Return to Transcripts main page
The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper: 50 Years Of Apple. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired April 04, 2026 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[22:00:30]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: April 1st marks 50 years since Apple was founded. It started in Steve Jobs's parents' garage in California and eventually grew to become the first trillion dollar company in America.
From iMacs to iPads to Airpods and iPhones, Apple has changed how we interact, how we consume information, how we shop, eat, how we travel. It's even changed our posture with how we sit and stand.
But Apple's history is full of both success and failure. And while most people around the world have some kind of smartphone, there is a growing movement of people who want to relearn how to navigate life by relying on it less.
CNN's Bill Weir is one of them. He's the father of a daughter and a son, and after watching his eldest grow up with an iPhone, he's ready to try raising his son without one. In this next hour, he explores Apple's history and how life has changed because of it. He also looks at what tech may be doing to our brains, starting with his own.
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This morning. Hundreds of millions of us woke up in an ecosystem created by one company.
All day, their devices will fill our hands and eyes, ears and brains wants and needs until we are powerless without them. Which reminds me of Sunday school and that original test of willpower. That when knowledge of everything good and evil is wrapped in a delicious package like Eve's apple, humans will ignore all warnings, take a big bite and see what comes next.
WEIR: But this is a story of the modern equivalent. This is the story of Steve's Apple.
WEIR (voice-over): As in Jobs and Wozniak. The two Steves created it in a California garage, and just 50 years later, 2-1/2 billion users make Apple one of the most influential, iconic and profitable companies the world has ever seen.
DAVID POGUE, AUTHOR, "APPLE: THE FIRST 50 YEARS": If those fans were a country, they would be bigger than China, bigger than India. They would be the most populous country in the world.
WEIR (voice-over): Android phones now dominate markets outside the U.S., but --
WEIR: Do you think the Android would have happened without the iPhone?
POGUE: Oh, no.
WEIR (voice-over): If all it did was deliver on the Jetsons with facetime, that would be game-changing enough. But the app and attention economies have also changed how we work and play, how we eat and where we sleep, how we isolate, and how we fall in love.
WEIR: Hey, that's my wife, Kelly. We met on an app on our iPhone.
Just like this.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah.
WEIR (voice-over): But mounting science shows that smartphones are also changing our brains, moods, and attention spans in measurable ways. And this hits home literally.
OLIVIA, DAUGHTER: In middle and high school, my screen time was insane.
WEIR (voice-over): That is my 22-year-old daughter, Olivia. And this is my six-year-old son, River.
RIVER, SON (singing): This much I know is true.
WEIR (voice-over): Both of their lives have literally been recorded on increasingly better iPhones.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back.
WEIR (voice-over): They don't know a world without Apple products.
Which captures so many memories and keep them connected but --
WEIR: And if you take it away from him, he gets mean.
WEIR (voice-over): The iPhone can also come with membership in the anxious generation.
So, on Apple's 50th, this is a look at how we got here. The highs and lows. It's a search for what comes next. Both the backlash and the inventions to brace for.
WEIR: Good to see you, John.
WEIR (voice-over): Weve assembled a Mount Rushmore of tech reporters. David Pogue, Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg, and John Gruber all covered Apple's rise.
But let's start in Leavenworth, Kansas.
WEIR: Hey, David. Bill Weir.
WEIR (voice-over): And bring in David Freeman.,
DAVID FREEMAN, APPLE FAN: The grandfather of iPhones, the Newton message pad.
WEIR (voice-over): Whose knowledge, devotion, and collection recently earned him the title of world's leading Apple superfan.
FREEMAN: So us Apple enthusiasts like to say, that we bleed six colors in reference to the old six color Apple logo. And as part of that, this whole house is the six colors of the Apple logo.
WEIR (voice-over): Amid examples of nearly every product ever launched, he has the same glasses Steve Jobs wore, and even a tiny piece of the founder's signature black turtleneck. But it was the iMac that first won his heart.
FREEMAN: The first time I saw that, I was just smitten. It's like -- this is a computer made by a company that cares about computers, and it's not just trying to make money off of people making an operating system made by one company, pieced together on hardware made by another. This is a team of people from top to bottom that care.
WEIR (voice-over): He says their early values matter just as much as the hardware, because, along with engineering genius, Steve Wozniak brought the hippie ideals of computing for everyone and even intended to give away the design of the Apple 1 for free.
