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On this week’s Mac Power Users, it’s MPU Holiday Special time! David and I reflect on our college Macs and how influential they would end up being on each of us.

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In January 2006, the first Intel Macs were announced. We’ll deal more with that anniversary in a year, but for now, it’s worth walking through the final full year of PowerPC Macs.

Transitions happen for a reason, and exploring those reasons can tell us a lot about the priorities of the parties involved.

When the Mac moved from x86 to Apple silicon a few years ago, it was partially because Intel wasn’t delivering what Apple needed and partially because Apple was in a place with its own chips that the Mac would be radically better after the transition.

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I’m pretty content with my Apple Watch, but MY WORD LOOK AT THIS THING.

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It’s Top Nine time over on Instagram, so it’s also Top Nine time here on the blog.

Here’s my year, boiled down to nine images:

1. The Vision Pro box & my original Macintosh, which turned 40 this year.
2. Myke and I were given St. Jude’s Creator Achievement Award. Our community raised over $1 million in support of St. Jude this year.
3. Merri and marked our 17th anniversary this year. That photo is from our wedding day in 2007. Sometimes I think about re-piercing my ears.
4. This summer, we celebrated Relay’s 10th anniversary with a live show in London.
5. A photo of my Tacoma and mountain bike, taken on my sabbatical in October.
6. A comparison between the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the original model from 2007.
7. The photo used at the top of my Vision Pro review on 512 Pixels.
8. Another classic photo, this time from 2004. I had a lot of hair in high school.
9. I was in San Jose for WWDC this summer and the town is overrun with Tesla Cybertrucks. This one was parked in a compact spot.

The Vision Pro taking two slots of this grid is pretty funny. It proved to be much more popular on Instagram than it has been in my life.

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This week on Connected, we revisit the biggest stories of year, ranking each month on the most scientific scale known to humankind: the Ticci Scale.

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There’s a new version of Pedometer++ rolling out now that makes it easy to see your step count over time:

David and I have been talking about this feature for a while now, and it is exciting to see it shipping. I love being able to scroll back and see my progress over the years, and it’s easy to share a graph from the app.

Pedometer++ 6.2 also allows you to import your complete Apple Health history. Before now, the app only fetched recent step count data when installed for the first time, but we realized that the new Trends feature would be much more compelling with a complete picture of your step count data. Importing historic Apple Health data is fast, and can be done from the in-app settings screen.

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Apple Support:

In iOS 18.2 or later, the Mail app automatically sorts your email messages into categories to help you find and manage messages quicker.

• Primary: Find personal messages and time-sensitive information.
• Transactions: Keep track of your confirmations, receipts, and shipping notices.
• Updates: Catch up on news, newsletters, and social updates.
• Promotions: Browse your coupon and sales emails.

The rollout of this feature is weird. Mail categories are only on the iPhone, and while the feature shipped with iOS 18.2, it’s not part of Apple Intelligence, as it runs on phones older than the 15 Pro.

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I was recently moving some files around and came across a column I wrote for my college newspaper. I was on the design side of the paper¹ and didn’t get to write that much. In the fall of 2006, I was given a short-lived column covering the tech news, and this entry is from October 25.

This week, the geek world was all about one word.

iPod.

Monday marked the fifth anniversary of Apple’s beloved music player. On Oct. 23, 2001, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, stood on a stage in California and introduced the world to a 5GB, $399 device that would play music back faster and easier than a Walkman.

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From the Apple TV+ Newsroom:

Following the acclaimed second season premiere of “Silo,” today Apple TV+ announced that the global hit, world-building drama has been renewed through season four. The fourth season of “Silo” will bring the series to its final, thrilling chapter, telling the complete story of Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling trilogy of dystopian novels. Starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson, “Silo” season two is now streaming globally on Apple TV+, and new episodes premiere every Friday through January 17, 2025.

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PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide.

PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photo libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag-and-drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while keeping all your photos in the Photos app.

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Many people have more PDFs and files than they’d like. This week on MPU, David and I explore two great applications that make managing files more straightforward and efficient.

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I use several of Rogue Amoeba’s apps on a near-daily basis. They are critical to my work as a podcaster, and my Mac would be noticeably less useful without them.

With the transition to Apple silicon, installing these programs became much more complicated, and I feared that Apple was pushing tools like Audio Hijack, Loopback, and others off the platform.

In the background, it seems like the folks at Rogue Amoeba were living in fear as well:

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