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What Comes After The Iphone Apple At 50 With David Pogue

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TITLE: What Comes After the iPhone? | Apple at 50 with David Pogue CHANNEL: Techish DATE: 2026-05-01 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Apple’s next generation, the stuff they’re now working on, are screenless devices. Right? So, they’re working on the smart glasses that will someday give us all the same advantages of the of the smartphone without requiring our eyes or our hands. Um they’re working on making the AirPods smarter and smarter. Someday it’ll be like that independent movie Her. 50 years ago, two guys named Steve built a computer in a garage in California, and somehow they changed [music] everything. Not just how we work, but how we think, how we parent, how we sleep or don’t. [music] Our guest today has had a front-row seat to all of it. David Pogue, he’s been covering Apple for longer than I have, more than 30 years. He was the tech columnist at The New York Times for 13 years, a seven-time Emmy winner at CBS Sunday Morning, and he is the reason your iPhone has a screenshot button. Oh man, there are so many juicy little nuggets in this conversation. He’s out with his latest book. It’s called Apple, The First 50 Years, and it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list basically since it dropped, more than a month now. No surprise to any of us who’ve been following him. Let’s get into it. Okay, David Pogue, as I live and breathe, I am so excited to have you as our guest today. It’s been years in the making. I mean, we could have literally interviewed each other because we’ve we’ve both been trotting the same paths for decades. I I remember at one of the early iPhone press junkets, it was like you and Kara Swisher, you know, walking I still have this vision of the two of you like in slow motion, you know, like a movie, [laughter] walking down the the hallway, the long hallway, and I was like, It [laughter] was crazy. When was the first time you covered Apple? When was the first time you sat down with Steve Jobs? I’ve been covering Apple for almost all 50 years. So, I got I got a Mac in 1984 when they were when it just came out, and I was about to graduate from college, and they had this half-price deal for college students, which is really ingenious. I think they should bring it back because it it gets you, the young person, hooked on Apple’s way of doing things and their software and their conventions for the rest of your life. But yeah, so I got a Mac just before I graduated from college in ‘85. And first time I sat down with Jobs was once I was at The New York Times in in the year 2000. I’d get, you know, 15 or 20 minutes with him twice a year after these big Apple keynotes. Yeah. Uh not not enough to become, you know, bosom buddies, but enough to get a taste of what he was like. W- Were you scared? I remember the first time I met him, I was terrified. Uh I don’t think I knew enough to be scared. I I don’t think I I’d never witnessed one of his tirades, so I don’t think I was I was worried about it, but he was Yeah, he could be he could be Steve Jobs. He was a very volatile person, and he would um you know, John Sculley, the CEO for 10 years, told me that he thought Jobs was bipolar. I mean, he would he would be laughing hilariously at 8:30 a.m. and then crying at 9:30 a.m. And he changed his mind often. Um he would tell an engineer or designer, you know, that that piece of work is you can do better, and then like 3 days later he’d claim that as his idea. You know, so I I wouldn’t presume to guess what Jobs would do. The interesting thing about Jobs’ death is that yes, those 3-year patterns of amazing new inventions ended, but no other company has come up with any either. Yeah. Like no other company has come up with something as cool as as revolutionary as the iPhone either. So, again, that makes me wonder, was Steve Jobs it? Was he the only guy who could pull this off? We’ll never know. When you look back at the arc, Apple, The First 50 Years, you know, it’s a little light reading. Lift with the knees, not with the back.

[laughter] Who is this book for? Who sits down and reads this book? That was a big question. I mean, as I was writing, I was keenly aware that there would be several constituencies. First of all, it’s for the 150 people I interviewed. It’s to set the record straight. Uh there are there have been so many books about Apple, and frankly, they’re so full of errors and and and stories that have been party to a game of author telephone. Like they’ve been the the original guy wrote a story that was wrong, and then the next author used that as source material, and the next author used that as source material. So, stories that have gotten passed on. So, I could see it in the eyes of some of these, especially the older people who worked on early Apple stuff, that they really wanted the record set straight. And a lot of them said that. Like, “Please get the book right.” So, there was that. Um I wanted this book to be for