The Paint at 7AM

Plenty of companies make money. Fewer make things people love. I’ve been thinking about that gap lately, and I think it starts at the top. Does the CEO actually care about the product? Not the quarterly numbers. Not the stock price. The product itself.

Walt’s Shadow

Walt Disney didn’t build Disneyland because he thought it would be a good investment. Everyone around him told him it would fail. His board of directors was against it. The banks wouldn’t fund it. So Walt cashed in his life insurance policy and mortgaged his house. He did it because he had two daughters and he wanted a place where he could take them and they could all have a good time together. That was the whole pitch. A dad who wanted to take his kids somewhere fun.

Once Disneyland opened, Walt was there constantly. He drove the train on Saturdays. He walked the park. He noticed details.

Back in the 80s, I worked at Disneyland. There was an old-timer painter on the crew, and he used to tell me how he’d be working first thing in the morning and feel someone’s shadow fall across him. He’d look up and there was Walt, making the rounds, checking on everything. Seeing the thing he’d built and making sure it was right.

That story has stuck with me for decades. Walt wasn’t checking a spreadsheet or reading a report from a middle manager. He was standing over a painter at 7 AM because the paint mattered to him.

Lasers

Steve Jobs was the same way, but louder about it.

The Apple stories are legendary by now, but the ones that stick with me are the ones from people I actually know. A friend of mine who worked at Apple told me about seeing Steve in the elevator after the MobileMe launch. MobileMe was supposed to be Apple’s big cloud services play, and it was a disaster. My friend said Steve looked like he had lasers shooting out of his eyeballs. The product had Apple’s name on it, and it was broken, and that ate him alive.

You could argue that’s unhealthy. Maybe it is. But there’s something about a CEO who feels physical pain when the product falls short. That energy flows downhill. When the person at the top cares that much, everyone else figures out pretty quickly that they’d better care too.

The Leather Jacket

I see that same energy today in Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. The guy shows up to every keynote in the same leather jacket, and he talks about chips the way a woodworker describes the grain of a piece of walnut. You can tell he’s not performingenthusiasm. He’s genuinely obsessed.

NVIDIA could coast right now. They’re printing money. But Jensen keeps pushing, keeps showing up with that look on his face like he can’t wait to show you what they built. He still holds weekly meetings with engineers.

The Test

You can spot it pretty easily. When a CEO talks about their company, do they talk about the product or the business? Walt talked about the park. Steve talked about the iPhone. Jensen talks about the chip. The ones who love the product can’t help themselves. The ones who don’t talk about market share and strategic initiatives.

There’s a difference between a company that makes money and a company that makes something worth caring about. I believe it starts with whether the person at the top loves what they’re building. As a thing they poured themselves into, not a line on a balance sheet.

I try to pull this lesson into my own work. Sparky Media is a small company. It’s just me with a little help. But I only pursue products I’m passionate about. Before I start a new field guide or take on a new project, I ask myself whether I care enough to put my name on it. If the answer isn’t an immediate yes, I don’t make it. I’d rather publish less and mean it than fill a catalog.

I’m not building theme parks or GPUs. But I know what it feels like to care about the paint at 7 AM.

The Demise of the Mac Pro

Yesterday Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is officially discontinued. I don’t think anybody who’s been paying attention to this can be surprised. The writing was on the wall with the last Mac Pro update, which was twice the price and just slightly better than the then released Mac Studio M2 Ultra.

In the early, heady days of Apple Silicon and the M1 chip, there was a rumor that there was an even more powerful chip in the works, something along the lines of twice as powerful as the Ultra chips going into the high-end Mac Studio. That never came to fruition. In the intervening years, we’ve heard that chip still may come out, but in a future iteration of the M-series chips.

In my mind, the cancellation of the Mac Pro means that they’ve just given up on that. The most powerful Mac you’re going to be able to buy in the foreseeable future will be the upper-end Mac Studio.

The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage

Steven Sinofsky, who ran the Windows division at Microsoft, picked up a MacBook Neo on launch day and wrote a long, reflective piece about it on his Substack. He called it “a paradigm shifting computer”. Coming from the guy who shipped Windows 8 and Surface, that’s not faint praise.

