Where Apple’s Price Increases Will Land

Tim Cook just told the Wall Street Journal that Apple is raising prices. The cause is a memory chip shortage. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said. He added that Apple has been trying to shield its customers, “but the situation has become unsustainable”.

So prices go up. The question is where.

My money is on the high end taking most of the hit. Apple has spent the last couple of years pulling people onto Apple silicon and into the idea that a Mac is a real machine for local AI. I expect they’ll keep the gas pedal firmly down on the MacBook Neo and protect that entry price, even if it means the maxed-out configurations carry the weight. The person shopping for a base laptop is exactly the person Apple least wants to scare off.

There’s another issue related to this shortage. It’s the actual shortage part.

A shortage doesn’t just raise prices. It limits what you can build. When the next Mac Studio shows up, will there still be a 512GB configuration on the menu? Apple clearly wants the Mac in the local AI conversation, and big, unified memory makes that possible. You need the room to load large models. Wanting to offer 512GB and being able to source the chips for it are two very different things.

And if they pull it off, what will it cost? My guess: a lot.

I’ll be watching the high end.

This Week in the Labs — June 19, 2026

It’s week two of the new betas and we’re learning more in the MacSparky Labs.

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

Testing Siri’s Enhanced Dictation

Video · June 15 · All Labs Members

Apple says Siri’s enhanced dictation sets a new bar this year. I put it on an M5 iPad under the best possible conditions, ran it against a Wendell Berry poem and some free-form thinking, then handed the same tests to Wispr Flow to see how close Apple actually got.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

Natural Language Shortcuts: Build Automations by Describing Them

Video · June 17 · Pathfinder & Insider

Apple wants to bring Shortcuts to the people who always found it too intimidating. This year you can describe a shortcut in plain language and let Apple Intelligence build it for you. I turned on the camera and tried four of them live, from a quick text to my kids up to a full morning report, and showed where it worked and where it fell apart.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

The Lab Report for June 19, 2026

Podcast · June 19 · All tiers

It’s the week after WWDC and the Siri AI details keep coming. This week we get into the take-a-break message hiding in the iOS 27 beta, three real upgrades to iPhone Mirroring, Apple swapping macOS names for version numbers, and a rumor pile that runs deep, including a 20th anniversary iPhone and a touchscreen MacBook one leaker now calls confirmed.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

In the Community

Buy An Apple Watch! (Labs Discussion Board)

Nick shared a hard story this week. He lost consciousness while driving, went down a thirty-foot hill, and his Apple Watch called 911 and reached his family on its own. The thread turned into a steady stream of members making the case for the Watch and swapping their own close calls.

UniFi Travel Router (Labs Discussion Board)

Richard asked the group for real-world experience with the UniFi Travel Router before buying one. The replies came in fast with setups, gotchas, and travel notes. Good timing too, with the network jam session coming up next week.

Pocket AI Voice Recorder (Labs Discussion Board)

A first-time poster who works as a mobile service engineer asked whether a small AI voice recorder is worth it for capturing job details on the road, or whether the phone in his pocket already does the job. The thread weighed dedicated hardware against what we already carry.

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 calendar is quiet this week after WWDC, then picks back up. Here’s what’s next on the live schedule.

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.

Labs July Meetup

Meetup · July 11 · Pathfinder & Insider

The monthly gathering of the tribe. Open agenda, good company, and whatever’s on everyone’s mind in Apple land.

Links of Interest

A few things worth your time from my reading this week.

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

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:

  • Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code FOCUSED with this link and get 60% off an annual plan.
  • Vitally: Your Copilot for AI-Powered Customer Success. Get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you book a qualified meeting.

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:

  • Daylite: The only made-for-mac CRM solution. Start your free trial today.
  • Workbrew: Deliver the software your team needs securely and at scale.
  • Mercury Weather: Forecasts, beautifully done. Download now for free.
  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code MPU.