Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple. Several observations on his tenure from a long-term Apple customer and observer.

April 23, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Among the working titles for this post were Good riddance and Stop the praises, and I haven’t chosen them not because I thought they were somehow mean-spirited, but because they sounded like coming from a place of deep care. They sounded like the reaction of someone with deep emotional investment in the whole thing. But over the past few years I — a long-time enthusiastic Apple user and customer — have become desensitised towards most of what Apple does and what Apple has become. And I have to thank Tim Cook for that.

I was told on Mastodon that I shouldn’t judge Tim Cook only by the standard that was Apple leadership before him, because that would be missing the point. That “dismissing an era that delivered custom silicon, record financial performance, and a strengthened privacy among many other things feels less like critique and more like nostalgia frustration.” This because my initial reaction after learning that Cook would step down as CEO of Apple was indeed along the lines of Fuck off and Good riddance, and indeed came from a place of bottled frustration. From my corner of the Internet, I climbed on top of my metaphorical tower and yelled at the clouds like the Simpsonian old man. It was great. I needed to get that fuck off out of my system. 

But now is the time to have a more articulate conversation. 

Now, most people will look at Cook’s tenure as CEO of Apple and will talk about the incredible financial success it brought to the company. Cook took an already healthy Apple in 2011 and made it exponentially thrive in the following fifteen years. This is as dismissible as an elephant in a room. I never doubted Cook would be a good ‘maintainer’. It’s like letting a much-decorated admiral take control of your ship — of course they’ll do a good job. Before taking the role of CEO, Cook was the company’s COO, and in these past fifteen years he has always been a COO in CEO’s clothes. And I guess Steve Jobs knew that when he appointed Cook as his successor. Jobs didn’t want the Apple ship to sink, and Cook was the man to ensure something like that wouldn’t happen. With regard to vision and direction, well, that’s a whole other matter. 

I’m clearly speculating here as an external observer, so take this with the usual grain of salt, but I suspect that Jobs thought that his other men in executive positions at the time of his passing would help Cook when it came to envisaging products, avenues of technological research, and when it came to giving Apple a direction and personality. Or rather, Jobs perhaps thought that Cook would ask Jobs’s other lieutenants for help with these things. What happened, instead, is that Cook essentially did away with the figures who had been close to Jobs (in methods and mindset), to favour people he felt more collaborative, more ‘team players’ than the annoyingly charismatic and (I suppose) confrontational ones he had to argue with about pretty much everything. Too bad that a lot of these people were also pretty competent at their job.

Not knowing what to do with Jonathan Ive

Whether some like it or not, Apple historically owes a lot of its success to the design of its products, and therefore to Jonathan Ive. His role under Jobs’s tenure was clear: Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Designing hardware. Jobs also described Ive as his ‘spiritual partner at Apple’ because he felt they both consistently operated on the same wavelength. Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson:

If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ He gets the picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer. That’s why he works directly for me. He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me. 

Under Cook, after the ousting of Scott Forstall, Ive was also tasked to provide “leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his role as the leader of Industrial Design” (Source: Apple press release, 29 October 2012). This turned out to be an unfortunate decision, not because I think Ive was bad at this new role, but because his hardware design aesthetic didn’t translate as well or as efficaciously when it came to software and operating systems. This resulted in years of flat design in iOS and Mac OS, and in an increased focus on how a user interface looks versus how it should work.

In 2015 Ive was promoted to Chief Design Officer, which, again as an external observer, felt like the kind of title you give to someone when you simultaneously want to recognise their expertise and also dump everything related to their field squarely on their shoulders. Ive was ‘the design guy’ so let him ‘design stuff’ — it could be hardware, software, services, product packaging, architectural design for new company headquarters… You know, an Everything-Design Bucket, with Ive being responsible for this gigantic, undifferentiated bucket. Then in 2017 Ive was told to leave this big bucket alone and get back to manage just the product design team. Then in 2019 Ive was gone for good. 

I don’t want to exclusively defend Ive on this — I’m not a fan of certain design decisions and directions he made and took both under Jobs but especially under Cook — but I don’t feel that he was properly managed and utilised as the valuable asset he had been before Cook became CEO. After Jobs’s passing, Ive lost an important sounding board, someone who could really brainstorm with during the creation process, someone who had the ability to look at things from the end user’s perspective and who could make intelligent suggestions regarding the ‘design is how it works’ part of the equation. I absolutely don’t have a clue about how the atmosphere was at Apple Park with Cook as CEO, but my feeling is that that kind of constructive brainstorming was replaced by stuff like “Show me the designs for the new MacBook Pro by next Monday. Okay, have a nice weekend, see you.” Probably the only sounding board left was the rest of the Design Team, but they were basically all Ive’s subordinates. You can still have a productive discussion, but it’s just not going to be the same.

The power of iteration

Again, not to downplay Apple’s financial success under Cook, but let’s be real for a moment: do you honestly think people would stop buying Apple products after Steve Jobs’s untimely death? All major product lines were experiencing an enviable momentum at the end of 2011: the iPhone 4S was a great successor and upgrade of the iPhone 4. Mac laptops were in a good place, especially after a great 2010: MacBook Pros in three sizes (13‑, 15‑, and 17-inch); a redesigned and much improved MacBook Air; a healthy desktop offering with iMacs, Mac minis, a Mac Pro that was still going strong, a newly-introduced 27-inch Thunderbolt Display that would stay in production until 2016. And last but not least, the introduction of the iPad. On the software side, iOS was at version 5, showing lots of improvements and a mature visual design that worked well even on that ‘big iPhone’ that was the iPad. iCloud had been just announced, and promised to be a much more reliable solution than MobileMe. Mac OS X was at its peak with Snow Leopard, and while Lion didn’t really feel like a worthy successor, it was still in the right place compared to what was to come in the following years.

With all this food on the plate, do you really think people would stop coming to the restaurant? Of course they wouldn’t stop coming. When you can’t innovate, you iterate. And that sums up pretty much Apple’s hardware design under Cook’s tenure. Sure, there have been new products and product lines (Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, AirPods), and sure, design consistency isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if we follow the don’t fix what is not broken adage, but show a MacBook Pro or a regular Apple Watch to a layperson, and at first glance they won’t be able to tell whether it’s a recent model or not. The first time I brought to a library the 17-inch 2010 MacBook Pro I acquired two years ago, I was approached by a university student asking me if it was a new, bigger laptop from Apple. This happened in early 2025. When I told him it was a 15-year-old machine, he was genuinely astounded.

If you know by heart the recipe to make a good product, and a product that was already successful, you’ll keep making that product. Every now and then you’ll adjust the recipe slightly, so that you don’t deviate from the product too much but at the same time managing to keep it feeling fresh, and voilà, the power of iteration will keep you afloat.