POGUE: At this point, Woz was in college, Jobs is in high school, and they both have a love of Bob Dylan and pranks and music and girls and technology and Jobs saw this computer and he's like, you shouldn't give that away. You should sell that.
WEIR: Woz, happy golden anniversary.
STEVE WOZNIAK, CO-FOUNDER, APPLE: Oh my gosh, hard to believe 50 years.
WEIR: What do you think about most when you think about the early days of Apple?
WOZNIAK: I was passing out my schematics. Public domain, open source, telling all these other people that wanted to create a social revolution where we'd own our own computers. I wanted them to be able to build it. And Steve Jobs didn't yet know it existed. If I demonstrated a change in computers to the world that every computer in the future should have a keyboard and a video display, and the world changed with that.
POGUE: When Woz came along, computers were for corporations and governments. Normal people did not own computers. Nobody.
WEIR (voice-over): They were thrilled to sell about 150 Apple 1s, but the Apple 2 put them on the Silicon Valley map.
WALT MOSSBERG, FORMER TECH COLUMNIST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: You could use them without knowing any programing. You didn't have to be an engineer.
JOHN GRUBER, BLOGGER, "DARING FIREBALL": There were other companies that made computers for computer people, and there was the idea of, oh, other people want to use these, too.
KARA SWISHER, HOST, "ON WITH KARA SWISHER" PODCAST: The Apple was always more expensive. It was sort of the luxury item and not everybody could have it. So, it had an exclusivity.
WEIR (voice-over): But then the Apple three turned out to be a glitchy failure.
FREEMAN: Troubleshooting steps was pick it up six inches and drop it. And that would reseat some of the chips in there and hopefully get it working again
WEIR (voice-over): But Apple would save face in 1984.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A garden of pure ideology.
WEIR (voice-over): First by redefining the Super Bowl ad with an Orwellian spectacle directed by Ridley Scott.
DONNY DEUTSCH, MARKETING EXPERT: Probably the most famous commercial of all time.
WEIR (voice-over): And for former ad man Donny Deutsch, its brilliance comes from establishing Apple's values before any glimpse of product.
DEUTSCH: It ultimately set up that brand that we are, the anti- establishment brand, that we are the renegade brand, that we are not IBM, we are Apple. And Macintosh is going to change your life.
WEIR (voice-over): And then instead of a sledgehammer, the Macintosh arrived like an adorable pet, trained to greet you.
PROMPT: Hello, I am Macintosh.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Affordable, not just to the corporation as Lisa is, but to the individual.
WEIR (voice-over): Behind the scenes, Steve Jobs was known as harsh, demanding, even cruel. But on stage he won hearts and minds.
SWISHER: Steve was really the first star as technologist, became stars and celebrities, including the outfits including the you know, the way he dressed, the way he talked. And he was very aware of the marketing part of it. And I think that was as a business, it was really important. I think Gates missed that. All of them missed that idea of the romance around the product.
POGUE: He could be brutal and cruel. He would say, you know, whatever you just come up with is shit. You know, you don't deserve to breathe the air here. And there's two philosophies about that. One is that it was pure cruelty, and the other is that's how he got unbelievably great work out of people, work they didn't think they could achieve. WEIR (voice-over): But that style would cost him his company. And in
the '90s, Apple would nearly go bankrupt.
Coming up, how that humiliation helped bring the greatest comeback in corporate history, and why the Apple superfans of today think they are due for another one.
[22:10:00]
FREEMAN: Seeing Tim Cook cozy up in the Oval Office with a little gold trinket for the president, it's hard to square that with the company started by countercultural hippies 50 years ago.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Here it comes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's sad and clear that on several counts, you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.
WEIR (voice-over): This was Steve Jobs' first appearance coming out of Apple exile, pushed out in the '80s by a board and new CEO frustrated by slumping sales and his style.
STEVE JOBS, APPLE CO-FOUNDER: You know, you can please some of the people some of the time.
WEIR (voice-over): He helped create the Pixar we know today in his time away.,
Changing family entertainment forever. But it was his computer company next that opened the way back to Apple. Macs were crashing, so they bought the next operating system along with Jobs, around 300 engineers and a radically different business plan.
JOBS: You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it.
POGUE: I think it's probably the greatest business turnaround in history. In a single year, Jobs fired the entire board. He shut down all 22 ad campaigns Apple had going.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Steve Jobs.
