The Mac, with Apple's Tom Boger

Tom Boger is Sr. Director of Mac Product Marketing at Apple. He's worked on projects including the original iMac. Earlier this week, he took to the Apple keynote stage to introduce the new Mac mini. The following day he sat down with me to talk about that new Mac mini as well as the new MacBook Air and Apple's complete current line-up of Macs: What the design goals are, how to choose the right Mac for you, and how Apple sees the Mac now and into the future.

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Transcript

Rene: What was your first Mac? How did you start?

Tom: My first Mac. That's an interesting story, actually. It was when I was back in high school. Macs were a very, very new thing back then, as you remember. Buying a Mac, financially, for my family was a big deal.

My mom basically said I had to earn it. I was just so enamored with the Mac that I had to have one. Basically, what I did is I proposed that I would paint every room in our house.

Rene: Wow.

Tom: The baseboards, the walls, the ceilings. I would do it over the summer. If I accomplished that, she would buy me a new Mac. I dedicated a whole summer and painted every room in the house by myself. That's how much I loved the Mac back then. I still love it today. That's how I got my first Mac.

Rene: Which one was it?

Tom: It was the Mac 512? Yeah.

Rene: Nice.

Tom: The Mac 512.

Rene: It was before Bondi Blue. [laughs]

Tom: It was way before Bondi Blue. Way before Bondi Blue. I've been working in some capacity or the other within Apple ever since. I was even a student rep in college for Apple.

A lot of people might not realize this. We have people in colleges across the country that are student reps that work with Apple. I was a student rep in college. Then, my first job out of college was with Apple. I've been with Apple ever since.

Rene: Which have been some of the most memorable Macs for you over the years?

Tom: Lots of memorable Macs. Obviously, the first G5 Mac Pro was a huge memorable Mac. Lots of Macs in there, but the most memorable was the original iMac. I was a Product Manager at the time.

I think people can remember the circumstances around that period of time. Steve had recently come back to Apple. It was one of the most amazing, gratifying, and to be completely honest, exhausting experiences of my life.

It was unbelievable to have gone through that experience. Going from a blank sheet of paper, within about a year, to launching that product to the world was just an amazing experience. That, of all the things that I've worked on at Apple, has to be probably the most prominent thing that stands out.

Rene: I think what's so memorable about it for me, especially when you look back over the Macs that have come since is that it really established, or maybe even re-established this pattern of not giving people exactly what they expected, but giving them something that they realize they really wanted.

Tom: There's that old saying back in the day. If you would have asked people what they wanted back before the automobile, they would have said, "I want a faster horse."

One of the things that we have to do at Apple is, obviously, listen to customers, understand what their needs are, understand what they're trying to do, and make our products as great as we can make them, but also look around the corners.

We have the opportunity to see new technologies that might be nascent at the time but are emerging, something that we can incorporate into our products.

We want to listen to customer feedback very intently and try to address those concerns, but also bring in new technologies and new features and things that might be unexpected, that customers, once we find them, are absolutely delighted.

Rene: One of my favorite things about the way that you work is...In tech support, oftentimes, people tell you the solutions they want instead of the problems they have. That's problematic because you can [laughs] maybe think of a way better solution for them.

It feels the same way with the Mac. If somebody said, "I want more battery life," they might just tell you, "Please double the battery size." There's all sorts of other things that you have done over the years, like make them more efficient.

It seems like that's been one of the recurring themes, is that you've found ways to solve problems, maybe not the exact way your customers have always vocalized they wanted them, but in a way that really satisfies that need.

Tom: Any time you're working on the definition of a product, whether it might be an existing product or a new product, you're always searching for that magical combination of features that is just really going to delight your customers and address the needs that they have, but also address needs that they might not even realize they have already.

That's one of the things that we pride ourselves, at Apple, in trying to do. At the end of the day, it's really not that hard to understand what we're trying to do. We're just trying to make the best products we possibly can. That's our ultimate goal every time we approach any product, no matter what product it is.

We put the same amount of care and energy and meticulous attention to details in everything we do. As long as we just embrace that in every product that we have, because at Apple, the most important thing for us is the product, then our customers are delighted by that. It's really that simple.

Rene: I think one of the things, I know you've said. You've said it publicly several times, but I think it takes a while to sink in, is that there are also times where when you don't think you can make a product in a certain category or you don't think you can make exactly what you want, that you're willing to wait, to be patient, to not do a million different widgets for a million different things.

