David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat, thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard. My guest today is John Gruber, Raconteur, Apple aficionado, podcast host and sole proprietor of Daring Fireball. On the podcast, I talk with John about the fascinating 40-year history of Apple's developer relations, how almost going bankrupt in the '90s shaped today's control-focused approach and why we might need an App Store 3.0 reset. Hey, John, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast.
John Gruber:
Well, you've been on my show. I hope to have you on my show again soon, so it's the least I can do. I'm happy to be here.
David Barnard:
So today, I want to talk Apple Kremlinology, which I think is maybe a great term. I just threw it out there. Apple is such a unique organization that... And for most developers, it's like our most important partner. And I'm doing air quotes for those listening on the podcast. And I don't think a lot of people understand Apple, and I think a lot of how people interact with Apple, what they think of Apple is shaped by just not understanding them, which is maybe on Apple. But that's what I wanted to talk about today was better understanding Apple. And I think of all the people to have this conversation with, it's going to be really fun to have it with you.
John Gruber:
I appreciate that and only because, and I hate to flatter myself. I really do. I really do. I try to stay as humble as possible. I feel like that's what keeps me in the game. But understanding Apple to me is maybe one of the top three things I have. I really....
David Barnard:
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
John Gruber:
And there's always been an intuitive, oh, I love this company vibe fit and some other rolls of the dice of the way my life could have worked out surely on many of the other rolls of the dice. I end up working at Apple for some amount of time, possibly a very short amount of time, because every time I've ever had a job in my life where I actually am not self-employed has not lasted all that long. So probably not long, but one of my earliest memories, I think it was either fifth or sixth grade, which was early '80s, probably like 1983, '84, I just remember reading a story about Apple Computer and I knew at the time that I liked Apple Computers better than other company's computers, and I loved computers.
But I remember reading a story about the company and reading that all of the employees just show up to work in sneakers and jeans and T-shirts and that they wear clever T-shirts and they make. Every time they start a new project, the first job is to print up T-shirts for the team for the new project, and then they wear them to work. And I remember thinking, that's awesome because I don't want to wear a freaking suit and tie to work. And I remember telling my dad this and my dad telling me, "John, there is no way that a major computer company lets the people show up to work in jeans and T-shirts." And I was like, "No, I'm telling you, dad, I read it in a magazine. It's true."
David Barnard:
That's awesome. And then not to flutter myself, but while we're... We should have scripted this, and I should have done this for you and you should have done this for me, but I relied on ChatGPT pretty heavily to do research for the show because I wanted to go really in-depth in the history of Apple and their relationships with developers. And last night, I'm getting through my notes and ChatGPT says, "Three of the prominent voices in App Store related topics are John Gruber, Ben Thompson and David Barnard." And I don't know if it knew it was me and was freaking trying to flatter me or whatever, but I mean, similar to you in a way that the App Store is something I'm unreasonably passionate about. I have an emotional attachment to the App Store and care so deeply about it. And in part, and you know I've discussed this, I was a recording engineer and I knew that was kind of a dead end as far as having a family and being able to provide and stuff like that.
But I was a huge Apple nerd, so I got a 17-inch PowerBook in 2003. So my Apple journey begins a little later. I mean, I used them in college and I played with a original Mac in the '80s, but my real Apple fanboyism started in 2002, 2003. So I jumped right into the App Store in 2008 thinking, "Okay, this is an opportunity to build a real career that's going to provide for my family." And it did. I'm 17 years into owning an app business and I care so deeply about the store and then also care so deeply about Apple. And so everything we're going to talk about today, it's like you being one of the people who cares the most about Apple, who's outside Apple, and me, one of the people who cares the most about the App Store outside of Apple, I think is the two right people to have this kind of conversation. And maybe we should have had Ben on and to have a third voice, but...
John Gruber:
There are certain things that I just remember which years they were, and I just remember that 2007 iPhone no App Store, 2008 App Store comes out. 2009, it really takes off and coincides really with the go-go years of Twitter. And that's absolutely 100%, there's no confusion. I mean, maybe you sent me an email at daringfireball.net or something, but where I remember getting to know you was on Twitter, and I just remember like it's one of the great privileges of my position doing what I do with Daring Fireball where it's like, "Oh, I'm going to get to know this guy," and we'd at each other on Twitter about App Store issues, but I was like, "This guy," I could sense both your profound enthusiasm for it and the way that it was making you... It wasn't making a fanboy of the App Store where no matter what you wanted to say, "Oh, I love the App Store. So no matter what, I'm going to make my conclusion, whatever changes they make are great."
Your enthusiasm was such that you're like, "I want to understand every single thing about this to the deepest degree." And again, it's sort of like a laziness where I'm like, "Oh, if I become friends with this guy," and I've got a Rolodex of people who are experts on whatever, it could be AppKit, could be UIKit, could be the App Store, could be... And you're at the top of the list for the App store and have been since 2009 and probably should have been since 2008. But I just remember, 2009, you were just a key follow on Twitter for App Store related stuff, and it was such a fascinating time, explosive, just an explosive time.
David Barnard:
Well, and I was a Gruber fanboy, and you linking to my app in the fall of 2008, I think wasn't part of turning point. I mean, they were key people who helped me along the way, including people inside Apple. And I remember vividly...
John Gruber:
It was the Launcher app, right? What was it called?
David Barnard:
No, no, no, this was 2008. You linked to my mileage logging app. When the App Store launched, there was this terrible Windows phone ish, horrible user interface, no kind of Mac or iOS interface paradigm, a mileage log. They got there first, which is still eats me to this day. 17 years later, I missed the launch of the App Store because Apple did not approve my developer account. And so a month later, I release a mileage log, it was like we follow the iOS paradigms, I mean, looking back, I don't ever feel like I had the best taste, but I didn't have... It was brown and it was not the prettiest or most, but it was iOS. We used the paradigms of iOS. We built a native app. And so you link to that in the fall of 2008, and it was a turning point.
