Beach Ball of Death: The Ghost of a $10K Failed Computer Artwork

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Podcast Awesome

Beach Ball of Death: The Ghost of a $10K Failed Computer

August 11, 2026 • Season 4 • Episode 15

0:00 | 14:56

You've seen it a thousand times: you're two minutes late for a video conference call, you throw on a shirt with buttons (It's okay that you're still wearing jammie pants. Don't worry, nobody can see), and right when you need your computer most, that colorful spinning ball shows up to ruin your day. It's called a lot of things, but most of us just call it a curse word.

Today we trace the beach ball of death back to its actual origin story, which involves a $10,000 computer that flopped commercially, Steve Jobs in exile, a forgotten storage format, and Susan Kare's sketchbook. Turns out the most hated icon in computing has a surprisingly great pedigree.

We also get into why the beach ball exists at all (psst: it's your OS parenting a misbehaving app), how it could've been a spinning slice of pizza, and why Apple Silicon might be quietly killing it off for good.

What We Cover

How much of life is spent waiting on machines, and why the frustration doesn't stop when you sit down at your computer
The Xerox PARC origins of the "wait" cursor and Susan Kare's contributions at Apple
Windows 95 and the golden age of customizable cursors (RIP, dancing banana)
The lineage from hourglass to wristwatch to spinning disk to beach ball to flat ring
How NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, gave us the beach ball's true ancestor
Why Apple's 1996 acquisition of NeXT brought the spinning cursor along with it
How Aqua and Mac OS X turned a monochrome disk icon into a glossy rainbow ball
The many names for the beach ball, including the delightfully specific "bun of death"
Why the beach ball is becoming rarer on modern Macs, and what that means for a whole generation of users

Timestamps

00:00 - Cold open: the dreaded beach ball

01:00 - Welcome to Podcast Awesome

01:15 - How much of our lives we spend waiting on machines

02:00 - Xerox PARC and the first "please wait" cursor

02:30 - Susan Kare's contributions to the original Mac

03:30 - Windows 95 and the era of customizable cursors

05:00 - The full lineage: hourglass to beach ball to flat ring

05:30 - Enter NeXT, Steve Jobs's post-Apple company

06:00 - The $10,000 computer nobody could afford

07:00 - Apple acquires NeXT, and the spinning disk comes along

08:00 - The beach ball as an OS parenting a misbehaving app