Tom: Yeah. I can't remember exactly how many years ago, but we opened up one of our events where we talked about a thousand no's. That's one of the things that we try to adhere to in the company, is to have that discipline to say, "You know what? We could do this. We could do X. We could do Y. We could do Z. But we can't do it all."

One of our differences in approaches is other companies might have the approach of, well, let's come up with a long laundry list of features. We're just going to check every box on each one of those features. We're not going to care about how well those features are implemented. We just want to check every box.

That's not what Apple does. Apple looks at a long list of features, because every time you do a product, you can't do them all. What we do is we say, what are the top most important features? What those things that we really want to just hit a home run with?

We focus on those features. It does mean there are some other features that we're either going to get to later, or maybe not at all in this product. We focus on those top features, and we implement them really well.

That's one of the things that even though that feature might be in other products, Apple did it in the highest quality way, or the most intuitive way, or the way that customers aren't even going to have to think about.

It's not a feature list comparison. It's all about the experience. Getting back into what I was saying earlier about making the best products, it's about the customer experience.

Tim said it in our keynote yesterday. All of the numbers are nice, and milestones are nice. But at the end of the day, it's all about customer satisfaction, the experience they're having with our products.

Going back to my Mac 30 years ago, it hooked me because of the experience that I had. What better way to use a Mac everyday than to work at Apple, right? I've been using the Mac ever since. I love it, and that experience is something that is really, really important to us.

Again, yesterday in the keynote, we talked about how one of the things that people love about the Mac is macOS. We're very careful to hone that experience, to improve it without disturbing what people love about it. So far, it's proven to be a winning strategy, because people really love the Mac, and one of the reasons they do is the macOS.

Rene: One of the things, going back to that "a thousand no's for every yes" is that you have to actually go through every one of those no's to make a decision on them. I think that's something that gets lost.

It's not that you didn't think about it. It's not that you've never considered it. It was a very purposeful process that lead you to the things that you could say yes to.

I like to think about it that...this makes sense to me. You can tell me if I'm really wrong. At a certain point, Apple decided to bring experience to a spec fight. It could be megapixels in cameras. It could be any. You pick the spec.

It was a conscious decision to think about holistically the entire product and experience and the value that it was delivering, and not just those check boxes that you said that might be incoherent or even nonsensical at time.

Tom: Yeah. You could, as you say, just try to compete on specs, but we're not about that at all. We're about how you experience everything. Everything that you see, touch, and feel, that's what we're about.

We're about making the best quality displays that we can possibly make, the best quality trackpads and keyboards, and audio experience.

As you know, as a Mac user, that the experience of the Mac is way more than what specs are on a website. It's about how you experience it. It's about how that feature in macOS works, what your images look like on that display, what your movies sound like that you're playing, the music that you're playing.

How well does your Mac work with your iPhone? How well does it work with your iPad? It's the total user experience, and that's what's most important to us.

Specs, to some extent, we want to make sure that our products perform well and our products are very competitive from a variety of aspects. But it's so much more than just dry specs on some kind of technical list of specs on the product.

Rene: I want to get into this whole Year of Mac. It's been fascinating for me. But to that point, I found myself in that trap, too. I'll look at it and say, "Is this really enough RAM for me?" Then I'll realize that the SSDs are so fast now, I can't even tell when they're swapping anymore.

My conception of what RAM means in a workflow has changed. Or, is this processor the best one? Should I get this processor? But then you have a T chip that's doing a bunch of stuff that the processor doesn't have to do anymore. Then, I'm rendering video faster than I thought that chip was capable of.

The whole product is working, not just any one discreet specification of it.

Tom: Yeah, in that regard, it has been a big year for the Mac. If you go back to about a year ago, we came out with the iMac Pro, and then we updated the MacBook Pro in July. Now, we have updated the MacBook Air and MacBook Mini.

One aspect of why these updates are so significant is the Apple T2 security chip. That's custom Mac silicone. It's our second generation actually that we've brought to the Mac. We've brought to the iMac Pro, the MacBook Pro, now the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air.

It's adding all kinds of functionality that doesn't necessarily show up on a spec sheet, but it's so important to the experience of the product. The security that it brings is tremendous.

