Don’t Let the Robot Drive Alone

Since the first release of Claude Cowork, I’ve been diving deep on the tool.

Even when I had my OpenClaw dalliance, I still had a useful robot assistant helping me out in Claude Cowork. I’m convinced that at this point, it is our best option for getting AI assistance with donkey work.

OpenClaw is a 24/7 open door. If the AI hallucinates, it hallucinates with actual consequences. If it misunderstands a command, nobody’s watching.

With Cowork, I watch the AI work. I log in. I verify what it’s doing. Then I log out and the AI doesn’t stay logged in. It doesn’t make decisions in the dark. It executes tasks under supervision.

This sounds less efficient. It isn’t when you consider how much bigger the trust envelope gets.

I still get AI handling my posting, invoicing, and support. The AI processes the work in the same timeframe. The only difference is I’m present during execution.

The trade-off is asymmetric. You lose maybe 10 percent of the raw automation benefit. You eliminate 90 percent of the risk.

With Cowork, nothing happens unobserved. You’re present. You catch the mistake before it’s committed.

The supervised model feels slower only when you’re not familiar with it. Once you’re comfortable, Cowork moves fast.

You initiate a task. You watch. You verify. You’re done. If I trust the process, I’ll put it in a different space and just occasionally swipe in to make sure it’s doing the job.

This model is consistent with the way we humans historically handle high-risk situations. You don’t trust your accountant completely. You verify the numbers. You don’t trust automated backups. You test them. Supervised AI is just the same principle applied to autonomous agents.

If you’re thinking about AI automation, start with Cowork.

Get comfortable with supervised execution and learn where AI makes mistakes. Understand the kinds of donkey work you can offload without the extraordinary risk of an independent agent.

If you want some help getting started, stay tuned. I will have something for you … soon.

Home Screens: Dave Myhre

Today I’m featuring the home screen of my pal Dave Myhre. Dave, a former jet pilot and current Christmas Tree farmer, is one of the most thoughtful technology users I know. He’s the kind of guy who actually thinks about why he sets things up a certain way, not just how. He’s also been busy planting trees, which tells you something about his priorities. So Dave, show us your home screen.

Dave’s First Home Screen
Dave’s Second Home Screen

What are some of your favorite apps?

Obsidian — I like writing my notes in markdown and keeping everything stored locally. I wish it had a native Mac app, and I really wish it had usable iOS and iPadOS versions. On mobile devices, I only use it to view notes. If notes need to be shared, I’ve switched to Apple Notes.

Paprika is my go-to for meal planning, recipe management, and shared grocery lists. I really enjoy Paprika’s ability to capture recipes from the web. Sharing recipes in Paprika is also very easy. Last year, I spent time entering some of my Mom’s recipes into Paprika and even attached pictures of her original 3×5 recipe cards. I was able to share the recipes with family members either as a Paprika file or a PDF.

Focus Modes, although technically not a stand-alone application, has given me back control of my attention and focus when using my devices. I’m down to two key focus modes: Normal and Deep Work. Normal limits notifications to a select group of people and a very short list of applications, and it allows calls only from known contacts. Everything else shows up in scheduled notifications that display about every four hours. Now, when my phone sends a notification, it’s probably important to me, and I don’t feel bad about checking it. My Deep Work focus mode allows notifications only from my wife and my emergency bypass contact. All other calls and notifications show up in the scheduled notifications.

What app makes you most productive?

I have a bunch of pokers in the fire. Quite honestly, too many. The only way I keep from getting burned is by maintaining a robust task management system. I’ve found pairing OmniFocus with Reminders to be a powerful combination. My projects and personal tasks live in OmniFocus, and my shared tasks live in Reminders. Having two task management applications is not the ideal solution. To keep things straight between the two, I use a simple rule to decide where the task will live. If it’s a shared task, it’s handled in Reminders; otherwise, it’s managed in OmniFocus.

