Tech Reflect

My school district offered interesting summer courses ranging from pottery to magic to computer programming. I never took pottery but I took the other two.

The summer before kindergarten I signed up for the computer programming class. Everyone was within a few years of my age so it wasn’t like I was some crazy prodigy or something.

Turns out we only had one computer (a mainframe), a keypunch, a punchcard reader, and a printer. I didn’t know what to expect so it all seemed pretty cool to me.

We learned BASIC and set to work on writing a short program. I decided I wanted to ask the computer for the size of a baseball field and have it print out the answer. I showed my program to the teacher and he told me I needed to add a line of code to print out the answer.

I was deflated. The … READ THE REST

I always thought it would be fun to get fired from Apple. I thought it would make a good story! Maybe I could do increasingly outrageous things and eventually get fired.

The truth is less interesting though. I’ve been on leave for awhile and Apple finally said my time was up. So, in the end, I did get terminate (aka fired). But it’s such a boring story. I always wanted to go out either on a high note or a very dramatic note, so I am disappointed.

For most of my career, Apple has been the only organization I’ve been a part of where I fit in completely. I have a team photo from Aperture on my wall and I still get emotional looking at it. There are many other teams I worked on that I feel the same way about. Everything wasn’t always roses, but much of the time … READ THE REST

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people while I’ve been at Apple. Unlike most new recruits, Apple was not a company I ever dreamed about working for.

I never wanted to work for a big company. Period. For me, a big company was one withmore than 200 people. I found even companies that size were riddled with bureaucracy. You’d never talk to any of the senior leaders except during a Q&A at a company-wide event. I couldn’t fathom working at a company with more than 5,000 people.

Even if Apple were small, I had given up on them back in the mid 1990s. The last straw was my nearly $7,000 purchase of a PowerBook 5300— the worst computer I’ve ever owned. I later sold it for $500 just for the display. Apple’s system software quality was also at an all time low. For six months, I tried to switch to Windows but … READ THE REST

When I used to interview people at Apple, I sometimes liked to ask them what they thought were the best and worst Apple hardware products of all time. It was a good way to test product knowledge, the ability to be critical without getting carried away, prioritization skills, and ability to keep things in perspective.

Sometimes the interviewee turns the tables on me and asks me for my best and worst. It’s something I think about a lot because the company has gone through so many highs and lows. I think it’s important to evaluate what went well and what went wrong in the past so the same mistakes aren’t made.

The worst hardware product

I started with the worst because it’s really easy. In my mind, it’s been the worst Apple hardware ever since it came out and was never topped. This product was so bad that:

• I had