Obviously, it enables Touch ID on the products that have Touch ID. But also automatically encrypts all of your data on the fly written to the SSD. And so, it makes your Mac that has a T2 chip the most secure Mac and notebook or PC ever.

It also makes sure that the software that your Mac is booting hasn't been tampered with. The most secure boot process on a computer.

The great sound...I encourage people to check out the new audio system on the new MacBook Air. It sounds incredible. It has this wide sound stage with great separation. That's enabled by the T2 security chip.

It also manages thermals and battery life and all kinds of things. It has an always on processor for bringing Hey Siri to the MacBook Air for the first time.

What the T2 chip, the reason I'm bringing it up, is what it presents to your point. This past year, more and more innovation coming to the Mac that doesn't necessarily show up in that spec sheet that you were talking about earlier.

But these are real important things that make the Mac experience a better experience that you can't measure by a spec sheet. It's using the product, experiencing the product, and just delighting in it's use every day.

Rene: There are six products in the Mac line now? Or am I miscounting?

Tom: You have...

Rene: Let's do it.

Tom: Let's just go through our product line. We'll start with the desktops. We have Mac Mini. We have iMac. We have iMac Pro, and we have Mac Pro. Then we have, from a notebook standpoint, we have MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.

The obviously huge news from us is the new MacBook Air. It's a completely reengineered, redesigned system from the ground up. The goal here was to take what people love about the MacBook Air, it's distinct design, tremendous portability, it's awesome battery life, and just make that better in every way.

Starting with the design of the MacBook Air, we made it thinner. We made the footprint significantly smaller. When you add it all up, it's 17 percent less volume. We made a product that people love for it's portability even more portable.

Then when you bring the biggest feature that customers wanted in a new Air, which is a Retina display, it just makes the experience so much better on the Air. We have this brilliant Retina display on the Air that has 40 percent more color to it. It has a wider color gamut. It just makes a much better experience from a display standpoint.

Then we have Touch ID, which has been really incredibly well received on the MacBook Pro. More and more, Touch ID is just becoming an integral part of everybody's daily lives, from unlocking a notebook to paying things via Apple Pay. It's just great.

Then, we have the keyboard with the keys that are more stable. Individually backlit keys for really great illumination of the keys that people love.

Then paired with that, a Force Touch trackpad, which people just love the way you can click on it anywhere. You can force click on a word to get more information. It's really quiet compared to the trackpad on the previous Air.

Then as I mentioned earlier, we have a completely different acoustic system, where it's twice as much base, 25 percent louder.

Everything you see, feel, hear, and touch on this MacBook Air is updated, new, newly designed to just give you a much better experience than what you've had before.

Rene: And you're winning the war on bezels.

[laughter]

Tom: When you look at the line, you brought up the different product lines we have. In the notebook space, we have the MacBook Air, the MacBook, and the MacBook Pro.

Rene: Steve Jobs famously made that quadrant with portable and desktop and professional and consumer. Now the Mac market is bigger. You have a far wider range of customers, and you have a far bigger product portfolio.

Do you still think in terms of who this Mac is for? Like for example, 12-inch MacBook is for this person, and the MacBook Air for this type of customer, and the MacBook Pro...

Tom: I'm glad you brought up that metaphor that Steve used many, many years ago, the grid, where you have pro and consumer products, both notebooks and desktops. We still use that grid today when we think about our products.

We still want to add products where it makes sense, but also be careful that we're adding the right products in the right place, and still make our products and look at that grid and adhere that same general philosophy that Steve came up with many, many years ago, we still apply to our product line today.

If your priority is having the best performance possible, or maybe a larger more professional quality display, then the MacBook Pro is the perfect product for you in terms of what the features and attributes of that product are.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the priority for you is to have the thinnest and lightest MacBook design that we offer, then the MacBook is the perfect choice for that, for those people who just want something to throw in their bag and be on the go.

Then in between those two spectrums is the MacBook Air. It's just this great combination of portability, screen size, battery life, performance, and features that we added yesterday that for many, many users is the perfect notebook for what their use cases are.

I like to, again, describe it as that perfect notebook that's something you take with you everywhere you go for everything you do. I think it's really easy now, when you look at our Mac notebook product line, to decide which product line is right for your needs.

