Soldering My Way to 1MB

Get a few nerds of a certain age talking about the early days of personal computing, and the same machines always come up. The Apple II gets its flowers. So does the Commodore 64. Somebody gets misty about the TRS-80.

Nobody mentions the Atari ST. I’d like to fix that, because I owned one, and it was a terrific computer.

A little history. Jack Tramiel, the man who built Commodore, walked out of that company in January 1984. By July he’d bought Atari’s consumer division from Warner. His team, led by engineer Shiraz Shivji, designed the 520ST in about five months and showed it off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1985. It hit store shelves that summer. Concept to retail in under a year. The press nicknamed it the “Jackintosh” because it looked suspiciously like a Macintosh built to a Tramiel budget.

The budget was the whole point. Atari’s slogan was “Power Without the Price”, and for once the marketing was accurate. You got a Motorola 68000 machine with a mouse and a graphical desktop for far less than a Mac, and it was faster than a lot of what it competed against. In 1986, the 1040ST shipped with a full megabyte of RAM and became the first home computer to get memory under a dollar per kilobyte. Try explaining that pricing milestone to a kid today.

The ST had one more trick, and it’s my favorite. Built-in MIDI ports. Right there on the back, in and out, standard equipment. No interface box, no expansion card. Plug in a synthesizer and go. Musicians noticed. Cubase started life on the Atari ST. So did Notator, the ancestor of Logic Pro. Fatboy Slim made You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby on one, and Tangerine Dream leaned on STs in the studio and on stage for years. Game developers got clever with those ports too. MIDI Maze chained up to 16 STs together for networked deathmatches years before most people had heard of a LAN party.

I couldn’t afford the early Mac, but I could scrape enough together for a 520ST and I loved the thing. When I decided I needed more memory, I didn’t order an upgrade kit or take it to a shop. I cracked the case open and soldered new RAM chips directly on top of the existing ones, piggyback style. It worked! The machine ran for years afterward with double the memory. Every time someone tells me modern computers aren’t meant to be opened, I think about that afternoon.

The ST wasn’t perfect. The case felt a little cheap, and Atari never really figured out how to sell the thing in America, which is part of why it fades from these conversations. Atari wound down the ST line in 1993.

But for a stretch in the late 80s, the ST was the affordable path to real computing power, and for musicians it was the obvious choice. The Apple II and the Commodore 64 earned their nostalgia. The Atari ST earned some, too.

100 New Reasons BBEdit Doesn’t Suck

Bare Bones has shipped BBEdit 16, a major update to the text editor that has outlived nearly everything else on my Mac. The release notes count more than 100 new features and refinements.

The headline feature is text search inside images. BBEdit can now run its search engine, grep patterns and all, against the text living in image files on disk. Rich Siegel says this one came from his own routine: “Searching for text inside images, for example, addresses a real need that I encounter routinely”. Anyone who has ever tried to find that one screenshot of an error message knows exactly what he means.

Shortcuts support also goes much deeper this time. BBEdit’s text transformations are now available as actions powered by App Intents, so you can sort lines, process duplicates, find or delete lines matching a pattern, and run a grep-powered Replace All from inside a shortcut. BBEdit has always been a power tool. Now its text-processing brain is available to your automations without opening the app.

There’s plenty more. Notebooks get filtering with built-in indexing for fast searches. Projects and notebooks can carry their own color schemes so you can tell workspaces apart at a glance. There’s support for the W3C HTML checker, vi keyboard emulation for those who want it, and AI worksheet responses that now stream in rather than landing all at once.

BBEdit 16 requires macOS Sonoma or later. It’s $59.99 new, $29.99 to upgrade from version 15, and $39.99 from version 14 or earlier. If you bought BBEdit 15 on or after November 1, 2025, the upgrade is free. There’s also a 30-day full-featured trial if you’ve never given it a spin.

I’ve been using BBEdit in one form or another for decades, and updates like this are why. It doesn’t suck. It never has.

Intentional AI 2: The Useful Architecture

Intentional AI

On this episode of Intentional AI, Chris Bailey and I get into the part most people skip. Everybody knows you can chat with AI.

