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:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I am so happy with how Relay’s brand refresh went. We’ve been working on this for a long time.
We even dropped the FM which I used to swear we would never do, but as soon as we tried it, I knew it had to go.