Rene: The thing I think the Internet is not always good at is is understanding there's multiple perspectives out there and multiple use cases and many different kinds of customers.

Back in the day, there were so few Apple products, it felt like every one was for you. Now, you have a MacBook that is maybe for someone who travels a lot. Maybe you have a MacBook for someone who produces music videos professionally all day every day.

I think it's OK now to have a MacBook that's better for you, and to let other people sort of find their own niche.

Tom: We announced in the keynote yesterday that we passed a major milestone, and that's 100 million active Macs in the install base. That's huge.

We have 100 million customers out there that we make products for, and yet, you could basically take a reasonably sized table and put all those products, for 100 million people, right on that table.

We're very careful to curate our products and make sure that each one serves a very specific purpose.

Speaking of that, I should also definitely touch on the Mac Mini. Yesterday was a big day for the Mac Mini. Talk about a product that serves some specific purposes, the Mac Mini is just, I think...you've heard from people already what a huge change we brought to the Mac Mini.

It's interesting. The Mac Mini, going back to when it was introduced, was that computer that was about switchers, and bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. Primarily a desktop system.

Then over time, it evolved, in all these incredibly creative ways that our customers were using it.

It's still used by a lot of people as a desktop. They still bring their own display, keyboard, and mouse, and they create a desktop system. That's great. What we did to it yesterday, it makes it a far better desktop.

But it's also used in so many different, creative ways and different disciplines. It's huge in the audio industry, where it's this great component that all kinds of independent bands or the biggest name groups that you've heard of use the Mac Mini as a component in sound rigs running main stage or other applications.

When you see a guy up there playing a keyboard, that keyboard is sending MIDI controls to that Mac Mini, and that Mac Mini is the actual instrument. That's what you're hearing.

It's amazing that it's doing that. It's testing sound in stadiums and orchestral performances. It's huge in the audio space.

It's also in the video space, where typical workflow for video is to cut your video that you're working on, and then transcode it into a variety of formats. Then people are using Minis, sometimes one, sometimes stacks of them, to split out the transcoding job so that a stack of Mac Minis can transcode those, it does it much faster.

Then a huge, huge segment of our customers is developers that use the Mac Mini. As we talked about in the keynote, you can be anywhere in the world, and you could have a Mac Mini at your office desk. It could be on a shelf where you live, or it could be hosted by another company.

You can send it code and have it compile, and even run tests on other devices, and send it to you where you are.

Then there are large corporations that are buying thousands of Mac Minis and creating their own huge build farms. Then also hosting services like Mac Stadium that also will do it for you, if you don't want to set up the infrastructure.

What we did with Mac Mini is if you just went through, and again, listening to customers about their needs. One of things, if you go through the list, the things that were number one of the list were more powerful processors.

They were basically asking, "Hey, can you bring it to four core?"

Rene: Never enough.

Tom: We said, "Hey, not only can we bring it to four core, we're going to bring it to six core. Can you double the memory? Not only are we going to bring it to 32, we're going to take it to 64. We're going to make it all flash storage. We're even going to give you 10 gigabit Ethernet option. We're going to have a completely new thermal system."

So that Mac Mini, which was already loved for how versatile it is, is now even more versatile. And so, we can't wait to see if people were using it creative ways before, what are they going to do with it now? Because, I think it's going to pretty amazing.

Rene: Famously, many, many years ago when the iPhone came out, Steve Jobs...I think he said it. I forget how it came out.

But they took engineers off Snow Leopard so they could get iOS out on time. I think we realized that no matter how big or how rich a company was, you still can't do everything. You can do everything, you just can't do it all at the same time.

It seems like at least this year, you've but so much effort into pushing out so many Macs. Is that just a question of an act of will? You obviously didn't do everything again this year. Is this a way you go through picking and choosing which battles to fight at which times?

Tom: I wouldn't put it that way. I think one of the observations that could be made is that when we do a particular Mac, a lot of times, we're pioneering new technologies.

About three years, with the MacBook, we pioneered a lot of new technologies in that MacBook, the Force Track trackpad, the new keyboard. We brought USB-C to the Mac for the first time. Then, we also pioneered technologies in the MacBook Pro, like bringing Touch ID to the Mac for the first time.

When we make one product, we learn from and we pioneer technologies that we can use for the next product. T2 chip is another great example, where we bring it to one Mac, and then when we're working on another Mac, we can use those technologies in those products.