John Gruber:
Well, I'm happy, I remember that. And that was the other thing that I remember about you is it wasn't just that you were obsessive about the App Store, is that you actually had skin in the game, and that you clearly... Again, I'm not just trying to butter you up here, but no, but there was at that time, at the very highest level when they first announced the iPhone and said, "Hey," and underneath it was one of the... It wasn't called a Bento box at the time. They did the slides in a different style. But at Steve Jobs original introduction, they had a bunch of things on a slide and they said Cocoa, that everything Apple had done for the original iPhone, before the iPhone, before the App Store, and before they announced, famously took them several months before they said, "Okay, we're going to do an SDK," but they said that they were using Cocoa.
There's like a five-minute podcast Merlin Mann did at Macworld Expo talking to me and Jason Snell, the day of the keynote on the floor, it was like a five-minute interview with me and Snell by Merlin Mann. And Snell and I were like, "Apple didn't say much about this Cocoa thing, but presumably at some point, it's just probably not ready yet. They're going to open up APIs and this is going to be huge." I mean, this was hours after the keynote when we were still euphoric about the whole thing because everybody was sort of looking forward to just an iPod phone, right?
David Barnard:
Right.
John Gruber:
And it was so much more, it felt like my mind had gotten significantly bigger during the keynote. My brain had grown because the realm of possibility of personal computing was suddenly much larger than I thought. But in that initial moment, most developers were thinking was, "Well, that's fantastic if they're Xocoa APIs," and UIKits slightly different than AppKit, but every single AppKit going back to next developer I know looked at the initial UIKit APIs and was like, "Oh, all right, this is different, but I know this, this is very familiar." But the idea that developers had was how do you take ideas that are good Mac apps and put them on the phone? And for many apps, that was a great idea and Apple itself did that, right? Safari, mail, how do you take mail and make a version that fits on the phone?
But the opportunity that I think Mac developers didn't think of right away is what sort of ideas only make sense for a phone, a little pocket, 3.5 inch screen device that's with you all the time. That wouldn't make sense on a Mac and a mileage tracker is exactly that sort of idea. That's what I remember hitting me about that app in 2008. Like, oh, this would be stupid on the Mac. What are you going to do? Take your MacBook or PowerBook? I forget what, I guess they were MacBook set by 2008, but what are you going to do? Take a laptop with you in your car everywhere and log your gas and mileage? No, but for something that would replace what you would've done in a pocket notebook, that's a perfect idea. Obviously, people want this. And that's where I feel like you were ahead of me and I'm like, "I got to follow this guy because he's thinking about things that are phone first."
David Barnard:
Right. Yeah. Well, enough navel-gazing. I'm blushing. But I appreciate all of that. And again, just the perfect person to have this kind of conversation with, which I've wanted to have this conversation for a while in service of the community of... In my day job at RevenueCat, and I do still build apps on the side, so I'm still an indie developer, I was looking at my LinkedIn the other day and 17 years at Contrast and still going strong, still running my weather app on the side and stuff. So at my day job at RevenueCat, I interface with a ton of developers and a lot of them don't care one lick about Apple, in fact, I mean, the growing hostility, people who've never built an app before will book an office hours call with me and say, "Screw Apple, screw them in their 30%."
There's no care for Apple as a company or the products or anything like that. And so I wanted to do this podcast to give some of that history. I was actually thinking as I was preparing these notes, it's almost a book at some point, the history of the App Store and how it shaped the world. I mean, so many decisions that Apple made, big and small, literally did shape how things happen, and we'll get into some of that. But I wanted to step all the way back, and again, in doing the research for this over the weekend, I saw something that really surprised me, and I think I knew this, but I hadn't seen the numbers. And that is that the three top executives at Apple whose teams work on the app store. So I think maybe, and Apple is famously secretive about who does what and who reports to who and those kinds of things. But from my understanding...
John Gruber:
They're secretive about everything, David.
David Barnard:
Everything, yeah. Yeah. Something like 90% of the people who interface with developers in the App Store who work on the App Store report up to three executives. Greg Joswiak, who joined Apple in 1986.
John Gruber:
Yeah, I think right out of college. He went to University of Michigan and went right to Apple.
David Barnard:
Phil Schiller, who joined Apple in 1987, and Eddy Cue who joined Apple in 1989. And so to really understand Apple and how they interact with developers and how they receive the developer community, you really do have to go all the way back to the 1980s when these three key executives joined and started, and each of them have their different role in developer relations over time. But going back to that 1984 release of the Mac and these early days of developer relations between Apple and developers, I think is so fascinating, and one of the things, again, I didn't eve... I knew, but seeing it again in black and white, just how instrumental Microsoft was in those early days to Apple that two years ahead of the 1984 release of the Mac, Microsoft had agreed to build products for this new platform. And then specifically, and again, never heard this before, but Bill Gates was kind of an Apple fanboy in some of the early days before they got really contentious.
And I read this history piece about the history of Apple that said Gates would show up to events, Macworld and other events with Macintosh shirts, he would wear a Macintosh. I mean, can you even imagine Bill Gates in the '80s wearing Macintosh T-shirt? It was just such a different era. But then over time, developer relations started to get a bit contentious. What do you remember? I mean, you were, gosh, like 6, 8, 10 at the time when all this happened. And I was five. But we both read a lot about the history. So what do you recall? And then what do you remember from having read upon all this.
John Gruber:
Too young to have experienced those years extemporaneously, but from what I've read, one of the key superpowers that Gates had, and I think it's true, I think this is not an original observation, but no matter how big, and no matter even... I mean, I guess eventually after, when you get closer to 50 years, which Apple and Microsoft are at, but maybe closer to a century after entire original generations have clearly all died off, it fades away. But all companies in all fields are just infused with the personalities of their founders. And one of the things that Gates infused in Microsoft was an amazing willingness or just natural ability. I don't even think it was something he did purposefully. I think it's just the way his mind worked is he was always thinking what could be and was not attached to the way things were. The whole name Microsoft, the whole idea that revolution of the company was, "Hey, we could make a company."
