Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
The Talk Show: ‘Apple at 50’
Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?
Sponsored by:
More on Apple’s Fun ‘Rewind’ Video
Lex Friedman (with an embedded video to prove it):
If you reverse the new Apple video that plays in “rewind,” it’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.
Of course it is.
And, regarding that “◀︎◀︎ REW” button where the “REW” was set in bitmapped Chicago 12” but the “◀︎◀︎” was modern, Craig Hockenberry fixed it:
I pretended to be Susan Kare and fixed it, bottom is the original, top is my interpretation.
Ben Cohen of the WSJ Tours Apple’s Archive of Prototype Hardware
Lots of fun things I’ve never seen before in this 7-minute video. Best not to spoil them.
New Jersey, the Jackass State
By far the dumbest Internet Jackass Day “joke” I’ve seen so far is this one from the official New Jersey state account on Twitter/X, claiming that effective immediately, they’re lifting the statewide ban on self-service gasoline. For those of you who’ve never been there, I swear, you cannot pump your own gas anywhere in the state. It’s so ridiculous — and the historical reason so crooked — that people have a hard time believing it. You have to wait for an attendant, who is generally rude and almost always slow. Back in the day, they were extra slow returning with change when you paid in cash, hoping you’d just give up and leave. I’d rather run out of gas and just abandon my car on the side of the road than buy a single gallon of gas in New Jersey. And yet here’s the official state Twitter account yucking it up like the joke isn’t on them.
Ryan D’Agostino Profiles Tim Cook for Esquire on Apple’s 50th
Ryan D’Agostino, writing at Esquire (News+ link, in case Esquire stiffs you with their paywall):
Cook was at Jobs’s house the day he died. As he drove back to the office to announce it to the employees and, in so doing, to the world, he felt a strange kind of shock — strange because Jobs had been sick for so long, had even refused medicine when he was first diagnosed, instead trying to cure the disease with fruit juices, and so there should have been no shock at all.
“By that time, unfortunately, there was an inevitability to it,” Cook says. “But I was in denial for so long about the disease and where it would go, because I had watched him bounce back so many times, I assumed he always would. When I took the CEO role, I thought he was going to be executive chairman forever — that’s what I thought literally six weeks earlier. Looking back, I know somebody could say, How could you think that, given the circumstances? But that’s not the way I was wired in that moment.”
D’Agostino, fondly recalling the Apple IIe his family got for Christmas in 1983, wrongly remembers that, “When we turned it on, there was a little trash can in the corner of the screen.” Don’t let that conflation of the IIe and the Macintosh (yet to come in 1983) turn you off. It’s a good profile. Cook’s thoughts on Steve Jobs are touching, and D’Agostino gets Cook to expound upon his strategy of “engagement” with the Trump administration to a degree that I don’t think any other interviewer has. Cook’s answer is over 400 words, and Esquire, to their credit, ran the whole thing.
