Episode Details

Apple turns fifty today. To mark the occasion, Tim Cook published a beautiful letter. It thanked the millions of people who used their technology to “work, learn, dream, and discover.” It was generous, warm, and — I think — genuinely meant. Reading it, I felt seen. Because I am one of those people. Before you go any further, go read it — it is a gift, and you deserve to receive it before I ask you to think about who didn’t get one: Apple: 50 Years of Thinking Different

My Apple story starts in 1985, at the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh. I was a PhD student in Industrial Engineering, and my world was Fortran — punch cards fed into a mainframe, results retrieved hours later from a printout bin. Then Pitt opened the small computer labs, and there sat the Mac II, and the distance between the punch card and that screen was the distance between shouting into a canyon and having a conversation. I bought a Lisa. I wrote my entire dissertation on it. When Jayanthi was finishing her master’s thesis, I played scribe on that same machine, the two of us working through the night, the cursor blinking on a nine-inch screen in our apartment in Southfield.

After that I owned everything Apple made — often in multiple iterations, often to the ridicule of family members who eventually all caved. (They know who they are.) At every step the same thing happened: the tool got closer to the thought. The Mac became the iMac, the iPod became the iPhone, and by the time I was recording YouTube videos on the iMac and writing two books with Claude on this iPhone 17, the technology felt less like a device and more like thinking out loud with a very patient collaborator. Apple’s letter says its tools let people “make breakthroughs and launch businesses.” That is not marketing copy to me. That is my life.

So yes — it was a wonderful letter. A fitting thank-you from a company to the people who used its tools well. I mean that without irony.

But after I read it, I sat with a question I couldn’t shake: who writes this letter for the people who built the things?

Not the people who used the iPhone — the people who assembled it, in Zhengzhou, working twelve-hour shifts under fluorescent light. Not the people who drove the car — the people who welded the frame, in Ulsan or Wolfsburg or Flat Rock, Michigan. The global auto industry alone employs over eight million people directly in manufacturing — in more than fifty countries, on every inhabited continent. Eight million pairs of hands. In Hamamatsu and Chennai, in Puebla and Rayong, in Tuscaloosa and Sindelfingen. And when you count the tiers of suppliers and the indirect labor, the number swells past a hundred million human beings whose daily work makes mobility possible for the rest of us.

Apple wrote its people a letter. Nobody writes a letter to these people. Who thanks the third-shift worker in Manesar, the team lead in Tahara, the electrician in Craiova? Who speaks for the thirty-four thousand workers at Hyundai Ulsan — the largest assembly complex on earth — producing a finished vehicle every twelve seconds? Who cries for them?

I have spent thirty-six years in manufacturing. I have run assembly plants on three continents. In 1999, I was part of the team that shut down Buick City in Flint — a hundred-year-old factory, the kind of place where grandfathers and grandsons worked the same line, closed forever in a single announcement. I watched skilled people walk out of that gate for the last time carrying lunch boxes and nothing else. I worked at both Chrysler plants in St. Louis — the minivan plant and the truck plant — and both of them are gone now, the land scraped clean as if the work never happened. I have experienced the great pride of workers in Windsor and Brampton, people who built some of the best vehicles in North Americ