Far fewer people know how to turn that chat into a system that actually does the work. So we lay out the four pieces that make a robot useful: the harness you sit in, the context you feed it, the memory it keeps in plain files you own, and the reach that lets it touch your calendar, your email, and the web.

Chris brings a Show and Tell on the AI health coach he built, the one that reads his Apple Watch data and photos of every meal and steers him toward goals that usually fight each other.

Then we dig into Apple’s new Siri AI from WWDC, what it gets right, and why the privacy story might be the most interesting part. If episode one was the why, this one is the how.

The Virtual OS Museum Is a Time Machine for Mac Nerds

If you ever owned a Mac that booted on a chime, the Virtual OS Museum is the rabbit hole for you. Andrew Warkentin has assembled a single emulation project covering more than 1,700 pre-installed operating systems and apps across 250 platforms. Classic Mac OS. A/UX. NeXTSTEP. System 1.0 through Mac OS 9.

It ships two ways. A 121GB full bundle that runs offline, and a lighter 14GB starter that pulls each VM image down on first launch. Either one drops you into a desktop you probably haven’t seen in twenty years.

The fun of a project like this is that it is not trying to be polished. It is a labor of love by one person who wanted every operating system in one place and decided to make it happen. The full list runs 1948 to today, and stepping through it is like flipping through a textbook of computing history.

If you want to see where Apple’s modern OS came from, fire up NeXTSTEP. Most of the ideas that landed in Mac OS X a decade later are sitting right there.

One caveat. The whole museum runs as an x86 Linux VM, so don’t expect speed records on an Apple silicon Mac. You can browse the screenshots and the full list of installations at the project’s site before you commit the disk space.

Focused 258: Defaults

Focused podcast artwork

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I dig into defaults, chronotype, and capacity. Three things that quietly shape how you work whether you pay attention to them or not.

I talk about my practice of writing down my own belief systems, and what happens when you go back and read that stuff in a moment of stress. We get practical about chronotype, when each of us does our best work, and why protecting those hours matters more than most people realize. And then capacity, which is really the payoff of the whole conversation.

I also get to announce the new podcast I’ve been building with Chris Bailey. Intentional AI is out now on the Relay Network, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Episode Links

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

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Paste Meets MCP

Paste, the Mac clipboard manager, just added MCP support. Your clipboard history can now talk to Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any other AI tool that speaks the protocol, through a local MCP server running on your Mac.

Think about what passes through your clipboard in a week. Links, screenshots, snippets from PDFs, that paragraph you copied out of an email and promptly forgot about. A clipboard manager already remembers all of it.

Connecting that memory to a robot assistant makes it useful in a new way. Ask for everything you copied about a project this week, and the robot pulls it together into a draft or a summary without you digging through the history yourself.

This is the part of the MCP story that keeps me interested. Ordinary utilities quietly become context sources, and the robot gets smarter without you typing a single extra word into a chat box.

A word about the privacy side, because clipboards are sensitive territory. Mine has held passwords, account numbers, and plenty of things I’d never paste into a chat window on purpose. Paste puts this behind a switch. You choose which tools get access, and you can revoke it at any time. I’m glad it’s a switch and not a default, and I’d think carefully before flipping it on a machine where your clipboard sees confidential work.

Setup is simple. Open Paste’s MCP settings, turn on Enable MCP, pick your AI tool, and follow the guide.

I keep telling anyone who will listen that a robot assistant is only as good as the context you feed it. An MCP-enabled clipboard can really help.

Ethan Mollick’s Next Book

Ethan Mollick is writing a follow-up to Co-Intelligence. The new book is called Co-Existence, and he announced it this week on his One Useful Thing newsletter. It arrives October 20, and you can pre-order it now.

I really enjoyed Co-Intelligence. That book was written for the chatbot era, when working with AI meant going back and forth with a prompt box and the human stayed firmly in charge.

That world is already fading. With agents now doing real work (and sometimes doing it better than we do), the question has shifted from “how do I prompt this thing?” to “how do I work alongside it?”

That’s the premise of the new book. Mollick describes it as a book about working with AI that is sometimes, but not always, better than you. That framing rings true for me. I watch these tools nail a hard problem in the morning and face-plant on an easy one in the afternoon.

