David Pogue presents a condensed history of Apple’s first 50 years, which passed on April 1, 2026. David also sang two of his Apple parody songs. We think this qualifies this meeting as a musical. You’re welcome!
Transcript:
Aric • 00:00
Welcome, everyone, to tonight’s PMUG meeting. Welcome, one and all. Before we get started, I would like to just remind everyone that tonight is being recorded for our members. For anyone who can’t make it, they’ll be able to watch it later or listen to our members-only podcast. If you’re not asking a question, I just ask that you keep yourself muted. So this way, if your dog barks, et cetera, we don’t have to listen to that. Don’t forget to unmute yourself, however, if you want to ask a question. You can feel free to ask a question at any time. If you don’t want to appear on camera or in the recording, just leave yourself muted. You can ask questions in the chat room, and we will pick those up at the end of the presentation. or perhaps if they’re relevant while David is speaking. Okay, so welcome one and all. And let me introduce Mr. David Pogue. So David is a seven-time Emmy Award winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, a five-time TED speaker, a host of 20 Nova specials on PBS, and a New York Times bestselling author. He’s written about Apple for his entire career, including 13 years as a Macworld columnist, 13 more as the New York Times tech columnist, and 20 years as the number one bestselling author of books about Macs and iPhones. He lives with his family in New York. Without further ado, take it away, Mr. Polk.
David Pogue • 01:37
Thank you, Aric. Great to meet y’all. Thank you, Michael, for the great job you’ve done in promoting tonight’s events. Great to see you all. My career began in user groups. First, it was the Yale Mac user group. Sorry, Princetonians. And then it was the New York Mac user group where I was not a tech guy or a writer. I was a Broadway conductor. I spent 10 years doing shows, which is why I have a keyboard here. We’ll get to that in a bit. And there was this sheet music software that came out. I don’t know how many of you have heard of Finale. But for decades, it was like the Microsoft Word of sheet music. And it was $1,000 for this software, and I couldn’t afford it. So the NIMUG, New York Mac User Group, newsletter editor, we have this eight-page rag called the Mac Street Journal. He said, well, why don’t you write this company, if you want this software so much, and tell them that you’re our reviewer, and they’ll send you a free copy. And I’m like, it’s that easy? and so so i got a free copy of finale and i’m like could i get photoshop too and so i did the same thing with photoshop and microsoft office for a year that was what i did while i was doing musical stuff in new york i would uh get free stuff and write reviews and then the same guy same nyma guy rob allen he said one day you know you could be making money from this you should send your example writings to the to Macworld and Mac user magazine and see if they’ll hire you and they did so that’s the beginning of my career all because of a user group guy um anyway which brings us to uh this thing lift with the knees not with the back it’s uh this is my new book it’s called Apple the first 50 years as you may know two weeks ago today was Apple’s 50th anniversary And so I’m going to give you a little slideshow. Let me share my screen. So yeah, so this is the book and I’m very excited to say, ladies and gentlemen, it is a New York Times bestseller. That is correct. It’s number six, and it has been on this list for four weeks now. And I don’t feel too bad about the number six thing, because if you look at one through five, they all have something in common. These are all hot Hollywood celebrity memoirs. So if you take out, you know, Valerie Bertinelli and Liza Minnelli and Christina Applegate, you get two of these books with obviously titillating titles, Getting Naked and Stripped Down. I don’t think that’s fair. I think we should take those away, too. So if you take away those five, there we go. And, you know, I learned something from this experience, right? Because, like, this is the title of the book, but the title matters. I mean, look at how getting naked and stripping down are in the top five on the bestseller list. If I had any brains, I would have called this Apple the First Sexy Years. I mean, that would have been much smarter. But anyway, but who cares about being on the bestseller list? That’s neither here nor there. The greatest part of this experience has been the social media explosion of people who are Apple fans who have posted themselves with the book or done unboxing videos or posed the book with their equipment. It’s the most unbelievable ego inflating thing that could possibly happen. It just means the world to me. Look at this guy. This guy’s from New Zealand. He’s like, I’m gutted. My copy of Pogue’s book is officially lost, according to the Courier, having to deal with getting a new copy sent from Amazon US. But the lost book is in such an amazingly beautiful country. Can’t help wondering what it’s up to. And so he’s got, you know, he’s got, you know, bungee jumping and where they filmed Lord of the Rings in New Zealand and the New Zealand Tower and eating kiwis. Very funny. And this guy, he has a Mac museum. Absolutely gorgeous. Mac Museum, at least one of every machine. He bought three copies. So he’s got one copy there, so you can see the cover on his museum, a second copy there, so you can see the back cover, and a third copy as an e-book, so he can actually read the book. He’s just fantastic. So this all began two years ago at the Mac’s 40th anniversary. There was this outfit in in California called the Computer History Museum, wonderful museum, and they hosted a reunion event for the people who actually designed the original Mac in 1984. So there’s Bill Atkinson and Steve Capps and Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn and Susan Kerr on the right. Susan Kerr, who hand drew all the icons, the bomb icon, the happy Mac icon and all the fonts by hand, pixel by pixel, really made the Mac what it was. I was the MC for this thing. And it was, let me tell you, it was like Woodstock. It was like a crazy love fest. It was humor and stories and tears and PTSD. And so a few weeks after that, my wife, Nikki, that’s Nikki, woke me up in the middle of the night having had a dream. She literally shook me awake and she’s like, David, David, I just had the best idea for a book. There is no photo of this moment. So I asked ChatGPT to make a recreation. That’s what it came up with. The quality of this picture is how I know AI will never take over humanity. I look like I’ve had a heart attack there. But anyway, so I literally shut her down and like, Nikki, that date’s come and gone. You missed it. And she’s like, oh, sorry. And we went back to sleep. But the next day I looked it up and she was right. It was two years away, the 50th anniversary. And that’s just the right amount of time to write a 600 page book, if you’re crazy. So that’s how that began. It was a two year amazing adventure of interviewing 150 people, including, by the way, people who were who are at Apple. That was the real worry. You know, Apple has a rule that they do not let current employees speak to journalists. And so, like, what was I going to do about the last 15 years of Apple? There’s going to be 200 blank pages in the book. So it took six months and I had I sent them a sample chapter. You know, I told them they could not have editorial control. They weren’t allowed to see the book, but until it was done. But finally, Tim Cook’s entire executive staff and all the key designers and engineers, amazing experience. So there’s Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. There’s Johnny Ive, who designed the iMac and the iPod and the iPhone. There’s John Sculley, who is the CEO for 10 years. And next to him to the right is Bill Atkinson. I’ll talk more about him in a minute. To the right of that is Michael Chow, who’s the Newton guy. Anyway, I did insist that the book be printed in color. So there are 360 color photos, which the publisher made clear to me is a very expensive undertaking. And they tried to persuade me to do 16 pages of colors, color photos at the back. I’m like, oh my God, that’s just so lame. So Apple also gave me access to their archives, which is incredible. So all this amazing ads and documents and prototypes, you really just can’t do a book that features the iMac and the iPhone and do it in black and white. You just you’re just not going to do that. I found I got in touch with the previous designers, the people who preceded Johnny Ive. Like this is Robert Bruner. He was he’s he said on my gravestone, it’s going to be here lies the guy who hired Johnny Ive. But he was the designer before Johnny Ive, and he dug up his photo CDs from the 90s and shipped them to me here in Westchester so that I could get at his prototypes. Look at these cool things that never saw the light of day. Anyway, so Apple, two and a half billion people are carrying around Apple devices. If you do the math, that is 31% of every man, woman, and child on Earth. They sell 220 million iPhones a year. and if you do the math that means they make a million dollars in revenue every 90 seconds so that’s you know all of us put together can’t even touch that so they were excuse me they’re the first company in the world to have a market cap that is the total value of all its stock of a trillion dollars and then two trillion three trillion and now they’re about to hit four trillion dollars if you wanted to summarize this talk and you’re in a hurry and you want to know Apple’s complete story arc. It’s basically this. It’s a rise, a fall, and a rise again. In fact, I would argue it’s the greatest corporate turnaround in history. I kind of fudged it a little bit. It’s more like that. So starting from the left, you get the Apple One, the Apple Two, the Mac, Steve Jobs is out, PowerBook, Newton, Steve Jobs is back, iMac, iPod, iPhone, Tim Cook takes over, Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro, and then all the services. and uh there you go thank you for coming tonight everyone that was really fun no i’m just kidding um so the story really begins with steve wozniak and so does the book by the way not steve Jobs you have to remember in 1976 computers were not something that people owned these were things that corporations and governments had you saw them in movies but no individual had ever owned one or seen one up close. So Woz really wanted to play games. His dream was to own a computer of his own, so he built one. We now call it the Apple I. It was nothing more than a circuit board, and he built it for himself and maybe for his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, the very first Mac user group or Apple user group. But he met this guy, Steve Jobs, four years younger, same high school, but they never ran into each other because of the age difference. And Jobs was like, hey, we should sell that. This will not be the first time you hear this. And so they did. They sold 150 of the Apple I. And they did eventually persuade a local cabinet maker and his son to build a case for it. It could hook up to a TV, detach a keyboard. And what cracks me up is the legend is that this amazing case, and there’s only like seven of them still exists and they go for huge fortunes on in auctions one went went on sale last year and they sold it for four hundred thousand dollars um because it’s made of rare hawaiian koa wood which is a very fancy wood it’s only grown in hawaii super rare um the hilarious thing is whoever paid four hundred thousand dollars believed it to be made of rare hawaiian koa because it still says that on the auction website. Well, guess what? At one of my book tour stops, the guy who made it showed up. This is Chaz Fisser. He was the son of the guy of the cabinet maker. The two of them designed and made the Apple I cases, and he brought one back to show it. And he’s like, Coalwood? What the hell, man? It’s walnut. It’s just walnut, highly polished and beautiful. He’s like, walnut is beautiful. Why would I make it out of coal? So it’s a complete myth. I love shattering myths in the Apple story. So 1977 came along. He followed it up with a slightly better seller, the Apple II. This was the world’s first personal computer because it came in a case, fully built, ready to use, nothing to assemble, software installed, everything. It had a keyboard, you just plug in a TV or a monitor. And this thing sold 6 million units over 10 years, which, you know, in those days was astronomical. It was, for many of you, for many of me, the very first computer we ever touched. You know, it was big in schools. People learned to program it on it. And I mean, Apple would sell other computers in the next 10 years, but the Apple 2 who kept Apple alive through all the failures. And really, we have to hand it to Jobs because he was the one who said, this should be made of plastic. Remember, computers in the 70s were metal. They were industrial equipment. They were tools. They were not meant to be attractive. They were not meant to have rounded edges. This was Jobs’ thing. He said they shouldn’t look out of place on your living room table or your desk. So this is what it looked like once it was all decked out with a monitor. It had no floppy drive at the beginning. Instead, you stored your data on your programs on an audio cassette. And I found a copy of the original Apple II manual where it literally said, here’s how you do it. Put the data cassette into the player, hit play. And if you don’t see anything on your screen, adjust the tape deck’s volume. If you turn up the volume a little bit and you start seeing data being red, then you