Art & Creativity Quote by Andy Hertzfeld

The slyest flex here is how casually Hertzfeld admits to doing something that would get most modern product orgs marched into a compliance seminar: “the Mac had no formal testing.” It lands as both confession and boast, the kind of gallows-humor bravado that only makes sense in the early-1980s crucible when the original Macintosh team was small, stubborn, and moving fast enough to mistake velocity for destiny.

His first move is to normalize scale: “the size we had was pretty good.” That’s not project-management talk so much as culture war talk. It pushes back against the corporate instinct to solve uncertainty by adding headcount. Then he sketches a lifecycle where growth is tactical, not ideological: the team expands for manuals, for testing, for the peripheral work that hardens an idea into a sellable object. The ellipses do real work, implying a practiced narrative: this is how responsible teams behave.

Then comes the twist: they didn’t. “Though” is doing heavy lifting, puncturing the neat model he just presented. The subtext is that the Mac’s success depended on an unusually concentrated pocket of talent and taste - a group that could run on intuition, internal standards, and a tight feedback loop with the machine itself. It’s also a reminder of how mythology gets made: by retrofitting discipline onto what was, at the time, a high-wire act.

Read today, it’s less a blueprint than a warning label. The romance of skipping “formal testing” only works when you’re holding a rare mix of people, stakes, and constraints - and even then, it’s flirting with catastrophe.