It’s worth noticing that, wherever Apple deviated from the tried-and-true formula, the results were questionable at best. Examples include, in no particular order:

  • Putting a notch on the iPhone. This was done as a design compromise: you want to provide a bigger screen real estate, but the technology to put a front-facing camera beneath the display panel is still unsatisfactory, plus you need space for additional modules since you’re also debuting a new authentication method based on face recognition. The notch on the iPhone was a necessary evil. I despised it from day one, but I understood the kind of compromise. I kept buying iPhones with a Home button and TouchID technology because I still believe to this day it’s less intrusive and less awkward from a UX standpoint than FaceID (especially when you pay with your phone). I also think that iOS had better, easier to memorise gestures on iPhones with a physical Home button than on notched, FaceID-based iPhones.
  • The Touch Bar. A potentially-interesting idea, poorly developed, badly executed, and left behind much later than it should have.
  • Thinness for thinness’ sake. The 2015 12-inch retina MacBook was not a worthy successor of the MacBook Air. The only improvement was the display. It failed under every other aspect. Yes, it was even thinner and lighter, but the difference was not that significant, and that thinness came at a cost: underpowered CPUs, severe lack of ports, and…
  • The butterfly keyboard. Another design blunder that Apple was too proud to promptly back-pedal from, and this fiasco got protracted too many years and cost actual money to a lot of people affected by faulty keyboards multiple times.
  • Putting a notch on MacBooks. This is just inexcusable, stupid design. And less justifiable a decision than putting a notch on iPhones. Here, space is not at a premium. And putting a centimetre-high black spot in the top centre of a display because you don’t want to have a centimetre-thicker bezel is again a very questionable decision. Other manufacturers have either opted to have slightly thicker bezels on their laptops, or to go the opposite direction of a notched display by having the webcam placed on a sort of ridge while keeping the display bezels thin. Said ridge is also useful as a place where you can put your finger to lift and open the laptop lid.
  • Radical design departures that have been ultimately detrimental for an entire product line. It happened with the ‘trash can’ Mac Pro in 2013. It happened with the 24-inch M1 iMac in 2021. We can argue the fine points, but my general takeaway in both of these cases is that Apple profoundly misunderstood the needs of the users these machines are supposed to cater to. Professionals who favoured the Mac Pro liked its internal expandability and didn’t really care about the sheer size of the machine, which was always purchased for its versatility and not for its looks. iMac customers appreciated having a thin-enough all-in-one machine with a good display and a good array of ports. The redesigned iMac brought back colours but took away other stuff. Apple needlessly doubled down on the thinness, which led to having an awkward external power supply that also featured an awkwardly-positioned Ethernet port. Thinness that also led to internal design flaws, such as a display cable that can’t withstand the internal heat and breaks down over time.

All in all, the most impressive display of the power of iteration is that Apple, under Cook, has managed to iterate on its very success. It has been the industry equivalent of autophagy. The company has eaten from its own already consolidated brand and reputation and benefitted from it. That is significant, especially if you like to limit your perspective to the financial and growth aspects of this success.

As I wrote in my 2024 piece Jobs’s ‘quirky Apple’ (something worth re-reading, if it’s not too much asking):

The ‘utterly consistent’ excellence of Cook’s Apple is achieved through masterful levels of iteration. We’re seeing, for the most part, the same computers, devices, peripherals we’ve been seeing since they were introduced under Jobs, but continually refined and perfected. The brand and related recognition must be maintained. And before you jump at me and tell me that iteration in tech isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I’ll tell you that you’re right, it’s not. But when it patently goes on for this long and for every product line, I’m starting to question Apple’s ability to come up with something truly original and groundbreaking (and sorry, but the goggles are not that — they are stereoscopic iPads with iPadOS floating in 3D). 

Thinking indifferently

But as a long-time Apple user, and someone deeply interested in technological research and advancements, I didn’t want Apple to become ‘the top dog’ after years of being the underdog. I wanted Apple to stay true to its culture. Not necessarily by remaining an underdog in the tech industry, but by remaining the alternative choice, the different choice, the entity that does not align with the rest of the industry, but stays in its unique sphere, in its out-of-the-box approach. Apple under Cook went in the opposite direction and now — as a big tech company — is not really different from Google or Microsoft. As a product company, it’s just another Sony when Sony was at its peak.

One thing I appreciated of the Jobs’s era was that for Jobs the products — and therefore the customers — came first. The logic was simple and effective: if we build great products for our customers (and we do because we care to understand their needs), then people will come to us, they’ll buy our products, they’ll be satisfied with them, and will become returning customers. And money will be the natural outcome. 

It’s clear that under Cook money and revenue and the bloody ROI have always been the priority and the rest has been the process of putting in motions various plans to achieve that goal. Under Cook, every Apple product seems the result of some corporate strategy instead of the result of some thoughtful investigation into customers’ needs and ways to actually improve their lives and work. These computers and devices somehow feel more generic and impersonal, produced in ways as to appeal to as many customer segments as possible, with an approach that reminds me more of a car manufacturer or a fast fashion company than a tech company making supposedly personal computing devices.

Among other things, the failure to keep the Mac Pro relevant is a testament to this progressive detachment Apple has shown towards its customers, a detachment that comes from putting Apple’s own needs before everything else. It’s also a clear consequence of another issue that only got more and more evident under Cook’s tenure: spreading Apple’s resources too thin.

One sin of Cook’s Apple I’ll never forgive is wanting to be everywhere and keep adding platforms and services. Apple went from being excellent at a selected few things to being mediocre at many things. When Apple was excellent at a selected few things, they had razor focus and were very receptive to the needs of their customers. The pre-2013 Mac Pros were great because Apple knew and cared about what professionals wanted from it. But Apple today just wants to sell as much stuff to as many people as possible. There is almost no more ‘tailoring’ in their products. There is a very much consumer-first mentality (consumer as opposed to pro), so their offerings are more ‘general purpose’ than they used to be. And it’s all made with one priority: it has to be as low-maintenance as possible (from Apple’s viewpoint). So we have increasingly closed, un-expandable Macs. Here are some more ports if you need to connect something.

In this scenario, a machine like the good old expandable Mac Pro is viewed as a high-maintenance one. If you make one (or more) slot for custom graphics cards, you have to work with graphics card makers to provide an always up-to-date support for past, present, and future cards. And so forth. And this Apple doesn’t care. They still have an amazing hardware prowess, but they don’t care. It’s too much work. These ‘professionals’ are a niche (hint: they’re really not), it’s not worth it. The 2023 Apple Silicon Mac Pro is existing evidence that today’s Apple does not understand an important segment of their audience. It’s a machine that looks like the result of someone at Apple asking ChatGPT how to make a new Mac Pro. “But look, it’s still expandable!”, they point at proprietary slots, while the motherboard sports an SoC with integrated CPU, GPU, and storage. The tagline for that Mac Pro should have been “This is really it. You can’t make this shit up”.

Not knowing what to do with the iPad

I’ve written so many things about the iPad’s identity crisis over the years, that this has become a topic I loathe revisiting. I’ll be as brief as possible.

We don’t know how Steve Jobs wanted the iPad to grow. He passed away too soon for that. But this is how he introduced the iPad in 2010:

…And so all of us use laptops and smartphones now. Everybody uses a laptop and/or a smartphone. And a question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone? And of course we pondered this question for years as well. The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. They’re gonna have to be far better at doing some really important things: better than the laptop, better than the smartphone. 