know you’ve hit the sweet spot. I mean, can you imagine? Anyway, then came the Apple III. The thing about the Apple II is everybody who bought one eventually would also buy the disk drive, the floppy drive. They would buy VisiCalc, which is the world’s first spreadsheet software. If you saw VisiCalc, you’d know right away that it’s Microsoft Excel. It’s the same thing. And it ran only on the Apple II. So everyone would buy that. They would buy an extra card that would expand the number of characters across the screen from 40 to 80. And Jobs was like, if everybody’s going to buy all these accessories, why don’t we make a machine that builds it all in? So that was the Apple III. It was going to be for the business world. One thing you’ll notice, The difference between the Apple II and the Apple III is the Apple III does not have any vents because Jobs had a bugaboo about fans. He did not like fans in his computers. And as you may know, that stuck with him till the day he died. He did not like fans. So he insisted that there be no fan in this machine. It would be totally silent. It wouldn’t have big, ugly slots for vents on the side. And unfortunately, what happened was the Apple III overheated. I mean, it got really hot in there. In the Stanford archives, I found this consultant’s report. They asked this guy to try to figure out why the Apple III was randomly shutting down. And it turns out because it was getting to be 220 degrees in there. I mean, you’d stick in a floppy disk, one of the old five and a quarter inch disks. And when you pulled it out of the slot, sometimes it had melted in the slot. And the problem was that this thing had a little daughter board that had its memory chips on it, held up by four aluminum posts. And when they got hot, they expanded and they pushed the memory board up off the posts and then the whole computer would shut down. So there was this myth, this piece of Apple lore, that Apple told its users, if that’s happening to you if your computer is randomly shutting it down simply lift it three inches off the desk and drop it and that will reseat the memory board onto the posts and if you can believe it i found the guy who designed the apple 3 and he confirmed that’s really true they really did tell people and he said why not it works it got the machine working again anyway So that was a big bomb, and the Apple II kept right on selling. Even so, as they began the work on their next computer, the Lisa, the Lisa originally looked like the Apple II in that it was a command-based interface. You typed out commands. You had to memorize the commands. If you typed out one wrong character, you’d get an error message. And halfway through designing the Lisa, they got this invitation to visit Xerox PARC, Most of you probably know this story. Jobs in exchange for granting Xerox the right to buy what would be $10 million worth of Apple stock right before it went public. Oh, yeah, they did really well with that stock. Don’t think that Xerox got the worst end of this bargain. They discovered that at this think tank, they were experimenting with a new way of doing computer. It was graphic interface. So it had a mouse. I mean, it was ugly. It had three different buttons and the context of what the buttons did changed all the time. But it was black type against a white screen, just like a printed piece of paper. And they had you still had to memorize commands. And there was no desktop. You know, there are no icons, no trash. But you could copy and paste. You could have overlapping windows. And so Jobs saw this and he’s like, this is the future. Why aren’t you guys selling this? You’re crazy. So he told Bill Atkinson, this young genius programmer, see if you can recreate everything we saw at Xerox, but finish it, make it complete, make it elegant, make it polished. And lo and behold, he did it. And so the Lisa came out looking like this. Everybody thinks it was the Mac that introduced the mouse and the menus and the windows. But no, it was the Lisa, an incredibly advanced computer. It had multitasking. It had memory protection. So one program that crashed did not bring down the whole machine. It had a constantly saved state. So if someone yanked out the power cord, you didn’t lose anything. It was an amazing, amazing machine. It had a megabyte of memory and it cost $10,000 or 38 grand in today’s dollars. So needless to say, this thing bombed too, but my favorite story in the entire book has to do with Bill Atkinson and The overlapping windows thing so when he was trying to create this desktop Overlapping Xerox part thing see how this window in front with the rows in it is in front of other windows What he couldn’t figure out is how they’d managed to get it so that when you move a window aside You instantly see what was behind it when? Atkinson tried it. There was so little memory that it would just reveal a big empty blank white spot and it made him crazy. How did they do it? How did they do it? And it would flicker and it looked terrible. So he worked on it for weeks. And finally he came up with this very technical, very elegant solution. Something about storing the overlapping coordinates of the background window in a memory buffer, like a screenshot. And then anyway, he finally solved it. And then a few weeks later, first of all, I have to tell you, Bill Atkinson, the most incredible guy, he wrote Mac Paint, he wrote Hypercard. I interviewed him at the end of 2024. And I’m very sad to say it was the last interview he ever gave. At the time, neither one of us knew it, but he had pancreatic cancer. So he was dead within months of our interview. But in the meantime, he called me a couple times after the interview to say, oh, I thought of something else. You got to tell the story of the nudist camp. Yes, Bill Atkinson was really into this nudist camp in the Redwoods. This is an AI recreation. But one day, he was in the hot tub in the Redwoods at this nudist camp, And this other guy gets in and he’s like, oh, my God, you’re Bill Atkinson from Apple. You’re the guy. And he said, why? Yes, I am. And this guy goes, my name is Bill Muti from Xerox. I hear that you solved the overlapping windows problem. And Atkinson’s like, well, well, yeah, it took me so long to figure out how you guys had done it at Xerox. And the Xerox guy goes, no, we never solved it. We still haven’t solved it. you must have misremembered. And that is in fact what happened. Bill Atkinson only thought he had seen that feature because even Xerox hadn’t started it. So Bill was an amazing guy. He was heavily into, well, I’ll just say it. He was heavily into LSD and he was very into mind consciousness, universe expansion, all that stuff. So he said, and David, that lesson, it just goes to show you someone tells you something’s impossible, you just haven’t thought about it. So anyway, amazing story. So the Lisa bombed, but it was a beautiful machine. In the end, rather than sell off the unsold inventory, Apple famously hired a company to bury it in a Utah landfill, New Mexico landfill. And last year, there was a guy who started a GoFundMe. He wanted to go there and dig up the Lisas on camera. And he was going to live stream the unearthing on TV. And the goal was $400,000. What he got was $85. It didn’t happen. One backer. Anyway, Jobs was very sad about the Lisa. But he said, these ideas are too good to die. We’re going to put them into a smaller, less expensive package. Excuse me, the Macintosh. And that was, of course, the Mac. This computer did not sell either. It had a quarter of a megabyte. No, no, it had less than an eighth of a megabyte of memory. 128K, no hard drive, one floppy drive slot. It was so slow and so memory constrained. Literally, the longest MacWrite document you could write was 10 pages long. One program at a time, open a program, then quit it to open the next program. Barely worked. There were no software programs available for it. So it basically didn’t sell during Jobs’ time there. It was also a closed system. This was another Steve Jobs bugaboo. You could not install more memory. If you opened the case, you voided the warranty. But what it did do is it introduced the world to Jobs’ mania for detail and design. He sent the designers back a hundred times to adjust the curvature of that screen bezel or to adjust the drop shadows or the corner radius of the icons. I mean, he was just a maniac for detail. And that included the packaging. Like, who had ever cared about computer equipment packaging? but no he said the experience should be just as beautiful as using the computer itself and that is why so many of us still don’t throw away our apple boxes because they’re gorgeous steve of course had hired a ceo this is john scully he was uh the former president of pepsi he had never seen a computer didn’t know anything well no that’s not true he’d he’d experienced apple twos but He’d never seen the Macintosh. The graphic interface was totally new to him. But he made no bones about the fact that he was not a technology guy. But what he was was a great marketing guy. These two were like brothers for the first couple of years. But then when the Mac didn’t sell, they began to bicker and backbite and undermine each other. Finally, it came to a head and the whole board had to choose between the two. And they chose Scully. So Jobs was demoted. He was exiled to an empty building across the street that he called Siberia. And shortly thereafter, he quit. So now comes what I call the interregnum. It’s 11 years when Jobs is gone from Apple and the company begins deteriorating and falling apart. Most Apple books and Apple accounts sort of skip over these 11 years. But I think they were sort of interesting. A lot got done. I mean, QuickTime happened then, and HyperCard, and early speech recognition happened then. And let’s remember the PowerBooks. So at the time, laptops looked like this. They were designed to remind people of typewriters. So the keyboard was pressed up against the front of the machine. And that’s what all laptops looked like. And it was really a bad design because where are you going to put the trackball? It has nowhere to go but hanging off the edge, where all it takes is one flight attendant’s cart, and you’ve snapped off your trackball. So this is another one of the greatest stories in this whole book. This guy named John Krakauer is studying this, and he’s not even a designer. He has nothing to do with the design department. He works at Apple as a systems integrator. His job is to make the hard drive, the battery, the circuit board all work together. So he’s looking over these parts and he, on his own, after hours when the lights are dark at Apple, he builds a model of a different design where the keyboard is pushed back against the screen. So this does three things. First of all, it gives you palm rests to type on. Second, it lets you bring that trackball on board the deck there. And it puts your thumbs where they can reach the trackball without taking your hands off the keyboard. And as a bonus, the heavy elements of this laptop, the battery and the hard drive, which used to be up there by the hinges, they tended to make the laptop back heavy. It would do a back flip off your knees. So now with this design, they are up against the front where the balance is much better. So everybody at Apple thought it looked really weird. Krakauer had gone and gotten 45 different people, just secretaries and janitors and ordinary people at Apple, to come in after hours without anyone’s knowledge to try this thing, beta test it. Where should the buttons be? How big should the trackball be? And finally, he had this thing perfected and he showed Robert Bruner. Everybody thought it was weird looking, but Bruner thought it was brilliant. And shortly thereafter, Apple introduced its first successful laptop, the PowerBook. This was a giant hit. It sold a billion dollars worth of laptops in the first year. And as you know, no laptop from any company ever again used that design all for all time. Apple redesigned what laptops would look like. They now have palm rests. Jobs was busy also during 11 years. He started next. He started Pixar and he started a family. So when he came back in 1997, when Apple bought Next, what Jobs found was really upsetting. Apple had descended into fiefdoms and duplication and redundancy. They were selling 50 different Mac models. They had 12 different ad agencies, all marketing different things. They, oh my God, my favorite story of this whole thing is when one day in 1996, when two Apple lawyers showed up in trademark court to sue each other. I mean, it was just an absolute mess. So Jobs sat down and pulled off in one year, the greatest turnaround in corporate history. He shut down all 50 Mac models. And instead he said, we’re going to, this is Gil Emilio, the outgoing CEO. And there’s, uh, there’s Jobs with Woz. Um, and he said, we’re going to replace all 50 Mac models with four. We’re going to have two laptops and two desktops. And you got to remember, people did not think this was a great idea. People didn’t think that Jobs was the savior, come back to fix Apple. Because at this point, how many successes had Jobs had? The Apple 3 failed, the Lisa failed, the Macintosh failed, the Next failed. He had never helped to create a winning computer. I mean, The Apple II was kind of like Waz’s project. So the thing was, but he had so much focus. And he argued that the engineers who were complaining about shutting down all the other models, they were saying like, dude, we’ve spent millions in R&D on these machines. You can’t just shut down our projects. And he said, I can and I will because this way we can put our top engineers on all four of these machines. And he also fired all 12 ad agencies and he replaced them with one, one ad. And I think you remember this.
