Apple – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

Shutterstock 1766228261.

Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.) Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Apple Pulls The Plug On The Mac Pro

Something, something, something about writing on the wall

Apple is finally pulling the plug on the Mac Pro, long after the water was drained out that tub.

Id mac pro 2019.

According to reports the Mac Pro no longer appears on Apple’s website and Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer that line of hardware going forward.

The end of the product line is less of a surprise than the fact that Apple was still selling Mac Pros up until today. It’s a move that has been obvious ever since the advent of the Mac Studio in the Apple silicon era began replacing the high end desktop for high end customers.

Farewell and adieu.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

AntiFreeze: A Web Based Solution To Track ICE

Life and the web finds a way

Remember ICEBlock? The app created for iPhone users to track and alert others of ICE activities nearby? You know the one that Apple and Google blocked. There were several others that got blocked as well.

In this moment of something new and horrible to distract attention from the latest happening almost every hour, ICE activities might have faded from the headlines, but those activities haven’t ceased.

joshuahacks has created a progressive web app called AntiFreeze. From his post on Daily Kos:

AntiFreeze lets anyone anonymously report an ICE sighting. When someone submits a report, every user within five miles gets a push notification on their phone in real time. If ICE is spotted four blocks from your house while you’re making dinner, your phone buzzes and tells you.

But it’s not just alerts… Open the app and you can see a map or list of every reported sighting within 25 miles from the last 72 hours. So even if you missed a notification, you can check what’s been happening in your area before you head to work, drop your kids off at school, or go to the grocery store.

No login. No account. No personal data collected. Completely anonymous.

You can read all about it and find out how to use it on that post. As the developer and author says, “It works. It’s free. And nobdy can take it away from you.”

Who’d a thunk that the web could be the answer?

(images are from screenshots of The AntiFreeze app and website

Sunday Morning Reading

Life is a roll of the loaded dice

Nostalgia can be a mind fuck. Democracy, journalism, personal computing, they all feel like games with rules we all understood. No longer. Yes, the house always wins. Especially when everything feels like a war we’re not sure is beginning of ending. When all bets are off if feels more like sticking your head in the mouth of a tiger than a roll of the dice. Yet we play on. Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading.

Eyestetix studio m0EzHtexapU unsplash.

Kicking off is an excellent piece from JA Westenberg called Everything’s Casino. From Iran to the Dutch tulip crisis, with a dash of Dostoevsky. The section on When The Future Stopped Arriving is aces.

Follow that up Jon Ganz’s Command-Shift-War. Snake eyes.

Spend some time with this terrific series from Quinn Norton on Emptywheel that began a little over a year ago with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does. It concludes with an epilogue that is titled Small Models, Gently Loved, and subtitled An AI Speculative Fiction. It won’t spoil the rest of the series, so I’d suggest starting with that fictional epilogue, but also checking out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

John Gruber and Manton Reece both linked to this piece by Les Orchard called Grief And The AI Spit. I’m glad they did. You will be too.

Orchard’s piece above kicks off talking about how making computers do things is fun. Which is a nice companion to Sam Henri Gold’s reaction to Apple releasing the MacBook Neo called This Is Not The Computer For You. There’s nostalgia there, certainly. But I think it’s deeper than that. I’m betting Apple’s stake in the next game is solid.

Speaking of gambling, McKay Coppins was staked by his bosses at The Atlantic to a year long escapade to dive into the rise of gambling. His piece Sucker, tells the tale of his year as a degenerative gambler.

There’s an excellent series worth your attention from various writers on The Verge titled AI vs. The Pentagon: Killer Robots, Mass Surveillance, and The Red Lines. We sure are betting the farm on this, aren’t we?

If not advertising, then now what? That’s the question Hamilton Nolan poses in Patrons of Journalism.

In a piece on democracy dating back a few years, David Todd McCarty sticks his and our heads in the mouth of the tiger in Dreaming of Tigers. The house and the tiger always win.

(Image from Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.)

MacBook Neo-ing

Neo newness

On an errand with my wife I happened to be in the neighborhood of one of the two Apple Stores closest to me and decided to drop in and take a look at the new MacBook Neo.

The Citrius MacBook Neo on display at the Apple Store

I’m decidedly not in the market for one of these, but I imagine one of the folks I support will find this more than suitable for their next computer. My intent was to just handle the machine a bit and see if the build felt as nice as most of the very raving reviews say it does. Bottom line, it does.

As I said in an earlier post, I think all things being not equal, the price point is the feature of note for this device. And based on reviews I’m seeing, I think that more than holds.

Speaking of, you might want to check out Sam Henri Gold’s thoughts in This Is Not The Computer For You. I concur with his points on the impact this move by Apple is going to have. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.

He has decided he’ll be fine.

Lots of people are going to be fine with the MacBook Neo. And that’s fine.

