“Apple: The First 50 Years”
1. To tell you the truth, I finished this book almost a week ago, and I forgot most of what I wanted to say about it. Primarily the business insights.
Not that I don’t remember the facts. Not that I haven’t internalized the messages.
In any event, this book is not for casual fans, casual readers. If you came to the Mac after Steve Jobs returned or later, you probably won’t get far in this tome. But if you were there at the beginning…
I was not. At the very beginning. Because it was all about the Apple II.
And that lore is repeated here, the creation of the Apple I, the Apple II team’s frustration that it was considered a second class citizen whilst generating all the profits, keeping the company alive well into the Macintosh era.
But I came in in 1986. With the Mac Plus…
The original Mac was close to unusable, it only had 128kb of RAM…
Now let me see… This machine I’m running has 48 GIGS of RAM. 128kb was infinitesimal. Months later came the Fat Mac, with 512kb, but the Mac Plus had a gig of RAM. However you still had to swap floppies. The screen was still small and black and white. But if you bought in, it was a religion. Like being a fan of your favorite band, but deeper. Maybe because you were there early, you were intrigued, and you knew these machines would change the world.
Computers were not rare in 1986, but most of them were PCs…which really didn’t have an effective Windows interface until 1995. In other words, they were not very usable. They were business tools.
But what really blew up computing was AOL. Didn’t matter what platform you were on, they all worked with AOL…and people ran out and bought computers just to play.
But that was almost thirty years ago. Do today’s generations, many birthed in this century, know this?
No, just like we couldn’t fathom the introduction of television in our parents’ era.
Anyway, I had no allegiance to Apple. All I knew was I wanted to start a newsletter and needed a computer to do so. And it didn’t take much research to find out I needed a Mac, with PageMaker, and a LaserWriter.
This was a different era, not quite the hobbyist era, but the machines were not foolproof, unlike your iPad and iPhone. Not only did they crash, they might not reboot. The Mac wasn’t truly user-friendly for everybody until the introduction of Mac OS X, based on Unix with the Mach kernel.
Not that you need to know that, not that today you need to know how your car runs. But for almost all of my life, you had to have a rudimentary knowledge of how your automobile functioned, because it would break! Computers were even worse, although they rarely physically broke, they just stopped working.
And you had to figure out why.
That’s right, there was no Genius Bar, really very little tech help at all. You had to sit in front of the computer and figure out what was wrong, and it could take you hours…I found it nearly impossible to fall asleep until I’d solved the problem, gotten my computer back on the right track.
Needless to say, those are not these days.
2 So forty years ago…
Not only was there no internet, techies were considered nerds, geeks, they were not respected by the hoi polloi, who were infatuated by MTV. But once you got bitten…
I used to say it was like having a math problem on my desk. Only there was no test, I wasn’t graded, but when I figured it out the level of satisfaction…
And what the Macintosh could do, and what the PC could not!
So if you were around in those days, you’ll be intrigued, you will be riveted, because Pogue brings it all back. The system updates, which you had to go to the store at first to get. The step by step innovation. The dark years and then the renaissance.
Now this is not the first time this territory has been covered, but it has never been covered so well, because David Pogue is one of our own, he’s not only writing about the Mac, he LIVED the Mac!
The best books ever about the Mac and Mac products were authored by Pogue, and I used to buy the “Missing Manual”s and read them cover to cover. You’d be stunned how powerful these machines are, most only use a tiny faction of their ability.
And the software too.
I read all the manuals, also from cover to cover.
Do you know if you double-click the top of your window, it will shrink it down to the dock? I could list tons of tips, but most are not used and not cared about. It’s almost an insider’s game. But…
Those early days, do you remember Conflict Catcher?
All the breakthroughs and bumps in the road are catalogued by Pogue. In an upfront, breezy style. He makes Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs look like the doorstep it is. Content is secondary to readability, and Pogue is very readable. And as much as he knows to leave in, he’s not afraid of leaving a bit out. It’s a book. Made to be read from start to finish. If you do so, you’ll know Apple’s history.
But how many people need to know this?
3
Apple was the little engine that could. The true breakthrough was the iPod.
But before that, during Jobs’s hejira with NeXT…
The problem with Sculley was he was a marketer, of a completely different product. Pepsi could sit on the shelves for a while. Computers lost value every day they were held in inventory.
Also, Sculley was a publicity hog, who wrote a book and liked being perceived as a visionary, even though he was not. We see this story again and again, do not believe the hype. Which is easy to garner. Can you say “Theranos”? No, the true people to admire are those who are doing the work, whose names are out there, but oftentimes say no to press, it slows them down, never mind that the press always gets it wrong, ALWAYS! Because unlike Pogue, most writers are not familiar with the territory.
Was Jobs a terror?
Yes.
And he was milder when he came back.
But he had a vision, and he didn’t believe in consumer research. He was about the bleeding edge. A lot of this has been documented, which is why the second half of the book is less interesting.
