‘For Apple To Win, Apple Has To Do a Really Good Job’ →

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While working on another project, I came across this video of Steve Jobs speaking at Macworld Expo in the fall of 1997. It’s a stunning video for a few reasons.

In it, he announces no products. Instead, he shared some thoughts on how he viewed the mess that Apple had found itself in before it purchased NeXT. In the span of about half an hour, he announced a new Board of Directors and a wide-ranging partnership with Microsoft, complete with Bill Gates making his now infamous appearance via satellite.

The closing of Jobs’ remarks really grabbed me. He insisted that the broader Apple community needed to change how it thought about the company and its relationship with Microsoft and other companies. At the very end, he spoke about how Apple’s brand meant thinking a little differently from the other players in the field. About six weeks later, Apple would launch its Think Different campaign.

What blew my mind — other than how fast the 38 minutes flew by — is that just ten years later, Jobs would be introducing the iPhone.

The Power Mac G5’s Hidden Fan →

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While working on another project, I came across this delightful blog post by Jay at The House of Moth, about the Power Mac G5:

How many fans does a Power Mac G5 have? Depending on the configuration this answer varies but you can be almost sure the answer is always one short. Let’s take a look at the Late 2005 Quad in this example.

– 2 intake fans (front inlet fan assembly)
– 2 exhaust fans (rear exhaust fan assembly)
– 1 fan in the PCI bay (speaker assembly)
– 1 fan for the hard drives (media bay fan)

6 fans total, right? Wrong. There is a fan behind the hard drive fan as well, part of the media bay fan assembly (in some models), and it does not get the credit it deserves. Without this single fan your G5 can overheat and even die.

So where is this fan located exactly?

I won’t spoil it, but I will say that I had totally forgotten about this quirk of the Power Mac G5, and I gutted a bunch of them back in my day as a Mac Genius.

Phil Schiller to Join OpenAI’s Board as Observer →

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Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties between the once-unlikely partners.

Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation. As a board observer, he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.

It’ll be good to have an adult in the room over there. Gurman continues:

The board observer role will put Apple on par with Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s biggest backer and its main AI technology provider. The job allows someone to attend board meetings without being able to vote or exercise other director powers. Observers, however, do gain insights into how decisions are made at the company.

Having Microsoft and Apple sit in on board meetings could create complications for the tech giants, which have been rivals and partners over the decades. Some OpenAI board meetings will likely discuss future AI initiatives between OpenAI and Microsoft — deliberations that the latter company may want Schiller excluded from. Board observers often do oblige and exit meetings during discussions that are seen as sensitive.

The 512 Pixels Merch Store →

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I’m happy to announce that 512 Pixels now has a permanent merch store over on Cotton Bureau. At launch, I’ve got five shirts for sale. Three of the designs are back from the vault, updated for 2024, with a new 512 Pixels logo shirt and a design celebrating the original iPod1 joining the collection:

These designs are all available on-demand, and ship within a few days. Cotton Bureau is offering free shipping on orders placed before July 11 with the discount code HBDCB11.

Members of 512 Pixels get 10% off their orders. Discount codes were emailed yesterday! For most folks the free shipping code means bigger savings, but the membership discount will stick around after the 11th.

  1. Initially, this group of shirts had five options, but after chatting with some friends, I decided to add the 3rd-generation iPod shirt. I was holding onto this design for release later in the year, but we thought it deserved to see light of day now.

    Yes, the third-gen is my favorite. ↩

The End is Near for the ISS →

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Last year, NASA announced plans to deorbit the International Space Station at the end of the decade. We now know much more about the agency’s plans, according to Jeff Foust:

NASA selected SpaceX to develop a spacecraft that will be used to perform the final phases of the deorbiting of the International Space Station around the end of the decade.

NASA announced June 26 it awarded SpaceX a contract valued at up to $843 million to build the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV). That contract covers the development of the spacecraft, with NASA to conduct a later procurement for launching the USDV.

Little is known about what the USDV will look like or what its capabilities will be, but it is clear that NASA believes a controlled deorbiting of the station is the safest way to close the chapter on the ISS.

Another Way to Move Reminders →

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Dr. Drang, bouncing off my recent post on Reminders:

If you have the Move tool in your Mail toolbar, you can select all the messages you want to move, click on the Move tool, and select the appropriate folder from the drop-down menu. Because the menu is long, this may seem no easier than dragging and dropping, but it is. The key is that once the drop-down menu is active, you can start typing the name of the folder and it will be selected. Boom.

Reminders could add this same Move tool to its toolbar. I guess Reminders doesn’t have a true toolbar because there’s no way to customize it, but it does have a small set of tools up at the top of the window and there’s plenty of room up there for a Move tool.

This is a very elegant solution, and one that comes with a bonus, as Drang points out:

Adding a Move tool to Reminders would be more Mac-like than mimicking what we see on iOS. And it would make the Reminders UI more consistent with Mail. Remember when consistency between apps was thought to be important? That goes back as far as drag and drop.

I’m Just a Simple Macintosh User, Asking a Bazillion Dollar Company for a Better Way To Move Tasks Between Lists in Reminders

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Every summer, I take some time with Apple’s updated stock apps. Many of them are quite good, and meet the needs for the vast majority of users.

I fully understand that sometimes you and I are not the vast majority of users, and that third-party apps can often better fit our needs.

Every year, I feel the call of Reminders. It looks nice, is integrated with the system in a bunch of fun ways, and unlike my normal app Todoist, is easy to use with Siri.

And every year, there’s a detail that derails my use of Reminders. In 2022, it was the app’s inability to show a badge that reflected what is due Today. Thankfully, Apple fixed that in iOS 16 Beta 3.

Last year, my quest was for better options when it comes to organizing the Today view. I am happy to report that with iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, users now have the ability to edit the order of the sections within the Today view.

This year, I return with something that has bothered me for a long time: the differences between the Inspectors used in the various versions of Reminders.

The visual differences are striking. On iOS, the Inspector is colorful and easy to use. On the Mac, it’s dreary and full of small controls:

Reminders in iOS 18 and Sequioa

That’s not my biggest concern here, however. I strongly believe that the Inspector should be the same for both the Mac and iOS in terms of functionality.

The biggest example in my mind is the ability to move a task to a different list. On the iPhone and iPad, it’s super easy, as there’s a drop-down right in the Inspector. Mac users, however, don’t have that UI, and are left to drag and drop tasks between lists.

That’s fine if you know about drag and drop and have a small number of lists. However, it can be error-prone and confusing to many users.

So, dearest Reminders team, please consider adding the List control to the Mac version of Reminders, if not the entire Inspector directly from the mobile — and more useful — version of Reminders.

(This was filed as Feedback FB14077154 the day this blog post was published. It can also be found as FB11779798 from 2022 and FB12336797 from 2023.)

Update: This issue was addressed by Apple in Developer Beta 4 of macOS Sequoia!

More on the CD Caddy →

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Back in 2021, Ernie Smith wrote about the curious world of CD caddies:

The first time I ever saw a CD-ROM, I had never seen a regular CD before, and I thought that it came in a giant plastic case. To be fair to me, I was in middle school, and I had little experience with them. It was in a library, and the screen did not display anything related to multimedia, but general reference information—stuff like databases, for example. A couple of years later, I got a home computer, along with an audio CD player, and soon enough, a CD-ROM. But I always thought about that caddy, which I never saw on any of the computer equipment I owned. Why did it exist? And why, when CD-ROMs trickled down to my home, wasn’t there one?