What kind of tasks? Well, things like browsing the Web. That’s a pretty tall order; something that’s better at browsing the Web than a laptop? Okay. Doing email. Enjoying and sharing photographs. Watching videos. Enjoying your music collection. Playing games. Reading eBooks. If there’s going to be a third category of device, it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone, otherwise it has no reason for being. 

Now, some people have thought that that’s a netbook. The problem is netbooks aren’t better at anything. They’re slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky old PC software. So they’re not better than a laptop at anything, they’re just cheaper; they’re just cheap laptops. And we don’t think they’re a third category device. But we think we’ve got something that is. 

Quoting from my 2019 piece My kind of tablet:

…what I want to emphasise in this quote is this part: In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. They’re gonna have to be far better at doing some really important things: better than the laptop, better than the smartphone.

Far better at doing some key tasks. Better than the laptop (but let’s just say better than a Mac or any other traditional computer), and better than the smartphone. Think about that.

For the first few iterations of its existence, the iPad and iOS delivered on their mission. In 2010 I had a brand-new MacBook Pro and I was still making the most of my iPhone 3G, but I couldn’t wait to get an iPad. I wanted to use it especially for reading, so I waited very patiently for an iPad with a retina display. And in 2012, with iOS 5, the iPad was still a great device to do everything it was designed for. A fast device with an intuitive operating system with an extremely low learning curve. Some apps for more creative tasks had appeared, and with the addition of a Wacom stylus I had fun at drawing and painting some stuff.

Then some people got very excited about the iPad, and another question arose: why can’t we use the iPad for all kinds of tasks?

That’s when things started to go awry, in my opinion. 

Simplifying a lot, the iPad could have taken three different paths:

  1. Continue being a device mostly designed for consumption, very practical and portable for everyday tasks, for checking information, enjoy audio & video content, doing light work on the go; and, with the right app, being a good-enough device for digital art.
  2. Become a true tablet in the way you interact with it; an interface tailored for stylus-based input and activities, backed by an operating system that could take the best of iOS and NewtonOS and fuse them together. Essentially turning the iPad in a creation-first device.
  3. Become Apple’s bold response to Microsoft’s Surface. A device that could be considered more like an ultraportable laptop with mixed input (traditional + pen and touch), but running an operating system that could guarantee desktop-class applications in a compact and portable format. iOS would have been too simple for such task. A version of Mac OS adapted to such a device would have been ideal.

And Apple never really took a definitive decision with the iPad, so they kept changing course and approach. They kept throwing stuff at it, at this iPad that kept becoming a jack of an increasing number of trades, while being a master at very few of them, comparatively. They built an increasingly higher tower of ‘stuff the iPad can potentially do’ over the inadequate foundation that iOS/iPadOS was and is. They thought that the problem was solvable by throwing faster and faster CPUs at it, while the actual work should have been done on the operating system front. There are still things a Newton MessagePad 2100 with a 162MHz ARM processor can do better than an M5 iPad Pro because NewtonOS is a better-designed OS for the device it runs on than iPadOS is on the iPad.

They also thought that remaining vague enough about the iPad’s core purpose was a good strategy, perhaps to buy time or to avoid taking a defining direction for the iPad that couldn’t be easily reversed. Apple’s way of remaining vague was perfectly epitomised by the phrase, We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it. Like, here’s this obscenely powerful slab of glass and aluminium, do with it whatever you wish. Wow.

The thoughtless neutering of Mac OS

Ah, Mac OS. An operating system that kept getting better and better until the moment it wasn’t the only (or main) operating system to be developed at Apple. We love the Mac, Cook and other executives have been repeating for the past 15 years, while doing very little to actually prove they meant that. Mac OS has lost a lot of functionality over the years through removal of features, services, extensions (someone on the TidBITS forum even tried to compile a full list of what has been lost); removal or obfuscation of user-interface affordances, a general reduction in user-interface cleverness, clarity, intentionality, polish.

The moment it was decided that Mac OS and iOS had to converge, it was sort of the beginning of the end for Mac OS. This convergence is demonstrably unnecessary from a user’s standpoint. Even new users of Apple platforms had no real issues getting accustomed to Mac OS and iOS when these two operating systems were visually and functionally more distinct. (I know firsthand because at the time I was still doing a lot of freelance Mac consulting and tech support). From a user interface and user interaction standpoint, it makes more sense to have distinct operating systems, each designed to make the most of the device it runs on — even visually, because the way you do your computing on a Mac desktop or laptop, with big displays and mouse and keyboard, is spatially different than how you do stuff on an iPad or iPhone.

First Apple tried to make iOS and iPadOS more complex because the iPad needed to be a more sophisticated device than an iPhone, but apparently there’s a ceiling after which complicating iPadOS makes the whole system unintuitive, with increasing discoverability issues, and the insurmountable obstacle that is a touch interface — and a touch interface can only do so much.

So, when the complication of iPadOS didn’t go very far, the natural next step for Apple was simplifying Mac OS. Why? Because ‘convergence’, because they’ve been homogenising the hardware architecture for years, and mirroring that by homogenising the software as well is the easiest thing to do. Less stuff to maintain under the bonnet, while giving the illusion of things moving forward by working at a surface level. From a management perspective it’s an efficient strategy, a good plan. But you should hire competent people to help you accomplish that. Or, if you did indeed hire competent people, you should listen to what they have to say. 

What I can see from here, as a tech observer, end user, UI and UX enthusiast, is that you could make Mac OS more ‘friendly’ for someone coming from iOS without having to butcher Mac OS with the hammer of UI regression. People aren’t tech-illiterate as they were when the first Macintosh came out. Tech literacy has dramatically improved in the years following the introduction of the first iPhone. I still remember with wonder and surprise how quickly regular people got accustomed to interacting with the iPhone’s OS back in 2007, and later with the first iPad in 2010. When you have two separate but well-designed operating systems, people quickly pick up both on their respective devices. They know that things may work slightly differently on a traditional computer with mouse, keyboard, menus, sophisticated window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc. from a multi-touch device with an operating system that is designed for touch- and gesture-based input. People know, people learn. Especially young people. These are not the things that confuse them.

Instead, the Mac OS Simplification Initiative is apparently in the hands of UI designers that don’t seem to know much about the evolution of the UI in Mac OS. They seemingly poke around Mac OS’s interface, and prune and graft haphazardly so that their resulting FrankenMacOS can look and feel as much iOS‑y as possible. But it’s like dismantling an automaton and rebuilding it while leaving out some springs and screws and levers and buttons, and when you interact with the rebuilt mechanical puppet, you keep finding glitches: you turn the wind-up key, and instead of the puppet moving its right arm, an eye pops out of the socket. You try to move its head, but it remains stiff. You expect it to walk, but only one leg moves correctly. You get the idea. You end up with a crippled toy. You end up with an operating system that is a shell of its former self.

