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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, March 27th, and I'm Kristen Baird Adams, immediate past president of the City Club board of directors on behalf of the City Club staff and board, I'm pleased to introduce today's speaker, David Pogue, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and author of his latest book, Apple The First 50 years.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series, in collaboration with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and Cuyahoga County Public Library.

It also is the annual Richard W and Patricia R Pogue Endowed Forum, providing the perfect opportunity to share a very special update from the City Club, where earlier this week, our board approved David's father, the one and only Dick Pogue, as the city club's first ever emeritus director.

Dick Dick pod's leadership over many decades has left an enduring mark on the city of Cleveland.

The law firm of Jones Day and countless civic causes and nonprofit organizations, including our beloved City Club, where he served as a longtime member of the board, board president, honorary co-chair of the Guardians of Free Speech Campaign, and as perhaps the most passionate advocate of free speech and civil civic dialog and debate.

What an honor it is to have members of the Pogue family with us here today to celebrate this special occasion.

And, of course, welcome David Pogue home to hear his insights on one of the world's largest and most influential tech giants, Apple.

There is little doubt that over the last 50 years, Apple has changed the trajectory of American culture.

It reshaped how people communicate, work and create through technology.

Yet with such longstanding notoriety come myths and legends, some of which are rooted in truth.

Some of which are not.

In Apple, the first 50 years, David, who has written about Apple for his entire career, tells the iconic company's entire life story, revealing the brand's triumphs and its flops and business lessons that we can learn from all of them.

David is, of course, a seven time Emmy Award winner from his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, a five time TEDx speaker, a host of 20 Nova specials on PBS, and a New York Times bestselling author.

For those of you who are not familiar with David Pogue style of presentation, buckle up, as I'm fairly certain that it will involve a keyboard and that there may be just a few laughs along the way.

A quick reminder for our live stream and ideastream public media live radio audience.

If you have a question for the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794 and the City Club staff will do its best to work it into the program.

Members, friends and guests of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming David Pogue.

Thank you.

Nicely done.

Well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have.

Anyway, so great to be here.

Thank you for this.

I understand there the audience is composed of three segments.

There are those of you who are here in the room.

And that includes, by the way, the coolest, most loyal members of the Shaker high class of 1981.

Pull this off behind my back.

Had no idea.

So there's the live audience here.

There are the audience listening on the radio.

And there's the audience watching the streaming, broadcast.

So just so we all feel like one unified group.

Would you guys mind on the count of three Cheering.

So the other two segments can hear you 123.

All right.

And now I'd like the radio and streaming audiences to cheer so we can hear you.

My wife said that joke will just not work.

Anyway, it's thrilling to be back at the City club, and it's 113th year.

This book did just come out, and I'm very, very pleased to say so.

Did the New York Times bestseller list.

Yep.

There it is at number six.

And I also feel so bad about being number six, because look at the top five.

What do they have in common?

They are all starlet memoirs.

So if you take all the female Hollywood memoirs away and take out the titillating topics like getting naked and stripped down.

That makes me number one.

And this whole thing has been a learning experience.

I mean, honestly, if I knew the importance of the title, like, like my book is called Apple, The First 50 years, and if I cared about the bestseller thing, which obviously I don't really I would have called it, you know, Apple the first sexy years.

But I didn't think of that.

So, this book has been a two year adventure.

And the other really exciting thing that happened since it came out was that the Apple cult is a big one.

There are people who think that this book is like, you know, their document, their ticket to to true tribal, love of this company.

To my astonishment, it became a thing to take a picture of your book when it arrived and posted on social media.

Hundreds upon hundreds.

And some of them are just amazing.

This guy is such an Apple fan that he has an entire Apple Museum.

He has one of every Mac model and he bought three copies of the book, one so that the cover would always be visible a second, so that the back cover would always be visible, and a third in electronic format.

So he could actually read the thing.

Amazing.

The story began two years ago when the Macintosh celebrated its 40th anniversary, and this outfit in California, called the Computer History Museum, invited me to make a reunion of the people who created the original Macintosh in 1984, there were Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld and Susan Care on the right.

She's the one who hand drew pixel by pixel, every icon you know, the Little Bomb and the smiling Macintosh and every font, every one of the original Mac fonts she drew by hand.

It was an amazing night.

It was laughter and tears and a lot of PTSD.

And for the audience, it was just this love fest.

It was like Woodstock and so, a few weeks after that, my wife Nikki, she's right here.

She said, she woke up in the middle of the night having had a dream, and she shook me awake and said, David, I have the best idea for a book.

You should do a book about the first 50 years of Apple.

And I'm a little sheepish to say I shut her down and I'm like, do you miss that?

That that was that's gone by.

