Apple Chat: A Cult of Mac podcast with Leander Kahney

“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.

Sue Williams is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. Her new film, Death by Design, takes a sobering look at the electronics industry and it’s toxic environmental legacy — both here in the US and in China. The film starts in Silicon Valley, which has a horrible record of environmental pollution. The industry appears to be nice and clean, but has a long and toxic history of environmental damage. Silicon Valley is home to the most Superfund cleanup sites in the country. And now that the industry has offshored most of its manufacturing overseas, the environmental problems have been exported right along with it. Currently touring film festivals around the world, Death by Design is a sobering, behind the scenes look at the cost of the devices we so consume in some measure of ignorance.

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.

This week we talk to Suki Dunham, cofounder of OhMiBod, a company that makes a line of iPhone and iPad controlled female pleasure products. Suki used to work at Apple, where she learned a lot about product design, packaging and marketing, which she applies to her business selling high-tech vibrators.

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.

These developers have been looking under Siri's hood to discover what iOS 10 and macOS Sierra will bring to users of Apple products. In this episode of Kahney's Korner, they tell us what they found.

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.

We talk about leaked iPhone 7 CAD files with Tim Hickman, a veteran accessories maker. The files are circulating among iPhone accessory makers ahead of Apple's big launch in the fall.

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.