SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0100 - MAR 13, 2024

A New Take on Platform Preferences

David Heinemeier Hansson recently revealed that he’s making the switch from Apple to Android and trading in his Mac for a PC. In this week’s episode, co-founders of 37signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson discuss the shift in direction, the events that led to the change of platform, and what the company was missing by being focused on the Apple ecosystem.

REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website. Full video episodes are available on YouTube and X.

If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 or email, and we might answer it on a future episode.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

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Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Well, last week we did a rapid fire Q and A and David answered my question of what he was looking forward to with a very vague response. And now that things have moved forward, we thought we would talk about it. We’re talking about platforms today, Apple versus Android, PC, all of those things. David, jump in. Tell us what’s going on.

David (00:31): So I have after 20 years of the Mac and what is that going to be? 17 years of the iPhone, was it 17? Something like that, changed both of those. And I’m now running Windows and Android as my primary phone and as my primary operating system, which to me is a big deal. I mean, I have not just been a Mac user and an iPhone user for two decades plus, I’ve been an evangelist, a booster, a fan, all of the things. And unfortunately, if you live long enough, some heroes become villains. And to me, Apple falls into that category right now. Apple has been running the App store in particular in a way that we’ve obviously had several altercations with them about including when we launched, Hey, back in 2020. They almost didn’t allow us to launch, and then again, when we launched Hey Calendar, they almost didn’t allow us to do that.

(01:37): And on top of that, the latest straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when they, for a period of I think four weeks, is that how long it lasted, decided they were going to nuke progressive web applications, PWAs on the iPhone in the EU. They had somehow a twisted interpretation of what the Digital Markets Act and new regulation in the EU said, and they thought or said, hey, this means that you can’t run web applications on the iPhones natively, as we were just getting so excited about having push notifications, having all the facilities of native applications, but running on the web in the EU. And I thought, you know what? The first thing I thought was I should go on Twitter and rant about this. And then I thought, you know what? That would be the fifth, sixth time where I just drop my arms and start screaming.

(02:31): What’s that going to do? So I actually didn’t say anything. I went off Twitter for two weeks 'cause I’m like, Jason called it, and I’m kind of annoyed that he got it right. When we went all in on PWAs with Campfire, he was like, what if Apple just pulls this back? And I was, they’re not going to pull it back. They’ve already put it out there. You can’t take something back that you already put in. It would break applications, uses would lose data. How’s that even going to be a thing? Literally a month or two later, it was a thing. Apple did the thing. They pulled the rug and anyone who had invested in PWAs on account of them, finally after I think seven years deciding to support these standards that are required for PWAs to be viable, they just pulled the rug on the EU. So I thought my mental model again here is flawed.

(03:29): I have a conception of what Apple is and how they operate and it’s not accurate. Even after all these altercations we’ve had, I had this sense that I sort of knew which way the beast was going to go and I didn’t. So that led to me thinking, I can’t live like this. I can’t compute like this. I can’t feel like I have to be on Apple stuff to be productive, to be happy. I need to branch out. So that’s what I did. I ordered about 400 different boxes of PCs and Android phones and everything, and I spent about two and a half weeks going through all of it and trying to find something that I liked and it almost didn’t happen because it is a little harder to find stuff in the PC Android world that is up to the standard that Apple sets because Apple makes really good stuff.

(04:27): They make really good laptops. Their M CPUs are really, really good, their phones are good too. But that one was actually the easier I changed to Android and within three days I’d almost forgotten about it. I was like, this is surprisingly interchangeable after the key step. And the key step that had hold me back for so long was being trapped in platform specific services. Now before Hey, this was way worse. I used to run Apple Mail and I used to run Apple Calendar and whenever I tried an Android phone, it always just stayed with a try. Do you know what if I don’t actually have my email, if I don’t have my calendar, I can’t really use it for real. I can play with it. And I always had, I’ve owned tons of Android phones over the years, but it was always at a play level.

(05:19): Hey, moving those two crucial services, especially the calendar, that was the one that really had its hooks into me at the end, moving that out and getting that into a multi-platform tool where I can use it on Windows, I can use it on the Mac, I can use it on an iPhone and use it on Android, and it’s all the same in the best sense of that word. It’s all great on all the platforms which made this possible. There was a few laggards, I had Apple Notes. I ended up moving that to Dropbox with AI Writer as the interface for it. Dropbox syncs on all the platforms that works pretty well. And then I had photos, and photos was actually the more difficult one. I ended up moving to Google Photos on that one, which was also sort of easier than I thought it would be.