But when I woke up, it turned out I was wrong.

The deadline for, I mean, the actual 50th anniversary was two years away.

It was April 1st, 2026.

This Wednesday.

It's this Wednesday.

So that that's two years, which is just the right amount of time to write a 600 page book.

If you're crazy.

So there no photo exists of of that, critical moment when Nikki woke me up.

So I had I take a try at it.

Look like I'm having a heart attack.

The quality of this photo is what tells me we have nothing to fear about AI taking over the world.

Anyway, that began a two year process of interviewing 150 people for this book.

And to my great gratitude and astonishment, nobody turned me down.

There's Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs.

There's Jony Ive, the famous knighted designer of the iPhone, iPad, iMac.

There's John Sculley, who?

The CEO for ten years.

It was an unbelievable experience.

The problem is, it's one thing to get a former Apple person to give you an interview.

It's quite another to try to get somebody who's at Apple to give you an interview, because the rule at Apple is our people do not speak to media.

They do not let people speak to journalists unless it's at Apple's direction.

Like, we need you to speak to the Wall Street Journal about AI or whatever.

And so it took six months of of begging and haranguing.

I wrote a sample chapter to show them that this this wasn't a muckraking book.

It was, you know, about the products and the inventions and the and the technologies.

And finally they agreed.

They said, you can fly out here to Apple Park, their big headquarters, which is a a ring a mile around and will set up hourly interviews with, with the entire executive team, with the engineers, the designers, the executives.

And we'll give you access to the archives, which is incredible because this book is in color, 360 pictures, all in color, amazing archival stuff.

And I even got the the, the other designers at Apple over the years to send me photos of their prototype designs that never got made, which is so cool.

So, you know, the joke at the end of every one of these interviews was there actually is no book.

I just wanted to hang out with you.

It was an amazing experience.

So, as you know, Apple is a gigantic company.

At this moment, 2.5 billion people are carrying around Apple devices.

If you do the math, that's 31% of the entire global population of the planet.

They sell 220 million iPhones a year, which brings in $1 million of revenue every 90s.

So if you think you guys are well paid, I believe, and they were the first company in history to hit $1 trillion market capitalization, the value of all of its stock.

First company to hit 2 trillion and then 3 trillion.

And now they're approaching $4 trillion.

So the book is 600 pages long.

I'm not going to have time to cover the entire story.

I will give you some highlights, but if you want one mnemonic takeaway for remembering this story, it is, I think you'll agree by the end, the greatest corporate turnaround story that ever was this graph, the graph of the company's fortunes, could very much be summarized as the letter M. It was a rise of fall and a rise again.

I kind of fudged it a little bit for simplicity.

The actual rise, fall, rise looks like this.

So starts on April 1st, 1976.

Apple one, Apple two.

Macintosh Steve Jobs leaves the company PowerBook Newton Jobs returns to the company ie Mac, iPod, iPhone Steve Jobs dies, Tim Cook takes over Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro and all the Apple services.

The history of Apple.

Thank you and good night.

Yeah.

No.

So that's sort of the nutshell version, but it did indeed start in 1976 with these two Steves in Cupertino, California.

On the left is Steve Wozniak, painfully shy, gifted savant at circuitry.

He knew at the time that the only people who could use or have access to computers were universities, governments, and corporations.

The notion that an individual would own their own computer was absolutely crazy.

I mean, it was literally absurd.

It was a sci fi futuristic thing, but he wanted to own his computer, so he built one.

And today we call it the Apple One.

It was just a circuit board.

There was no no housing for it.

There was no screen.

And his buddy Steve Jobs, four years younger, said, hey, Steve, you know what?

We should do?

We should sell that.

This is going to become a running theme, by the way.

And so they did they marketed this thing and they sold 150 of them.

And as it was going on, sale was on the left, was increasingly unhappy with its limitations and thought, you know, I could if we're going to sell this, I could do better.

And he came up with the Apple two, and this was the first personal computer.

This they sold 6 million of these for many of you, I'm guessing, was the first computer you ever saw or touched.

It was the computer in schools where kids learn to program in basic, just a huge, gigantic hit that changed the fortunes of of Apple and the rest of the computer industry as they rush to copy it.

The thing we have to remember about the Apple two is that using it looked like this.

It was it was text on the screen.

It was you have to you'd have to memorize commands and then type them out.

And if you got one letter wrong, it wouldn't work.

They say, who was the first friendly computer?

It was the first computer self-contained in a case.

Incredibly weirdly, it was a plastic case.

This was radical.

Computers before that were metal.

It came in metal boxes.

And Steve Jobs had this notion why couldn't technology be beautiful?

The dude's 21 years old, and this was his insight.

