Apple Takes Off with Jony Ive

Steve Jobs, Jony Ive and others at Apple were able to make huge changes, going from the brink of bankruptcy toward success. What would come next would be an incredible era of innovation and success at the company, from iPods to iPads.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
how the tech are you. We are continuing our series
of episodes about Johnny. I've the famous tech designer, industrial

(00:26):
designer who, under the guidance and support of Steve Jobs,
was instrumental in changing Apple from a company that was
on the brink of bankruptcy into a company that became
a household name in electronics. Now, if this is your
first time hearing about all this, you should look at
the episodes I published last Monday and Wednesday first, because

(00:46):
I've already covered a lot of ground and we're just
gonna pick up from there now. I ended the last
episode a little rushed with a summary of ives work
on the iPod, and as I mentioned in that episode,
the iPod would go on to become an iconic piece
of technology that would extend Apple's influence beyond the faithful

(01:07):
customers who had been Apple's bread and butter for so
many years. You know, I gotta keep in mind that
Apple was really facing a huge uphill battle while the
iMac was a big hit, and you know, especially in
like the educational sector. The truth of the matter was
is that Windows PCs still had most of the market share,

(01:28):
like mac had only carved out that tiny little slice
of the market share in comparison. So while while the
iMac really helped Apple out and and helped it, you know,
reel back from falling over the precipice, it was this
expansion into electronics that would really change Apple's fate. So

(01:49):
the iPod would ultimately reach folks who had never owned
any other Apple product, but it took a while, and
one reason for that had nothing to do with the
industrial line of the iPod, but rather the lack of
compatibility with non Apple computers. So the original iPod, the
first generation, required a Macintosh in order to synchronize the

(02:10):
iPod with the user's music collection, which was on iTunes. Now. Also,
at this point in Apple's history, you could not buy
digital music off of iTunes and there was no music store. Instead,
you would take your CD collection because that's what we
used to keep music on kids, and you would insert
CD by c D you would RiPP music from the

(02:32):
CD into iTunes. Then you could transfer the music from
your iTunes library to your iPod using a physical cable,
which is also how you would charge the iPod. It
was a FireWire cable back in the day. So this
was a point where Apple was really keeping everything within
its own ecosystem for the most part. Now, the reason

(02:53):
you couldn't buy digital music off iTunes in those early
days that had a lot to do with the music industry,
not with Apple. So this was a transitional phase where
the record labels held most of the leverage, though sales
of CDs and other media were starting to flag, and
it wouldn't take very long for Apple to switch that

(03:14):
around to get the upper hand over the music industry.
It was not instantaneous, and it did progress in phases,
but it totally happened. One other thing I wanted to
mention before we move on is that last year, this
past year one for those of y'all listening for the future, Uh,
that was iPods twentieth anniversary, So it had come out

(03:36):
twenty years earlier, and this year in Apple finally discontinued
all iPod models. But anyway, last year a software company
called Panic actually showed off a prototype of the iPod
and it looks absolutely nothing like what Apple would ultimately launch,

(03:56):
and that was on purpose. So this prototype iPod, it's
funny to even talk about. It was enormous. It was
like the size of a DVD player, and it was
also pale yellow in color. Uh had a mechanical scroll
wheel in the upper left corner of the front face
of this thing. It had four physical buttons that had

(04:19):
little labels that were taped onto the prototype and the
label said up, down, left, and right, so there was
like a physical switch for each of those. And it
had the Apple logo with the word iPod underneath in
the upper right corner of the device. And according to
Tony Fidel, the interior of the device was mostly empty space.
It wasn't like filled with circuitry or anything. And the

(04:40):
team who made it purposefully avoided anything that would look
like what the final design was supposed to be be like.
And that was just to avoid any potential leaks or
anything like that. As for the real thing, I've was
inspired by a much older piece of technology, the nineteen
fifty eight Brown T three radio, which was designed by

(05:01):
an industrial designer, famous industrial designer named Dieter Rams. I've,
like Rams believed in the mantra, less but better meaning
the design of whatever you're working on should not be
burdened with flourishes and unnecessary touches. I have a feeling
that Johnny I've detests baroque. If he walked through say

(05:25):
Hurst Castle, his eyes would probably pop out of his
head because it is probably the gaudiest place I've ever
been to, and I've been to Pigeon Forward, y'all. Now,
if you google image search the nineteen fifty eight brown
that's b R A U N T three, you'll see
a small radio that, when it stood on its end,
has a speaker that's at the top, and below that

