Writing a sort of retrospective of Cook’s tenure as Apple CEO. It’s getting long (currently 3,800 words) and certainly not pretty. I’ll hopefully publish it later tonight.

I haven't been feeling great lately. Imagine having a bad cold+cough on top of your usual allergies. Hence the radio silence.

I’ll write here the exact comment I left on the video (a comment probably no one will see because there were already 4,630 comments when I added it):

Either Mr Green is a gullible fool, or he's getting paid by Anthropic. Don't waste 50 minutes of your life watching this.

#FuckAI

UPGRADING a MacBook Neo using iPhone Parts YouTube video by dosdude1

He (dosdude) is the best.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIeE...

I know it’s not ideal for an iOS/Mac developer to support iOS/Mac OS versions prior to 26.

It’s also not ideal for me to have to update my device to iOS/Mac OS 26 just to try your app out.

So… I wish you well, I guess.

Current mood: I don’t even know what the fuck to talk about.

Has anyone thought about making a Pokémon-themed CAPTCHA and calling it PICAPTCHA? 😁

⑫ When I see those celebrations… “50 years of thinking differently”, I just shake my head. It’s time WE the customers started thinking differently and progressively detach ourselves from this toxic relationship with a company that doesn’t really care about us anymore.

(Ads in Apple Maps. I mean!) 🔚

⑪ So yeah, not surprising that they’re officially giving up on it. Like a socially awkward person who finally realises and admits they really screwed up big time. At that party. All those years ago.

⑩ “But look, it’s still expandable!”, they point at proprietary slots, while the motherboard sports an SoC with integrated CPU, GPU, and storage. The tagline for that Mac Pro should have been “This is really it. You can’t make this shit up.”

⑨ The 2023 Apple Silicon Mac Pro is existing evidence that today’s Apple does not understand an important segment of their audience. It’s a machine that looks like the result of someone at Apple asking ChatGPT how to make a new Mac Pro.

⑧ And this Apple doesn’t care. They still have an amazing hardware prowess, but they don’t care. It’s too much work. These ‘professionals’ are a niche¹, it’s not worth it.

___
¹ They're really not.

⑦ In this scenario, a machine like the good old expandable Mac Pro is viewed as a high-maintenance one. If you make one (or more) slot for custom graphics cards, you have to work with graphics card makers to provide an always up-to-date support for past, present, and future cards. And so forth.

⑥ And it’s all made with one priority: it has to be as low-maintenance as possible (from Apple’s viewpoint). So we have increasingly closed, un-expandable Macs. Here are some more ports if you need to connect something.

⑤ But Apple today just wants to sell as much stuff to as many people as possible. There is almost no more ‘tailoring’ in their products. There is a very much consumer-first mentality (consumer as opposed to pro), so their offerings are more ‘general purpose’ than they used to be.

④ When Apple was excellent at a selected few things, they had razor focus and were very receptive to the needs of their customers. The pre-2013 Mac Pros were great because Apple knew AND CARED ABOUT what professionals wanted from it.

③ One sin of Cook’s Apple I’ll never forgive is wanting to be everywhere and keep adding platforms and services. Apple went from being excellent at a selected few things to being mediocre at many things.

② And waiting 6 years to get back to an expandable tower design was too little too late.

The Mac Pro fuckup is another ramification of the ‘spreading themselves too thin’ Apple issue.

① Yes, let’s celebrate 50 years of Apple just when they announce the end of the Mac Pro.

Not that I had any illusion about seeing another one. As soon as I looked at the 2013 CIAMA model (CIAMA=Can’t Innovate Anymore My Ass), I knew Apple was taking the wrong turn in the Mac Pro evolution roadmap.

YouTube algorithm: here are some videos about older cars and car restorations, and also some videos about BeamNG Drive car mods and customisation.

Me: I can’t say which is which at first glance. 🤣

This is how I’ve been listening to music on the go for a year now. Which is how I’ve always listened to music on the go before streaming services got popular. One of my several iPods (today it was a 4th-gen iPod touch), a good pair of WIRED headphones, and off I merrily go.

“My first PC Build!” YouTube video.

2019 reaction: Oh, that’s very cool! Love the case design!
2026 reaction: You filthy rich bastard, get fucked!

Malapropism of the day, again thanks to a comment on YouTube.

“I was on defense about picking the leather strap vs the steel bracelet”

(In case you’re confused, what they meant to write is “I was ON THE FENCE about…”)

Earlier today, I spent a couple of hours doing stuff on my Power Mac G4 Cube running Mac OS X Tiger and on my 17-inch PowerBook G4 running Leopard.

I almost had tears in my eyes for how just utterly NICE the user experience was. I really wish I could do more with these machines today.

@getwired.com I'm reading your latest, "AI is Sea Monkeys", and I think it's a phenomenal essay!

A few notes about the MacBook Neo The MacBook Neo is overall a very nice machine. This isn't a review, just a few bullet-point impressions after trying one in person.

New, on Morrick.​me — A few notes about the MacBook Neo: morrick.me/archives/10286

Sorry, the last decade really doesn’t count.

The sheer amount of common-sense grenades Dr Collier throws around is exhilarating!

I was actually cheering as the video progressed.

I love the new Nothing (4a) and (4a) Pro phones.

Nothing is rekindling something inside me that used to happen only in the good Apple days: making me want to upgrade even if my current Nothing Phone (2a) is absolutely fine for my needs and still works just as great as the first day I got it.

These two phones are still snappy today, are very pocketable, don’t have stupid camera bumps and notches, can be operated with one hand, and still sport this timeless design. And while I wish iOS 10 and 12 were more skeuomorphic, they’re not as 2D-flat as iOS 7.