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**Steve Jobs:** \[39:32\] I believe that you can use the concept of technology windows opening and then eventually closing. What I mean by that is enough technology, usually from fairly diverse places, comes together and makes something that's a quantum leap forward possible. And it doesn't come out of nowhere; if you ... |
And in our case, our first product failed. We came out with this cube, and we sold 10,000 of them. Why? Because we weren't quite there yet, and we made some mistakes along the way, and we had to course-correct. You know, Macintosh was a course correction off the Lisa. With Apple II and III we did it in reverse... \[lau... |
And so when we are pushing that window open -- I think with our current generation of products, we finally got the window open. After six years, it's open, we've got an extremely elegant implementation, and we've got five years of work to do to exploit it in the marketplace. And we’ll peak in five years. Five years, we... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Even if you know about these technology windows, I suspect that none of this works without a well-oiled shipping machine, or supply chain, as some call it, and essentially going from idea, to prototype, to a final product as fast as possible. How did you manage to solve this really hard problem? |
**Steve Jobs:** One of the key things that manufacturing can contribute to competitive advantage is time to market. Why is that? Because the way most things work is you design your product here, and after you're done, you throw it over the wall and you design your manufacturing process here, right? Sorting out a bunch ... |
What we do is we suck data out of our CAD systems and engineering, we zing them around over the local network, and in our own computers we compute all of the robot placement programs fully optimized path, we compute all the vision system programs, we check it against the bill of materials in the iOS system, and we down... |
Now the key is that manufacturing did that so well for engineering that we haven't built a prototype in engineering for two years. We haven't built a wire wrap or any other kind of prototype in engineering for two years; everything has been built in the factory. Now, what does that mean? What that means is manufacturin... |
\[44:15\] Secondly, a lot of times when you build prototypes, it's not quite the same technologies you're going to use in production. And so all the accumulated knowledge you get from building your prototypes you throw away when you change technology to go into production, and you start over in that accumulation proces... |
The key to it all though was we didn't go out and hire a bunch of manufacturing people; we went out and hired engineers. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Whenever I hear anyone mentioned manufacturing and factories, my mind goes straight to “The Goal” and “It’s Not Luck”, both amazing books written by Goldratt. And one of the key takeaways from those books for me was the inventory and work-in-progress, or Git branches and PRs, as we know it in today's ... |
**Steve Jobs:** One of the things you learn when you start building factories is that warehouses are really bad, right? Warehouses are bad, because you tend to put things in them. And inventory is really bad; inventory is really bad because if it's defective, you don't find out about it for a while, and you don't close... |
I was walking through the Mac factory one day, and the two biggest pieces of automation we put in were a giant small parts storage and retrieval system; there were these totes that ran around. And the second one was this giant burn-in system at the end; a few tens of millions of dollars worth of equipment. And I realiz... |
And the reason that we were able to do a lot of what we've done is because when we were learning about manufacturing Mac, we hired a Stanford Business School professor at the time named Steven Wheelwright... And he did a neat thing, he drew on the board a chart. The first time I met him, he said, “You can view all comp... |
\[47:58\] And in general — you can sort of put the American flag here, and put the Japanese flag in here... \[laughter\] And that's changing, however. That's changing. And it's changing because people like you are going into manufacturing. Big companies are starting to realize that we were great at this one time, and t... |
By the way, just going back to software for a minute... I often apply this scale to computer companies and how they look at software. See, I think most computer companies are stage one - they wish software had never been invented. I think there's only three companies here, and that's us, Apple and Microsoft in stage fi... |
And our first robots that we got, we spec'd them out, and we bought them completely turnkey, with the robot arms on them and all the electronics, and the software to control them. And we spec'd it out, but we didn't write it. And they worked okay. Some of them are still in use, but they weren't great. And being softwar... |
So the second generation, we spec'd out the hardware and had somebody build the hardware for us, but we wrote all the software on our own computers. We’re object-oriented, so we started writing robot objects, quality objects, all sorts of objects to control this factory. And we found out our computer was great for it. ... |
I've been to Japan a lot of times, maybe 30-40 times, and I loved to tour factories over there... And they always amaze me, because they built everything themselves, they weren't afraid of anything. They needed a robot—they'd try to buy one, but if they couldn't, they'd actually engineer it and build it. And you'd thin... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow, this is fascinating. And I want to make sure that I understood it... So automation is key; only by understanding and owning the entire stack, can you make a meaningful difference, and using robots or automation for tasks which don't challenge the human imagination or empathy is the way to go. Thi... |