WEIR (voice-over): He also axed 70 percent of Apples products, focusing all their brainpower on a few.
POGUE: He said, we're going to replace them with four -- two laptops, two desktops. That's it
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels.
DEUTSCH: This commercial is actually my favorite commercial of all time. How do you not want to line up and be part of that club?
WEIR (voice-over): With no new product for his comeback ad campaign, jobs went with shots of his favorite humans and a Richard Dreyfuss voiced rallying cry aimed at both customers and his employees.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do
WEIR: IBM's tagline at the time was think.
DEUTSCH: Yes.
WEIR: And so, think different --
DEUTSCH: Yes.
WEIR: -- was both a shot at the establishment and a play on words, right?
DEUTSCH: What they're selling with Apple is not the technology, they're selling, do you think a certain way, are you that kind of person? Everybody wants to be out of the box. Everybody wants to be a renegade. Everybody wants to be revolutionary.
WEIR (voice-over): The colorful iMac would become a bestseller, but they needed more hits. And that is when Tony Fadell got the call.
TONY FADELL, ENGINEER: We're at MIT's Morningside Academy of Design.
WEIR (voice-over): These days, he is a genius in residence at MIT who's filed more than 300 patents and co-founded the nest labs. But back then, he was an up-and-coming engineer who'd worked with the Mac team, and they all knew that Apple wanted a music player.
FADELL: So, for six weeks, putting together the design, the chips, the rough prototype that would ultimately become the iPod.
JOBS: There it is right there. This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.
MOSSBERG: There were a lot of MP3 players that could only hold 30 songs, and they were big -- or ten songs.
JOBS: Sixty-four megabytes of memory.
MOSSBERG: Nobody had 1,000 songs. Nobody had one with a hard drive like that, and nobody had one as small as a deck of cards.
FADELL: This is the iPod. This is the very first one that we said, and it had this magical mechanical wheel. And then we had the interface.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here, the clicker.
FADELL: The company was literally quarters away from bankruptcy because it was running out of money. So, it was an incredible risk for Steve to bet on this little product, this little team, to say, were going to bet the company on it.
WEIR (voice-over): And then Jobs put him to work on the next version and the next and the next, next.
MOSSBERG: He wasn't afraid to cannibalize himself. He brought out the iPod mini, the iPod nano, "Saturday Night Live" did a famous skit. Remember that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The iPod micro.
MOSSBERG: He kept taking these tiny little smaller things.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ladies and gentlemen, I am thrilled about this. Introducing the new iPod macano
FADELL: At the time, companies like Nokia were working really hard to get music on a phone, and so we were looking at another existential crisis at Apple, these companies who have a lot more money and world domination on phones, they're going to take the iPod business away from us. So, what are we going to do? And what we said was, how do we make a phone inside the iPod?
JOBS: Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.
POGUE: He said, today, we're unveiling three new products.
JOBS: An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.
POGUE: And then he goes, an iPod.
JOBS: An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it?
POGUE: And suddenly people realized it's all the same thing.
JOBS: This is one device.
POGUE: And people just lost their minds.
JOBS: And we are calling it iPhone.
WEIR: Is this number one here?
FREEMAN: That's the original iPhone.
WEIR: Oh, I remember this baby. It's so adorable.
FREEMAN: It feels -- it feels small by today's standards, but it --
WEIR: Doesn't it?
FREEMAN: I remember holding it when it first came out and pulling the camera up and having the viewfinder. I felt like I was looking through my hand. I was like, this is such a big screen.
(LAUGHTER) WEIR: Mind blowing.
WEIR (voice-over): Years before the iPhone, the obsession with mobile communication brought crowd favorites like the Razr, the Sidekick, and of course, Blackberry.
FADELL: Blackberry was covering the corporate world. Everyone was messaging on their what they said were crackberry.
WEIR (voice-over): But the iPhone created a whole new category.
GRUBER: The iPhone is sort of the apex of consumer electronics. Somebody took like a full page. RadioShack ad from like the '90s, and every single thing on the page is on your phone now. Everything.
WEIR (voice-over): Apple stores born in 2001 were already a phenomenon in retail. The iPhone turned them into permanent flash mobs.
MOSSBERG: And it was insane. Insane.
SWISHER: And then when you walked out, you got cheered. It was so nuts.
