Apple at 50: Five Decades of Thinking Different [video]

Looking back at Apple's products, 3/4 of them are impressively bad; very very bad. But the stuff they get right...

Never been a fan of Pogue's 'pop tech' take on things, but GREAT interviews here with Woz, Bill Fernandez, Ron Wayne, Chris Espinoza, John Sculley(!), Robert Brunner, Avi Tevanian, and John Rubenstein - never going to see a team like this again (Federighi and Ternus sighting at 56:54). Also good to hear names like Burrell Smith, Joswiak, Jef Raskin, Wendel Sander, and Andy Hertzfeld throughout (would've been great to have Gassee and Markkula, but I'll take what I can get). And while I miss Steve Jobs, he went out on top, and I'm sure the current landscape would have relegated him to outcast status yet again.

Growing up across the bay in the 80s during Apple's heyday makes me so very nostalgic for the culture of innovation, creativity, and fun that once made us elementary school nerds excited about building great things and outshining other nerds, with our unsung heroes not too far from us geographically. Also, the massive pranks at Sun and SGI just made everyone believe they can be a kid well past their teens. Now I'm seeing the high school and college kids I coach are so obsessed with scale, clout, and unbridled control, through hedged iterative development efforts and overhyped marketing. Grit's been replaced by grift.

For me, the final nail in Silicon Valley's coffin was when Weird Stuff closed - an obscure milestone, but one that marked an end to that era. Nevertheless, glad to have CHM continuing to carry the torch with amazing retrospectives like this.