(05:49):
is a radio tuning wheel. And you'll look and you'll say, yeah,
that does look a lot like an iPod where you
had the screen at the top and then you had
the little scroll wheel, the circular wheel you could, you know,
physically mechanically move in a circle. With that first generation
on there, you could definitely see the similarities. The T
three is larger than the iPod, but the T three's

(06:11):
influence on I've is unmistakable. That's not to say that
I've didn't make this design his own. He totally did.
But you can see sort of the pedigree of the
iPod design by comparing it to this this old radio. Now,
Johnny i'ves design of the iPod brought in a material
that Apple had not really been using for its products
up to that point, which was stainless steel. So the

(06:33):
front of the iPod would be white. Actually the name
of the color of the original iPod is moon gray.
The back of the iPod would be stainless steel, and
the company logo would be on the back of the
iPod on the steel side. Now, some questioned i've's decisions.
They thought it made more sense for Apple to put

(06:53):
the logo on the front of the device, not on
the back. But I didn't want the logo to intrude
on the experience, and he wanted to use stainless steel
partly because it would actually give the iPod some heft.
It would it would have some weight to it, and
I was thinking that weight in the hands of the
user might be associated with the work that artists were

(07:15):
putting into their music. That you were actually listening to
this idea that it should be heavy. It can hold
up to a thousand songs like it's a It's an
interesting leap there, because obviously music doesn't weigh anything unless
you're trying to carry a musical instrument or a lot
of sheet music. But you know, music doesn't weigh anything,
but the idea of no, but we need this device

(07:37):
to make it feel like it should weigh something because
it's able to hold an entire library is worth of music.
Well that's what they thought back in the day. Turns
out that people can collect way more than a thousand songs,
So that was an interesting choice one that I don't
I don't know how I fall. I mean, I like
the feel the weight of that first generation iPod. Actually

(07:58):
like the way that feels. Um. I don't necessarily associate
it with the amount of work artists put into their music,
but that may be a lack of imagination on my part. Now,
one component that wasn't ives idea on that first generation
iPod was that mechanical scroll wheel, right, that circle that
you could spin around to go through menus and stuff.

(08:18):
That was actually Phil Schiller's idea. Schiller was head of marketing, uh.
He would actually step in for Steve Jobs a few
times when jobs health was in decline, and Schiller had
pitched the idea of an input device that gave physical feedback.
The clicking of the wheel in this case, and so
that element did not come straight from Johnny Ives group. Now,

(08:40):
like I said in the last episode, the first iPods
sold well, but they it wasn't the breakout hit that
later generations of the iPod would become. I mean, if
Apple had stuck with the way they did the first iPod,
we probably wouldn't be calling these things podcasts. We'd be
calling them something else. But Apple did more than a
hundred thousand units between when the first iPod came out

(09:04):
in early to mid November of two thousand one and
then the end of the year, So in uh, you know,
a little more than a month, they sold a hundred
thousand units. That's not shabby. By January two thousand three,
Apple had sold more than six hundred thousand iPods, which
wasn't bad, but it did show how Apple's customer base
at this point was still fairly limited. In fact, the

(09:25):
company had only added support for Windows machines in August
of two thousand two. But in two thousand four things
really picked up. Apple introduced the iPod Mini, which was
a slimmed down version of the iPod that was available
in several colors, so not just moon gray that I've
really favored. In addition, the Mini was made out of
anodized aluminum, giving the iPods a different feel. Uh they

(09:49):
you know that the texture was different, and Ivan his
team had worked hard to find just the right material
and colors to create a line of devices that still
had the right weight and feel to them and would
be inviting. And Apple's iPod sales climbed above two million
but into January two four by the end of the year,
so that was at the end of January, but by
the end of the year they went to more than

(10:12):
ten million units sold. That's an astronomical climb in sales, right, Like,
it was two million by the end of January two
four by the end of the next ten eleven months
rather more than ten million. Incredible. So the iPod success
was huge both for I've as a designer and for

(10:33):
Apple as a company. And we'll talk about what that
meant for Apple when we come back from these messages. Okay,
So the iPod was a huge hit, and that huge
hit was enough to really convince Steve Jobs, not that

(10:54):
he needed much convincing anyway, but it really sealed the
deal that his own preference, which was to put it
as much emphasis on design as on things like functionality.
That was the way to go that you had to
have designed be a prime component of any product. That
couldn't just be what does the software do or how