(06:05): Google Photos has an app on the iPhone and if you start that up, it asks you do you want to import all your pictures? And it allowed me to import like 20,000 photos, 130 gigabytes worth of memories. That still has a few complications, but otherwise I run Signal as my messenger. I use WhatsApp with all my international friends. I now use Hey for email and calendar, all of the things that I thought, you know what? I can’t live on Android. I totally could. Windows on the other hand, that was a little trickier. And part of the trickiness there is that Apple’s lead in laptops is substantially bigger than their lead if there even is one with the iPhone, finding a PC that has a very high quality display that can run fonts, render fonts really beautifully, as beautiful as you will get on a retina display Apple is not that easy.

(06:59): And I almost threw it all out because I got this one screen and I ran this thing called fractional scaling to get it all right and it didn’t look all right. The fonts looked crap to be honest. And I posted about it and I started reading up about it and I learned that if you want things to look as good as a Mac on the PC, you have to use the same ingredients. You can’t get beautiful fonts on a PC if you use a crappy, not a crappy display, a low resolution display with fractional scaling, that’s just not going to work. So I spent almost a week and then I was so happy for a second that we didn’t talk about it on the last podcast because I was going to be, oh man, now I got to eat my words.

(07:40): I can’t actually change the windows because I don’t like how the fonts look. And then I plucked it into my Apple display that of this configuration I’m sitting with right now. That’s the Apple thing that’s left, which is hilarious. My 6K Pro display is a fantastic screen and thankfully it works on Windows as well. And now all is good. So that has basically led to the full transformation right now that I’ve changed fully over and been running this for a bit and I’m kind of enjoying myself, which is a bit odd because if you go back to 2005, I think it was, I posted on Signal versus Noise. I don’t understand developers who haven’t switched away from Windows yet. And now that was a time before Windows made up with the open source world. And that’s really the fascinating thing to me about this whole saga.

(08:34): When I found Apple in 2001, just as I started working with Jason. Jason, you’d been on the Mac the whole time, right? Yep. You’d been on the Mac the whole time. I hadn’t been on the Mac the whole time. I was not a OS nine person, that era of Magnus, that was not me. But when OS 10 came out, they embraced Unix underpinnings and that was when it clicked for me. And I thought this was an escape from Microsoft because Microsoft used to be the kind of platform bully that Apple now is today. But back in the late nineties, there I go, 20 years of being so happy to be on Apple, being away from Microsoft, and now the roles are reversed. Now we’re at war with Eurasia, not Oceania. And it’s just fascinating that you can be around technology long enough for the two villains to swap places that the hero becomes the villain and the villain becomes the hero.

(09:27): But that’s basically what I feel right now. Microsoft is a tremendously pleasant company to deal with these days, which still to a lot of technologists who were around in the nineties sounds bizarro. It does not even sound like that’s possible. But what Nadella and his philosophy about not making Windows the center of the universe that Microsoft should have their applications on multiple platforms, they should not be so possessive, they should embrace open source has really paid dividends in two crucial ways. One is you can run Linux on Windows at full speed and it’s real Linux. It’s not Apple’s, otherwise very fine, sort of own little flavor of Linux. This is Ubuntu Linux, this is Fedora, this is the real distributions. Ubuntu is what we run on our servers. I can run the same version of Linux that we run on our servers inside my windows and it’s great.

(10:32): That to me is, I mean that’s the main key that unlocks all of this. And then the second thing is Microsoft now owns the most popular text editor/IDE for web development called BS Code. How did this happen? How did it happen that Microsoft went from calling Linux? I think Bomber was the one who said Linux is a cancer. Linux needs to be eradicated. This is late nineties stuff to you can run Linux inside your windows and we love it. And by the way, this main editor, you’re using VS code that everyone loves is open source. Microsoft has some of the biggest open source projects there is. Oh, and also Microsoft owns GitHub and they haven’t fucked it up. What? None of those things, none of those very positive things or things you could say about Apple. Apple exists in a very different world, in a world that is increasingly bitter and entitled and smug and just unpleasant.