No one had ever thought of computers as anything but equipment.

Great industrial tools.

Why would we care how it looks?

And this is what made Apple Apple and is to this day.

So this always bugged him too.

And he heard that at a local research think tank called Xerox Parc, the Palo Alto Research Center.

He heard they were working on something much better.

You didn't have to type commands that would be listed for you in menus that you didn't have to remember.

There was this thing that move the cursor on the desk called a mouse, and above all, it was white background, black type on the screen, just as though on a printed piece of paper.

So he wrangled himself a visit to this research center that is the Xerox Parc mouse.

It had three buttons, and each of them not only did something different, each button did something different in each context.

So when they were pointing at a scroll bar, their functions did one thing.

When they were over text, they did.

I mean, everyone's like, Xerox Parc invented the easy computer and Steve Jobs stole it.

Not quite.

It was pretty early on.

The right is what the screen looked like.

There were windows, but there was no desktop.

They didn't have icons in the trash and folders.

None of that.

You could copy and paste within the word processor, but you couldn't copy and paste anything into another program.

So it was the early, early version of what we know today as the graphic interface.

Steve Jobs had this absolutely unbelievable genius on his staff named Bill Atkinson, and he said, Jobs said to Atkinson, take what you saw at Xerox and finish it, make it beautiful, make it complete.

And ultimately what Atkinson came up with was what we know today.

So there's overlapping windows and icons in the desktop, all the menus at the top of the screen so you can't get lost.

Brilliant.

And tragically, Bill Atkinson, I spent an amazing day with him.

And then two months later, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And a couple months after that, he was gone.

But he was an incredible, incredible thinker and engineer.

And he called me after the interview was over at home and said, I forgot to tell you my favorite story.

The hardest part of making the user interface work was overlapping windows, where you have one window in front of another, and the problem was in those days, there's so little power and so little memory available to me that when I moved a front window aside, instead of revealing whatever was in the window behind it, you just got this blank white rectangle and it would flicker and slowly fill in with what was supposed to be there.

And I could not figure out how Xerox Parc had solved that.

I wracked my brain for months, and finally he came up with this very technical solution, basically taking a screenshot of the part that was covered up and storing it in a frame buffer, this whole thing.

And he said Jobs said, oh my gosh, you son of a ___ you did it.

You're amazing.

And then a few weeks after that, he was at a nudist camp.

Yeah.

Bill Atkinson man.

He.

And, on the radio, by the way, they're laughing because I have an AI generated picture of this moment.

You'll have to watch the stream.

So, anyway, so he's in a hot tub.

He frequented nudist nudist camps, and this other guy gets in, it goes, hey, I'm Bob beauty from Xerox Parc.

You must be Bill Atkinson.

And he goes, I am Bill Atkinson.

And this guy says, you're the guy who solved the unsolvable.

You solve the overlapping windows problem.

Dude, my hat's off to you.

And I said, what are you talking about?

I saw that at Xerox Parc when we visited.

And he goes, oh no, you didn't.

We still haven't solved that.

Bill Atkinson misremembered.

He never saw it because no one had ever done it.

So Atkinson is very LSD oriented guy and.

He gets very philosophical.

And he would say to me on the phone, and, David, all that shows you is that when something tells you something's impossible, you just haven't spent enough time with it.

Amazing.

So all that work, the menus, the windows, the graphic interface debuted on the computer.

We all now know as know the Lisa.

No one's heard of the Lisa.

It was a $10,000 personal computer that introduced the world to the mouse and the windows and the icons, and it failed because it was $10,000.

But it was a brilliant technological breakthrough years ahead of its time.

The saddest part of the Lisa story is not that it didn't sell.

It's that in the end, when it didn't sell, they took all the 10,000 unsold Lisa's and paid to have them buried in a Utah landfill because apparently the tax write off was worth more to them than selling the remainder to whoever would buy them.

Last year there was there was a GoFundMe campaign by this guy who wanted to go dig them up.

He wanted $20,000, and they would film it and they'd make a special out of it.

He raised $45.

So Steve Jobs was a maniac back then.

He was very raw, very abusive.

He would scream at you if your work wasn't to his opinion, up to par.

And he said, we can do better than that, Lisa.

Let's take the same idea and make it smaller and cheaper.

Make it $1,000 and cuter.

And that was the Macintosh.

That is the computer that is still with us today.

It wound up not being $1,000 is $2,500 when all was said and done.

But it introduced the world to Steve Jobs.

His mania for design and beauty and details what other CEO of a multi-trillion dollar corporation gets down on his hands and knees with his designers and says, I want the corner radius of that icon broader.

You know, I want the drop shadow darker like fusses with the details.

