
140: ‘Apple’s 2015 Year in Review’ With Rene Ritchie
The Talk Show With John Gruber
12/29/15
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Rene Ritchie returns to the show for a look back at the Apple year that was: the new one-port MacBook, Apple Watch's launch, WWDC and Apple Music, the iPhones 6S, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Apple TV, iPad Mini 4, iOS 9, Mac OS X 10.11, and, of course, the most important new product of the year, the Smart Battery Case.
This episode contains absolutely no Star Wars talk, except for a little.
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Links:
- Debug episode 76 (iTunes, Overcast): "Don Melton, former Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, and Nitin Ganatra, former Director of iOS Apps at Apple, talk about managing teams, managing up, retention, rivalry, and more", with hosts Rene Ritchie and Guy English.
- The Art of 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'
- "Obsession Times Voice": John Gruber and Merlin Mann at SXSW 2009. "A pretty good stab at a simple formula for doing it right."
- Princess Leia wearing what looks like an Apple Watch in Return of the Jedi.
- Jennifer Bailey, Apple's VP of Apple Pay.
- uMake -- innovative iOS 3D drawing app with rich support for Apple Pencil.
- Gizmodo: "Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked".
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Previous Episode

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift — Apple’s new programming language that just went open source.
Next, John Siracusa returns to the show to follow up on Federighi’s segment on Swift. Other topics include Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S, and our mutual (and perhaps futile) desire to head into this week’s premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens knowing as few spoilers as possible.
Transcript of Craig Federighi’s interview.
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- Harry’s: High-quality shaving products; great gift ideas. Use promo code “TALKSHOW” to save $5 off your first purchase.
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- Wealthfront: An intelligent, automated investing service. They’ll build you a free personalized investment plan in 2 minutes.
Links:
- Craig Federighi talking about Swift going open source with Ars Technica, TheNextWeb, and Mashable.
- Siracusa’s explanation of Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) in his Mac OS X 10.7 review in 2011.
- Siracusa’s excellent introduction to Swift from his Mac OS X 10.10 review last year.
- Glyn Williams post on Quora regarding how iOS devices need less RAM than equivalent Android devices, because Android’s virtual machine uses garbage collection and iOS doesn’t.
- “The Curious Case of the Curious Case” — my review of Apple’s new Smart Battery Case.
- Michael Tsai’s link roundup on Sketch leaving the Mac App Store.
- Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s The C Programming Language, first published in 1978.
- Android’s Dalvik (old) and ART (new) runtimes, both of which use garbage collection.
- “Don’t Drink the Bacta Tea” — spoiler-free episode of The Incomparable last week, with Siracusa, Jason Snell, Serenity Caldwell, and Dan Moren talking about The Force Awakens.
- Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki
- Sci-Fi Corridor Archive. Start here, of course.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
Next Episode

A brief holiday chat about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with a cavalcade of special guests, including Guy English and Amy Jane Gruber.
Sponsored by:
- Igloo: The intranet you’ll actually like.
- Backblaze: Unlimited, unthrottled online backup for your Mac.
- Wealthfront: An intelligent, automated investing service. They’ll build you a free personalized investment plan in 2 minutes.
- MailRoute: Hosted spam and virus protection for email. Use this link for 10 percent off for the entire lifetime of your account.
Links:
- Writers Guild panel discussion between Lawrence Kasdan, JJ Abrams, and Michael Arndt, writers of The Force Awakens.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
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