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.…
Continue reading →The Demise of the Mac Pro
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…
Continue reading →The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage
Steven Sinofsky, who ran the Windows division at Microsoft, picked up a MacBook Neo on launch day and wrote a long, reflective piece about it on his Substack. He called it “a paradigm shifting computer”. Coming from the guy who shipped Windows 8 and…
Continue reading →Focused 252: Donkey Work
On this episode of Focused, Mike and I dig into an idea we’re calling “donkey work.” It’s the stuff that has to get done but doesn’t require your best creative thinking. Invoicing, email triage, file management, scheduling. The question is whether AI assistants can…
Listen & read notes →MailMaven: The Email Client for Mac Power Users (Sponsor)
My thanks to SmallCubed for sponsoring MacSparky this week. When Apple pulled the rug out from under third-party Mail plugins, a lot of power users lost tools they depended on. SmallCubed’s MailSuite (MailTags, Mail Act-On) was one of the big ones. Rather than walk…
Continue reading →Mac Power Users 841: Robot Assistant Field Guide
This week on Mac Power Users, Stephen and I go deep on the robot assistant system I’ve been building with Claude Cowork. We cover the whole journey — from why chatbots never quite delivered on their productivity promises to the combination of skill files,…
Listen & read notes →The Case for an Ultralight Mac
The MacBook Neo is here, and it’s already obvious it will be a massive hit for Apple. People are going to buy so many of these. It will be transformative and bring lots of new users into the Apple ecosystem. But I want to…
Continue reading →Using Cowork Dispatch
I made a video explaining how I’m using the new Claude Cowork Dispatach feature to run my shutdown routine from bed. Here you go:
Continue reading →Pixelmator Pro FTW
I recently realized that I’ve stopped using every photo editing app except Pixelmator Pro. It happened gradually over a couple of years, but now it’s the only tool I reach for. I love Acorn and respect the other developers making great image editors. But…
Continue reading →The Robot Assistant Field Guide is Here
I spent the better part of a year experimenting with AI and coming away unimpressed. The chatbots were fine for generating a quick summary or answering a trivia question. But every time I tried to use them for real work, the same problem showed…
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