Tag: Apple

Categories
AI Silicon Valley Technology

The View from the Edge

“Living on the edge” usually means you’re taking risks. One of the guests on the More or Less podcast used it the other way: as a diagnosis. A description of people who’ve lost their depth perception.

From where they sit, it looks like everyone is moving. The feeds are full of demos. The group chats debate which model won the week. Colleagues are building agents that book their dentist appointments and summarize their email while they sleep. David Sparks is selling a Robot Assistant Field Guide. The frontier feels like the present tense — not where things are heading, but where things already are.

When everyone around you has already crossed a threshold, you stop being able to see the threshold. You mistake the edge for the center.

The primary point — that the tech community wildly overestimates how much ordinary people want AI in their lives — lands harder when you hold it against that image. It’s not that the industry is wrong about the technology. It’s that it has miscalibrated the desire. Most people aren’t trying to optimize their Tuesday. They’re just trying to get through it. An always-on personal agent isn’t a solution to a problem they’re carrying.

Think about the woman in the Safeway parking lot, sitting in her car for three minutes before going in, scrolling back through her texts to find the thing her husband asked her to pick up. Egg product and cheddar cheese. She finds it, pockets her phone, and goes inside. The whole problem — the forgetting, the retrieval, the solution — lasted less time than it takes to read about it. She didn’t need an agent. She needed three minutes and a text thread she already had.

The edge distorts in a specific way: it makes appetite look like inevitability. From out there, adoption feels like a question of when, not whether. But whether is a real question. Most technology that could be woven into daily life never is — not because people couldn’t learn it, but because they didn’t want what it offered badly enough to bother.

The view from the edge is intoxicating. Everything looks like signal. But the middle is where most people live, and from there the signal looks a lot more like noise.

Which is why WWDC matters more than any model release this year. Apple doesn’t sell to people living on the edge. It sells to people who just want their phone to work. If Apple makes AI invisible enough — tucked into the camera, the keyboard, the thing that finds your photos — it stops being something you adopt and becomes something you already have. That’s a different motion entirely. Not convincing people they want AI. Delivering it before the question occurs to them.

Whether Apple can actually pull that off is a separate argument. But the watershed, if it comes, won’t look like a frontier crossing. It’ll look like a Tuesday that went slightly smoother than usual. Most people won’t even notice the edge they just walked past.

We will find out in a week or so.

Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.

Categories
Technology

The Silence of Glass

There is a moment, right before surgery, when the anesthesiologist asks you to count backward from ten. You get to seven, maybe six, and then the world goes clean and white. Scientists have a word for the material responsible for that transition: borosilicate. The same compound in the syringe barrel is in the telescope mirror trained on the Andromeda galaxy, in the fiber strand carrying the surgeon’s consultation with a colleague three thousand miles away, in the smartphone screen the patient’s wife is staring at in the waiting room, hands shaking, refreshing nothing.

Glass is everywhere and we have made it invisible, which is the oldest trick civilization knows.

Vaclav Smil argues in Making the Modern World that the most consequential material of the last two centuries is not steel or silicon or oil. It is float glass — invented by Alastair Pilkington in 1959, when he watched dishwater spread across his kitchen sink and understood something that had eluded glassmakers for four hundred years. Pour molten glass onto a bath of molten tin and it finds its own level. It becomes, on its own, perfectly flat. Every window, phone screen, solar panel, and architectural facade descends from a man watching his wife do dishes.

What Smil doesn’t quite say — though you feel it accumulating across his pages — is that glass is the one material that consistently mediates between the inner and the outer. Not metaphorically. Literally. It stands at the boundary and says: you may look, but you may not touch.