Creating those Apple Stores did also change everything. The idea, not just of retail, but that is an experience that you're part of an ecosystem, you're part of a plan. You're part of a group of communities. And I think that was an incredibly effective thing.
WEIR (voice-over): But his iPhone unveilings were sadly numbered.
JOBS: Oh, thank you.
WEIR (voice-over): As a rare and aggressive cancer took a visible toll.
JOBS: Thank you very much.
[22:20:02]
It always helps. Thank you. It always helps and I appreciate it very much.
WEIR (voice-over): His final reveal. The new data centers running iCloud.
JOBS: It's as eco-friendly as you can make a data center.
WEIR (voice-over): Steve Jobs would die four months later at just 56.
TIM COOK, APPLE CEO: I personally admire Steve not most for what he did or what he said, but for what he stood for.
WEIR (voice-over): When Jobs needed a liver transplant, Tim Cook reportedly offered part of his own, so grief colored the early days of the Cook era at Apple, along with a full blown supply chain scandal.
DIANE SAWYER, FORMER ABC NEWS ANCHOR: Bill Weir made his way into the giant factory.
WEIR (voice-over): Foxconn, the main supplier to Apple and other tech giants, was already under scrutiny when a cluster of worker suicides in 2010 led to the installation of suicide nets around their dormitories in Shenzhen. Apple went on to join the fair labor association, opening Foxconn to a number of audits.
WEIR: I'm told this is the very first time any reporter from any country has been allowed to see this.
WEIR (voice-over): I saw endless assembly lines and the crush of young people hoping to work 12-hour shifts at around two bucks an hour..
WEIR: It's a stampede.
WEIR (voice-over): The audits I covered would lead to higher pay and less abusive overtime. But they also revealed the deep co-dependence between Apple and China.
MOSSBERG: The company would fall apart if they didn't have China. China is the key as the place where things are made. It also is their second biggest market.
WEIR (voice-over): And that co-dependence only gets more complicated in the age of tariffs and Trump.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: China, 67 percent.
WEIR (voice-over): When we come back, a look at the future of Tim Cook's Apple and what the tidal wave of new technology is doing to our brains and our kids.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:26:48]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOBS: This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years.
WEIR (voice-over): Before the iPhone ever hit shelves, engineers at Apple noticed the seductive pull --
JOBS: Breakthrough Internet communications device.
WEIR (voice-over): -- of an Internet you can hold in one hand.
FADELL: When we got the first prototypes and people started using it, I could see the behavior of people changing. They were on them in meetings because you wouldn't bring out your laptop in meetings, and I started going, something's different here. Something's very different.
WEIR (voice-over): A couple years later.
JOBS: And we call it the iPad WEIR (voice-over): They made that dynamic even friendlier to users of
all ages.
JOBS: More intimate than a laptop. And it's so much more capable than a smartphone.
WEIR (voice-over): By 2025, one study found that 40 percent of American children have some brand of smart tablet by age two, nearly 60 percent by age four. But when Steve Jobs was asked how much his kids enjoy the iPad in 2010, he said they haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.
WEIR: What did you observe in your own family and how did you manage it?
FADELL: You just start seeing that kids would start being on them all the time. They can watch YouTube all day or they could be playing games all day. They didn't have smartphones at the time. They had iPads. So take the iPads out of their bedrooms. None at the dinner table. There's too many times I go out to dinner or whatever, and you just see these kids with these digital nannies with them and they're not interacting with anybody around them.
OLIVIA: In the morning, as soon as my eyes open, I just grabbed my phone and start looking at my phone.
WEIR (voice-over): For my daughter Olivia, the iPad was a gateway to her first iPhone at the regrettable age of ten.
OLIVIA: When like five seconds, I have had like three different emotions. About two posts. Like it's really, it's a lot.
WEIR: Is that you?
OLIIVA: That's me.
WEIR (voice-over): And honestly, I've been the one modeling a life of screen addiction and want to break that habit with my six year old son who may never get the iPad passcode.
RIVER: My mom and dad do it fast because they don't want me to sneak and turn it on and watch it.
WEIR (voice-over): And to better understand what we're all up against, I head to Ontario's Western University and one of their laboratories devoted to studying a generation of overstimulated brains..
DR. EMMA DUERDEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, WESTERN UNIVERSITY: That brain's cognitive control center. This part in the front.
WEIR (voice-over): And with my nervous system wired up, Dr. Emma Duerden has me set a baseline with a few minutes of Zen animation.
