Apple
Take a Risk Apple, Give Tony the Job
Over the past few years, rumors have run rampant that John Ternus is poised to claim the CEO position upon Tim Cook’s retirement. While they’re heating up, that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about another candidate, not someone who can just perfect a product but someone who can draw the blueprints for a completely new one, someone who can undoubtedly push Apple to put a dent in the universe again.
“Ever wonder what this pocket’s for?”
Like many of you, I was skeptical of the iPhone Pocket when I first laid my eyes on the press release from Apple last week. Now is sort of a tone deaf time for a high fashion collaboration, but I’ve decided that this is a product that’s actually designed to bring joy. Having finally seen them in-person, I think I was right about that. They may just be a piece of cloth, but they’re extraordinarily nice. The knit feels incredibly high quality and the colors are drop dead gorgeous up close. But the best part was seeing people react to them, there was more buzz around a couple of socks than there was around the Vision Pro area.
10 Qualities the 8th CEO of Apple Should Have
There’s been a lot of discussion as of late about who may be the next CEO of Apple. As a lifelong observer, dare I say fan, I care deeply about who is going to steward the company into a future that no one quite anticipated. Instead of opining on what I think of each individual rumored candidate, I thought it would be more productive to offer a checklist of what qualities I think that the 8th Apple CEO ideally should have.
The iPhone Air is the One Steve Would Use
For the first time in years, an iPhone truly made me feel something again. When this year’s new devices came out, I picked up the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but I quietly (or not so quietly) harbored envy towards those who bravely picked the iPhone Air. About a week ago, I finally caved and picked up my very own iPhone Air.
I am absolutely smitten with this device in a way that feels foreign yet nostalgic.
The Paradoxical iPhone Arrives: Launch Day Thoughts on Apple's 2025 Lineup
The new iPhones are indeed incredible. While I opted for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the iPhone Air is truly unbelievable. When Apple called it a “paradox” I was skeptical, but that’s exactly what it feels like. The thinness and lightness is jaw dropping. It also happens to just be simply beautiful. The polished titanium rails look stunning, the closest thing we’ve had to the iPhone X design in years. While the mismatched corner radii of the plateau and the casing does bother me, it’s far less visible on the best of the four colors: space black. I cannot get over how sexy this phone is. It feels entirely new, but is visually reminiscent of the jet black iPhone 7, which is the best black they have ever shipped. Until today. While I haven’t bought an iPhone Air today, I know myself. I won’t be surprised if I make a switch mid-cycle.
Orangeness Beats Thinness: Thoughts on Yesterday’s Event
I don’t think there’s a whole lot of tea leaf reading to do after yesterday’s Apple event. The upgrades are fairly straightforward. But there are some intriguing notes that I wanted to share, so here we go…
Keynotes are Bad Because Products Can’t Speak for Themselves Anymore
That Google event yesterday was very strange, from Jimmy Fallon’s general awkwardness to the uncomfortable QVC-style segment to the overuse of high profile celebrities. That’s already been discussed at length, so I won’t dwell on it. But it did get me thinking a lot about the state of product launches. Ever since the start of the pandemic we’ve been in a weird limbo, where some brands do videos and some host live keynotes. I’m personally a proponent of everyone returning to their pre-pandemic live formats, there are still a few holdouts, I’m looking at you Apple. Though the live stage presence is important for consumer confidence, human empathy, and an overall sense of community I think there’s actually something deeper going on.
Tinted Liquid Glass Should be the Future of User Interfaces on Apple Platforms
It’s certainly no secret that I am a huge fan of Apple’s new liquid glass design language. I know that’s not technically the name of the design system, in fact there actually isn’t one. Liquid glass is simply the core material of the new user interface, not the actual language. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call it liquid glass regardless. I find the new look and feel to be extremely refreshing after more than a decade of flat visuals that generally lacked personality. Because liquid glass is so fluid, it comes to life when user interface elements move or get tapped. The playfulness of liquid glass hasn’t been up for debate, it seems to be generally well-received. But the actual look of the material, the clear component that is the namesake liquid glass, is controversial to say the least. Over the past few days I’ve started to think about how it could evolve over the next few years and I think I might have figured it out.
Ollama's New App Makes Running Local Models Even Easier
As a lifelong Mac user, I have a particular affinity for native applications. For a long time, most of the AI models were only useable through a web browser. But the model providers have slowly been rolling out fully native apps for their products. We now have native apps for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, among others. If you’re really into large language models, you likely also know a bit about using them via command line tools. Ollama has been the go-to solution for easily running models on your Mac via the Terminal. There have been third-party solutions that integrate with Ollama to offer proper graphic user interfaces, but none of them have quite made an impression. All of this makes local models a bit tedious to start using for the average person. The good news is that starting today you can easily install a native macOS Ollama app with the click of a button and get yourself using local large language models without ever launching the command line.