Once again, I don’t know the truth. It could be the fault of a design team that isn’t enough competent for the task on hand. It could be that the executives don’t care that much or don’t have time to care because Apple has a bad case of the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and it must be in every tech market imaginable to stay relevant (hint: not true). Or there is no time in general because Apple executives decided that every OS must follow a strict yearly upgrade cycle, and this is what we get in return. The reasons could be many. I, in my observer’s innocence, have repeatedly suggested that maybe this yearly upgrade cycle is a bad idea, and that maybe leaving alone certain mature and established areas of Mac OS’s interface and underpinnings was a better solution than this thoughtless trimming, which keeps going on because — much like the first time you decide to cut your hair yourself, and you keep trimming the sides because they never seem ‘right’ — the new UI adjustments and rearrangements never seem to bring things to a stable and balanced stage.

TL;DR — Fucking up Mac OS was not necessary and was completely avoidable, but it has become collateral damage under a direction that has always clearly favoured the iOS platform. Everything that has been done to Mac OS under Tim Cook has been done in the service of iOS. iOS is ‘the future’ for these people, not recognising that a crippled, iOS-ified Mac OS is a terrible operating system for very powerful computers that are supposed to carry out much more complex, fine-grained tasks than mobile devices.

Not knowing what to do with developers

How Apple has treated developers for the past decade has generally been awful. Third-party developers are fundamentally responsible of improving the whole Apple ecosystem, and yet they’ve been increasingly treated as an annoyance, or taken for granted as if they were mere suppliers that Apple — the Big Tech behemoth it now is — can just bully around. The App Store Review process remains, after all these years, an inscrutable mechanism in the hands of capricious entities. Similar entities may decide the fate of even long-standing applications overnight. Developers aren’t considered valued collaborators but rather resources to take advantage of. The fact that a trillion-dollar company still takes the same 30% cut of a developer’s revenue it took back in 2008 is ridiculous and insulting. Yes, I know that this can become 15% under the App Store Small Business Program. It’s still too much for small businesses (as some of these have told me in private correspondences).

I really liked Jeff Johnson’s piece Small ways the App Store could be improved for developers, which makes so many good points on the matter.

I won’t say more on this. The subject is as old as the App Store itself. Much already has been said, and very little (if any) steps or improvements on Apple’s part have been made.

Macs are simultaneously better and worse than before

Macs have certainly come a long way with the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon that started taking place six years ago. I waited until I felt the platform was mature, though I was very impressed by the performance of the first M1 chip from the beginning. I purchased my M2-Pro Mac mini in mid-2023 and from a hardware standpoint I really have no complaints. It works today as well and as responsively as the first day. Performance-wise the current Macs are the most powerful and power-efficient Macs in all the history of the Macintosh, no doubt about that.

But the way the Apple Silicon SoCs are engineered, it also means that these Macs are also the most closed-down, un-upgradeable Macs we’ve ever had. CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, are all fused together. Upgrading RAM and storage down the road was a great way to extend the lifespan of an entry-level machine. Alternatively, it was a way to have a Mac adapt to your needs as time passed. Maybe you were fine with a machine that had 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD initially. Then, as you needed more storage, or as new software updates demanded more RAM, you could swap the old RAM chips and have 8 or even 16GB of RAM. If I remember well, there were even Macs with a socketed Intel CPU, so in theory you could even upgrade that with a more powerful, but still compatible chip.

This kind of flexibility also helped when your hard drive or SSD failed. You could just swap it with a new one, restore from a backup, and be back on track in a matter of a few hours. I hear that the storage chips in Apple Silicon Macs are very reliable. But still, in the event of a hardware failure, you practically lose everything if you don’t have backups and you have to bring your Mac to an Apple Store as there’s nothing you can do yourself. With a fixed amount of RAM and storage, you also have to pay a premium if you want to better future-proof your Mac at the time of purchase. Something not everybody is ready to do, budget-wise.

The general level of repairability is poor for these Macs, something that clearly makes Apple happy, as they can exert more control over spare parts, and over who can repair what. And of course now, since you can’t upgrade a Mac anymore, Apple gains more money because you either pay more for a Mac to future-proof it from the start, or you get another one sooner than you used to if you’ve outgrown the specs of the Mac you bought previously. You’re also more likely to pay for AppleCare because who knows what may happen with these black boxes… 

Again, yes, Apple Silicon is good technology, Apple Silicon is genuine hardware innovation. But it also looks like a very convenient way to squeeze money out of the customers.

Lastly, in a piece I wrote at the end of 2020 about the then-new M1 Macs, I said:

They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, software quality, and so forth. Who cares that a pill tastes bitter, if it makes you feel good, right? 

Which is exactly what has been happening over and over again. Power users lament the increasingly worse quality of Apple’s software, Apple and other fanboys divert everyone’s attention by extolling the sheer performance of Macs (and iPads, and iPhones). This has just happened with the new MacBook Neo: lots of people and pundits marvelling at its performance and specs-to-price ratio; everyone seemingly forgetting it comes with the disgraceful Liquid-Glass-infused Mac OS 26 Tahoe preinstalled.

I have to conclude, but really, I could go on.

As someone who first got his hands on an Apple computer in 1982, to then finally become a regular Mac user since 1989, my huge disappointment in Apple under Tim Cook doesn’t really come from a place of nostalgia. It comes from having seen a company that has had an immense impact on my life progressively deviate from directions and practices I supported and I recognised myself with. It comes from a place of unplanned detachment, like when you have to break up a relationship with someone because their values have shifted, the things they believe in have changed, and you can’t see eye to eye anymore on a lot of that.

In the pursuit of that record financial performance, in having put financial engineering over software engineering, in transforming Apple from a company that did things in a different — sometimes even special — way, to yet another big tech money-making behemoth, Tim Cook has lost at least one customer, me, and probably many more, judging from the numerous emails I still get from readers of my blog.

At the memorial to Steve Jobs, it’s reported that Cook said, Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right’ [Jobs said].”

Nevertheless, when Cook began his tenure as CEO, I hoped, expected, wanted an Apple that could treasure all the best lessons from Steve Jobs and build on them. And what I got is a very different Apple. In some ways, an unrecognisable Apple. An Apple that valued its past only as a treasure trove of reputation to ransack and cannibalise in order to go on and as a shield to get through their various blunders (What do you mean, “which ones”? Have you been reading this piece at all?) and keep thriving in spite of them. 

Was all this right, Tim? Did you do the right thing? You’ll probably think so. Many others will think so. Everyone who thinks in terms of, If the money keeps coming, we must be on the right track, will think so. I do not. I just do not.

 

Will things change significantly under the new CEO John Ternus? I like the guy. I also like that other guy, Stephen Lemay, who has taken the role of Alan Dye, former VP of Human Interface. They’re competent figures, and I certainly hope their competence will shine through during this new chapter. I’m not feeling particularly invested in Apple at present, just vaguely curious to see where things will go from here. But to be frank, I don’t expect significant deviations from the status quo.

