your history with Apple and as a writer on Apple for decades kind of inform writing this book?

I love this question. Nobody's asked me this question. It could be argued that I was in some small way part of Apple's story in the ways that you're describing. But I decided early, long that I should not insert myself into this history. There are a couple of exceptions you mentioned. One of them is as a sidebar, as an illustration of the way Jobs would call journalists and scream at them. I told the story of one time he called me. And then, you know, for Macworld, I used to, for my column there, I used to write song parodies like new,

you want to Sing us Mac Maker?

Yes, that's right. That's right. So I included one of those in the book. And by the way, the behind the scenes story is everybody involved with putting out a book is terrified for legal reasons. Like, you have to get the rights. And like, if there was a TV ad, do you have the rights of the person who wrote the ad? Do you have the rights of the person who is in the ad? Do you have Apple's rights?

Do you have.

It's just, it's a screaming freaking nightmare. And so all I wanted to do is put my lyrics for Mac Maker, Mac Maker, find an os, you know, I wanted to do a parody of Matchmaker. All I wanted to do is print the lyrics in the book and the publisher's like, nope, you have to get permission from the composer and the lyricist. And you know, the. So incredibly, I used to be a Broadway conductor and so I know a lot of people in the biz and I found both the composer and the lyricist. One of them had died, but I got to his lawyer and they both gave me permission. So unbelievable. But that's. Anyway, so bottom line was those are the only two exceptions. I did quote myself a few times in the book, like the New York Times reviewer said, but I didn't name myself. So I'm revealing here for the first time that when I said the New York Times reviewer said that the MacBook Air looked like it was descended from a spatula, that was me.

Okay, that's really funny. We recognize that in a lot of the interviews. The tour for this book is really concentrated on a lot of the well trodden ground around Steve Jobs and the creation of the Mac, the revival of the company, his return. We were hoping we could dive a little bit into some of the less well known areas of the company history. So would you mind telling us a little bit about the, the early executives that we might not have heard as much about? Mike Markula, who I had definitely mispronounced from Pirates of Silicon Valley as you mentioned, which actually, as you mentioned that I'm pretty sure Pirates of Silicon Valley isn't available in a lot of streaming ways for the same things you were talking about. There's a lot of great music in that that I bet they're having trouble with. Maybe. Regis McKenna, Mike Scott. What did they contribute in helping take the company from Woz's prototype to a billion dollar ipo? And yeah, if you could go into the roles of some of those early executives that heard about.

I mean the thing about Steve Jobs is, you know, he had two stints at Apple, right? He was, he co founded Apple in 1976, 50 years ago this week. And then he was pushed out in 1985. He's gone for 11 years and then he came back from 1997 till he died. Incredibly in that first period Apple, they had a huge success with the Apple ii, which is really Woz's masterpiece. But Steve Jobs never had a success except for that one. I mean the Apple One sold 150 units. The Apple Three failed, the Lisa failed, the Macintosh failed in those days. Then he went off and he started next, next failed. So when he came back to Apple in 1997, you might think, oh, he must have been hailed as the savior who's going to save this dying company. But that's not true. He. He had never achieved a successful computer at that point. And so there's a lot of doubt surrounding him. But, yeah, the early days, the people around him were very important. Mike Markula is this behind the scenes adult supervision that nobody talks about. Partly because he himself is a very shy, retiring person. He doesn't want the spotlight. But, man, he was, in effect, Apple's CEO for the first 20 years. I mean, he was the chairman of the board. So he hired and fired the actual CEOs, and when a CEO had to be fired, he would step in. Apparently he's unable to do interviews now, but he is just a shy, brilliant. I mean, he wrote Apple's first business plan when he joined them. And he said, I predict that this company will be a Fortune 500 company in five years. It actually took seven. But, I mean, that's how much he knew and could see the future. Mike Scott was Apple's first CEO. Nobody knows anything about. If I asked you to describe what he looked like, would you know? No. He died last year and was there. I mean, I told Apple, but was there a press release? Was there an announcement? Nothing? Interestingly, as we speak today, tomorrow I'll be in Florida at a book tour event and Mike Scott's brother is going to be there. So a little too late for an interview for the book, but yeah, so some of the people he worked with, and especially the engineers for the next

version, you know, 55 years.

Yeah, exactly 2.0. You know, it is said that Steve Jobs does not often share credit. He often takes credit for things he didn't do. But I mean, those early Mac engineers, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, you know, the graphic artist Susan Kerr, who hand drew all the original icons and the fonts, Steve Capps and Bruce Horn, who worked on the finder, these were young, hungry artistic geniuses. They had no significant others. They had no lives outside of Apple. And that's how Steve Jobs liked him. He liked him there late at night burning the midnight oil, and he liked him artistic. So they were all guitar players or musicians or artists or movie makers, because he very much felt, and Apple still very much feels, that the company lives at, as they say, the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. But yeah, they were the wind beneath Steve Jobs wings, I often hear. Oh, but Steve Jobs was not an engineer. You know, he's a phony, he's a poser. I don't think that's really fair. He never said he's an engineer, but he was the world's greatest prophet of technology visionary. And he had the most unbelievable, like, taste. Like he could. He could view some fledgling technology in a lab somewhere, some crude, complicated, slow thing, and immediately know that's going to be WI Fi or that's going to be a tablet. I mean, he would just know which things to bank on. And he was right almost every time. Yeah.

