bruce the wonder yak 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

Bruce saying 'I'm sooo a rock star already.'

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.

Bruce on a Final Cut Pro timeline with a thought bubble: 'With a rotary attachment like that, it's already interesting to me.'

Bruce on a timeline saying 'I speak for us, all three of me.'

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.

Bruce with huge scared eyes, about to bolt — Get too close and Bruce panics.

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 sometime around FCP 7.

A 2-pop.com news brief from August 10, 1999 documenting Bruce's first known sighting — The earliest known documentation of Bruce, from 2-pop.com, August 1999.

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, and I wanna do my part to fix it. I didn't understand it when it wasn't weird.