He was I interviewed this guy, Eddy Cue, who's now the head of all Apple services, Apple TV, Apple Music, and so on.

And he told me, if I ever write a memoir, it's going to be called off by one pixel.

Drove him crazy.

I mean, look at the boxes.

Like Apple was the one who decided that even the packaging should be beautiful.

And this is why Apple people never throw their boxes away.

It just feels like a sin, you know?

Like, these are so.

Jobs was only at Apple for nine years.

He had hired a CEO.

This guy, John Sculley, the former CEO, president of Pepsi.

And by the time the push came to shove, the Macintosh came out during an industry slump and it wasn't selling.

So they got into this huge fight.

The board decided one of them had to go and it was Jobs.

So Jobs spent 11 years away.

He started a new computer called next.

He he bought Lucasfilm's graphic imaging department and renamed it Pixar.

Might have heard of it.

During these 11 years, Apple began that long, slow decline of the end of the capital end.

It just fell to pieces.

They had three CEOs in five years.

They had they started ramping up different Mac models by 1996, they were selling 50 different Macintosh models, each with minuscule differences.

And nobody could tell the difference, not even Apple people knew the difference.

They had 12 ad agencies, all with different campaigns, some of which conflicted in messaging that my favorite story of this, of this chaotic time of fiefdoms and duplication, was the day in 1995 when two Apple lawyers showed up in U.S.

Trademark Court to sue each other.

That's how dysfunctional this company was.

So through a corporate acquisition, Jobs came back to Apple in 1997.

And I have a song about this.

See, I used to be a Broadway conductor.

For ten years, I worked in orchestra pits.

And, so I have this habit of writing new lyrics to old, old songs.

And this is one of them.

I had just seen the movie Evita with Madonna.

You know, when she's on the, And Jobs came back in his black turtleneck and jeans and he took the same breath, and I'm like, where have I seen this before?

And it might seem crazy.

Sorry, I forgot the words.

It might be crazy.

You think I'm strange when I try to explain why I'm back after telling the press Apple's future is black, you won't believe me.

All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named was.

You.

Try rhyming with garage.

Don't cry for me, Cupertino.

The truth is, I never left you.

I know the ropes now.

Know what the tricks are.

I made a fortune over at Pixar and don't cry for me Cupertino.

I've still got the drive and vision.

I still wear sandals in any weather.

It's just that these days there are Gucci leather.

Yes, it's Apple the musical.

So Jobs in a single year pulled off the greatest corporate turnaround in history.

Apple was six weeks from bankruptcy.

They had a run rate of $50 million a month, and they were earning nothing back.

So Jobs replaced the entire board.

He canceled all 50 Macintosh models, and this was not popular at this point.

Steve Jobs had never had a success.

Right.

The Apple two was kind of was his project.

There was an Apple three that failed.

The Lisa failed.

The Macintosh was failing.

And then he gone and started next and the next failed.

So he was not hailed as the returning savior.

People were quitting.

They were working on those 50 Mac models.

They were investing research and development.

And then yeah, so he canceled those and he said, we're going to have four Macs, guys.

We're going to replace them all with four models, two laptops, two desktops.

And this way we will always know that our best people are on every single project.

And then he fired all 12 ad agencies.

He said we're going to have one ad.

And it was the think different ad.

But here's the crazy ones were never mentioned.

A computer never showed.

A computer just celebrated great thinkers and iconoclasts.

And the whole message was both to the public and to Apple employees that this company still has a soul, that we haven't lost it.

So in the depths of the Apple Design CEO, he found a 27 year old British genius designer who was just about to quit because nobody had paid him any attention in the last five years.

No CEO had visited the design studio at Apple.

His name was Johnny IV and this guy was a genius.

He had all these full models of cool new machines and Jobs tour this studio.

He was like, what is that?

Well, that's so cool.

What is why are we making these?

They became an instant bond.

They had lunch together every single day until Jobs died and they began the revolution.

It began with this.

The iMac.

Jobs had this uncanny ability to see the future.

He did this over and over again.

If you were the new CEO of a dying Apple and your job was to revive the Macintosh computer, would you change everything about the computer?

Would you make it a globular triangle out of transparent plastic?

Would you kill the floppy drive and the printer port?

Like, what are you doing?

You don't change all the variables in one go.

That's obviously bad business.

But Jobs somehow knew.

I mean, his own team was like, Steve, no floppy drive.

Every computer has a floppy drive.

No.

And it became the best selling computer in the history of the world.

They sold 150,000 before they were even shipping them.

And they sold 5 million iMacs in the first three years.

And then in 2001, the iPod.

This is the music player that turned Apple from a computer company into an electronics company at the time.

If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you could have these portable music players that stored your music on memory cards.