It was tough to snap any good pictures that captured the colors of the new Neos (is that redundant?) on display because the Apple Store lighting, the new colors, and iPhone photography just weren’t working that well together. But I fired off the camera for a few you can see in the gallery below.

It’s a good thing they provided matching tinted display pads for each different color, except the Indigo model in the first picture. Almost as if they knew.

The next two shots in the top row feature the Blush and Citrus versions from the front and behind. The larger one show the size different between the Citrus flavored Neo and the MacBook Air.

On the way out of the store as we were passing the iPhone display, we noticed that the iPhones were synced to run the same ads for F1 that you see before any Apple TV offering of the moment. The different ad images race across each of the separated screens. Neat effect, but it made my wife, who, like I, is sick and tired of seeing these already, stifle a curse until we got out of the store.

The Gadget Price Conundrum That Isn’t Really A Conundrum

A future of haves and have less

It’s always fun watching folks trying to shoehorn yesterday’s conventional wisdom into tomorrow’s reality. It might feel like dealing with a today thing, but it’s actually making the point by missing it.

Julia taubitz 3X8a5pxNG4k unsplash.

Recently I’ve seen lots of blogging and social media mouthing off that such and such a device is boring, or isn’t innovative enough, or just iterates on last year’s model. Pick a device category and you’ll find a chorus singing that song. In the wake of Apple releasing the $599 MacBook Neo this week, which as a device seems anything but boring, I’ve seen plenty of folks complaining about the tech Apple left out to hit that low price point.

But that low price point is the point. And it’s not just a way to expand the market to more cost conscious consumers. That will happen of course. But Apple is opening up a future of higher price points for newer tech by now selling these lower priced Macs and iPhones that are anything but the low priced junk it once dismissed.

In case you’ve missed it there’s been a lot of preparation to condition the market for more advanced and more innovative tech that’s going to cost considerably more than what the median has been for quite some time.

No one knows for sure, but folding iPhones are predictably going to rival folding smartphone price points of other makers, and be much more expensive than what most consumers (I’m not talking tech writers and gadget bloggers) are used to seeing.

Whether costs go up because of new tech and new innovations, DRAM shortages, tariffs, wars, or what have you, the point is Apple, Samsung, and others are seeding the low end of the pricing fields to create more room for more expensive tech in the higher, richer pastures. Tech is poised to make some bolder moves, or so they tell us, but not everyone is going to be able to afford to play on the high end. But there is an essential, increasingly more marginalized market, perhaps not as lucrative on the margins, but still worth harvesting.

It’s no different than seeing the mix of higher end vehicles in the same traffic jam alongside rusting out beaters on the highway.

It’s actually and accurately a pretty sober assessment of how the frame of income inequality is gaining a more intense focus lately, even though it’s been that way for quite some time. Unless we’re EMP’d back to the Stone Age, tactile tech in our hands is going to be a part of all of our lives for quite some time. (Call me when you can do a video doctor’s appointment on an AI pin.) We’re just going to see a broader gap between what’s essential to have and what’s nice to have if you can afford it.

(Image from Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Apple’s MacBook Neo Will Probably Hit Many Sweet Spots

The sweet spot that matters most is the price

I support a number of folks, both older and younger, who only use computers in the same basic way they use their smartphones. I’m thinking Apple’s new MacBook Neo, with a starting price of $599 will hit many of their sweet spots.

Of course, we’ll all have to wait for the reviews after the first wave of reviews, the ones that real users take the time to share before we really know what’s what. But if nothing else the pricing is going to be one of, if not the, winning feature. If the build quality lives up to what Apple usually provides I’m guessing it will be a hit, and sell millions, adding new opportunities for Apple Services revenue growth.

I saw someone somewhere yesterday say that you can buy an also newly introduced iPhone 17e alongside a MacBook Neo for the same price of the base MacBook Air. They are not far off. The number of iPhone users I know who have shied away from Mac computers, simply because of price, will I’m sure will be checking this out, especially since you’ll be seeing them on sale at Walmart, Best Buy and other outlets. Certainly given that possible customers will be able to see these computers in locations no where near Apple Stores.

Online chatter is about as you’d expect with both positive and negatives responses to the announcement. The negatives focus on what Apple did not include and lesser specs than existing MacBook lines. But in the end, the spec that matters is that $599 starting price. My guess is the online chatter and the reviews are going to be largely irrelevant regarding the success of this product.

You can watch Apple’s clever product intro video below.

Sunday Morning Reading

Slicing life close to the bone

It could be said that the world is off its axis. Or it could be said that we’re just slicing the meat closer and closer to the bone. Because we don’t know what we don’t know about the war the U.S and Israel launched against Iran I’ll leave off any direct links on that topic for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. Be warned though, some might be peripherally related. Things happen that way. I’m sure there will be plenty to share in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, here is the usual serving of links on a variety of topics that caught my eye this week. You’re on your own for the tzatziki.

