Apple Chat: A Cult of Mac podcast with Leander Kahney

Curious what it was like to work at Apple during its Golden Age of design? What exactly did the creative process look like? On this episode of the Apple Chat podcast, I sit down with Ken Kocienda, a programmer who spent 15 years at Apple during the Steve Jobs era, working on the first versions of the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. His new book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, chronicles his experiences working at the company and offers an inside look at the creative process that made the team successful.

“The job of a designer is to be a psychologist…” Industrial design is something that a lot of manufacturers used to outsource. Companies would design a product and then contract with a firm of outside design consultants to slap a good-looking skin on it, and hope for the best. But in the last decade or so, lots of companies have gotten design religion. Design has been brought in-house, where it can shape products from the very get-go. There’s an obvious source for this idea — Apple. This week we talk to Oliver Seil, the Senior Design Director of Belkin International’s Innovation Design Group. Belkin is an accessory company based in Los Angeles that has grown into one of the biggest suppliers of mobile accessories. It’s has a big portfolio of products, from iPhone and iPad cases to battery packs, surge protectors, networking gear and its line of WeMo home automation products. We talk to Seil about Belkin’s products and design process; the surprising complexity of USB cables - and why they cost so much; and of course, why Apple has had such an enormous influence on design and manufacturing.

Steve Jobs enjoys a mythic reputation as a technology and business genius. After his death, it often seems like he dreamed up products like the iPhone and iPad from whole cloth, single handed. But a new book by the former CFO of Pixar, Lawrence Levy paints a very different picture of Jobs at work. In Levy’s book, To Pixar and Beyond, out this week, Jobs is portrayed as very human and vulnerable. He doesn’t have all the answers, and he makes tons of mistakes. He doesn’t scream and yell. He’s not the tyrant we expect him to be. It’s one of the first books I’ve read that realistically details how Jobs worked, and it’s surprisingly relatable. Plus, there’s a whole chapter devoted to a whiteboard meeting.

iPhone teardowns are a cultural phenomenon. This week we talk to Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, about the latest iPhone 7 teardown, which attracted a massive global audience, and the secrets of Apple's new iPhone.

Autonomous vehicles are going to have a giant impact on society -- even bigger than the internet, says robot car consultant Paul Godsmark. In this fascinating interview, Godsmark talks about the enormous changes that are coming up fast with self-driving vehicles, including the rumored Apple car. Buckle up! Everything is about to change dramatically -- from the way we travel to the way we work, and even how we'll make money from our robot cars.

Ken Segall is a former Apple adman who worked closely with Steve Jobs for more than a dozen years. Segall is the guy who put the “i” in iMac and worked on the famous “Think Different” campaign. The big lesson he learned from Steve Jobs was keeping things simple. But how exactly do you keep things simple? Segall went out and found 40 business folks who keep things straightforward. His book based on those interviews is called Think Simple. We talk to Segall about some of those lessons, how Steve Jobs kept things uncomplicated and about how Apple is doing these days without him.