This Week in the Labs — July 3, 2026

This was a transition week around here. A lot of you are moving into the new Circle home for MacSparky Labs, and it has been fun watching the place fill up. If you are a Labs member and you haven’t made the jump yet, send me a note and I’ll get you an invite link.

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

June Jam Session — Network Setup and Security

Jam Session · July 1 · All tiers

The recording of last month’s members roundtable is up. We worked through home network setup and security, from hardware choices to keeping the smart-home gear walled off on its own network.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

Build Your Own Safari Extension with Natural Language

Video · July 2 · Pathfinder + Insider

iOS and macOS 27 let you describe a Safari extension in plain language and build it in seconds, right on your device, no App Store required. I show a few that are actually worth keeping around.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

The Lab Report for July 3, 2026

Podcast · July 3 · All tiers

Apple shipped 26.5.2 with 25+ security fixes, and the bigger story is why the patches keep coming faster. Same-day updates are the new normal.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

In the Community

Rumors that the MacBook Pro with touchscreens won’t get M6? (Labs Discussion Board)

A member flagged the reports that the touchscreen MacBook Pro may skip the M6, and the thread turned into a good back-and-forth on what that would mean for timing and whether it’s worth holding out.

Who are you? (Labs Discussion Board)

With so many new folks landing in Circle this week, members are introducing themselves. A nice place to say hello if you just arrived.

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

The Labs July Meetup is July 11 at 10:00 AM Pacific, the monthly gathering of the tribe. Pathfinder | Insider

The July Deep Dive, Hidden Gems in the Beta Software, is July 16, a closer look at the small features hiding in this year’s betas. Pathfinder

The Labs Book Club meets July 30 at 12:00 PM Pacific. This round we’re reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. Pathfinder | Insider

Links of Interest

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

On Pain and Happiness

A listener recently wrote in about something that stopped him mid-page. He’d picked up Gregory Hays’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, while working through a hard stretch in his life, looking to Stoicism for a foothold.

Then he hit a line in Hays’s introduction: “Marcus does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.” He asked whether that’s really all Stoicism has to offer, and what else he should read.

Here’s what I told him.

Yes, I’ve read Meditations many times. The Hays line that worried you is actually honest, and I’d reframe it as a feature: when you’re going through hard things, a philosophy that teaches you to hold steady under pressure is exactly what you need. Happiness that depends on circumstances is fragile. Resilience isn’t.

That said, Meditations works best as a companion, not a starting point. I’d pair it with Donald Robertson‘s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. Robertson is a cognitive therapist who connects Marcus’s practices to modern psychology, and he makes the whole thing feel immediately usable. I had him on Focused #239, How to Focus Like a Roman Emperor, and his work is the real deal.

For the spiritual compass piece specifically, I’d also look at Epictetus’s Enchiridion. Short, direct, and it gets at the core of what you can and can’t control in a way that’s genuinely clarifying when life feels out of hand.

Keep going. The fact that you’re asking these questions is a good sign.

I actually believe that the ancients do give us a formula for happiness. This goes a bit beyond Stoicism, but I believe it requires figuring out what’s important to you and pursuing that ethically. If you can do those two things, in my experience, happiness just arrives.

Good luck on your journey.

Intentional AI 3: Context is King

Intentional AI podcast artwork

On this episode of Intentional AI, Chris Bailey and I dig into the idea that sits under everything else: context is king.

The model you pick matters less than the raw material you feed it, so we get practical about what context actually is, why long threads rot and turn the robot dumb, and how thread management fixes it. Chris shares how he loads a session with Wispr Flow and then lets the robot interview him for his blind spots.

I bring a Show and Tell on my Daily Dispatch, the 4 a.m. scheduled task that reads my calendar and tasks and tells me when I’ve overloaded the day. We close with AI news (Claude in Slack, ChatGPT’s scheduled tasks, the burnout paradox) and a few honest experiment check-ins, including the cognitive offloading research that gave us both pause.

If the model is the engine, this episode is about the fuel.

Mac Power Users 855: Shortcuts with Viticci

I just spent an hour and a half talking Shortcuts with Federico Viticci, which means I walked away with about six new projects and zero free time. Federico runs MacStories and knows more about Shortcuts than just about anyone, so he was the person to talk to now that WWDC is behind us. We dug into Describe a Shortcut, Apple’s new natural-language way to build automations, and where it shines versus where it falls apart. Federico even explained the adapter Apple trained to make it work, which is exactly the kind of nerdy detail that makes this show fun for me. We also covered the rest of the iOS 27 Shortcuts updates, including Else If support, new automation triggers, and built-in data storage that finally brings global variables to Shortcuts. Then Federico walked us through his coder era, including Shortcuts Playground 2.0 and the local model he trained on a Mac Studio to generate shortcuts from scratch. My to-do list grew three sizes during this one. Worth it.