The fiber optic cable looks like nothing. Pull back the orange jacket and you find strands thinner than a human hair, each one pure silica glass so precisely drawn that a photon launched into one end will emerge after sixty miles having lost less than five percent of its energy. That number seems impossible. It is a kind of miracle achieved through obsessive purity: any contaminant at the molecular level, any stress in the crystal lattice, any deviation in the core diameter, and the light scatters and dies. Underneath every ocean, through every mountain, connecting data centers in Virginia to servers in Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of kilometers of this material, laid in darkness, carrying light.

I think about that sometimes when I hit send. The electrons leave my keyboard, convert to photons at some local junction, and then travel — genuinely travel, as light through glass — to wherever they are going. There is something devotional about it, though I can’t quite say why. Maybe it’s the invisibility. Maybe it’s the faith required — that the thing you release will arrive, intact, somewhere it has never been.

Glass is in the MRI machine and the X-ray plate and the laboratory flask where the drug was first synthesized and the vial where it is stored and the syringe through which it enters the body. Glass does not react. It does not corrode. It does not leach. This chemical inertness, which seems like absence, is actually the whole point. Medicine needed a container that would hold the thing without becoming it.

There is also glass in the eye reading the label on that vial. The human lens is, optically speaking, a soft glass. It focuses, ages, clouds — cataracts are the eye’s glass going milky — and the surgeon replaces it with an intraocular lens engineered to behave like glass. We have spent considerable effort making fake versions of something the body was already doing.

For most of human history, clear glass was expensive, fragile, and small. Window glass in medieval Europe admitted light hazily, like looking through ice. Clear vision was for churches, which is perhaps why we came to associate light with the sacred — it literally arrived, in those buildings, in a way it did not arrive anywhere else. Then Pilkington’s tin bath made clarity cheap, and the world changed in ways nobody fully catalogued because the change was so pervasive: big windows, watched experiments, extended growing seasons, telescopes reaching farther, microscopes going smaller. Each a story of glass making a distance crossable that was not crossable before.

The screen I am writing this on is glass. The Corning Gorilla Glass on this display is an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet, chemically strengthened through ion exchange, harder than most knives, clear enough that the pixels look like they are sitting on the surface rather than behind it. Apple spends considerable engineering effort making the glass seem like it isn’t there. The ideal phone screen is invisible. A window to computation.

And yet the glass is the thing you actually touch. All day. More than you touch almost anyone. The glass is warm from your hands. It has learned, in a way, the pressure of your thumbs.

Glass is the material of thresholds — it makes the threshold visible, makes it possible to stand at a door and see all the way through before you decide whether to enter. We built the internet through it. We see our loved ones through it. We study cancer through it. We watch the news through glass that traveled to us through glass captured by cameras with glass sensors launched on satellites with glass lenses through a sky that is itself, technically, a lens — bending and filtering the light from everything that has ever been.

In the hospital waiting room, the wife is still holding her phone. The screen has gone dark. She taps it. It lights up. She looks at her own reflection for a moment — the screen a mirror now — before the notification arrives and the glass goes transparent again, the way it always does, showing her something other than herself.

That is what glass does. It waits. It holds. And then, when there is something to show, it gets out of the way.

Categories
Apple Business

The Architecture of Subtraction

Hold an iPhone in your hand, or run your fingers along the cold, machined edge of a MacBook. What you are feeling isn’t just glass and aluminum; you are feeling the physical manifestation of a thousand invisible rejections.

We are conditioned to think of creation as an additive process. But true institutional excellence operates in reverse. It is an act of relentless, unsentimental subtraction.

A few years ago, Tim Cook articulated what became known as the “Cook Doctrine.” It is meant to answer the existential question of what makes Apple, Apple. Reading through it, what strikes me isn’t the corporate ambition, but the brutal, uncompromising geometry of its choices.

We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing. We’re constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.

The gravity of that doctrine doesn’t live in the pursuit of “great products.” Everyone claims to want that. The gravity lives in the tension between wanting to do everything and having the discipline to do almost nothing.