DUERDEN: We're going to look at your brain activity while you're resting.
WEIR (voice-over): And then a scroll of skydiving videos on TikTok.
DUERDEN: That we're seeing like lots of rapid changes in your cognitive control center here. When you're -- when you're scrolling, sorry, are you are you already sucked in?
(LAUGHTER)
WEIR (voice-over): Her work began when Canadian families reported their kids' screen time had nearly tripled during the pandemic and held. But screen time doesn't fully measure the effect of just existing in this environment.
DUERDEN: So if we even actually have someone else's device near us, another cell phone, you know, that's turned off and turned over, we can't see the face.
[22:30:05]
Actually, this is going to impact your ability to attend and focus. So, they are powerful. That's all I have to say. These devices are so powerful
WEIR (voice-over): On the other side of the continent, meanwhile, Dr. Gloria Mark has been studying attention spans since 2003.
DR. GLORIA MARK, AUTHOR, "ATTENTION SPAN": So from worst is I would call mindless scrolling.
WEIR: That's -- what's - that's the worst.
MARK: That's the worst.
WEIR (voice-over): When she started, the average person would stay focused on a page or screen for 2-1/2 minutes.
MARK: I was really quite surprised. WEIR: By how short that was.
MARK: By how short that was.
WEIR: Right. Now, it seems like an eternity. What is it now?
MARK: Now it's -- average is about 47 seconds.
WEIR: Is the phone to blame?
MARK: So, it is all screens. The phones, of course, are ubiquitous, such that every time we see our phone, we have this urge to pick it up and swipe it open. It's like we have an internal whiteboard in our minds and you suddenly switch and you're mentally erasing it and rewriting new information. Sometimes you see we can't erase it completely. And you see remnants of the last thing that was written. So those remnants on your internal whiteboard interfere with your current task at hand.
WEIR (voice-over): She says the age of smartphone reliance is shrinking the hippocampus, that part of the brain that both creates memories and gives you a sense of direction.
MARK: They've done brain imaging, and they have found that the more reliance on GPS, the smaller the size of the hippocampus. Our inability to pay attention, of course, affects relationships. And of course, there are other consequences in terms of how it might be affecting young people developmentally.
WEIR (voice-over): There is no official diagnosis for screen addiction but this place outside Phoenix is a clear sign of the times.
Not My Kid was founded to help teens battle substance abuse, but temptations have changed.
SARAH GRADO, CEO, NOTMYKID: Our phones are the new drug. That's the new drug that we're -- that we're facing.
WEIR (voice-over): While rates of teen drug and alcohol use have plummeted in the us, a 2021 survey found teen screen time reached 8.5 hours a day. By 2011, about 1 in 4 teens owned a smartphone. By 2018, nearly every teen had access. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression, suicide and eating disorder, hospitalization went up as well.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Raise your hand if you have any fun activity that you do that does not require a screen or the Internet.
WEIR (voice-over): So Not My Kid pivoted to help teens fight a grip of technology that only got tighter during pandemic lockdowns. And despite her position at Not My Kid, Sarah's own son fell victim even though she kept him on a so-called dumb phone until he was 17.
WEIR: What kind you get?
REESE: IPhone 11. And then I downloaded Snapchat, Instagram
WEIR (voice-over): Reese (ph) says it was a quick spiral into hopeless despair.
REESE: A lot of those thoughts evolved into a sort of, like, do I -- do I want to be alive?
GRADO: He wasn't even able to go to school. Like he wasn't able to get out of bed in the morning. And so, I stepped in. I got some professional help.
WEIR (voice-over): Ultimately, it was face to face friendship that pulled Reese back from the brink. After a deliberate decision to wean off a smartphones.
FADELL: We need to have screen time limits, not just for kids, but for adults, too.
WEIR (voice-over): After leaving Apple in 2010, Tony Fadell would join a chorus demanding they address screen addiction.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's with a feature we call screen time. WEIR (voice-over): But the screen time feature wouldn't come until
2018. Finally giving parents more control over their kids' devices and allowing users to track, limit or even block certain content. A vital first step in measuring what we put in our brains and how much.
FADELL: So, when I look at the iPhone, it's a refrigerator. Do you put good stuff in it? How often do you open it? Do you put lots of bad stuff in it?
WEIR: Do you stand there with the door open grazing?