And I think that's great that you bring that up, David. I was going to say the intersection of technology and liberal arts as well. I think even though they didn't have a super successful product in that first sort of reign of Steve Jobs, he didn't create products that succeeded. But he created a culture amongst the employees and a culture amongst the fans that later was the foundational piece that helped them succeed during Apple 2.0. And one element of that culture, and maybe one person who violated that culture a little bit, is Mike Scott. As you mentioned, he was the first CEO, which this is only my third Apple book after the presentation, Secrets of Steve Jobs and Apple and China, which we did on this podcast. So I was surprised to know that Steve Jobs wasn't in fact the first CEO of Apple. And in fact he wasn't until the very end, essentially. But Mike Scott was brought into sort of the adult supervision by the investors. And as CEO, I think when you look at the chaos he was managing the ultimate financial results that he achieved, you can only say he was incredibly successful. Yet, you know, part of the culture thing, he created this incident called Black Wednesday, you know, this kind of big layoff that ultimately led to his own firing. You know, what's your read on his leadership and were there any lasting contributions by him as the first CEO? When it comes to some of that culture, some of the success of the

early products, I mean, you have no. I mean, this is the 70s. I mean, this is so long ago. Apple really wasn't Apple at the time. And, you know, he did his function, which was to get the company logistically set up and financially set up. And you know, he was not a, you know, computer designer. He was a technical guy. And Mike Markola hand picked him. But near the end he, yeah, he started to become really unstable. And Mike Markla said he was having, you know, just life difficulties and. Yeah, so there was this one random day when Apple was doing great, but he just did this mass firing and nobody knew who he was going to fire next. He would call you into his office and just say, you're out. And didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. And then shortly thereafter, and he never checked with the board about this, which was a big no, no. And then shortly thereafter, he did a major reorganization of the company without consulting the board again. So he was fired. The first of several CEOs in a row to be fired. In fact, Apple did not have a CEO that wasn't fired until Steve Jobs. So that was the fourth CEO. Wait, Mike Scott. Yeah. Michael Spindler, John Scully, Michael Spindler, Gilmy Elliot, and then finally Steve Jobs. Yeah. So the fifth CEO is the first one that wasn't fired.

David, fast forwarding to that next CEO, John Scully. He was CEO of the company for 10 years. You interviewed him for the book. You interviewed him at the 50th event at CHM. You, I think, started writing for Macworld while he was CEO. So I feel like he's somebody you really got to know. And he's also somebody who is under the radar as well. Even though he was CEO for a fifth of the company's history, he isn't prominent in a lot of the modern talk about Apple yet. He had some successful products. You talk about in the book, the Power book and how it reboosted the Mac sales and he got the Mac market share back up. But we always talk about the malaise of Apple in the mid-1990s, and I'm wondering how much of that you really lay at Scully's feet versus his successor, Michael Spindler. And is Scully kind of underappreciated in Apple history?

I feel like he's underappreciated. I mean, people, people compare everyone to Steve Jobs. Nobody else is Steve Jobs. No one ever has been, no one ever will be. For all his flaws and all his genius, he was one of a kind. But I think that Scully was probably, at least in the first, you know, 35 years, he was the closest in that he, he got the culture in a way that Spindler and Emilio, his successors, did not. He really tried to be a visionary. I mean, in 1987 he made this, this concept video for talks that he was giving called the Knowledge Navigator. And it's just a skit, it's a six minute video in which this college professor sits down with what is literally a folding iPad. He unfolds this folding iPad. It has a front facing camera it's got wifi, it's got microphones, speakers and camera. He's on the Internet, which did not exist for another six years. He has an AI bot butler helper in a little window that speaks to him. This is decades before there was AI. It's incredible the number of things in that video that later came to pass. We don't have the folding iPad yet, but I predict next year. So if he wasn't a visionary, he at least tried to be one. He tried to see where the hockey puck was going to and skate there. The other thing is, as you guys may know from the introduction of the book, ends with a list of 10 surprises that you might not have known. And one of them is the very controversial statement that the Newton saved Apple. And that's because of John Scully. The Newton, the handheld computer, was his pet project. And you could say that was a precursor to the iPhone. They did use some of its technologies in the iPhone, but he needed a chip for that. And all the chips were too battery hungry for what they were doing. So they were originally using an AT&T chip and it got hot. And anyway, so midstream they found this tiny startup in England called ARM A R M and they had a very low power, high horsepower chip. And Sculley said, that's just what we need. Let's invest $3 million in this little company and use that chip in the Newton. Which they did. And then ARM got the bright idea to license their chip to every electronics company in the world. So within a few years, that investment in ARM for Apple became worth $800 million. And if they hadn't done that for the Newton, then they would not have been able to buy next in 1996 and bring Steve Jobs back to Apple. So literally, without that ARM Newton chip, there would be no Apple today.