“Saying no to thousands of projects” is easy to write on a slide. It is agonizing to practice in reality. It means looking at a perfectly good idea—perhaps even a highly profitable idea—and killing it because it dilutes the core mission. It is the architectural equivalent of leaving vast amounts of empty space in a room so that the few pieces of furniture inside it can actually breathe.

I think about the times in my own career when I lacked that specific kind of courage. I have held onto projects that had long since lost their spark, simply because of the sunk costs. I have said yes to interesting distractions that slowly eroded my focus on the essential work. We dilute our attention not because we intend to fail, but because the alternative—staring at a promising path and refusing to walk down it—feels entirely unnatural.

That is where Cook’s point about “self-honesty” becomes the linchpin. You cannot admit you are wrong unless you have created a culture where the truth outranks the ego. The deep collaboration Cook speaks of isn’t just about sharing resources; it’s about sharing the burden of that honesty. It is a collective agreement to not settle, to look at a nearly finished product and have the courage to say, this isn’t right yet.

Ultimately, the Cook Doctrine isn’t a strategy for building computers. It is an observation about human nature. The future is only guaranteed for those who can afford to survive the present—and survival demands knowing exactly what you are not.

The chaos isn’t an obstacle to the mission; it is the environment in which the mission earns its meaning.

Excellence is not just about what you build. It is also about what you are willing to destroy.

Categories
AI Mac

The Dangerous Allure of the Digital Butler

“I’ve never seen anything so impressive in its ability to do my work for me… Now, why did I turn it off?” — David Sparks

For decades, the holy grail of personal computing has been the “digital butler.” We don’t just want tools that help us work; we want entities that do the work for us. We want to hand off the “donkey work”—the invoicing, the password resets, the mundane email triage—so we can focus on being creative. David Sparks recently built this exact dream using a project called OpenClaw. And then, just as quickly, he killed it.

Sparks’ experiment was a tantalizing glimpse into the near future. He set up an independent Mac Mini running OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, and gave it the keys to a limited portion of his digital kingdom. The results were nothing short of magical. He went to sleep, and while he dreamt, his agent woke up. It read customer emails, accessed his course platform, reset passwords, issued refunds, and drafted polite replies for him to review before sending. It was the productivity equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. The friction of administrative drudgery had simply vanished.

But his dream dissolved at 2:00 AM.

The paradox of AI agents is that for them to be useful, they must have access. They need the keys to the castle. Yet, the entire history of cybersecurity has been built on the opposite principle: keeping things out. Sparks realized that by empowering this agent, he had created a serious vulnerability.

The breaking point wasn’t a complex hack, but a simple realization about the nature of these systems. He had programmed a secret passphrase to secure the bot, thinking he was clever. But in the middle of the night, a cold thought woke him: Is the passphrase in the logs?

He went downstairs, asked the bot, and the bot cheerfully replied:

“Yes, David, it is. It’s in the log. Would you like me to show you the log?”

That moment of cheerful, robotic incompetence highlights the terrifying gap between capability and safety. Sparks nuked the system, wiped the drives, and unplugged the machine. He realized that while he is an expert in automation, he is not a security engineer, and the current tools are not ready to defend against bad actors who are.

We are standing on the precipice of a new era where our computers will starting to work for us rather than just with us. But as Sparks discovered, the bridge to that future isn’t built yet. At least not securely built. Until the community figures out how to secure an entity that needs access to function, we are better off doing that donkey work ourselves than handing the keys to a gullible ghost.

But it won’t be long… Dr. Alex Wisner-Gross reports:

The Singularity is now managing its own headcount. In China, racks of Mac Minis are being used to host OpenClaw agents as “24/7 employees,” effectively creating a synthetic workforce in a closet. The infrastructure for this new population is exploding.

Categories
Apple

About that 11-inch MacBook Air!

9to5Mac has a story today about Apple officially declaring obsolete the 11-inch MacBook Air.

Of all of the Macs I’ve owned over the years, the 11-inch Air that I used years ago undoubtedly logged more keystrokes from me than any other.

