This blog post by Doug Brown blew my mind a little:
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
This was an article sent to 512 Pixels members last month. Learn more about membership here.
At the end of every year, I publish a photo on Instagram cataloging the Field Notes notebooks I used over the previous 12 months. Here is the most recent picture:
Every year, I get questions about this. I wrote a bit about the topic in 2014, but I thought I’d do it again here. So, uhhhh, here’s an FAQ:
I try to operate on the “Nothing Doesn’t Go in Here” principle. Flipping through the notebook that is on my desk right now, I see shopping lists, notes from conference calls, sermon notes, a little chart I made when working on some invoices for Relay, a doodle of the Widgetsmith icon I made for some reason, and a lot more. A receipt for a recent meal with a friend fell out of it onto my lap; I’ll probably tape that into the notebook for safekeeping.
Looking at the shelf, it’s a notebook every 4-6 weeks.
I am not, haha, but I’ve gotten to know some folks there over the years. In 2017, I helped record a live episode of The Pen Addict at the Chicago headquarters. It was awesome.
Beyond making cool Instagram posts, I scan every notebook and store them on Dropbox and in Apple Notes for future reference. I just scanned notebook number 129.
Here’s what that folder looks like in Finder:
I use a plain, old-fashioned flatbed scanner to do this. I used the same scanner for over a decade, but it died a while back, and I replaced it with this thing. I use the Mac’s built-in Image Capture application to make 300 DPI PDFs with OCR data. The OCR is pretty hit or miss with my handwriting, but I don’t often rely on it to search for old notes anyway.
Every few months, I need to refer to something I had written down in a previous notebook. I often do this by scrolling to when I think the information may have been captured, and then I skim through the notebook for that month. Has this ever radically changed the course of a project or saved my butt in some other way? No, but that’s not really the point. These notebooks are a trail of breadcrumbs dating back almost 15 years. If I flip through an old one, I get a glimpse of what was going on in my life at that time. I can go to the notebook I was using when we launched Relay, or when I quit my job. I like having them on hand; seeing them in my studio each day makes me happy.
In 2013, I started working at a web design firm and took a lot of notes there, so I switched to a Moleskine journal for a while. I have a scan of it but do not know where the notebook is. It’s been missing for a long time, and it bothers me.
I love Field Notes’ tagline:
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
There’s something about the act of writing that helps things stick.
For years, my go-to has been the Uni Jetstream Sport Ballpoint Pen. I like the 0.7 MM weight in blue. I also like the 0.5 MM Zebra Sarasa Clip in blue-black ink.
You shouldn’t be! Yes, they can get lost or damaged, but they shouldn’t be precious. I’ve torn them, gotten them wet, and misplaced them from time to time. They are tools; as long as they’re on my desk, in my pocket, or in my backpack, I know I’m ready for the day.
The guys reflect on the Vision Pro’s first year and then talk about things that matter more, like the recent resurgence of read-it-later apps and Apple’s new Invites app.
Basic Apple Guy poured one out for the OG.
Apple has a new iPhone app in the App Store for creating custom invitations to events and managing guests. Invitations include the date and time of the event, location, a preview of the weather, and yes, you can use Image Playgrounds to create artwork for the event:
From the app you can create a shared photo album for the event and add an Apple Music playlist as well. Once an invitation is shared, guests can RSVP, leave comments, add the event to their calendar, and even be allowed to bring additional guests.
I have no idea how popular this app is going to be, but compared to a bunch of online tools for managing events, this is very polished. Some of the websites I get sent for things like school events are truly awful, yet getting a bunch of folks to use iCloud on the web or download an app seems like a high bar.
Here is a bit from the company’s press release:
With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share invitations, RSVP, contribute to Shared Albums, and engage with Apple Music playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple Invites from the App Store, or access it on the web through icloud.com/invites. iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.
