‘Designed in California’: Help us bring Apple history to life

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that Myke Hurley and I are launching a Kickstarter for a new podcast, Designed in California.

Myke and I have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. For Apple’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, I researched many different accounts of that era and wrote a 90-minute special episode of Upgrade. The reception to that episode was phenomenal—and we loved doing it. So we want to fund an entire year of a new podcast that will tell more stories in that vein.

We’re using Kickstarter for this project because researching and writing these scripts is quite labor-intensive, and I was hesitant to make that time commitment in the hope we would eventually build up enough of an audience to justify the large workload. We’ve set a goal that would allow us to generate thirty 30-to-45-minute episodes over the course of a year, with our first stretch goal to raise that number to a full fifty episodes in a year.

Kickstarter backers will help make the podcast happen. And backers at the Founding Producer tier or higher will get access to a special backers-only podcast feed for the show’s first year. This includes:

Ad-free episode

All episodes on a topic will drop at once in the backer feed so that you can hear the whole story; in the public feed, those episodes will release weekly

Access to the Relay podcast network membership plan, which includes access to a Discord community and an exclusive Relay members-only podcast

Bonus content that will be created if we hit stretch goals

We’ve already planned more than enough topics to get through year one. It’s all subject to change, but right now these include:

The earliest days of Apple, including the release of the Apple II, the fraying of the Jobs/Wozniak friendship, and the calamitous reign of Apple’s first CEO

How Steve Jobs ended up being ejected from the company he founded and his time in the wilderness, including the founding of NeXT

Apple’s Mac OS crisis of the late 1990s, which ultimately led to Apple’s buying NeXT, creating Mac OS X, and bringing back Steve Jobs

A history of Apple’s TV commercials, good and bad

The origins of the iPod and iTunes, and how they changed how we listen to music forever

The secret project that ultimately led to the creation of the iPhone

The story behind why Apple is obsessed with controlling its own destiny, what’s now commonly called the “Tim Cook doctrine”, but is firmly from the era of Steve Jobs

The long and complicated relationship between Apple and its arch-frenemy, Microsoft

During June, we’ll also be releasing several preview episodes of Designed in California as Upgrade special installments, so you can get an even clearer sense of what this podcast will be like.

One of our inspirations for this project is The Rest Is History, one of our favorite podcasts and one that has proven that an enthusiasm for history and storytelling can make for a magical experience. We want to bring this sensibility and excitement to the incredible variety of stories connected to Apple, the people who have worked to bring Apple products to life, and all the aspects of our lives that have been touched by the technology that has emerged from a few square miles near the south end of San Francisco Bay.

I realized when writing about Apple’s 50th that I’ve covered the company for roughly two-thirds of its existence. I’m looking forward to digging deep into research on topics that were before my time, and getting the chance to bring my own personal experience to bear on events I witnessed personally. And I’m hoping to tap the knowledge of many of my friends and colleagues as the project rolls along.

This will be unlike your other tech podcasts. Myke and I have built a story list that can feed several years of the show, so we know we won’t run out of material. We’d love for you to take the journey with us.

Please check out the Kickstarter at designed.fm and consider helping us make it happen.