John Ternus at the Helm

Apple named John Ternus as its next CEO this morning. Tim Cook moves to executive chairman, and Ternus takes over September 1. Johny Srouji picks up an expanded Chief Hardware Officer role, combining Ternus’s hardware engineering job with his own hardware technologies work.

I have been on the Ternus bandwagon for a while. Back in November I wrote about why he felt like the obvious pick. The first time I saw him walk out on an Apple keynote stage, my initial thought was that “this guy looks like a CEO.”

In my years as a business attorney, I sat in on a lot of CEO transitions. Nearly every time that the transition happened in an ongoing, successful company, they landed on whoever was running their most successful division. If you want to predict a successor, look for the person responsible for the part of the business that is working. Ternus has been running Apple’s hardware engineering. Hardware is the business. The iPhone, the Mac, the iPad, and the Watch are the engine. You hand the company to the person running the engine.

So this choice is consistent. It is the least surprising CEO announcement Apple could have made.

What happens next is the harder question. Apple is too big to change direction quickly. New CEOs at companies this size do not reshape the company in their first year. They learn where the levers are. They keep the trains running. The real signal of Ternus’s hand on the tiller will come later, probably well into 2027 or beyond. What products get greenlit. What gets killed. How the company talks about itself.

I am eager to see this new chapter. Tim Cook was very successful in the short term. Time will tell what his impact was over the long term. Handing the job to an engineer who has been in the product trenches since 2001 feels right. Now we get to watch what he does with it.

Hubble USB Doctor

Hubble USB Doctor is a $10 Mac app that maps every USB device on your system and flags anything running slower than it should. Mine turned up a few rate-limited backup drives and a Stream Deck hub chain I didn’t actually need. Worth $10 for an afternoon of cleanup.

This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Mac Power Users 845: Patrick Rhone

On this episode of Mac Power Users, David and Stephen welcome back their old friend Patrick Rhone after far too long. Patrick is a writer, an Apple consultant, the author of Enough, and the guy who taught David how to dress like a grownup. They get into why Patrick’s 2020 M1 MacBook Air still handles everything he throws at it, his “Amish approach” to technology as a long-term tester, and how he keeps his phone in his pocket on purpose. They also talk about the minimalist phone movement, raising kids around technology, and a healthy detour into vintage Apple gear and the Timex Sinclair.

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Small Experiments Over Drastic Changes

I was talking to someone recently who felt paralyzed by too many commitments. Work was consuming her. She knew what roles she wanted to focus on, but there simply wasn’t time. She knew things had to change. But looking at her list, she couldn’t see how to escape.

So she was stuck. Paralyzed.

This happens more than you’d think.

When you’ve been saying yes to everything for years, the idea of changing course can feel catastrophic. You imagine cutting a commitment and the whole thing collapsing. Your boss firing you. Your family disappointed. Your identity crumbling. So you stay in the system because at least the system is familiar.

There’s a trick to escaping this. Don’t revolutionize your life. Run a tiny experiment instead.

Pick one small part of something you’re doing and stop doing it. Just stop. Not forever. Not as a grand philosophical commitment. Just for a week or two. Nobody else has to know.

See what happens.

Maybe it’s email you’ve been answering that someone else can handle. Maybe it’s a meeting you attend but don’t really need to attend. Maybe it’s a project you volunteered for that drains you. Pick something small. Something reversible.

Then stop doing it, and you’ll discover the universe will not implode. Your life will not end. The thing you were afraid would happen probably won’t happen at all. Try it, and you just might break the spell.

Once you realize you can drop something without everything falling apart, you get bold. You try another experiment. You cut another thing. You add something back that matters more. You adjust.

But the key is starting small. Baby steps. Reversible moves.

The reason people fail at change is that they go too drastic. Monday they decide to quit their job and move to Costa Rica. By Wednesday, they’re terrified and back to the old way. Or they commit to cutting five big things at once and it feels so overwhelming they don’t cut any.

Experiments are different. An experiment feels safe. You’re not making a permanent decision. You’re just testing something. And tests generate data you can use.

When you drop one thing for a week, you learn whether your fear was justified. You learn what fills the space. You learn whether people actually depend on you the way you thought they did.

The catastrophe isn’t real. Go find out.

Capto: One App to Record, Edit, and Share Your Screen

This post is sponsored by Global Delight, makers of Capto.

If you’ve ever tried to put together a screen recording to explain a workflow, a feature, or a concept, you know how quickly it turns into a multi-app job. One app to record, another to edit, a third to annotate, something else to share. By the time you’ve bounced between all of them, you’ve usually lost the thread of what you were trying to explain.

Capto does all of that in one place.

It’s a screen recording, capture, and editing app for Mac that handles the whole process without you ever switching apps. You can record your full screen or a selected region. Add a webcam overlay and voice narration while you record. Then edit, annotate, and share, all from within Capto.

The annotation tools are where Capto earns its keep for instructional content. You can add arrows, text, highlights, and blur out anything you don’t want visible. The scrolling capture feature handles full-page and long-interface captures. These are the kind that are awkward to document any other way.