They would hold literally six songs, or you could get one with a hard drive in it the size of a peanut butter jelly sandwich.

Very heavy, clunky.

Couldn't run with it.

Fragile, and that would have more capacity.

So on a trip to visit their suppliers in Japan one time, Jobs's team was it to Sheba and they had their meeting like, here's the parts you ordered.

And they said, what else are you working on to Sheba?

And the Toshiba guys said, well, we've we've come up with this hard drive the size of an Oreo.

We just don't know what to do with it.

And job said we know what to do with it on the spot.

They wrote to Sheba a check for $10 million in exchange for an exclusive.

They couldn't sell that to anyone else, and in ten months from that day, they brought the iPod to market.

Ten months.

And then they were so afraid of being overtaken by, for example, Sony, which was, of course, the founder of Portable Audio, the Walkman, the Discman.

They're so sure that Sony would catch up with them, they decided to revise the iPod every year.

A new model every year.

Things really changed when this model came along.

The iPad mini.

Apple with this went from a company selling a couple million computers a year to a company selling 100 million of something, and it was this music player, and this is the part, even though I interviewed all the people I wrote the pros, I don't understand how Jobs knew, he said.

As this thing became the best selling piece of electronics in history and was only accelerating, Jobs told his team, we're going to cancel it.

We're going to replace it with a smaller model that holds less music.

And they were all like, Steve, what are you doing?

And indeed, that's what he did.

He Jobs was the ultimate showman.

He introduced the iPod nano on stage like this.

Now this pocket's been the one that your iPods go on in.

Traditionally, the iPod and the iPod mini fit great in their.

You ever wonder what this pocket's for?

I've always wondered that.

Well, now we know because this is the new iPod you.

And here's the crazy thing.

He was right again.

That thing made the previous model look like a warmup act.

This thing flew out the door, and he had been right to move all their resources and marketing into this new, unproven model.

How did he know?

How did he know that the iPhone would be what it was?

Everybody told him, you can't do a phone without a keyboard.

Everybody.

The BlackBerry was the reigning machine, right?

The little thumb keyboard.

And here he was going to ask people to type on glass.

It's insane.

But instead it to change the world in ways that even he couldn't have seen the first year of the iPhone.

It actually didn't sell that well.

It sold like iPod numbers, but not through the roof numbers.

And that's because there was no App Store.

You couldn't download your own apps, there were no games, there was no banking app.

There was obviously no Tinder, Airbnb, DoorDash, Grubhub, Airbnb, all of that required apps.

So there's this amazing story.

I'd never heard before.

Everyone on his team said we should create an app store where any programmer can write any app, and it'll run on our iPhone Jobs hated that idea.

He hated the idea of open systems.

He's like, someone will write a grubby bad app and it'll make us look bad.

So he literally told his head of software, Scott, I'll tell you what we're going to do.

You and I are going to spend the weekend writing down every possible app that anyone could ever think of, and Apple will write them.

We will hire the biggest group of programmers ever seen in one place, and we will write those apps.

I mean, it's obviously insane.

So what force all did?

It says, okay, Steve, I'll see you this weekend.

But he turned around and he went to his team and said, guys, we're going to start making an app store, get to work building this thing, because he knew that sooner or later, Jobs was going to have to come around and sure enough, after a year, Jobs changed his mind, said, all right, I guess we need to do an app store for us all.

Said, guess what, Steve?

It's already in place, ready to go, and Jobs like, oh my God, I'm going to fire you, but I love you.

So that was the beginning of the App Store and that was the beginning of the smartphone era for all its benefits.

It's it's many trillions of dollars of economic development and all the downsides, you know, the the alienation and the loneliness and the the depression of young people and obsession with screen time and addiction.

But they kept up the pace that they had had before.

Every year, a new iPhone model.

Steve.

Steve died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.

And here again, seeing the future, who did he choose as a successor?

The world's least like Steve Jobs, human being, Tim Cook.

Tim Cook was not flashy, creative, loud.

Dynamic.

Volatile.

He is shy and quiet, never raises his voice.

He's a logistics guy.

He doesn't go down to the design studio.

He knows the prices of parts down to four decimal places of a penny.

He's a genius with logistics.

And so since Steve Jobs died, there hasn't been this every three year cadence of, you know, iPod, iMac, iPhone and some people criticize cook for that.

He's not a product guy.

Never said he was.

They've tried.

They came out with this headset called the Vision Pro.

Really amazing technology, but much too expensive and heavy and uncomfortable.

And they spent ten years and $10 billion working on the Apple Car.

Hardly anyone knows about it.

I tracked down the guy who ran the program on LinkedIn, and he told me the whole story.