Richard Drefuss • 31:59
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
David Pogue • 32:22
and this ad was as much for the employees of apple who hadn’t quit as it was for the public he wanted everyone to know that apple still had a soul i mean this ad doesn’t show a single computer doesn’t mention a computer not that apple had any to sell but that was about to change he met Johnny Ive, this 27-year-old British designer who was laboring away in the design studio, completely ignored. At the time, the way computers were designed at Apple was the engineers would say, okay, here are the components. There’s a hard drive, there’s a circuit board, there are ports, and then they would give it to the design department and say, here, wrap something around this but Jobs fell in love with the designs that i’ve had there in his studio these foam models of fantastic new creations they started having lunch today lunch together every single day and they would hang out on weekends they just spent hours together and i’ve had been about to quit he was literally on the verge of quitting and this changed everything from now on i was going to be at the table when a new machine was conceived. And that is how they came up with this. This is the iMac. This is the machine that changed everything for this dying company, Apple, which had been six weeks from bankruptcy. The thing that blows my mind about Jobs, for all his faults and his abusiveness and his volatility, he could see the future in absolutely freakish ways. And what I mean is if you were going to turn your computer company around and you were going to if you were going to bet everything on one machine would you change every variable i mean it’s not rectangular it’s not opaque it’s not beige it doesn’t have a floppy drive what it doesn’t have a printer port they got rid of apple’s own keyboard and mouse jacks the adb jacks they got rid of everything that you would expect to be on the computer. And they introduced in their place something that no one had ever heard of called USB. And this is a running theme, by the way. Apple introduced the mouse, Windows, menus, copy and paste across programs, laser printing, CD-ROM, the digital camera, Wi-Fi, USB, all of this stuff Apple introduced, but did not invent. Apple perfected all of these technologies when they were still promising, but really rough and ugly. And that’s a running theme through Apple’s 50 years. So anyway, he changed every variable at once on the iMac, which seems crazy. Here’s this guy, never finished college, never had a lick of business training, thinks he knows what’s going to be a best-selling computer, and it was. It became the best-selling computer in history. They sold 150,000 iMacs before they were even on sale, and they sold 5 million in the first three years. Absolutely a stunning success. Then came the iPod. This is a great story, too. At the time, if you wanted a portable music player, You either had memory cards, which could hold, I kid you not, six songs on a card, or you could get one the size of a peanut butter jelly sandwich that had a hard drive in it. So very fragile, very delicate, very big and expensive. so john rubenstein who’s Jobs is hardware guy in in 2000 he was visiting their suppliers in japan on a routine trip and he was sitting down with toshiba that made parts for apple and at the end of the meeting he goes so what else you guys got what are you working on and they brought out a hard drive the size of an oreo and they’re like we’ve made this tiny little hard drive we just we just can’t figure out what to do with it. And Rubenstein’s like, oh, we know what to do with it. And he said, here’s a check for $10 million if we can have the exclusive on that hard drive. And that is how the iPod was born. Absolute huge megalithics. Well, not a success at first. It sold okay the first year because Jobs insisted that it would work only with the Mac. It would not work for the 98% of the world that use Windows. It took a year for people to convince him to try that. And at that point, it really took off. Apple was paranoid that Sony or somebody else would come up with a competitor that would eat their lunch. So Rubenstein and Jobs decided that they would do a new iPod model every single year. And I mean, it made everybody crazy, but it kept them so far ahead of the competition that no one ever caught up. Sony finally introduced their own iPod-like player four years later with the spectacular feature that it was an MP3 player that could not play MP3 files. Arguably not a good feature in an MP3 player. So it could play only their proprietary format. So this is another example of like, how did Jobs see the future? This is the iPod mini. This was the time that Apple went from selling a few million of something a year to a hundred million of something a year. This was the biggest hit and its popularity was only growing. So of course, Jobs said, we’re killing it. We’re going to shut down the iPod mini. We’re going to replace it with a new model that holds less music. His entire team was like, Oh God, oh God, this is such a bad idea. What are you doing? Have you never been to business school? You don’t kill off your greatest cash cow. But Jobs somehow knew that the iPod Nano would outsell the Mini even though it held fewer songs. And this is, he was the greatest showman who ever lived. This is him unveiling the Nano.
Steve Jobs • 38:35
Now this pocket’s been the one that your iPod’s gone in traditionally. The iPod and the iPod Mini fit great in there. You ever wonder what this pocket’s for? I’ve always wondered that. Well, now we know because this is the new iPod Nano.
David Pogue • 39:00
And of course, he was right again. This thing sold in the hundreds of millions and became the best-selling electronic in the history of the world. Then came the iPhone. I think you’ve heard of it. And by the way, I’m going to stop sharing here for a second because I have to tell you that I used to be a Broadway conductor. I think I mentioned that. And sometimes people say, well, do you ever still do that stuff? And the answer is yes. I have a habit of writing new lyrics to old songs about Apple. And so I thought, well, maybe since we’re all gathered here tonight, maybe I would I would do one of these song parodies for you. And I’ve I’ve never done one over Zoom before. This is this is a thing I do live in bookstores and stuff. But Aric was like, could you do one of your song parodies over Zoom? And we tried it and it sounds OK. So if you like, I will I will sing you one of these. This was when the iPhone came out. You may remember that it was a huge, huge line around the block at the Apple stores. Everybody wanted to get it. And so I wrote this song parody and I got the people in line around the New York Apple store to sing parts of this song while I filmed it on the camcorder. Ladies and gentlemen, for six hours, this was the number one video on YouTube.
David Pogue (Singing) • 40:32
And now the end is near I’m sick to death of this old cell phone Bad sound, the signal’s weak The software sucks, a made in hell phone I’ve heard there’s something new A million times more rad than my phone I too will join the cult I want an iPhone Concerns I have a few We’s got some flaws We may just face it No keys, no memory card, the battery’s sealed, you can’t replace it. But God, this thing is sweet, a multi-touch iPod WiFi phone. You had me from Hello, I’ll get an iPhone. I want to touch its precious screen. I want to wipe the smudges clean. I want my friends to look and drool. I want to say, “Look, now I’m cool!” I’ll stand in line, and I’ll get mine. I’ll get an iPhone. For what is a man? What has he got? If not iPhone, then he’s got Squat. It’s all the things a phone should be. Who cares if it’s AT&T? I took a stand and paid a grand and got an iPhone.
David Pogue • 42:43
Could you hear that? Does it sound okay?
Aric • 42:46
Oh, yes, it was great.
David Pogue • 42:47
Oh, that’s awesome. Never done that before over Zoom. Never. Aric, I owe you my life. Good. All right. So anyway, so back to the story. Share that screen. Yeah, so the thing most people forget is that they announced the iPhone in January of 2007, and they weren’t going to put it on the market until June 1997. And during that time, Jobs discovered that the screen, the plastic screen, was getting scratched in his pocket. So after having announced the iPhone, he said to his team, we’re going to switch to glass. We’re going to give this thing a glass screen. This was not a popular decision. People were like, dude, what are you talking about? We tested glass. It breaks if you drop it by a foot. And we’ve already done the order of the parts. We’ve already set up the factories. We’ve already priced the components. You can’t switch now. And Jobs said, I can and we will. We will find a glass that is strong enough. So he sat down with the CEO of Corning, the leading maker of industrial glass. And he said, what do you got? What formula do you have that will withstand scratches in your pocket and drops from at least three feet? And the answer was nothing. There’s no such glass. And then the guy said, I mean, in the 60s, we did fool around with this formula, this Gorilla Glass formula that we use on race car windshields. But like there wasn’t enough market for it. So we shut that down. And Jobs said, well, we want you to resurrect that for this iPhone. You have six months to do it. And the guy said, no, dude, that’s impossible. We don’t have a factory. We don’t remember the formula. We don’t have any guys who developed it. And Jobs, you know, his reality distortion field, his ability to persuade anybody of anything. He did. He persuaded Wendell Weeks to resurrect this factory in Kentucky that made Gorilla Glass. And they got the thing done by June. It is absolutely mind blowing. No other CEO in the world would have pulled that off. Stunning. And he always did this. The iPhone was not such a great hit, by the way, when it came out, because Jobs and his closed systems refused to have an app store. He said, you will get 16 apps that we write and you will be happy. There’s a great story in the book I’ve never heard anyone tell before about Scott Forstall, who is the head of software. Jobs got more and more intrigued by jailbroken phones. So people couldn’t install their own apps on the phone legally, but they would hack it in such a way that they could write new apps and illegally install it. And Forrestal would show these to Jobs. And Jobs was like, all right, all right, all right. But we’re not doing an app store because I don’t like the idea of an open system. So here’s what we’re going to do. You and I are going to spend the weekend making a list of every possible app there could ever be. And then we are going to, I’m going to write you a blank check and you’re going to hire as many engineers as it takes to write every possible app. And needless to say, this was an absolutely absurd idea. Instead, Forrestal went back to his team and said, guys, start writing an app store. So that when 2008 rolled around and Jobs finally was willing to consider it They were they were halfway there already and it’s the App Store that changed the world, right? It’s the App Store that launched entire industries Airbnb and tinder and door – and grubb And you know social media websites, which of course social media apps that launched Isolation and loneliness and all the bad things we have in the world – no one saw any of that coming They once again decided to do a new model every single year, and they continue to do so to this day. Jobs died in 2011, a rare form of pancreatic cancer. And again, with Jobs and his ability to see the future, who does he pick as his successor but the one person least like himself? Jobs was volatile and colorful and an idea man and a product guy. He picks Tim Cook, who is a logistics genius, a supply chain god, but he’s quiet and shy and introverted and does not have, you know, he’s not an idea guy. He’s not a product guy. And everyone knew that going in. How did Jobs know that this was the right guy to quadruple Apple’s revenue, profits, stock price, headcount? Absolutely amazing performance by Cook. They really have not been able to sustain the Jobs pattern of a new blockbuster iProduct every three years. I mean, really, since 2011, all the Jobs, I mean, all the Tim Cook Apple has done successfully is the watch and the AirPods in terms of hardware. