Computers compute

June 30, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In a short novel I wrote about 20 years ago, there’s a scene where Eric K. (the protagonist, a private detective) and his best friend Patrick Z. (a hacker), are approaching the investigation from different angles. There’s a bit of banter between them, then Patrick ends the conversation dismissively, hinting that there’s work to do and they’re just wasting time. “Off you go,” he says to Eric, “As they say, You’re a detective, go detect. I’ll stay here with my machines. [a beat] They’re computers, they’ll compute.” 

I was reminded of this exchange when thinking about the current phenomenon of so-called ‘AI psychosis’, where people, believing the many lies of the ‘AI’ industry, think that now computers and other computing devices are capable of thinking, reasoning, understanding, remembering and learning from our ‘conversations’ and their training, and so on and so forth. They aren’t.

There is no intelligence involved behind the blanket term that ‘AI’ has become today. Large Language Models are a useful tool within specific applications, but that’s all there is to it. It involves statistical analysis, it involves prediction. But outside those applications where it can produce useful results, it’s a gimmick, it’s a magic trick. The ‘AI’ industry is doing exactly this — selling you a tool that can be used to perform a magic trick while telling you that what you’re getting is real magic. That magic exists.

Nothing has changed in the nature of computers since their invention. The difference between the first mechanical computers (e.g. Charles Babbage’s machines) and what we have today on our desks is computing power. Nothing else. Computers have become increasingly fast at performing calculations, their hardware has become increasingly refined and sophisticated, their use cases have multiplied, but nothing in their fundamental structure has changed. Today’s computers do not think. Despite what the ‘AI’ industry and ‘AI’ fanatics may tell you, there is nothing ‘neural’ about ‘artificial intelligence’ or computers today. It’s snake-oil salesman marketing terminology designed to misdirect people. It’s like telling you that that mug with Homer Simpson’s face on it is alive and has feelings, while actually it has a thermo-sensitive coating that makes Homer Simpson change expression when you pour hot liquids into the mug.

The ‘AI’ industry has essentially capitalised on that famous Arthur C. Clarke’s quote, which is the third of his three laws: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I’ll say that the computing speed of today’s devices is fast enough to trick some people into thinking that such devices are doing more than just performing calculations. But this ‘understanding’ and ‘learning’ and ‘communicating’ are just a faster and sometimes more efficient autocorrect. Yes, the autocorrect you have on your phones and tablets and personal computers. 

When you’re typing a message and you see your phone’s OS correctly suggesting the next word after the one you’re typing, that’s not intelligence. The phone doesn’t ‘get’ you. The phone doesn’t ‘know’ you. The system is making a prediction by calculating probabilities. The data sample it’s using for this prediction is everything you’ve typed on the phone since you bought it. Fun anecdote: one of the vintage iPhones in my collection is a second-hand model I purchased from an Austrian seller on eBay. Throughout its previous life, this iPhone was set up in German by a user who only spoke German. I switched the language to English, and the first times I was typing messages and other things, the predictive text engine was essentially shooting random stuff, and ‘guessed right’ only in obvious scenarios, like suggesting ‘the’ after I typed ‘into’.

Now, some will say, But as you kept typing stuff in English, the iPhone got better at understanding you and at suggesting the right words. But that is not learning in the same way a human learns. That is ‘learning’ in the sense that pieces of information have been progressively stored in the device’s memory. When I type “Hey, do you want to meet for lunch…” and the iPhone autocorrect proposes ‘today’, ‘later’, and ‘now’, these are guesses that are calculated every time, from scratch, by going through all the similar sentences I may have written in the past. It’s not knowledge. In fact, the iPhone doesn’t even know what ‘lunch’ — or any other word in that sentence — means. It has only registered that, up to now, 349 previous sentences I wrote ending with ‘meet for lunch’ had the word ‘today’ after ‘lunch’, 188 sentences had the word ‘later’ after ‘lunch’, and 70 sentences had the word ‘now’ after ‘lunch’.

By the way, Large Language Models don’t even see those as words, but numbers, tokens.