Episode Links

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Why Local AI Is Apple’s Play

Right now, the frontier AI models are, at best, getting $200/month from AI consumers. And Sam Altman has said publicly that OpenAI loses money on every one of those subscriptions. The compute bills are just that large.

Apple is doing something entirely different.

At WWDC this year, they started making the case for local AI. Not with a frontier model of their own. They don’t have one, and they’re not trying to win that race. What they did instead was double down on the hardware advantage they already have and start wiring their platform for AI in ways that keep the processing on your device.

Apple has over a billion active devices. OpenAI and Anthropic are spending enormous amounts of money trying to get in front of those people. Apple already has them.

Put simply, Apple believes the customer experience is more important than the model. If they can get workable local AI on your Apple devices, Apple figures they’ll win whatever this is.

And they are slowly getting there. The M5 chip is genuinely capable for local AI, and that is as bad as it gets as the Apple chip designs march forward. Apple isn’t matching what frontier models do in a data center. But the tasks most people actually need AI for, like drafting, summarizing, searching, and organizing, are getting within reach of what local models can handle.

Likewise, Apple didn’t adopt the MCP standard but instead seeks to again be a gateway to its customers with its own APIs. What Apple did was open up App Intents and a handful of related frameworks so AI can privately reach into your apps (and data!) and do things. It’s the same idea as MCP, just Apple’s version.

Apple is trying to position its devices as the place where AI meets your actual life. Your health data, your messages, your documents, your photos. None of that leaves. The processing happens on-device. Third parties who want to reach you through AI do so via Apple’s hooks, on Apple’s terms.

And if local AI on Apple silicon gets capable enough, they don’t have to route your requests through a frontier model at all. They need fast enough hardware, a capable harness, and a big enough installed base.

They have the user base, and they’re on their way with the hardware and the harness. If AI compute truly becomes a commodity, Apple could come out of this looking really good. At least that is one possible outcome, and it increasingly appears to be the one Apple is betting on.

Fantastical Tackles the Double-Booking Problem

If you run more than one calendar, you already know the double-booking trap. Your work calendar shows a meeting. Your personal calendar shows that same hour wide open. You say yes to lunch, and now you’ve promised to be in two places at once.

The latest version of Fantastical goes after exactly this problem. The new feature is called calendar mirroring. You set up rules, and Fantastical automatically copies events from one calendar onto another so each one knows what the other is doing.

The hard part isn’t the copying. It’s privacy. You don’t want your personal calendar spilling its details into your work account, and you don’t want a client seeing the name of your dentist appointment. Fantastical gives you control over what gets mirrored and how much of it shows up. You can block the time without exposing what’s in it.

I made a video for the Flexibits team that walks through the whole thing, from setting up your first rule to keeping the details private.

Calendar mirroring shipped in this week’s Fantastical update. The same release adds a Meet With feature for checking other people’s schedules in your organization, plus the usual batch of fixes. You can grab the update on the Fantastical page.

Fantastical has been solving everyday calendar headaches like this for 15 years now. This one fixes a problem I’ve actually lived. I’m glad it’s here.

This Week in the Labs — June 26, 2026

A busy week in the labs as we continue to process the WWDC announcements and releases…

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

Exploring the New Beta Software

Video · June 24 · Pathfinder

An early look at some of the new features in the Apple developer betas. Pathfinders got the first look this week.

Pathfinder Link

2026 Q2 Q&A

Video · June 25 · All tiers

The quarterly question-and-answer. I work through your questions on the robot assistant in daily use, the move to Circle, the new MacBook Pro and running local models, the betas and Siri AI, and the personal side of the year so far.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

June Jam Session — Network Setup and Security

Event · June 25 · All tiers

This month’s members-only roundtable covered home network setup and security, from hardware choices to IoT isolation strategies. The recording is coming.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

The Lab Report for June 26, 2026

Podcast · June 26 · All tiers

Apple officially raised its prices this week, and it touched nearly the whole lineup. I get into what went up, what held, and why Apple says it had no choice.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

In the Community

Buy An Apple Watch! (Labs Discussion Board)

A member shared that their Apple Watch called 911 and reached their family after they lost consciousness in a car crash and went off the road. They walked away. Nineteen likes and fifteen comments, and the thread is still going.

How Much Mac Memory to Buy? (Labs Discussion Board)

With Apple’s price increases landing this week, members are working through how much RAM to buy on the next Mac purchase. A good practical read if you’re trying to figure out where to land when Apple Intelligence is part of the equation.

