Stephen
Hackett

Stephen Hackett runs a podcast network, a long-form blog, a newsletter, and co-manages a portfolio of popular iPhone apps. He does all of this from Memphis, Tennessee, which is not Silicon Valley - and that seems to be the point. His entire career is a quiet argument that the most interesting thinking about Apple doesn't happen inside Apple Park.

Right now, in April 2026, Hackett is co-founder of Relay (formerly Relay FM), one of the most respected independent podcast networks in the Apple orbit. He co-hosts Connected - a weekly Apple discussion show with Federico Viticci and Myke Hurley that just crossed its 600th episode. He co-hosts Mac Power Users with David Sparks. He writes 512 Pixels, where posts range from nuanced hardware analysis to pointed takes on tech industry accountability. And as Managing Director of Cross Forward, Inc., he helps oversee apps used by millions - Widgetsmith, Pedometer++, and Sleep++.

The description sounds exhausting. The output is remarkably steady.

Hackett came up the way many in independent tech media did - through an Apple Store, then into IT management, then into writing because the writing was more interesting than the day job. What he didn't do is move to San Francisco or angle for a journalism position at a media company. He built his own thing, piece by piece, from Memphis. He's been doing it for nearly two decades, and the thing he built now reaches 1.5 million people a month.

In 2008, Hackett started a blog called ForkBombr. The name - a reference to a Unix denial-of-service attack that spawns infinite processes - was the kind of thing a tech-savvy twenty-something names a blog and then immediately regrets. He renamed it 512 Pixels, after the 512 kilobytes of RAM in the original 1984 Macintosh. The name is a statement of intent: this is a place where the history matters.

512 Pixels is not a news site competing with MacRumors for pageviews. It's closer to an ongoing conversation between a deeply knowledgeable enthusiast and an audience that takes Apple hardware as seriously as he does. Posts cover macOS releases, vintage hardware archaeology, software opinion, and occasionally sharp takes on where the tech industry is going wrong. When Hackett writes about AI skepticism, it lands differently than the same take from a writer who's never held a Bondi Blue iMac.

The blog's most landmark contribution is the Aqua Screenshot Library, launched in August 2018. Hackett captured over 1,500 screenshots spanning every major macOS release from Mac OS X Cheetah (2001) through the current version - not using emulation, but on actual vintage Apple hardware he owns and maintains. A Power Mac G4. A Mac mini. A MacBook Pro from the right era. The project was picked up by MacRumors, 9to5Mac, TidBITS, and iDownloadBlog. For anyone researching Apple's interface history, it's the canonical reference.

The story of Relay FM begins with a tweet. Hackett connected with Myke Hurley on Twitter in 2011 - two Apple enthusiasts on different sides of the Atlantic who liked talking about the same things. Three years later, on August 18, 2014, they launched Relay FM with five shows and a bet that independent podcasting could be a real business.

The bet paid off. Relay grew into a network of 31+ active podcasts generating 1.5 million monthly downloads. The shows range from Connected and Mac Power Users at the center of the Apple universe to Ungeniused - Hackett and Hurley's show about the strangest articles on Wikipedia, which exists mainly because they both thought it would be funny.

The business model Relay FM built - membership-based with a strong advertising layer - became a template for independent podcasting. The membership isn't just a tip jar: members get ad-free versions, bonus content, and a genuine sense of being part of something. That community dynamic is what made Relay's St. Jude fundraising possible.

In January 2025, Relay FM dropped the "FM" and rebranded to simply "Relay." The name change acknowledged what the network had always been: not radio, not a throwback format, but something new. The FM was always a bit of branding nostalgia anyway.

In May 2009, Hackett and his wife Merri went to a well-baby checkup with their six-month-old son Josiah. Four days later, Josiah had a brain tumor removed at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. The diagnosis was an astrocytoma. The treatment was 18 rounds of chemotherapy. By age two-and-a-half, the cancer was dormant.

Josiah still requires shunts to drain brain fluid. He participates in the St. Jude Life Study, a long-term research follow-up program for childhood cancer survivors. He is now a teenager. He survived because his family lived in Memphis, because St. Jude exists, and because the hospital never sent them a bill.