(11:16):
do you access it? What's the user interface? But the
actual physical design of the product had to be just
as important, if not more so. Now you have to
remember that back then, Apple was not the brand that
it is today. The company had its rabid fans back
in you know, two thousand, two thousand one, but they

(11:36):
were in the minority. Apple had been the butt of
jokes in the mainstream, Like people joked about how the
Apple Mac was. You know, you don't even play games
on an Apple Mac, like there's there's nothing to play.
That wasn't true, by the way, but that was the perception.
So things were starting to turn around now, right because
the Imax had really started to catch capture a lot

(11:56):
of attention. They were just very fun and and love
lead designed like you wanted you wanted to have one.
It looked like candy. The iPods were a huge hit.
So now the general public, we're starting to want to
get their hands on Apple products. It was it was
going beyond the Apple Faithful, and those attractive computers and
iPods were really transforming the company. One computer that got

(12:19):
attention and not all of it was positive, was the
iMac G four computer, which was released in two thousand one,
so same year that the iPod came out. And if
you take a look at this, if you look at
the iMac G four, which had a couple of different
names throughout its history, you can definitely see that the
evolutionary step that existed between the iMac G three models,

(12:42):
which were those really colorful CRT screen computer systems that
were all in one computer system, and then you can
also see the following step after the iMac G four,
which are the more modern IMAX, which are kind of
all in one devices where you've got a flat screen
with the computer integrated right behind the flat screen and

(13:02):
it's on a stand. Right, That's been the IMAX of
recent years. Well, this one, the iMac G four, is
kind of in between those, though I'd say it's more
it's closer to the more recent IMAX than the old
uh G three's. So the base of this computer was
a little dome and that's where all the computer elements were,

(13:25):
right like that's where the optical drive was, That's where
you would plug in your peripherals, and that dome is
kind of what I think of as the nod to
the IMAX three days now. At the top of the
dome was an attached arm that you could tilt kind
of like a desk lamp, and on the end of
that arm was the flat panel display for the computer.

(13:46):
So it didn't have the computer incorporated behind the flat screen.
It was instead incorporated in this little dome. So it
wasn't quite the same as modern IMAX. So that's why
I say it was kind of in between. And this
was a bold move for the company. It differentiated Apple's
computers from the beige desktops associated with Windows machines, and

(14:07):
the company called it the New iMac at the time.
Later on they would rename it the iMac G four.
The l c D display on the New iMac wasn't cheap,
and so the New iMac was pretty expensive machine, and
the education sector, which again was one of Apple's really
big customers, kind of lagged on adopting the iMac G

(14:29):
four because it was so expensive. A lot of them
kept on buying the G three until Apple stopped selling them.
In two thousand four, Apple would unveil the iMac G five. Now,
this was the first of the Imax to incorporate the
computer behind the flat display itself, and it would all
be supported on an L shaped stand that would be
on your desk. Now, unlike later Imax which would have

(14:53):
aluminium cases like the most recent ones have aluminium cases,
the iMac G five had a white case, and I've
insisted on that. He felt that the screen was meant
to capture the user's attention, like all their attention should
be on the screen. The screen was beautiful, it was
the focal point for the computer. So he wanted a
really minimalist approach on the case so that you wouldn't

(15:16):
your eyes wouldn't be drawn to something else, You would
be focused on what was important, and everything else like
the keyboard and the mouse would all be a simple
white as well, again not to pull focus from the display.
Now back to the iPod. The introduction of the iPod
Nano in two thousand five, which would replace the Mini,
would change things up again. The first generation of the

(15:36):
Nano was available only in white or black, and it
had a screen measuring just one point eight inches on
the diagonal. The second generation added a few more features
as well as some more color options. The third generation
would change the form factor by having the candy bar
like dimensions of the first two generations trade off for

(15:57):
I don't know, like a Graham Cracker kind of dimension.
It was more squarish than a rectangle. Uh So the
actual physical form factor changed and that design would flip
flop a bit between those over the following generations until
Apple just playing Out discontinued the nano. So yeah, So
again it was Ive's team kind of working on different

(16:18):
things to try and experiment with different design layouts, and
sometimes they would go back to an idea that they
had had before, you know, refined it a bit. So
it wasn't like you know, the I Pod, the nanos
of of you know, two thousand ten looked exactly like
the ones from two thousand seven. It wasn't like that,
But they did kind of experiment with those different form factors.

