The Talk Show With John Gruber

MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Drafts: The Swiss Army knife for text on all your Apple devices. Act now to get your first year of Drafts Pro for 50% off. Finalist: A daily planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac, built on proven paper-based planning methods. Use this link to get six months free. Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good. Links: Apple Newsroom: “Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO”. “Johny Srouji named Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer”. MG, at Spyglass: “A Cook’s Tour”. “John Ternus’s Magic Show”. Yours truly: “Another Day Has Come”. “Time to Serve Some Delicious Claim Chowder Regarding the Cook-Ternus CEO Transition”. “The New York Times Printed the Wrong Crossword Grid Last Sunday, and I Find That Timing Serendipitous”. Steven Levy: “Apple’s Next CEO Needs to Launch a Killer AI Product” (paywall-busting Apple News+ link). 2008: “Joe Nocera Gets a Call From Steve Jobs”. 2010, regarding Mark Papermaster, whom Steve Jobs fired just weeks after the iPhone 4 antennagate press conference: “Papermaster and That Damn Antenna.” “Look at how many blueberries your muffin has, and how many mine has. Yours is falling apart. I have nothing.” This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.

Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa? Sponsored by: Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good. Links: The Commodore VIC-20. Apple’s looks-good-to-this-day “Snow White” hardware design language from the 1980s, created in collaboration with Frog Design. The Apple IIc — in my opinion, the epitome of “Snow White”. Frog Designed turned 50 back in 2019, and The Verge has some amazing photos from their collection, including a jaw-dropping prototype for the Lisa. Star Blazers. Yours truly, back in 2014, on the Finder’s “Special” menu. Yours truly guesting on The Verge’s Version History podcast, to talk about the original Macintosh. Hyperspace — Siracusa’s perfectly-named Mac utility for saving space via APFS magic. ATP (a pretty good podcast), and episode 683 in particular (a pretty good episode of that podcast, wherein Marco Arment tells the tale of the Mac Mini server farm he built for Overcast’s now-in-beta generated-transcripts feature). Infinite Mac — classic Mac (and NeXTStep) emulators that run in your web browser. “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” ResEdit 2.1 Reference — still hosted at Apple’s website. SNL’s “McIntosh Jr.” commercial, the best Apple parody ad ever made. This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.

Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple’s big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good. Links: The iPhone 17e. Thoughts and Observations on the MacBook Neo. My review: The MacBook Neo. Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro With No Plans to Bring It Back. Yankees-Giants opens MLB season, on Netflix. Nomad 65W Slim Power Adapter. This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.

Special guest David Pogue discusses his excellent and amazingly comprehensive new book, Apple: The First 50 Years. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off. Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good. Links: “Apple: The First 50 Years” official website. Hardcover: Amazon Bookshop.org E-book: Kindle Apple Books Photo of Sculley and the other white dude in suits on his executive team, circa 1993, from page 251. (My son Jonas quipped that they look like the executives from the company that made Robocop.) The “Apple at 50” event David hosted at the Computer History Museum earlier this month. The similar event David hosted two years ago, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh. Matt Neuberg, back in 1998 (!), reviewing Conflict Catcher for TidBITS, with mention of the user manual. This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good. Links: Apple in 2025: The Six Colors Report Card. Kieran Healy, in a post at Six Colors published after we recorded the show: “Charting the Vibes in the 2025 Apple Report Card”. Kieran Healy’s homepage/weblog. My 2025 Apple Report Card. Upgrade: “The Shifting Sands of Liquid Glass”, wherein Jason and Myke discuss this year’s report card, and Jason makes rascally comments supporting MacOS 26 Tahoe. (And Myke isn’t much better.) Apple’s July 2025 announcement of the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit. Derek Sivers, in 2005: “Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution”. ChangeTheHeaders — a Safari extension I convinced Jeff Johnson to build, which, among other things, allows me never to be served WebP images in lieu of PNG or JPEG. StopTheMadness — the older sibling, companion Safari Extension to ChangeTheHeaders that gives you explicit control over all sorts of web features, on a per-website basis. (I conflated the two during the show.) WebP. Mac Launchers: LaunchBar (my favorite, and until Tahoe, Jason’s too). Alfred. Raycast. Tuna. Quicksilver. Incomplete list of what’s wrong with MacOS 26 Tahoe: Terrible app icons. The terrible idea to include inscrutable, inconsistent icons next to just about every menu item in every app, as documented by Jim Nielsen and Nikita Prokopov, and linked to by yours truly here and here, respectively. Norbert Heger: “The Struggle of Resizing Windows on macOS Tahoe” — and a follow-up. Daring Fireball: “Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe”. Daring Fireball: “Bad Dye Job”. Stephen Hackett’s MacOS Screenshot Library at 512 Pixels. Steve Krug’s classic book, “Don’t Make Me Think”. The Appearance Manager and the themes that never actually shipped for classic Mac OS. Comparing Alan Dye’s horseshitty introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025 to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua back in 2000. Manu Cornet’s 2011 classic: “Organizational Charts In Major Tech”. This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.