A few notes about the MacBook Neo

March 16, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

The yeahs

  • It is a well-built machine. Hardware manufacturing is still one of Apple’s few strong suits left.
  • The colours! Citrus is my favourite, Indigo a close second. When seen in person, they both live up to the expectations after you’ve seen the photos.
  • The A18 Pro chip delivers very good performance overall.
  • I don’t care if the Neo lacks an ambient light sensor or if the webcam isn’t cutting-edge — It does not feature a notch on the top of the display and this is so huge for me. I thought Apple forgot that displays are supposed to be plain, uninterrupted, unblemished rectangles. Design-wise, this is currently the only Apple laptop I can look at and can think of purchasing after the 2020 M1 MacBook Air.
  • The introductory video is fun and reminded me of all the whimsy Apple forgot about in all their efforts to convince us that they only make serious, premium machines produced in a greyscale vacuum.

The okays

  • The trackpad is fine. Well-built and ‑engineered for being a regular, old-school trackpad without haptic engine.
  • 8 GB of RAM are fine. If you want more it’s because you need more. If you need more, get a MacBook Air or Pro. For consumer and prosumer use it’s enough RAM. I have my 2013 11-inch MacBook Air in my other studio. It has 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD for internal storage. It has a 1.3 GHz Core i5 Intel processor (boosts to 2.6 GHz). It currently has 7 open apps — Vivaldi (with 7 tabs), Mail, Safari (with 4 tabs), Reeder, Acorn, nvALT, and Skim, and it runs smoothly. I’m still running Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra, and not Mac OS 11 Big Sur, which is the last version of Mac OS supported by this MacBook Air. High Sierra feels less resource-hungry than Big Sur.
  • The pricing. I’ve put it in the ‘okay’ and not in the ‘yeah’ category because, while the original pricing in USD makes it feel like a very affordable machine (especially with the education discount), those $599 and $699 in my country become €699 and €799 respectively. It’s still the cheapest Apple laptop, relatively speaking, but the gap between €799 and the €1,199 of a base 13.6‑inch M5 MacBook Air doesn’t feel that wide, especially considering just how much you gain by choosing the Air, including a higher degree of future-proofing. These machines aren’t upgradable, but the Air with 16 GB of RAM and an M5 chip is certainly a machine that will last you longer especially if it seems too overkill for your initial needs; you’ll probably touch the Neo’s ceiling much sooner. If you don’t even need a laptop, the €719 base M4 Mac mini is a better deal than a €699/€799 MacBook Neo.

The mehs

  • In my opinion, a worse offender than the 8 GB of RAM is the base 256 GB of storage. Cry “RAM shortage” all you want, but if 256 GB are more than enough in a current smartphone, they’re definitely too tight for a computer. Storage tiers closer to 2026 needs would have been 512 GB/1 TB.
  • I’m not thrilled by the lack of backlighting in the keyboard. Maybe it’ll appear in the pricier model in a future iteration. The keys are white/tinted, so maybe the printing is contrasty enough to make the key symbols visible even in poor light. I was willing to put this in the ‘okay’ category, but I can’t help feeling this was an unnecessary corner for Apple to cut.
  • Mac OS 26 Tahoe. I love how, now that the MacBook Neo is here, suddenly a lot of people seem just fine with Mac OS 26. “Well, what can we do? It comes preinstalled,” you’ll retort. Okay, but if you’re doing a review of the Neo and you don’t like the current iteration of Mac OS and its dreadful ‘Liquid Glass’ UI, you could at least say that. Not just turn a blind eye to Tahoe and act as if everything’s fine because the MacBook Neo is cool hardware. I’m especially talking about people who used to criticise Liquid Glass before the MacBook Neo came out. Well, for me it’s still a glaring issue, and while I’d instantly purchase the Neo just for the lack of a notch in its display, the Neo coming with Mac OS 26 preinstalled is the real deal-breaker for me. There are moments when I feel as if the MacBook Neo is Apple’s hardware distraction and eye-candy to make people forget about the Mac’s worsened software quality. And too many reviewers seem to have happily taken the bait.

→ A toolbar that is rudely stamp’d

March 3, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Nick Heer has published another very good piece, The Window Chrome of Our Discontent, analysing how Apple over the years has progressively done away with the chrome in application windows, in an attempt to prioritise content over the rest of an application’s user interface. A goal that has been repeatedly stated since OS X 10.7 Lion; a redesign whose execution, iterated a few times since then, has been overall increasingly poorer.

Heer shows this in a series of screenshots of Apple Pages’ interface, focusing on how the window chrome and toolbar have changed over time and pointing out what works and what doesn’t. Yes, not everything introduced in a subsequent redesign iteration has been for the worse but, as Heer rightly observes:

Overall, however, what Apple has done to Pages over this period of time is representative of a broader trend of minimizing the delineation of user interface elements from each other and the document itself. This is the only tool in the toolbox, and I am skeptical it achieves what Apple intends.

Compare again the two more recent screenshots against the ones that came before, and focus on the toolbar at the top of each. In the older two, there is a well-defined separation between the toolbar — the window itself — and the document. In the Big Sur visual language, however, the toolbar is the same bright white as the document. By Tahoe and the Liquid Glass language, there is barely a distinction; the buttons simply float over the document. And, bizarrely, that degrades further with the “Reduce Transparency” accessibility preference enabled […]

For me, this means a constant distraction from my document because the whole window has a similar visual language. As the toolbar and its buttons become one with the document, they lose their ability to fade into the background. In the two older examples, the contrast of the well-defined toolbar allows me to treat them as an entirely separate thing I do not need to pay attention to.

Heer’s analysis focuses on the visual aspects of this general regression, and is spot-on. The only thing I feel like adding is that this regression also appears semantical to me (for lack of a better term). Let’s take that last screenshot of Apple Pages’ top window/toolbar and do a quick thought experiment: suppose you’re not familiar with this application. Suppose you’ve never used it before or used it too sporadically to memorise its interface and commands. Look at that toolbar:

 

Can you tell me what all those toolbar buttons do? Can you guess their function by looking at them? Can you guess why some of those controls are grouped and some are not? Can you establish whether there’s a difference in their prominence? I showed this toolbar to a couple of people who primarily use Windows, and they were both fairly puzzled.

What’s the difference between (1) and (2)? They both seem to add or insert something, but what exactly? What does (3) do? Or (5) for that matter. Or (6). Why are (4) and (6) in a different colour than the rest of the buttons? The icons for (7), (8), and (9) are still familiar enough, so one can easily guess they are used to insert a table, a graph, and some shape, respectively. (10) is already more ambiguous. If this were an email client, this would be the button to add an attachment to an email message, but this is not an email client. Could it still be referring to some kind of attachment? (11) too is a bit vague, but you can ultimately guess it’s about inserting a comment… Not to open a chat window between collaborators, right? (13) is misleading if you don’t already know Pages. A paintbrush? Could it refer to pasting something? But if it were a Paste command, where are Cut and Copy? And is (14) used to add a page or change the page layout? Maybe?