When you ask ChatGPT or Claude or your fave chatbot something — whether a simple query or what sounds like a more sophisticated one — these tools are not sentient, they’re not ‘built different’. They process the data you passed to them, which is analysed, computed, and spat out in a friendly, anthropomorphised language. These tools are designed to sound like real, responsive, agreeable, trustworthy assistants. But the emphasis should not be placed on trustworthy — it must be placed on sound like. Because they’re far from infallible, and their output should always be fact-checked. This is the main reason I don’t waste one second of my time with this stuff and insist on doing my searches and research myself. I want to look at the sources, I want to cross-check and do my due diligence. I don’t need shortcuts — I’m not in a hurry. And if you’re doing important and meaningful work, you ought not to be in a hurry, either.

In a conversation with friends on this subject, one put this in a way that looks pretty straightforward to me: ‘AI’ isn’t a surgeon (or any other professional); it’s an actor pretending to be one. If you’re rushed to the emergency room, you don’t want to be checked out by George Clooney or Noah Wyle, no matter the amount of medical terms they have memorised and they’re able to assemble on the spot — you want a real doctor.

Going past the trick of using anthropomorphised terms to describe LLMs’ modus operandi (like ‘thinking’, ‘reasoning’, ‘understanding’, ‘remembering’, ‘learning’, ‘hallucinating’, and so on), another unfortunate approach of ‘AI’ advocates and apologists is that to demonstrate how ‘AI’ behaves in a human way, they reduce every complexity of human processes and every complex facet of human identity to the cartoonish and vague approximation provided by these ‘AI’ tools. They will tell you that no, an LLM really learns because what is human learning if not an accumulation of data and a probabilistic extraction of such data whenever necessary. (Hint: it doesn’t work that way). What is a human brain if not a very large neural network, they say. (Hint: it’s not. It’s so, so, so much more. Just because you put the term ‘neural’ doesn’t mean that every node has the same functional ability of a human neuron. In fact, you could say that it takes a very deep neural network to barely do something a single biological neuron can do. As Brooks Brown says in this video, “That thing we named neuron [in a neural network] is to an actual neuron what a stick figure is to the human body”).

Another approach I profoundly dislike is the sheer abuse of the term ‘AI’ even when it’s really unwarranted. ‘AI’ advocates will tell you that there have been several advancements in medical research (or other fields) thanks to ‘AI’, so ‘AI’ is good and it’s the future and similar bullshit. It wasn’t ‘AI’. There wasn’t a machine that woke up one day and autonomously decided to absorb the most pertinent and up-to-date cancer research and made a discovery based on deduction and intelligence. All the data was fed to computers that made calculations also utilising LLMs and analysed the data in a relational manner and made educated (i.e. by processing an absurd amount of information) projections. It wasn’t artificial intelligence, it was computers that computed. It’s always been computers computing. We have more refined tools today, but that’s it. The ‘AI’ industry likes this kind of misdirection because it puts their tools in a far better light. It builds trust in the snake oil they’re selling. And by the way, I’m not saying that LLMs aren’t useful per se. But they’re just a tool, not the Second Coming of Computer Intelligence, and certainly not the Prelude to the Singularity that will produce, one day, out of nothing, a sentient machine. This is the snake-oil part. Use the tool, if you like, but think critically and don’t fall for the narrative. And for the love of all that’s good, don’t outsource your thinking to the tool. Do your fact-checking, do your due diligence. 

And that’s really it. Computers perform calculations using potentially immense amounts of data, at exceedingly high speeds. They compute. Any other verb is basically an illusion. Or manipulation, however we want to call it. 

Personal recommendation

The number of YouTube creators I have chosen to support can be counted on one hand. Brooks Brown is one of them. On his channel (mainly about philosophy, but also technology, with entertaining ‘After Hours’ streams) he has started a new series of 15 videos called The Lies of AI, where he demystifies ‘AI’ much more articulately than yours truly. At the time of writing he has published seven of these videos, roughly 10–12 minutes long each. This is very good stuff, and I strongly suggest you subscribe to his channel and watch these. Here’s a link to the first video of this series.

Intelligence not included

June 10, 2026
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Apple’s WWDC26 keynote last Monday felt… weird.