MKBHD went further in his review, calling the Neo “potentially Apple’s most disruptive product in the last 10+ years.” He said it should make the entire Windows and Chromebook laptop industry nervous. I think he’s right, but maybe not for the reasons most people are talking about.

Everyone’s focused on the specs. The A18 Pro chip. The $599 price. The aluminum build. Those are all real, and they all matter. But I think the deeper story is structural, and it’s one that PC makers can’t fix with a better chip or a thinner bezel.

Think about what it takes to build and sell a $599 PC laptop. You’ve got Microsoft, who needs to get paid for Windows. You’ve got the chip maker, whether that’s Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm. You’ve got the hardware manufacturer, Dell or HP or Lenovo. And you’ve got the retail channel. Every one of those companies needs their cut. Every one of them has shareholders and quarterly targets and sales teams and marketing budgets. By the time the laptop reaches a customer at $599, the margins have been carved up so many times there’s barely anything left to put toward making the actual product better.

Apple doesn’t have that problem. They make the chip. They write the operating system. They design the hardware. They sell it through their own stores and website. One company, one margin, one set of decisions. When Apple prices the Neo at $599, they’re not splitting that revenue four ways. They’re keeping it, and they get to decide exactly how much of it goes back into making the product great.

Moreover, I’m not sure Apple even cares that much about the profit margin on the Neo itself. Every $599 MacBook Neo that lands in a college student’s backpack is a new Apple customer. That person is going to buy apps, subscribe to iCloud, maybe pick up AirPods. A few years later they’ll upgrade to a MacBook Air or a Pro. Apple has always been good at the long game, and the Neo might be the longest game they’ve ever played. Get people into the Apple world at $599 and let the lifetime value take care of itself.

Sinofsky’s piece was interesting to me for another reason. He spent a lot of it reflecting on Windows 8 and Surface RT, which tried to do something similar with ARM chips back in 2012. He’s honest about what went wrong. The hardware and software were ready, he says. What they couldn’t pull off was moving developers to a new, more efficient app model fast enough. People wanted the old Windows. Microsoft’s greatest strength, running everything forever, turned out to be the thing that held them back.

Apple took the opposite approach. They spent twenty years systematically moving developers to new frameworks, sunsetting old APIs, and refusing to let backward compatibility become a prison. When they switched to Apple Silicon, the apps were ready. When the Neo shipped with an A18 Pro, nobody complained that their software didn’t work. That’s not an accident.

So yes, there will be PC laptops at the same price as the Neo. There already are. But there won’t be comparable PC laptops at the same price. That’s the distinction. You can match the price or you can match the experience, but the economics of the PC industry make it nearly impossible to do both at once. Apple can, because they’re the only company that controls the entire stack from silicon to storefront.

There is also another question here. If Microsoft’s legacy support kept them from going to the next thing, what is in Apple’s DNA prohibiting it from going to the next thing?

Focused 252: Donkey Work

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I dig into an idea we’re calling “donkey work.” It’s the stuff that has to get done but doesn’t require your best creative thinking. Invoicing, email triage, file management, scheduling. The question is whether AI assistants can take some of that off your plate. I just released the Robot Assistant Field Guide, and Mike’s been working through it, so we compare notes on how we’re each using tools like Claude and Obsidian to offload the operational grind. We also talk about where these tools fall short and why you still need to understand what you’re delegating before you hand it off to a robot.

Episode Links

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • Gusto: Payroll, HR, Benefits. Simplified. Get 3 months free.
  • Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code FOCUSED with this link and get 60% off an annual plan.

MailMaven: The Email Client for Mac Power Users (Sponsor)

My thanks to SmallCubed for sponsoring MacSparky this week.

When Apple pulled the rug out from under third-party Mail plugins, a lot of power users lost tools they depended on. SmallCubed’s MailSuite (MailTags, Mail Act-On) was one of the big ones. Rather than walk away, the SmallCubed team did something ambitious. They built their own email client from scratch.