The Air was sold from 2010 to 2015 and my recollection is mine was a second generation Air. It went with me everywhere I went – home, office, coffee shops, libraries, client locations, you name it.

At the office and at home I had large displays that I plugged into the Air. The transition back and forth from the builtin screen to the larger displays worked great.

I can’t really remember why I eventually retired it. I think I upgraded to a 13-inch Air. But I’ve got so many fond memories of that smaller Air and what a great platform it was for all of the work I needed to do. I was always sad that Apple never saw fit to replace it but instead upscale to the larger models. Looks like it’s finally time to declare those 11-inch Airs to just be museum pieces!

Categories
Apple iPhone Photography

Take Better Photos on iPhone

I recently attended one of the new Today at Apple workshops that was all about taking better photos on your iPhone. I attended the session at the Apple Park Visitor Center which is just adjacent to the big “Apple ring” building in Cupertino.

I’m a very experienced user of the iPhone’s Camera app and also am very familiar with editing images in the Photos app. But I was curious to see how Apple was teaching photography in this new workshop – and I’m glad I went! There were about 15 others also participating (in a very busy venue filled with folks looking at all manner of Apple products before tomorrow’s kickoff of WWDC week at Apple Park.

The workshop began with a review of the Camera app that walked through all of its capabilities for both photos and videos. It was a great reminder about some of the features (and important settings) in Camera.

Next was a workshop breaking out how to take various kinds of images. Most interesting was the discussion and practice using portrait mode with suggestions like always shooting portraits using the Mac telephoto lens to cast your subjects in the most favorable way.

The session ended with a review of the editing capabilities of the Photos app. The workshop was taught in a fun and positive manner that made it quite enjoyable. I’m glad I participated!

Categories
AI Apple History iPhone

An iPhone in 1900?

This morning I was listening to one of Dwarkesh Patel’s latest podcasts when he happened to muse about why an iPhone wasn’t possible in the year 1000. A crazy idea or so it seemed to me!

But it got me wondering about that same question in years closer to when the iPhone was actually introduced in 2007.

I opened up Google Gemini (using the new 2.5 Flash model) and had a fascinating conversation. “A conversation like no other!” as Mark Halperin likes to say on his 2Way conversations.

Here’s the final result – after I asked Gemini to summarize the conversation a bit and put it into Markdown format for blog posting. To be clear, I asked the questions and Gemini did the educating and writing. Enjoy!

Building an iPhone Through Time: Why 1900, 1950, and Even 2000 Couldn’t Do It

We take our smartphones for granted today. These sleek, powerful devices fit in our pockets, connecting us instantly to the world, housing vast libraries of information and entertainment, and performing complex computations. But have you ever stopped to wonder what it would take to build something like an iPhone in a different era?

Let’s take a little journey through time and see just how science-fiction the iPhone would have seemed not so long ago.

The Utter Impossibility of 1900

Imagine walking into a workshop in 1900 and asking them to build you an iPhone. Their reaction would likely range from utter confusion to thinking you were stark mad. In 1900, the concept was not just difficult; it was fundamentally impossible.

  • Computing: The most advanced computing devices were mechanical or early electromechanical machines like punch-card tabulators. There were no vacuum tubes yet for practical electronics, let alone transistors or integrated circuits. Building anything with the processing power of an iPhone, even using room-sized 1900 tech, was unimaginable.
  • Display: Visual output was limited to mechanical indicators or basic light bulbs. The cathode ray tube (CRT) was still experimental. A high-resolution color touchscreen was pure fantasy.
  • Connectivity: Wireless communication was in its absolute infancy (Marconi’s transatlantic signal was Morse code). Mobile voice communication was decades away. The idea of connecting a personal device to a global network was beyond comprehension.
  • Storage: Data storage meant punch cards or paper tape – storing a single song, let alone thousands, would require a library-sized collection and complex machinery to read it.
  • Power: Batteries were bulky and low-capacity. Powering complex electronics wasn’t feasible for a portable device.
  • Size: Components were large, assembly was manual. Miniaturization to pocket size was impossible due to the fundamental physics and engineering available.