There are many flavours of weird, some with positive connotations. Quirky, for example. Quirky can be charming. It can be interesting. The flavour of weird I felt as I watched the keynote unfold, was inching more towards gross — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Let me try to explain.

Especially in Cook’s era, and especially since Apple stopped presenting events live before an audience, with live demos of products and product functionalities, we’ve had to watch videos with either pre-recorded demos or with simulated ‘slice of life’ situations where you could see a certain feature or set of features in action. Such videos have always felt particularly artificial to me, always leaving me with the impression that people at Apple — both due to their social status and the Apple Park ‘ivory tower’ creative environment — don’t really have a clue as to how regular people go on about their lives.

During the WWDC keynote, this kind of detachment was (to me) painfully obvious both in the initial segment about children safety, and especially throughout the excruciatingly long segment about Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

Children safety

I’m not an educator. I’m not a parent. I’m not in a position to tell people how they should properly educate their children or protect them from today’s dangers. However, based on observed behaviours, and having a certain knowledge and expertise when it comes to technology, I am of the opinion that children should not be given a smartphone in the first place. Of course, big tech companies such as Apple will present the smartphone as an inevitability to then offer you ‘solutions’ to mitigate the impact of this inevitability and develop ‘healthy digital habits’. 

Just because we’ve all become obsessed with our smartphones doesn’t mean the next generations have to develop the same kind of behaviours. The smartphone isn’t an inevitability in a child’s life — its physical presence can be delayed and introduced when it’s necessary and safe to do so. This of course doesn’t mean keeping Internet and the online world a secret until your son or daughter turns 13, or 15, or 18, or whatever age you consider safe. But using a smartphone or tablet as a tool to keep your child entertained and pacified and as a shortcut to a lot of parental work is just as misguided.

But Apple prefers the inevitability scenario because it involves — you know — buying an extra iPhone or iPad for your household. 

Apple guy, during the keynote:

On one hand, there’s so many benefits to your child having their own device. You rest easier, since you can stay in touch, know where they are, and provide them with great apps that help them learn and grow. 

Note that, as the guy says “great apps that help them learn and grow”, the icons appearing on screen are for the apps Books, Notes, and Freeform. If you really want to put devices in the hands of your young children, you can stay in touch by giving them a dumbphone. And for reading, regular books or a simple ebook reader is enough and even provides fewer distractions. Deep focus is essential from a young age, and you can’t do that by shoving the digital equivalent of an amusement park in children’s faces.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these new ‘trust and safety’ features Apple touted are bad. But the whole discourse rings a bit hollow to me. It all sounds like a sales pitch to parents, as in, Feel free to get an iPhone and leave it in the hands of your children: we have put a lot of safeguards in place, so you don’t have to worry. And I’m sitting here, shaking my head, thinking about all the children I see when out and about, literally left to their own devices while their parents are doing other stuff, arguing among themselves, or doomscrolling on their own smartphones. I’ll reiterate: The first step to children’s safety is not giving a smartphone to a child. They won’t miss out on anything. You don’t need special skills to master the use of a smartphone that is essential you start using such device from a very young age. But it’s much better if a child starts learning another language or how to play an instrument if they’re musically inclined. Both these activities are highly beneficial the sooner you start them. Countless studies demonstrate this. 

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

This is how the segment on Apple Intelligence begins, with Craig Federighi saying:

AI is incredibly powerful technology, with the potential to shape society in profound ways and, with proper care, unlock meaningful benefits for people everywhere. Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve. 

Keep these words in mind. He continues:

At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone. […] We believe that truly helpful AI must be centred around you and your needs. This means integrating AI deep into the products you use every day, grounding it in your personal context and the apps you rely on… 

Isn’t this just another flavour of “pursuing AI for the sake of AI”, though? Why not take this opportunity to do something radically different in your approach to ‘AI’, instead of basically saying, Other actors are doing AI in a bad and untrustworthy way, putting it everywhere, not caring about people. We’re still putting AI everywhere in our ecosystem, but TRUST US BROS, we’re going to do it the right way. We know what’s best for you.

