Apple’s innovations – David Pogue’s new book shares five Apple origin stories that sound like legend—but hinge on something practical: when ambition meets a technical wall, someone finds a workaround, tests obsessively, or admits when the story got scrambled. The result is a kind o
On paper, innovation is supposed to be clean: an idea, a prototype, a product launch. In David Pogue’s telling, it rarely feels like that. It feels more like deadlines, constraints, misunderstandings, and a stubborn refusal to let “impossible” become the end of the conversation.
Pogue—who is a seven-time Emmy Award winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning. a five-time TED speaker. host of 20 NOVA specials on PBS. and a New York Times bestselling author—lays out those lessons in his new book. Apple: The First 50 Years. in a “Book Bite” format. His through-line is simple: Apple’s greatest innovations came not just from technology. but from relentless creativity. unconventional thinking. and an obsessive drive to make products feel magical to ordinary people.
The stories begin with something no one can fake: a technical glitch.
In 1979. Steve Jobs and some of his lieutenants visited Xerox PARC—the Palo Alto Research Center—to see work on next-generation computer products. At PARC. Jobs and his team saw an early version of the graphic user interface: black lettering on a white screen with fonts and graphics. There was a mouse. There were menus listing the commands, so you didn’t have to memorize them. Overlapping windows also appeared in the demonstration. and when a front window moved aside. you could immediately see what was behind.
Jobs believed that future computing would look like that. He told his team, “We’ve got to reproduce that for our upcoming new computer called the Lisa.”
For Bill Atkinson, the star programmer, the challenge was recreating what he had seen from memory—especially overlapping windows. When Atkinson moved a front window aside, instead of revealing the background window, he got a blank white flicker. He couldn’t make it work fast enough and couldn’t find enough memory and power to immediately reveal what was behind.
After weeks of effort, he solved the problem with a technical hack. Shortly afterward, Atkinson ended up in a hot tub at a nudist camp in the California Redwoods. A man joined the hot tub and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m from Xerox PARC. You must be Atkinson, the guy who famously solved the overlapping windows problem.”.
Atkinson was confused. “What are you talking about? I saw that at your guys’ place. I was just trying to figure out how you guys had done it.” The man told him something that didn’t fit the legend: “No, we’ve never solved it. We still haven’t solved it. You solved it. You must have misremembered.”
According to Pogue, Atkinson had misremembered seeing that effect at Xerox PARC. They had never solved it.
When sharing the story, Atkinson offered a takeaway that lands like a challenge: “It just goes to show that if somebody tells you something’s impossible, you just haven’t thought about it enough.”
Pogue then pivots from hardware limits to the question Apple kept asking as it chased smaller and smaller designs.
During the development of the iPod, Steve Jobs insisted it be as small as possible. One day, the team brought in the latest prototype and said, “Steve, this is it. Doesn’t get any smaller than this. We need a screen. We need that little hard drive. We need a circuit board and a battery. It can’t get any smaller.”.
Jobs reportedly got up, took the prototype, dropped it into an office fish tank, and pointed to the air bubbles coming up from the dropped iPod. He then said, “See those air bubbles? That means there’s still room in there. Get rid of it.”
But Pogue stops the story before it turns into a certainty. “Such a great story never happened,” he writes. The fish tank detail doesn’t hold up under scrutiny: the tale has been around for years. but “not a single person says that it happened. remembers hearing about it. or ever saw it.” Pogue also notes that there weren’t even fish tanks there. “Not all the stories are true.”.
That willingness to separate myth from method becomes its own kind of credibility test. Apple didn’t only build products; it also built—again and again—proof that the product would behave the way people expected.
That obsession shows up in Face ID, where Apple wanted unlocking to work “no matter what your face looked like—no matter what the facial hair, makeup, or glasses.” The company launched “the most insane series of testing events.”
Pogue describes Makeup Mondays in the Apple cafeteria. where people were invited to come with weird makeup. weird hair. with glasses. and with wigs to see if they could fool the prototype. The testing then expanded: the company took the system to a twins conference to test whether an identical twin could unlock the phone. It also took the prototype to Harley-Davidson rallies, banking on the likelihood of creative facial hair.
Apple even sought permission to take the technology out of the country to sub-Saharan African tribes, where facial structures are different from European facial structures.
