First, a quick review of what’s in the box:

The MacBook Neo ships with a 2-meter (6′) braided USB-C charger and an iPad-style USB-C charger rated for 20W. I was surprised to not see the foldable 2-port 35W charger that comes with the MacBook Air, or the newer single-port 40W charger that you can order, but this truly is the budget offering, so that’s budget choice that Apple has made.

The shorter cable is long enough for many scenarios, but not all of them. It’s also not color-matched to the device, meaning I won’t have folks upset by a new charging cord that doesn’t match the device if it needs to be replaced with a stock — or, more likely, third party — option.

Next up, external aesthetics:

The MacBook Neo is a very gentle refinement of the current M4 and M5 MacBook Air model that makes up a lot of our current fleet. The corner radii of the traditional round-rect shape of the Mac is slightly more pronounced on the Neo. I actually prefer this slightly more rounded approach, but it also belies that the screen bezels are slightly larger on the Neo than on the Air. The Apple logo on the lid is not shiny, and the whole lid actually looks a bit like it’s behind a frosted glass pane, which looks very lovely. This feels a lot like the material that Liquid Glass is supposed to be inspired by, and it’s a good look. My objections with regard to Liquid Glass remain as an interface motif, but the physical representation of it aren’t the problem.

Where the new aesthetic choices shine, though, are when the machine is open. When I opened the Indigo tester I ordered, I was really quite delighted by the new choice on the keyboard. The unlit keyboard has a lighter shade of grey-blue for the keyboard, and it really pops. I love how this looks. I never found myself missing the backlight. The contrasty feeling of the light blue keys against the deeper hued chassis are a comfort to my eyes.

Typing on the new keyboard feels just like my desk keyboard, a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. The keyboard here is uncompromised, which is a welcome relief. The trackpad on the Neo is a change from other models, not relying on haptic feedback, but rather a button mechanism that is beneath the device. There is not a lot of travel on the button, but you can see it visibly move less than a millimeter when you press it. It is a well-fitted assembly, though, and I don’t see this becoming a maintenance challenge for devices in the field. The current trackpads are sealed units, however, so that will have to be field-tested over time.

How does it fit into the work desk situation?

Well, this is where I was surprised. There has been a lot of back and forth from the tech community over the Neo’s specs. Only 8GB of RAM, only so much storage, only one full-speed port. All of these are tradeoffs Apple is making to reduce cost, and they are all reasonable trades for the average work computer.

I was able to use my existing Apple Studio Display at a lower resolution without any difficulty, as long as I plugged into the rearmost port, which is a full USB-C port, as opposed to the USB 2 speed port in front of it.

The Apple Studio Display (mine is a 2025 vintage of the version from 2021) works perfectly well as a 4K Display for the Neo, and it handles it very well. I never felt like I was missing the extra pixels, even if I could — if I squinted very hard — see the difference.

How does MacBook Neo handle standard tasks?

This week, I’ve been living on the Neo as my daily driver, putting my MacBook Pro M4 in a desk drawer and using the Neo wherever I go. My usual daily carry is the Pro on my desk in my office, and iPad Air M3 13″ with a keyboard in my backpack wherever else I go. At home, I’ve got an M4 Pro Mac mini, and a MacBook Pro M3 for use, as well. For this week, I’ve set all of them aside and I’m doing all my work on the Neo.

I live in the following workflows:

• Mimestream for work email and Apple Mail for personal email.
• Slack for centralized management of activity both personal and professional
• Safari for web browsing (standard) with Profiles for personal and work turned on.
• Chrome for specific sites that work best in Chrome (including one of our internal apps).
• Microsoft Office is still in heavy rotation, as no one who has ever mastered Excel can be expected to use Google Sheets and remain sane.
• 1Password for credential management
• Apple Notes and Reminders for productivity, along with Spotlight.
• Apple Photos for camera roll management
• Claude for desktop prompt management and working with AI workflows.

What worked well?

I was actually shocked at how good the web conferencing camera is on the lid. I was not expecting it to be so crisp and good. More on this in a bit.