There were a few other of these investments that I'd never heard about that were interesting as well. Apple has just really. Well, I guess we've heard about the big successes. I'm sure there have been failures. But as you point out, they didn't do very many big investments, so they didn't risk that much with most of them as well.

Yeah, Apple doesn't like to buy other companies like every other tech company does. Facebook bought Instagram, bought WhatsApp. Microsoft bought LinkedIn, bought Minecraft. Google bought Nest, bought Ring, whatever, or I guess Amazon bought Ring. But Apple does not buy known companies. They buy a lot of little tiny tech startups that has a promising technology or a few great engineers that they want and partly that's because they want to avoid those awful cultural clashes that happens when big companies merge. And it also avoids scrutiny from the ftc, you know, accusations of antitrust violations and so on. Apple only did that once when they bought Beats, the headphone company. And I think they did that in order to get. They wanted to start their own music store. And Beats had one that they could already, you know, already built, that they could adapt. But in general, yeah, Apple only makes little, tiny, selective acquisitions, which makes it very unusual among the big tech companies.

I think one person who is almost never in the conversation at all is Michael Spindler. And when people talk about the history of Apple and you, of course, were covering the company at that time, you cover that era very well in the book. And I'm wondering why he was so unsuccessful. Did he not understand the right strategy? Was going to the clone manufacturers just his idea, or was he kind of already given a ship that was sinking by Scully, in your opinion, that it was almost impossible for him to bail his way out of? So was it him making bad decisions or was his fate already kind of sealed? And I just want to note that he had a long history at Apple, as you. As you cover in the book, that he had been in Apple since 1980, and many executive positions had even been CEO under Scully. So he had, like, a lot of preparation for the role, yet still seemed to really fall flat on his face. What do you attribute that to?

I think it was both. I think he was handed a lousy situation. You know, Windows had entered the picture because of a terrible contract they'd signed with Apple years before Apple versus Microsoft was settled in favor of Microsoft. Microsoft totally stole all the graphic interface work that Apple had spent years perfecting, just ripped it off perfectly legally, as it turned out. And so the world was running away with cheap PC clones running Windows. So it was very tough for Apple to compete under those circumstances. So Spindler, he also had some profound medical and psychological challenges. I mean, the famous stories of under. When he would be under pressure, he would just crawl under his desk and lie in fetal position. And people like Michael, Michael, he had to be rushed to the hospital multiple times because his heart was racing and wouldn't stop. So he. He had his challenges. But, you know, for years there was talk about, is Apple more like Microsoft in that it is a software company and therefore could emulate Microsoft's situation where they get a royalty for every copy of the Mac OS sold, or is it a hardware company like IBM where if they license their Macs to other companies. It would eat their lunch and they'd lose money. And for years, I mean, you remember this is going back and forth during the Mac world years. People would argue it both ways. And finally Spindler said, okay, let's try it. Let's see if we can get people to make Mac clones, which arguably would bring down the price for everybody. And it was a disaster. Mac clones did come out, they were cheaper. And what it meant was that yeah, Apple got $50 for every Mac clone anyone bought, but those were Macs that Apple could have been selling. So you know, when Jobs came back, that was the first to go.

So let's, let's turn there a little bit. Everyone talks a lot about the turnaround when Jobs came back and there isn't as much of the detail on the reasons for the downfall. And I think you really went, went deeper on this than I've read. And I'm not as comprehensive as Kopeck in reading all of the books, but I have read a lot about Apple. So it wasn't just Windows 95. Apple was already dysfunctional and Windows 95 was kind of just a compounding of the problem. So if you could lay out for us in your opinion, what were the top two or three problems that had led to Apple having their difficulties in the mid-90s?

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it because those 11 years are typically the part that people kind of skip over. It was Apple's big decline. I think it's fascinating. It's like watching a car wreck in slow motion.

The interregnum I loved as your framing for. I don't know if it was your original thing, but I'd said it. Even with Kevin and David, when I was talking, I was like, this is the part I really didn't know about until I was reading this book.

