There’s a common high-tech term for a daily regimen of using and evaluating your own product while you’re trying to develop it: dogfooding. I never liked this term myself, and it didn’t appeal to Apple sensibilities either. Pet food isn’t typically thought of as a pinnacle of product development. On the Purple hallway, we were trying to make excellent products for people, and while we sometimes said “dogfooding” inside Apple, more often, and more officially, we began to say “living on” to describe the day-to-day routine of living on our in-progress software like it was a real product.