“With Apple Invites, an event comes to life from the moment the invitation is created, and users can share lasting memories even after they get together,” said Brent Chiu-Watson, Apple’s senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing for Apps and iCloud. “Apple Invites brings together capabilities our users already know and love across iPhone, iCloud, and Apple Music, making it easy to plan special events.”
While it’s great this is available on the web, I can’t help but think that making it part of a paid iCloud subscription is going to limit its adoption.
… and I worry about Invites’ long-term prospects given Apple’s habit of launching iPhone apps to just forget about them or quietly kill them years later. (Cards, Music Memos, and Clips all come to mind.)
Jason Snell is back at it, for the 10th annual report card:
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
This is the tenth year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.
This year, Snell posted everyone’s full comments, but I’ve collected mine here as well.
As we round out the fourth year of the Apple silicon Era, the Mac is truly firing on all cylinders. Modern Mac notebooks are incredible; even my new M4 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro runs silently and boasts shockingly good battery life. While I could have never had a notebook-only setup during the Intel days, I’ve done just that for several years with no complaints.
The one ding on the hardware front is that the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are stuck on M2-based SoCs. It’s clear that the process used for the M3 was a bit of a dead-end and that an M3 Ultra wasn’t in the cards, but Apple’s two high-end desktops using old silicon is a bit embarrassing.
On the software front, macOS Sequoia brought my favorite macOS feature in years, which was the iPhone Mirroring. I use it daily to access iPhone-only apps while sitting at my desk. I’m thrilled that Apple continues to find new ways to tighten the integration between the Mac and the iPhone without turning the former into the latter.
By tightly bundling the iPhone, iOS, and the App Store, Apple has made it impossible to untangle the iPhone from Apple’s ongoing legal woes in the European Union and beyond. And by plastering the planet with rainbow-colored Apple Intelligence ads, Apple has wound the iPhone up very tightly with a group of features that weren’t even shipped when the iPhones launched last fall.
That puts Apple’s most valued product in a slightly weird spot, but the Report Card demands answers, so let’s start with hardware.
The iPhone 16 cycle brought Camera Control, an excellent bit of hardware engineering swamped with confusing software decisions. Learning to swipe, press, and click around the tiny UI can be confusing. With visual intelligence a press-and-hold away, it’s easy to be in the wrong mode entirely if you activate the button as you pull your iPhone out of your pocket.
Apple has made it possible to simplify the Camera Control, boiling it down to a basic shutter button, but this requires delving into multiple sections across Settings.
The Action button was added to the regular iPhone 16 models in 2024, and the 5x telephoto lens from the 15 Pro Max lives on in both the 16 Pro Max and the 16 Pro. Both are great changes, as is the move to a bolder color palette for the 16.
However, 2024 was also the Year of Apple Intelligence. These loosely associated features run across various iPads and all Apple silicon Macs. However, Apple is marketing these features as a core component of its newest iPhones.
That’s unfortunate, given how mediocre much of Apple Intelligence has proven to be so far. Apple’s writing tools are good, but nothing exceptional, and the UI is quite cramped on the iPhone. When it comes to image generation, Apple Intelligence shines with Genmoji, which is a genuinely fun feature, but it also falls on its face with Image Playgrounds. The images it creates are far behind the competition, and honestly, a race I wish Apple wasn’t running. The company says it has gone to great lengths to build guard rails to keep Image Playgrounds from creating anything offensive or troubling, but it’s not hard to get it to create fictional images depicting some of history’s worst people. At least they look like cartoon characters, which is the best product choice Apple made here.
The lack of photorealism may keep Image Playgrounds out of the headlines for making fake news, but Apple’s summarization of notifications has done just the opposite. From screwing up sports scores to re-writing breaking news alerts to say the opposite of the reporting, notifications summaries don’t seem ready for prime time. Apple hasn’t yet shipped the next generation of Siri either, which raises questions about Apple feeling rushed to get these features into the market. If it’s true, it’s an unusual place for Apple to be in, and I hope the company will not make the same mistake again.
