445: ‘Apple at 50’, With John Siracusa

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa?

Sponsored by:

• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.
• Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW.

Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good.

Links:

• The Commodore VIC-20.
• Apple’s looks-good-to-this-day “Snow White” hardware design language from the 1980s, created in collaboration with Frog Design.
• The Apple IIc — in my opinion, the epitome of “Snow White”.
• Frog Designed turned 50 back in 2019, and The Verge has some amazing photos from their collection, including a jaw-dropping prototype for the Lisa.
• Star Blazers.
• Yours truly, back in 2014, on the Finder’s “Special” menu.
• Yours truly guesting on The Verge’s Version History podcast, to talk about the original Macintosh.
• Hyperspace — Siracusa’s perfectly-named Mac utility for saving space via APFS magic.
• ATP (a pretty good podcast), and episode 683 in particular (a pretty good episode of that podcast, wherein Marco Arment tells the tale of the Mac Mini server farm he built for Overcast’s now-in-beta generated-transcripts feature).
• Infinite Mac — classic Mac (and NeXTStep) emulators that run in your web browser.
• “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.”
• ResEdit 2.1 Reference — still hosted at Apple’s website.
• SNL’s “McIntosh Jr.” commercial, the best Apple parody ad ever made.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.