My first meeting with Bill Atkinson was unforgettable. It was November 1983, and reporting for Rolling Stone, I had gained access to the team building the Macintosh computer, scheduled to launch early the next year. Everyone kept telling me, “Wait till you meet Bill and Andy,” referring to Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, two key writers of the Mac’s software. Here’s what I wrote about the encounter in my book, Insanely Great:
I met Bill Atkinson first. A tall fellow with unruly hair, a Pancho Villa moustache, and blazing blue eyes, he had the unnerving intensity of Bruce Dern in one of his turns as an unhinged Vietnam vet. Like everyone else in the room, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. “Do you want to see a bug?” he asked me. He pulled me into his cubicle and pointed to his Macintosh. Filling the screen was an incredibly detailed drawing of an insect. It was beautiful, something you might see on an expensive workstation in a research lab, but not on a personal computer. Atkinson laughed at his joke, then got very serious, talking in an intense near-whisper that gave his words a reverential weight. “The barrier between words and pictures is broken,” he said. “Until now the world of art has been a sacred club. Like fine china. Now it’s for daily use.”
Atkinson was right. His contributions to the Macintosh were critical to that breakthrough he’d whispered to me at the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would singlehandedly make another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, which presaged the World Wide Web. Through it all, he retained his energy and joie de vivre, and became an inspiration for all who would change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74.
The impact of Bill’s contributions is immeasurable. Although he worked alongside other early members of the Lisa and Macintosh teams, everything I find suggests that he wrote the Mac’s QuickDraw graphics engine and the initial versions of MacPaint and HyperCard almost single-handedly. It’s almost incomprehensible that one person could have created so much of such import in a relatively short span of time. A great Steve Jobs story on Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore site gives a sense of just how insanely creative and productive Bill was, and I encourage you to search for Bill’s name on Folklore to read more about his accomplishments.
Apple has been attempting to build its own LLMs over the machine learning technology that currently powers Siri, a product already used in hundreds of millions of its bestselling devices, with the aim of creating a truly conversational assistant.Former executives said that the process of integrating the technologies has led to bugs, an issue not faced by competitors such as OpenAI which have built generative AI-based voice assistants from scratch.
One former Apple executive said: “It was obvious that you were not going to revamp Siri by doing what executives called ‘climbing the hill’,” meaning to incrementally develop the product rather than rebuilding it from the ground up.
Apple’s AI struggles are larger than just a product delay. The bigger issue is that Apple’s current AI tools don’t offer experiences that are notably different from what you can get elsewhere. Apple Intelligence can summarize text messages, identify real-world surroundings with the iPhone’s camera, erase unwanted objects from photos, rewrite emails and prioritize notifications. But those features are similar to capabilities offered by other companies such as Google, OpenAI and Samsung.
In fact, rivals like Google and OpenAI are already moving one step further with technology they claim can execute tasks for consumers rather than just answering questions or generating summaries.
I still don't think AI is that critical for Apple at this time, but, boy, there sure are many people trying to make the point it is do-or-die.
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Thanks for reading.