I left my physical wallet at home last Tuesday. Not on purpose. I was halfway to a doctor appointment when I realized it was sitting on my desk.
But I had my iPhone, so I kept driving.
I had my California digital ID, my digital insurance card, and my credit card in Apple Pay. I was fine. (My car also opens with my phone, so I haven’t carried keys in a long time.)
Apple Wallet has been quietly getting better for years. If you’ve only used it for Apple Pay at checkout, you’re missing the best parts.
You can now store physical card numbers behind Face ID. Peer-to-peer payments are as easy as a tap. My state has a digital ID that shows up nicely in my Apple Wallet.
And yet …
There’s a part of me that still feels compelled to carry a small wallet with my driver’s license in it. In my imagination I get in some situation where somebody needs my ID and the app doesn’t work or the authority asking for it doesn’t accept it.
I wonder if I’ll eventually get over that and truly go out knowingly wallet-free. Am I alone in my hesitation?
The way I handle keyboard shortcuts on my Mac with Keyboard Maestro sounds completely nuts until you get it and then it’s brilliant. Watch this video and become a believer. This is a post for MacSparky Labs Pathfinders and Insiders only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?
Jason Snell published his annual Apple report card today. I always enjoy participating. Notable drops this year were the Mac and Apple OS quality. Both of those are entirely attributable to the new Mac user interface. There were no notable improvements. Certainly worth the read.
Join Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users as we go deep on the Mac menu bar, comparing our contrasting philosophies and walk through our favorites. We also explore how macOS 26’s multiple Control Centers are changing the game.
In some 30 years of representing businesses, a universal truth that emerged was that every time a company I represented got taken over by one of those sharp-pencil guys, they lost their way. Seth Godin’s recent piece on how short-term optimization leads to enshitification is absolutely spot-on.
I’ve been buying Macs forever. For most of that time, the conventional wisdom was simple: Get as much memory as you can afford. Back then, everyone was doing video editing or photo work. Memory was expensive. So you bought as much as your budget allowed. More memory always makes your Mac snappier.
Then the world changed. Solid state storage got cheap. Cloud services got fast. Most people stopped doing local heavy lifting. They stored their photos in iCloud. They edited video in the cloud. RAM didn’t matter as much anymore. You could get away with less memory on a Mac and never think about it.
I told people that advice for years: “Don’t go crazy when buying memory”. When I bought my souped up M2 Mac Studio, the one place I scaled back was memory.
I’m done giving that advice.
The age of LLM-based Artificial Intelligence has made memory a premium again. That’s particularly true if you run local AI models, but even Apple Intelligence can get memory hungry. Modern Macs are amazing hardware. But it means nothing if you run out of memory.
The AI era has changed the buying calculus for Macs.
If you’re running local AI models, you need more memory than you think. Significantly more. I’m not talking about academic research. I’m talking about doing actual work on your Mac.
The M5 GPU is better at this stuff than previous chips. It’s built for it. But you need to feed it memory. Without it, you’re bottlenecked. With it, you actually get performance.
In addition, the price of memory is skyrocketing and it’s only a matter of time before that’s reflected in new Mac pricing.
For most people using traditional Mac software 16GB is still fine. If you’re using Slack and Chrome and Word, you don’t need more. But if you’re thinking about running local models or you’re thinking about a future where some of your AI processing happens on your hardware instead of in the cloud (which I expect most of us will be doing soon), you need to spec higher.
I’d say for someone interested in AI work 32GB is the new baseline. Not for today necessarily. But as a hedge for tomorrow.
This is a shift from how Mac people think traditionally. We’ve been storage-focused. How much SSD. How much disk space. We’re moving into a world where RAM is the limiting factor. Where more memory means access to capabilities that weren’t available at lower levels.
So here’s my practical advice. If you’re buying a Mac in 2026, go big on memory. You’ll thank me in three years when you don’t need a new machine because you hit the memory wall.