Safari and Chrome are fast performers and loaders, and there’s nothing that either browser does on the A18 Pro that feels unnatural or bad. I didn’t have slow performance compared to what I normally experience in an active browser tab. Everything rendered with high fidelity to what I was expecting.

On the first day I had to do some basic video editing, and what better way to see how it handles than to try to do some basic iMovie. Scrubbing around was surprisingly quick, and when I was done cutting the movie, the export was just as quick. iMovie is a viable app here, but I’m not sure I’d trust Final Cut or Logic with the current workflows available, especially if you’re doing capture.

Office handled large documents well, even in track changes mode, which can be a UI nightmare on the best day. Excel handled the macros in our spreadsheets well, if not as fast as MacBook Airs from the last few years. The screen on the laptop is plenty for standard word processing and writing. I’m not sure I’d try the Creative Suite with 8GB of RAM, so our creative team will likely remain on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models for the foreseeable future.

What’s not so great?

Well, web browsing is a little weirder than I want it on the Neo. It’s not the frontmost tab that’s the problem — Safari and Chrome are both zippy on the Neo — but every other tab that I have open just don’t stay rendered. There is aggressive memory control killing those processes and resurrecting them when I return to the tab that has been challenging. If I have a Google Sheet open in one, and a B&H cart in the other, I find myself ending up refreshing often involuntarily behind the scenes than I’d like, and that can be painful

The speakers leave something to be desired, but since I generally believe that using speakers at work is a crime punishable by exile or death, this isn’t a problem. The side-firing speakers are definitely better than those on PCs of the same price range, but you can absolutely hear how cheap they are. There’s no depth to these drivers at all. Get a pair of headphones, your coworkers will thank you.

Waking from sleep isn’t as instantaneous as it is with the MacBook Air and Pro line of devices. There’s a lot more that seems to happen on the lid-lift action that causes it to be slower to wake from sleep. Now, I don’t mean that we’re in the timeframe of several minutes to wake from sleep, but 30-40 seconds isn’t uncommon to wake, show the login screen, authenticate, and return the user to working. It’s long enough to make you notice it, where the MacBook Air and Pro are instantaneous. This is probably the thing that would drive me the craziest, while others would just accept it.

How does the revised microphone and camera perform?

The MacBook Neo has a major upgrade over the M1 MacBook Air in the camera and mic department. Tests on Zoom and Google Meet in the first week were better than expected. In a well-lit room, the 1080p camera is a substantial upgrade over the 720p camera in the M1, and the sensor handled dynamic range changes much better, especially in backlit environments. The microphone array is also a major upgrade, and on the calls I tested with, multiple participants on the other side were shocked at how good the audio is. Most modern videoconferencing solutions are processing both the audio and the video once they receive it, but you can’t refine details that never make it that far. The Neo provides plenty of fidelity here, even if I find myself skeptical about the lack of directly-connected green “the camera is on!” LED in the lid.

How about the networking picture?

The Wi-Fi chip in the Neo handles my home and work networks admirably, definitely better than the M1 Air my son uses, and in some cases better than the MacBook Pro M3.

It negotiates fairly slowly, however, and the time necessary to turn off the Wi-Fi interface and turn it back on again was longer than a minute under some of my testing. While Wi-Fi testing is often challenging due to atmospheric conditions in your environment, and may be fairly variable, this is a place where your mileage may vary from mine. But below, on the left is the signal from a MacBook Pro 14″ M3 (2024), and on the right is the signal from the MacBook Neo (2026).

The Neo is showing 11 dBm better signal, for an increased MCS Index of 11, maxing out the speed at 573 Mbps of Transmit Rate. Internet speed tests with Fast.com were coming out at 310 Mbps of throughput to the device, slightly better than half duplex. The same test average on the M3 MacBook Pro was approximately 230 Mbps under its conditions. This is the test, however, that has the least confidence of all of my testing. Wi-Fi conditions are highly dependent on a lot of uncontrollable factors that may be transient.

It’s very possible that the MacBook Neo has Apple’s best non-N1 Wi-Fi chip in the lineup, and that was a very big surprise indeed.