This was him and Paul Allen that just focuses on software and had no plans in those early days to make their own computer. And all of the action in the late '70s at that moment of the PC revolution, the late '70s and the early '80s was on the company's making computers, Apple and Commodore and Texas Instruments, you name it, IBM, once they made the PC and Microsoft's key insight was, "Hey, software is incredibly valuable." And at the time, that idea alone was revolutionary. It was absolutely revolutionary because everybody else thought the only thing that matters is computers and computers were all absurdly expensive. Just look at the memory that was in those computers. The Commodore 64 was called the 64, not because it was 64 bit, but because it had 64 kilobytes of RAM, right? That was the 64, and it wasn't cheap, cheap.
And the idea was software, you just copy, it was just ones and zeros. You could just make copies. And the idea that no, no software is worth paying for was a revolution. And I think that's why Gates could have such incredible enthusiasm for something like some other company's computer because everything they did was for somebody else's computer. They didn't make computers and they didn't really have a platform. And so I think Gates recognized early that Apple made better computers and that they were onto something. And he clearly, from the outset, had the mindset of the complete opposite of, I forget his name, but the 1960s era, IBM CEO who said, "I think there's a market in the world for six or seven computers."
Because the thinking in that era was, well, the US military will want one, maybe like the US IRS, and there'll be one great supercomputer for universities to share. Whereas Gates was really thinking early on, "Oh no, there should be computers in every house." But he wasn't thinking that Microsoft would own a platform. But then when the opportunity came with DOS and they saw the opportunity they had by owning MS-DOS and being the company that provided it, it changed their thinking completely to instead of, oh, we'll make software for anybody's computer. We're going to make a platform and we'll still make some software for other platforms, but we really want to steer everybody to our platform even though we don't make the computers.
David Barnard:
One of the interesting footnotes in this as well is that Apple had a similar idea of we're building this platform, we need to make sure there's software on it. And so they built Mac, right? MacPaint, MacDraw, and a bunch of other apps. And again, something I didn't realize until doing all this research was that in 1986, they stopped bundling those because it was competitive with third-party developers. And man, I mean, these days with sherlocking and Apple building an app for everything, I mean, even most recently building an invite app like building a sports app, Apple has over the last 17 years of the App Store gone deeper and deeper and further and further into competing directly with third-party developers.
But back here in the '80s, they were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don't want to squash the potential for third-party developers to build for this platform that we have. So these apps that we built for our own platform that we have previously bundled," I mean, again, at some point maybe when Schiller or Jos or one of these guys retires, we'll do this again and get the inside scoop on some of the deeper thinking behind this. But they stopped bundling, and then in 1987, they spun all those apps off into Claris, a subsidiary of Apple to have them at little bit more of an arm's length. It's specifically to not interfere with third-party developers. And it's still fascinating to go all the way back to the '80s and see such a different Apple that they recognized the power of developers in the platform and were actively doing things at that time to make sure they didn't compete. They didn't make it a non-starter for people to build these kind of apps for the Macintosh platform, which is just fascinating.
John Gruber:
And it was about a decade, I would say maybe '86, '87, and those are the years where I was there as a teenager into college, and '86 to '95, '96 or so was the decade where Apple was very hands-off about first-party apps and it made sense. And one of the areas of contention, it's sort of like a heartbreak, and I forget the exact details. I know Andy Hertzfeld's wonderful, wonderful... I think there's a story about it on Folklore.org, but you can look it up. But there were two basics, the basic programming language for the Mac in the very early '80s and Apple Basic was much better and could let you do Macintosh-like things like pop open a dialog box, which you think like, well, of course, why would you want to have a programming environment for the Mac that couldn't pop open a dialog box? But that was revolutionary at the time, and Microsoft had their basic, and as like a, let's keep Microsoft happy, Apple sort of squashed their own in-house basic, which was a much better programming environment for the Macintosh.
So as not to step on the toes of Microsoft Basic, which was more of a oh, character based sort of text interface basic, where you could write the same Microsoft Basic program and run it on the Mac and run it on any other computer that had Microsoft Basic. And that's just one example of that sort of thinking and this sort of thing that led them to spin off the initial, which they had to do again because nobody knew how to write these graphical user interface programs. It often comes up and people, you have to Google the images to believe it, but the original Macintosh keyboard didn't have arrow keys because they wanted to force developers and users to use the mouse as opposed to almost all other computers at the time didn't even have mice. So there was the Macintosh, which had a mouse and other computers which had no pointer interface, just a keyboard interface.
So you'd be like, "What do you want to do in the computer?" And it would present a text menu and you'd use arrow keys to go up and down. I want to open existing file down. I want to create a new file down. I want to manage my files up, down, left, right. So to force developers to make programs that were mouse driven, mouse pointer driven. Apple didn't even put arrow keys on the original Macintosh keyboard, which imagine the frustration editing text now. So if you wanted to, you could backspace, there was a delete key, but if you wanted to go back a word or two, you had to go take your hands off the keyboard, go to the mouse and click where you wanted to go. But I understand why that didn't last, but I also understand the thinking at the time to break people's habits because as much as they thought this is a computer for the rest of us, which was their slogan, and this will be the way that most people in the future learn to use computers.
Right now, the market is people who already know how to use computers, but what they know from the existing computers isn't the way this computer works. And so they had to make apps like MacWrite and MacPaint and MacDraw, and then two years in, they're like, "Ah, we're kind of squashing the market. What we really need is a thriving third party market, so let's go hands off." And then for the next decade, the Mac really didn't have many first party programs. If you just went to the store and bought a brand new Macintosh in 1991 or '92, you got TextEdit or it was called SimpleText at the time. There were very few apps that were built in. There was no built-in Contacts app. You didn't have all these things that you would think, "Oh, how do you have a computer without an address book?" Well, the idea was that whole thing was a third party opportunity.