Now that we are preparing to wrap up, what would you like listeners to take away from this conversation? |
**Steve Jobs:** People say, you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing, and it's totally true. And the reason is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It's really hard, and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, if you're not having ... |
\[52:27\] The second thing is you've got to be a really good talent scout, because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you've got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them, and see how you do, and refine your intuition... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Thank you, Steve, for sharing so much with us, and for caring enough about personal computers. This changed my life for the better. I followed your advice, and asked for help with the ending. What Jony Ive said ten years ago at your memorial is just as meaningful today. Here it goes. |
**Jony Ive:** Steve used to say to me, and he used to say this a lot... “Hey, Jony, here is a dopey idea...” And sometimes they were, really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas, or quiet, simple... |
And just as Steve loved ideas and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely-formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so... |
He used to joke that “the lunatics had taken over the asylum”, as we shared a giddy excitement, spending months and months working on a part of a product that nobody would ever see, or not with their eyes. But we did it because we really believed that it was right, because we cared. He believed that there was a gravity... |
\[55:29\] Now, while the work hopefully appeared inevitable, appeared simple and easy, it really cost. But you know what? It cost him most. He cared the most, he worried the most deeply. He constantly questioned, "Is this good enough? Is this right?" And despite all his successes, all his achievements, he never assumed... |
I loved his enthusiasm, his simple delight... Often, I think, mixed with some relief. But we got there. We got there in the end, and it was good. You can see his smile, can't you? The celebration of making something great for everybody, enjoying the defeat of cynicism, the rejection of reason, the rejection of being to... |
He was my closest and my most loyal friend. We worked together for nearly 15 years, and he still laughed at the way I said, “Aluminium.” Thank you, Steve. Thank you for your remarkable vision, which has united and inspired this extraordinary group of people. For all that we have learned from you and for all that we wil... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And that's it for this special episode of Ship It, where we remembered Steve Jobs and all the learnings and special moments that he shared with us throughout his life. |
I want to thank Andrew for showing me what it means to be a great friend. and a loyal Apple employee. I still have fond memories from when we used to pair at level 39, and it's been a joy seeing you grow over the years into a great manager at Apple. Everything worked out great. |
• Celebrating 30 episodes of Ship It podcast |
• Discussing the impact and journey of creating a podcast |
• Reflecting on future plans for upcoming episodes (40+) |
• Explaining GitOps approach to infrastructure management |
• Analyzing an incident where "latest" tag caused problems with app container image |
• Identifying need for revisiting GitOps approach |
• Unsolved cases and mysterious events |
• GitOps adoption and deployment strategies |
• Using Argo CD for automating infrastructure reconciliations |
• Importance of versioning manifests in repositories |
• Push-based vs pull-based deployments |
• Preventing issues with "latest" tags in Docker images |
• Implementing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) |
• Integration with Honeycomb for monitoring CDN behavior |
• Implementing Honeycomb for observability and visibility into CDN behavior |
• Leveraging Fastly's caching capabilities to improve performance |
• Analyzing slow requests and identifying areas for optimization |
• Discussing the impact of cache misses on user experience |
• Examining the benefits and limitations of relying on a third-party CDN |
• Discussion about CDN caching limitations |
• Estimating storage needs in terabytes vs gigs |
• Visibility into 99th percentile tail latency |
• Law of diminishing returns in optimization efforts |
• Apple Watches consuming MP3 files causing slow requests |
• Suggesting static content be served from a CDN for faster access |
• Implementing Fastly as a CDN for serving cache pages and files |
• Troubleshooting issues with Fastly's performance and functionality |
• Exploring ways to optimize Fastly usage and reduce "misses" on MP3 files |
• Discussing the benefits of having more visibility into how Fastly works, including using Honeycomb for data analysis |
• Setting up a dev environment on M1 Macs, specifically with changelog.com and Docker |
• GitHub Codespaces discussed as an alternative to local development environments |
• Equinix Metal and other cloud providers mentioned as potential alternatives to Azure-backed infrastructure |
• GitPod and Tilde.dev mentioned as examples of alternative development platforms |
• Discussion of potential collaboration with GitHub on Codespaces development |
• Adam Stacoviak's preference for using Codespaces over setting up his own local dev environment |
• Gerhard Lazu's idea of exploring a more configurable version of Codespaces in the future |
• Planning for buffer time in scheduling |
• Managing last-minute changes to podcast episodes |
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