the fans, for the 2 and 1/2 billion people who are carrying around Apple devices and love the beauty and the simplicity and the magic of what they’ve done. Um I wanted to celebrate that which was celebratable, but I was also aware that there are Apple haters. So, it couldn’t just be this big squishy, you know, we love Apple stuff. It had to be critical where it needed to be critical. It had to cover, you know, the Foxconn Chinese factory suicides and the failed projects like the Apple car. It had to be really fair, really thorough. I was aware that there would be students of business reading this book. They wanted to know, “How did Apple do it? What’s different about Apple? What’s that culture got to do with Apple’s success?” So yeah, so basically, there were a lot of different constituencies that I was thinking of, and so far I feel like I’ve I’ve threaded the needle. Give me an example of what somebody got so wrong that’s been retold so many times. Oh man, there’s some really great stories. I mean, the thing about Steve Jobs encountering somebody in an elevator at Apple and saying, “What do you do here?” and if you didn’t like your answer, “You’re fired.” I totally believed that. That didn’t happen? I’ve never found anyone who witnessed or heard of that. So, as far as I know, that’s an urban myth. And then the really good one is is when they were working on the iPod, and Jobs wanted it as small as it could be, so they brought him the final final prototype, and they said, “This is it, Steve. Can’t pack things in any tighter.” And he took it over to the office aquarium, the fish tank, and he dropped it in there, and as it sank to the bottom, air bubbles came out. He’s like, “See those air bubbles? That means there’s still space in there. It can get smaller.” And like, what a great story. Never happened. There’s no fish tank. There’s no one who ever heard or saw of that. So, that’s just a legend. Oh, I love that. Looking back at this arc from the ‘84 ad about fighting Big Brother to kids now zombified on iPhones, do you think that Apple became what it once promised to destroy? I just watched your big sit-down with Tim Cook. Is this one of those things that he loses sleep over? What do you think about that? I will say that when I became a Mac nut in 1984, Apple told the world that it had 5% of the market in computers. At at the time it actually had 2% of the market, but they said 5%. So, we, the Mac fans, felt like we were the underdog. We we felt like a tribe who knew taste and beauty when we saw it, that we had the superior product, and that the other 95% were the Microsoft Borg, that they were wrong, you know? And so, there’s a little bit of that David and Goliath thing in much of Apple’s story. But as you say, now things have flipped. Now Apple is the Borg, but they’re still a tribe. There’s still a fandom out there that this book experience has taught me that. I mean, there are people who buy this book in multiple formats. Like like they’ll buy the audiobook, but then they’ll also buy the paper book so they can see the pictures and follow along. They’re still a fandom and an a sort of tribalism. Um I do think Tim Cook worries about what has happened to us as a society with our our faces in the screens. That’s why Apple’s next generation, the stuff they’re now working on, are screenless devices. Right? So, they’re working on the smart glasses that will someday give us all the same advantages of the of the smartphone without requiring our eyes or our hands. Um they’re working on making the AirPods smarter and smarter. Someday it’ll be like that independent movie Her, in which there’s a a future where this is all we have is is a little earpiece and a an AI personality we talk to. And, you know, Jony Ive is is now no longer at Apple, but he is said to be working on similar screenless devices, maybe a pendant, maybe a badge kind of thing. So, that’s def- definitely the next wave. That’s exciting on the one hand because it gets us away from doing this all the time, but it’s scary on the other hand because we’re in a loneliness epidemic. We have this whole backlash now of getting these devices out of schools and of kids being the ones saying, “Thank you so much. We’re actually talking to each other in the cafeteria again.” So, it is this balance of like good and evil. Where are you feeling about all of that right now? First of all, the school bans is a mind-blowing development. I mean, it seems like so regressive and nostalgic and like old boomers saying, “You shouldn’t have it.” But, 35 states have now banned the smartphones during school hours. And, as you say, the kids love it. The kids. Everybody thought they’d be like, “I can’t function.” But, no. They don’t have that the the lazy excuse not to talk to the person in the cafeteria anymore. So, they’re making conversations. Obviously, the teachers love it cuz they can get teaching done. And, really, the only people who really object to the school bans anymore are the helicopter parents who are like, “But, how do I reach my kid in an emergency?” Well, the same way we did for the 70 years