David Barnard:
And this is a great example of why I wanted to have this conversation, and maybe we'll pull on some of these threads as we go through. One thing to understand about Apple and how they operate today is that they've had success in doing those sorts of things. And so when you look at Apple TV that famously launched, and Apple tried to get people to develop games for it, but you could only use the Apple remote, and it was Apple as with the keyboard not having arrow keys, it was, we don't want people to require a gaming controller to build games, so we're going to force them to use remote. And games sucked, and I was so pissed at Apple, it took them, what, three or four years to finally enable controller support. And by that time, it was just so clear that Apple TV was not going to be a gaming platform, maybe could have been more of a gaming platform had they done it, maybe it was the right choice, whatever.
And then look at the Vision Pro. Two years ago, I was so frustrated that Apple didn't release motion track controllers like what you have on the Meta Quest, but why did they do that? It goes all the way back to 1984 and not having the arrow keys, it was, "Hey, we're introducing a new user interface paradigm, a new user experience, and we want to force developers to build apps that use hand gestures and eye tracking and not controllers." Now, two years later, they just announced at WABC that PlayStation VR controller support in Vision Pro, but this is two years after the fact, and I was so frustrated two years ago. But this is one of those things when you look back, you better understand why they make the decisions they make. They have a long history of making those kinds of decisions going all the way back to the '80s and forcing developers into the path that they think is best for the platform is just so fascinating.
John Gruber:
I keep repeating it. I'm more bullish on visionOS as a platform than most commentators, and I keep drawing the analogy to the original Macintosh, the original Macintosh in 1984, I know the number off the top of my head because I bring it up all the time. It was $2,500, which inflation adjusted is give or take right now, like $7,200. There was only one config. There was no option to get more RAM. There was no storage, you used floppy drives. So $2,500, it was 7,200 equivalent today about twice the cost of a Vision Pro, very expensive. It's sold so poorly and so under their expectations that it was the impetus for driving jobs out of the company. And in the whole, people don't know the history, like how in the world did Apple kick Steve Jobs out of the company? The real reasons were mostly personality conflicts, and that yes, of course, he did not work well when there was somebody else, John Sculley from Pepsi as the CEO who Jobs, the founder, ostensibly reported to, of course, Jobs did not work well as anything but the CEO, and that's ultimately the reason.
But in terms of going to the board and having reasons other than this guy's a pain in my ass, to force him out, the sales of the Mac were the... And again, it was expensive and Apple couldn't really afford the fact that it was a bit of a flop in 1984, 1985, but the PC press of the time took it as, "Hey, this whole graphical user interface thing, it's clever, but it's a gimmick. This isn't how real computer users want to use a computer. Nobody wants to take their hands off the keyboard and use a mouse all the time. It's a waste of memory to be drawing all these windows and stuff like this." That was all proven wrong. The Mac was the right idea for the future of personal computing, but it needed at least four or five years before you're like, "Holy, shit, this is like a thriving platform that's revolutionizing certain industries like desktop publishing."
David Barnard:
Yeah. And as a 40, almost 50-year-old company, I guess next year it's 50 years, somewhere around there. Apple's patience is remarkable. This is another thing that I continually get wrong, and I think a lot of people get wrong. 100% agree on the Vision Pro. It is a phenomenal piece of hardware. It is an incredible platform for experimenting with the future, even if it's flawed and even if there are problems. But Apple's patient, and clearly they have AR stuff in the labs that Cook and others have played with. There's been reporting recently about all Tim Cook thinks about is getting to this AR glasses future or whatever it might be.
And the Vision Pro is that first step along the way, and Apple is very patient, as much as people pan it as few units as they sold, even if it's been less successful as they internally hope for, they are nothing if not a patient company that's going to keep plugging away at these things. Because look how it turned out for the Mac, like you said, it took four or five years. Well, I mean, we're two years into the Vision Pro. They've got time and they've got cash to wait around and they've got the experience of building these platforms over decades, not making sure something is a hit in months and days.
John Gruber:
This is only based on observation, but I think I almost see how can somebody refute this is that their thinking is basically if their projection of where a hit AR/VR, let's just put aside whether the first hit product in the category will be AR or VR, but it'll probably be AR, right? VR is just too weird where my definition of the difference, the broad difference here is if the device is off, powered off, can you see anything or do you see through glasses, right? If it's glasses that when the device is at 0% battery powered off, you still see through the lenses, that's AR. And if it's like Vision Pro where it's off, it's like blindfolds, that's VR, it's probably AR, but let's just say it doesn't matter. Put that aside, that it'll take till around 2030 to have a product at a price and a feature set and a battery life that's compelling to explode in popularity and that people will be like, "I got to get one of those."
If it's 2030, when that's going to come out, what's the right way to approach the market? And I think the people who are laughing at Vision Pro and saying, "It's $3,500, nobody's bought one. They've only sold hundreds of thousands, not even a million, whatever." Apple should have waited until then to release a product, and then boom, here's the first thing. And the iPhone was sort of like that, right? And the iPhone was right out of the gate. Yes, it was a little more expensive, but the first iPhone was incredibly useful, totally credible device. And I know it didn't sell in great quantities compared to today's numbers, but as somebody who bought one, it was like, "Yeah, this is real." And it's not like I'm buying a product that hints at a future. The Vision Pro is not like that. The Vision Pro is not the iPhone in 2007.
The Vision Pro today, I don't like calling it a dev kit, but it's like an enthusiast kit, which includes developers, but it's an enthusiast kit that you spend a ridiculous amount of money compared to a MacBook Air. You get a really good MacBook Air for $1,000, or you could get a really good MacBook Air for 1,300, $1,400. This is three times, four times more expensive and it's less essential to people's lives than their iPhone, which you can get a really good iPhone for seven, $800. It's different than that, but is the right strategy to wait until that hardware is out in 2030 and then start there with building a platform or is the right strategy to start building a platform around 2023, 2024, and when that hardware is finally available and there's a breakthrough in the technology and the price and the capabilities in the battery life that you've got five years of ecosystem and content behind it.