Alfred FG in 2026 (Labs Discussion Board)

With the new Alfred Field Guide now in the store, a member asked how well it holds up against Alfred 6. Good timing, and the early replies have been useful.

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

The Labs July Meetup is July 11 at 10:00 AM Pacific, the monthly gathering of the tribe. Pathfinder | Insider

Links of Interest

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

Where Apple’s Price Increases Landed

Last week I wrote that Apple’s price increases were coming and bet the high end would take the hit while the cheap stuff stayed cheap. The prices landed this week, and I was half right.

The high end did take it. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio jumped from $3,999 to $5,299. That’s the worst of it, and it tracks with what I expected.

I got one part wrong. I figured Apple would protect the MacBook Neo at all costs. It’s the machine that gets a student or a switcher in the door, and it’s been a hit at $599. They raised it $100 anyway. I keep coming back to that one. The math makes sense. Memory and storage prices have quadrupled in the past year. This is component-driven and not a margin grab, and Apple’s competitors are raising prices too. But the Neo is the one I’d have fought hardest to protect, and they let it go up.

They also held the line where it counts most. The iPhone, AirPods, and the Studio Display all kept their prices.

Then there’s the Apple TV.

The Apple TV 4K went from $129 to $199. That’s a 54 percent jump, the biggest on the whole board, on a box almost everyone expects Apple to replace this fall. Raising the price of the outgoing model right before the new one ships looks like chiseling.

I think it’s deliberate. If Apple holds the old price until the new Apple TV arrives, the new model shows up looking more expensive, and that becomes the story at launch. Bump the current box now, and the fall model can land at the same price as the thing it replaces. The same logic runs through the whole lineup. Once these numbers settle in, the fall products are measured against the new, higher prices rather than the old ones. It even does John Ternus a favor. This way, his first act isn’t a price hike on everything.

A few of you have already asked whether this is temporary. If memory prices come back down, does Apple roll its prices back?

I wouldn’t hold my breath. Prices are easy to raise and hard to walk back, and Apple has never been shy about protecting its margins. My money is on this being the new normal for Apple pricing.

Lettera, A New Markdown Editor for Mac from Bear Developers

The team behind Bear just released the beta of Lettera, a native Markdown editor for the Mac. It grew out of Panda, the editor they built for Bear 2, and it’s now evolved into a standalone app.

The feature list is the kind that makes a plain-text nerd lean in. Live CommonMark rendering, so the Markdown syntax hides while you write. Open a single file, or point it at a whole folder as your workspace. Tables, code blocks, inline images, MathJax, and a table of contents for moving around a long document. Export to PDF, ePub, and HTML when it’s time to send the work somewhere.

I have aspired toward these bespoke Markdown editors for years. They look beautiful and focused, and I want to love them. And yet I keep gravitating back to Drafts, because I never leave text in these editors very long and Drafts tools make it so easy to manage. A pretty editor is lovely right up until you need the one feature it doesn’t have.

So I’m going in clear-eyed. I’m looking forward to spending real time with Lettera to see how it feels. Either way, it’s worth a look.

You can grab the beta through TestFlight, and the app has a home at lettera.md.

The Model Holds the Shovel. You Hold the Map.

I spent the last month setting up a new community for the MacSparky audience. I’m not going to walk you through the build today. That’s a piece for another week. What I want to tell you about is where the actual decisions came from.

I worked through option after option. Names, structures, pricing, rooms, access tiers, onboarding flow. By the end I had a draft set labeled A through H. Yes, eight versions. I went in deep.

Claude was useful for a lot of that. Skills, drafts, the small gears that turn busywork into something I could finish in a sitting. I’d describe what I needed and the robot cranked the wrenches for me. That part really did help.

The big decisions, though, didn’t come from any of those eight drafts. They didn’t come from any large language model. If anything, the models would have led me away from the answer.

The big decisions came from phone calls.

A call with Mike about which platform actually fits the audience. A call with Nick on whether to launch one community or two, which sounds tactical until you realize how completely it reshapes the next year of work. A few conversations with my biggest customers about what they actually wanted, in their own words, before I built around what I assumed they wanted.

Each of those calls reset something I had been confidently typing into Claude for days.

There’s a reason for that. The people I called know me. They know the business. They know the audience. They had context the model doesn’t have and won’t ever have. The model is an amnesiac eager intern. Useful for donkey work. Hopeless at holding the picture of what I’m actually trying to do.

I’m not anti-AI here. I’ve spent years building Field Guides on this exact topic. The lesson from this experience is just that the model holds the shovel. You, in your guts, and your trusted human advisors hold the map.

So here’s a question for you. What decision are you about to make on Claude’s advice that would change if you picked up the phone and asked someone who knows you?