before that. You call the office, you know. It’s amazing how successful those those bans have been. So, the nice thing about society is that over time, when something gets off whack, we do tend to self-correct. We do send tend to push back, whether it’s through legislation or just public opinion. And, I do feel like that’s happening with with the smartphone problem. Well, it’s happening a bit with the recent verdicts finding meta liable for things that they said they were doing that they did and the damage to children. And, you said something on a podcast that popped up in my my Instagram feed that was what Apple is doing that really no other company is doing with this approach to AI. I just think, “Why doesn’t Siri work yet? Come on, Apple.” But, there’s a whole bunch of AI stuff behind that that’s actually doing the right thing. Can you explain all of that? Yeah. I mean, there there are a couple reasons Apple in their approach to AI is smarter than most people think. And, the big one is the reason Apple did not release its AI on time is that it wasn’t working very well. Apple is not a company that releases products that sort of work. You know, and as you know from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, AI right now only kind of works 20 25% of the time. The answers it gives you are just wrong. And, that can lead to real problems. I also I haven’t seen this written anywhere until I wrote it. But, [laughter] but it seems like Apple is going out of its way to release AI in forms that remove the worst of AI. So, what I mean by that is the writing AI on the phone or the Mac, it will summarize writing. It will recast writing to be more or less formal, but it will not write for you. You can’t say, “Write my essay on Huckleberry Finn.” You know, it because Apple does not want to contribute to kids cheating with AI. And, similarly, they have this dumb little app Image Playground. You know, it’s it’s AI image generation, but it will only make cartoony images because Apple does not want to be in the game of making deepfakes. They don’t want people creating images or videos of people doing and saying things they never did. And then, the privacy thing. You know, Apple is alone with this unbelievably complex and and unusual system they call private cloud compute. And, it’s a little nerdy and in the weeds. But, basically, when you ask an AI question on your phone that’s too complicated for the phone to process, it is sent away to an AI server data center somewhere. And then, the answers returned to you. But, as soon as it’s processed, the query and the answer are erased forever from that data center. And, that’s what Apple says. And, of course, everyone’s like, “Oh.” That’s what Everyone’s like, “Sure you are.” Right. That’s the part that that killed me. When you said this, you Apple tried to remove the awful aspects of AI. They have the writing tools, but they won’t help kids cheat. There’s an image generator, but they won’t be in the business of supporting deepfakes. They they’ve dreamed up this elaborate, complicated scheme. And, they send it off to their servers. And then, you were like, “Wait, is that really true?” And then, they said they’re available. You’ll get a million bucks if you can hack this. Tell me about This is the part that blew my mind cuz I don’t trust after doing this stuff for 20 years, I trust no one. I think they’re all lying to me now. But, these guys are being good guys? What? They are trying to be good guys. I mean, so that’s right. So, they say “If you don’t believe that we’re really wiping these servers like we say we are, come and inspect it. We will show you the code. This is open to anybody, a researcher, a competitor.” And, they actually have a million-dollar bounty program. So, if you can find a situation where they’re keeping any of your data, they’ll pay you for it. And, I mean, I cannot begin to tell you how weird and rare that is for a big company to say, “Come and look at our code.” I mean, that’s like that does not happen. So, it does like seem like they’re trying to go about it the right way. And, they don’t get a lot of credit for it. Yeah. But, at the end of the day, why doesn’t Siri work better than it does? Oh, it will. [laughter] It will. It’s this June they say they’re they’re going to be releasing the new version. Apple many times has been late to the party. They didn’t have the first music player or the first mouse or the first tablet or the first They didn’t even have the first touchscreen phone, you know. But, what they do is they wait until it’s great. And then, they release it and everyone everyone forgets. You mentioned a lot of stuff that they’re working on, the the screenless, the better AirPods, that we know they’re coming with glasses. Everybody’s talking about the multi-screen, the two-screen, three-screen. The folding? The folding stuff. Are they coming with that next? That that is the rumor that they’re working on the iPhone fold for this for this fall. The leaks that we’ve seen, leaked images, are really interesting. It’s not as tall as the current iPhone. But, when you open it up, it turns into the shape of like an iPod mini. So that when it’s a map or a movie or a photo, uh you’ve got a really beautiful big big screen to work on it. So, it’s going to be expensive. Like, all of those folding phones are really expensive, like 2,000 bucks. But, I think a lot of people will be into it. And, it’ll be the best folding phone that we’ve seen so far because it’s Apple. Probably. Yeah. [laughter] On the folding phone, like all the existing ones, when you have it opened up, you sort of see a crease at the hinge. And, the the big news is that there’s this guy, Mark Gurman, who writes for Bloomberg. And, he’s sort of That’s who I find everything out from. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. And, he’s got a, you know, 80% track record of being accurate. And so, the word from from Mark Gurman is that the they Apple has licked the crease problem that when you open it, you will not see any line down the middle. So, that’s pretty cool. I feel like everything Apple does is is really nice and thoughtfully done. Um I mean, that MacBook Neo that they just came out, I think is is true brilliance. They’ve got a laptop half the price of their old cheapest one that is absolutely beautiful, like a jewel. And, it runs, you know, 80% of the speed and and features of of the expensive one. I think that’s allowed to happen. Apple can afford to sell something inexpensively because Tim Cook has gotten the company into services, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV. So, this inexpensive Mac is like a an on-ramp for the next generation of people who will use their services. So, pretty ingenious. Of course, the what Apple hasn’t kept up is that roughly every 3-year cadence that Steve Jobs had of another mind-blowing new platform, you know, iMac, iPod, iPhone. 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry. [applause] Uh I think those days are gone. And, you know, we can talk about whether that’s because Steve Jobs isn’t here anymore or whether that era has passed. Like like he came along during this incredible time when when a couple things converged. One is, you know, Chinese manufacturing, inexpensive and high quality, plus miniaturization of components, plus uh the public had finally stopped seeing technology as intimidating and frightening like as they were, you know, when Apple was founded, computers were scary. So, Steve Jobs was the beneficiary of all three of those things. And, you know, in some parallel universe, he lived. But, we’ll never know whether he would have been able to keep up that that rate. Yeah. That’s what I was just thinking about, too, is, you know, when I first started really reading like becoming religiously addicted to Pogue’s posts, you talked a lot about different categories of gadgets. You know, these are the health gadgets that are really interesting. These are this kind of gadgets. Now, we we have like gadget saturation. And, even just in the jobs that we do, nobody really covers gadgets anymore. We cover more kind of trends and trend stories. And, do we still want gadgets? Do we still care about gadgets? I mean, really, it’s all been subsumed into the phone. Like, we don’t need a fax machine, a walkie-talkie, a radio. All of these There’s that classic 1981 Radio Shack newspaper ad, a two-page spread, [laughter] CB radio and, you know, fax machine and camera and camcorder. All of it has now been folded into the phone. Like you don’t need all that stuff. So, I think that’s one key reason why the the gadget reviewer has largely died away, at least at the newspapers. And the second reason is of course the world has moved on into AI software and services. It’s more this intangible stuff that gets all the investment and all the headlines today. What do we need? What’s the one thing you need that you don’t have when it comes to gadgets in your life? So, 2 years ago Apple demonstrated the AI-based Siri that it was working on. Siri also maintains conversational context, [music] so I can follow up and say create an event for a hike there tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Hike is scheduled for 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on June 11th. And they on stage they had this product manager say to Siri, “What time do I need to pick up my mom?” And this prototype Siri knows all about your email, your files, and your text messages. So, in a blink of an eye, it knew that her mother was coming for Thanksgiving because that was in an email. It knew what flight she’s on because that was in a text message. It knew what the flight was doing in terms of being late from a flight website, and it knew the traffic. So, it just says, “You need to leave at 1:30.” Like Apple stock went up $200 that day. I mean, that was so enticing. Like a really useful AI personalized for who you are and what you need. So, the problem is, like here we are almost 2 years later and what they demonstrated still isn’t here yet. But there’s so Think of how much fuss and red tape and administrative stuff you go through every day. I mean, just logging into your website. Why