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t been busy. They did try a new platform with the Vision Pro, which, while a technical marvel, did not sell. Very expensive, very uncomfortable on your head. And they tried for 10 years to do the Apple Car. I managed to find the guy who ran this project and interviewed him for the book. $10 billion they spent on this car. It was to be a completely self-driving vehicle. No steering wheel, no pedals. Four seats on the inside that faced each other. Beautiful reclining easy chairs. The greatest sound system ever put in a car. The windows, they experimented with making augmented reality screens. Like you could look out the window and it would identify the restaurant for you that you’re passing by. But in the end, after 10 years, they just could not get the self-driving perfect enough for Apple’s tastes. And so they ultimately shut that thing down. So one thing a lot of people ask is, all right, so that’s the first 50 years. What about the next 50? And, you know, the distant future is too hard to predict. But we do know a few things Apple is working on now. We know that this fall we will be able to see the iPhone Fold. This is a leaked prototype of what it looks like. So the idea is you’ll have sort of an iPod mini effect when you open it all the way. It’ll be very expensive, $2,000 or more. But really cool. Apple is said to finally have licked the problem of the crease down the middle that all other folding phones have. They’ve you know, the big movement at Apple and elsewhere is to get our faces out of our screen, to move beyond the phone. And so that’s where the smart glasses come in. Google has them. Meta has them. Some of them have a screen in front of the in front of the lens. Some of them don’t. But it gives you all the advantages of, you know, a smartphone without having to look down in your hand and pull out the phone and so on. So they’re working hard on that. The other thing is I don’t think people give Apple enough credit for Tim Cook’s leading them into becoming a medical company. And it started with the watch detecting atrial fibrillation, which is when your atria, instead of pumping, they just quiver. So yeah, so the thing about atrial fibrillation is that you can get tested for it in the doctor’s office, but it’s an intermittent problem. So if it’s not happening at the moment you’re tested, it’ll miss it. But this thing’s always on your wrist. And I’m telling you, they get letters and letters and letters about how this feature saved their lives. Because these are like young, healthy people who had no thought that something was wrong with their heart. And this thing warned them. And they’ve gone so much farther. Now they warn you of hypertension. That’s high blood pressure. They predict that a million people a year will be notified that they have high blood pressure who didn’t know it because of this watch. And sleep apnea. I love this Vitals one, the one that says two outliers. So this thing tracks all these features while you sleep, like your heart rate, your breathing rate, your skin temperature, your blood oxygen level, your stages of sleep. And if any two or more are out of whack during the night, in the morning, it lets you know. And it says something is up with you. And usually it means either you’re about to get sick, you’re in the verge of getting sick, or you got really drunk last night. So one of those two things. And I am told that they are now working on snoring detection too. So I mean, Why not, right? It has a microphone and it has a vibrating mode. It can vibrate you to a lighter level of sleep so you don’t disturb your partner. This will sell a lot of watches, I predict. And the AirPods just recently became clinical grade FDA approved hearing aids, which is so huge because the average price of hearing aids in this country is $5,000. the average. And these are, you know, 160 bucks. So this could save a lot of people from loneliness, isolation, and early death. So one of the most interesting things that I try to do in the book is to track the through lines of Apple. What hasn’t changed across all 50? And when you open the book, the first thing inside the cover is this two-page spread. And it shows you that in all 50 years, Apple’s headquarters have not moved more than two miles, which is really astonishing. And the company’s mission has not moved more than two inches. Like Steve Wozniak’s mission was to take something that is out of reach for normal people, computers, and make it simpler and joyous for anyone to own. And that is arguably still Apple’s mission today. But there are some other things. I’m going to advance the slide and letting you know in case it doesn’t work. One thing is focus. What’s astonishing about Apple is you could put everything they make today and it would fit on a boardroom table. I mean, can you imagine saying that about Samsung or Sony? I mean, that’s a really rare quality. Secrecy, another big Apple through line. It gives them all kinds of advantages. One thing is if they have to cancel a product or project, then nobody ever knows about it. They don’t look embarrassed. And of course, it all keeps competitors from catching up. Another one, rounded rectangles. Every key, every trackpad, every laptop, every screen, every watch, every phone, even that $19 wiping cloth has rounded rectangle corners. Every icon, every window. This was a Steve Jobs obsession, and they keep it up to this day. It’s absolutely amazing. everything with rounded rectangles. And of course, Apple believes and has believed from the very first machine in beauty. And they have created some absolutely gorgeous machines. And it’s not just outside, that’s also inside. These are the internal layouts of the watch, the laptop and the power Mac. I mean, they’re beautiful. And people used to think, you know, Jobs, what are you doing? who gives a crap about the internal things that no one will ever see? And, you know, Johnny Ive, I interviewed him and he explained it like this. He said, you sense care, even if you can’t see care. And I think what he means by that is if the company, the designers have slaved and sweated over excellence of every component and every design, even the ones you can’t see, then by the time you get to the parts you can see you’ll kind of feel like wow somebody really sweated over this product they care and finally I have one more song parody for you this one I wrote just for just for the 50th anniversary and for this book tour so give me one second I’m gonna have to I I have not plugged in my, uh, my damp appellate. Sorry. I’m not good with technology. Um, okay. Oh, there we go. There we go. All right. So with great apologies to Pharrell. I hope you can hear this.
David Pogue (Singing) • 55:41
It might seem crazy what I’m about to say. Apple is 50 almost to the day. Are you a real fan? How do you know? I got news, there are certain clues, baby, here we go! Because it’s Apple! Tap along if you feel machines should be made to part. Because it’s Apple! Tap along if you feel like the movement of your heart. Because it’s Apple! Tap along if you plug in twelve gadgets every night Tap along if you’re proud that your chargers all are white Here come bad news so you understand It’s not always easy being such a fan In town and everywhere it’s super cheap. But who wants to be a corporate sheep? Because it’s Apple! Tap along if you’ve never thrown away a box. Because it’s Apple! A special closet just for Donald or the dots. Because it’s Apple! Tap along if you bought that stand for a thousand bucks. Clap along if you feel that Siri still kinda sucks I don’t feel down when they raise the price I don’t feel down using pucky mice I don’t feel down because AI is late Or when an AirPod falls down a grate I don’t feel down, I’m saving non-stop I don’t feel down when I can’t or drop And I have to charge on my Apple Watch Clap along if you dump friends whose texts show up in green Clap along if you spent 19 bucks to wipe your screen Clap along if you’re in line when a new phone rolls around Clap along if your cordless mouse charges upside down Clap along if it’s better to be best than to be first. Clap along if you know that Windows is the worst. Clap along if roundage orders always make you high. Clap along, you will please six colors till you die. Woo-hoo!
David Pogue • 58:40
All right. There you have it, folks. Apple at 50. Thanks for coming. Oh, look at those clap icons. That’s cool. Thank you. Well, I’m happy to take any questions you might have. I definitely have a question.
Aric • 58:55
How did you get Apple to talk about projects like Project Titan and the folding phone, et cetera? They don’t talk about stuff like that.
David Pogue • 59:06
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. No, those did not come from Apple. those I had to go get people who used to be at Apple and were willing to talk about it so yeah you’re absolutely right there was one really wild exception to that when I went to Apple for these day-long sessions of interviews one of the most memorable was this guy Mike Rockwell he’s the Vision Pro guy yeah it was his team that did the the headset and you know everybody knew that it was heavy and expensive and uncomfortable. And like the third line out of his mouth was, and of course we’re working on one that’s lighter and cheaper. I didn’t even ask him. I guess they were allowed, but the sad thing is they then, they subsequently canceled the Vision Pro 2. Now they’re putting all their efforts into the glasses, but anyway, so that was
Aric • 01:00:00
a funny one. Wow. Incredible. I got to say, I read your entire book, both the physical and I listened to the audio book. Wow, dude. And it is an impressive piece of work. I’m shocked at the amount of detail that has been in there. The previous to your book, the last one that I’d read that was about Apple’s history. Read fast, everybody. Right. Well, luckily, we’ll be giving away a copy of your book tonight. Oh, that’s really cool. One person will get to read it in person. That’s very nice of you. Thank you, PMUG. Yep. And it is, you know, before your book, I think the last one that I’d read about the history of Apple, and it stopped, I think, in the early 2000s was Owen Linsmayer’s Apple Confidential, I think. Yeah, that’s right. So it’s been a long time coming to get the rest of the story. So I’m so glad that you did it. The instant that I saw your book was available for pre-order, I pre-ordered it on bookshop.org. And so I got it day and date. But yeah, so I had a chance to read it, and then I picked up the audiobook. Honestly, they’re both great because the book obviously has all the pictures, which is just amazing. High color, really good quality. But then your audio book has actual audio from the people that you talk to and the various ads and stuff that you’re talking about. Plus, of course, you read the actual book, which must have taken you forever to do.
David Pogue • 01:01:52
I sat at this desk for 12 days.
Aric • 01:01:56
Oh, wow.
David Pogue • 01:01:57
Yep, it’s my voice you’ll hear for better or for worse.
Aric • 01:02:00
And there’s also other secret reason why I enjoyed. I was glad I listened to the audio book as well. Oh, I know what you’re talking about. I will leave that alone.
David Pogue • 01:02:17
Well, I think we can say that there is an Easter egg in the audio book.
Aric • 01:02:23
That’s all we’re going to say. Yes, there is. So really good. Does anyone else have any questions?
David Pogue • 01:02:33
Let’s see. There might have been a couple in the chat.
Aric • 01:02:35
Let’s see. Kurt asked, where can I find those song videos? Are they on YouTube or TikTok? Oh, yeah.
David Pogue • 01:02:43
Yeah. Let’s see. Yeah. Well, well, so the the I want an iPhone one, that one from 2007 on YouTube is still on YouTube. And it’s it’s pretty funny. I mean, it’s me much younger. And, you know, you see the thousand people wrapped around the Apple store waiting, singing bits of it. So you should definitely look that one up. And then the the the clap along one that I just did. You know, there are various places various talks that I’ve done. Oh, no. No, I’m sorry. That’s also on YouTube by itself Yeah, okay. Just just look up David. Oh, yeah, just check on YouTube. Yeah
Aric • 01:03:22
Is it in like your personal YouTube channel or is it just yep?
David Pogue • 01:03:27
Yeah, okay both of them on my well, yeah, just or just type David Pogue Apple song parodies and you’ll find Yeah, excellent. I love it. I love that. Kurt Williams says I have a shelf full of boxes. I need a hobby
Aric • 01:03:40
be yeah yep uh it’s funny too i guess i have a friend uh like i i usually keep my boxes for a little while but after you know i don’t have a lot of room so after a while you have to you know as much as i hate it but i do have a friend who who keeps every box he’s ever had um it’s gotten to the point where he actually had to uh you know rent a space to save all the boxes so he’s very committed but uh but it’s fun to go over there and look at all the stuff because he’s been picking up uh apple products for many many years so all right i like gordon’s 2005
Khürt • 01:04:22
apple mac mini box that’s probably worth something now and i love that note 50 years of apple the
David Pogue • 01:04:31
Broadway show. Yeah. Apple, the musical. I love it.
