Wit & Attitude Quote by Andy Hertzfeld

“Crazy tricks” is Hertzfeld’s disarmingly casual way of describing something closer to a philosophy: the Apple II wasn’t engineered to be respectable, it was engineered to win. In the late 1970s, “ordinary product” implied corporate mainframes, locked-down systems, and design-by-committee caution. The Apple II, by contrast, emerged from a scrappy hardware culture where the boundary between elegant design and clever cheating was thin - and often productive.

The specific intent here is revisionist realism. Hertzfeld punctures the myth that iconic tech is born from pure, clean-sheet brilliance. He’s pointing to a machine built under brutal constraints: limited memory, tight budgets, immature components, and a market that didn’t yet know what a personal computer should feel like. “Crazy tricks everywhere” signals the hidden labor of invention - timing hacks, ingenious circuitry, software workarounds - the backstage rigging that users never see but that makes the show run.

The subtext is pride, with a wink. Calling them “tricks” frames these choices as playful and audacious rather than desperate compromises. It also hints at a cultural divide in engineering: the Apple II wasn’t optimizing for textbook purity; it was optimizing for experience - color graphics, expandability, approachability - and doing whatever it took to ship.

Context matters: this is Silicon Valley before it became a brand. Hertzfeld’s line captures the original Apple ethos in miniature: irreverent, constraint-driven, and allergic to “ordinary,” even when that meant building miracles out of hacks.