All these complaints, again, I've complained too and I'm a little surprised, but they're getting there, just in terms of having entertaining immersive content, the things like the Bono video and the adventure climbing mountains and all this stuff. They've got some stuff, you would think with their budget that they could have more, but the idea of, hey, if they're going to sell this thing for all this money, shouldn't they have more content available? Well, if 2030 is when they think this is going to explode, think of how much content they're going to have in the library by then. And I think that's what they know. There are so many similarities between this and the Macintosh in 1984, but there are also so many profound differences because Apple is so big and so pervasive in popular culture and people's lives.
And it breeds a different sentiment towards the company, which I think we're going to continue talking about with developer relations. But then on the other hand, their profound, almost unfathomable financial success gives them the liberty of saying, "We're going to make a seven-year bet that costs a lot of money," just in terms of this thousand or so software engineers who work on Vision stuff inside the company. We're going to make a profound bet to build this out over half a decade so that when the hardware's really there for a mass-market thing, we've got it. We've already got the platform, we've already got the UI paradigms nailed down, we've got the input, we've got the sensors. We're going to be...
John Gruber:
... nailed down. We've got the input, we've got the sensors. We're going to be there five years ahead of time. It's a very different way of thinking than a company that is sweating it out. Are we still going to be in business two quarters from now?
David Barnard:
Yeah, and I think that's part of the pushback is that too many people, especially in the press, continue to expect every product Apple releases to be the next iPhone. And the iPhone is just singular in history as a consumer electronic device that it was able to come out of the gate as such an incredible useful day one thing. Because even, and again, I mean, this is why we're having this conversation. You go back to 1984, the $2,500, which is $7,200 a day or whatever it is, was not a daily driver, this is changing my life, most productive thing in the world. It was a nice to have, it was an enthusiast, it was something to tinker with and maybe you find a few productivity things here and there that it benefits. Apple has done this decade after decade after decade, and they have that long vision.
And again, going back to these execs who've been around through it all, it's like they've seen it happen and they know it will happen and they know it can happen. And to your point, they're not under that pressure of the Vision Pro has to be the iPhone. It doesn't have to be the iPhone. We've done this 10 times before with different products with transitioning from Power PC to Intel, with early days of iMac and it becoming a consumer hit that wasn't even the massive smash hit compared to the iPhone. And so it's like they know how to build platforms over decades and not over months and years that everybody else expects it to happen.
John Gruber:
So the one difference, and it is almost the same thing but along a different vector where I said about Gates and the way that Gates instilled in Microsoft a sort of flexibility in thinking like, hey, what's the opportunities right now? I think Satya Nadella's era as CEO embodies that where I feel like he came in and was like, you know what? We don't have to be all about Windows, Windows, Windows. We can go to more of a cloud first mindset and look at where they are financially and in cloud services and stuff. It's been a great deal for them, but that they got their institutional fortitude is once we have a hit, we will latch onto it and try to stick with it and ride it all the way down. And that was the whole mindset with Windows. Windows everywhere and they're going to put Windows on your TV set-top box and Windows phone, right?
And they were trying to make smartphones years before the iPhone and literally they had a start menu in the lower left corner. It looked like Windows 95 but on a phone and it wasn't running Windows apps, but it was a mindset of bringing Windows mentality. Whereas Apple's mindset led by Steve Jobs was let's start from scratch. And as much as they wound up using the Cocoa APIs and made UI kit, it was only not because that was a starting point. It was like, okay, if we're going to do this, maybe we could fit a small version of the Mac kernel onto this device and we'll build it, but we're not going to have any compatibility. It's not going to be called the Mac phone. We're not going to have an Apple menu up in the upper left corner. We're going to rethink this whole thing from scratch.
Apple has this sort of, if it's a new form factor, we're going to start with a new platform and that's a very different thinking, but at another level, just in terms of its capabilities, the reason the iPhone could debut in 2007 as a totally credible, you could buy one right now, the first one totally useful is that it's ultimately, and this is the unifying theme of the last five years of dithering with me and Ben Thompson, is that the biggest marketing shame of the entire industry is that we wasted the term personal computer on desktop and laptop computers in 1980 because the phone is ultimately the personal computer. And that's where everything was heading from the Apple One in 1977 until 2007. Everything was heading towards building something under $1,000 that fit in your pocket and had an interface that anybody could just use and that the input was just poking at it with your finger and it was all visual and it had wireless connection to a network that connected to the entire world.
It was so science fiction from the perspective of 1978, 79, but within 30 years, that's where everything in those 30 years was heading. So when it launched, it was really the culmination of what we've called personal computers for 30 years, whereas Vision Pro is sort of like, let's do something all new and we have to sort of start from scratch. It's going to be way too expensive and heavy and limited and the battery's going to be a pain in the ass, but it's a totally new vector.
David Barnard:
Yeah, well, we've kind of gotten ahead of ourselves. I want to go all the way back to the eighties again. It's important to step through the history of these developer relations of what brought us even to the iPhone. So I'll speed through this. You and I could talk for five hours, but I don't think we should turn this into a five-hour podcast, so I'll speed through a little bit of this. But going all the way back to the eighties, PageMaker was a huge turning point. Third party app, some people have credited it as saving the Mac platform. That it was so important to digital publishing and this is where as a platform apps can revolutionize your platform. When you've built a and hardware and third party developers go nuts on it, they build new things and do things that you would've never done as a first party software closed ecosystem, it's only Apple and the Mac and we're the only ones building for it.