(11:33): Apple just got a verdict against it in the EU judgment of 1.8 billion that they had abused their market power in relation to Spotify. And of course they had. Apple competes with Spotify with Apple Music. Yet if Spotify wants to be able to sign up customers on iPhones, they have to pay Apple 30%, which doesn’t make sense in the music business. There’s not an extra 30% margin to give away. This was just a slam dunk case of all the monopoly abuses and they lost in the EU and they put out the most incredible pissy self-indulgent press release I have ever read from a major company. I basically couldn’t believe it as I read it. You should look it up. It’s on apple.com/press I think, or wherever they post.

Kimberly (12:19): We’ll link to it in the show notes.

David (12:21): And they basically go, how dare Spotify complain? Spotify owes us everything. Why is Spotify not grateful for the fact that we allowed ‘em to exist and have access to their customers? And also, by the way, Spotify is doing fine. I don’t know what they’re complaining about. I read that letter and I went, yeah, I can’t have all my computing eggs in these guys’ basket. That’s nasty. And it’s nasty in a way that feels cultural, which means it’s difficult to fix. I’ve read it in the voice of Phil Schiller, who’s the main guy over there who’s in charge of the app store, and I just went, I don’t think this is going to change as long as the same characters are in place because it reminded me of something else. Jonathan, ive who’s the legendary designer at Apple. I have tremendous respect. I mean probably the most respect of any industrial designer who’ve worked in computing, but he would occasionally get bad ideas.

(13:24): The butterfly keyboard that Apple ran on the MacBooks for five years was the most atrocious hardware failure I’ve witnessed from a major company in a sustained period of time at our company. I think we had a failure rate of 22% was what we calculated. 22% of all the MacBooks we had bought in that horrific era of keyboards eventually would end up breaking and require a new keyboard or the keys would just become stuck and people would start living with it, right? It took Ive to leave Apple for Apple to fix that problem. I think it’s going to take Phil Schiller, maybe even goddamn Tim Cook, to leave the company before this is fixed. You know what? I’m not going to hold my breath for that. These guys might be in the seat for the next 10, 20 years. We need alternatives. So I’m really happy to report that the hinterland of Windows and Android are far more pleasant than I not just expected, but have otherwise experienced.

(14:22): And some of it is that if you wait long enough, people will get better. When I first started playing with Android, seriously, maybe mid 2010s. I didn’t like the font rendering. I didn’t like the scroll acceleration, I didn’t like the Jankis, I didn’t like the animations. I basically had a hard time finding anything at all that I liked about the platform. Now, fonts look great. Scroll acceleration, spot on, cameras as good as Apples hardware in general screens better. I have a Samsung S 24 plus. The screen puts out 2,600 knits. I was just sitting at a restaurant the other day in bright sunlight with my freaking sunglasses on and I could totally read the screen. I can’t actually say that of the iPhone that I was rocking before that. So this brings us to the other revelation, wonderful payoff of this whole journey. I mean, I wasted, if you want to call it that. I spent, let’s say a couple of weeks digging into all this, and one of the things I realized was we didn’t have anyone at the company running Windows. We used to Kimberly, did you run Windows when you first joined?

Kimberly (15:32): No, I didn’t. Chad did. But when I first started Chad, it was like, pick your computer. What do you want to use? I’ve always been a Mac person. I see there were only a handful of people on Windows at that time, maybe like three or four people had Windows. And then as a company, we switched over.

David (15:48): Yeah, switched over is a kind word for forced Ron to run a worst version of Excel. Ron is in charge of our finances to run a worst version of Excel because we wanted to improve our security management of these platforms, which is easier to run it all on the mag. And in hindsight, that was probably a mistake. I mean, you still need to deal these security thing, but what was a bigger mistake was not just that we had a few people running Windows, but none of the people we’ve had, and that hasn’t been true for a long time, have run Windows on the product side. The programmers weren’t running Windows, the designers weren’t running Windows. No one who was looking at product and marketing going out the door was looking at any of that stuff on Windows. And when I opened up the things in Windows, it was a little embarrassing.