We also can benefit from products across the company. I think what you're seeing, the rapid evolution of the Mac over this last year, is pioneering a technology in one product and then bringing to the next, and putting that right combination of features together to just make a great product for what that product is designed for.

Rene: To that point, you see that Apple gets into Home Pod, but then you realize that they're doing pretty cool things with the iPhone earpiece, and they're also doing pretty good things with the Mac speakers and the iPad speakers. It's a synergistic skill that starts to benefit all of your products.

Tom: That's a great example. Our acoustic design team, they work on all of our products. These guys are incredible, just the advancements in acoustics that they're making in all of our products you also all benefit from.

If they're working on something like a Home Pod, which is acoustically very different challenge than, let's say, something like an iPhone, all that expertise and all that learning and all that engineering talent, we get to apply on all of our products.

That's one of the really great things about Apple and having this portfolio of products that we do. Our display team, they apply their expertise across our products. The acoustic engineering team, you name it.

If you go through the various things, they can apply that. That's, I think, one of the things that makes the Mac experience so great, is one, each product is inspiring the next.

Rene: You get technologies like Touch ID that just work their way across the line.

Tom: Exactly.

Rene: Technologies like Retina and E3.

Tom: Exactly. Then the great thing is the software technologies, things like iCloud, things like Continuity. Things that make your experience from one Apple product to the next so seamless.

Again, that's one of those things that's not on that spec list. Going back to, we don't try to do all the features, we try to pick the most important features and just really nail them. That's a huge advantage we have.

We've been talking about it for years. It's that saying that we have, where we design and build the whole widget, all the way from the lowest layers of the hardware, all the way up through the customer experience and through the software stack. That's a tremendous advantage that we have that I think expresses itself in our products.

Rene: I was trying to help a relative get some photos, and they didn't have any of the stuff. I'm so used to AirDrop and Continuity Clipboard and all those things, that when I did not have them, I floundered.

Tom: AirDrop is a great example. It's the greatest thing. It's a simple thing. It's an intuitive thing. It's the greatest thing to just be able to share, whether it's a file or a photo or whatever, just using AirDrop.

That's one of the things we strive for, is that interoperability between our products and that continuity. When you're using, whether it's an iPhone or an iPad or a Mac or a watch or all four, they just all work together.

Rene: The watch unlocks the MacBook, and it's just...

Tom: There you go, there you go.

Rene: Switching gears slightly, one of the things I really liked about the Mac Mini, the RAM. You can take that to an Apple Store or a certified Apple service center, and they can swap that out for you.

How do you determine when it's good to make something that's user accessible or expert accessible? For example, the storage, which you want to have connected to that T2 chip, there's a security layer there. How do you balance hobbyist interests with security and other concerns?

Tom: With the Mac Mini, the buyer for the Mac Mini is someone is more technically savvy, is more likely to want to upgrade their memory. It's typically a system that gets put in one place, and it just runs for a long, long time.

Mac Mini customers marvel at the reliability of their Mac Mini. They use it for years and years and years. They want at some point, typically along that lifespan, to upgrade the memory. It just made a lot of sense to offer the memory on SO-DIMMs.

Whereas other products like our notebooks especially where the products are on the go and they're in a backpack or whatever, where we have the memory soldered to the board. Obviously, you're trying to make the product really thin and light, and soldering it on the board saves space.

It's basically the application of that Mac, what it's going to be used for. We make those decisions on a per product basis.

Rene: I just realized I haven't had a computer fail to start because of a loose DIMM in a laptop in many years.

Tom: There you go, there you go.

One of the things that people don't realize is that we put all of our components and everything that we use in our products through tremendous reliability testing. We are just doing tremendous amount of testing on drivers and various components.

We want the highest quality product that we can. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about our goal is to ship the best product. We test our products in ways that no one else does.

We put it through reliability testing. We calibrate the displays individually on the factory line. We just do so many things that are behind the scenes that are transparent to customers to make the highest quality product that we can.

Having memory soldered on the board that we've tested and tested over and over is something that makes our notebooks tremendously reliable, too, on the road.

Rene: I want to go back to the spec thing for just a second, because it made me realize something, that there seems to...it's not a shift in focus, but it seems it's more apparent to me that you're focusing on efficiency not quantity.