You get this entire ecosystem of people building new things and PageMaker was one of those things that became so integral to the digital publishing world that it's credited as a third party app for saving the whole Apple Mac platform and then you get Illustrator for Mac in 87, you get Photoshop in 1990 and during this time I think Apple really recognizes that power of developers. Guy Kawasaki joined around that time. I forget exactly, I think he may have joined before the 1984 Mac, but he was the first software evangelist and developer evangelist. Again, in doing research for this and reading up on some of the history of this, I realized just how much a debt of gratitude in some ways I owe to Guy Kawasaki for me having a job today at Revenue is that he... This whole developer advocacy and people who aren't technical or... I mean, I'm mildly technical but really can promote these platforms. It goes all the way back to the eighties and Guy Kawasaki and Apple being so enthusiastic for third party developers.
John Gruber:
I know Guy a little, I feel like I should know him better. I feel like he sort of left this racket right around the time that I was becoming more prominent in this industry, but I've met him a few times, but I've read his books and the Macintosh Way, it's a great book if you can find a copy of it. When I joined Barebone Software, I worked at Bare Bones, the BB edit company from 2000 to 2002. It was the only mandatory reading before.
It was like the entire employee onboarding process was you have to read Guy Kawasaki's the Macintosh Way, but arguably it was the Apple way and at the time though, because it was the only successful platform Apple had, the Macintosh and Apple were easily conflated, but I think that what Guy Kawasaki really crystallized was the intersection of developers, users, and the platform maker and that combined the three could form a cohesive whole that everything... And formed a flywheel where it just kept benefiting everybody where users are happy and they're buying the devices, which helps the platform maker and that the more devices the platform maker makes, the bigger the market is for third party developers.
And so third party developers make more and invest more in the platform and make more innovative software that makes users like, oh my God, look what PageMaker can do. Holy crap. And then the users buy more of the... And it just keeps going and going.
David Barnard:
Sounds a lot like the iPhone.
John Gruber:
Yeah, I think that the other thing that Guy Kawasaki really crystallized was the idea that you could be an important serious player professionally in this field without being a programmer or a designer even. You could be a professional user. I'm a writer and I have a computer science degree from college from long ago, so more technical than most users, but I get that mindset where kind of what I wanted to be was a professional user, by being an enthusiast and learning how everything works. And that was his evangelism. It wasn't evangelism in the sense of evangelizing a religion based on faith. It was more like a religion based on practical advantages, like hey, learn how to do these things, learn how the actual system works and you're going to have superpowers compared to people who do the same thing as you who don't understand how these computers work. One person can do the work of 10 people with a Macintosh, and it was true.
David Barnard:
I saw that guy has been doing the rounds on podcasts. You should definitely have them on your podcast at some point. That'd be one I would love to listen to, you and Guy talking through this for two hours. We're kind of breezing over it in five minutes here, but I think it would be a fascinating listen for you and Guy to kind of talk through that in more detail. But we did want to keep moving. So that was the kind of eighties and into the early nineties. But then what happened in the nineties I think is kind of pivotal to Apple's relationship with developers is that in the nineties, and you know this better than I, so you can fill in the details here, but hardware sales started to tank. Things started to get really rocky for Apple and they got to this point where third-party developers had so much power over Apple that if Adobe wasn't updating their apps on the Mac platform and simultaneously the Windows platform had taken off at that point where they were probably, I assume making way more money on the Windows platform.
It was kind of the platform to be on during that time, but Apple desperately needed those third-party developers to continue building for the platform to keep the platform sustainable. And that all kind of culminated in 1997 with the famous Steve Jobs standing in an auditorium with a giant screen of Bill Gates behind him and Microsoft saving Apple. And again, people who haven't studied the history or been around or not old men like you and I couldn't even fathom that Microsoft saved Apple. Had Microsoft not done that, Apple would've gone bankrupt. So fill in some of the gaps there. What happened in the nineties and how did Apple get into this desperate point where third-party developers had so much power over them needing Microsoft to save the company.
John Gruber:
I think point one that gets overlooked a lot in the years where Jobs was exiled from Apple, who knows what would've happened. Maybe that was for the best that he went and founded... It worked out well for him to go found Next, struggle to make next a thing and then have Next in Apple. I always call it a reunification rather than an acquisition because it really is so obvious. I mean, Craig Federighi's first job out of college was at Next and it's like he left for a while, right? Scott Forstall, but where Apple got lost in those years, one of the ways, and I think I haven't seen a lot of people or a lot of books focus on it, was the sort of mindset in the early PC years, a company would come out with a new computer and the computer was the platform effectively, and there wasn't really this idea, there wasn't so much of you'd make the Commodore 64 and then when Commodore came out with the Commodore 128, I forget if you could run Commodore 64 programs, but it was sort of a new computer.
It was like, ah, this is a different computer. And then Commodore came out with Amiga is sort of an overlooked thing in history and I know the panic guys were big Amiga fans and the Amiga had the video toaster was doing digital video editing way before any other computer platform. It had some amazing capabilities, but Commodore just exemplifies it. Commodore 64 was a hit, then the 128 not so much of a hit, then the Amiga, which was way more capable. But that every couple of years the idea was there'd be like a new thing and backwards compatibility was like a maybe and it would be like a mode, but basically you'd sort of come out with an all new thing every couple years as opposed to evolving a platform over decades. It just didn't enter Apple's mind.
And so Apple had all of these failed next generation, what's going to come after the Macintosh things in the late eighties and especially the early nineties, Pink and Taligent, and it's all confusing and it would take forever to explain as opposed to what was an operating system and what was a company and what was a cross-platform like?
Taligent was sort of a cross company thing with IBM where it was in addition to an operating system, they'd make a new platform and the power PC chip architecture sort of came out of that. And so it wasn't totally futile, but the idea wasn't to how do we keep evolving the Macintosh? It was what comes after the Macintosh. That's the fundamental flaw. And the Newton is laughed at in some ways and other ways people are like, oh man, they're sort of a decade ahead of in terms of you'd have a handheld thing in your hand with a touchscreen, but the most obvious problem with the Newton was that something handheld that needs ubiquitous wireless networking. And there wasn't even Wi-Fi at the time, let alone cellular. Palm Pilot was sort of more of a hit, but mostly because it was affordable. And people like me, I had one, I had a handspring visor and I liked it.