Beyond annotations, Capto has video editing built in. Trimming, cropping, cutting. The basics you need to remove a fumbled intro or a section where you lost your train of thought. Nothing fancy, but it covers what most recording projects actually need.

The use cases are broad. Remote teams walking colleagues through processes, trainers building onboarding materials, educators recording lessons. Any situation where you need to explain something visually and get it cleaned up fast. Capto keeps that whole workflow inside one app instead of five.

If that sounds like your kind of tool, Capto is worth a serious look. It’s available on the Mac App Store and the Global Delight website.

Lab Report — April 17, 2026

The Artemis II crew returned from humanity’s farthest journey since 1972, with iPhone 17 Pro Max selfies taken 270,000 miles from Earth. Apple Business Platform launched in 200+ countries, iOS 26.5 public beta 2 landed, and high-RAM Mac mini and Mac Studio configs went completely out of stock.

This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

My Episode of First, Last, Everything

Jonathan Reed runs a show called First, Last, Everything over at MacStories. The format is simple: he asks guests about the first piece of tech they remember, the last thing they bought, and works through a conversation about everything in between.

I was the guest a couple of weeks ago, and it was a fun hour. Jonathan asks good questions. The kind where you start answering and find yourself somewhere you didn’t expect.

We talked about how I got into podcasting, the field guide work, the Robot Assistant project, and my thoughts on where AI is headed for regular people. There were also some embarrassing early tech memories I probably should have kept to myself.

If you want to give it a listen, the episode is up on MacStories now. Thanks to Jonathan for having me on. It’s always nice to step out of the host seat for a bit.

Mac Power Users 844: Apple Home

On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and David compare notes on their Apple smart home setups and cover what you need to know to build one yourself. They get into the weeds on Matter, Thread, HomeKit Secure Video, smart locks, and which cameras are actually worth buying. David also shares his ongoing tension between a HomeKit-only setup and Home Assistant. If you’ve spent any time with HA, you already know the feeling. Plus a lightning round of their favorite devices and a walkthrough of the best automations to get running first.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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In Defense of the Desktop / Laptop Setup

A few weeks ago, I came very close to buying a MacBook Pro. Not just any MacBook Pro. The big one, the maxed-out M4 Max with enough RAM to make a server blush. My plan was to simplify: one computer, everywhere, always. No desktop, no juggling.

I talked myself out of it. And I’m glad I did.

The thing that stopped me wasn’t the price, though the price didn’t help. It was something more fundamental. I kept thinking about what I’d actually be giving up.

My desktop Mac is an always-on machine. It never sleeps, never powers down, never needs to be woken up. When I come in first thing in the morning, everything is where I left it. Backups have run. Syncs have completed. My AI automations have been doing their thing all night. In the age of AI assistants and robot workflows, that matters more than ever. An agent can only do its work if the machine it’s running on is actually running.

There’s also the peripheral situation. My desktop has a big display, a microphone that sounds like I know what I’m doing, and input devices I’ve spent years getting right. Every time I sit down at that desk, I’m at full capability. No re-pairing, no hunting for a dongle. The laptop is for couch work and coffee shops. The desk is for real work. That physical distinction helps.

Then there’s the anxiety problem.

I’ve owned expensive laptops before. The problem is, they’re expensive. When I had a $3,000 MacBook Pro, I was perpetually terrified of it. Taking it out of the house felt like a hostage negotiation. I second-guessed every bag, every coffee shop table, every time it went through airport security. It wasn’t fun.

A MacBook Air doesn’t carry that weight. I genuinely don’t stress if it gets scratched or left in the wrong bag. And if something happens to it, nothing important is lost. Everything that matters lives on the desktop or in the cloud.

That’s the other part of the math that gets overlooked: you can get a genuinely excellent MacBook Air for around $1,100 (or a Neo for $600!). It’s fast and light and handles everything a laptop needs to handle on the road. You’re not compromising on capability. You’re just not paying for portable horsepower you don’t need away from the desk.

Meanwhile, the desktop can be as powerful as your work demands. Mine has unified memory I’d never need in a laptop and storage that would be eye-watering in a portable form factor. That’s where I do video editing, heavy writing, and anything that takes a lot of time. The laptop handles everything else.

The reliability piece is real, too. A desktop just runs. It doesn’t throttle when it gets hot. The battery never degrades. I don’t think about it. When I need to let a process run for an hour, I set it up and walk away. That kind of dependability is underrated.

And there’s something to the mode-shift value of two separate machines. Sitting down at my desktop means I’m working. Opening the laptop somewhere else means lighter work. That physical difference creates a mental one, and I don’t think that’s trivial.

The upgrade cycle is calmer too. An entry MacBook Air will be plenty fast for casual use for years. A good desktop Mac can run even longer before the speed gap becomes noticeable for real work. And when it’s time to upgrade the desktop, that decision has nothing to do with the portable workflow. They’re independent.

I came close to collapsing it all into one machine. I’ll acknowledge I’m in the minority here, but the two-machine setup does more, and stresses me out less.