Yeah, I mean it was just an unbelievable period of well meaning people who didn't have the talent or the backbone to say no to things. So here's a classic example. So every chain, Sears, CompUSA, Best Buy, whatever would come to Apple's salesforce and say, we need a low price guarantee. That's our deal. We want to say to customers, you cannot buy this model any cheaper anywhere else. So to accommodate them, Apple would develop multiple versions of every computer differentiated only by what software comes on it or the modem speed or whether it had a CD player or a CD burner. These tiny differences. So by 1996 they were selling 50 different Mac models, including the Performas, which were the Low end Macs. Internally they were called deformas. They were terrible. They were just crappy products. And also the second problem was that it was first Spindler and then Emilio. Emilio wrote this very self serving, sad autobiography called on the firing my 500 days at Apple. But in it he said, and I interviewed him too, and he told me the same thing, which is that the place was ungovernable. Like you'd have a meeting with the executive staff and you'd say, okay, this is our marching orders, this is our action plan, this is what we're doing. And then nobody would do it. They just simply pretended that the meeting hadn't happened. And then I interviewed people at Apple who were there and they're like, yes, of course we didn't do what he said because there were stupid ideas. The place was just not. There was no leadership. There's no respect for leadership. So the whole place devolved into these fiefdoms, these silos of competitive middle managers and a lot of duplication. My favorite story in the whole book is the time two Apple lawyers show up in trademark court to sue each other. It was just a complete smoking wreck. They had 12 different ad agencies all going on with sometimes conflicting ads, ad messages. It was just, let's take that sales thing where every chain needed a different Mac model to call their own. Well, if it were Steve Jobs, he would have said, no, nfw, no freaking way. But nobody is Steve Jobs. And so if you were the CEO, you might think, well, that means more sales. That means more of these stores will be working hard to sell our Macs. I mean, there's a logic to it, but it just, it led to chaos and dysfunction. And imagine being the service department at Apple. You've got 50 Mac models to know and to be able to repair. Yeah, it was just, it was just grisly. And then Steve comes back and in one year, one year, he fires the entire board. He shuts down that whole sales program. He fires all 12 ad agencies, he cancels all 50 math models, says, we're going to focus on four. You know, the quadrant, the two laptops, the two desktops. We're going to have one ad. It was the Think different ad. It was the here's to the crazy ones. I mean, and like the first computer he does is the imac. You know, you. If I were the CEO and I was going to bank the company on one new machine, would I change all of the variables at one time? Like it had no floppy drive, it had no printer port, it had no mouse port. It was not a rectangle. It was a translucent blue plastic blob. Like, what are you doing? And if you can.

We had to go to multiple design firms to just hear that, yeah, we can't design this. We gotta fix it a little bit.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. There were designers who said, that's not manufacturable as you have it. It had a handle like, who puts that? What are you doing? And there were plenty of people who thought it was idiocy. It was a terrible. I remember reading the Boston Globe. The imac has no floppy, no mouse port and no future. It was just too weird. And yet it instantly became the best selling computer in the history of the world. So, like, once again, somehow Jobs knew and he restored this company that was six weeks from bankruptcy, turning their first $45 million profit in a year. I mean, this guy had never finished college, never been to business school. The guy was unbelievable.

So thank you to our friends at Audible for sponsoring today's episode. You can check out great books over@AudibleTrial.com biz that's AudibleTrial.com biz. If you go there, you'll get a special 30 day free trial of Audible as well as credits towards your first purchase. Like Apple the First 50 Years by David Pogue, it's on Audible. And you know what, there's some special exclusive audio in the audiobook version. I know that David and Kevin enjoyed it as they were reading the book. So check out the link, go to audibletrial.com biz and get that 30 day free trial of Audible and credits towards your first book. Thanks to our friends at Audible.

And when David Pogues reads the book, he actually sings the MacMaker song. So, you know, you really need to get that Audible version.

That's pretty special. That's, that's a real incentive for our listeners.

What's interesting too is I love how you mentioned with Gil Amelio how executives would leave their meetings and say, we're not going to, we're not going to do what he's telling us to do. And one thing that Jobs does, it sounds like in your book, was at executive team meetings, everyone was accountable for raising their objections, you know, within those closed doors and that nobody could really walk away with those same feelings as they did under Emilio. And I did want to just spin the tape back a little bit. You know, a lot of people don't know that Gil Amelio actually sort of signed his check out of Apple by signing the check for the purchase of Steve Jobs's company, Next, Right, Using its software and its technology to really save the company. Although I guess the Next technology didn't get integrated for another three to five years. But that brings Steve Jobs back into the fold. And you described that. You know, I thought it was actually a pretty graceful exit that Gil Amelio had, you know, when he made the choice to bring Jobs back in, and he recognized that that was going to, you know, lead to his downfall or that it could lead to his downfall. But there was this really awkward episode where it's Ja. Well, it's Emilio gets up at one of the conferences, and he just rambles on and on for hours, and everyone is sitting behind the scenes saying, what is he doing? And it's available on YouTube for our listeners who want to check it out. But at the time, you were fully enmeshed in Apple World, it sounds like, and a Mac World columnist. And I was just wondering. I'm guessing you were at that event. I want to know what's going through your head during that keynote as Emilio is up there for two hours rambling. I mean, what were you thinking in 1997? Are you worried you're in the wrong business at that point, or that this. I should probably start covering something else?

I mean, it's so mean, but so funny. So this was the keynote where Emilio was going to announce that Steve Jobs was back at Apple. And as a bonus, he had Woz, who had left Apple used before he brought back Woz. And it was, oh, my God, they were going to unveil the 20th anniversary Mac, Pat each other on the back,

and have that big reunion.