This We know what’s best for you attitude — which has always struck me as being a bit patronising — used to work, ultimately and in most cases, when Steve Jobs was still alive. Why? Because Jobs was User Zero. Because despite being a very affluent person, he was still grounded in reality in a way that fewer and fewer ultra-rich people in tech display today. With Jobs, Apple knew what was best for you because he demanded that his people do their damn homework and presented that homework to him, the ultimate user/tester: testing ideas, variants, iterations, until a new feature was perfected, until a user interaction was polished and flowing naturally, until something was implemented in a meaningful way, or scrapped altogether because it wasn’t going anywhere. 

So, that We know what’s best for you wasn’t just arrogance on display. It was something Apple was indeed ready to prove. Today’s Apple, though? Eh, not with their recent track record. You can’t show up and tell me We know what’s best for you with a straight face after coming up with something like Liquid Glass, and after demonstrating you have been straying badly from even the most basic and most established UI principles.

These were my thoughts as the segment on Apple Intelligence and Siri was being introduced at the WWDC keynote. And my scepticism was confirmed later, by certain examples and demos they showcased.

Other Apple guy:

Siri is the personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. […] Siri AI uses our new Apple Intelligence capabilities, and you can tap into them in the same ways you access Siri today. […] This includes personal context understanding, app actions, on-screen awareness, image understanding, and access to broad world knowledge. So Siri is now a profoundly more capable assistant that helps you find what you need and gets more done. It’s also more conversational, so you can go back and forth like never before and get detailed, engaging answers. As you have these rich conversations, you can refer back to them with a new dedicated Siri app. And not only that, now Siri offers helpful Visual Intelligence across platforms. Along with integrated tools, so you can write and edit with Siri virtually anywhere you type. 

Translation: we have turned the old, ever-unreliable Siri, into a modern ‘AI’ chatbot (which is probably as reliable as any other ‘AI’ chatbot out there).

Other Apple guy now shows a few examples of how Siri is now a more capable assistant. He asks Siri information about an upcoming concert in the city, and how to get tickets. Siri’s answers are not questioned. And while the query is simple enough, and the answers very probably trustworthy, this is simply not the way I’d choose to get information about a local concert. It’s still less cumbersome for me to just type something like “Esperanza Spalding Valencia summer 2026” in my browser (whether on my computer or my phone), and see the information I need appear right there, in the form of results from different sources I can quickly cross reference to confirm that Esperanza Spalding will play in Valencia the next July 7. The whole operation took little time, I didn’t have to talk to my phone, I didn’t have to talk clearly to my phone, I didn’t have to check whether the assistant actually understood my query, nor did I have to take the assistant’s word for it.

The on-screen awareness demo makes for a cool, polished demo, no doubt, and while I realise it’s just an example to show you how Siri is able to make contextual connections and provide an articulated response, I wonder if this is the kind of friction we actually need to remove. If I remember a friend mentioning a change of address, I’ll probably just look for their message in Mail or whatever chat app I typically use when talking to them (e.g. Signal). I can find that information just as quickly and in a way that makes me feel less passive and dependent on a digital assistant for every little thing.

In the next example, Other Apple guy tells Siri to show him photos from a specific occasion, isolate only those where his family members appear, and put those photos in a Shared Photo Album. Convenient? Sure. But also lazy and thoughtless. It really feels like an example taken from the everyday life of a rich, busy guy who can’t even bother looking at photos taken during an excursion with his family, and personally share those that he feels relevant and important to other family members. It feels a bit like having a friend who’s very fond of cats, and just ask Siri, Hey Siri, take all photos of cats in my Camera Roll and put them in the Shared Photo Album I have with Emma. Are these the super-boring activities we desperately need ‘AI’ to do for us?

Then, Other Apple guy show us the new Siri voices, which according to him now sound “incredible and a lot more expressive”, while to me these still sound artificial, but now with an added inflection that makes them also sound strange, like… well, like a machine that’s really trying to mimic how a human talks, and ending up in Uncanny Valley.

Then, better dictation. And this is objectively a good thing, as Apple always seemed to lag behind the competition in this department.