(16:41):
I've also had a hand with the iPod Shuffle, which
didn't have a screen at all on it, so you
had no screen to look at. Instead, you would load
music on this device, you would play it in shuffle mode.
You could play it in just you know, regular nodes
that would play in order, but typically it was shuffle
mode and it would just sort of randomly shuffle up
the song order for you and play whatever. And it

(17:02):
had simple controls for advancing or going back through songs,
plus volume controls and a play pause button and that
was about it. Like it had the little headphone jack
and that's you know, he didn't have much more after that.
The first one looked kind of like a stick of gum.
You could actually pull the end off. It was a
cap for a USB that could be you know, plugged

(17:22):
into a computer. The second generation looked more like a stamp,
like it was you know, rectangular in dimension. The third
generation of the Shuffle would be the boldest of the
designs because I've and his team created one that lacked
any physical controls other than a power control. So instead
all of the controls for changing the volume or advancing

(17:45):
through a track, all of that moved to Apple's iPod earbuds,
which I've also designed, which meant that initially, at least
the third generation of the Shuffle had limited functionality if
you weren't using Apple's own earbuds, so you couldn't just
you know, plug any earphones into a shuffle of this
generation and be able to control it. You'd be able

(18:07):
to listen to music, but you wouldn't be able to
do things like change the volume, So if it was
too loud or too quiet, you couldn't do anything about it.
And if a song came on that you didn't want
to hear, there was no way to skip it unless
you were using the the Apple earbuds which had the
controls on them. Eventually, third parties would come up with
their own earbuds that would have controls that were interoperable

(18:28):
with this shuffle, but this was one of those decisions
that had people kind of complaining about Apple. Apple has
a reputation for uh making moves to trap people into
an ecosystem, whether it's with peripherals or with their approach
to software um and that you know customers, consumers tend

(18:49):
to like to have a lot of options, right Like
a lot of people would much prefer to be able
to pair their favorite headphones with their favorite music device.
But Apple was taking an approach where, at least to
have the ideal experience, you really need to be all
in on Apple, something that I think was really true
even when Apple opened up iTunes to Windows machines. But

(19:12):
I've complained about that too many times in the past,
so I'm not going to pick that up again here.
The fourth generation Shuffle would actually bring back those physical
controls onto the device itself, which seems to be an
admission that perhaps the third generation may have gone too far.
I mean, some bold moves just end up being the
wrong ones, it turns out, or at least maybe if

(19:33):
you want to say it's not the wrong move, it
might be a move that just doesn't resonate with the
general public as well. And then after all that, we
would have a device that really would push Apple into
the next level. So to to kind of some up
what we've been looking at so far. With the Johnny

(19:54):
Ives tenure at Apple, you know, he came in during
a tumultuous time where the company was heading toward disaster.
He was encouraged by Steve Jobs to help design a
new generation of Macintosh computer that brought attention back to
Apple on a level that had not been there for years,
Like positive attention, the company had largely been dismissed at

(20:17):
that point. He had helped introduce a new product line
with iPods a new whole business for Apple, which when
paired with iTunes and the iTunes store, would end up
being a lucrative business for Apple. But what would come
next would really push the company into the stratosphere. We'll

(20:38):
talk about that when we come back after these messages.
All right, this is where we're getting up to round
two thousand seven. And if you know Apple and you
know your timelines, you know that two thousand seven is

(20:59):
when we get the iPhone and who boy. So the
iPod established Apple as a household name in electronics. The
iPhone would move the company into hyperspace. So when Steve
Jobs unveiled the iPhone back in two thousand and seven,
it took the world by storm, which was particularly remarkable

(21:21):
because I don't know how many of you remember this,
but here in the United States, when the iPhone launched,
it was exclusive to a T and T. You could
not have the iPhone running on any other carrier. So
if you were a Sprint customer, or a Verizon customer
or T Mobile customer, then you would have to switch

(21:42):
carriers if you wanted to get an iPhone. There was
a big limitation, and yet the iPhone was still a
remarkable hit for Apple, and when Steve Jobs took the
stage in two thousand seven to talk about this to
unveil it, he drilled home to the audience that he

(22:03):
was going to introduce products that represented an iPod, a
mobile phone, and an Internet communications device. And the implication
at first was that these were three different products. But
then he reveals, no, I'm talking about one thing that
that happens to be all three of these, and that
was the iPhone. So he gave a very long presentation
about the iPhone that day. It's like a couple of hours.

