Apple: trying to think different for 50 years

April 1 marks 50 years since the founding of the Apple Computer Company, and we're diving into some of the company's lesser-known stories.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ira 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. The 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.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much.

• 0:44Ira Flatow?

  Always good to talk to you. You know, 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?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  They really are. And one of the ways is that their mission, love them or hate them, has never changed. I mean, 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.

• 1:18Ira Flatow?

  All right, 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?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  It wasn't founded in a garage.

• 1:31Ira Flatow?

  Next topic. Now, tell us about that.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  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 mini-computers. 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.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  You could hook it up to a TV. You know, 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 sell this." And so that is the beginning of their long-term collaboration.

• 2:41Ira Flatow?

  So the Woz was the brains behind the hardware and Jobs was the marketing person?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that happened over and over. I mean, 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." And so they did.

• 3:14Ira Flatow?

  Well, you know, on paper, Apple has a third founder, Ronald Wayne, right? What happened to Ronald Wayne?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  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 rapporteux. 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, like, Jobs was this long-haired, stringy, stinky teenager.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  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 One. And Ron Wayne did not have a good comfort level with that. He'd been burnt on entrepreneurial ventures before. So 12 days later, he unsigned himself from the partnership. They paid him $800.

• 4:31Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  And today, he said, "You know, 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."

• 4:41Ira Flatow?

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

• 4:49Speaker 01

  I mean, Jobs, there's no one like Jobs, never has been. This guy, I mean, John Sculley, his CEO, told me that he was bipolar. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the earlier engineers on the first Macintosh, told me that, you know, 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.

• 5:34Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, so how much of the Apple story then, is the Steve Jobs story?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Really a lot. I mean, to this day, there would be no Apple what it is without Jobs.

• 5:45Ira Flatow?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  When Jobs died, he told Tim Cook, "You know, as you take over the company, don't ask what would Steve do, just do what's right." But in fact, I mean, 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.

• 6:20Ira Flatow?

  And people talk about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, his, right? His ability to make you believe in a product.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  He was unbelievable. He did it to me!

• 6:33Ira Flatow?

  He did?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. One time I reviewed a new version of iMovie that they had come up... 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 [__] we do here at Apple, do you?" I'm like, "What are you talking about?" And he goes, "You don't know what people use this for. Nobody edits videos anymore." And I said, "Steve, I do.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  I have 100 tapes of home movies and someday I'm gonna edit them." He's like, "You're not gonna edit them. Those things are gonna sit in a drawer till you're 60." And he was right.

• 7:26Ira Flatow?

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  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 Park, 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. You know, they weren't overlapping, and you couldn't move them around, but they were windows.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  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 are 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 that you could make diagonal lines without jagges.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:27Ira 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?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  You know, I think it's a third thing. Apple really didn't invent much. You know, 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.

• 10:11Ira 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, you know, it's got no buttons on it, it's a totally different idea?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and it was controversial in-house. Jobs knew that, you know, at the time, Jobs' big business was the iPod, right? They were selling hundreds of millions of music players a year. And everyone was saying, you know, someday they're going to merge the music player with the phone, and we should be ahead of that. So Jobs, 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 cellphone. But meanwhile, there was this other sort of Skunk Works project that had developed the multi-touch, all-glass screen, all-glass phone.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And in the end, they sort of had a bake-off between the iPod cellphone and this much more difficult, advanced, multi-touch screen concept. And Jobs said, okay, we're going for the multi-touch screen.

• 11:23Ira Flatow?

  And then they moved into the iPad. Was the iPad an idea before the iPhone?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right. The, 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 gotta 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 gonna do a tablet, and we're gonna do it right." So, in the middle of that project, the iPhone project came along, and Jobs said, "Let's

• 12:13Speaker 01

  put the tablet on the shelf and do the phone first, because that's the more urgent business case."

• 12:20Ira Flatow?

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

• 12:31Speaker 02

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• 13:15Speaker 02

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• 13:29Speaker 03

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Bose Junior Foundation.

• 13:37Ira Flatow?

  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?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  That's all part of Tim Cook's idea. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, Cook became the new CEO. And, you know, both as an author and as a fan, you know, 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, you know, the iPod, and then the iPad, and the iMac, and the iPhone, and iMovie. That doesn't happen anymore. They have, you know, 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,

• 14:35Speaker 01

  hugely successful. I mean, 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.

• 14:50Ira Flatow?

  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 skunkworks that work on those things behind the scenes?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  They do. And that's one of the 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 looked kind of like a beautiful, white, symmetrical, modern-day version of like a Volkswagen bus. And in the end, after a decade...

• 15:50Speaker 01

  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 ultimately, so Tim Cook killed it. That was, that was the biggest one, but there really are little projects all the time.

• 16:04Ira Flatow?

  So there are a lot of other things that just didn't go anywhere.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I got to see, when I was researching this book, I got to see the Apple fax machine.

• 16:12Ira Flatow?

  The Apple fax? There's a new idea.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Product Paladin. I, 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, it didn't.

• 16:26Ira Flatow?

  Did Apple, after Steve had passed away, did Apple build something that Steve said, "I don't ever want to build this"?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Oh, many things. Yeah. First of all, he never wanted this whole catalog of iPhones, right? He, he always was a believer in very simple model lineups. And, and also look at the size of the iPhone today compared to the original one. The original one was like 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, a dollar per song, radically changed the music industry with that idea, with the iTunes Store. And he hated the idea of renting your music, of, of the Spotify model, paying a monthly

• 17:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:27Ira Flatow?

  Right. The book is entitled "The First 50 Years: Any Crystal Ball You Can Gaze Into for the Future"?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  There have been a number of leaks to, to journalists about the next step, which is clearly going to be glasses. So there are two forms of, of smart glasses already on the market from companies like Google and Meta. There are 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.

• 18:13Ira Flatow?

  Are they going to call that the Borg model?

• 18:18Ira Flatow?

  I do. Well, David, thank you for taking time to be with us today. David Poga, longtime 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. Great to join you, Ira. This podcast was produced by Charles Berkquist. 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.