It was going to be a self-driving electric car, and I mean completely self-driving.

No steering wheel?

No.

No pedals.

It would you have four recliner chairs inside facing each other, and the windows were, there could be screens so they could identify what's out the window, that restaurant there, what's its ratings and and so forth.

But they just they couldn't get the self-driving to work flawlessly.

Nobody has yet.

And so in 2024, they killed it.

So the most common question I'm asked in interviews is, so what's next?

What's what's an apple the next 50 years?

So anything I say could change.

These are just leaks.

But we have it on pretty good authority that the model of the iPhone coming out this fall will be a folding iPhone.

So you can use it like a regular iPhone.

But when you need a bigger screen, it unfolds into the size of an iPad mini for movies and maps and stuff.

We know that everybody, everybody hates our faces being buried in screens all the time, including the people who brought them to us.

So the new movement is to bring the power of the iPhone into glasses or AirPods or pendants, things that don't involve your hands or your eyes.

So these would be smart glasses with a little screen projected in front of one eye.

It'll give you driving directions or translate foreign language text for you.

They're working on that.

And the part that's kind of crept up on us that I don't think anyone's really observed is how Apple has turned into a medical equipment company.

This started a couple of years ago with the Apple Watch.

Apple made it capable of detecting atrial fibrillation AFib, which is the world's most common heart rhythm ailment.

If you have it, 35% of patients get a stroke from it, and that's bad news.

So you can get tested for AFib in a doctor's office, but it's intermittent.

So if it's not happening in the doctor's office, they won't see it.

But this thing is on your wrist all the time.

So every single month Apple gets hundreds of emails from people who say, I'm a young, healthy, athletic person.

This thing said, there's something going on with your heart.

Get it checked out, save my life.

Unbelievable.

And now to that, they've added detection of hypertension, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, which can be very dangerous.

There's a thing called vitals, which I really love.

If you wake up in the morning and during the night, two out of your vital signs were weird.

Like your breathing rate or your heart rate.

In the morning, it says something's going on with you.

Either you're coming down with something you shouldn't go into the office, or you got drunk last night.

So it's one of one of those two things.

And I also have a leak that they are working on snoring detection because it does have a microphone, this watch.

Right.

And it can vibrate you into a lighter level of sleep.

So that be cool.

Last year they made the AirPods $270 product into clinical grade hearing aids.

Now, before that, hearing aids average price in America was $4,700, which is why 80% of the people who need hearing aids don't get them.

And that can lead to loneliness and falls and bad stuff.

So this is all revolutionary.

One of the things I want to do, chief, with this book was to see what hasn't changed in 50 years.

What are the through lines?

And one thing I noticed is that in two years, in 50 years, the company has never moved more than two miles from its very first office.

And also its mission has never changed.

Take advanced technology.

Make it simple and joyous for the masses.

That was Steve Wozniak original idea, and it's still what they're doing.

There are a few other three lines.

This is the most focused product company you can imagine.

You could put everything Apple makes today and it would fit on a boardroom table.

Compare that with Samsung or Sony, who make tens of thousands of products.

Hi, secrecy.

This prevents other companies from getting a jump on what you're doing, and if the product you're working on doesn't work out, you can cancel it and you're not embarrassed because no one knew about it.

Rounded rectangles.

Everything Apple does has rounded corners.

That that means the trackpad, the keys, the laptop, the watch, the computers, the icons, the fold, everything they do, even the power brick for your laptop has rounded corners.

A huge emphasis on beauty.

Again, this is a weird thought.

Why should our tools be beautiful?

You don't care how you're.

You know, your socket wrench looks right, but this tool, Apple believes should be beautiful.

That even goes for the insides.

People used to say to Jobs, why are you making this redesign the circuit board?

Nobody gives a darn about the parts you can't see.

And you would say, I care about the parts you can't see.

I interview Jony Ive and you put it like this.

He said, you the customer, you will sense care even if you can't see care.

So in other words, if they slave and obsess over every part of every product, the overall vibe when you get it will be, wow, somebody thought this through.

So those are some of the three lines.

And I have one last thing to offer you.

I've written a new song parody, that I, that I will bring to you as, as a gesture toward Apple's upcoming 50th anniversary, and I it's so new.

I haven't memorized the lyrics yet, but, with great apologies to Pharrell, you know, because I'm happy now.

It's because it's Apple.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oops.

A little louder.

It might seem crazy what I'm about to say.

Apple in 50, almost to the day.

Louder.

Are you a real fan?

How do you know things?

I got news.

There are certain blues, baby.

Here we go.

Because it's like a long get.

You feel what seems to be dead with hearts.

You really took back a. If you feel like.

Oh man, oh, there's arts I clap along.

