David Pearce

Like a PowerBook and an iBook.

utterly different ideas about what a laptop should be.

And then all of a sudden everything converged and we have MacBooks, right?

And MacBooks look slightly different, but they're all MacBooks.

A MacBook is a MacBook is a MacBook.

And everybody has a MacBook and there's a MacBook for everybody.

You go back to like the early days of phones and there were lots of new ideas about phones and lots of different colors and lots of different styles and lots of different ways that screens would open and rotate.

And then we all converged on this one idea.

And you go back to like the early days of software and there were lots of ideas about how software looked.

And then there have been fewer and fewer and fewer ever since.

And I think in asking people about why this has happened, I've really come to two answers.

The first is just that as something gets sufficiently popular, it becomes very hard to change it.

at all.

Especially when something is popular and good and people like it, right?

Like, look at the MacBook is maybe a perfect example of this, right?

Apple basically found a design that looks good, it works well, and it serves a lot of purposes.

You can make it a little tiny bit thicker and you can put more battery into it, you can put a fan into it to cool it down when that was necessary and useful, and you can make a big, powerful laptop.

Or you can shrink it very slightly, slim it down a little bit, and have a

MacBook Air.

You don't need a bunch of new ideas because you have one that kind of more or less works for everybody.