Apple turned 50 this week, and there’s a lot to talk about. Tim Cook rang the NASDAQ bell, shared rare prototypes with the Wall Street Journal, and Paul McCartney played Apple Park…
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Apple just dropped the price of the VESA-mount Studio Display XDR by $400. The standless version is now $2,899, down from $3,299. The stand version stays at $3,299.
That’s a big correction for a product that’s only been on the market for a few weeks. And it makes me curious about the internal conversations that led to it. Did the original pricing miss the mark? Were pre-order numbers lower than expected? Did someone at Apple realize that charging the same price for a monitor without a stand as one with a stand didn’t make a lot of sense?
Either way, if you are looking at the new monitor sans stand, it just got a bit more affordable.
Apple Maps has been quietly accumulating useful features over the last few years and most people are only using a fraction of what’s there…
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Fantastical now supports Apple’s AlarmKit, the persistent alarm feature that arrived with iOS 26. You can set urgent alarms on individual calendar events, and they’ll ring through even when your iPhone is silenced or in a Focus mode…
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Apple turned 50 today. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a fun animated history running on Apple’s homepage that sketches its way through five decades of products. It’s clever but not too clever. If you’ve been around through Apple’s triumphs and failures, it’s a good watch.
I’m glad Apple is marking the occasion. Fifty years is a real milestone, and the company has earned a moment to look back. The Apple II. The Mac. The near-death experience. The iPod, the iPhone, and everything that followed. That’s a story worth reflecting on.
But I hope they don’t overdo it.
The reason I became an Apple customer wasn’t nostalgia. It was the opposite. Apple’s thing has always been an unrelenting focus on what’s next. What’s the best product we can make right now? What problem can we solve tomorrow? That restlessness is what made them interesting and what kept me buying their stuff year after year.
A 50th birthday celebration is great. A 50th birthday year where every keynote opens with a sepia-toned montage? Less great. Apple is at its best when it’s building the future, not curating the past.
So happy birthday, Apple. Now get back to work.
MacSparky Labs members get to participate in member events and receive a number of exclusive videos and podcasts each month. Here’s a summary of offerings this past month:
Labs content and its membership level: P – Pathfinder; I – Insider; M – Member
If you’d like to be a part of the MacSparky Labs, you can get more information and join right here.
I was a guest on The Supportive, a podcast from Help Scout hosted by Mat Patterson. The episode is about customer support, small business, and figuring out what matters when you’re a one-person operation.
When Mat first reached out, I wasn’t sure an interview made sense. What I do is small. I make video tutorials and run a website. I’m not managing a support team or fielding thousands of tickets a day. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I actually care a lot about customer support. Maybe more than I’d admitted to myself.
We ended up going deep on some things I don’t usually talk about in public. My early days working at RadioShack. The values my dad taught me over lunch when I told him I wanted to be a lawyer. Why I chose a small law firm over the big ones. And how all of that shaped the way I run MacSparky today.
The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is about kindness as a business strategy. Not in a soft, abstract way. In a practical way. If you solve for kindness in your customer interactions, you end up attracting the kind of audience you want. The aggressive people filter themselves out. That’s been my experience for twenty years now.
We also talked about the tension between growth and staying hands-on. Mat did a great job of getting me to talk about things I don’t usually discuss.
On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I dig into the feedback bag. We cover everything from Stephen’s secret Cloudflare image-hosting shortcut to the great Raycast vs. Spotlight vs. Alfred debate, Stream Deck setups (and whether that new XL is too much Stream Deck), iCloud security with Advanced Data Protection, and how I’m using Keyboard Maestro conflict palettes for window management across two monitors. We also announce something new for More Power Users subscribers: monthly bonus episodes starting with a Star Wars movie ranking that may test our friendship.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.