As for Tim Cook and the players in power today…
Yes, the petty wars are delineated, but the real point is they are not superstars, they are not visionaries, those only come along once in a while.
Like a classic musician, Jobs is focused on getting it right, in a world where everybody is taught to compromise to get along, where no one wants to stand out, upset the apple cart. Jobs focuses on product, believing the rest will take care of itself.
And prior to his return and their replacement, those who sat on the board saw Apple as a traditional business. They wanted to sell it, before it cratered, before Jobs came back and reinvigorated it.
Now I remember one of the lessons I wanted to impart… Don’t underestimate expertise. We see this all the time in the music business, since you don’t need a degree to be in it, no one has any respect for those who work in it. Average citizens believe they can find talent, they can do ticketing. But again and again outsiders fail, because the expertise cannot be quantified, it is built over time, it’s something you feel, it’s something innate. Even as simple as picking the hits. I’d say at least ninety percent of what people e-mail me, saying it’s great and deserves further attention, does not. I’m not saying they can’t like it, but they don’t have the seasoning and the vision to know what will spread to the public.
But it’s not only in music, in politics people have contempt for expertise. There’s this belief everybody can do everything. Then why did it take Steve Jobs to come up with the iPod and iPhone?
Breaking rules all the while. Getting rid of legacy ports on computers, getting rid of the physical keyboard on the iPhone. People are attached to the past, and if you’re busy serving them you’re going to be left behind. Jobs knew the iPhone was going to destroy the iPod, but rather than keep the music player alive, Jobs insisted on pushing the envelope, he was not willing to rest on his laurels, giving competitors a window to leapfrog Apple.
Hell, me-too is everywhere. When was the last time you heard a successful record that was truly surprising, completely different? Labels don’t sign those acts anymore, it’s too heavy a lift. They want it easy. Just like the movie studios, whose lunch was eaten by Netflix. Let me see… You raise the prices, you make fewer movies in obvious genres and then you complain that the theatre experience is dying? Believe me, people will show up for something unique and different. Then again, something might have to percolate in the marketplace for a while to catch on, but these flicks play in theatres for a minute and are then available on TV, which is a better experience.
User experience. That was Jobs’s main focus. But in most avenues of life, this is denied. Purveyors are trying to whittle down and control human behavior, keep it in the past, which is a fool’s errand.
4
The press is all over Apple’s 50th.
But it’s kind of like a lifetime achievement award… Once you get that, you’re usually done.
I get a new iPhone every year. But recently, the changes have been miniscule, almost irrelevant.
Apple is making a ton of money on services, and maybe the days of hardware breakthroughs are done, then again, the days of tech wowing us died over a decade ago, now tech is the enemy.
But the story of going from Motorola to Intel to in-house chips… Once again, the company is always thinking about the future, whereas in entertainment, everybody seems to be constantly blind-sided. Kind of like George Bush and 9-11. Who could envision they’d fly planes into buildings?
Then again, entertainment executives are all about lifestyle, accumulating and displaying. The company is something to milk.
Oh, I just remembered another thing that struck me… This happened again and again, but foremost with the original Macintosh team.
Yes, Jobs asked for the theoretically unachievable, which they always delivered, but once the Mac was released…most of the members of the team were so burned out, they couldn’t work for months, if ever at this level again. Most left Apple. None set the world on fire once again. They’d been to the mountaintop, they’d experienced the ride and the rewards, they just weren’t up for doing it again, like a hit act that cannot create hits anymore.
There are a lot of lessons in Pogue’s book. Not that he bats you over the head with them. But almost no one is going to read this book. They might buy it, but the average punter just doesn’t care about the minutiae of tech, the history of creation. Kind of like cars. You may love Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, but how many people want to go back seventy or a hundred years and hear about the arguments and decisions regarding what kind of engines and suspensions to use, the failures…
However, the thing about Apple is unlike any single car brand, unlike any musician, period, the company’s products and services touch a broad swath of the public. Sure, Android might be bigger internationally, but all the innovation is on the iPhone first, which has over fifty percent market share in the U.S.
And now with the MacBook Neo, Macs are no longer expensive. The last hurdle has been eliminated, you can enter the cult on the cheap.
And once you do…
You get locked in.
And the love for Apple sustains. This is not a musical act or TV show that ultimately peters out. We expect Apple to continue to deliver, to lead us into the future.
Did it miss AI?
I’m not even gonna get into it. Could be their philosophy of licensing turns out to be the best.
But one thing is for sure, Apple is not a one trick pony. So many use their products and they think they know what goes on inside the gold mine. In truth they don’t. And, in truth, they don’t really care that much, they have no need to know.
But if you do…
P.S. Don’t buy the e-book unless you’re going to read it on an iPad… There are numerous color photos.
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Originally published by Bob Lefsetz at the Leftsetz Letter
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