(22:25):
You can actually find it on YouTube. You can watch
the whole thing if you like. And he spent some
of that time to talk about the design of the phone.
Although it was in pretty general terms. He pointed out
that there were minimal physical controls on the device. There
was a home button that would take you back to
the home page wherever you happen to be. There was

(22:47):
a wake slash sleep button, so you could, you know,
turn the phone on or off. There was a volume control,
and there was a switch to turn the phone to
ring or silent mode. It also had front facing and
rear facing cameras, had a back that was made out
of aluminum. The front was originally going to be plastic,
but Steve Jobs noticed that his early model he was

(23:08):
carrying around was starting to get scratched up, and so
the team at the last minute had to change the
determination to make it go to glass. The one that
you'll see in the presentation that that Steve Jobs is
showing off, that's the one that has a plastic face.
The one that would go to market would have a
glass face. Now that design change, uh was a big one.

(23:32):
I'll talk about it a little bit more and what
the team had to do in order to make it work.
It was pretty remarkable, and the design of the iPhone
overall followed that less but Better philosophy. So, unlike other smartphones,
iPhone did not have a physical keyboard. If you look
at the smartphones around two thousand seven, you'll see that

(23:52):
all of them pretty much have a third to about
a half of the phone taken up by a display
and the rest of the phone taken up by a
physical keyboard with little plastic keys and some navigation buttons.
And Steve Jobs hated that he wanted to have a
touch screen device, and because of that, it meant that

(24:13):
you could dedicate the entire almost the entire front of
the phone to the screen, which measured three and a
half inches on the diagonal for the original iPhone. Now
above the screen was the front facing camera, the speaker
for your ear, that kind of thing. Beneath the screen
was the home button, and there was a fairly narrow
bezel on either side of the screen. So it was

(24:35):
a pretty simple and elegant approach to a smartphone with
most of the focus going on the display, just like
with the newer iMac computers that were coming out. The
glass that would cover the iPhone was special, and it
ended up being a special kind of glass that Corning
had been working on in its R and D department. Uh,

(24:56):
you know, because Apple was looking everywhere to find someone
who could deuced glass that wouldn't scratch or shatter easily.
They needed something that was going to be durable, especially
for a device that could, you know, on occasion, maybe
slip out of your hand and hit the floor. So
they looked at this special glass Corning had developed, and
this was stuff that would later evolve with the commercial

(25:19):
name Guerrilla Glass. That's a popular brand of glass that
has scratch and shadow resistant properties. It's really cool. I
once wrote an article on how guerrilla glass works for
how stuff works way back in the day, so um yeah,
and that was great. I got to talk to people
at Corning and everything to learn more about the actual
engineering that was required to make this happen. Now, at

(25:40):
the time that they were using it for the iPhone,
this stuff hadn't really found its way into any consumer products.
It was still kind of an R and D thing.
So this is an example of how Steve Jobs and
Johnny I would go to great links to make sure
that their vision would be realized, even if it meant
having to make use of an experimental material in order
to do it well. I should also add that Jeff

(26:00):
Williams played a critical part in getting the glass from
Corning incorporated into the iPhone design. I know, when I
talk about this, it makes it sound like Johnny Ivan
Steve Jobs did everything at Apple on their own and
just raised it from the mud and put it into
the heavens. That's not the case. There were clearly hundreds
and thousands of people working at Apple who made these

(26:21):
things possible. Some of them took on, you know, leadership roles,
so people like Jeff Williams and Johnny I've and Steve Jobs.
But you know, I don't ever want to take away
from the fact that these things exist because of the
collaboration of lots of incredibly talented people. Now, a lot
of the design elements of the iPhone would obviously find

(26:43):
their way into the iPod Touch. In fact, you know,
a lot of people said the iPod Touch was really
just an iPhone only without the phone part. And the
iPod Touch had also a multi touch display, meaning that
you could do multi finger gestures on it, like pinch
to zoom, that the stuff. But it also had a
lower resolution screen than the iPhone did, so it wasn't

(27:05):
as sharp as what you would get with the iPhone.
It also lacked physical volume buttons for the first generation
of the iPod Touch, which was something that irritated some
reviewers and some users. Uh. You could actually use an
iPod Touch as a phone if you enabled the WiFi
and you used apps like Skype. Actually know someone who
did that for a while. My buddy I as actor