Frank • 01:04:35
I was thinking that a name you could be using for your book, the peeling the apple. Yeah. I mean, it kind of fits in with the beginning when you talked about it.
Aric • 01:04:45
Yeah. That’s pretty good. I like it. 50 years of Apple, the Broadway show. All right. Your, your, your, your songs to Broadway.
David Pogue • 01:04:55
Yeah, exactly. Apple, the musical coming soon. Lovely.
Aric • 01:05:00
Okay. Uh, All right. Any other questions? Okay. So. I had one question. Sorry, Aric. Apologies. I’m a little slow with the unmute.
Khürt • 01:05:12
First of all, thank you, David, for presenting for us today and giving us a fantastic history of Apple through your eyes. For me, the magic was that Mac Mini, that very first Mac Mini in 2005. And then I cried when Steve delivered the iPhone to us. It was like Moses handing down the tablet from my eye. It was like, oh, my God. And then the iPods. But since then, I haven’t had a – oh, yeah, sorry. And the iPad in 2010, that first iPad, loved it. But since then, I haven’t had that experience. Do you see that Apple is going to have any products coming up soon that will give us that first time, oh my god experience? Yeah, that’s a profound question. I mean, Apple really has not given us
David Pogue • 01:06:05
a whole new platform like the iPad or the iPhone since Steve Jobs died. I mean, the watch and the AirPods are both essentially accessories for the iPhone. And I mean, really the most, the bravest, coolest thing they’ve done is the MacBook Neo. I mean, it’s so anti-Apple to go for the low end But to do it with such beauty and such joy, that thing is a spectacular success. But it’s still it’s really still not that great new product project platform. It may be, by the way, that even Steve Jobs would not have been able to keep that up had he lived. I mean, he came along at the perfect time. Chinese manufacturing was taking off. Electronics were getting miniaturized. And let’s not forget that we, the people, had finally become comfortable with owning electronics and handling them in a way that we hadn’t been before. So he came along at kind of just the right time. I mean, no other company has come up with anything as important as the iPhone since then either. So, like, I don’t know. Maybe he would have surprised us, maybe not. But you’re right. The days of like entirely new mind blowing platforms, they seem to be over. By the way, Jim asks a really important question. How much of the book is a celebration? Are there any issues that Apple is disappointed that still exist? And this is an incredibly important question to me because I am an Apple fan, but I really did not want to be an Apple fan boy with this book. And that is why I said they could not have editorial control. I know that they were unhappy with the coverage of the Apple car, the Project Titan. I know that they were not pleased that I revealed this massive failure. You know, the book goes into all of it, the Chinese factory suicides, Steve Jobs’ stock options. I mean, there were a bunch of things. Oh, you know, Tim Cook going to the White House. Whatever your politics, it was not something that is inconsistent with his stated beliefs. So there’s a lot of stuff in there that Apple would not have put in its own book. But I felt that it was important to have the actual history, not the rose-colored history. And Steve, I saw your note about my CBS Sunday morning story from the day before yesterday about, is your phone listening to you? So I’m so glad you were able to talk to the customer. I mean, nobody believes my experts from that story. The question is like, you know, everyone’s had this experience where they said something and then later they saw an ad for it on Facebook or Instagram. And, you know, the logical conclusion is the phone is eavesdropping on us. But I interviewed all these experts as to why that’s impossible. like the amount of bandwidth to monitor eight and a half billion phones 24-7 and to process everything that everybody says to show you at like it would bring the internet to their to its knees so probably not true but yeah steve says they still don’t believe it nope nobody believed it and even the guy even my expert on the show i i ended by saying so now that you’ve explained it do you think people will believe you and he’s like nope nobody will believe me yeah it’s you know
Aric • 01:09:34
it’s like any conspiracy theory, right? Sometimes they’re just too satisfying for some people, like it’s too clear and obvious an answer even if it’s wrong. You know, so they’re like, well, that must be it.
David Pogue • 01:09:49
What’s funny is that when I’m in discussions with this with people online, they think that the nail in their argument’s coffin is I know I’m right because one time I was just thinking about this thing. and I saw ads and like, you idiot, you’ve just proved my point. You know, I mean, the thing is there’s a selection bias in that you, you see six to 700 ads a day on average. You don’t notice the ones that have nothing to do with things that you’ve said, right? So when there is a coincidence, it sticks out in your head and you’re like, Oh, That’s what I said. So I think that’s a very powerful effect that’s hard to explain away.
Aric • 01:10:34
Yep. Anecdotes aren’t data, but they sure do feel like it sometimes, right? Yep. That’s right. Exactly. Next. Okay. All right. Let’s see. I think that’s, I don’t think we missed any. Let me just go back here and make sure we didn’t miss anything. Okay. Thank you, Terry.
David Pogue • 01:10:51
And hello, Linda. Yeah, I just want to say thanks for coming out tonight. And it was so much fun for me. And I mean, user groups, I mean, the internet kind of did a number on user groups, right? Every city used to have one. But it’s so great that they’re still around and that you’re still around. So thank you for coming out. It was super fun. And hello from Westchester.
Aric • 01:11:14
Thank you. Okay. So I just posted again in the chat a link to the PDF that I have that has the links to the stuff that we talked about today. So if you need them, you can get them there. Please do hang around. We’re about to give away a copy of his book, as well as two copies of his audio book to paid members of PMUG. And then we will be opening our Q&A section of our meeting. So…
David Pogue • 01:11:51
You know what, Aric? I just had an idea. I would like to make you a very special offer. If anybody here buys the book, email me your receipt, pogueatme.com. My last name, pogue@me.com. And give me your address. I will sign a book plate. It looks like this. I will custom sign it for you. It’s a sticker. And mail it to you. And then you can put it in your copy of the book just like I signed it in person.
Aric • 01:12:25
That is amazing. Thank you so much, David. That’d be awesome.
David Pogue • 01:12:29
Yeah. It makes it a little special. I’ll put that in an email. Oh, there. Aric just put my address in the chat. Yeah.
Aric • 01:12:36
Yes, Kurt. They still work. Yep. As does the Mac.com addresses if you have one of those.
David Pogue • 01:12:43
Yep.
Aric • 01:12:44
Yep.
David Pogue • 01:12:44
I like it because it’s really easy to explain to people verbally. Pogueatme.com. I mean, they can remember that.
Aric • 01:12:51
Yep. For sure. I’ve used it a lot. Okay. So yes, by all means, if you guys get a copy of the book, just email and you get a signed copy for no additional charge. Again, thank you so much for taking the time. I’ll tell you what, this book is amazing. I’m actually going to be working on a review of the book. So thank you so much for taking the time. You’re welcome to stick around for the rest of the night if you wish. But if you have to go somewhere, by all means, feel free to head out whenever you need to. All right. Okay.
David Pogue • 01:13:30
I think I will duck out. But great to see you guys. Thank you. And I really appreciate this. Thanks again. Take care, guys. Bye. Bye.
Aric • 01:13:38
Okay. Okay. Now that he’s gone. That was fantastic, Aric. I thought it was great. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. Yep. It was a good get, that’s for sure.
Frank • 01:13:54
I’m surprised for a small group like ours that he would do something like this. You have some good connections, Aric.
Aric • 01:14:02
Yeah, this one worked out. Honestly, they mostly don’t, so it’s nice when they do. But, yes, so now let’s give away. We have a physical copy of the book. Let’s see if this is there.
Jim • 01:14:20
Put it in front of you, the person.
Aric • 01:14:23
Yeah. Because it’s a solid color, it keeps trying to.
Jim • 01:14:27
You’re right.
Aric • 01:14:28
Well, anyway, it’s here. There it is.
Jim • 01:14:31
There we can see.
Aric • 01:14:33
So we have two copies of the audio book and one physical copy of the regular book. The first person to be drawn will get to pick their pick of whatever they want. And then the other two that draw will get their pick of whatever’s left. Obviously, I will have to mail you the physical copy of the book. And I will touch base with you if you win and want the physical copy of the book, just to make sure where you want me to send it. If it’s in your address in your member account is the one you want me to send it to, you can just say that. Please don’t give me information here. We don’t want to dox anyone by accident. But the audiobooks are DRM-free. I got them from LibreFM, a company that specializes in giving away all of their audiobooks are DRM-free, so they’re available as MP3 files and also as MM4B files, which are basically specially designed MP4 audio only, designed for audiobooks. So that, for example, if you stop listening to the audiobook, iTunes or the Apple Books app won’t start over from the beginning like it would with an MP3 file by default. So, all right, let me pull up my magic random number generator and we will start drawing some names. And then we’ll move on to the general Q&A. Okay. Okay. All right. So the first person to be drawn is Kurt. Kurt, unmute yourself, sir.
Khürt • 01:16:43
Sir, seriously?
Aric • 01:16:44
Yes. The random number generator does not lie. I never win anything. I should go buy an audio book right now. Well, you’ve broken your losing streak, as it were.
Jim • 01:16:56
Have you chosen between book, physical, or audio book?
Aric • 01:17:02
You know what? Physical. Okay, physical book it is. All right. I’ll touch base with you to see where you want me to send it after tonight’s meeting.
Khürt • 01:17:13
I’m in the Princeton area, so I can…
Aric • 01:17:16
No, you’re not in Princeton, though. Well, I mean, I’m not far from Princeton. I’m maybe 10 or 15 minutes away. But I can mail it to you. We plan to do that anyway.
Khürt • 01:17:27
I’ll buy you as much coffee as you want to drink, or be your choice.
Aric • 01:17:32
Okay, all right. So then that leaves us two copies of the audiobook To give away. All right. Let me pull up the next Lucky person. Okay. The next lucky person is Gordon Gordon K Hooray All right so I Don’t need a physical address for this because I can just send you an email I will send it to the email that we have on record unless you Want me to send it somewhere else if you want me to send it somewhere else Don’t tell me where just tell me that you do and then I’ll I’ll email you directly
Gordon • 01:18:15
It’s fine. Just send it to me the one you got. Okay, that works. Okay for that
Aric • 01:18:22
Alright, and then the last audio edition. Okay. And the next winner is, let’s see, who’s that? Oh, Donald K.
Don • 01:18:36
Don Katz, right?
Aric • 01:18:38
Yep. That’s you.
Frank • 01:18:41
The address is, the email that you have on record is fine.