Yes, That Appears to be a Real iPhone 17 Pro
It looks like we just got our first look at a real iPhone 17 Pro. In an unlikely encounter in San Francisco, an X user by the name of Skyfops stumbled upon what must be an Apple employee testing an iPhone 17 Pro in one of Apple’s signature disguise cases. While there is some (very fair) skepticism surrounding this leak, I have heard that it is real.
18 Years Ago Today, iPhone Premiered and Everything Changed
On this day, 18 years ago, the iPhone went on sale for the very first time at Apple and AT&T Stores across the United States. I was going to write a long piece reminiscing about that special day, but I remembered that I already did that a few years ago when I was at 9to5mac for the 14th anniversary. I highly recommend returning to that piece to relive launch day and though you may have issues with images showing up, the text is still great too if I do say so myself.
Meta Goes on an AI Hiring Spree, What's Apple's Plan?
Apple should be the one on a hiring spree. Over the past few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have kicked the hiring and acquisitions machine into high gear. The man knows he can’t miss out on the next platform shift and it shows. It wasn’t the metaverse and it wasn’t goggles, but it’s almost certainly some form of personalized super intelligence.
F1 Marks Apple's Acceleration into a New Era of Entertainment
Apple’s had a very good run with its string of successful streaming shows on TV+ over the past six years and has frequently been called “the new HBO." But the company has struggled to land a true hit with its feature films that it bestowed theatrical releases on. Sure, they’ve won Oscars for CODA and movies like Killers of the Flower Moon were well-received. But none of them have been able to capture the scale of a massive cultural moment. I have good news, I think F1 is finally that film.
The Curious Case of Apple and Perplexity: Do They Need Each Other?
Apparently it’s the season of acquisitions and hirings. Thankfully, this time Apple is also in on the action. According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity. My initial reaction was “that wouldn’t work.” But I’ve taken some time to think through what it could look like if it were to come to fruition. Let me share where my head’s at.
“The Talk Show Live” Returns to Form—And It Was Great
While there was a lot of consternation heading into WWDC over Apple skipping John Gruber’s live taping of The Talk Show, it might have all been for the best. Instead of sitting down with Craig and Joz, who were both unlikely to say much more than they did during the day, we got to hear a really fun conversation between John and two of my favorite people on the internet: Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern.
Apple Snuck an Endorsement for Ivory and Mastodon into WWDC
One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbots’ Ivory.
WWDC 2025: Through Liquid Glass—No Longer Behind, Just Off to the Side
I was unusually concerned heading into this year’s WWDC, fully prepared to be disappointed. I feared that Apple would continue to be on weak footing after the Apple Intelligence failures of the past year. To my surprise, I feel very differently post-keynote. I worried that they wouldn’t acknowledge what happened last year, but Craig addressed it right out of the gate. While the acknowledgement itself is appreciated, we still have to wait quite a long time for the new Siri to rear its face… or voice, I guess? Fortunately, Apple did deliver a combination of new AI features that are sprinkled throughout their new operating systems. I am largely relieved, albeit still slightly on edge for reasons we’ll get into later. Over the course of the keynote, I began to relax as they subtly and intentionally introduced an array of practical AI use cases one by one. I am actually quite excited about some of these, but none of them compare to the triumph that is Apple’s new universal design language: liquid glass.
Apple’s Silence at "The Talk Show" Will Speak Volumes
If you follow Apple at all, you’ve likely heard the news: Apple’s skipping John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live at WWDC this year. For a decade, it’s been tradition for Apple executives to join John on stage at the annual conference to recap the the keynote and dive deeper into the announcements. It is one of my favorite parts of that week, something I look forward to every year.
A Tale of Two IOs: What it Looks Like When Apple Doesn't Lead
We are at more than just an inflection point; we’re at a moment where the global technological order may be about to fundamentally change. Don’t think about this just as an “iPhone moment” but as an “Apple acquires NeXT” event. A NeXTus event if you will. When Apple acquired NeXT, it kicked off a series of technological shifts that were completely unforeseen. It led to products like iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and technologies like Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, AirPort, Apple Silicon, among countless others. That acquisition fundamentally altered the course of human history and changed the technological landscape. I believe that the events of last week may have done the same.
Raycast for iPhone is the Launch Center Successor I've Always Wanted
Before it was sort of abandoned I was a heavy user of Launch Center Pro. Apple enthusiasts and power users alike will almost certainly remember the powerful shortcut tool from Contrast that let you build out an extensive grid of quick ways to get things done. The app is technically still available on the App Store, but it has not been updated in years. I stopped using it once it appeared to fall by the wayside and after Apple began truly supercharging its own solution in Shortcuts. Launch Center Pro was very much a manually configurable tool, but had it kept up with the times I would imagine it would look something like the new Raycast for iOS. Funny enough, Raycast for iOS almost resembles the original version of Launch Center from 2011. We have sort of come full circle.