Yep. So Jobs and Woz are backstage, and Emilio gets up to give his keynote speech. And no one is really clear on what happened. Emilio says that someone had loaded an old draft of his speech into the teleprompter. I've also heard that the teleprompter was not working. There were people in the audience who thought he had a stroke. But the point is, he just started talking and about nothing. Just rambling for 30 minutes, for an hour, for two hours, for three hours, and there was nothing anybody could do. And Sachid Jahil was the marketing head of marketing at the time, and he was the manager of this keynote. I can still hear him saying, like, he's Indian. He's like, I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me. He was, like, so mortified. And when in the keynote, you can see Jobs finally comes on after three hours, and he is furious. He is pissed. And he gives this gorgeous 20 minute, very simple, very clear speech about how Apple needs to come back. And then they were going to conclude the event by giving the two Steves each model number one and model number two of the 20th anniversary of Mac, which was this futuristic flat panel, like today's imac, but way beforehand, a flat panel vertical Mac. And they wanted to show that it could also be a television. So Sajiv had lined up from Comcast a cable brought into the Moscone center or whatever the hall was, because it was an underground auditorium, so they had to have it specially wired for cable. And he said, now if you watch, I will turn on cnn. You can watch live TV on your Mac. And nothing happened. And he's like, let's try that again. Nothing. Like, as though the day couldn't get any worse. And it turns out that Emilio had rambled on so long that he'd gone past the window of service that Comcast was going to have the cable on. It was just, oh my God, just a smoking wreck, but really kind of amusing if you're kind of into black humor.

So Steve Jobs, of course, does come back to the company. And when we read about it in a compressed few pages in a business school's case study, it sounds like the savior is here and then everything's wonderful. But you mentioned in the book that actually 50% of Apple's employees were skeptical of him. And in fact, some people left during the turnaround because they felt there was a lot of uncertainty under his leadership. So why is it that a significant number of employees were skeptical of Jobs coming back? And in the four quadrant strategy, which you already mentioned, to get to that, he cut a lot of products. I'm wondering as a follow up if you felt there were any products that he cut that he should not have.

Well, yeah, so we mentioned that he had never had a success under his leadership. And when he came back and it was not like, here comes the savior, because he had never demonstrated the ability to launch a successful machine. So there was a lot of doubt. And the idea was that the Mac, which had really never had this is 1997, the Mac had been out for 13 years without a real operating system. The original Mac had so little memory that it had just enough software to be able to boot up and run one program at a time. It had no multitasking, it had no memory protection. So if one program crashed, the whole thing crashed. And so it desperately needed a modern operating system. So Apple, as you know, Gil Amelio bought Jobs company Next the computer had failed. But the operating system, NextStep, was brilliant, futuristic, rock solid, based on Unix, gorgeous. And Jobs brought in two former Next executives, John Rubenstein for hardware, Avi Tavanian for software. Very, very, very big, important people in Apple's resurrection that Jobs probably did not give enough credit to. But Avitavanian, for example, said, okay, here's the new operating system, here's how things are going to work in the new os. And engineers are like, but you can't take out that feature. You know, that's how Mac people are used to. It's working. You can't introduce the dock. We never had a dock. What is that? And he would say, look, do you want to write an operating system for the 2% market share we have, or do you want to go after the other 98%, kind of brilliant. And people quit over that. People are like, then, then forget it. I've worked hard on this and you're throwing out all the work that I've done. So, yeah. So people quit and, you know, it was a shame. But the people who stayed believed in this, in this new feature. The thing that I thought they shouldn't have cut was probably the Newton, because the Newton came out in 93 and the handwriting didn't work. We understand that. But during the next four years they kept working on it and they eventually developed a machine learning version of the handwriting recognition that worked. I mean, it could do script, it could do printing, it didn't rely on a dictionary so you could write people's last names that were spelled weird and it would get you. So the thing finally had gotten there. It was now being designed by Jony. I've this 27 year old British designer in the design studio and it was, it was pretty good. But that was, that was part of what Jobs canceled.

Well, he hated styluses almost as much as he hated fans. Right? I love how you always mention fans in parentheses.

You're right, that's, that's supposed to be a running joke in the book. By, by the fifth mention, I'm like, parentheses. Incidentally, Jobs hate advance. You're supposed to be like, I know. Anyway, yeah, he always hated fans. They were noisy and they required vents in the case which he thought were ugly.

It was another thing that I heard, but I learned it more, so really appreciate it. At the end of the book, you have a chapter through Lines where you go through 15 themes of what the company had gone through. And I think you make a great case for all of them. We were hoping to flip that a little bit. And think about the through lines for the customers. So Apple has had this loyal fan, Mac fanboys, Apple fanboys. And in the 90s when it was near bankruptcy, there were still these Mac faithful. That being an Apple user was a big part of their identity. So what is it about Apple that makes its fans so fiercely loyal to the company? Are there some through lines that you've observed over the decades as you've followed this group of people?