I have a shelf full of books I’ve read but can’t quite remember. Not the titles. The ideas. The specific thing I was supposed to do differently after finishing them.
That’s the problem with most reading. You finish the last page, feel smart for a moment, then move on. The insights vanish within a week.
I’ve been using Shortform for three years now, and it’s changed how I read. What started as a way to preview books before buying them became something more useful. It became how I actually retain what I read.
Two Ways In
Shortform gives you two ways into any book. There’s a one-page summary you can read in about five minutes. Then there’s the full guide that goes deep, chapter by chapter, with analysis and commentary.
Most summary services give you brief, AI-generated overviews that only scratch the surface. Shortform’s team of writers and editors actually analyzes each book. You get real depth, not a skim.
I usually start with the one-page version. If it hooks me, I’ll read the full guide. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it convinces me to buy the book.
The Part That Actually Works
What keeps me coming back to Shortform are the exercises built into each chapter. Not quiz questions to test if you paid attention. Real prompts that make you apply the ideas to your own life.
Questions like “Where in your life does this apply?” and “What will you do differently?” These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re the ones that make reading actually stick.
Beyond Books
Shortform has grown well past book summaries. The library now covers thousands of titles across more than 30 genres, and they add new guides every week. But the newer additions are what surprised me.
Master Guides pull together multiple books on a single subject, giving you complete coverage from several viewpoints. Article Guides cover faster-moving topics that books can’t keep up with. And their newest addition, Podcast Guides, brings the same treatment to audio content.
There’s also a browser extension that summarizes content across the internet. Emails, articles, YouTube videos. One click and you get a summary. Every guide comes in PDF and audio versions too, so you can read or listen however you prefer.
The summaries cross-reference other books in the library, which helps you spot patterns across different authors. Everything syncs to Readwise if you use that system, and you can export to Kindle.
The Honest Assessment
I renewed my subscription again this year. For the price of one book a month, you get access to thousands with the ability to learn from them faster. The exercises are what make the difference. Without them, it would just be another summary service.
If you’ve ever finished a book and thought “I should really do something with this,” give Shortform a look. MacSparky readers get a free trial and $50 off the annual plan.
In this February 2026 MacSparky Labs deep dive, I share the latest iteration of my iPhone home screen and explain why I prefer a clean, neutral gray look with clear or gray icons to reduce visual noise, along with custom-made wallpapers created in Pixelmator … This is a post for the MacSparky Labs Pathfinder members. Care to join? If you’re already a member, you can log in here.
This post brought even more questions about M5 vs M6 MacBooks Pro. The timing is weird this year. The M5 MacBook Pro arrives soon. (Likely March 4!) The M6 arrives later in the year with a completely new design and OLED display. You could buy in spring or wait until fall.
The M5 is a massive jump in AI performance. 4X over M4. Apple engineered the GPU specifically for running language models locally. The M6 is a design refresh. New chassis. OLED display. Probably some GPU improvements too, but nothing as dramatic as the M5 jump.
This is a use case decision. If you’re running local AI models or doing development work that benefits from GPU acceleration, buy the M5. The performance gain is real and the wait costs you months of productivity.
If you’re doing video editing, color grading, or anything where display quality matters to your actual work, the M6 OLED is worth waiting for. If you’re mostly doing text-based work, this choice barely matters. The M5 is more than sufficient.
Now the money angle. Apple usually signs long-term memory contracts. RAM is getting expensive. Memory prices are likely to go up. An M5 with 32GB might be $2,400 now. The same RAM in an M6 could be $2,600 in September.
Prettier design, better display, faster GPU. But you might pay more for the same memory.
My recommendation: Buy the M5 if you need the performance now. You’ll regret waiting more than you’ll regret missing the design refresh.
Wait for the M6 only if display quality or industrial design are actually important to your work. Not aspirationally important. Actually important.
Regardless of whether you go M5 or M6, you’re going to get a helluva Mac.