FADELL: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
WEIR (voice-over): And all of our experts agree that parents should try to keep kids out of that fridge until their late teens.
GRADO: I thought I waited long enough and we tried the dumb phone. I do regret moving to a smartphone
SWISHER: They're all culpable. Apple, Facebook, you know, all of them. Google, all culpable together as a group that has come together to sort of kill our ability to create communities, bringing us addictive substances very much like cigarettes.
[22:35:00]
WEIR: Take it from Tim Cook, who said that finally knowing his own screen time had a profound effect.
COOK: And so, I dialed back a whole bunch of notifications and, and sort of stopped myself from being too antsy about picking up the phone. But for me, my simple rule is if I'm looking at the device more than I'm looking into someone's eyes, I'm doing the wrong thing.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[22:40:11]
WEIR (voice-over): One of the nice things about living in L.A. is that it's only a short drive from crowded freeways to the isolated splendor of Angeles National Forest. But that's also what keeps Will Richards awake at night, literally.
WILL RICHARDS, MONTROSE SEARCH AND RESCUE: I think that's part of the problem is people getting lost, not realizing there's no cell reception.
WEIR: I guess that's what makes you the busiest search and rescue team in the state. Is that right?
RICHARDS: It does.
WEIR (voice-over): Montrose Search and Rescue averages one operation every two days, and they recently spent 600 man hours searching Monkey Canyon for two lost women. RICHARDS: At about four in the morning, we could hear her yelling. We
didn't find her till 2:00 p.m. The terrain was just so treacherous and the echo coming off canyons. It's just this like, you know, playing Marco Polo.
WEIR (voice-over): But a couple of years ago, they would get a huge leg up.
JOHN GILBERT, COORDINATOR, MONTROSE SEARCH AND RESCUE: Vehicle that went over the side.
WEIR (voice-over): Thanks to a new kind of call for help.
GILBERT: It's, you know, 300 feet or so straight to the bottom, no cell reception.
Every other vehicle over the side that we've had over here has been an automatic fatality.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: IPhone 14 pro.
WEIR (voice-over): But the couple in the car had a new iPhone 14, the first to come with emergency SOS via satellite and help was there within the hour.
GILBERT: It was an unwitnessed crash, so without that feature would have potentially been there overnight. They would have been cold, potentially wet in the 30-degree temperature with nobody knowing they're there.
WEIR: So, their phones saved their lives that night.
GILBERT: I fully believe it saved their lives.
WEIR: They tell me that as much as a third of their calls are now placed by phones smart enough to sense a crash and call for help. Before you even know what happened.
One more feature that makes these things hard to put down.
I'm eager to find some balance. And since we're safely out of the canyons and in the capital, let's check out a joint that promises to help.
Welcome to Hush Harbor, D.C.'s first phone free bar, and the brainchild of Rock Harper.
ROCK HARPER, HUSH HARBOR: We put your phone in the bag and give it to you and allow you to come on in. We're not anti-tech, right? What we are pro-presence is what I like to say.
This phone is the main culprit. This is the thing that keeps us from interacting with one another. So yeah, it was a big risk. And we did have a lot of people that will not come back here that hate it, pissed off at me. Absolutely.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How are you feeling?
HARPER: I'm good, I'm good.
I did win Hell's Kitchen. So, any heat that I get from the public on taking phones away doesn't bother me a bit.
WEIR: Have you seen heightened humanity as a result of this?
HARPER: I've seen more first dates in these six months than I have in the three years. We also have seen strangers just interact with strangers. We've attracted so many new customers that come here specifically because it is a phone-free space.
I had this woman the other night and she was crocheting at the bar. I ain't never seen no shit like that in my life.
WEIR (voice-over): On this night, there's also the monthly meeting of a club called Month Offline, started by this guy.
GRANT BESNER, CO-FOUNDER, MONTH OFFLINE: We were trying to come up with an idea for a way to try to help people put down their smartphone for any period of time.
WEIR (voice-over): He pasted some posters around town and was shocked when dozens called and agreed to pursue smarter brains with a dumber phone.
KATIE SUPER, MONTH OFFLINE PARTICIPANT: And the goal was that we would keep our iPhones put away in this box for the whole month, and we would just be on our flip phone. Sometimes I had a cheat weekend or two.
WEIR: Okay.
SUPER: Or an hour, but then I knew I had my accountability buddies waiting for me at the next meeting. So, I would -- I would put it back in the box.