Toolbars like this work much better with an icons + text view and a much clearer distinction between their function, if they’re direct commands or if they just open inspectors or additional tools. I don’t have Mac OS 26 installed, so I don’t know whether Pages’ toolbar now comes in icon view only or not. If it does, then this is a rather cryptic toolbar for novice users. If you design for purely icon-based toolbars, then you must do additional work to make those icons as clear and unambiguous as possible. If your toolbar has multiple views and can be displayed as icons + text or even text-only buttons, then you can afford to have a couple of icons that aren’t very immediate at first glance, because when you have such multiple view options in toolbars (as Mac OS historically has had), they usually default to an icons + text view. Once you got familiar with what all the buttons do, you can save some application window real estate by switching to an icon-only view.

And what’s amazing is that, if you go back to Heer’s article and look at Pages’ toolbar under OS X Lion, all those icons are rather self-explanatory when you look at them without their labels. That happens thanks to the icons being more colourful, detailed and descriptive. Of course the Comment button is a Post-It note. Of course the Media button is instantly recognisable. Of course all the buttons that open a menu instead of triggering a direct action do feature a small expansion triangle next to them. They all have these little visual cues that you consistently see in other places of the operating system’s UI. But this, of course, only works if you have a consistent operating system’s UI, and not a patchwork of different ideas assembled by different committees.

→ On software quality (and reliability, and frugality)

February 25, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

On Software Quality is a very fine article by Nick Heer I suggest you read. There’s a passage I don’t fully agree with:

There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable. 

I have several older Macs I still use, some on a daily basis (like my 2017 21.5‑inch 4K iMac and my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro), some on a frequent-enough basis (like my 2013 11-inch MacBook Air and my 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro), some others just occasionally (like my 2008 13-inch black MacBook or my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro). The two main factors that contribute to their obsolescence are:

  1. Progressive unavailability of up-to-date Web browsers (and up-to-date digital certificates to guarantee online security).
  2. Cloud services like Dropbox and OneDrive progressively dropping support for older Mac OS versions.

Typically, for how I use all these computers, №1 is more disruptive than №2. I very much enjoy using older Mac OS versions, but not being able to browse the Web properly and securely, not being able to correctly sign in to check a Gmail account, not being able to fetch some RSS feeds because you can’t authenticate securely or establish a secure connection is very frustrating. Not having Dropbox work on my 2009 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.11 El Capitan is a minor annoyance and means I just won’t have access to certain personal files and that I’ll have to sync manually whatever I do on this other machine.

But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable. Just because a third-party app has moved on from supporting a Mac OS version (or even a whole Mac architecture) doesn’t mean I can’t keep using the previous version of such application with that older Mac OS version. I’m aware this isn’t exactly what Heer was arguing — I’m just saying that when I use these older Macs with older Mac OS versions, it’s like entering a snowglobe-like environment where everything that still works by current standards or demands, still works reliably and predictably. And what doesn’t work, well… just doesn’t work. It really doesn’t make the Mac or its older Mac OS version less reliable.

Now I’ll admit, one important thing that works to my advantage is that I have been using for years more or less the same bunch of core third-party tools made by Mac developers who:

  • have released either free software or software that can be purchased upfront without a subscription; or even software that has a usable free tier and requires a subscription only for its more ‘pro’ features (BBEdit is a perfect example of this);
  • have maintained access to older versions of their software applications, making said versions free to use or unlockable by providing a valid licence for a more up-to-date version of their application.

So yes, I’ve tailored my software experience around predictability and stability for quite a while now, favouring these aspects over ‘needing’ to update just because a piece of software promised some fancy new features. The proliferation of subscription-based software — or software as a service, as Heer says — has clearly made things a bit trickier in recent times. If you, unlike me, heavily rely on subscription-based apps for work and leisure, then yes, remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software can present an issue and may end up being unwise in the long run. But I wouldn’t frame the issue in terms of ‘reliability’ — more in terms of ‘availability’ or ‘compatibility’.

I think the trade-off of staying on an older major version of an operating system or third-party application to pursue stability instead of buying into an increasingly mindless update cycle still exists. And that while an older software (or system software) version may not necessarily be more reliable than a newer one, it doesn’t mean it is necessarily less reliable or stops being reliable altogether.

Nick Heer concludes:

What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.

People buy hardware, and it shows. People subscribe to services. But people use software. This is not solely an Apple problem. Many of us spend our time fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed; it seems to have become the norm. But it is particularly glaring when the same attitude is taken by Apple, a company that ships some of the nicest hardware in the business. I would love to see the same tolerances for what is shown onscreen as Apple has for how the screen is made. 

What’s really sad in all this is that many of those “problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps” aren’t structural; that is, they’re not derived from historical faults or shortcomings in the fundamentals of the operating system. They often are the result of more recent bugs breaking something that used to work or a solution that had already been found, and said bugs have been allowed to fester thanks to an unsustainable yearly release cycle that forces engineers to work on new features instead of fixing what broke down in previous iterations. This core issue in software’s ‘cardiovascular system’ is equally felt at the major arteries’ level and at the capillary level, which is that ‘fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed’ that Heer talks about.

By the way, the ‘software as a service’ model, in this scenario, does nothing but exacerbate these functional issues. The perennial, flawed, beta state of software is maintained at the OS level because this system software — instead of being designed to achieve a final, self-supporting state — is designed to be continually patched, retouched, refined on an asymptotic line (a process that creates a lot of baggage and technical debt). And when it comes to third-party apps, having software that is considered a service and not a product means, once again, that it is not designed to achieve finality, but to remain available in a usable state for an indefinite amount of time. We can debate exceptions, good intentions, and finer points ad nauseam, but I maintain that this progressive departure from viewing and structuring software as a product has been severely detrimental to the nature, quality, and usefulness of software applications for the end user. 

It has disincentivised a lot of big and small companies from striving for excellence and releasing truly great products, instead opting for software that is decent enough but always has some room for improvement, a gap that is never really filled because otherwise the updates would stop coming and it wouldn’t make sense to pay a subscription fee anymore. In the best-case scenario you may have developers who genuinely strive for releasing great apps but their work is disrupted by Apple’s update cycles, forcing them to rewrite code and update their apps so that they keep working after a major Mac OS release. This is why I was using the ‘cardiovascular system’ metaphor before: the flow at the operating system level (major artery) affects the flow at the third-party app level (the capillaries). I really hate this kind of entropy because it feels largely avoidable. But reversing the course needs significant efforts, and such efforts have to come from Apple; they theoretically have the resources to shoulder these efforts and lead by example. I’m not holding my breath.

On software frugality

When technology was kinder to its users, and when someone like Steve Jobs was still alive and had Mac users’ interests at heart, keeping my Macs updated was a pleasure. When a new Mac OS X version was presented, I knew Apple had been at work to genuinely improve on the previous version, so for me updating was a matter of when more than if. And up until probably Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, ‘when’ usually meant ‘as soon as possible’. 