Aric • 01:18:45
Okay. That’s fine. I will email you after tonight’s meeting. You will basically get a a special link that you can click on that will, you know, take you to their website. You have to create an account if you don’t have one already, just because that’s, you need it to download the files. But, and they do have an app that, so you can listen to their, their audio books that way, if you prefer to listen through their app, but you don’t have to, like I said, they’re DRM free. So you can listen to them at any, any item that you like. So, all righty. So that’s the winners for tonight. Okay. So now let’s open up the floor to anyone who has questions in general or anything they want to talk about.
Frank • 01:19:36
I have a question. On the iPhone, when I plug it in, you know, click it, it used to be able to, like, download and keep a backup on the computer itself. When I go on to that, I don’t see it.
Aric • 01:19:49
Okay. Yeah. So you can do that, but you have to plug in the device to your Mac. And then what happens is, since iTunes isn’t a thing anymore, the way it’s supposed to work is the phone will appear in the Finder. So if you open a Finder window.
Frank • 01:20:13
Yeah, that’s where I am.
Aric • 01:20:14
Right. And then if you do a backup, so you click on the name of your iPhone in the sidebar there.
Frank • 01:20:21
But it’s not listed there. That’s what I don’t understand.
Aric • 01:20:24
Okay. I think we might have mentioned this before, but one of the things that can happen is the first time that you plug any device into your Mac or something into one of your other devices is you have to approve, like basically I trust this thing that I’m plugging into for security purposes. If you say no, don’t trust this device, then it won’t appear. But in most cases, you should be able to go to, I think there’s a setting on the phone. Let me see if I can find it real quick. all right see trust okay give me one second here i’m gonna scroll through this list all right so we go to should be here um if i can’t find it real quick i i will uh find it after tonight’s meeting and then uh i’ll i’ll email you but there’s a way to basically say that like because on your phone there is a setting that says like if you plug this phone into a device you know, you should trust it or not. And there’s a way to basically reset that so that if you’ve accidentally said, don’t trust my Mac, you can get the prompt back again so that it should appear. The other possibility too is that you might be plugging into a Mac that is simply too old to have that functionality. And if that’s the case, then usually most of those old operating systems, they use iTunes still. So if you have a copy of iTunes on your Mac that works, you can, you know, back up just like you used to with your iPods. It backs up to the iCloud. It says it does that. Right. And that’s always the case. But if you want to be able to back up a copy locally. Yeah. So I can’t find it really quick here, so I will contact you after the meeting once I find that setting. And then hopefully that will get it solved for you. Okay.
Khürt • 01:22:54
I had a question for you, Aric, which I am hoping you can find a solution to. So I can use Apple Pay on my wonderful smartphone. Okay. I can use Apple Pay on my iPad. I even got it working on my watch. For the life of me, I cannot add the Capital One card to my Mac for payment. Every other card works except the Capital One Venture One card.
Aric • 01:23:26
Okay, well, let me ask you a question. When you go to set it up, because normally what happens is there’s like two pronged settings. There’s stuff that Apple has to do, and there’s stuff that your bank needs to do in order to set it up for Apple Pay. So what should happen on your Mac when you set up the card is it should be like, okay, and then it should contact Capital One. And Capital One should be like, hey, is this okay? Do you want to do this? usually go to their app on your phone or whatever and like approve the thing and then it will let the item be used. So do you get that at all?
Khürt • 01:24:10
So on the phone it tells you oh you need to go to the app it will send you back to the Capital One app, it goes back boom. So you do the watch app on your phone same thing you do on the iPad the iPad also has a capital one app fine on the Mac there is no capital one app so it starts talking to capital one and then then comes back and says try again later I have called capital one 20 times in the last six months hmm ask them how do we fix this because I know for sure it It was in there before. So they came something and said every other credit card, Bank of AmArica, Chase Bank, TV banks, debit card, all of them work except for yours. The issue must be at their end. But until the tech support finally called me back with a solution, is there any work that you’ve ever heard of?
Aric • 01:25:14
Well, so, yeah, I mean, obviously, if it’s a problem on their end, there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do about it. But are you using anything like an outbound firewall, like Little Snitch or anything like that? No. Because you can accidentally block things.
Khürt • 01:25:33
No, there’s no blocking. Everything on the Mac OS is stock Mac OS. No, what do you used to call them back in the day? The little utility that would sit between the security layers. Because Apple kept squashing them, and I just kind of gave up most of them. Yeah. So I don’t have any of those.
Aric • 01:25:57
Okay. Well, so, I mean, granted, it’s a workshop, and I’m not sure if it’ll work. But have you tried booting your Mac into SafeMobile? No, I have not. Okay. Just to see if, because that basically, like, in case you have some old, you know, or something from the leftovers that are somehow causing a problem. That will remove everything that’s not like officially from Apple’s operating system. And maybe that will do something, you know, because honestly that’s probably where I would go next. It sounds like you tried most of the obvious stuff.
Khürt • 01:26:37
I’ve blown away caches, I’ve blown away logs, I’ve basically said, Okay, let me just log into an account that literally has nothing when I log in, which is the admin account. Login, there’s nothing there in the admin account that automatically launches. No icons across the top. That didn’t work. So I will try safe mode and see if that fixes it. I’ll try that.
Aric • 01:27:01
Yeah, it’s worth a shot. You know, since nothing else will do, that’s what I would try. Because, I mean, the only other thing you could possibly do that would test things on your end, would either try setting it up on a different Mac that you own, or basically wiping your Mac, reinstalling the operating system clean, and going from there. That’s a pain.
Khürt • 01:27:29
No, it’s not a pain. That’s a six-month project.
Aric • 01:27:36
Fair enough. So yeah, definitely try the safe mode in that case. I think it’s still holding down shift during startup. And then, yeah, because even in recovery mode, there’s nothing you can do to add stuff to your wallet. So that’s not going to help you. Well, I will say there is one thing that might possibly help without wiping your computer. If you boot into recovery mode and reinstall the OS, You remember how back in the day, like Apple used to do, there’s like combo updaters. So like if you wanted to like reinstall the OS, make sure all your files were clean, you could do it. That’s how you do it now. It doesn’t, it won’t remove any of your files. It’ll just replace Apple’s own in the section of the hard drive that is basically locked off. So just to make sure that everything’s clean there. So that’s the only other thing I can think of to try.
Michael • 01:28:40
It looks like Jim Thursby raised his hands. Maybe he has something to add.
Jim • 01:28:45
Yes. I thought of two things that might be insightful, might be ridiculous, or you already know. One is I have never added a card to my Apple Pay where I have an app for the card. So the idea that you’re saying is it doesn’t have an app, so that must be the reason. I have never had an app on my iPhone for the cards that I’ve added. So that might be an insight that you’re confusing yourself with when, if you go back through it, you might go, oh, let me not assume that. The other thought was sometimes I see like a screen from my browser of my iPhone show up on my Mac. I don’t know if there’s any way to get them to communicate together that you had not thought of trying to work on.
Khürt • 01:29:41
I know that. I tried exactly that last night. I tried running the iPhone app on my Mac because you can do that now. You can run. Right. That didn’t work either.
Jim • 01:29:55
Okay.
Aric • 01:29:55
Yeah. The thing is that even if it detects you have the app, it will, even on the Mac, suggest that you go to your phone. Because Capital One in particular prefers that you use their app, so it sort of volunteers that first as the option when you set up a Capital One card. I don’t know what would happen if you’ve never installed the app. I don’t know, because I have the app myself, so I’ve never had to go past that.
Jim • 01:30:30
The other thought comes to mind is Capital One recently bought Discover. I’m not sure if you can follow up with one thing or another saying, hey, it works on Discover. Why doesn’t it work on Capital One card?
Aric • 01:30:46
Yep. Less competition. It’s always great, right? It never goes wrong. Okay. Yeah. Well, I hope they get back to you if the things that we suggested don’t help. Because, you know, it’s funny, like, it’s amazing the number of times that I’ve run into issues. And then, like, you know, you talk to a bunch of people at a company to try to get them to help you. And you just have to convince them that first off, like, you know what you’re doing and you’re not an idiot. And then when you finally get through to the one person who really knows their stuff and is like, oh, man, I wish they’d sent you to me directly because it’s amazing. You find the one right person in the company. It can really open doors, as it were.
Jim • 01:31:36
I don’t think I’ve used Apple Pay or tried to run it on my Mac. But I seem to remember at least once where something was, oh, well, you can use the Apple Pay of your phone while you’re on a session on the Mac. It might be a nightmare, or it might be, why do you need to have it on your Mac when you’ve got your iPhone having it right there?
Khürt • 01:32:00
No, I agree. And that’s supposed to work. But I couldn’t get that to work either. Oh, okay. I was like, I mean, everything you’re saying, Jim, is correct. But the life of me could, I’m sitting there, wait a minute. It keeps saying you can pay via your phone if it pops up on your Mac, but it never activated the phone.
Aric • 01:32:19
So there’s a process. So if you have an Apple Watch, you will try that first. And if that fails, but it knows that you have the watch on, it won’t go past that. If you take your watch off and put it on a charger and put it away so that the Mac is clear that, like, oh, you don’t have your watch on, you know, and you log into your machine. It should fall back to the iPhone as a second option, but if your Mac is too far away from your iPhone because it uses both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Is Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled on your Mac?
Khürt • 01:33:07
Yes. So I’m sitting in front of it. It’s a Mac Studio, so I’ve got the studio display. I’m sitting in front of it. The phone is literally up to my left. Okay. about five inches from the Mac.
Aric • 01:33:20
I would say that’s close enough. So why is it not in here?
Khürt • 01:33:23
Yeah. So I’m saying you’re going, none of it works. So that just works thing is broken from my perspective.
Aric • 01:33:31
Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t had that happen where it won’t do. There is a third option for Apple Pay. You can actually use the password for your administrator account to trigger Apple Pay if the other two aren’t available, but they have to really not be available, or the Mac needs to think they’re really not available before it’ll even give you that option.
Khürt • 01:33:59
What I’m hearing is put my devices to charge in another room.
Aric • 01:34:03
Yeah, or turn them off completely. Or shut them off completely. Restart your Mac and then try it and see what it does. And spin around three times. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay, yeah. So Gordon mentions, so do you have to shut off all your other Apple devices in order to get it to work? Normally, you’re not, like, when Apple says things just work, generally they’re supposed to be like magic. But sometimes you fall into the cracks, and things don’t work quite the way you’d hope. So under normal circumstances, no, you’re not supposed to have to do any of that. Just because he’s having problems, it’s worth trying. Since there’s nothing he can do, if it’s a bank problem, then, you know, unfortunately he’ll just have to wait until the bank fixes it. Presumably, you know, Apple sends an error log if you have the, you know, share, you know, issues with developers. If Apple runs into an issue, they might automatically be sending that in the background to Capital One’s developers. But who knows if that’ll, you know, that may be an actual problem that you’ve run across, like a bug of some kind. But if the developers haven’t pushed a fix for it, then, you know, it doesn’t matter. So, well, hopefully they get back to you or that at least one of the things we suggested will help. Oh, I see. I’m sorry, Gordon. I didn’t realize it was a joke. My bad. Okay. Any other questions?