are we still putting our name and address onto like website forms when we’re I want to be able to say “What’s the last flight home from Chicago on Friday?” I mean, like is it that hard? Like is there a florist shop on my way home from work that’ll still be open? Or hey Siri add this to my calendar and then actually have it work. Or hey Siri, send a text to my daughter and have her actually find my daughter. Like it’s really simple stuff that I do feel a little angry about not being able to do right right now. You know, just getting like simple things right. I mean, I I will say I I use that send a text message to command. Actually, I just use tell. So, I’ll say, “Tell my wife I’ll be there at 6:30.” And I find that very reliable. I Does that not work for you? Uh half the time-ish. I mean, I just I just texted the wrong person. I said text Dora. Hey Siri, send text to Dora. It texted Sophie. Sophia instead. Wow. I mean, the I get a big fear a Siri fail probably once a week. I do tend to push it. Maybe I have it I always think it’s operator error still after all these years. I think what am I doing wrong? But a lot of times it’s just not working great. You know, those are the little things that I do feel like they should have ironed out for all of humanity by now. I mean, Siri does need to play some catch-up. I think we can we can all agree. Like like Google’s assistant is way better than Siri. But Yeah. you know, supposedly this June we’re going to see this totally revamped Siri. Crossing fingers. Yeah. Well, what’s the one thing you asked him cook for when you sit down with him? Do you say, “Hey, can you fix this for me?” [laughter] You know, I asked him, “What are the pros and cons of being big?” Cuz Apple now you know, they can’t fly under the radar with anything anymore. And he he like out of nowhere he said, “Well, when you get big, everybody scrutinizes you and that includes a lot of regulation he thinks should go away.” Did I ask you about regulation? No, it’s interesting that he gave that up to you because he I mean, we’ve seen a lot of regulation go away with AI and it’s gotten really scary with this administration. I would think that that would be good for him, somebody with a conscience. You know, the the whole thing with Apple that’s really interesting is that they have had a series of PR crises. And actually, this is 10 years ago, but Foxconn Chinese Foxconn factory thing and then the tax avoidance thing and when I dug into these, what I found out was that Apple was essentially taking the heat for things that all big companies were These were legal. These were known. Like the Foxconn thing, yes, four people workers at the Chinese factory that was making Apple’s stuff jumped to their deaths from their dormitory roofs. Apple immediately revamped the way they were doing things. They joined the Fair Labor Association, which is a watchdog company. They installed those awful suicide nets. Um But but what Americans saw were workers working 12-hour days, 6 days a week literally so tired that they were taking naps at their desks without understanding that Chinese workers have a 6-day, 12-hour work week. That’s just a cultural difference. And so, Apple wound up getting blamed for something that’s very standard in China. And so is taking naps, you know, during the day. That’s very common in many countries, not ours. And I know this because I I interviewed a guy who works there at the Chinese factories. So, a lot of it was just a culture shock that America was Americans were were putting on Apple. But it was of course true for Sony and Toshiba and Microsoft and Google and all the companies uh who were making gadgets. And you know, the same thing with that tax loophole in Ireland Apple was dodging a lot of American taxes by offshoring its profits which was legal. And every big company was doing it. And Tim Cook would say like “So, elect someone who’s going to change the tax laws, but don’t blame us just cuz we’re big.” And I’m a little sympathetic to that. You know, should big companies live by different rules because they’re big? Should they deliberately give up their profits that they’ve earned because they don’t think the law is tough enough on them. I mean, I don’t know. It’s a It’s a conversation we should have. It is a really interesting conversation. In that interview with you and Tim Cook you asked him like what’s something that that Steve Jobs told you that you think about and he said it was don’t do as I would do, just do the right thing. Something to that effect. I don’t know if I’m remembering it right. That’s exactly it. Yeah. Tell me about that. Tell us about that. Yeah, when when Jobs was dying in 2011, he called Tim Cook to his house and he said “You’re the new CEO and I don’t want you to say ‘What would Steve do?’ Just do the right thing.” Yeah, you you got it almost exactly. And what he meant was he had seen Disney, one of his most admired companies fall to pieces after Walt Disney died because everybody kept saying, “What would Walt do? What would Walt say?” And they became paralyzed and incapable of taking risk or reaching their full creativity. And Jobs didn’t want that to happen. What I find so interesting about that statement to Tim Cook is that like today I feel like that’s all anyone says is what would Steve do. I mean, Steve haunts that company. Every All his policies of secrecy and beauty and simplicity and trying to say no to features the rounded corner you know, square shapes of the keys and the power adapters and the laptops. It is so much Steve’s company. I mean, I also asked Tim Cook, “Would you still call this Steve’s company?” And he said, “Absolutely.” Um So, on one hand Steve said, “Don’t try to say what Steve would do.” And on the other hand they they they very much do. So, take with that what you will. One of the things I was most interested in achieving with the book is to find out if there were any through lines of Apple through all the were talking about that in your interview and there’s a lot of them. There are There are a lot of them. Yeah, exactly. And what I found out was that a number of them began when Tim Cook took over. Like he added new corporate policies, precepts, beliefs that weren’t there before. So Steve Jobs was famously not a charitable giver. So, he was not a philanthropist. Very wealthy, but he didn’t really give away anything. Tim Cook has instituted a charity matching program. So, any money employees give to a charity, Apple will match it. If they volunteer work Apple will give to that charity $25 an hour to match the time that you’ve put in. Tim Cook has become much more socially aware in terms of inclusivity um LGBTQ rights, even immigration rights. Uh accessibility is something that Steve started, you know, 1985, but not in such a nearly as heavily an emphasized way as Tim Cook has. Um and sustainability Tim has taken things way, way beyond his rivals in terms of recycling old machines and powering all of Apple with renewable energy. The MacBook Neo, 60% of that thing, 60% by weight is recycled materials. I mean, that that’s hard to do. [laughter] What is one hack, one tech life hack that you David Pogue use every single day? You’re not going to like this, but I I use Siri for a lot more than most people do. So I like it. I just think that Siri and I are just rivals at this point. I just I Well, I This is not about the quality of of interpretation, but just the things that Siri can do. So, for example, I open apps that way. I’ll just say open Uber. Or you can pay something with Venmo. You can say, “Pay Jean Jolly $25 with Venmo.” I mean, that’s That saved you a bunch of steps. You can say, “What do What do I have on my calendar tomorrow?” Or what’s the first thing on my calendar? I mean, there’s a lot of cool things that just saves you a lot of fussing around and things you can do without your eyes and hands when you’re, you know, walking along a city street that are really useful. And again, I do all my texting that way, you know, “Tell Brian, how have you been, man?” You know, and and stuff like that. So, uh also, look into the use of the accessibility features. There are some really useful ones. For example, you may know about the double tap on the back of the phone. You can program that to do whatever you want. I have it set to turn on the flashlight. I do, too. And my FLASHLIGHT’S ALWAYS ON. [laughter] WOW. DO I NEED TO COME AND VISIT? YOU DO. SO, how do you find these hacks? Where How do you find them? Where do you get them? It’s a combination. You know, some some people would send them to me. It became sort of a self-fulfilling thing. Um there were actually programmers at Apple who were the ones responsible for these Easter eggs and buried features and knew that I was writing books of tips and tricks, and so they would send them to me. Do you know the screenshot story? No. I I have not told this story before, but on the 50th anniversary, I think it’s finally safe. When the iPhone came out in 2007, there was no way to create a screenshot. There’s no keystroke. There’s no way to do it. And I was doing a book about the iPhone. It was iPhone: The Missing Manual. How was I going to illustrate this thing? Well, I knew that Apple had a way of creating screenshots because they had marketing materials full of them. So, I contacted the PR people and said, “How do you do them?” And they said, “Well, we have this internal tool that takes screenshots, but it’s like a command-line ugly thing. We don’t give it out.” And I’m like, “Well, can you help me illustrate this book? Can I have that app?” And they said, “Well, no, because we can’t let it out into the wild because it’s so crude. But tell you what, if you fly out here to Cupertino, we’ll set you up in a conference room under observation, and you can create all your screenshots on our equipment, and then go home with the JPEGs.