(16:36): I mean, Jason, I sent Jason a couple of screenshots from, we had done some localized version of the base camp, home Pace for India and Philippines and Brazil, and they look really great on the Mac. We use this little Unicode emoji flag looks great. You open it on Windows, there’s no flag. It just says IN for India. In the middle of the font, the typeface, it just looks broken. And in India Windows is 67 or 72% of our potential user base. Whoops, 72% of the people who go to that page just saw kind of a little bit broken page. And we didn’t notice that all because no one was running Windows inside the apps. We hadn’t updated the scroll bars, so they kind of looked kind of bad, pretty bad. The fonts weren’t the best. So just within running Windows for a week, we were able to fix a bunch of these things that if we had had someone inside of our organization running Windows, it would never have stayed like this for so long.

(17:39): So it really shone a light on the fact that as developers, especially web developers, I think are very much in the eco chamber of Apple. And that’s because Apple makes really good stuff and it’s great. And I don’t fault people for liking the Apple stuff. They’re good computers, they make good software. I have a lot of beefs with their service side and leadership, all this stuff. But the problem is if you’re making things for the web and you have, especially if you have an international customer base or audience, the Mac is not all there is. In fact, even Basecamp, even when you include the us, the number one platform for Basecamp is Windows. So it’s kind of not great if your biggest platform is not used by anyone inside your company. We used to have this problem too with Android. We didn’t have very many people running Android at all inside of the company.

(18:32): And then we went through a phase where not only did we build up a bigger Android team to make excellent Android apps, but we also got some of the designers to switch. We have some of the web designers, they’re running Android as their daily phone, which means that everything that goes out the door the first time looks great on Android. I think everyone making stuff for the web for a multi-platform audience needs to have a diversity of platforms. So that’s actually one of the reasons why I’m kind of happy just to stick around with Windows for now because someone’s got to do it. I, and I don’t mean that sounds like, oh, someone’s got to dig the shit up. Windows is actually kind of great these days. I like a lot of things better about Windows than I do about the Mac. Is it overall better? I don’t know. You can argue that until the cow comes home. But it’s a nice platform and it’s wonderful that we have an alternative and it’s literally used by way more people in the world than used as Mac. And if you make things for the web, you should have some Windows users,

Kimberly (19:29): Okay, Jason, are you going to switch to Windows? Are you a Mac guy? Through and through.

Jason (19:34): Sounds like I have to switch now. Otherwise my friend, I mean I’m going to switch to Android definitely for a while and probably maybe even permanently. The only thing, this is probably what Dave was alluding to, that’s a little bit tricky on Android is a bunch of our family members use iCloud. And so there’s the iCloud photo sharing thing and you get that stream where you don’t have that stream anymore. That’s just one way where the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and cousins kind of stay together on photos and I can’t ask everyone to change. So that’s the one little thing, but whatever, we’ll figure that out. And also if I stay on the Mac, I’ll have that at least for now on the Mac side of things, but I’m going to switch over to Android. Why not? I’m actually curious about it. In fact, oftentimes when I see it, I’m actually like, this is actually really good. I like some of the ideas here.

Kimberly (20:22): The cameras are really good.

Jason (20:23): I really like some of the ideas actually quite a bit more frankly. And to David’s point, it is just healthy to switch. I mean, I’m long overdue. David and I stood in line for the original iPhone, first day stood in line, and

David (20:39): For four hours

Jason (20:40): Hours

David (20:41): Four hours.

Jason (20:42): Yeah, I remember that. And so you know…

David (20:44): Up in Wilmette or something, some suburb

Jason (20:46): Yeah, it was an old orchard mall. I forget what town that is. But yeah, and we got 'em and I actually bought two and I had a shrink wrapped one still with the original box, which is worth like a hundred grand now and I can’t find it, which is fucking embarrassing. I don’t know where it went, but I bought, I remember buying two, I’m going to put one of these away. Anyway, so it’s about time. First of all, what the hell is the worst thing that’s going to happen? A little discomfort for a minute and then maybe find something better or maybe you don’t. But I mean, out of all the things, this is not a hard thing really, so might as well do it. And I think also just out of curiosity, and frankly, a mind shift is healthy.

