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Really Enjoying Designed In California Podcast

I’ve been listening to the Designed in California - podcast, which is produced by Jason Snell of Six Colors and Myke Hurley of Relay.fm. Designed in California started as a Kickstarter campaign and it completely blew through its goals in the first 24 hours and in a few days, the stretch goals went down. The version with ads is found at: Designed in California - Relay. The Kickstarter still has membership availability to get the ad-free version: Designed in California: An Apple history podcast - Kickstarter, which also drops all episodes as they are completed and not on the weekly release schedule.

What Drew Me to an Apple History Podcast

Apple and its history have long fascinated me as I grew up around it as it happened. From middle school until years after college I was in Northern California and Apple and Steve Jobs were commonly on local news and the subject or Northern California industry insight shows. I had friends in college whose older siblings worked for Apple in its very early days. After college my group of friends and extended friends included a few people who worked at Apple as well (when they would hire students after their sophomore year of college, did well, and had the foundations down, and Apple planned to teach them the rest in their vision and understandings). Over the years I bumped into Apple a fair amount with their products (used them in work environments and later bought my own), I held a lot of jobs where I was a non-programming (or light programming) computer related role, before getting deeper into development and product management. I had a lot of interaction with many computer, application, and systems companies as clients in various roles and many of them were similar and had the same problems and solutions (which didn’t really solve the problems but sometimes took the rough edges off them). But, watching and interacting with Apple was different. Their approaches and understanding of problems and needs were different and what they offered was different. Friends and relatives of friends who worked for Apple, whom I talked with quite a bit, all had very different mindsets from the 1980s onward.

These seen and perceived differences were a deep interest of to me. In the mid–90s onward I started reading many books about Apple to help me get a handle on this “difference”. This also included reading and watching interviews with Steve Jobs.

What Designed in California Provides

With my interest in Apple and many different contexts and a lot of reading about Apple I’m always looking for more pieces to connect the dots. Boy howdy, does the podcast Designed in California do just that. The podcast looks at the history of Apple going all the way back. Jason Snell has been a professional tech journalist (particularly Apple-focussed) since 1994. He has a lot of close personal history with Apple. Jason is the writer of the show and is interviewed by co-host Myke. They also have guests on the show to give other personal perspectives of the era and topic in focus for that episode. Jason is a huge fan of the podcast The Rest is History and the influences are noticeable and a very good thing.

I’d highly recommend the podcast to anybody with an interest in Apple and their inner workings and products, but also has an appreciation for well-crafted historical podcasts.