Apple’s had a lot of success with Ted Lasso. If you have Apple TV+, I’d recommend it. Emily VanDerWerff wrote an excellent piece in VOX about why Ted Lasso works and the general idea of Comfort Food TV. I don’t consume a lot of TV, but I can tell you that my tastes have very much turned toward comfort food TV over the last several years.

There’s enough conflict in the world. To relax, I’m not interested in watching people do knowingly bad things to one another. Instead, I prefer watching generally good characters try their best to muddle through. Ted Lasso scratches that itch. Also, I recently bought the DVDs for the complete run of Northern Exposure and it is giving me the same sorts of feels I got from Ted Lasso.

I had to grin a little when I saw this post about Apple not handing over Scott Forstall’s phone number in discovery to Epic as part of their lawsuit. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been in Apple’s shoes on these kinds of requests, and I think their answer is not as silly as it sounds.

When you’re in a lawsuit, the parties ask each other questions (the fancy legal term is “interrogatories”), that the other side is then bound to answer under the penalty of perjury. That means if you give a false answer, you could end up in contempt of court and even possibly in the pokey. When a party asks a company to answer these interrogatories about former employees, it puts the company lawyers in quite the pickle.

They could try and go and find Forestall’s phone number. But that assumes they can easily find such information and confirm (under penalty of perjury) it is correct. Forstall doesn’t seem to have left on the best of terms and it may be they don’t have access to this information. If they do put a phone number in that answer and they are incorrect, they could be subjecting whatever Apple executive signs the perjury declaration to a pile of trouble. The only bit I’d add is that if I were Apple’s counsel and I thought I had a good phone number that I couldn’t confirm, I’d answer something like “The last known phone number was 555-867-5309”. Regardless, it actually makes more sense to say “I don’t know” and let the other guy go figure it out without you having to stick your neck out and perjure yourself. So, the headline sounds crazy, but it really isn’t.

Apple has never been very enthusiastic about having its employees telecommute. On MPU 538, James Thomson shared the story of how he, while employed as an Apple engineer, secretly worked from Scotland to the chagrin of Steve Jobs.

In the Apple Shareholder meeting yesterday, Tim Cook talked about remote work:

“We’ve been primarily remote since March of last year. We’ve got nearly a year under our belt right now, and I would tell you we’re still learning new things. I would say that I’m incredibly impressed with our teams and their resiliency. The fact that we have had this remarkable run of innovation and creativity of the past year is a testament to their work, undertaking during a really challenging time.

There’s enormous benefit to getting teams together in the office, but when the pandemic made business as usual impossible, we innovated and adapted …”

While I’m sure Apple, as a whole, has more respect for remote work going forward, I also know that when it comes to corporate culture, old habits are hard to break. I expect that once vaccines are distributed and things are safer, Apple is going to try and get most of its employees back on site.

My hope, however, would be that this experience causes some reconsideration on the historical position that Apple employees are all in Cupertino. If Apple is to continue with its historic run, they need to keep talent acquisition and retention a top priority. There are a lot of brilliant folks that could help Apple out that don’t wish to live near Cupertino, California. If Apple could become a bit more of a remote company, getting those folks on board would be a lot easier.