Simple Beep is a podcast focused on the history of Apple and the Mac community. It’s hosted by childhood friends Brian Sutorius and Ed Cormady, who discuss topics from Apple’s history and their experience with them. The podcast started in 2014 and released 90 episodes by its end in 2021. I’ve listened to nearly every episode, enjoying the deep dives, reliving my past, and learning some things I didn’t know.

The beginning of each episode starts with a section called Follow Up, where the hosts provide updates on content from previous episodes. Often times Follow Up covered corrections or additional information from a recent episode, but sometimes it went to episodes years past. Now that I’ve listened to the entire thing, I thought it would be fun to reflect and do some Follow Up of my own.

There’s too much to cover in one post, so this will be a series.

The 12” MacBook Air

The focus of Episode 6, released in January 2015, is keyboards, starting with the Apple II. At some point rumors of an upcoming 12” MacBook Air enter the conversation. The hosts are looking at an artist’s render of the keyboard and debating some of the “subtle” changes to it , related mostly to key size, key placement, and key width. They focus on the awkward placement of the escape key, which has been shifted right to make room for a power key instead. They also discuss the mixture of full-height and half-height arrow keys.

What wasn’t discussed was the reduction in key travel, the degree to which was not known at the time. A few months later the 12” MacBook (not Air) was released and the firestorm that was the Butterfly keyboard began. Almost three years later they refer to the keyboard’s reliability issues in the December 2017 episode about hardware failures.

iTunes 13

Episode 14, released in May 2015, was the second of two episodes focused on iTunes. In this episode they noted that iTunes 12 was the current version and that “we’re going to see iTunes 13 sometime soon”. They discuss whether or not it will simply be a store like it is on the iPhone, with music functionality moving into a separate music app.

iTunes 13 never came, but continued to receive feature updates for more than three years as the primary way to interact with music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies on the Mac. It was finally replaced by separate iOS-like Music, Podcast, TV, and Books apps in 2019’s macOS Catalina (10.15). By the end of the end of the year it became obsolete on the Mac, seeing its final release in May 2019 for macOS Mojave (10.14).

The separate apps have yet to be developed for Windows, so iTunes lives on as a Windows-only application, updated in October 2025 to a ridiculous version 12.13.10.3 supporting the iPhone 17e and the M4 iPad Air. The irony of adding support for the most recent iPhone to a major application version that was released ⅔ a decade prior is not lost on me.

I used iTunes from version 3 and had never shared the criticism of it’s bloat. Sure, it did a lot of things, but I had no issues managing my music, syncing my iPods, and purchasing from the store. I even used it for movies and survived the Apple Music transition with it. I found it funny recently when listening to MacBreak Weekly that the hosts were complaining about how bloated the Music app is. I guess some things are forever.

More to Come

Stay tuned for the next installment!