Jim • 01:35:45
I finally bought and loaded TurboTax yesterday. I’m getting some weird behavior at the very startup pages of it. And I rebooted my Mac for the first time in about a month to get it to start up after I was shutting it down and having problems. And it doesn’t say that it has any updates available when it checks for that. It comes back with a blank screen after that. And I have to click on the screen to get it to show me even something. Anybody facing anything like that and or I was going if there’s a workaround thing that I should know about. Right now, rebooting my Mac at this point is kind of OK. And I’ll hope they will get another upgrade sooner when I finally get around.
Aric • 01:36:34
Well, you’re not using it for taxes now, are you?
Jim • 01:36:37
I want to submit an extension.
Aric • 01:36:42
Oh, okay. Because you have to do that by tomorrow. Right. So, all right.
Jim • 01:36:50
Just installing yesterday, it’s kind of early to ask about, but I’m asking because it’s…
Aric • 01:36:55
Well, yeah, you don’t have any time left. Yeah. Because you have to put in the request by the 15th. Yeah. So I haven’t used TurboTax myself, but if it’s not loading, is this on an Apple Silicon Mac or is it on one of your older ones? M1. It’s on an M1 Mac. An M1 Mac. Okay. Is it running Tahoe or? No, it’s old Sonoma. Okay. Well, that’s relatively easy. Which is in the scope. The reason I ask is because if you were using something much older than that, then I would say, well, maybe it doesn’t work with your operating system. But honestly, that’s recent enough. It shouldn’t be a problem. You can check the requirements. It’s within their requirements.
Jim • 01:37:46
In the past, they have come up with a statement that says, I’m sorry, your Mac’s too old. For security purposes, you need to update your Mac. And even when I had hardware that couldn’t be updated in their thing, they’re saying, update your operating system.
Aric • 01:38:03
Yeah. In other words, like, I can’t run here. So if you can’t update, you know, oh, well.
Jim • 01:38:09
Implying that one way of updating your operating system is to go out and buy a new Mac.
Aric • 01:38:14
Yeah. Well, I mean, that certainly would fix it. I mean, yeah. You know. Hey, but at least the NEO is only $500.
Frank • 01:38:29
I use TurboTax, too. And my problem, when I’m done for the day, I try to turn it off. It’ll never shut off. The ball just keeps spinning.
Aric • 01:38:38
It just sits there. It’s funny because I used to use TurboTax a number of years ago. And then they started to treat the Mac like it was a second-class citizen. And so I moved on to a different tax package, and I haven’t gone back since. So I’m not, you know, I don’t, you know, this sounds like…
Jim • 01:39:03
I had to force-quit the application in order to shut down my Mac to reboot it. Yeah.
Aric • 01:39:10
That’s definitely not… Okay, are you in front of your computer now?
Jim • 01:39:16
Yep.
Aric • 01:39:16
Because I’m just curious, if you go to your applications folder, And then you just click once on TurboTax and then go Command-I to bring up the information about the app. Is there a, in the info box, is there a checkbox that says open using Rosetta?
Jim • 01:39:42
I hear what you’re saying. It’s going to take me a moment to get to my, wait a second. I’ve got the icons in the bottom and one of them is okay. And there we go. It’s coming up. Applications folder, TurboTax, 1T25. Oh, I opened it instead of checking what you suggested.
Aric • 01:40:04
Oh, okay.
Jim • 01:40:06
Force quit the app? And I’m trying to see if it’ll let me quit it. Canceling that again. And it’s like nothing. So again, we’ll go back up to…
Aric • 01:40:18
If you press…
Jim • 01:40:20
I’ve got over a dozen windows open on my Mac. Okay.
Aric • 01:40:23
If you press Option, Command, and then Escape on your keyboard, that’ll bring up the Force Quit applications. Because you said you can’t quit it normally.
Jim • 01:40:32
Right.
Aric • 01:40:32
Or you’re having trouble with it.
Jim • 01:40:34
So I got to Force Quit, and I Force Quit it.
Aric • 01:40:35
Okay. So, yeah, just click on it once in the… Because this might be part of the problem, which is why I’m asking.
Jim • 01:40:44
Okay. So back there again.
Aric • 01:40:47
Just click on it once and then hit Command-I for info. Get info.
Jim • 01:40:52
The window closed when I did that. Please wait while we verify everything. TurboTax updater, you’re up to date. And then it goes to TurboTax.
Aric • 01:41:01
Oh, yeah, it restarted again.
Jim • 01:41:03
So it started again. It must have double-clicked by accident. So, and it’s the page after that where it was getting stuck. So I’m going to go in there and try a right-click. Nothing is happening. A single click and it starts it. That’s because that may be that this application tool in that bottom list of things is a specialty.
Aric • 01:41:24
Okay, so you’re not actually in the window for the applications. You’re somewhere else?
Jim • 01:41:29
You know, if you go down to the bottom of your screen, just to the left of the wastebasket, I’ve got a folder for applications there.
Aric • 01:41:36
Oh, yeah, you don’t go there. Actually bring up the applications folder in the finder.
Jim • 01:41:42
Okay.
Aric • 01:41:43
So, you know, double-click on your hard drive and then double-click on applications?
Jim • 01:41:48
Well, right now it actually quit when I said to quit.
Aric • 01:41:51
Oh, that’s nice. That’s something anyway. So, yeah, what you need to do is, you know, bring up the actual, you know, like whatever your hard drive is called. It’s probably Macintosh hard drive unless you’ve changed it.
Jim • 01:42:06
So I went to my left bar on applications and I found it there, the TurboTax app. So from there, do a command I?
Aric • 01:42:15
Yeah. So once you have the application folder in the finder, when it’s open, find TurboTax.
Jim • 01:42:23
Uh-huh.
Aric • 01:42:23
And then hit, click on it once.
Jim • 01:42:27
Right.
Aric • 01:42:27
In the window. And then hit command I?
Jim • 01:42:31
Yep.
Aric • 01:42:31
I’m there.
Jim • 01:42:32
Okay.
Aric • 01:42:33
In that window, is there a checkbox sort of, there’s a bunch of like sort of information sort of near the top of the Get Info window, like the kind, size, you know, that sort of stuff. Underneath all of that, below the copyright, if there is any, you might see something that is like a checkbox that says open using Rosetta.
Jim • 01:42:57
Okay, and I am not seeing anything like that.
Aric • 01:43:02
Okay, do you see a checkbox that says locked?
Jim • 01:43:04
That is unchecked.
Aric • 01:43:05
Okay, is there any other checkbox other than locked?
Jim • 01:43:09
in that area? Scale to fit below built-in camera. No. All right. I was just curious because
Aric • 01:43:20
some applications, they’re not Mac native, but some are fully both Apple Silicon native and They’re like a double-threaded? Intel native. And if that’s the case, there will be a checkbox there saying open using Rosetta. So I wanted to find out. It looks like TurboTax is basically an Intel-only application.
Jim • 01:43:55
I hear what you’re saying there.
Aric • 01:43:57
It’s running under Rosetta 2, the sort of compatibility layer on the Mac, which is fine. most of the time it works good, but it’s possible that that, because it’s not a native application, could be part of the problem. I can’t say for sure, but… Right. I’ll at least keep aware for
Jim • 01:44:21
that if I see anything. Yeah. The fact that it actually shut down, quit on its own the last time is positive. That’s something anyway, yeah. I had gotten around with suggestions to say, just open it from the applications folder rather than where I had slid the icon for it in the
Aric • 01:44:39
bottom. Yeah, under normal circumstances, it’s not a problem where you launch it from, but like I said, just because of the thing we wanted to do, it was needed to be up in a finder window.
Jim • 01:44:54
After it says it’s checking for updates, the screen then goes to a blank thing, and I have to click on the blank part of it to get it to tell me no tax form updates this time. We’ll post updates to tax law.
Aric • 01:45:07
Yeah, I got to be honest. It really does sound to me like it’s just not a well-written app or it doesn’t run well under Rosetta. And, you know, this is the problem. Like, you’ve paid money for this. Right. But if you can’t get it working, the best they’re going to do is, you know, offer to refund your money, but given that you need to do this, like, you know, by tomorrow, you don’t have a lot of options. Do you happen to have an Intel Mac in your house?
Jim • 01:45:43
I happen to have a Windows 11 machine, and I have an older Mac that will not run. Oh, okay.
Aric • 01:45:55
Well, it was worth a shot.
Jim • 01:45:57
The timing that got me to update to this Mac was because TurboTax wouldn’t run on my old Mac.
Aric • 01:46:04
Yeah, yeah.
Jim • 01:46:06
So I’m going to see if I can force my way through, and then I’ll consider a few other things.
Aric • 01:46:12
Yeah. Well, okay. So I will, like I was, you know, when we were talking about the issue with Kurt’s issue, you might want to try booting your Mac into safe mode, you know, holding down the shift key when you start the Mac, just on the off chance that there might be something running on your current Mac that might be causing some interference. Again, this is kind of a long shot because it…
Jim • 01:46:39
If it helps with anybody else, I have had problems with the IRS for years and haven’t actually completely filed a return for several years. I also just uploaded a 2023 version. And the main thing I noticed new with the new one is they’re doing a lot more advertising of their services. Of course, they want to make even more money from you. That they didn’t do with the 2023 and 2024 version. And I don’t know if that integration is a problem. But if nobody else is running and it’s add similar to that, then it doesn’t sound like I can go through and say, oh, well, this is happening with everybody.
Aric • 01:47:22
Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. I haven’t had that particular experience. So I can’t, unfortunately, I don’t have the magic fix. But like I said, it’s worth trying after you’re done for the night. Just restart your Mac, hold down the shift key until it starts up. And then try launching the app, the first thing that you do, and just see if it works any better. You know, that’s the best you can probably do at this point. I think there are free online only tax programs that will let you file an extension. But you might end up needing to import your data from.
Jim • 01:48:11
Right.
Aric • 01:48:12
You know what I’m saying?
Jim • 01:48:14
That’s what I was afraid of. If I can find one that just lets me update. Otherwise, I also run a trust for my brother. And I have to file a trust return. Right. And I was checking on problems with stuff. And they said, yes, we got the payment that went through our electronic payment system. Within 24 hours of that but we still haven’t seen that thing that you put in the mail and you’ve taken a picture of the Postmark on right into December. I mean at the end of January and we’re telling people It takes like a month to get out and maybe another three weeks. So yeah
Aric • 01:48:55
dealing with the IRS right now is a problematic because They’ve had a lot of their workforce fired so You know, there’s fewer people available to help when you run into issues.