I mean that's a really profound point and I wished the book could have been longer because the fandom and how it kept Apple alive. And I don't just mean financially, I mean that the people who were left at Apple, the engineers and the designers, they literally took sustenance from the fandom. They literally pictured when they were working, they were picturing who would be using their work. You know, there's sort of this Chinese wall. The customers don't know the creators of the machines and the machine creators don't know the customers. But they pictured each other and worked for each other. Mac fans started out as a, as a minority, as an oppressed minority. I was one of them. In 1985 I bought my first Mac. I was about to graduate college and Apple had this half price deal with colleges and Apple told people at the time it had 5% of the market. They actually had 2% of the market at the time. And so we knew that we Mac heads knew that that 98% of the world was Wintel. But the Mac was so much obviously better. It was more elegant, it was more beautiful, it was more thoughtfully designed that we felt like we had good taste and the rest of the world did not. We were a cult, we were a tribe. We congratulated ourselves for our, our taste and our discernment. And we didn't care that we were the underdog. Being the underdog was fun. That really never left, you know, you, you identity, you identify yourself as, you say, as someone who knows good craftsmanship when you see it. And even as Apple recovered and became the corporate behemoth, now Apple is the Borg, but there's still a little bit of element of that of we're the tribe who knows taste when we see it. And I will also say that it does become part of people's personality and self identification. I wrote this column for the New York Times for 13 years and wow, did I know it. Because if you said anything bad about an Apple product, the Apple people would just descend on you with pitchforks. And if you said anything good about an Apple product, the Apple haters would descend on you with pitchforks. And I think part of it is once you're invested in a platform or a company, you've literally invested money. You know, if you buy a Mac, you probably buy an iPhone and so on. And so it's too late for you to switch, really. It's expensive and difficult to switch to a different platform. So you wind up having to bolster your own wisdom in choosing Apple. Like, you kind of rationalize. Well, of course I chose these products because I am a person of taste and class, just like Apple stands for taste in class. So it becomes, you know, part of your identity because you aren't free to switch to something else.

Well, I am one of the dreaded MacBook owners, but an Android user for my mobile. So I get off this call. My now wife, we're married four months now, she almost, she made fun of me in our first texts after we met on a dating app about my green bubbleness. And I'm glad that you mentioned it in the. It's.

It's a real problem for the podcast also. It's. We gotta be honest.

Well, I'm sorry about that, but. And not to be too clever, David, but I loved your description of the Apple fan base. And, you know, one thing that really stood out to me was how Steve Jobs and then Jony, I've really cared about the inside of the machine and making it beautiful. And I feel like. And hopefully this isn't too clever, but the Apple fans sort of care about the inside of the company, right? And they want and they see the beauty, the art and the intentionality there. And I think that also amplifies it. So it's a lot more than just like transition friction. It's also that recognition of beauty and good design. But switching topics and thinking about the book, you mentioned that you prided yourself on fixing some of the mistaken stories or the mythology that have become common lore, right, about Apple. Whether it's the cream soda computer that Woz and his friend designed that predated Apple, maybe wasn't called cream soda computer at the time, it was called their computer. Or even like the interactions between Apple and Xerox PARC that have been dramatized a bit. What's one or two myths about Apple that you most wanted to dispel in putting this book together?

Well, my favorite of all time is the story of the ipod's development, when Jobs kept wanting it to be smaller and finally they bring him this prototype. They're like, Jobs, it's as small as it's going to get. Everything's packed in there. And he walked over to the fish tank and dropped the ipod prototype and air bubbles came out. And he's like, see those air bubbles? That means there's still space in there. Make it smaller. What a great story. Never happened. You know the story of Jobs finding someone in an elevator, saying, what do you do? And he doesn't like your answer, so he fires you. Never happened. No one's ever witnessed that happening. And then I have one for you that happened yesterday. I haven't told anyone about this and it's kind of long winded, but do you want to hear this?

Oh, definitely. We want the exclusive. David.

