The Apple Way: Creativity, Obsession, and a Little Insanity
David Pogue reveals the unlikely stories, eccentric personalities, and relentless pursuit of excellence that turned Apple into one of the world's most influential brands.
The Big Idea: Apple’s success wasn’t just about building better technology. It was about making technology more intuitive, more delightful, and more human. The company’s greatest breakthroughs came from people who refused to accept limitations and obsessed over details others considered unimportant.
Why It Matters: Most innovation stories focus on strategy and execution. Apple’s history suggests that breakthrough products often emerge from something messier: curiosity, playfulness, showmanship, unreasonable standards, and a willingness to rethink what everyone else assumes is impossible.
Try This Today: Identify one frustrating process, product, or experience in your life and ask the question Apple teams asked repeatedly: What would make this feel magical instead of merely functional?
These ideas come from Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue. David is a seven-time Emmy Award winner, five-time TED speaker, host of twenty PBS NOVA specials, and spent over two decades as the bestselling author of guides to Macs and iPhones. Read on for 5 of his favorite Apple stories.
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1. Bill Atkinson naked in the hot tub.
Apple followers know that in 1979, there was a famous visit by Steve Jobs and some of his lieutenants to Xerox PARC. That’s the Palo Alto Research Center, a think tank where they were developing next-generation computer products. That’s where Jobs and his team saw an early version of the graphic user interface: black lettering on a white screen with fonts and graphics. There was a mouse. There were menus listing the commands. You didn’t have to memorize the commands. And there were overlapping windows. To Jobs, this was clearly the future of computing, and he told his team, “We’ve got to reproduce that for our upcoming new computer called the Lisa.”
For Bill Atkinson, the star programmer, it was a matter of recreating what he’d seen at Xerox PARC from memory. And the one thing he struggled to imitate was this business of overlapping windows. When you moved a front window aside, instead of immediately revealing what was in the background window, Atkinson was getting a blank white flicker. There just didn’t seem to be enough memory and power to immediately reveal what was in the background window.
Finally, after weeks of effort, he solved the problem with a technical hack. And shortly thereafter, he was in a hot tub at a nudist camp in the California Redwoods. Somebody got into the hot tub naked with him and introduced himself:
“Hi, I’m from Xerox PARC. You must be Atkinson, the guy who famously solved the overlapping windows problem.” Atkinson was very confused: “What are you talking about? I saw that at your guys’ place. I was just trying to figure out how you guys had done it.” And the guy said, “No, we’ve never solved it. We still haven’t solved it. You solved it. You must have misremembered.” And indeed, Atkinson had misremembered seeing that effect at Xerox PARC. They had never solved it.
Atkinson told me upon sharing this story, “It just goes to show that if somebody tells you something’s impossible, you just haven’t thought about it enough.”
2. Steve Jobs and the fish tank.
During the development of the iPod, Steve Jobs was insistent that it be as small as possible. So, one day, his team brought in the latest prototype and said, “Steve, this is it. Doesn’t get any smaller than this. We need a screen. We need that little hard drive. We need a circuit board and a battery. It can’t get any smaller.” Jobs got up from the table, took the prototype, dropped it into the office fish tank, and pointed to the air bubbles coming up from the dropped iPod. And he said, “See those air bubbles? That means there’s still room in there. Get rid of it.”
“Not all the stories are true.”
Such a great story never happened. This story’s been kicking around for years, and not a single person says that it happened, remembers hearing about it, or ever saw it. In fact, there weren’t even fish tanks there. Not all the stories are true.
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3. Face ID and the Hollywood masks.
When Apple was developing Face ID, they wanted to make sure that it would unlock your phone no matter what your face looked like—no matter what the facial hair, makeup, or glasses. They wanted to make sure it worked every time. So, they launched the most insane series of testing events.
They hosted Makeup Mondays in the Apple cafeteria, where people were invited to come with weird makeup, weird hair, with glasses, and with wigs to see if they could fool the prototype. They took this thing to a twins conference to see if an identical twin could unlock the phone with their face. They took this thing to Harley-Davidson rallies on the premise that they would find a lot of creative facial hair. They got permission to take this thing out of the country to sub-Saharan African tribes, where the facial structures were different from European facial structures.