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So, I literally booked a flight out. I mean, there are like 400 color illustrations in this book. So, then right before I was about to fly out, the PR guy called back. And he said, “Steve Jobs heard about this and he he said, ‘No way. We’re not letting him sit there and use our unfinished apps. We We don’t show Apple’s, you know, ugly internal tools to journalists. Tell him to send us a list of all the screenshots he wants in this book, and we will dedicate a designer or an engineer to sit there all summer and and create the screenshots for him.’” So, I sent him this massive list on in a spreadsheet with like what I wanted to see on the screen, what the data would show, you know, where the windows were positioned, the whole thing. And this poor guy spent an entire summer doing these screenshots, and it worked out beautifully. So, cut to a year later, they were coming out with a new version of the iPhone. I had to update my book. And so, I went back to them and said, “I need screenshots.” And they’re like, “Oh, no. We’re not doing that again. Tell [laughter] you what, we’ll just put in Well, we’ll we’ll call it the Pogue feature. We’ll put in a thing where you press in opposite buttons on the phone and it will take a screenshot for you, so you can do it yourself.” And that is what happened. So, to this day, you are using the Pogue feature every time you take a screenshot. That was cuz of me. That’s awesome. Isn’t that nuts? I finally met the guy who spent that summer making screenshots. He’s super nice guy. He’s still at Apple. hate you a little bit after that? He’s No, he actually He actually said I mean, I thought he would, but he actually said it was one of the most fun experiences he had in his early days. Well, this reminds me I mean, David, I could talk to you for hours. I have so many questions. But when you think back not just to covering Apple and this book, but just your life. What’s that one day, that one moment, that one tidbit Um and and we can start This is such a big question, but let’s start with the book. What was the hardest chapter line? What was the hardest thing to find and and get for this book? What was the single hardest thing? I was really really worried about the last 15 years because Apple does not allow current employees to speak to press or journalists, un- unless it’s something Apple PR sets up for some purpose, like talk to the Wall Street Journal about artificial intelligence. Um and I I am telling you, my wife will tell me tell you, I literally would lie awake at night going, “What the hell am I going to do?” Like the last 200 pages of the book would be blank. You know, so I started hitting up Apple like a year in advance saying, “Could you make an exception? Can I please interview your designers and your engineers?” And it took about 6 months, and I, you know, I sent them a sample sample chapter. I sent them an outline. I They didn’t have editorial control. Like Apple did not see the book until it was done. It was an act of trust on their part, I think, when they finally said, “Okay, you can come out here to Apple Park.” And ultimately, it was 4 days of all day hour hour hour hour interviews with Tim Cook’s entire executive team and the engineers and the designers. Really really thrilling lucky lucky lucky break there. So, but for a long time, I was I was really sweating it. Were there people there in the room with you saying, “Oh, oh, you can’t say that. Oh, oh, don’t” Like is it that crazy? There was always a PR person present. That’s how it works. And they did say, “If if one of our people says something we don’t like, we reserve the right to strike it to strike it from the record.” And I accepted those conditions because the alternative would be nothing. But do you know, through all of that, they only asked for one word to be struck. One of their engineers used the F-bomb. [laughter] And they said, “Please don’t have him say If Steve Jobs read this book, what’s the one sentence he’d circle and say, ‘That’s exactly right. You nailed that.’” I think it’s the through-line of of beauty and simplicity. Um I was really affected by the stories of Jobs asking people to redesign components that you can’t see, that no one would ever see. The circuit board in the iPhone. Like who cares what the circuit board looks like? And, you know, Jony Ive was very much of the same philosophy, and the way he put it to me was, “You sense care even if you can’t see care.” In other words, if they slave over the the aesthetics and the beauty and the quality and the simplicity of every component inside and out, every screw, every material choice, then the end result, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel just the care that went into it. And I I’m I’m sure Jobs would have underlined that five times. What’s the one sentence that would make him furious? What would What would make him really angry? I made the observation, not not a particularly fresh observation, that um nothing. That what Jobs was incredibly good at was spotting brilliant technologies in the wild that are fledgling and complicated and much too difficult to use, and then making them pleasurable and simple and joyous for everyone else to use. You know, by saying that, it might sound like, you know, we’re minimizing his achievements and Apple’s achievements. I don’t think that follows. I think that the taste and the