In hindsight, there's a lot of younger people who probably vaguely have heard of Palm Pilots, but it wasn't that big a deal. At the time, people are like, oh, the Palm Pilot is what Apple should have made with the Newton. No, because even the Palm Pilot really wasn't that big of a hit and it didn't have any staying power because it didn't do networking, it didn't have a connection to the internet, even Wi-Fi, let alone cellular. That's really what a handheld needed. But the other thing about the Newton that was just as important to its failure was it really hardly related to the Macintosh at all. There was a Newton, I forget what it's called, Newton Sink Utility or something, and you connect a serial cable to your Mac and Newton, you could sync some things, but like I said earlier, there was no contact app on the Mac from Apple.
So where did your Newton contacts go? The Newton had a contacts app because it was a personal digital assistant and they had all of these things about what comes after the Macintosh when what they should have clearly been thinking of is how do we move the Macintosh forward? And meanwhile, while Apple's core interest and at the top level of the company was interested on these big expensive, all-failed next generation, what comes after the Macintosh? There were people at Apple who were grinding away on the Macintosh, putting out system seven and then system 7.1, system 7.5 and sort of keeping the company alive financially because that's an actual platform that people were using and buying. And I think at the highest level, Apple was looking at that the way that the Macintosh part of the company was looking at the Apple II in the eighties. And for most of those mid to late eighties, Apple was staying alive financially through Apple II sales, not Macintosh sales.
And they were thinking, that's what the Macintosh is doing now and we will get pink or Copeland or whatever this thing is. Copeland was a next generation Mac. That was where they started to get it through their head that, oh, what we really need to do is keep the Mac alive and come up with something. They just wasted half a decade of great still explosive new stuff coming out. The whole internet thing happened in the midst of that where there was no internet to speak of. I mean, the internet existed, but it was like a university type thing in 1991 and by 1993, 4, 5, it was like, oh, Netscape is a huge thing. Meanwhile, Microsoft was doing the opposite with Windows where they're like Windows One, nobody used, nobody even heard of Windows Two, nobody used, nobody heard of. Windows Three, now people are using it instead of DOS, but it was really clunky and awful and they're like, let's make a better one.
Let's make one that steals interface ideas from Next where the buttons and stuff look 3D and have gray scale. And they were grinding away on making the thing that was sort of a hit just a little better every couple years. And Apple just lost half a decade in that period. And thankfully they had people who were incrementally making the Macintosh better, but then they'd sort of painted themselves in a corner where the Macintosh operating system, not to get too super nerdy, but was still fundamentally based on some assumptions from the mid-eighties about how low level all software worked and the idea of preemptive multitasking where a program crashing couldn't possibly crash the whole computer because it would just be the program. Whereas the Macintosh was so low level and all programs sort of made some low level assumptions where they were, there was no kernel to speak of in computer science terms in that classic macOS.
And they were doing things with low level memory where like, hey, if Internet Explorer froze up, your whole computer might just freeze. And then you had to literally use the power button on the hardware to restart it and anything you had open that wasn't saved was gone. In 1984, 85, 86, that's the way a computer like the Macintosh had to work. There was no option to do preemptive multitasking and have memory safe applications in that era because of the constraints of the hardware. But by 1995, 96, that was totally possible and it was obviously the way it should be, but there was no simple way to just say that's how the next version of macOS is going to work. And all of the existing apps like Photoshop and Excel and Microsoft Word will just work. There was no way. It was too incompatible.
And that's what you were talking about earlier where Apple was up against it because the only reason the Macintosh was thriving was because of these apps from companies... And the big ones were Adobe and Microsoft, and if their existing apps didn't continue to work, there was no way anybody was going to upgrade to whatever they came up with no matter what its technical capabilities.
David Barnard:
And so then being back against the wall and Jobs having gone off to Next and built that next iteration, the Next revolution in computing the foundation for everything we do today was what Jobs built at Next, they acquired Next in 96 and Jobs comes back and then that's what leads up to this Microsoft committing to the platform, investing money into Apple. And then I wanted to read a quote, and this is going to be long, and those of you who really care can go back and watch. There's a video of this is that at WWDC in 1997. There's a quote from Jobs. A developer asked about OpenDoc, so I [inaudible 00:55:54] all this, but we can skip over the details of it because I think the details are less important, but Apple decided to kill this technology, OpenDoc and the developer very frustrated, goes up to the mic at WWDC during an open mic session with Steve Jobs at WWDC in 97.
Very frustrated, why are you killing this thing? We've invested a lot of money into it and I want to read the quote. I kind of jump around in the quote because it would take 10 minutes to read, but let me read this quote from Steve Jobs because I think it's just so fascinating.
"I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of, I apologize, I feel your pain." I wanted to get that in there because can you imagine Apple in 2025 saying, I apologize, I feel your pain and just the rest of this is so good.
John Gruber:
I can imagine it, but it would be very surprising and I feel like that's exactly what they could use, but yes.
David Barnard:
Yeah, that's what we're going to get to and that's why I wanted these quotes. We'll come back to it maybe an hour from now when we get deeper into the iPhone stuff. So continuing, it's skipping around the quote, but "focusing is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no and you've got to say no, no, no. And when you say no, you off people. So you take your lumps and Apple has been taking their share of lumps for the past six months in a very unfair way, and it's been taking them like an adult, and I'm proud of that." Man, Steve Jobs off the cuff. I miss that. I miss that so much. "And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts." So again, that's missing a lot of context.
It's missing a lot of the actual quote. You can go back and watch the video. I'll put it in the show notes, but I just thought that was so fascinating that Apple in '97 was at this point that Steve Jobs of all people was there on stage answering this kind of question with a level of kind of humility and self-awareness that, "Hey, developers are so important. I feel your pain. I'm sorry, I apologize. But then also clearly talking to the future of like, hey, this is going to be hard, but we're building towards something."