If you plug in 12 candles every night.

He goes back a long.

If you're proud and your chargers all are white.

Here come bad news.

So you understand.

It's not always easy being such a fan.

That when tell is everywhere, it's super cheap.

But who wants to be a corporate sheep?

Because you fat before it, you never run away.

Your fox.

You got it.

Got a special closet just for dongles, cords and ducts.

Because you step along.

If you bought that stand for a thousand bucks, you step along.

If you feel like Siri still kind of sucks.

I don't feel down when they raise the price.

I don't feel down using puppy mice.

I don't feel down because I is late or when in the air pod falls down a great.

I don't feel down upgrading nonstop.

I don't feel down when I can airdrop.

I don't feel down that I've got the notch and a half they charge on my Apple Watch.

Pop along if you don't.

Friends texts show up in plain because it's better luck if you spend 90 bucks to wipe the screen because you step along, you're in line for the next round.

You let them all get your cordless phone charges upside down.

Clap along if it's better to best than to be first, because it's better long and you know that windows is the worst because you better long, rounded corners always break your heart.

Because clap along you will be six colors till you die.

Thank you.

So much.

We're about to.

Oh my gosh.

Oh!

Thank you, thank you.

You're so kind.

Thank you are about to begin the audience Q&A.

For those just tuning in via our live stream or our live radio audience, we are at the City Club of Cleveland and you are listening to David Pogue, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and author of his latest book and class of 81, Apple.

Apple, the First 50 years.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, City Club members, guests, and those joining us via our live stream or our live radio broadcast.

If you would like to text a question, please do so to (330)541-5794 and the City club staff will do its best to work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please?

Very entertaining and informative speech.

Thank you.

My question is that with Apple taking over the, phone basically worldwide, is it that reason why everybody, all the different companies, are I spending billions of dollars and not let one company get ahead of each other?

The AI question is tricky.

Apple missed it.

Apple is two years behind on the AI.

They it caught them completely by surprise.

I think partly that's because Apple thinks of itself as a hardware company and not a software company.

So Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, meta, they're all working on, on, on AI.

So I think it's more like the other way around.

I think it's that Apple missed the whole thing.

Two years ago.

Apple just displayed demoed what they're going to do with AI.

They're going to make Siri capable of knowing everything in all your email and all your texts and all your files completely securely on your phone.

But they gave a demo where a woman said, what time do I need to pick up my mom from?

From her email, it knew that her mom was coming for Thanksgiving.

From her text messages.

It knew what flight number it was.

Then it checked FlightAware to see if the flight was late.

Then it checked the traffic to see how the traffic was, and in fraction of a second said, you need to leave at 130.

That would be cool.

Apple stock went up $200 billion that day.

It was so compelling.

Where is it two years later?

So Apple just two days ago said in June, we're going to be making a big AI announcement.

So I'm thinking it's that so?

Yes, sir.

I know you've covered Apple for a long time.

What?

What things in your investigation last couple of years surprised you?

Oh, I love that question.

You know, every company says we strive for excellence, right?

This company is nuts.

This company, one person after another told me these outrageous stories that Apple goes to in the name of excellence.

I'll just give you one example.

When they were developing face ID, the thing that unlocks your phone from the contours of your face, they wanted to make sure that it work on every face in the world every time.

So they took it the prototype to twins conferences to see if your twins could fit.

They took it.

They want to make sure creative facial hair wouldn't fool it.

So they took it to Harley Davidson rallies.

They hired a Hollywood maker, a Hollywood visual effects company, to make a set of two dozen hyper lifelike face faces with like stubble and irises and, like, really realistic to make sure that you couldn't fool it with a mask.

And I've just unbelievable lengths and and the woman who's in charge of the program told me that the best part was the guy in the mailroom who opened up the box of the face of face of the masks.

Oh my God.

Yes.

Thank you.

David, this has been wonderful.

My name is Daniel Levin.

I'm a professor at Tri-C.

I know you are the scholar on On Mac right now.

Probably more than anyone, but there's something I'd like to share with you related to biomedical that you may not be aware of.

Cleveland is building 1,000,000 square foot neurological institute.

It will be the largest in the world to study the brain in 2021.

I had the first of three brain surgeries, and I have transmitters in my brain.

And I used to turn myself on and off every night and every morning with my Mac, Apple phone.

This past year, I received a new computer in my chest, and now I have a rechargeable battery.

But I still control myself using my phone, so thank you.

Apple.

I have 7000 settings.

My phone, controls my brain.

that's amazing.

Hi, David.

What is the story or the reality of what happened to the knowledge that went out of the apple when somebody took a bite out of it?

You rest your case.

Yes.

I'm going to read one of our text questions that we've received.