In 1900, an iPhone was not just science fiction; it was magic. You couldn’t build it because the scientific knowledge and engineering capabilities simply did not exist.

Closer, But Still Impossible in 1950

Fast forward 50 years to 1950. We’ve made incredible strides!

  • The transistor has been invented (1947), a crucial step beyond vacuum tubes.
  • Early electronic computers exist, albeit massive, expensive, and less powerful than today’s simplest chips.
  • CRTs are common (the television era is beginning), allowing for monochrome displays.
  • Radio communication is much more advanced, and early, very limited forms of mobile radio-telephony (like bulky car phones) are being experimented with.
  • Basic magnetic storage (tape, drums) exists.

So, could you build an iPhone now? Still impossible, but for slightly different reasons.

  • Integrated Circuits (Chips): The ability to put thousands or millions of transistors onto a single piece of silicon – the foundation of modern electronics – hadn’t been invented yet (that came in the late 1950s). Building an iPhone’s processor or memory still required assembling thousands of individual, relatively large components.
  • Miniaturization: While better than 1900, components were still too large and power-hungry for a handheld device with complex functionality. A computer capable of iPhone-like tasks would still be room-sized.
  • Display: While you could have a small monochrome CRT, it would be bulky and fragile. A flat-panel, color, high-resolution, touch screen was completely out of reach.
  • Connectivity: Mobile communication existed, but not in a cellular format, and certainly not for high-speed data like internet Browse. Connecting a personal device to a data network wasn’t feasible or even conceived of in the modern sense.
  • Storage: Storing gigabytes of data in a portable way was impossible.
  • Operating System & Software: Programming was done at a very low level, and the concept of a sophisticated, user-friendly operating system running rich applications on a personal device didn’t exist.

In 1950, you could build pieces of the puzzle (a basic computer, a radio), but combining them into a compact, interactive, networked personal device was still beyond the technological horizon.

On the Brink? The Year 2000

Now, let’s jump to the year 2000. We’re only 7 years away from the first iPhone launch. Surely, we could build it now? Almost, but still extremely difficult and not the iPhone as we know it.

By 2000, most of the fundamental components did exist:

  • Powerful Microprocessors: Processors capable of running complex software were common.
  • Color LCDs: Standard in laptops and high-end mobile devices.
  • Wireless: 2G cellular networks were widespread (GPRS offered slow data). Wi-Fi existed (802.11b). Bluetooth was available. GPS was available for civilian use.
  • Batteries: Lithium-ion batteries were standard for portable electronics.
  • Flash Memory: Available, but expensive and lower density per chip compared to 2007.
  • Basic Sensors & Digital Cameras: Existed and were being integrated into some phones/PDAs, albeit low-resolution.

So, what was still missing or not mature enough to build the iPhone?

  1. Capacitive Multi-Touch Screen: This was the key missing piece for the iPhone’s revolutionary interface. While resistive touchscreens (used with a stylus) were common on PDAs, large, reliable, capacitive screens capable of registering multiple finger touches were not ready for mass production and integration into a consumer device.
  2. Affordable High-Density Flash Memory: While flash existed, putting 4GB or more into a phone was still prohibitively expensive for a mass-market product.
  3. Required Chip Integration & Miniaturization: While processors were capable, packing all the necessary components (CPU, GPU, wireless, memory, sensors, etc.) so tightly and efficiently into a thin, integrated System-on-a-Chip required manufacturing advancements still underway.
  4. Mobile OS Optimized for Touch & Data: Existing mobile operating systems (like Palm OS, Windows CE, Symbian) were designed around styluses, keyboards, and less data-intensive use. An OS built from the ground up for a finger-driven multi-touch interface and seamless internet use (like iOS) didn’t exist yet.
  5. Network Readiness: While GPRS offered data, the speeds weren’t truly conducive to a rich mobile web experience. Widespread 3G networks, necessary for faster data, were just starting to roll out or hadn’t launched yet in many areas.