But then, the ‘new cool features’ promised by the newer Mac OS version started feeling less important or groundbreaking. More cosmetic. Or more tied to a vision of the ‘Mac experience’ that has progressively felt more detached from the regular user’s reality, concocted by executives from their ivory towers at Apple Park who don’t seem to actually know how people work with their Macs in their day-to-day.

So there was a moment where upgrading to the next version of Mac OS turned into something I did reluctantly, often waiting two or three minor version updates because the .0 releases were getting buggier and broke more things. I even skipped OS X 10.10 Yosemite entirely because the visual changes were just too jarring for me and Neue Helvetica as new system font was really working against my eyesight — and against common sense, from a design/UX standpoint. OS X 10.11 El Capitan felt better in many departments, so I jumped back on the update bandwagon.

Anyway, to make a long story short, over the past 10–15 years my attitude towards Mac OS and software in general has shifted and has become more self-centred. I ask myself more questions. What can this new update do for me? Is there anything that the previous iteration can’t keep doing? No? Then what’s the point of upgrading? Does this app have some groundbreaking feature I was really looking for or missing from my tools that makes it worthwhile to start a subscription and rent software I’d really prefer purchasing? No? Then I don’t need this app.

Today more than ever, technology wants to put you in a river where you flow from update to update unquestioningly; a river where you keep flowing forward because the ‘new’ is always better than the ‘old’. I went along with this until it stopped ringing true. Today more than ever, technology and tech companies feel like entities that don’t work for us and don’t have our interests at heart; they just want us to depend on them utterly and continually. So I have to look out for my needs.

That means making difficult choices sometimes. That means questioning convenience (convenience for whom?) and reintroducing friction. I can’t use the term minimalism with a straight face anymore, that’s why I prefer frugality. I can’t provide a set of ‘rules’ or a list of tips & tricks here. This is the classic situation where your mileage really may vary a lot. What I can do is share an attitude. You should have already gleaned it from the previous paragraphs, but I’ll reiterate.

Put yourself and your needs first. Anything that works against that is not worth your time, energy, money, or obsession over it. A piece of software that is ‘nice to have’ but in exchange keeps you hostage through some form of lock-in or yet another subscription that further erodes your budget (especially if you don’t have money to burn)… is it really nice to have? An operating system that forces you to adjust your habits and workflows on a yearly basis… what does it really have to offer that makes all that hassle worthwhile? That new app that does the same thing as that old app you trusted… do you switch to it because it’s actually better or just because it’s new and ‘looks fresher’? If upgrading to Mac OS 26 means you have to also update a bunch of apps and all these now have worse usability — because Mac OS 26 is the worst usability regression in all Mac OS history — is that upgrade working for you or against you? If you reach a point where the entire software ecosystem you’re using is constantly thwarting you in a big way or even in a myriad of smaller ways, where do you draw the line? Do you even draw a line? Is the constant acceptance of the compromise of convenience, still convenient?

When you think in terms of ‘your needs first’, in terms of ’none of these tech companies is your friend’, and you build your software toolbox around the concept of ‘essential tools’, migrating to another platform isn’t as daunting or traumatic as it feels when you start imagining it. You do a bit of homework to prepare yourself. You ask yourself what kind of applications you need to look for if you change platforms, and evaluate the best candidates. Sometimes you get lucky and you find that the same company that made one of your favourite tools has also made a version of such tool for Windows or Linux. In this case you don’t even have to adjust to the new tool. In other cases, you might have to do additional work to become as productive in the new platform as you were in the old. But if you’ve answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Is it time to leave this platform behind because it takes from me more than it gives me?’ then you’re willing to do the additional work of forming new habits.

Where am I now in all this? I’m at a point where I’m not upgrading to Mac OS 26 or any other 26 software release from Apple. If the poor state of Mac OS user interface, user interaction, and usability is not radically addressed in future versions, I will keep using older Mac OS versions until the resulting friction is no longer sustainable. My main Mac is still on Mac OS 13 Ventura, and I’m planning to upgrade to Sonoma very soon. Considering how I use my Mac and my tools, the impact of staying on this older version of Mac OS has been non-existent so far. Everything I need to work still works without issues, and I’m still enjoying the benefit of working with a Mac OS version that — while not as perfect as Snow Leopard, or as stable as El Capitan, High Sierra, and Mojave still feel today — is way, way more legible, usable, and ‘out of the way’ than Mac OS 26 with its Liquid Glass UI. 

I’m already using Windows and Linux as secondary platforms on other hardware. I don’t think I’ll ever remove any trace of Mac software and hardware from my daily life. The beauty of not needing ultra-specialised software that has to be constantly kept up-to-date means that I’ll be able to hold on to older, trusted Mac apps for a long time. But if I ever need to move away from the Mac as my main computing platform, switching to Windows or Linux won’t be much of a culture shock as it often felt in the past. And if my day job, as I fear, dictates that I’ll have to keep upgrading to newer, worse Mac OS versions, then I’ll make sure to do that on a dedicated machine where I don’t do anything else but work.

People and resources added to my reading list in 2025

February 13, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Welcome to the thirteenth instalment of my annual overview of my most interesting discoveries made during the previous year. A few months ago, a friend of mine remarked that the title of this series of posts should be updated, because instalment after instalment, my list of things to actually read has become shorter, and the list of resources to watch has become longer. Maybe you should just say, “People and resources added to my watch list”, they suggested. But ‘watch list’ gives me bad surveillance vibes, and discovering and suggesting new blogs always has priority for me, so ‘reading list’ it is. Or perhaps I should go back to the wording of the first post of the series, published in early 2013 — Some interesting resources I discovered in [year]. We’ll see.

Apologies for the slightly navel-gazing introduction. 2025 was another ‘difficult’ year if you hadn’t guessed from articles like My 2025 in review, and Not fatigue, but disconnection; a year where I began to revisit older habits that used to stimulate me more and kept me from looking at screens all the time. Among these, reading physical books and engaging in more active music listening by actually sitting in my other studio (where I keep the bulk of my library and my hi-fi stereo), and listening to whole albums while keeping a notebook handy in case this activity triggered some new ideas or inspiration for my creative writing.

This and the promise I made to myself to be more selective in what I actually decide to add to my repository of resources-worth-keeping, resulted in yet another short overview.

Blogs

  • The website of V.H. Belvadi. I discovered Mr Belvadi after an acquaintance passed me a link to this piece, The death of an argument — Why analogies are best used sparingly. I enjoyed it and liked his analysis, so after reading I started exploring his site. As you may recall (or not), in last year’s instalment I wrote, You know what happens when you get even more selective? That maybe you follow a link to a blog article, and you like the article, but then you explore that blog further and you realise that such article — and perhaps a couple more — is the only highlight of that blog, and you start wondering, “Is this website worth adding to my RSS feeds, or should I just share the link to that specific article and let others decide?” In most cases, I’ve ended up bookmarking & sharing articles instead of adding blogs to my reading list. This was definitely not the case with V.H. Belvadi. He writes consistently well, and consistently interestingly about a varied range of topics. I encourage you to check out his website and add him to your RSS feeds.
  • The website of Jason Velazquez. It all began with someone I follow on Mastodon, who boosted a post by Jason I enthusiastically agreed with. I’m a curious person, so first I checked Jason’s profile to have a general feel of the kind of things he posts about. I kept liking what I saw, so the next step was to visit his website, read the article referenced in one of his most recent Mastodon posts (Hank Green And The Fantastical Tales of God AIs), and continue to read other pieces by Jason. I invite you to read that article and then explore Jason’s website, which is a delight to navigate. Jason’s writing is meaty, evocative, pragmatic, and I know these adjectives may feel a bit contradictory — I’ll let you visit his site and see for yourselves.

