Apple Executive retires to San Luis Obispo
John Couch is a relative newcomer to San Luis Obispo yet he has already made a significant impact in the community. John is a jack of all trades, professionally starting his career at Hewlett-Packard, then joining Apple in 1978 as Director of New Products and eventually Vice President of Software. He retired at the ripe old age of 36, spent 10 years helping turn around a K-12 school in North County San Diego, a short stint as at Mayfield Venture Fund, followed by a five-year career as CEO of a Bioinformatics company.
He returned to Apple at Steve Job’s request in 2002 as Vice President of Education until his second retirement in 2020.
Somewhere along the line he found time to be a father of four children and a grandfather of 17.
A man of multiple talents, John is an entrepreneur, author, music writer, a movie producer, an active churchgoer and is involved in multiple real estate projects on the Central Coast. His passion for education, lead him as a UC Berkeley alum, to invest philanthropically in many student, athletic and academic programs at Cal Poly.
John’s passion for education developed as a young student at the University of California at Berkeley. Transferring from UC Riverside after being accepted to Cal’s first-ever computer science department, he then went on to earn his master’s degree in electrical engineering, and then was one of six students to be accepted into the Computer Science Ph.D. program.
However, earning his Ph.D. came to a halt after a disagreement with the department about his thesis project. This is when John realized that what he wanted to do (man computer interface) didn’t align with earning another degree. So instead, John went to work with Hewlett Packard, proving that he didn’t need a Ph.D. to be a sought-after job candidate.
As John was settling into his job at HP, he also was growing a family. At the time when his first son Kristopher was five years old, Steve Jobs approached John about joining Apple. At that point Apple was in a growing stage with only $7 million in sales. As we know now, this was only the beginning for everything Steve Jobs had planned for the company.
The offer from Steve was enticing to John, yet it came with a major salary reduction and responsibility relative to his management position at HP. However, after Steve gave his son an Apple II and told him he could keep it if his dad came to work for Apple, John decided to take the job since Steve wanted to solve the same problem that John was passionate about, a new computer that anyone could us.
“He was asking me to solve a problem where the answers weren’t in the back of the book.”
Nothing in John’s education had prepared him to solve a problem that had never been done before. He fell in love with the challenge instead of simply memorizing equations like he was trained to do in school.
John took a risk by joining Apple, but it ultimately came down to wanting to build a computer for his family and for himself, and Steve gave him that opportunity. John was also mesmerized by Steve’s unique ability to perceive the unseen–something he did again and again at Apple through the continual innovative products.
One project John accomplished during his second tour at Apple was building a pedagogy around the iPad. Through “challenge-based learning,” John designed a learning environment that allows students to take risks and learn through “immersive doing” rather than memorization. John says he would love to see this model of learning expand in the United States.