Now, Other Other Apple guy talks about how Siri is now “more conversational [and again, I can’t contain my laughter because I don’t want my computers and devices to be conversational. I don’t want to engage with them this way. I want the reliability of the written word, of the intentional interaction mediated through the UI], so it gives you richer answers and gets more done for you. This goes well beyond quick questions or one-shot tasks. With Siri AI, you can ask for an in-depth plan, go back and forth during a creative brainstorm, get feedback on a document, and so much more”.

If you ask me, ‘quick questions and one-shot tasks’ should be the only way to use ‘AI’ that isn’t ultimately detrimental to our ability to think, organise, create, compose, write. I want technology that helps me sift through 316GB worth of PDF files to locate a specific sentence or word pattern, or that helps me sort a record with 1,730 authors’ names in alphabetical order by surname but also chronologically by birth date. I don’t want technology I can just outsource my thinking to.

Other Other Apple guy proceeds with an example where he asks Siri to display the opening matches for the World Cup, and when he sees Brazil vs Morocco he asks Siri to show him typical dishes from both countries because he wants to organise a watch party, and also wants to include in the menu some creation his daughter mentioned recently, and of course he needs Siri to remind him about it, because he — a young guy probably in his late thirties — can’t even remember that his daughter wanted to make coconut cookies. Then he asks Siri to create a menu based on all the information gathered so far. And finally, he asks Siri to send a prepared message to all the people in his chat who may be interested in this watch party. 

On the one hand, if Siri has indeed become this reliable at understanding queries like those demoed so far, it’s indeed impressive. On the other hand, I can’t help but ask myself, once again, whether people at Apple even know how regular people actually use their phones and devices. (Some people will probably be interested in the ‘compose and send the message for me’ part because they’re lazy. And part of me hates that this behaviour is now even more facilitated thanks to ‘AI’ tools).

The first example of Siri on the Mac Other Other Apple guy makes is just baffling to me. He says his son is “super into 3D printing” and that his son’s school has a setup and he (Other Other Apple guy) wants to help them expand into a dedicated space. Now, instead of actually sitting and thinking about how to do that, he just asks Siri: How should I think about building a maker space in a shed?

And yeah, having Siri analyse three different files with estimates from different companies makes for a neat demo trick, but really, in the real world, are you telling me you need a computer to perform some basic comparison like this? I know that if you’re a busy manager at Apple, stuff like this is boring and all you think about is delegating it to someone or something else. But this kind of task is one of dozens of everyday tasks that typically keep our brains nimble. In this Apple-made fantasy (a fantasy that is shared by other AI companies), you just ask everything to the ‘AI’ and accept whatever response you receive — uncritically.

Siri, think of this maker space problem for me. Pick the best contractor of the three, Siri. Write a friendly email to them. What’s next? Which jacket should I wear tomorrow at work, Siri? I know they’re ‘just making examples’ to illustrate a process, but this is all very telling of the way they think people should be helped. It’s very telling of the kind of assistance Apple (and other AI companies) think people need. It’s hard not to sound a bit conspiratorial here, but it’s almost like they want us to be more dumbed down and dependent on this type of technology. Wink, nudge.

Next, after a little wrap-up, the word goes to Other Other Other Apple guy, who talks about Siri’s ‘powerful Visual Intelligence’ across Apple’s platforms. On iPhone, it’s going to be integrated into the Camera app with a brand new ‘Siri mode’. You take a photo of something and Siri can tell you what it is (because asking people or doing an image search on the Web with results you can collate yourself is too outdated and not frictionless enough). 

Again, some of the examples are hilarious. Select a portion of a photo of a slice of focaccia, wait for the Siri prompt to appear, then ask if this can be made gluten-free. Wow, so useful! So intuitive! So much better than opening a new browser tab and typing “can focaccia be made gluten free” in the default search engine field. Right? Right!? Oh goodness, all this innovation is killing me!

The following Siri AI examples in Vision OS also kill me. Asking Siri if a certain backpack can work as carry-on for an upcoming flight, with Siri answering yes and reporting the backpack’s measurements that are clearly visible on the backpack’s website, or asking if a pair of boots you own will fit in such backpack when you can clearly assess it yourself — the boots are right there, and you have the backpack’s measurements already!