Parthenon 14.

David Todd McCarty is bringing his writings from other platforms to his own site, and some of his earlier writings often strike with new currency. This piece, Defiantly Daft, Duplicity Delicious is certainly one that does.

What is journalism for? Good question these days, but it’s actually been an important one for quite awhile. Take a look at this piece from 1989 from Janet Malcolm called The Journalist And The Murder-I.

Journalism, like everything else, might be under fire at the moment, some of it friendly, some of it not so. Check out Zack Whittaker’s adventure in FBI Agents Visited My Home About An Article I Wrote, And Now I Can’t Go To Mexico.

Tom Nichols says The Republican Party Has A Nazi Problem. Well, duh.

One of the many charges against Artificial Intelligence is what it will do to the cost of the energy needed to power it. Chris Castle takes a look in Update: Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection” Pitch Becomes A Private Power Plan for AI — But Grassroots Revolt Won’t Fade. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

Apple is about to release a number of products this week at a time that it is under increased criticism on a number of fronts. Recently, Jason Snell of Six Colors released The Six Colors Report Card, in which he surveys a number of the Apple faithful on how things went in the last year and compares that to year’s previous. The scores are always interesting, but the commentary is even more so, which you can read here. Also of interest is Kieran Healy’s charting out the bad vibes based on that commentary.

Speaking of Apple, Wesley Hilliard takes a look at some of those bad vibes in Apple’s Week February 27: Chasing The Puck.

On a local Chicago front and also on the tech beat, The Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board takes on a local (yet owned by Albertsons) grocery store’s shopping app in Fix Your Lousy Shopping App, Jewel-Osco! Having suffered through using this app, and watching store personnel and other customers show their distaste for it, I can agree. Fix the lousy app.

Libraries, like so much else, are under attack these days. So this piece from 2017 from Eliza McGraw reminds us of a bit of history. Check out Horse-Riding Librarians Were The Great Depression’s Bookmobiles. Knowledge, like life, finds a way.

Buttons, Buttons, Who Designs These Buttons?

Designing for dummies

Tossing this tidbit on the growing bonfire that burns around Apple’s design flaws, this Apple Watch screen drives me nuts.

Close-up of a person’s wrist wearing an Apple Watch displaying a bright orange screen that reads “Timer Done 3 MIN,” with cancel and repeat icons, in a cluttered home office setting.

It shows up when a Timer expires. I get that there needs to be two options: stop the Timer or reset it to go round again, but if that gigantic circle in the middle doesn’t scream STOP, I don’t know what else does. I reach to press it each time.

And in the context of design being not just about how something looks, but also how it works, there is that repeat button. Its functionality doesn’t make sense. If I set a Timer for something I’m cooking for 20 minutes or so, why would I want it to completely reset to 20 minutes if I determine whatever I’m cooking needs another minute or two?

Also interesting, if you use the Wrist Flick gesture it doesn’t provide you with options, it just stops the Timer. It’s not that I think options are needed, but if the only one besides stopping the Timer is to repeat the full Timer than the watch face UI makes no sense to me.

I think the entirety of this needs to be rethought.

Apple’s Color Wheelies

Color me a gadget utilitarian

I’ve never been one to be that obsessed with the color of tech gadgets or any of the other tools I use. Sure, colors attract, and I’m all in for more color rather than less in many things, but I’ve never been one who has made a gadget purchase based on color.

CleanShot 2026-02-23 at 11.21.19@2x.

In fact, I usually shy away from bolder color choices. I’ve typically chosen whatever version Apple is marketing as black when it comes to iPhones and whatever case I bury them in. I do the same for laptops, not straying too far from silver or occasionally the variant of Space Black that seems to change more frequently than I imagine happens in the dark depths of space. I do own a Blue iMac 24, but the last time I really saw the “blue” on the rear of the enclosure was when I set up the device.

I feel the much the same when it comes to other non-computing tools. Walking through a hardware store I always view the bright green, bright orange, red, aqua, and other multi-color designs of drills, other hand held tools, lawn care equipment, etc… as somehow cheaper than those with a more muted approach. They look more utilitarian, and frankly, suggest longer lifespans. As my grandkids age and I shop for their gifts, the more brightly colored tools look like toys to me.

I know I’m probably the oddball when it comes to color coveting. There certainly seems to be a lot of excitement about Apple presumably releasing new products with a slew of new color options soon. But I think of my computing devices the same way I do other tools. I acquire and use them to complete a task. Many others see them as personal statements and that’s cool. More power to those who need that or appreciate that sort of whimsy.

Another way I think of this is that if a tool maker needs to market new colors to keep customers excited about their products, it means the product has probably reached maturity enough to more than prove its value. But that doesn’t always keep the marketers employed.

(Images from 9to5Mac and MacRumors)