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

Drafts — it’s my capture tool of choice. Almost everything starts in Drafts. Unfortunately, I rely too heavily on cut-and-paste to get things out of Drafts. The actions library in Drafts is excellent. I really need to pick a few actions and get those under my fingers. (Dave, I can help with that.)

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Solitaire by MobilityWare. It’s simple and easy to start and stop, even in the middle of a game. And of course, I never play it in Game Center. It’s called Solitaire for a reason.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Add deep link support to Notes, Reminders, Files, and Photos. There is some support now, but system-wide deep link support would be nice.

Fix Siri. Enough said. (Amen, Dave.)

What’s your wallpaper and why?

Just the stock black background that has a slight gradient from dark gray to black. It’s boring and simple, but I like it. I’ve also removed most of the icons from my home screen. I use the Calendar and OmniFocus widgets to keep tabs on what’s going on. I also use the Left widget to graphically show the days remaining in the current quarter. Only a handful of apps live on my home screen. Notes, Reminders, PCalc, 1Password, Drafts, OmniFocus, and Maps. The Phone, Messages, FaceTime, and Mail applications live on the second page, along with a short list of other key applications. Slowly, I’ve been removing the other applications from the remaining screens, since searching for them works fine when I need them.

Thanks, Dave!

The Rivian Apple Watch App

For the last week, I’ve been using the new Rivian Apple Watch app, and it’s pretty great. There are separate screens for security, climate control, and charge level, in addition to a mini dashboard that has everything you need.

Rivian Phone App Dashboard
Rivian Gear Guard
Energy Screen
Climate Screen

Related, their recent integration of the digital car key into Apple Wallet has been running on my iPhone (and Apple Watch) flawlessly for six weeks. Not a single failure to unlock. It’s interesting how good Rivian is getting at supporting Apple devices with their applications while at the same time resisting CarPlay. In some ways they are a great Apple partner. In other ways, not so much.

Rivian has announced its own large language model that it will install in a future update, which will hopefully include the features I’m still missing from CarPlay. As I understand it, this update isn’t far off.

And yes, I named my car Peregrine.

MacBook Neo First Impressions

Apple announced the MacBook Neo today, and I think it’s a bigger deal than most people realize.

The headline is the price. $599. That’s it. And if you’re a student, $499. Yesterday, the cheapest way to get a Mac laptop was north of a thousand dollars. Today, it costs less than a lot of Chromebooks. That is a massive shift.

I’ve been teaching people how to use Macs for a long time. The number one barrier has always been cost. People want to try the Mac, but they can’t justify the price. That excuse just evaporated. A college kid working a summer job can afford this. The Mac is available to a lot of people today that it wasn’t available to yesterday.

It comes in four colors: blush, indigo, silver, and citrus. I love that Apple is having fun with this. They’re bright and playful, and that’s exactly right for a computer aimed at bringing new people into the Mac. I’m a little sad there’s no orange, though. I would have been first in line.

Stephen Hackett wrote a great breakdown of the technical differences between the Neo and the MacBook Air. The A18 Pro chip instead of an M-series. 8GB of RAM with no upgrade option. USB-C instead of Thunderbolt. No MagSafe. One of the two USB-C ports is only USB 2. You’re giving things up.

But for the person this Mac is designed for, none of that matters. If you’re writing papers, browsing the web, managing email, taking video calls, and maybe editing a few photos, this machine does all of that. And it does it with 16 hours of battery life in a fanless design.

Stephen Robles put together a good video walk-through of the new machine if you want to see more.

I think part of the reason this computer exists is the continued payoff from Apple silicon. Apple’s chips are so good that a chip from the iPhone can drive a full Mac. That’s not a compromise. That tells you how far ahead Apple is in chip design.

The A18 Pro handles Apple Intelligence, runs macOS, and does it all in a thin, silent chassis. The silicon advantage is what makes this price point possible. No other laptop maker could do this.