Next, Other Other Other Apple guy talks about the integrated writing tools, ‘Write with Siri’: “Suppose you’re kicking off a document at work. Just describe what you need in natural language, and Siri can generate a draft from scratch to get the ball rolling”. In this technological vision, we’re all 12-year-olds who are too dumb or too lazy to do the homework ourselves, and so we do the equivalent of the old-school ‘copying stuff from books’ and patch together an essay.

“You can also get feedback on your writing”, Other Other Other Apple guy punctuates triumphantly. No. No, no, no. I don’t want ‘helpful tips and suggestions to improve my work’ from a language model. This is what teachers do. This is what editors do. And in an informal capacity and in a casual scenario, even a family member, or partner, or even that friend whose writing you always loved can tell you whether something you wrote sounds okay or needs a bit more work. A machine should not tell you how to write better. It’s gross. 

And Apple Intelligence is going to wriggle its way into so many apps. I won’t keep listing other dumb examples introduced by more Other Apple guys and gals with contrived smiles on their faces. How can you suspend your disbelief when some Apple gal introduces Safari like this — and I quote: Safari was designed to help you move fast and stay focused on what matters.

Are. You. Kidding. Me. It’s a damn Web browser! It’s a tool to search, view, and organise stuff from the Web. But wait, now Apple Intelligence in Safari is going to make it easier to find what I’m looking for because — wait for it — it’s going to organise my browser tabs in topics, analysing Web pages and rearranging everything by relation. I don’t know about you, but in my case, no one, nothing organises my browser tabs except me. As for topics, that’s what Bookmarks are for since this feature was added in browsers decades ago. 

Once again, that minimum of friction required to organise your stuff yourself isn’t unnecessary mental payload to get rid of. It’s one of the little things that, together, help you become better at organising yourself and your stuff because you are doing them and learn in the process. Remember when your mother tidied up your room for you, putting away your belongings and storing them according to her criteria, and then you searched for something and you couldn’t find it? Wasn’t it maddening? Sure, you asked your mother where she put that book or that pen you love using, and she would tell you. Just like you can ask Siri where’s that website or document you let Siri arrange and store for you. Is this lack of agency ultimately appealing for you? Because for me it’s just unsettling.

I’ll end my discussion of this segment by making one last passing observation. Looking back at all the atrocious examples the various Apple presenters have made to extol the virtues of Siri AI during the keynote, I’m starting to suspect that most of these examples were actually drafted by Siri itself.

Closing thoughts

The segment on Apple Intelligence took the lion’s share of the WWDC26 keynote. I found it rather patronising and infantilising towards us users and customers. These people think we’re all just a bunch of idiots who are completely dependent on technology for every little stupid thing — or want to become completely dependent. (This is American Big Tech’s dream of course. This is what they would love us to become).

Notice how with Apple Intelligence everything, everything is a mission to reduce, pulverise, annihilate friction. In this worldview, Apple is this close to telling us, Just stop thinking, just touch here and there, and everything will be done for you. You will all sound a bit more like Siri in your emails and messages. Your peculiarities and ways to organise your stuff and your life will be a bit more levelled and similar to one another’s. Even with little creative things like taking a photo, you’ll have the chance to feed them to Siri AI to ‘make them better’ and make them look more like one of those glossy, ultra-processed hero images you see on Apple’s website. Please, do not think for a moment about the creative process of taking the photo, just tap the shutter button and then let ‘AI’ do the ‘heavy lifting’ (in quotes because come on, LOL, what heavy lifting!?)

Remember at the beginning of this piece, when I quoted what Craig Federighi said about Apple Intelligence? Let’s revisit that quote:

AI is incredibly powerful technology, with the potential to shape society in profound ways and, with proper care, unlock meaningful benefits for people everywhere. Still, some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve. 

Yes, after watching the WWDC26 keynote I have no doubt whatsoever that Apple, too, is seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that it’s ultimately meant to serve.

 

Oh, I almost forgot. It appears that at least Apple is actually trying to un-fuck Liquid Glass. So that’s something, I guess. I didn’t expect my personal ‘one more thing’ moment would come at about 6 minutes into the keynote.

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 whom Ive could really brainstorm with during the creation process, someone with 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 motion 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 it 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 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.