ability to see the future that Jobs had is just as much an important quality as the raw invention itself. I mean, no one else did it. But I feel like that would that would upset him. Is saying that most of what Apple does is finishing and beautifying other people’s existing tech. When you look ahead, if you had to bet right now, not hope, but like bet, will Apple still be the most valuable company on Earth in 2050? Haha. 2050? I don’t know about the most valuable company on Earth, but I mean, they’re not now. They’re now something like number three after the AI companies, like Nvidia and Microsoft. of the most valuable. [laughter] One of the Yeah. I think it’s likely. You know, they have, you know, two and a half billion devices out there right now. That’s 31% of the global population are Apple heads. That gives them a long cushion, a long runway. You know, they can they can make a couple of mistakes and not suffer terribly. So, uh like like the people who are in the giant Apple tribe, it’s hard to leave, right? You’ve already bought the apps. You’ve already bought the carrying case. You’ve already invested in learning how things work. So, it’s not easy to switch. Um so, I think that that gives Apple the benefit of the doubt and time to come up with its next killer product. David, after everything that you’ve seen, you know, 50 years of Apple, the hype cycles, the products that change everything, and then all those products that don’t. Um what what’s that one moment that sticks with you the most today? I mean, I will say I was uh in the room for the iPhone unveiling. And you you got to I mean, anyone can watch it on YouTube. And the moment when he took two fingers and spread them on a photo to enlarge it, or the moment when he flicked a list and it had momentum. I mean, it was literal magic before your eyes. And you could hear it rip through the crowd. I mean, today we do it 100 times a day, but no one had ever seen it before. And you’re just like, I have to have that. I was there. I remember the the applause, the aw. I was there for his last time that he ever unveiled a new iPhone, and it was the he got that standing ovation. I mean, that really is special. And you’ve been there for so many moments. Are those the most special in all of your years covering tech? I mean, in terms of the awe that I felt and just the gooseflesh and like, Jobs has done it again. I mean, [clears throat] Yeah. I I can’t imagine anything more impactful. I mean, I have I have my own personal moments. I mean, I still remember buying that Mac my senior year of of college and and pulling it out with a handle. It had a handle. And sitting on my desk and turning it on. And you know, you it didn’t have a hard drive, of course. It ran off of floppies. But, if you didn’t have a floppy, it just displayed a blinking question mark on the screen. That’s all I got. And so, I I rustled through the the user manual. And it said, “Insert an application.” And I literally, this is going to sound so dumb, I literally ransacked through the box and the Styrofoam trying to find this additional part. The application. I didn’t know It’s a term Apple made up. It meant program, but I didn’t know that. And so, I think in that moment I learned that computerese is not English. And you know, 7 years later I wrote Macs for Dummies, and that launched my entire career as a as an explainer. But, it all came from that one minute of feeling like the outsider, like the idiot who didn’t know the terminology. So, I I really feel like that was a key personal moment in that it shaped the the rest of my career. Aw, I love that. If somebody wrote a book about you and the last 30-plus years of your life, what would that book be called and what would it tell us? Maybe the explainer, uh because I feel like everything I do for CBS Sunday Morning or in these books is to explain, whether it’s, you know, usually technology, but in the case of Apple, history and corporate dynamics. Um Either that or the show-off, because I was I was the third of three children. I was the kid who never got any attention. And so, my my own armchair theory is that I spent the rest of my life uh trying to get the attention that I was deprived of as a child. [laughter] That’s why I’m on TV and on stage and doing all that stuff. Okay, I need a minute because that was David Pogue, and I could have talked to him for approximately 12 more hours straight. Once again, David’s book is Apple, The First 50 Years. It’s linked in the show notes, and I promise it is worth every single page, even the heavy ones. Oh, and he just launched Pogue’s Posts, if you missed those from The New York Times. That’s on Substack, also in the links. You know, if this conversation made you think, made you laugh, or made you immediately want to go double-tap the back of your phone just to make sure your flashlight isn’t on, please share it. Send it to a friend who can’t stop complaining about Siri. Leave a review wherever you’re listening. Subscribe to Techish on Substack, if you haven’t already. This is Techish with Jennifer Jolly. Thanks for being here. Talk soon.