This is an exclusive. Nobody knows about this but my wife. All right, so in the Steve Jobs book, there's a story about where the idea for the iPad came from. Jobs went to dinner at a friend of his wife Laureen's and the husband's. It was the husband's 50th birthday, so the. And Bill Gates was there at this meeting. This 50 year old birthday guy had led Apple's, Microsoft's development of their tablet. It was the tablet PC. It was thick, it was ugly, it was studded with buttons and it had a stylus. Apparently Steve Jobs hated styluses. Okay, so in the book, in the Steve Jobs book, there's this whole quote, half a page quote from Steve Jobs saying, we went to this asshole's dinner and all he wanted to talk to me is about how Microsoft has solved the future of computing with this stylus thing. There's a piece of crap, and this is like the 10th time he talked to me about it. And I was so pissed, I said, I'm gonna quote him. He said, fuck this, we're gonna show them how you do a tablet. And he stormed into the executive team meeting on Monday and said, that's it. We're going to do a tablet. All right? So I had this story backed up. I had it confirmed by Scott Forstall, who is Apple's head of software for those years. And he told me virtually the same story, so I assumed it was true. So I printed the version of that story that I just told you. Um, the book comes out, my book comes out and I got an email from the guy whose birthday it was him, like, I'm the guy who told Jobs about our tablet and that he was talking about. And it makes me so upset that everybody's parroting the story because it's all wrong. And like, oh my God, I, I parroted the Story, too. What. What was wrong with the story? And. And he goes, for one thing, I turned 50 in 2007 after the iPhone was out. And this story supposedly took place in 2005 when Apple began working on their tablet. So the chronology doesn't work at all. Second of all, his name is Bert Keeley, and he started out at Silicon Graphics. He had dreamed of. Of tablets for years. He took this idea to Dell, he took it to all these different. He took it to Apple, and he. He'd taken long walks with Steve Jobs many times. He said, it wasn't 10 times I talked to Jobs over 10 years. It was a hundred times. I had talked to Jobs so many times about doing a tablet, and he just said, no, no, it's not for us. So the purpose of this dinner where I invited Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to sit down, was we had our ugly, slow, thick tablet, and here was Jobs with this gorgeous phone. And my thought was, let's brainstorm together. Maybe three of us can finally solve the tablet puzzle. And it didn't go as he intended. Jobs thought, I mean, Gates thought that Bert Keeley, his employee, was giving away their secrets by showing them the prototype of their tablet. And Jobs hated the fact that it had a stylus. So how do I reconcile the published version of this chronology in this story with the one that Bert Keeley is telling me? So, by the way, I left out the part Bert Keeley wrote me, said, I'm the guy from the birthday party. I'd love to tell you the real story. So I got on a zoom with him yesterday and heard the entire story as I just described it. So, in fact, what happened was this. Apple developed this Multitouch technology in 2004. In 2005, they started working on a tablet. It was going to be a Mac, a Mac tablet that used the multitouch technology. Then the world started putting music players into phones. And Jobs is like, oh, man, there goes our ipod business. Unless we're the one who does a phone with music built in, we're putting the tablet aside, we're dropping that. We're going full tilt on the iPhone. So that came out in 2007. Then this dinner happened, and he said, let's redo, resurrect the tablet project that we forgot about and start it up again. And that's what became the iPad. So the problem is, I've already published my book the Wrong Way. This really bugged me. I really wanted this book to be right. So many of these people I interviewed, so many said, dude, you're the keeper of the flame. You are the documentarian. This has to be right. So if you can believe it, I learned from Simon and Schuster that we can do a new version of the audiobook and a new version of the ebook like that. We just push it out and in your app you'll get a notification that says there's a new version of Apple the first 50 years. So we redid that over the weekend. I rerecorded those two things and moved the things into the correct chronology. And then there's the matter of the printed book. As it turns out, we are heading toward. We're running out of copies, so we will probably be doing a reprint. So I sent those in last night to the publisher. So those two pages will now be updated with the correct story and all will be well. Thank you and good night.

Somebody I once read about said artists ship. And so you're certainly shipping that forward.

I mean, that's a really long in the weeds story. But it was really important to me. I just could not reconcile how everyone could have gotten the story so wrong. And now I kind of get it. There were two attempts to do the iPad and this story. The author of the Steve Jobs book put in the wrong place and instead of putting it in 2007 where it really happened. So I'm happy to put that one right.

Well, I love your commitment to accuracy, David. I think it's so important when you're writing kind of a definitive history of a company. So that's something that I appreciated throughout the whole book. But as we get close to the end of our time, I want to ask you a big picture question about the leadership of Apple. So Tim Cook, I think has some parallels to John Scully and you tell me if I'm wrong. Both of them are kind of riding on the coattails of some Jobs led innovation. So you have the Macintosh before Scully. The Macintosh as you mentioned earlier, wasn't successful at first, but Scully really takes it to new heights. And then you have the iPhone, of course, and the iPad before Cook becomes CEO. And the iPhone even, you know, was successful, but it wasn't the success that it became under Tim Cook. Both of them are. John Scully and Tim Cook are not really product people. John Scully came from Pepsi. He's a marketing guy. And Tim Cook is an operations guy. And self admits that he's not a product guy. I think as you talked about earlier with the Newton, John Scully was trying to kind of be a product guy, but it was. He wasn't essentially a technology person from the get go. Tim Cook has never tried. But do you see parallels between the tenure of John Scully and the tenure of Tim Cook? What qualities do you think they have in common? And given how after John Scully left under Spindler and Emilio, things kind of crashed and burned when we were no longer going off of those Jobs coattails at the beginning, do you think there's a risk with the next CEO transition of something similar?