Can you speak to the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?

Oh, yes.

That was an interesting one.

There's a whole chapter on the Apple versus Microsoft story, but basically Apple needed Microsoft to write software for the new newly born Macintosh.

So he invited Bill gates in his team to come and look at the prototype.

And gates saw the mouse and the windows and the menus and the fonts.

He said, oh my God, this is brilliant.

But Jobs said, but you can't.

Have we developed this?

You can't steal the ideas.

Sign this agreement.

And the agreement said Microsoft agreed that they would not use any of those ideas until after 1983.

The Mac would have been out for two years at that point, but the Mac was delayed multiple years.

By the time the Mac came out, it was 1984, and Microsoft was clear and free to steal all those ideas, which it did in windows.

What the contract should have said is you can't use the ideas until two years after the Macintosh was available.

So some Apple lawyer is crying himself to sleep every night.

So Jobs did.

He did what Microsoft did to the depths of his brain till his dying day.

So eventually they sort of arranged a detente.

They once they once appeared on stage together.

But yeah, that was not a good relationship.

Yes, sir.

I find it interesting that Apple went from a computer company to a rock and roll music company.

What was the process that went that?

I mean, Jobs, you said was smart, but it's so different.

What happened?

How did that occur?

Oh, this is incredible story.

So Apple you know, Steve Jobs was a music nut, right?

And what had happened when the internet was born was that kids started exchanging their song files for free instead of buying CDs, and the recording industry was in a panic.

So Jobs comes along with this idea.

We will build a legal app store, and we will charge a dollar per song and you'll own it.

You can put it on your iPod, you can bring it to a CD, play it in your car, whatever you want.

And at this point, the five record labels were so terrified of anything involving the word internet, they all said, no way, man, no way.

So Jobs kept at it and added and added and finally you got Warner.

You got one of the five to agree to a trial.

And his his argument was this look, we're Macintosh.

We have 2% of the market.

This store will only be available for the Macintosh only in the United States, and only for a year if it doesn't turn out to be wildly popular for you, we'll shut it down.

Try it.

And you know you've heard of Jobs's reality distortion field.

He can persuade anything of anyone.

He's them was the most charismatic, compelling, persuasive speaker who's ever lived.

So Warner agreed to this little experiment.

And instantly hundreds of millions of songs.

Warner got 70, $0.70 for every song.

And at that point, the other four record companies were easy sales.

They were like, all right, we'll be in two.

So that's how it came about.

And here's Apple now getting $0.35 of every song ever sold to anyone in the world.

You know, just an insanely triumphant, successful idea.

And again, how does Jobs see a head like that?

It's just absolutely mind blowing.

Hi, David.

Thank you for, all the information in your talk.

I'm Austin Dixon with, ideastream public media.

I was just curious, your opinion on would you consider the Siri being behind current AI a failure on Apple's part or a benefit because of their focus on hardware privacy and on device processing?

Incredibly profound point.

So yeah, so I you might have heard, is not perfect yet.

And I think this is a big problem for Apple because Apple does not like to send out products that sort of work.

That's just not Apple's thing.

Google and OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft, they're all fine with making AI.

That gives you wrong answers 30% of the time.

They're fine with that.

Apple doesn't have a good it doesn't agree to that.

The things that Apple has done in AI, are are carefully designed to avoid the problems with AI.

So, for example, Apple's AI will rewrite something you've written.

It can summarize what you've written.

It can make it more or less formal, but it will not write for you.

You can't say, write me an essay about Huckleberry Finn because Apple doesn't want to help kids cheat.

So it's trying to avoid that.

Apple, will they have a thing that makes images for you?

Like, give me, you know, koala bear on a unicycle, but they're not photorealistic.

No one would think that they're photographs.

They're cartoony.

So because Apple doesn't want people trying to deceive other people with AI images like I did today, so and then the privacy thing is unbelievable.

Apple does not want your data, either your questions or the AI answers to fall in anybody's hands, even its own.

So it's gone to these elaborate lengths to build these encrypted server farms that nobody no trace of anyone's there.

So the answer is yes, it's a failure because they it caught them by surprise.

And now they're two years behind.

But on the other hand, no, it's not a failure because they're they're pledging to do it right.

And Apple so Apple introduced Wi-Fi to the world.

Apple introduced the first digital camera.

Apple introduced laser printing and the mouse and the touchscreen phone and the tablet.

But it was not the first to develop any of these things.

It was just the company that made them palatable and joyous to use and spread out into the world.

So what I expect is that's what will happen with AI is they will take everything that's bad about it and fix it so that we're happy using it.

You.

Thank you.

Thank you, David Pogue, for joining us at the City Club of Cleveland today.

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