MIKAYLA DIDONATO, MONTH OFFLINE PARTICIPANT: TMI, but I met my boyfriend day one of using the flip phone.
BESNER: Are you serious?
DIDONATO: Yeah, we were able to build such a strong foundation because we were always present with each other.
WEIR: Since your Month Offline, is your screen time way down, are there times when it creeps back up?
HARPER: No, I'm almost out. I mean --
WEIR: Are you?
HARPER: Yeah. Tim Cook can kiss my ass, you know, pardon my language. I will never buy another iPhone. Right? I used to really trust Apple. Maybe I feel a little betrayed. FADELL: What's really interesting now is we have schools banning them,
right? And we have countries not saying it's right or wrong, but they're starting to ban social media for kids under 15.
[22:45:01]
France just did it. Australia is doing it. They were looking at different states and the U.S. are doing it. It's just like alcohol limits and driving, you know, age limits and these kinds of things.
DUERDEN: So I think if Steve Jobs were here today, I think he would be designing that ecosystem with our nervous system in mind.
WEIR: What are your thoughts around screen addiction? How powerful these devices have become, both on our brains and our children's?
WEIR (voice-over): Wozniak says he relies mostly on his Apple Watch, as it doesn't have the same pull as the phone.
WOZNIAK: We got a lot of great things from technology that improved our lives and communication ability and education, but it came at a price where we don't no longer really are in control.
WEIR (voice-over): But coming up, what if there is something in the Tim Cook pipeline to solve this problem? A whole new way to use computers.
And in the meantime, I'm told that just two weeks in the Month Offline club will take years off my brain. So, it's time to get dumb.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WEIR: Hello? Yeah, I'm on the dumb phone.
WEIR (voice-over): After two weeks of iPhone fasting, my social media cravings are fading. My keypad typing is improving. But I really miss the camera.
We take the quality of home movies for granted now, but image gathering has come so far since I got the world's first glimpse at how Apple's tiny cameras are made.
WEIR: And get this with two shifts, they can make 300,000 of these in a single day.
In 2024, Apple says iPhone users took 500 billion selfies. But when Apple created video in 2009, it would change how humans interact with everything from live music to police brutality, to government tyranny.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: The Arab Spring was fascinating because, to me at least, was the first really digital revolution what you saw there was everyone had a phone, especially the people in Tahrir Square, which was sort of the hub of the revolution. These were young people. They were mostly affluent. They were digitally savvy, and they were using their phones as a method to organize and then to broadcast what they were organizing to everywhere. WEIR (voice-over): Journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered the Arab
Spring from Egypt and beyond.
Would the Arab Spring have happened without this technology?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: No, it wouldn't have. In the Middle East was just an incredibly oppressive, stagnant place, and the phones allowed people to send information in a way that bypassed the traditional methods of communication. The power really was in the pocket of the people.
WEIR (voice-over): The movement that began in Tunisia, toppled the Mubarak regime in Egypt and then spread to Syria.
Hadi is from the Syrian city of Hama, site of a hushed up, government led massacre in the '80s. And in 2011, he fled for berlin and watched this new revolution that would be impossible to cover up.
HADI AL KHATIB, FOUNDER, SYRIAN ARCHIVE: In the massacre that happened in the '80s, no one was able to see what happened at that moment. But in 2011, from the first moment of the revolution and the uprising, we were able to see those protest images immediately online.
WEIR: Was there a moment when you realized you had to archive all of these clips and create some sort of chain of evidence?
AL KHATIB: Absolutely. Those images were being lost, were being destroyed
WEIR (voice-over): Hadi then founded the Syrian Archive, which has saved and verified over seven million records, some of them vital for groups like Human Rights Watch and the French investigation of Syria's former president for a sarin gas attack that killed over a thousand civilians.
WEIR: Is there hope that some of these former Assad officials will actually see punishment for this now?
AL KHATIB: Absolutely, there is hope. We see evidence and documentation is very important part of it.
WEIR (voice-over): Hadi tells me he once sat on a panel with Tim Cook and says, Cook talked about how the privacy and security built into iPhones makes them vital in the pursuit of human rights.
AL KHATIB: It's very helpful for the human rights defenders that have access to Apple products and devices such as iPhone and Mac computers.
WEIR: Do you trust that Apple won't work with these authoritarian regimes in the future?