(27:27):
who uh who produces content for a c net he
um for a while was using an iPod Touch as
his primary phone. And uh, one of these days I'm
just gonna have to have him on the show again
and talk about how that worked out for him and
was it convenient or what did he like about why
did he hate about it? Sometimes I think having a
WiFi only phone would be great because anytime I'm not

(27:50):
around WiFi, I wouldn't have any notifications. And I'm just
I've I've obviously reached the age where uh notifications are
the bane of my existence, and I tried to avoid
them at all costs. Anyway, back to Ivan Apple, you
would also clearly see Johnny i'ves influence and the release
of the iPad, which came out in twenty And in

(28:12):
case some of y'all didn't know, I usually say this
whenever I talk about the iPad, so you probably have
heard me say this before, even if you haven't heard
the original episode. Way back in the day, I infamously
dismissed the iPad when it was first coming out. I said,
this is not gonna work. It's gonna be a flop.
No one's gonna want this. I could not imagine that

(28:32):
people would flock to a tablet computer, and the reason
for that was because in the past, tablets had really
only found a place in niche markets, Like you know,
in the medicine field, there were places where you know,
doctors and nurses were using tablet computers, but it just
never managed to take off as a mainstream product. And

(28:55):
I was convinced that that was just that was just
gonna be the case, that even Apple would not be
able to produce something in that form factor that would
appeal to the average person. And I could not have
been more wrong. So I've actually provided a bit of philosophy.
When he talked about the iPad later on, he once said, quote,

(29:18):
when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works,
it's sort of becomes magical. And that's exactly what the
iPad is. End quote, which I think of a sort
of paraphrasing Arthur C. Clark, the science fiction author. Clark
once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(29:42):
That if the technology is advanced enough to someone not
schooled in that tech, it would seem to be impossible.
And you think about that, like if you were to
somehow go back in time to I don't know, the
Renaissance and show off a computer somehow get it running,
I don't know how you would do it as the results.

(30:03):
But let's say you did, everyone would think that you
were you were, you were magical, and you probably would
be persecuted because that's just the way the world goes
right anyway, he was more or less saying that the
iPad was magical. It fell into that realm martely because
of the way that you would interact with the device.

(30:23):
You know, you literally had to put your hands on
whatever it was you were doing. And there is something
to that, right that your interaction when you're touching something directly,
even if that directly is through a screen, it creates
some more connected experience. You know, Steve Jobs, when you

(30:44):
introduced the iPhone, talked about getting your hands on your
music because you were physically touching your screen in order
to play specific songs, as opposed to typing something out
on a physical keyboard, which adds a bit of distance
between you and whatever it is you want to do.
It's that connection that cuts out those other input forms

(31:08):
that could otherwise act as sort of a barrier between
you and whatever it was you were doing. It's an
interesting thought. I don't know how much I buy into it,
but I do think there is something there. Uh and
it meant that you were going to be able to
interact with stuff on a screen very much like an iPhone,
but on a size at much greater scale. Obviously, now

(31:33):
we're going to start to to wind down here because
I have one more episode in this series I want
to do, and it really ties into the decline of
Steve Jobs as health. His health would obviously have a
huge impact on the operations at Apple and on Apple's future. Uh.

(31:54):
He had first been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer back into
thousand three. He underwent a surgery to remove it, and
he mostly kept it under wraps from even his close
friends at Apple until two thousand four, when he did
send out a message to everyone at Apple letting them
know what had been going on, and there was hope

(32:19):
that the surgery he had undergone had had removed all
the cancer and that he was cancer free and healthy.
But obviously over the following years that would change. So
in our next episode, we're gonna talk about Steve Jobs
and his failing health and ultimately his his passing, how

(32:40):
that affected Apple in general and Johnny I've in particular,
and how at least some people say that set the
path for Johnny I've ultimately to step away from the
company he had fallen in love with um not that
it was the one and only factor that that went

(33:01):
into that decision, but that that was the starting point.
We'll talk about that in our next episode. I hope
you've been enjoying these It's been really interesting to dive
into Johnny i've's history and his influence at Apple, something
that was clearly really important. And in the next episode
we'll also talk about what we might expect with Apple

(33:25):
moving forward without Johnny ivan It. But that's for the
next episode. If you have suggestions for episode topics, well
let me know. One way to do that is to
download the I heart Radio app. It's free to download.
You can navigate over to the tech Stuff podcast page
use that little microphone icon to leave up to thirty
seconds of a voice message let me know what you

(33:45):
would like me to talk about, or you can reach
out on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
stuff hsw and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tex Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

(34:07):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.