Finally, they wanted to make sure that masks would not fool it. They hired a Hollywood special-effects company to create a series of hyper-realistic human heads. I mean, we’re talking about whiskers and stubble and the little lines in your eyes. And sure enough, they made a bunch of these masks to see if the phone would be fooled. It wasn’t fooled by the masks, but they did tell me a great story about the poor guy in the mail room who unpacked the box from Hollywood and saw these 12 dead faces staring back at him with open eyes.
4. The July 1999 Macworld Expo keynote by Steve Jobs and his team.
Jobs was the most unbelievable performer and showman when he gave presentations. He was so funny and would engineer these stunts that left you with unforgettable, indelible impressions of whatever it was he was trying to sell you. The expo in 1999 was particularly amazing because Jobs walked out on the stage in his black turtleneck and his jeans, and he said:
“Thanks for coming. This is going to be a great Macworld. We’ve got some great new products, some really great new products, some insanely great new products, some really, totally, wildly, insanely great new products.”
“Jobs was the most unbelievable performer and showman when he gave presentations.”
Through all of this, the crowd is beginning to ripple. They’re slowly beginning to realize that the person on stage is an imposter. It’s a lookalike. It was Noah Wyle, who had just played Steve Jobs in a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley, and he looked just like him. It was so funny as the audience caught on, and then Jobs came barging on saying:
“That’s not me at all! You’re blowing it. Look, you’re supposed to come over here, open a water, get the slide clicker, then you can put your hands together.”
That was the same keynote when they unveiled the first iBook. This was the laptop version of the iMac, available in blue or orange. They called it the toilet seat iBook because it kind of looked like a closed toilet seat.
A lot of people don’t remember that Apple introduced Wi-Fi to the world—it was at this same keynote. It was the most unbelievably witty demo. Jobs had this thing of ending his discussions by saying, “Now there’s one more thing.” And then he would roll out the best thing of all. And in this case, he had already unveiled the iBook and he said, “Now there is one more thing.” And he opened this thing on a podium and started surfing the web and goes, “Let me show you how I can surf the web on this iBook.” He picks up the iBook and starts walking across the stage:
“Oh, there’s CNN, you can see. And maybe I’ll go to Disney here. I can come over here. Let me show these guys how it works. Come on over here, you want to sit behind me there? No wires.”
It was Wi-Fi. No one had seen it before. It was mind-blowing. And then the pièce de résistance? He took a magician’s hoop and passed it over the iBook just to prove that there were no wires. It was the greatest, funniest demo of all time.
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5. My favorite Apple story.
In 2007, when the iPhone came out, I wanted to write a book about it called iPhone: The Missing Manual. I needed a way to illustrate the book, but the first iPhone had no way to take screenshots. You may know now that if you press the opposite buttons on the iPhone, you capture a screenshot of the screen as a graphic you can use for any purpose.
I wanted it to illustrate my user manual. I knew there had to be a way to create screenshots because Apple’s ads and documentation were full of them. So, I called Apple PR and said, “How do you guys make screenshots?” And they said, “Well, we’ve developed this software tool internally, but it doesn’t have a nice user interface. It’s just for our own use.” So I begged them to let me use that app to create screenshots.
“I knew there had to be a way to create screenshots because Apple’s ads and documentation were full of them.”
After a lot of hemming and hawing, they first said, “Well, you can fly out here and use it under supervision.” But Steve Jobs killed that idea. Finally, it was settled that I would make a list of the screenshots I wanted to use in the book, describe exactly each one, what phone number it would display, what data would be on the screen, and they would set aside a graphic designer to create these screenshots for me using their tool.
So, some poor guy spent the entire summer taking 400 screenshots for my book. We printed in full color, and they were absolutely gorgeous, as you can imagine. Years later, I found out who it was, and I sent him a nice gift. But the point is that when Apple was coming out with a new iPhone, I needed to create an updated edition of my book. I called my Apple PR contact and said, “You going to have a guy spend his summer making screenshots for me again?”
This time they said, “No, we’re never doing that again. We have, however, come up with something we call the Pogue feature. We will set up a feature involving pressing two buttons that lets anyone take a screenshot, however they want and whenever they want.” To this day, every time I take a screenshot, I smile knowing that internally it was called the Pogue feature.
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This added to the pleasure I had in reading the book. Pogue has the gift for making readers feel like they're swapping stories across a table in Starbucks, except that Pogue's are so much better.
Definitely not self-aggrandizing! I've followed you since the late eighties. I love when you recount your personal stories. I'm enjoying the book immensely. I prefer reading slowly, a little bit at a time, so I can savor it, which means it will be awhile before I finish.