AL KHATIB: This is something that might change because of the political situation
WEIR (voice-over): He's hesitant because of what he has seen in America -- the fights over immigration raids, the federal pressure on tech companies to cooperate, and like many Apple users, he noticed Tim Cook's gestures of fealty to the Trump White House.
COOK: And it's 24-karat gold.
WEIR (voice-over): Including a personal million-dollar donation to Trump's inauguration and attendance at a White House screening of "Melania" the movie, the same day Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minnesota amid protests over Trump's immigration crackdown.
[22:55:07]
His death, captured on an iPhone.
WEIR: What are your thoughts about where they stand politically right now and how that trickles down to their fan base?
POGUE: It's a P.R. disaster for the company. I know why he's doing it is because Trump has threatened these unbelievable tariffs that would drive the price of an iPhone up to $3,500.
WEIR: Really?
POGUE: It would destroy much of what the company is doing right now. So, Cook is playing the game.
WEIR (voice-over): Apple refused to talk to us for this documentary, but in a memo to employees, Cook said he had a good conversation with Trump about values of shared humanity.
COOK: Congratulations, mr. President.
FREEMAN: As a person who has always respected Apple for their values and how outspoken they've been about civil issues in the past, seeing Tim Cook cozy up in the oval office with a little gold trinket for the president, it's hard to square that with the company started by countercultural hippies 50 years ago.
SWISHER: I hate to say it, all they understand is staying in power, status quo or shareholder. Like you see Tim do unnatural acts like bring Donald Trump a gold statue. And for Steve Jobs to have done that? Never, never.
Everyone's like, oh, don't get so emotional. Well, you know what? We think better of Tim Cook. We think better of Apple. I don't think the next great product will come from them.
WEIR: Are you boycotting Apple?
SWISHER: No, I'm not boycotting it. I'm just not buying a new one.
WEIR (voice-over): For the most part, apple refuses to hand over user data, though it has made exceptions, including a recent case involving an alleged threat against the girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel. In 2016, when the FBI wanted help cracking into the iPhone of a mass shooter killed by authorities, the company refused.
WEIR: Do you think they would do that today? POGUE: Yes, I do.
WEIR: You do?
POGUE: Yeah. Tim Cook is so emphatically insistent on this privacy thing because he knows it's an Apple exclusive. Google can't do it. Facebook can't do it because their business is selling ads and collecting data.
WEIR (voice-over): While Cook has dramatically increased Apple's profits since taking over, buzzy new product launches have been rare. Two years ago, the Vision Pro made a mind blowing first impression, allowing users to sort a desktop like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, make eye contact with a dinosaur or share the stage with Metallica.
On that next level, immersion is created on a whole new kind of camera, which my team will soon bring on a reporting trip to the arctic. But the wait, isolation and $3,500 price tag have put the Vision Pro in limbo. An Apple could move to challenge Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses next, or add little cameras to Airpods. Baby steps toward a world without screens.
POGUE: I think the glasses are going to be a big deal if the A.I. can be perfected to the point where you don't need to see what you're doing, but you can speak to it and its 100 percent accurate or very close, then there's a lot less need for the phone.
WEIR (voice-over): But Steve Wozniak believes we'll be holding on to our phones for a long time.
WOZNIAK: I think it's going to be very similar to today. Look at automobiles, 150 years, and they pretty much the same. So, I believe the computer now shrunk down to smartphones is still going to be around in the future.
WEIR (voice-over): After two weeks of iPhone avoidance, I strap on the brain sensor, repeat the tests, and send the results to Emma Duerden.
DUERDEN: Your reaction time improved by about a fifth of a second over that time period.
WEIR: That's a 23 percent improvement in reaction time.
DUERDEN: Yeah. So, you did. So, you improved. Yeah.
WEIR: By every measure, she says my dumb phone brain outperformed by a surprising margin. Pre-detox on below zero brain activity. And then after the detox, look at that red line. It just jumps up there.
DUERDEN: Big jump. Yeah. I have to admit, I was pretty surprised when I saw these differences.
WEIR: By how big the changes were.
DUERDEN: Yeah, I mean the connectivity your brain became even more coordinated and organized over that time period. WEIR: Oh, look at this.
WEIR (voice-over): Granted, it would take a lot more data to form real scientific conclusions, but just the exercise of choosing a book or a chat or eye contact over more screen time has reset my relationship with this device. At least for now. But let's see how it goes tomorrow.