What these two websites have in common is that they’re designed to look, feel, and be navigated like books. I’m a bit jealous of such designs, because that’s how I always viewed my own website, but my limited coding knowledge has always prevented me from reaching these lovely results. (Suggestions of using ‘AI’ tools for this purpose will lead to excommunication; you’ve been warned).

YouTube channels

After last year’s intervention, the situation with my excessive number of YouTube channel subscriptions has normalised and returned to healthier numbers. As you’ll see below, I did indeed add a dozen new subscriptions, but a lot of the following channels have a somewhat relaxed publishing schedule, so things rarely get overwhelming.

Gaming-related

  • Riloe and Ratat are two creators whose channels focus mostly on gaming essays. Riloe’s essays are more about tactical and extraction shooters, while Ratat talks more about horror games, and I find his analyses of Supermassive Games’ Dark Picture Anthology games to be well worth a watch.
  • Euro Brady — Brady is a therapist, and provides a very interesting perspective and a fresh angle to the usual ‘let’s play’ style of gaming videos. Unlike so many other letsplayers, Brady doesn’t rush through game levels, lore, etc. but instead frequently stops and analyses the personality and psychology of the various game characters. What’s really great, in my opinion, is that talking about the character’s psychology or struggle before a certain situation in the game isn’t an end in itself, but a starting point to talk about mental health in general. Brady’s digressions have often helped me understand certain behaviours in real life, certain interpersonal dynamics and interactions we may find ourselves in. Follow him if you appreciate this kind of insights, more than watching someone reach the end of a game. The game is not really the point here.
  • nocaps — Indie games reviews and overviews. I really like her calm and pleasant personality.
  • itsTedBrooks — Ted has a small channel that started with filmmaking-related content and turned its focus to gaming essays over the past year. His videos are on the short side, well scripted, edited, and shot. I discovered him thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, which one day suggested I watch We don’t play games anymore… We just argue about them. I turn that suggestion to you. If you like it, then watch Ted’s video about the game CONTROL, and then subscribe!

Tech-related

Two very different approaches to technology here:

  • Janus Cycle — The best thing to introduce you to this channel is its very own description: Exploring retro devices from the pockets of history. Janus Cycle is an eclectic journey into technological wonders of the ages. Follow along with detailed looks into a wide range of intriguing devices, while appreciating the marvels of technological miniaturization. Going deep into the technological aspects that makes each device unique. Following their stories into inventive and sometimes esoteric ways they function or affected our lives. Old mobile phones, PDAs, computers, assorted devices… This is a channel for the tinkerer and the person interested in discovering more about the technology behind many devices from the past 2–3 decades. A real gem, in my opinion.
  • Our Own Devices — From the channel description: Our Own Devices is a channel dedicated to the fascinating world of vintage technology, and the many elegant and ingenious ways our ancestors solved even the most complex technical problems. [Update: YouTube has just removed this channel because “it violated our Community Guidelines”. I wonder how, given that the channel was a fascinating exploration into the workings of devices such as mimeographs, portable record-players, radios, and many many other items from the 20th century. Update 2: The channel has been reinstated. It turns out it had been hacked.]

Other

  • Voynich Talk — I’m obsessed with the Voynich Manuscript. This is probably one of the best YouTube channels about it.
  • The Late Late Horror Show — Mainly movie reviews and nightly streams of old time radio shows.
  • Quarantine Collective — From the channel description: The Quarantine Collective is the home for a new kind of philosophical pedagogy. Instead of experts telling you how things work, we encourage discussion, transversality, and rely on the participation of every skill level. Join a live stream as we make our way through texts collectively, with the support of experts, academics, and hobbyists alike. The main force behind the channel is Brooks Brown, and the channel isn’t exclusively focused on philosophy. Many of the Quarantine Collective’s ‘After Hours’ streams are more free-form, with the host reacting to other YouTube videos and bringing his wealth of knowledge and common sense to the table. He has also made one of my favourite video essays on LLMs and ‘artificial intelligence’: No, AI is not Sentient (It’s just more Capitalism)
  • Anna Bocca — Anna’s video essays are mainly focused on economy and society. She is a great communicator and I really like how she edits her videos, patiently crafting the visuals and infographics. Me and economics are like water and oil, and she managed to make me understand a few things that normally would have flown over my head…
  • baby.murcielaga — Fantastic music compilations, mainly ambient and vaporwave, but not limited to that. I have no particular favourite to recommend, just dive in and explore.
  • Chris and Jack — They are an amazing duo making comedy sketches that feel more like short films. Great humour, great scripts, and very well produced material. My first exposure to them was this: Sci-Fi Movies never pick the right year. You’re welcome.

Podcasts

Another year, another round of copying-and-pasting the same quote from a few years ago:

In 2019 I unsubscribed from all the podcasts I was following, and I haven’t looked back. I know and respect many people who use podcasts as their main medium for expression. My moving away from podcasts is simply a pragmatic decision — I just don’t have the time for everything. I still listen to the odd episode, especially if it comes recommended by people I trust. You can find a more articulate observation on podcasts in my People and resources added to my reading list in 2019.

If you’re wondering why I keep the Podcast section in these overviews when I clearly have nothing to talk about, it’s because to this day I receive emails from people un-ironically asking me for podcast recommendations.

Useful Web tools

  • PiliApp — A collection of fun and cool Web tools.
  • ColorPalette Pro — Load it in your browser. Play around. Yes, it’s about colour palettes.

My RSS management

Yet again, nothing new to report on this front. I’m still using the same apps I’ve been using on all my devices for the past several years, and I haven’t found better RSS management tools / apps / services worth switching to. In my previous overviews, I used to list here all the apps I typically use to read feeds on my numerous devices, but ever since I broke my habit of obsessively reading feeds everywhere on whatever device, I’ll only list the apps on the devices I’ve used over the past year or so. If you’re curious to read the complete rundown, check past entries (see links at the bottom of this article):

  • On my M2 Pro Mac mini running Mac OS 13 Ventura: NetNewsWire.
  • On my 17-inch MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.14 Mojave, and on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire 5.0.4 — A slightly older version of this great RSS reader.
  • On my other Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
  • On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit.
  • On my Android phones — Nothing Phone 2a and Microsoft Surface Duo: the Feedly app.
  • On my iPhone SE 3, iPhone 8, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread. (Though on the iPad 3 Reeder seems to be more stable and less resource-hungry).

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email, Mastodon, or Bluesky. Thanks for reading!