In 2000, you could build a smartphone (like a BlackBerry or a Pocket PC phone) – a device combining calls with email, calendar, and basic web Browse, likely with a physical keyboard or stylus. But the seamless, touch-driven, media-rich, always-connected experience of the iPhone wasn’t possible yet because the critical enabling technologies and the specific level of integration weren’t mature or affordable enough.

When Did It All Come Together?

The technologies that were missing or immature in 2000 converged and matured rapidly in the years leading up to the iPhone’s launch in 2007:

  • ~2004-2006: Capacitive multi-touch display technology became viable for mass production. Flash memory density increased and prices dropped dramatically. 3G networks rolled out more widely.
  • ~2004-2007: Apple internally developed iOS and perfected the integration of hardware, software, and the multi-touch interface. Chip manufacturing allowed for the necessary miniaturization and power efficiency.
  • 2007: The culmination of these advancements arrived as the first iPhone, combining these previously missing/immature pieces into a revolutionary product.
  • 2008: The App Store launched, solidifying the software ecosystem that became central to the smartphone experience.

Looking back from 2025, it’s incredible to see how quickly technology evolved. What was pure fantasy in 1900 became a bulky, impossible dream in 1950, a collection of nearly-ready parts in 2000, and finally, a reality in 2007. The journey of the iPhone isn’t just a product story; it’s a testament to the accelerating pace of scientific discovery and engineering innovation over the last century.

Categories
Apple

When “Today at Apple” Lost Its Spark: A Fan’s Disappointment

Sketch Walk at an Apple Store

I used to be one of those people who’d eagerly check the “Today at Apple” schedule at my local Apple Store. There was something magical about walking into that sleek, glass-walled space and knowing I was about to learn something new—something creative. Whether it was a deep dive into photo editing on the iPad, a music production workshop with GarageBand, or even a coding session with Swift Playgrounds, these courses felt like a gateway to unlocking the full potential of Apple’s tools. They weren’t just tutorials; they were experiences that left you inspired, with skills you could actually use.

That was before Covid hit. Like so many things, “Today at Apple” had to adapt, and I get it—health and safety first. But what started as a necessary pivot to online sessions has, over time, turned into something else entirely. The program I once loved has been stripped down to the basics, and honestly, it’s disappointing.

The Golden Days of “Today at Apple”

Let me take you back. Picture this: It’s 2019, and I’m sitting in an Apple Store, surrounded by other curious minds, as an instructor walks us through advanced storytelling techniques using Final Cut Pro. We’re not just learning how to trim clips; we’re learning how to craft a narrative, how to use pacing and sound to evoke emotion. By the end of the session, I felt like I’d leveled up—not just in software proficiency, but in creativity. That was the beauty of “Today at Apple” back then. It wasn’t about teaching you the bare minimum; it was about pushing you to explore what was possible.

And it wasn’t just me. I’d see people of all ages—kids, professionals, retirees—engaging with these courses, each walking away with something valuable. The program had depth. It had variety. It had soul.

The Post-Covid Shift

Then came 2020. The world shut down, and so did the in-store “Today at Apple” program. When the program finally returned in person, it wasn’t the same. Gone were the advanced courses that challenged you to think differently. Instead, the curriculum now feels like a series of “Intro to [Insert Apple Product Here]” sessions.

Take the photography workshops, for example. Pre-Covid, you could attend a course on mastering manual camera settings or creating a photo essay. Now? It’s “How to Take a Great Photo with Your iPhone”—a session that, while useful for beginners, barely scratches the surface for anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with the Camera app. It’s like going from a masterclass to a quick-start guide.

