Daring Fireball

Desert Island Discs is a remarkably long-running BBC Radio interview program now hosted (or presented, if you will) by Lauren Laverne. The gimmick is that guests are asked to name eight songs, a book, and a “luxury item” they’d take with them if stranded on a desert island, and those picks — including playing the songs — are sprinkled throughout the interview. This week’s guest is Jony Ive, and it’s one of the best interviews with him I’ve ever encountered. Incredibly thoughtful and inspiring, and Laverne covers a lot of ground without ever seeming the least bit hurried.

A few highlights, from Ive:

I think that one of the struggles I have, though, is in some ways, I think ironically, I struggle with being present in the now because I spend so much of my life in my head in the future. The way I try to understand the future is I’m obsessed with the past. And so the bit that often gets missed out is right now.

I know that feeling.

Regarding his early years at Apple, before the reunification with NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs, Ive spoke about the company’s severe financial troubles skewing how it thought about products:

I think when you struggle, then a goal can become just commercial issues. I understand — I mean, if you’re losing lots of money, you’d like to stop losing lots of money. The problem there is it means you focus on money, and you’re normally losing money because the products aren’t right. And from ’92 to ’97, it was a very, very difficult season. One that I am so grateful for — but I still get the shivers sometimes.

The telling word Ive used in that passage is “right”. He could have said the problem was that Apple’s mid-’90s products weren’t “good”, but he didn’t. Judging them as good or bad isn’t the correct framework. It’s that they weren’t right. There’s an inherent subjectiveness to rightness. A je ne sais quoi. The original iMac that started Ive’s long and remarkably fruitful collaboration with Steve Jobs wasn’t a hit because it was good, so much as because it was so obviously right.

(The BBC’s podcast feed for Desert Island Discs seems to run about a month behind the website, alas. I nabbed the MP3 from the BBC’s web page (using Downie) and uploaded the file manually to Overcast. Apparently the episode is also now available in the the BBC’s own BBC Sounds app.)

Michael Liedtke, reporting for the AP:

Apple shareholders rebuffed an attempt to pressure the technology trendsetter into joining President Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.

The proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research — a self-described conservative think tank — urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it. In a regulatory filing submitted Tuesday evening, Apple disclosed that 97% of the ballots cast were votes against the measure.

President Trump, at 8am this morning, on his own very popular social network:

APPLE SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM. DEI WAS A HOAX THAT HAS BEEN VERY BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY. DEI IS GONE!!!

Needless to say, the National Center for Public Policy Research is a bunch of ding-dongs, and Trump has no idea, at all, what Apple’s actual policies and goals are for diversity — he just knows he wants them gone. (And I love the photo MacRumors’s Joe Rossignol chose for his report on this story.)

There does exist a formal world of DEI, right down to using that very acronym. Think of it as DEI™. Some universities seem overrun with it, despite results that strongly suggest it doesn’t work and some clearly objectionable dogmatic requirements. But there are obvious reasons any company (or university, or organization) ought to be concerned about diversity and inclusion, in the plain sense of those words. Not just ethical “the way things ought to be” reasons, but empirical studies have shown that diverse organizations are more successful.

It’s a spectrum. A lot of US universities are at the far left of that spectrum. The Trump administration and its proponents are, clearly, at the far right of that spectrum, where they’re seeking now to pressure companies into not even concerning themselves with “diversity” in the plainest sense of the word, and are scrubbing from government agencies words like “woman” and “disabled”. I’m being overly simplistic by presenting the left/right divide as unidimensional here. Trump, for example, has ushered in a very different “right” than that of, say, the Bush-Cheney era 20 years ago. But the DEI™ “left” is a very different left than the truly liberal free-speech left. Liberals object to DEI’s rigidity, dogma, and performative nature; Trump and his cohorts object to actual human diversity and inclusiveness.

Some big corporations, in recent years, veered pretty far to the extreme on “DEI initiatives”, and are using the current political moment to course correct back toward the (to me, sensible) center. But this course correction started long before Trump’s re-election. Here’s a CNBC story from December 2023 on Google and Meta scaling back formal DEI programs.

Apple, from my observations, has long charted its own consistent course on such matters, right down to calling their policies “Inclusion & Diversity” rather than the name-brand “DEI”. Apple didn’t lunge to the left at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, because they didn’t need to. And so they have no need to course correct now. Apple shareholders seemingly agree.

The advantage to having me on Rene’s show, rather than vice versa, is that he’ll push us through talking about a new iPhone model in 30 minutes. If I were hosting it’d be two hours. But the first hour would be about the whole James Bond film rights thing.

Special guest: Paul Kafasis. Special topics: Siri/Super Bowl nonsense, “Gulf of Mexico/America” nonsense, the iPhone 16e gets announced, and a veritable Bond villain buys the rights to the James Bond movie franchise.

Sponsored by:

• Listen Later: Turn articles into podcasts and listen on the go, with AI-powered narration.

Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Let’s keep it that way.