(21:28): I mean, I get in a rut sometimes and you get in a rut looking at the same stuff all the time and the same way all the time, and sometimes something needs to pop you out of orbit. And I think seeing how someone else does something that’s similar but in a different way is very healthy and good for you. It’s just even as a product person in general, well, how do they solve these problems and how do they do these things and what are these transitions like and what are this experience like? So I owe it to myself I think to do that. So I’m going to start there and then we’ll see how it goes.

Kimberly (21:56): Okay, and then my last question, on behalf of every 37signals employee who is listening, what does this mean for company policies, in terms of platforms?

David (22:06): I want to find a way for us to be more diverse for sure. When it comes to these platforms. I shouldn’t be the only one running Windows. Me and Jason shouldn’t be the only ones, plus the Android teams running Android. That’s already not true Android, I feel like we’re actually better represented than that.

Jason (22:23): Scott runs Android.

David (22:24): Scott runs Android I think is huge, but we need to find a way for the security posture to apply to Windows too, without it being bad. I mean, there’s a lot of very heavy handed surveillance tools available on Windows. We don’t have any interest in any of that, but yet at the same time, we also need to be secure enough that if someone loses a Windows laptop, it is just as little of a deal as it is of someone uses a Mac laptop because we have all the tools to remote research and so forth. But I’ve absolutely changed my mind on Windows and the value of it. I wish, and I look forward to the PC makers catching up on hardware. Apple still does have a slight lead. I just ordered a new PC laptop the first one I got, which is really cool, and I strongly encourage people to check it out.

(23:16): It’s called Framework. Frame dot work. It’s a completely novel approach to making laptops because it’s fully user replaceable. It’s not quite as sleek as a MacBook is. It’s not quite as cohesive perhaps. I found that I care less about that than I thought. I thought a key component of why I liked the MacBook was its millimeter, aluminum, unibody, precision, all that stuff. And I’ve been using this framework lap. I’m using it right now. I plugged it into my big screen. It runs everything great. I’m like, maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe I convinced myself that there are all sorts of little nuances that matter, and actually they don’t. When you try something else, which goes to Jason’s point, it’s really healthy to try different things. You might have these conceptions in your head about where you constraints are of what you really like and you change it out and you find something else.

(24:05): But I have also just ordered what is essentially the MacBook of the PC world. A Samsung Galaxy book or something I think it’s called. It’s got an even higher resolution screen. That’s one of the things Apple just gets right. They get it right that the screen is not even probably the screen is the most important thing of a computer. I’d put that number one, and then the keyboard is number two, and everything else is actually kind of a distant third and fourth. All Apple computers you can buy today have excellent retina level screens. That’s not true of PCs, but this Galaxy Book, Samsung, I was so impressed by that Samsung S 24 screen. I was like, you know what? If anyone’s going to beat Apple at their own game, make a better display than Apple, it’s going to be Samsung because I think actually Apple buys the displays from Samsung or something.

(25:00): They don’t actually make their own displays. Samsung is the original creator of a bunch of display technology, so of course they’re going to have the best stuff. So I’m going to try that and arrives tomorrow. I’m excited for that because I’ve kind of been looking for a PC laptop. I could without reservation, recommend to the designers at their signals. If anyone wanted to give PC a try, what should I tell 'em? I can tell 'em this Framework and I think it’s cool, but that might be more of a programmer thing, a little bit more nerdy maybe the Samsung Galaxy book is the thing that will make some designers feel like they’re not giving up a bunch by handing in their MacBook or just carrying two. This is to Jason’s point as well. I still have my iPhone. I didn’t fucking throw it in the river, so I’m on the same thing with the iPhoto stream. I have family members who are on that. I just keep that in the drawer and when I need to add some photos on that, I pull it out of the drawer. It’s no big deal. I do the photo stuff on it and then I put it back into the drawer and rock my Samsung as the daily. You can have more than one type of a computer.

Jason (26:01): And that can just be wifi too. Your just be wifi. You don’t need cell service for that. Yeah, it’s like an iPod basically. Yes. iPod Touch essentially is how you treat it. Yeah. Okay.

Kimberly (26:11): Well, David, I’m sure we’ll hear more about this whole transition as you get more products delivered to your house. We’ll look for that on Twitter and we will link to all of the things that he sent us in the show notes. REWORK is production 37 signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37 signals.com/podcast. Full episodes are on YouTube and Twitter, and if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, or what PC technology you should be using, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.