He also admits his last book had 128 em-dashes, and he cut way back this time to prove a human wrote it. I know that feeling.

I’ve already pre-ordered. Mollick is full of good ideas on this subject, and I expect this book to give me plenty to chew on when it releases in October.

Mac Power Users 853: WWDC Reactions

Stephen Robles spent the week of WWDC 2026 at Apple Park, and I spent it running betas on a slightly scratched iPhone Air I grabbed off eBay. He sat two rows behind Tim Cook during Craig Federighi’s post-keynote tech talk. I sat at my desk in a chair.

Despite this, I think we came away with the same conclusion: this is the year Apple actually delivered on the AI promises it made two years ago. Siri no longer fails at simple tasks. It found my notes about solar panels, remembered where I’m vacationing this weekend, and located a shirt receipt without me naming the vendor.

Stephen brings the inside story on what Apple said in the smaller briefings, including how the Gemini partnership actually works and what Apple meant when they said Siri AI is grounded in personal context. There’s also a solid stretch on Safari’s new custom extension builder, the Shortcuts overhaul, Photos AI, and the new Spotlight + Siri combination on Mac. More Power Users goes long on the UniFi Travel Router, which Stephen used all week from his hotel room and which I am about to test on my own vacation.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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The New Siri Doesn’t Suck

I got beta access to the new Siri AI and the first thing I asked was, “Can you check the weather for where I’ll be this weekend?”.

I’m going on vacation. I never told Siri that. It read my calendar, figured out I’d be in Hawaii, and gave me the forecast. Old Siri would have read me the weather at home, or handed me a list of web results and wished me luck.

That one answer tells you most of what changed.

For years, the truth is that Siri made a fine kitchen timer and not much else. That’s no longer true. I spent my first hour with the new Siri running it through real tasks, and it handled a lot of them.

I asked it to add a calendar event. It asked me which calendar I wanted it on. That’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing old Siri never bothered with.

I keep an Apple Note about putting solar on my house. I asked Siri to find it, and it did. Then I asked whether California’s solar laws have changed since I wrote that note. It went and researched the answer, then told me how they’d changed. It found my note and then updated it from the web, all without me touching the keyboard. That’s new.

The one that got me was the email task. I told it I’d ordered some shirts a while back and asked it to find the email. I specifically didn’t tell it the vendor name. Siri found it, REI. Then I asked it to take that receipt and build an Apple Note with all the transaction details. Done. Two apps, one spoken request, no typing.

It wasn’t all wins. I asked it to set a reminder to research solar again next weekend, then asked it to drop a link to the Apple Note into that reminder. The reminder showed up. The link didn’t. A few of my requests just stalled out. It got stuck.

World knowledge held up better than I expected too. It knew the Dodgers lost, when they play next, and who’s pitching tomorrow. The old Siri would have shrugged and offered me a search.

This is a real improvement, and I want to be clear about that. Siri with context is a smarter Siri, and you can see the shape of it in these early tests. The weather answer worked because Siri could see my calendar. The note answer worked because Siri could see my notes. Context is the whole game.

Which is exactly what I can’t stop thinking about. How much context will Apple actually allow?

Letting Siri read your calendar and your notes is one thing. Those are Apple’s own apps, on Apple’s own terms. The harder question is what happens with everybody else’s apps. The tasks that impressed me most were the ones that crossed from one app to another. If that only ever works inside Apple’s walls, it’s useful. If outside developers get real, deep access to the same context, it’s a different product entirely.

Developer buy-in has never been a given with Apple. They’ll need to hand developers a reason to show up, and developers will need to trust that the floor won’t move under them in two years. I don’t have an answer there yet. We’re just days past the keynote. Nobody has had time to push on the edges.

Part of me also feels like this is Apple arriving where they should have been a couple of years ago. Context-aware assistance isn’t new. I run a whole Field Guide on building an AI assistant with deep personal context, and what I can do there runs circles around what Siri pulled off for me today. I didn’t expect Apple to match a full Cowork-level harness on day one, and they didn’t. But the gap is real, and it’s worth saying out loud.