In September 2019, Hackett turned that personal debt into a community act. Relay FM became the first podcast network to partner with St. Jude, launching an annual fundraising campaign that combines listener donations with a multi-hour live Twitch podcastathon. The model was simple and devastatingly effective: listeners who cared about Hackett's work, and who knew the story behind it, gave generously.

By 2026, the campaign has raised nearly $5 million. A single year's campaign brought in $753,756. These are not corporate foundation numbers. These are podcast listeners, choosing to send money to a children's hospital because someone they trust asked them to, and told them why.

Hackett owns more vintage Macs than there are people in his household. This is reported as a fun fact; it is also just his actual life. The machines are not decorative. They are working computers, maintained to run the software that shipped with them, used to capture screenshots and photography that no emulator would render correctly.

The collection feeds the Aqua Screenshot Library. It feeds the annual Apple Hardware Wall Calendar, which Hackett photographs himself and sells via Kickstarter. The 2022 and 2023 editions sold out. Buyers don't get a generic tech product - they get twelve months of images taken by someone who has held, cleaned, and thought deeply about each machine pictured.

Mac Power Users episode #331, titled "Stephen Hackett: Collector of Macs," gave listeners a full tour of the collection. It became one of the show's most discussed episodes - partly because the depth of knowledge Hackett brings to individual hardware makes each machine a character rather than a spec sheet.

The collecting is also research. Hackett's book "Aqua and Bondi: The Road to OS X & The Computer That Saved Apple" traces the parallel development of the iMac G3 and Mac OS X - the hardware and software that pulled Apple back from near-bankruptcy. It sells for $3.99 on Gumroad. At that price, it's absurdly underpriced for the quality of the research. But pricing is a choice, and Hackett's choices consistently favor access over monetization.

In July 2015, Hackett left traditional employment to go fully independent. The timing was not accidental - Relay FM was generating enough revenue by then, and Hackett had been building his freelance consulting practice alongside it. He credits his wife Merri explicitly and repeatedly as the reason this was possible. She is from Memphis too. They met in high school. She understood what he was building and why.

The independent income at peak complexity included: Relay FM (advertising + membership), 512 Pixels (newsletter + membership), freelance writing for MacStories, iMore, The Sweet Setup, and Six Colors, Apple consulting for Memphis businesses, and eventually app business management at Cross Forward. At one point, Hackett was hosting or producing six Relay FM shows simultaneously while managing all of the above.

He's been public about the trade-offs: "balancing the needs of advertisers, co-hosts, members and of course, family." That last comma is the honest one. The independent life is not just freedom - it's the constant negotiation between everything you've built and everyone counting on you to maintain it.

The Cross Forward partnership with developer David Smith, managing Widgetsmith, Pedometer++, and Sleep++, added another dimension in 2024. Hackett handles design, marketing, and business management. The apps collectively have millions of users. It's the kind of role that would have been called "Chief Marketing Officer" at a startup - but this is a two-person company in Memphis making software that people actually use.

There are dozens of people who cover Apple well. Hackett covers Apple in a way that feels like a person who actually loves the objects thinking about what they mean. That's a rarer thing than it sounds.

When he writes about the iMac G3 or Mac OS X Aqua, he's not summarizing Wikipedia. He's working from machines he owns, software he's run, and a research discipline inherited from his journalism training. The Aqua Screenshot Library isn't just a useful resource - it's an argument that this history deserves careful documentation. Someone had to do it. He decided that someone would be him.

The St. Jude campaign captures something similar. The Apple podcasting world is good at enthusiasm and analysis. It's rarer to see it redirect that energy toward something with stakes outside the Apple ecosystem. Hackett made that turn because his personal history demanded it, and his audience followed because the demand was clearly genuine.

He's also been steadily skeptical of industry hype in ways that distinguish him from the booster wing of Apple media. His 2025-2026 writing on AI skepticism - including attention to environmental and labor costs - reads like someone who watched the iPhone era unfold without losing the capacity to ask whether something new is actually good. That's a harder position to maintain than it looks.

None of this is accidental. It's the result of building slowly, staying independent, and choosing Memphis over the tech cluster. The distance, it turns out, is a feature.