I think there are parallels and God damn it, I wish I'd thought of that when I was writing the book. That's your thought, but I wish it were mine. It was John Scully. We were talking about how he's underappreciated. I mean, he saved the Mac by opening it up. Like the Mac did not become a big hit until the Mac 2 introduced slots and color. And the Mac SE stood for system expansion, that it had a slot, you could attach SCSI devices to it. And those happened under Scully. So that's what really rescued the Mac from Jobs big mistake, which was making it a closed system in the same way that Tim Cook is, you know, milk squeezing a lot more juice out of the products that Apple already had, namely the iPhone. I don't think that's. I mean, I know it was really exciting that Apple under Steve Jobs used to do a new, whole new platform, roughly every three years, iMac, iPad, iPod, you know, that was exciting. I'm not sure it was sustainable. Like, remember, Steve Jobs came along that time at the same time as the confluence of Chinese manufacturing and miniaturization of components. And don't forget a public that was now willing to accept technology, whereas technology used to be scary and intimidating. So Jobs benefited from all that. But Tim Cook has developed the Apple silicon, which is totally in the weeds and nerdy but unbelievably profound in the battery life and the power we now get from our phones and our laptops. Tim Cook is the one who's taken the Apple into the direction of medical devices. I mean, the watch now detects atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, early detection of Parkinson's that they're working on, snoring detection. Even the, even the AirPods now have heart rate detection. The watch can detect your blood oxygen level. How does it know the concentration of oxygen in your blood? Like it's detecting problems with your heart, your brain, your lungs, while sitting on your wrist, which is some spectacular triangulation AI technology right there. And it's saving a lot of lives. And he's doing all of this while preserving privacy. Right. Keeping it locked on the phone. So the Tim Cook Apple is not doing successful new hardware platform and the AirPods are both basically accessories for the iPhone. The Vision Pro is not selling the Apple car spent $10 billion in 10 years on that and ultimately abandoned it. But, but, but it doesn't mean that they're not innovating. Right. They're just innovating in other ways. Services, software, AI, medical, silicon.

Excellent. So final substantive question here, David. And one of the reviewers who picked up the book said that they were at first afraid this was going to be a product dossier and through all the products and they were pleasantly surprised when instead it covered the interregnum, it covered the early personalities, the CEOs that you may have never heard of. We have a lot of mid, well, we have a lot of young to mid career professionals who listen to the show. It's called Business Books and Company. You know, we're looking for different lessons from these leaders that you profiled so well. And I'm wondering, you know, which of them do you think really have the most informative trajectories for our audience at any level of Apple when you covered it?

Right.

Chris Espinosa was there for 50 years. You know Jony, I've is the design luminary for Apple 2.0. The list goes on. You know, who would you suggest, you know, who can people early in their careers learn the most from, from the characters in Apple's history.

You know, the culture of Apple is, is this business of striving for excellence. And this is really painful for me to say because it sounds like such a cliche. Every company says we strive for excellence. But like the question is, do you really have there never been a time in your business where you said that would cost too much or that would take too long? I bet there have been times when you did that. Apple just doesn't do that. They just go and wait and spend until it's right. That's why Apple is, I mean Apple introduced so many things, the digital camera, WI fi, the mouse, CD burning, the laser printer that they didn't invent. Right. But what they did do is they waited until it was excellent, they perfected it, they took the time and the money. So if you're asking about one person, I would say probably Jony, I've, I spent an amazing day with him talking for the book and he said the most profound thing. Two things really. One is he said, I said, but every company says we make the finest phone, we make the finest tablet and he goes, do they. Have you ever really heard Google or Microsoft or Samsung say, we make the finest phone in the world? I don't think they actually say that because they couldn't look at themselves in the mirror. We do. We really strive to make the finest in the world. And the other thing he said, and this is in relation to Jobs's weird thing about making sure the circuit board looks nice, a component that no one's even going to see. Johnny said you sense care even if you can't see care. And what he means is that if you slaved and obsessed over the excellence of every component along the way, then by the time you get the whole taking it out of the box, you, the customer, will feel how this came from a culture of excellence. So I know it sounds like a trope, I know it sounds like a cliche, but when you really ask yourself, am I, as a business person, really doing the most excellent job I can, I bet you'll find places where you're not. And that's where the culture of Apple is different. Not everybody can take it. It's an intense culture and not everybody lasts. Some people quit, but those who do tend to stay for years because they're swept away by this notion of we are here to make the finest thing in the world.

What an amazing lesson for young people. I hope some of my students are listening. David, thank you so much for coming on Business Books and Company. It's really been an honor. All three of us absolutely love the book. Of course we're going to put links to the book into your social media in the show notes, and we wish you so much luck with the continued success of the book. We know it's a New York Times bestseller, but I hope everyone picks it up.

Well, thank you so much, guys. Just unbelievably great that you read the entire book and that your questions were so profound and so thoughtful. I mean, that's excellence.

Thank you, David. All right, that was so amazing, guys, having David on the show. I want to thank David, of course, for coming on the show. The link to buy his book and check him out on social media is in the show notes. And there's also something new in the show notes. We have a newsletter where you can be informed about new episodes from Business Books and Company. Other happenings with the podcast. It's low volume, but it's high impact. Please click the link and sign up for our newsletter. Okay, David, Kevin, anything else that you want to plug and how can our listeners get in touch with you?

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