bruce the wonder yak: i didn't understand when it wasn't weird

On the Macintosh episode of Version History, David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs's obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer.

About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce.

Yakkity Yak

If you left older versions of Final Cut Pro running for 12 hours or more, you might come back to a small brown creature grazing a patch of grass on your timeline. There were other ways to intentionally trigger him, but this was the most fun one.

Periodically, thought bubbles with "pearls of wisdom" would appear from its head, such as:

💭 "I'm glad it's getting weird again. I didn't understand it when it wasn't weird."

Another revealed his name:

💭 "You can call me Bruce the Wonder Yak"

Catching a glimpse

However, if you moved your cursor too close, Bruce's eyes would get really big and he'd scurry off screen in a panic. To the uninitiated, you weren't sure what you just saw or how you'd explain it without sounding crazy.

I vividly remember rushing my friend Josh over to my G5 to catch a glimpse of Bruce before he vanished again. It was like seeing the Macintosh-equivalent of Bigfoot.

Software made by weirdos

Bruce was actually part of FCP from the very beginning, spreading wisdom and confusion until he disappeared in FCP 7. At this point, he's been gone for nearly two decades now, but I probably remember him better than anything I edited on FCP back then. To me, Bruce represented the unserious side of Apple I loved so much. Sadly, that all started vanishing when the iPhone-era took off.

A lot of old software was made for weirdos, by weirdos.

I miss that. I didn't understand it when it wasn't weird.