So what I’m watching now is whether Apple keeps its foot on the gas. What shipped today is a good start. My worry is that “good start” quietly turns into “good enough,” and the effort slows down right when it should be accelerating. Context-aware assistance isn’t a feature you ship once and check off. It’s something you keep pushing, year after year, app by app.

I hope they push. The bones here are good, and that’s not something I’ve been able to say about Siri … well … ever. For the first time, I’m curious what it’ll be able to do next month instead of resigned to what it can’t do today.

This Week in the Labs — June 12, 2026

This week in the Labs was a lot of fun as we covered Apple’s WWDC event. We had three meetups, and there were multiple videos. This year’s WWDC announcements were unlike most years, and we all had a lot of takes.

Below you’ll find the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, and what’s coming next week. Most of those links lead straight into the Labs community on Circle, so they’ll only open if you’re a member. If you’re a Labs member who hasn’t set up your Circle access yet, send me a note and I’ll get you in. For members, this is your week at a glance. If you’re not one yet, it’s a peek at what you’re missing.

The Week’s Releases

Productivity Field Guide Early Access in Circle

Announcement · June 6 · Labs members that are PFG owners.
Labs Members who own the Productivity Field Guide got early access to the PFG space inside MacSparky Circle this week. It’s not open to the public yet. If you own the PFG and haven’t seen your invite, drop me a note.

WWDC Keynote Reactions Meetup

Live Meetup Recording · June 8 · All Labs Members
A last-minute bonus meetup to share first reactions to the WWDC keynote before everyone disappeared into the betas. Noon Pacific on Zoom. Recording now published.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

First Look at the New Siri

Video · June 9 · All Labs Members
It’s WWDC keynote day, and the new Siri is here. I got beta access about an hour after the keynote and went straight to testing. This video shows exactly what it could and couldn’t do, with my take at the end.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

June Labs WWDC Meetup

Live Meetup · June 10 · Pathfinder & Insider
Our monthly Labs meetup, this month all about WWDC. We worked through the announcements together. Questions, reactions, and the stuff everyone was still trying to make sense of the day after the keynote.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

Apple Photos AI Features in iOS 27

Video · June 11 · Pathfinder & Insider
iOS 27 gives Apple Photos a new set of AI editing tools. I put Cleanup, Extend, and Reframe through their paces on a beta iPhone Air, using a family photo from Disneyland. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and where the generative fill surprised me.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

June Deep Dive: Exploring the New Beta Software

Deep Dive · June 11 · Pathfinder
We went hands-on with the new betas. What’s different, what’s worth installing on a backup device, and what to watch as the betas mature over the summer.

Pathfinder Link

The Lab Report for June 12, 2026

Podcast · June 12 · all tiers
WWDC week, and after two years of Apple Intelligence promises that didn’t quite land, Apple came back with a real answer. The new Siri, rebranded Siri AI, is the center of it.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

In the Community

Turn Nouns Into Verbs (Labs Discussion Board)
A member tied a Simon Sinek idea to the Productivity Field Guide’s Arete statements. The case for writing your values as verbs, as actions under each role, instead of nouns that just sit there. A good thread on making your values actually guide you when things get hard.

Shortcuts OS 27 (Labs Discussion Board)
Someone digging through the Shortcuts beta found a new “Interpret as Markdown” checkbox for creating and appending to Apple Notes. They ran a big Markdown test through it, and most of it works now. That kills the awkward rich-text dance we used to need.

AI Security (Labs Discussion Board)
A member who wants to put AI to work on their files, but worries about sensitive data getting loose, asked how everyone else handles it. What do you hand to Claude, what do you hold back, and how do you keep it secure. The replies are full of practical answers.

If you’re a Labs member and haven’t joined the Circle community yet, let me know and I’ll get you set up.

Coming Up

After a packed WWDC week, things settle down a little. Here’s the next live Labs session on the calendar.

June Jam Session: Network Setup and Security
Jam Session · June 25 · Pathfinder, Insider, and Member
We’re digging into setting up and securing your home network. Bring your questions and your setup headaches.

Links of Interest

A few things worth your time from my reading this week. Most of it landed in the WWDC slipstream.

The videos, podcasts, and live sessions above are inside MacSparky Labs. Join at macsparky.com/join.