And they included that quote specifically from what you were alluding to is that in this forty-year history with developers, there have been moments like that where you see a more open Apple, a more contrite Apple, and that the success of the iPhone has really changed the way I feel like Apple does relate to developers and Apple has not had to take its lumps in a good 20 or 30 years and has not had that level of forthrightness and humility with developers when things do go sideways, and this is where I think Ben Thompson has said multiple times on different podcasts and articles he's written, I think some people inside Apple view this and maybe those three top execs who've been there this whole time and a lot of people inside Apple, it felt humiliating, not humble.
And that this was a period in their history that they were so beholden to third-party developers and they never wanted to be in that position again. They never wanted to have to take lumps again. They never wanted to be on that verge of bankruptcy. They never wanted to feel that pain and be humiliated like that again versus I go back and I read this, I'm like, wow, what a great example of just how much goodwill do you instill in developers in the entire ecosystem by speaking like that to developers?
John Gruber:
The first thing I'll say to that is that of those three executives you've mentioned, Eddie Kew, Jaws, and Schiller. Schiller's the exception where Schiller, I know you probably know this, actually hasn't been in Apple continuously since 1987 or whatever, and in the early nineties he was, I forget where else, but he ended up at Macromedia, which was the company behind PageMaker, or maybe not... No, I forget, but they had... They were the competitor to Adobe, and so Schiller has been on the other side of that divide making the essential tools for the Mac. That just helps add to that same perspective though of knowing how much leverage those companies had over Apple. And the two things that were scarring to Apple were the near bankruptcy. And so it's made the company institutionally incredibly frugal and more so while Jaws was still alive, it was only after Jaws died and Cook took over that they started doing things like shareholder buybacks and stuff while Jaws was alive.
They were just hoarding their profits. They just were putting it into that Braeburn Capital subsidiary and just sitting on an ever-growing mountain of cash because in the same way that my grandparents who had been through the Great Depression would eat, scrape every single bit of food off their plate and thought it was offensive, no matter whether you thought it tasted good or whether you were still hungry, it was offensive not to eat every bit of food offered to you because they remembered not having enough food and the parts of the company that remembered being on the verge of bankruptcy, in some ways it helps focus the company, but in some ways in the long run sort of hurt them. And I think having somebody new like Tim Cook, again, he's been there a long time, but he wasn't there for the near bankruptcy part or came in just after, and so he wasn't as scarred by it.
But I think that developer relations part definitely has, now that Apple has gotten big, has hurt them. That they're still so thinking of themselves as underdogs who want to assert not dominance over developers from their perspective, but having at least 51% of the power over developers that they've lost the fact that they've actually got 95% of the power or however you want to assign the power dynamic in the current state. They're so hell-bent on making sure they never fall below 51% of the power between the platform and the developers that they've just lost sight of how overwhelmingly they've already won and how much it would be in their interest to make concessions because of the surplus of power that they have to bolster developer goodwill. I don't think we're putting them on a hypothetical psychiatrist couch, but they do remember it. It's infused their thinking about the company.
David Barnard:
And we will put a pin in that to come back to as we talk about the more modern era of lawsuits and regulation and everything else like that, but stepping back and walking through the history, you do see a different apple after that. And so Apple does go on to build keynote and pages and numbers and the whole digital hub and they start building more and more of those key pieces of software. I think in part from that scarred time of we want to make sure there's great software for the average user and we're going to bundle it even though that's in conflict with our third party developers. We're going to give things away free or cheap, and you see a different Apple in that early 2000 era of like, we're going to control our destiny. Third party developers are important. We're going to be a platform.
We're going to encourage them, but we're going to cover our own bases. We're going to make sure that we're not beholden to these companies in the long run by doing these things. And then kind of the next era as I was going through all of this, and this is where I kind of step into it, is what I was calling the Delicious Era. And there were these at the time, going all the way back to the eighties, kind of smaller passionate developers, but I feel like the heyday of this passionate small developer time was those early 2000s. You had Delicious Monster Building, Delicious Library and Panic and the Omni Group and Rogue Amoeba, and you could probably... Bare Bones, you could probably list another 20 off the top of your head, and there was this kind of renaissance. The iPod started driving more and more people from Windows to the Mac.
There were these really passionate kind of fanboy developers building these really cool software for the platform. And as a platform, I feel like there was a bit of a heyday during that time where Apple was kind of... And Sherlocking famously came out of the Watson Sherlock thing in, I think, that was 2020, but there was this kind of heyday leading up to the iPhone of really great independent software creators while at the same time Microsoft and Adobe and others were starting to invest more back into the platform and the Mac becomes this really solid platform in that era.
John Gruber:
It's a tough thing to strike a balance on. It's almost impossible to just get perfectly right where it's clearly correct for there to be a suite of fundamental apps out of the box in a factory fresh new computer or phone or tablet. And that therefore that 1990 to 1995 Apple mindset of we're hardly going to ship any first party apps and everything will be third party apps because we don't want to step on their toes. And even if we have a subsidiary that makes Mac Write and Mac Draw and stuff like that, or File Maker, we're going to put it in a subsidiary and try to treat it as best we can as an actual third party developer, even though we own the company. That's not the right way to deal with a platform, but obviously Sherlocking every successful app is also not the right mindset.
It's a hard balance to strike, and I think they've managed it pretty well, especially... And again, in the early 2000s when Sherlocking first became a term, it was so few years since the era when Apple studiously avoided ever stepping on the toes of third party developers, that it felt like all of this was newly offensive. And here in 2025, that's sort of ancient history. And so people don't think of it that way. So for example, just this month at WWDC, they announced clipboard history management in Sherlock on macOS Tahoe and a sort of more launch bar, Alfred Ray cast style superpowers in Spotlight where you can assign a two letter abbreviation to something to launch a shortcut or something like that. I think that they continue to strike the right balance where I, as a long time launch bar user, I'm glad they're adding those features to Spotlight, but there's 0% chance that I'm switching to Spotlight.
I have an example though where here's a