Why This Matters

I know what you’re thinking: “It’s just a free course at an Apple Store. What did you expect?” Fair point. But here’s the thing—Apple has always positioned itself as a company that champions creativity. Their entire brand is built on the idea that their tools can help you “think different” and create something extraordinary. “Today at Apple” was a tangible extension of that ethos. It was a way for Apple to say, “Hey, we’re not just selling you a device; we’re giving you the skills to make something amazing with it.”

Now, it feels like they’re just checking a box. The courses are still there, but the heart is gone. It’s as if Apple has decided that most users only need the basics, and that’s a shame. Because the people who showed up to those advanced sessions? They were the ones pushing the boundaries, the ones who saw Apple’s tools as more than just gadgets—they saw them as instruments of creation.

A Plea to Apple

So, Apple, here’s my plea: Bring back the depth. Bring back the courses that challenge us, that inspire us to go beyond the basics. You’ve got the resources, the talent, and the audience. Don’t let “Today at Apple” remain a relic of what it once was.

In the meantime, I’ll keep my old course notes and screenshots from those pre-Covid sessions. They’re a reminder of a time when walking into an Apple Store meant more than just buying the latest iPhone—it meant learning how to make something beautiful with it at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

Note: this post was crafted by me with writing help from Grok by xAI.

Categories
Apple Apple Watch

The Mystery Behind Apple’s Closed Watch Face Ecosystem

I love my Apple Watch – mostly. But I am annoyed sometimes.

As I flip through fancy magazines on lazy Sunday afternoons, I find myself captivated by the high end watch advertisements showing the wide range of artistry of traditional watchmaking. The elegant faces, the intricate complications, the subtle play of light on carefully crafted dials – each design tells its own story. Yet when I turn to my Apple Watch’s Face Gallery hoping to recreate some of this horological magic, I hit an invisible wall.

Ten years after the Apple Watch’s debut, one question remains surprisingly unanswered: Why doesn’t Apple allow third-party developers to create custom watch faces?

The Untapped Potential

The business case seems compelling. Apple could:

  • Create a dedicated watch face marketplace
  • Generate new services revenue through face sales and subscriptions
  • Tap into the creativity of its vast developer community
  • Satisfy users’ desires for deeper personalization

Yet Apple – a company that has masterfully monetized its app ecosystems – continues to keep watch face development strictly in-house, with only luxury brands Hermès and Nike gaining special access.

Potential Roadblocks

Several theories might explain Apple’s reluctance:

1. Intellectual Property Concerns

The luxury watch industry fiercely protects its designs. Opening up watch face development could lead to a flood of knockoffs mimicking high-end timepieces, potentially creating legal headaches for Apple. The company may prefer avoiding this minefield entirely.

2. Technical Considerations

The Apple Watch isn’t just about displaying time – it’s a complex device balancing accuracy, battery life, and functionality. Third-party faces could potentially:

  • Impact battery performance
  • Interfere with complications and sensors
  • Compromise the watch’s core timekeeping reliability

While Apple could theoretically create a protected framework for developers, the technical challenges might outweigh the benefits.

3. Brand Control

Apple’s notorious attention to design extends to every pixel on its devices. Watch faces are quite literally the face of the product – perhaps Apple simply isn’t willing to cede control over such a visible aspect of the user experience.

4. Priority Management

With Apple pushing into new territories like Vision Pro and advancing existing products, custom watch faces might simply rank low on the priority list. The current selection, while limited, satisfies most users’ basic needs.

Looking Ahead

Will Apple ever open up watch face development? The success of other customization platforms (like custom keyboards on iOS) shows that Apple can loosen its grip when the time is right. But for now, the company seems content to maintain its walled garden of watch faces, leaving us to wonder what creative designs the developer community might have offered.

What do you think? Is Apple being overly protective, or are there valid reasons to keep watch face development in-house? Share your thoughts in the comments below.