Apple – Page 3 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

A basket of good writing to share

For those who celebrate Easter and Passover, and all who do not celebrate either, may you find some bit of peace on this Sunday morning, however you see yourself and the world. I’d like to say this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is filled with Easter eggs, but instead it’s just the usual basket stuffed with links to interesting topics and stories that I like to share. Enjoy.

It’s good to be seen, certainly the way you see yourself. When seen by someone who doesn’t know you, that’s eye-opening. Check out Natasha MH’s The Taxi Driver Knew.

The war that isn’t a war in Iran continues. Whatever that story is, it is still being written. Given that this might be heading to the culmination of a conflict that has simmered, and occasionally boiled over, for decades if not longer, there are a few stories out there that offer preface. He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb by David D. Kirkpatrick is one worth reading.

JA Westenberg’s The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation of Entrepreneurs is also one heckuva a read. There’s nothing passive about this take.

Seva Gunitsky takes on The Incel Global Order. Somebody needs to.

As the technology we use advances, in some spheres some are stepping back. Joshua Cohen takes a look in Sweden Goes Back To Basics, Swapping Screens For Books In The Classroom.

Social Media is under the microscope again after two recent court verdicts against Meta. Chris Castle takes a look with The Social Media Verdicts Are In. Now Ask The Hard Question: Where Was The Board? Counting the money, I imagine. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

In the category of no easy answers, Mathew Ingram also examines what’s going on in social media with Social Media May Be Bad For You But The Remedy Could Be Worse.

On the Artificial Intelligence front there are always interesting topics cooking as the AI purveyors cook the planet. I wrote about two fascinating pieces yesterday, and today I’m highlighting Angela Fu’s An AI Company Set Out To Fix News Deserts. Instead, It Copied Local Journalists Work. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing more of this going forward.

Apple is, I assume, winding up its week celebrating its 50th Anniversary. So much has been written on that topic because there is indeed much to celebrate and much history to contemplate while looking ahead. Here are four pieces that caught my eye, the first three primarily because they are more personal than historical, the fourth is a look ahead.

John Moltz gives us Missed Connections: Me and Apple.

James Thomson is one of my favorite Apple developers. His Apple At 50: Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden is indeed a personal journey.

Adam and Tonya Engst have been writing Tidbits since 1990. I started reading it shortly thereafter. What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses is certainly different than most, but one that mirrors the thoughts of many on this anniversary.

And Marco Arment, looking ahead, has penned A Letter To John Ternus, the guy everyone assumes will don the CEO mantle in the future.

Baseball is back. And every team and their fans are dreaming of a championship. David Todd McCarty spins a bit of fiction that’s baseball adjacent, but rooted deep in dreams in The Taste Of A Dream.

To conclude this week, this story by Audrey Pachuta very much sums up the contradictions we’re living through at the moment. Check out A Student Set A Goal To Run Every Street In Chicago And Inspired A City. Now He Must Leave The Country.

May you find peace however you can.

(Photo from the author.)

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.

Looks Like Thaw Will Be A Good Menu Bar Manager Solution For Mac OS 26

Melting the Ice

I use a lot of Menu Bar apps on my Macs. It looks like I may have found a new solution to managing those apps.

I had previously used Bartender to manage those, especially on the MacBook Air with a notch. But since the release of macOS 26, Bartender had run into some difficulties. I gave macOS 26’s new way of handling Menu Bar items a try, and that just didn’t work for me. I experimented with a few other Menu Bar managers and for a while settled on Ice.

Like Bartender, Ice also had its issues, and its developer has since halted updates. Turns out there’s an app that melts those issues away. It’s called Thaw.

Thaw, created by stonerl, is an open source fork of Ice, so much of what it offers is familiar and you can import your Ice settings. This article by Jannis explains why Ice, and I presume Bartender, ran into difficulties managing Menu Bar items.

So far things are working as expected. The idea is to hide Menu Bar icons that I don’t access frequently, yet make them available with a quick cursor flick to the Menu Bar.

As a side note on this, with the debut of macOS 26, it appeared Apple made was beginning to shift users away from using Menu Bar apps, favoring the Control Panel instead. I could easily get on board with that shift, but very few apps I use actually make Control Panel access available without creating a Shortcut to launch the app. That seems like a waste of time, but perhaps more apps will make accessing them through the Control Panel possible when we move to macOS 27.

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.

Yo! Companies on the Web: Find The Courage To Say Never

Always say Never

Years ago when Apple and others started allowing websites viewed in a browser to send notifications I knew we were headed to the mess things eventually turned into.

CleanShot 2026-03-31 at 14.26.

Sure, you can turn off notifications from individual websites, and I do. But in reality that’s just another wack-a-mole game that takes advantage of most users not having the time or wanting to do the necessary pruning. Whether websites are asking you to subscribe, or receive notifications it doesn’t really matter. Website notifications are just another fart noise on the enshittified web that stinks up the joint.

You’d think that website publishers would actually want to know who they turn off with their tactics, but that’s probably too much truth to handle. “Hey, boss. The majority of our users never want to see a notification from us.”

In my opinion, there’s an easy way to do so if companies have the guts to face the truth. Just add a button on any of those drop down notifications that says “Never.”

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

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.

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.