Snippet: How to Survive the Loss of Rosetta ☇

Howard Oakley on The Eclectic Light Company:

One of the new features coming in the next update to Tahoe, taking it to macOS 26.4, is a Rosetta warning. When you run Intel code on an Apple silicon Mac, macOS will start warning you that you won’t be able to do that in the future. At first, those will be infrequent, but as time passes their cadence will increase. This article explains why, and what you can do about it.

In about a year and a half, macOS 28 will drop Rosetta 2 support. That will be eight years into the Apple Silicon era, so it’s been a fairly long window. I’ve only got a couple of Intel-only apps on my Mac, but the clock is ticking to start finding replacements. Some are older versions that I’ve kept around, but a few appear to have been abandoned.

Snippet: Regarding Apple Keycap Labels ☇

With the introduction of the MacBook Neo and revised MacBooks Air and Pro, Apple quietly switched a number of keys to only be labeled by glyphs. This brings models sold in the United States, Canada, and Australia (maybe others?) in line with the rest of the world. While it’s been noted in a number of places, John Gruber’s thoughts were the first I could find when I was starting this post:

All the new MacBook keyboards sport this same change, including the M5 Air and A18 Pro MacBook Neo. I’m not a fan. I like the words on those keys. But I’m willing to admit it might just be that I’ve been using Apple keyboards with words on those keys since I was like 10 years old. iOS 26 switched from the word “return” to the “↵” glyph on the software keyboard (and removed the word “space” from the spacebar — which, in hindsight, seemed needless to label).

With a lot of the comments on this, I wanted to be slightly nitpicky and note something else: it seems that a lot of people were saying that symbols replaced “Backspace” and/or “Enter” (including the original tweet by Mr. Macintosh.) The Mac has used “Delete” for that role for almost its entire run—only the original Macintosh through Plus labeled it as “Backspace” (no Apple II used “Backspace” once that function was introduced on the IIe.) The key typically associated with “Delete” on PC keyboards was added on the Apple Extended Keyboard and included a “del” label with a forward delete symbol. As for “Enter” as a label, it was exclusively on the numeric keypad and treated as a different key than “Return” (unlike most PC keyboards that treat them the same.)

I think it’s interesting that these keys have roots in the world of typewriters, yet Apple made the intentional decision that getting rid of the last thing you typed was deleting, not backspacing. Similarly, at least on the Macintosh, Apple felt that that users would be using more carriage returns than executing commands, which was probably true on a mouse-based interface. One avoided the typewriter metaphor, while the other embraced it.

Does this really matter? Probably not—my Keychron keyboard has “Backspace” and “Enter” keys (with glyphs) and I use them just the same, although I think we should at least note the intentionality before Apple’s use of text-based labels end up in the history books.

Snippet: 50 Years of Thinking Different ☇

Apple CEO Tim Cook:

Every invention we bring into the world is just the beginning of a story. The most meaningful chapters are written by all of you — the people who use our technology to work, learn, dream, and discover. You’ve made breakthroughs and launched businesses. You’ve cheered up loved ones in the hospital and captured your toddler’s first steps. You’ve run marathons, written books, and rekindled friendships. You’ve chased your curiosity, found your new favorite song, and shared stories that connect us all.

In your hands, the tools we make have improved lives, and sometimes even saved them. And that is what inspires us — not what technology can do alone, but everything you can do with it.

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

I think there’s a lot of things we can be critical regarding Apple today: the dynamic with the current administration, developer relations, some questionable design choices, and so on. It’s never been perfect—think of the revolving door of CEOs in the ’90s that almost sank the company. However, the products have generally been great for creativity and feeding curiosity, true bicycles for the mind. Little complaints aside, my experience with Apple products have been that they generally get out of my way and let me accomplish something. For me, this 50th anniversary celebration isn’t necessarily about the company itself, but what the products mean: things people have been able to do with them and the people who made them possible.

Snippet: “This is Not the Computer for You” ☇

Sam Henri Gold on the MacBook Neo:

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.

Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do.

He has decided he’ll be fine.

I had a hard time pulling a quote from this piece because there were so many good ones, but this passage spoke to me. I’ve talked about the old Macs that I played with as a kid and they were severely obsolete, but cheap. I loved them anyway. On the other hand, if I was able to get a new Mac for $248 in 1999 (thanks, Inflation Calculator), I would not have cared about its perceived limitations and used it to try to do everything. Mark my words right now, the MacBook Neo won’t be the best MacBook, or the longest-supported (probably), but it will be the most-loved.

Snippet: Sure, the Mac mini is Getting Some More Love Because of AI ☇

Michael Simon for Macworld:

On Wednesday, Perplexity announced Personal Computer, an AI agent that “runs continuously, merging your local applications with Perplexity Computer.” The system runs on Perplexity’s “secure servers,” but what hardware does it all run on? An M4 Mac mini. […]

It’s not the first time Apple’s tiny PC made headlines as an AI tool. In January, social media was overrun with people running the free, open-source AI assistant Clawdbot on stacks of Mac minis before Anthropic killed the buzz.

Perplexity calls Personal Computer “more powerful than any AI system ever launched.” We don’t know yet which Mac mini it will be running on, but we assume it has the maximum RAM (64GB on the M4 Pro) model and a giant hard drive [sic]. It’s also unclear whether Apple is supplying the company with Mac minis or whether Perplexity is simply using off-the-shelf units.

I think it’s somewhat remarkable that while Apple’s cheapest, smallest desktop has always been generally overlooked, AI tools are giving it another potential market. As a very early adopter of the Mac mini, there was a stretch in the late-2000s where it seemed Apple was going to let it wither on the vine. Nonetheless, Mac minis have always been fantastic machines to repurpose, so I could see people reusing a spare M1/M2-based model for more AI tools once they upgrade or just picking up an M4. I’m also hopeful that this may also ensure that Apple keeps it in the lineup, despite the public’s gravitation towards laptops as a whole.