There’s little to say about the iPad this year that hasn’t been said. The M4 iPad Pro pushes the ole “Wow, this iPad hardware can do so much more than iPadOS will let it” adage to the stratosphere. It’s powerful and thin, with an amazing screen, but it’s still just an iPad. The new Magic Keyboard looks fantastic, but it’s still hooked up to iPad apps.
I’ve settled into equilibrium with this in my usage. My iPad mini is a great tablet for what I use it for: YouTube, TV shows, podcasts, and reading. I may hop into Slack or scroll through my mentions on social media, but I’m just no longer interested in turning the iPad into a computer I can or want to use for work.
Zooming out, the overall iPad family is still messy in places. Thankfully, the 9th generation iPad has been sent out to pasture, meaning all iPads finally use the modern gesture system for control. All iPads basically look the same, but there are still numerous differences as you move up and down the product line. The fact that Apple’s iPad keyboard page has a huge dropdown for a user to pick which iPad they have so the website can show them compatible models is not great, but Apple has been making progress. The current line of Apple Pencils is pretty straightforward, and having two models of iPad Air makes a lot of sense. I hope that the company keeps working to restore sense to the iPad hardware line while, at the same time, making iPadOS more capable for those who want to use their iPads more than they can today.
Jason breaks down the Wearables category into three areas, which I have scored:
Apple continues to kill it when it comes to AirPods. The AirPods 4 (especially with ANC) offers incredible value, while the AirPods Pro 2 continue to become more valuable to users through some remarkable software updates. Using AirPods as a way to take a hearing test or have your hearing augmented means millions of people who didn’t even know they had hearing loss will enjoy more moments with their loved ones in conversation.
With the Apple Watch, it’s more of the same good vibes. Detecting falls, car crashes, and possible cardiac issues has saved an untold number of people, and with sleep apnea detection in the newest batch of Apple Watches, users can be notified if their Watches detect a problem. This is some of Apple’s most important work.
I took the lack of an Apple Watch Ultra 3 personally, but the Series 10’s thinner and more powerful design almost makes up for it, as long as my bought-it-on-launch-day-like-a-maniac Apple Watch Ultra 1 holds on.
2024 saw the launch of the Vision Pro, and it’s unlike any Apple product launch I can remember.
The Vision Pro is an incredible feat of engineering. Just holding the thing feels nice, and the years of work that went into it shows when the screens light up. It is the only AR or VR headset I have worn that hasn’t made me feel sick after a few minutes. The Vision Pro is priced like a computer because Mac-level hardware powers its array of cameras and sensors, screens, audio system, and more.
visionOS springs to life on this hardware — after a lengthy boot process — and wraps the user in a world of their own content and apps. The floating windows feel real and stay in place as if they are made of actual frosted glass. The pass-through video feed of the outside world is by no means perfect, but it’s fast to respond to a turn of your head. A simple turn of the Digital Crown has the world fade away, dissolving into any number of landscapes that can help you focus on the task at hand.
Sadly, there are just a handful of tasks best suited for spatial computing. Text input can be tedious without a keyboard, the lack of any window management tools mean there’s a lot of fussing about needed if you want to look at more than one application at once. (Stage Manager seems like it was built for this thing.)
The App Store is quiet on the Vision Pro. The high price of the device has surely limited its adoption from both the user and developer perspectives. The new nature of the platform means users need to experience the Vision Pro before understanding it. Apple Stores have done a good job at this, but most consumers don’t know what they’d do with a device like this beyond playing games, which isn’t Apple’s strength. There’s no killer app for visionOS yet, and even if there was, you end up back at the price tag.
HomeKit continues to hum along, working better and better each year. The ecosystem continues to expand, if Matter ever really arrives, which ecosystem a particular product supports will become a moot question.
Rumors are swirling about Apple entering new markets, with cameras, locks, and even smart screens a possibility for 2025 or later. We will have to judge those offerings if/when they arrive, but I’m fascinated to see what Apple would bring to the table.
