This week on the podcast:
Federico has an M5 Ultra Mac Studio review unit and shares what local AI looks like on macOS today — and in the future. Myke has advice for buying iPhones in countries other than your own, and Stephen is old.
We will be off next week for the Podcastathon, but will be back on October 8.
I have launched and withdrawn more than 50 apps from the App Store over the years, but never have I had a withdrawal sustain the consistent attention that Geneva Moon (and its astronomically accurate complications) has. I pulled it 6 years ago and yet I still get people asking about it on a regular basis.
It broke in watchOS 27. Over the weekend I got it working again. Here it is. I hope this makes a small but highly dedicated group of people happy. Also, I made it free.
We are flying through September, and our St. Jude campaign is rocking and rolling. As of this writing, we are knocking on the door of $450,000 raised this month!
St. Jude cares for some of the world’s sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face.
Doug Brown has dug up something previously lost to time. In working with an early Performa, he discovered a true gem on its hard drive:
This Performa 410 was a store demo unit! This is the kiosk software that would have been running on a demo Mac inside a store like Sears or Circuit City. The machine was never wiped back to factory state before being sold, and the original owner kept the demo software the entire time they had the machine. Such a cool find!
Life is full of trade-offs. I often think about this in terms of vehicles. If you have a big family, a minivan is probably the right call, even if it means sacrificing performance. A luxury sedan may be nice to sit in, but it will cost you big bucks. You can drive a pickup truck, but you will probably pay for it at the pump.
In the world of technology, trade-offs change nature over time. The first iPhone was amazing, but it was expensive and only ran on AT&T. The original MacBook Air was an incredible piece of engineering, but it ran hot and slow.
This week on the podcast:
Apple’s 27 OSes are out, but a new beta is already overshadowing them. The guys talk about both, celebrate a huge milestone in Relay’s St. Jude campaign, and dream of future Apple Stores.
Dr. Drang, bouncing off my recent post on Apple’s dimensional drawings:
When I zoomed in on Stephen’s page, I was initially confused, but then I realized what seemed odd to me. You see, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past 40 years looking at engineering drawings, and I can’t think of any that looked like this. That’s because the drawings I’m used to are for making the depicted product, but the drawings Apple’s offering up here aren’t for that. These are for others—not Apple and not its suppliers—to use for making cases and other accessories. I figured it was worth a quick post on what makes a drawing like the one above so different from what I’m used to.
Apple’s 27 OSes are rolling out today, and there’s a lot of great stuff to read:
As is tradition, I have made and cataloged a whole bunch of screenshots of the new version of macOS.
Golden Gate is the 24th version of macOS that I have documented this way. It’s a lot of work, but I love having the screenshot library as a resource for folks to use and enjoy.
If you haven’t looked through the library in a while, you should check out my new-ish comparison tool. You can type what you are looking for, and the page will surface related screenshots, sorted by age. It is a lot of fun.
Mark Gurman has good news for Apple Store visitors:
In many stores, Apple will replace the video walls with dedicated Genius Bars, marking a return to a familiar element from an earlier era. The design resembles the Genius Bars of the past but with an all-wood look. There will be two counter heights for accessibility, while the wall behind the bar will include storage drawers and large posters highlighting new products.
Something remarkable happened over at Relay’s campaign for St. Jude.
We have now raised more than $5 million for St. Jude since we started this project in 2019.
If you had told me back then that this would be possible, I would not have believed you. The Relay community has proven me wrong, and I’m so thankful for it. Let’s keep the party going.
This is Relay’s dent in the universe.
The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems like a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.
Generally, they followed the usual adoption pattern and overall did very well, ending at around 20% of total usage.
With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison, the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs. the Air’s 0.3%).