MailMaven is that client, and it’s built specifically for Mac users who want more control over their email without handing their messages to someone else’s servers. Your mail stays on your provider and your computer. Nothing gets routed through a third party. If you care about privacy, MailMaven also supports end-to-end encryption via PGP.

The feature set reads like a wish list for anyone who’s ever outgrown Apple Mail. There’s a powerful tagging system that goes well beyond labels. You can attach dates, notes, and colors to messages. The rules engine is extensive, giving you fine-grained control over how incoming and outgoing messages get sorted. Smart mailboxes and fast search make it easy to find anything in your archive.

If you’re coming from Apple Mail, migration is seamless. And if you want to go deep, Joe Kissell wrote two books on the app, “Get To Know MailMaven” and “Take Control of MailMaven,” both included free with your purchase.

A couple of things worth noting on the roadmap: version 1.1 is coming at the end of the month and will add POP support. AppleScript support is in the works for version 1.2 later this year. MailMaven will also be featured on ScreencastsOnline in upcoming episodes.

MailMaven is a one-time purchase that includes the first year of updates and data syncing. You can keep using the app indefinitely, and extended maintenance plans are available if you want continued feature updates down the road. No subscription required.

MacSparky readers can get 20% off their purchase with coupon code MACSPARKY2026 at checkout. That includes the first year of updates and data syncing. The offer runs through the end of March.

Check out MailMaven →

Mac Power Users 841: Robot Assistant Field Guide

This week on Mac Power Users, Stephen and I go deep on the robot assistant system I’ve been building with Claude Cowork. We cover the whole journey — from why chatbots never quite delivered on their productivity promises to the combination of skill files, MCPs, and managed agents that finally made AI genuinely useful for the donkey work of running a creative business. I walk through practical examples including automated file renaming, email processing, sponsor invoicing, and podcast post-production pipelines. Stephen also shares his new Studio Display XDR setup and we dig into Perplexity Computer as another emerging option. Fair warning: I also confess to switching back to Gmail, so prepare your hot takes.

Episode Links

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • SaneBox: Take back control of your inbox.
  • Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.

The Case for an Ultralight Mac

The MacBook Neo is here, and it’s already obvious it will be a massive hit for Apple. People are going to buy so many of these. It will be transformative and bring lots of new users into the Apple ecosystem.

But I want to talk about what the Neo isn’t. If you’ve been waiting for Apple to make a truly ultralight Mac, something more premium, smaller, and yes, more expensive, the Neo isn’t that machine. The Neo is about accessibility and volume. It’s the MacBook for everyone.

I want the other thing.

Apple has made ultralight laptops before. The original MacBook Air was a revelation when Steve Jobs pulled it out of a manila envelope in 2008.

But every ultralight Mac has been held back by the same problem: Intel. Those chips ran hot, throttled under load, and demanded compromises in battery life that made the “Air” name feel like a warning label as much as a product category.

That constraint is gone now. Apple silicon changed everything about what’s possible in a thin enclosure.

The M-series chips run cool, sip power, and deliver performance that would have seemed absurd in an ultralight just five years ago. The engineering that makes the current MacBooks Air and Neo possible is the same engineering that could make something even more ambitious.

Think about it. Apple has covered the pro market with the MacBook Pro lineup. The Neo is about to cover the mainstream and budget-conscious buyer.

But there’s a gap at the top. A premium ultralight for people who travel constantly, who want the absolute minimum weight and footprint, and who are willing to pay for it. A MacBook that weighs two pounds or less, with a stunning display and all-day battery life. Not a compromise machine. A showcase.

The technology is ready. Apple silicon was basically designed for this. The question is whether Apple sees the market opportunity, or whether they think the Air (or whatever it becomes post-Neo) already fills that slot.

I don’t think it does. There’s a difference between a laptop that happens to be light and a laptop that’s built from the ground up to be as light as physically possible. Apple used to understand that distinction. The original Air proved it.

With the Neo handling the mainstream, there’s room in the lineup for Apple to go back to that idea. Not an Air. Not a Pro. Something else entirely. Something that shows what Apple silicon can really do when weight is the primary design constraint.

I’d buy one tomorrow.