Jim • 01:49:10
But it works so much easier if you just do everything online that they don’t need those people.
Aric • 01:49:15
Yeah. Until you do, you know, which usually means there’s a problem. Right. You know. But, well, like I said, hopefully restarting, holding down the shift key, maybe you’ll get lucky. If not, the best I could offer. I mean, obviously, if you have the physical forms, you could always manually fill them in. But it might be just faster for you to still use, like…
Jim • 01:49:44
Where I was going is that I was going to have to take those to the post office anyway.
Aric • 01:49:48
Yeah.
Jim • 01:49:49
That I might just do the physical form, like you say, for the extension. And I don’t owe any money, so… Right. That could be the right answer.
Aric • 01:50:00
Yeah. I mean, hey, if you have, you know, if you don’t have it or if you can’t, I mean, they are available for download. Right. Oh, yes. You know, you could print them.
Jim • 01:50:11
In fact, I’ve done that in previous years.
Aric • 01:50:13
Yeah. But, yeah, all I can say is I hope it works. I mean, you know, dealing with taxes is painful at the best of times. And then when you run into a problem like that, it’s even worse, especially for a program that you’ve paid for.
Jim • 01:50:29
The one thing that I haven’t gotten to that’s short of wiping my hard drive and starting over is they said something about go ahead and delete the application from your Mac, boot in as administrator and download as administrator. And that looked questionable, like you can really download programs for a user by logging in as administrator.
Aric • 01:50:57
Well, so basically what they mean is logging into an account that has administrator privileges on your Mac, which may already be the app, you know, the normal Mac user.
Jim • 01:51:12
When I validated the app, I had to do the, here’s my administrator account name and password.
Aric • 01:51:21
Right. Is it the same user as the one you normally log into, or is it a different user?
Jim • 01:51:27
Different user.
Aric • 01:51:28
Okay. Well, here’s the thing. When you install an application and then a different user attempts to access it, most of the time it’s not an issue. The Mac is designed to work that way. Right. But there are some apps that require data that must be installed in a special way if multiple users are going to use it on the same Mac.
Jim • 01:51:56
Right.
Aric • 01:51:57
And most of the time when you have an app like that, the app will prompt you like when you first install it or go to install it. It’ll tell you like, hey, do you want to install this for everybody or just this particular user?
Jim • 01:52:11
Right.
Aric • 01:52:12
Yeah.
Jim • 01:52:13
So in case to share, oh, go ahead.
Aric • 01:52:15
So, I mean, my point is, it’s not crazy to think that there could be an issue like that. Like maybe their app doesn’t properly put some information that is required into a place where all accounts on your Mac can access them. And if that’s the case, then logging in as the administrator, particularly the one that installed the app to begin with, might possibly solve that problem. It’s a bit of a long shot, but I mean, you can just basically fire it up and then, you know, well, you’re probably going to have to put your tax files, the ones that you worked on already, in a place where the other account can access it. But if you launch it from the account you installed it with, the administrator account you installed it with, you can try that and just see if it works. I would say that’s a long shot, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Jim • 01:53:23
Also, sure, this was the first applications that I saw that expect Keychain to be in use. So along the way, they’re saying, oh, good, we’ll get your data. Click yes or yes always for getting your data from Keychain. Right, yeah. And then they have a button for deny as though, no, I’m not going to use this application. But the deny, I was able to put in the normal kinds of recognition, and I was able to get it installed for both the 2023 and 2025.
Aric • 01:53:57
You do need to store like, you know, data or access data. And if because the app can store stuff in your key chain for the most part, unless you’ve said that it can’t. But in some cases, there are apps that will require access to information, say, like a previous version of TurboTax was installed. Right. Right. It’s not that same application. It’s the same company. Yeah. It’s not the same application. So sometimes the newer application should be like, hey, I see that you’ve had TurboTax installed on here in the past. I’d like to use some of that data that it saved so that we can save you time doing what you need to do. And in that case, it’s usually okay. But they usually will tell you why they need that.
Jim • 01:54:52
Yeah. So your idea about they aren’t that great of programmers they got on the Mac might go with that
Aric • 01:55:00
It’s certainly possible they could be you know cutting corners During development etc. Trying to make things easier for the developers. Yeah, so they spend less time working on the Mac app you know, I Yeah, you know, I wish I could tell you definitively that there’s an answer for this
Jim • 01:55:23
Well, thank you for spending so much time. I was expecting much less and to just force forward, but I learned a little bit extra. So thank you.
Aric • 01:55:33
You’re welcome. Okay. All right. Any other questions or what?
Frank • 01:55:37
Yeah, same thing, actually. I have the same problem with it. Oh, all right. But keeps asking me for a password for my keychain. And it says, well, use your same as you use to start your Mac. I do that and then it doesn’t accept it.
Aric • 01:55:52
Right. Okay. So that can happen sometimes if, for example, if you, this is just one example. It doesn’t mean this is necessarily what happened to you. But for example, if you get a new Mac and you use the migration assistant to migrate over an account with the same name.
Jim • 01:56:14
Right.
Aric • 01:56:15
as you logged into initially on the new Mac, it will ask you if you want to replace the existing user with the new user data. And every once in a while, some weirdness can happen where the keychain is actually from the previous user and not the one that’s currently there. So the thing I would try is if you’ve ever had a different password for the same user on that Mac, try, when it pops up asking you for the password, try some of those old passwords and see if that lets you in.
Jim • 01:56:55
We’ll try. I think my keychain is empty, completely empty. So I wouldn’t have expected anything. Frank, if you’ve used keychain for anything, it might be a different issue than what I was…
Aric • 01:57:08
Well, like I said, a lot of apps do use it to store private data. So there may be stuff that, even if you don’t personally use it, Apple stores certificates and stuff in there and other data that it needs to keep private.
Jim • 01:57:29
By the way, in case you were counting people, my brother joined like halfway through or later.
Aric • 01:57:35
Yeah, we had a maximum of, I think, 22 people.
Jim • 01:57:40
When I had checked previously, I’d seen 20. So he might have been counted or he might have come in late if you got to 22, dropped to 20, went up to 21.
Michael • 01:57:52
I counted the maximum of 21 people.
Aric • 01:57:56
The 22 was only there for a short period of time. There was a user who logged in towards the beginning and only stayed there for a while. and then some other guy came in and yeah.
Jim • 01:58:11
Took the spot in the grid?
Aric • 01:58:13
Yeah, so the most I saw, and it wasn’t for long, was 22. And that might have been, you know, sometimes you have one user logging in from multiple locations.
Jim • 01:58:24
And I saw several people from PAX, it looked like.
Aric • 01:58:27
Yeah. I know that Linda was here, so she did say she would come.
Jim • 01:58:33
And I think I saw one or two others. Yeah. If I hear anything as feedback on Saturday, I’ll let you know. Okay. Thank you. Otherwise, thanks again, everybody. It sounds like I should be letting you go on to other things, and I’ll try to get my tax extension out.
Aric • 01:58:52
Okay. No problem. And, Frank, I’ll reach out to you when I find that set in.
Frank • 01:58:57
That’d be great. Now, you could always print it, the extension, and mail it if you had to, or you can do it online. I’ve done that multiple times. Well, then, okay. I only have to do New Jersey extensions. So it’s easy there. They make it easy for you. The federal makes it tough. Yeah.
Aric • 01:59:16
Yeah. And I know for, like, New Jersey, you can just go to the New Jersey government website and, you know, fill out your taxes there for no charge.
Jim • 01:59:26
There’s a warning. If you get an extension, I think they shut down the New Jersey thing in the fall before the deadline for filing your taxes. So, like, if I went in there at the beginning of October, they’ve taken that down because they’re getting ready to replace it with next year. Oh, with the next year, yeah. So, just a warning.
Frank • 01:59:50
I don’t want to procrastinate that long.
Jim • 01:59:54
Congratulations compared to me.
Aric • 01:59:55
Yeah, you know, if you have a difficult situation to deal with.
Jim • 02:00:01
I basically have something where the IRS wrote something in their forms that, you know, do this and you get I-bonds. Yeah. And they basically kept making excuses for why they didn’t give I-bonds. And they finally said, there is no way that we can do it. We don’t have systems set up. So forget asking for something to get fixed. take the cash thing that could have increased by 20% if I’d gotten the I-bonds by then.
Aric • 02:00:27
Right, right. You know, the amount of ridiculous work that people have to do to file taxes in this country is ridiculous. Like, here’s the thing, like the IRS already knows what you owe. It should just tell you like, hey, send us a check for this much or here’s your money.
Jim • 02:00:49
I’ve grandfathered in so much stuff that they actually don’t know.
Aric • 02:00:53
Yeah. Well, I feel bad for you.
Frank • 02:00:58
I don’t understand. Sorry, I have to go through all that. I don’t understand. With all the stuff that the IRS does, how can it be all these frauds out there? How can you file a false return? Can’t they just compare it to some data that they have and they can see it’s fake?
Aric • 02:01:11
Here’s the problem that they tend to run into. One, Iris’s computer systems are really old, and they’ve been threatening to upgrade them for years, but they’ve never gotten the funds to do it, and now they have even fewer people. Yeah, nobody makes sense. It’s good in the one sense that if you accidentally make a mistake, you’re not likely to get audited.
Frank • 02:01:38
That’s true.
Aric • 02:01:39
Just because they don’t have the people to do it. But also it means if you have a problem and you need to talk to somebody, good luck.
Jim • 02:01:48
The other end of it is that you’ve got so many people out here that are so unknowledgeable that a good hacker can sound more real than the real person.
Aric • 02:02:01
Yeah. And there are clever ways to take advantage of that. I had a roommate in college who filed his taxes, got a check for his refund, went to the bank and tried to cash it, and the check bounced.
Khürt Williams • 02:02:20
Right.
Aric • 02:02:21
And they were like, what’s going on? Like, there’s no way that the federal government isn’t good for the money, you know. And what ended up happening was the IRS had actually made a mistake, and they had actually printed a batch of checks with the same check number. So if you were the first person to get that particular check number and you cashed it, it would go through fine. But if you weren’t the first person to cash it, it would bounce. So they had to send them another check. So, yeah.
Jim • 02:02:57
And then there are also clawback opportunities with our electronic system that you get something that says, yep, it’s been deposited, no problem. And then a week later, oh, that money just got taken out of your account because the writer of the check didn’t make it through and such. So warnings out there not to count on things to be there.
Aric • 02:03:18
Right. Well, you know, Jim, hopefully, hopefully, you know, we figure this out and you’re able to file.
Jim • 02:03:27
So if you hear that I went to jail, you’ll understand.
Aric • 02:03:31
Well, hopefully that won’t happen. Good luck.
Jim • 02:03:35
OK, thanks, everybody. Bye. See you next time. Yeah. Take care.