I understand why Apple went with a 13-inch form factor. It’s the sweet spot for most people, and it keeps costs down. But part of me would have liked to see this as a 12-inch machine.

I’m probably mixing my own signals, though. What I really want is an ultra-light MacBook built on Apple silicon. A spiritual successor to the 12-inch MacBook from 2015, but done right this time with chips that can actually handle the thermal constraints. That’s a different product for a different day.

The Neo isn’t trying to be the lightest computer Apple makes. It’s trying to be the most accessible. And at $599, it nails that.

They are going to sell a lot of these.

SoundSource: Complete Audio Control for Your Mac (Sponsor)

My friends at Rogue Amoeba are back to sponsor MacSparky, and this time I want to spotlight SoundSource, their essential audio control app for Mac.

SoundSource provides audio control so useful, it ought to be built in to MacOS. Get instant access to your Mac’s audio settings right from the menu bar, along with powerful per-app volume and routing control, and the ability to apply effects to any app’s audio.

The newly released SoundSource 6 is a major upgrade, with dozens of enhancements. Highlights include:

  • Supercharged AirPlay support: Stream audio to HomePods, Apple TVs, and more.
  • Output Groups: Send audio to multiple devices at once.
  • Quick Configs: Save your entire audio configuration so you can switch setups with a click.
  • A powerful new Audio Devices window: Get deep control over settings for all your audio devices.

All of Rogue Amoeba’s apps offer fully functional free trials, so you can download SoundSource and be up and running in under a minute. And as a MacSparky reader, you can save 20% on SoundSource or any Rogue Amoeba purchase through the end of this month. Just use discount code SPARKYMARCH26 in their online store.

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for supporting MacSparky and making Mac audio better for everyone.

M5 MacBook Pros: Fine Computers With an Asterisk

Apple announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros today, and they look like fine computers. The new chips bring an 18-core CPU with six “super cores”, GPU-level neural accelerators, and memory bandwidth topping out at 614 GB/s on the M5 Max. If you’ve been waiting for a Mac that can handle local AI models without breaking a sweat, this is it. I’m looking forward to the benchmarks rolling in over the next week.

That said, there’s an asterisk here. The M6 MacBook Pro is expected before the end of this year, and it’s rumored to be a substantial redesign with OLED displays, a touchscreen, the notch replaced by a Dynamic Island, and chips built on TSMC’s 2nm process. If even half of those rumors pan out, it will be the biggest MacBook Pro refresh in years. If you’re thinking about buying an M5, go into it with open eyes.

The biggest story for me, though, isn’t the chips. It’s the memory pricing.

DRAM prices have gone haywire. Memory manufacturers have pivoted their production capacity toward HBM chips for AI data centers. The result is a global shortage that has driven DRAM prices up 80 to 90 percent in recent months. PCs are going up in price as a result.

So I wondered if Apple would also bump their memory upgrade pricing on these new Macs. They didn’t. The upgrade from 48 GB to 64 GB is still $200. The jump to 128 GB is still $1,000. Those are the same numbers as last generation.

I have to eat some crow here. For years, I lampooned Apple for their inflated memory prices. The component costs have gone up substantially, and Apple has held the line. Maybe they locked in long-term contracts with their suppliers at lower rates. Maybe they just don’t want to raise prices.

I don’t think this lasts forever. If memory prices keep climbing at this rate, something has to give. But right now, Apple deserves credit for keeping their pricing reasonable when they had every excuse not to.

If you need a pro laptop today, the M5 MacBook Pro is a solid choice, especially for local AI work. Just know that a much bigger update is likely around the corner.

Stephen Millard’s Stream Deck Plugin

I’ve been using Stream Deck for years, and like many of you, I’ve cobbled together various plugins to make it work with my Mac automation setup. KMLink for Keyboard Maestro and separate plugins for shortcuts. It was messy. My friend Stephen Millard fixed all of that… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Pathfinder and Insider Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?