I know sometimes people are like, "Why don't they throw a Xeon on to that 12-inch MacBook?" Or, "Why don't they put 19 gigaflops of this into it?" But you seem to make your choices based on the maximum amount of performance you can get given the kind of device you're going to make.

Tom: Yeah. We definitely try to optimize for efficiency in everything we do. We pick the appropriate performance per watt for when we're talking about processors for actual product that we're making a decision for. That's obviously something that's important from a CPU standpoint.

But efficiency is not just a processor thing. The display that we debuted in the MacBook, we talked about how we made that way more energy efficient. You can make things efficient in the display. You can make advances in battery chemistry to make batteries last longer.

Rene: You can terrace them.

Tom: You can terrace them. Again, it's all about being the highest quality product we can make. A lot of times, that comes down to the most efficient product you can make. It's also, as you know, environmental efficiency is really important to us.

Rene: You had a huge announcement this week about the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini.

Tom: Absolutely. One of the big announcements about the new MacBook Air, and it also applies to the Mac Mini, is that they're made from 100 percent recycled aluminum.

Rene: Can you just explains what that means to somebody? Like if they're just hearing the term, is that aluminum that you've taken from other products?

Tom: Yeah. Let's get into more of the details about that.

Basically, take the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro as an example. There are unibody enclosures. That means we start with a single block of aluminum, and we mill out the spaces that we need for the circuitry and the battery and the trackpad, etc.

That creates a tremendously sturdy, stiff enclosure that people love about our notebooks. But it also creates excess material. That's really highly valuable material, because it's really good aluminum, because the specs for our aluminum are very high, in terms of strength, durability, cosmetic beauty, etc.

Up until now, what we've done with that aluminum is other companies would take that off our hands and they would recycle it into their products. Aluminum windows are a perfect example, where they don't have the cosmetic requirements that we might have or the strength requirements, etc.

But our dream has been for many, many years, a long time, to be able to have a closed loop, where we keep the excess material, and we reuse it into the next product, or other Apple products.

The challenge has been, as you go through the manufacturing process, there can be cosmetic defects that occur if you just take that material and just recycle it. We've been working on this a while, and what we have done is we have metallurgists that work at Apple, who work on our alloys.

Our metallurgists have come up with a custom Apple designed aluminum alloy that allows us to take that excess material and reuse it in our enclosures, and hit all of the really stringent cosmetic requirements that we have, strength requirements, durability requirements for 6000 series aluminum that we have, such that it's basically the exact same aluminum of what we ship in all of our products.

Rene: It looks indistinguishable. It looks like the classic Apple bead blasted aluminum finish that we're familiar with.

Tom: Absolutely. And the new MacBook Air is in three colors people are really excited about. Even if it's in different colors, we can use that. We can recycle that. And we can recycle it over again and over again.

That's a huge breakthrough for us. It's something that we've been working on for a while. It call came together in the MacBook Air. We also have made the Mac Mini enclosure out of it.

I don't know if you caught this, but in the keynote we also mentioned that the excess material from the iPad Pro we're also recycling into this.

One of the big benefits of this is that if you look at the process of making aluminum from material right out of the ground, the ore that you take out of the ground, it's the smelting process. It requires a lot of energy.

When you recycle aluminum, you don't have to smelt it. What it's done effectively is reduce the carbon footprint of this MacBook Air and the Mac Mini by nearly 50 percent. If we measure all of our Macs, based on their carbon footprint, this new MacBook Air has the lowest carbon footprint of all of them. And therefore, as we said in the keynote, it's our greenest Mac ever.

Rene: Final question. I know you hate talking about the future. You can't talk about the future. But where do you see the future of the Mac?

Tom: We are tremendously, tremendously optimistic about the future of the Mac. We just see the Mac having an incredible future as far as the eye can see. We're investing more in the Mac than we ever have had invested in the Mac.

It is incredibly important to Apple. We just see tremendous opportunity for the Mac, tremendous places we can take it. I'm more excited about the future of the Mac than I've ever been. In the 30 years that I've been associated with the Mac in the various capacities I have been with Apple, I'm more excited about the future of the Mac than I've ever been.

Rene: After that keynote yesterday, so am I.

Tom: Awesome, awesome.

Rene: Thank you so much for your time.

Tom: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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Rene Ritchie
Contributor

Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.