Masks weren’t treated as a side case, either. Apple hired a Hollywood special-effects company to create a series of hyperrealistic human heads—“whiskers and stubble and the little lines in your eyes.” Pogue says they made a bunch of these masks to see if the phone would be fooled. and that it wasn’t fooled by the masks.
Still, the effort left a human sting. Pogue tells a story about “the poor guy in the mail room” who unpacked the box from Hollywood and saw “these 12 dead faces staring back at him with open eyes.”
If Face ID testing shows Apple’s method, Pogue’s fourth story shows its performance—the moment a product idea becomes a public event.
For the July 1999 Macworld Expo keynote. Pogue describes Jobs as “the most unbelievable performer and showman” and emphasizes how Jobs engineered stunts that stuck with audiences. On stage, Jobs walked out in his black turtleneck and jeans. He told the crowd: “Thanks for coming. This is going to be a great Macworld. We’ve got some great new products. some really great new products. some insanely great new products. some really. totally. wildly. insanely great new products.”.
Pogue recalls the audience shifting in real time, beginning to realize the person on stage was an imposter. It was Noah Wyle. who had just played Steve Jobs in a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley. and he looked like him. When the audience recognized the prank, the moment turned into laughter and confusion.
Then “Jobs came barging on” and said, “That’s not me at all! You’re blowing it. Look, you’re supposed to come over here, open a water, get the slide clicker, then you can put your hands together.”
Pogue notes that the same keynote unveiled the first iBook. It was the laptop version of the iMac, available in blue or orange. People also called it the toilet seat iBook because it looked like a closed toilet seat.
He adds that Apple introduced Wi-Fi to the world at this same keynote. Jobs ended discussions by saying, “Now there’s one more thing,” then rolling out the best thing of all. In this case, he had already unveiled the iBook and said, “Now there is one more thing.”
On stage. Jobs opened the device on a podium and started surfing the web. saying. “Let me show you how I can surf the web on this iBook.” Pogue recounts that he walked across the stage—“Oh. there’s CNN. you can see. And maybe I’ll go to Disney here. I can come over here. Let me show these guys how it works. Come on over here, you want to sit behind me there?. No wires.”.
The demo then moved from spectacle to proof: Jobs took a magician’s hoop and passed it over the iBook “just to prove that there were no wires.”
Pogue closes with a story that doesn’t sound like a headline, but reads like the real engine behind product momentum: when people need tools now, partnerships get personal.
In 2007, when the iPhone came out, Pogue says he wanted to write a book called iPhone: The Missing Manual. He needed screenshots to illustrate the user manual, but “the first iPhone had no way to take screenshots.”
He called Apple PR and asked, “How do you guys make screenshots?” Apple told him it had developed a software tool internally, but it didn’t have a nice user interface, and was “just for our own use.” Pogue begged for permission.
At first. Apple offered a compromise: he could “fly out here and use it under supervision.” Steve Jobs killed that idea. Eventually, the agreement became precise and bureaucratic in a way that feels practical. Pogue would provide a list of the screenshots he wanted for the book. describing exactly each one. including what phone number it would display and what data would be on the screen. Apple would then set aside a graphic designer to create these screenshots using their tool.
Pogue says the work fell to “some poor guy” who “spent the entire summer taking 400 screenshots” for his book. The screenshots were printed in full color and were “absolutely gorgeous,” as he puts it.
Later, Pogue says he found out who the designer was and sent him a nice gift. The point, Pogue says, wasn’t just the finished pages—it was what happened when Apple released new iPhone versions and his book needed updated editions.
He called his Apple PR contact and asked if Apple would have “a guy spend his summer making screenshots for me again.” This time, the answer was no: “No, we’re never doing that again.”
But Apple had developed a workaround. They had created something called the Pogue feature. Apple would set up a feature involving pressing two buttons that lets anyone take a screenshot “however they want and whenever they want.” Pogue ends the story with a personal moment: “To this day. every time I take a screenshot. I smile knowing that internally it was called the Pogue feature.”.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
The Next Big Idea app also hosts Book Bites read by Pogue himself, and the full library of those Book Bites is presented as something readers can explore in the app.
Apple innovation David Pogue Apple: The First 50 Years Steve Jobs Bill Atkinson Xerox PARC Lisa iPod development Face ID testing Hollywood masks Macworld Expo 1999 iBook Wi‑Fi demo iPhone screenshots Pogue feature