For the 2023 Report Card, I wrote, “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long, it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again.”
I also said, “tvOS continues to feel trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix.”
Yup.
All in all, Apple is doing a good job with its various Services. TV+ is home to some of the best storytelling, and Fitness+ is inspiring and fun. iCloud syncs data more reliably than ever. Apple Arcade has become home to many rebooted classic iOS games, while Apple Podcasts has made the industry more accessible than ever.
There are still sore spots, but none of them are new. iCloud’s storage tiers are stingy and oddly spaced out, and the ads in News+ continue to spoil an otherwise solid experience.
Apple has long been a leader in hardware reliability. Now, with the company publishing repair guides and making parts available to end-users and small shops, users have more options than ever when something goes wrong.
Even with the addition of visionOS, Apple was able to move the ball forward across most of its ecosystem in 2024. Apple continues to ship features simultaneously across the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and beyond. Bugs remain, of course, but it’s been a long time since I’ve spent an afternoon troubleshooting something.
Starting with the relaunch of Notes in the iOS 9/OS X El Capitan days, Apple has worked consistently on growing its first-party productivity apps into tools that more and more people can rely on at work. Reminders has gone from some sort of digital Hipster PDA with its card-based UI to a full-blown task manager, complete with robust sharing, a Kanban view, and integration with Calendar. Freeform came out of nowhere to take on some serious contenders from third-party developers. Safari is the true favorite child, with features added every cycle. Photos has become robust and even more useful with the launch of family sharing a couple of years ago.
My biggest complaint is the lack of consistency across Apple’s apps. Look no further than Apple’s tools for smart searching. Editing a smart list in Reminders is weirdly different than creating a new smart folder in Mail or Notes, and on iOS in particular, Apple teams seem to be working from different guidelines when it comes to design elements. The new Sports app and Journal use gradients and color in fun ways, while much of iOS is still starkly white and blue. Messages is a hodgepodge of ancient message effects and fun, new text effects that operate in different ways in different parts of the app. It’s time for some UI cleanup across the board, even if that makes the Mac user in me a little nervous that the disease that is System Settings would spread.
The M4 Mac mini is the first carbon-neutral Mac ever made. It comes six years after Apple began using recycled aluminum in its Mac cases. The company continues investing in processes to make our world cleaner.
On the social front, things are more complex. Apple continues to support important causes and will continue its DEI efforts, even as other tech companies are rolling them back. However, Tim Cook runs a company with a bigger economic footprint than many countries, and that means that Apple will play ball with the new Trump administration in ways some of its users will find disagreeable. It’s naive to think that a company the size of Apple would do anything else, even if I hope it rubs Tim Cook the wrong way enough to bother him.
Stephen and David have been using Apple’s AI features since they showed up in betas last year. Today, they share their findings and talk about what’s worth your time — and what’s not — when it comes to Apple Intelligence.
Apple reported its financial results on Thursday for its first fiscal quarter of 2025, which covers the last three months of 2024. As expected, it was an all-time revenue record at $124.3 billion, up 4% from the year-ago previous recordholder.
Probably most notable is that iPhone revenue was down 1% from the year-ago quarter, which will certainly upset some analysts and investors, given that the iPhone is more than half of Apple’s total revenue. But the Mac jumped 16%, the iPad was up 15%, and services was up 14%. The recently sluggish Wearables, Home, and Accessories category was down 2%.
Legacy Stephen is back, and Federico has been wired in to the saga of DeepSeek.
John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:
Sotheby’s is auctioning the estate of renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. The auction house, which is auctioning the estate’s assets in multiple lots includes several collections of classic iPods and custom iPods…
Just look at some of these things:
Sotheby’s posted this video to Instagram, highlighting the collection:
David Pierce, with some news that is going to make some folks very excited. Here he is, writing about Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky:
He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.
To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.
The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old.
David has updated the Productivity Field Guide for 2025. This week, he and Stephen discuss what’s new in the course, what changes he has made to his various production workflows, and more.