Odds and Ends

Every Mac that has run a modern macOS version, all the way back to the beginning of Mac OS X, has set a local name that has corresponded to the first user’s first name, followed by an apostrophe s, and the model of the device. Roger’s Mac mini. Jane’s MacBook Air. It’s a familiar pattern that most recognize instinctively. I was surprised to see that my device is listed as “Tom’s MacBook” in the System Information:

I wonder if they meant to call this something else (MacBook) and left the string in place, or is this just a thoughtful interpretation of what the Neo is: an adjective, not the name? Either way, this felt right.

What’s the overall verdict?

The MacBook Neo is a capable general purpose computer, and despite its shortcomings, it’s a performer for day to day use. I can envision using these where we’d normally have a hand-me-down MacBook Air, or in the event we needed a broader loaner pool for most of our staff, this Mac will perform well enough to make it a great part of our ecosystem.

I suspect that I won’t change our go-to daily driver for most of our digital-facing staff, which remains a MacBook Air, but for role-based use, utility use, loaner pool use, and to purge the last of our Intel fleet, this machine will handle exactly what we need it to. Great job, Apple, making this feel exactly like every other Mac I’ve used. The sky is truly the limit, unlike the iPad, where even though it comes with a whole lot more horsepower, it still feels like something waiting to happen. A sports car dream without the right steering wheels, and far, far too many guard rails to make it the right choice.

It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve the Mac Admins community through helping to formalize our community for generations to come. The incredible response from the broad community, through volunteerism, financial support, and institutional support, is a testament to the vision that we laid out in the early days. The community of Mac Admins throughout the world is an amazing body of human beings who just want to help each other do well.

In stepping down from the board, I know that the building blocks of the organization are strong for the future, that leadership is in the right hands, and that the future of this community is as bright as ever.

Every organization has to outlive the founders that set it up, and MAF is no exception. This incredible community has never been about a single person at its head, and that’s a huge strength – there’s a chorus of voices out there who are all carrying out the incredible work of this community. I will be continuing on as a mentor within the mentorship program, and a dogsbody volunteer when MAF needs one, but my time at the helm is over and complete.

I started writing these public letters to you in 2021 after the events of January 6th, 2021, and again in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential Election. This letter comes at an even darker time for the Union and for the History of America: we are watching as masked and unidentified federal agents at the behest of senior advisors to the President are conducting a campaign of violence against the metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul. They are dragging people out of their cars and homes because of how they appear, not based on who they are, or what they are accused of doing.

What we are witnessing is a wholesale rejection of the tenets and spirit of our laws and founding documents at the hands of tyrants, sycophants, and extremists who are dead set on transforming America into something far worse. They have killed innocent bystanders already, as well as people whose only crime is existing here. They have killed, maimed, and injured citizens who stopped to catalog these assaults on our free society. It is now the demand of part of the government that people carry proof of citizenship at all times. This proof will then be ignored if you black or brown, and you will be detained anyway.

I am ashamed at who we have proven ourselves to be: craven and weak cowards who have to resort to threats of violence to achieve our ends.

I am ashamed to be an American in this world. We have fallen so far, so fast, and now serve as much as warning as anything else.

Meanwhile, we have carried out lawless actions abroad in Venezuela, by deposing and capturing a foreign leader. Sure, Maduro is a violent repressor of his people, but stealing a whole leader just to capture shitty crude oil is both on-brand for America, and a step too far. We are also threatening our European allies unless they turn over Greenland to us.

This isn’t how the United States is supposed to operate. It’s anathema to our values. We aren’t a mob boss that’s there to threaten even our friends.

The way that the Cold War was won was through alliances and through the projection of soft power throughout the world. The United States’ cultural values, combined with our business acumen and engineering prowess, was enough to order the world in a way that we could compete and lead a large portion of the economy. We had our failings — Vietnam, Africa, Central America — in that period, but we didn’t need to rely on our armies, we could lead through diplomacy and through policy.

What we’ve become is worse than the schoolyard bullies I faced as a kid. We’ve become venal and cold. We’ve cut off the foreign aid that we used to use to build goodwill abroad. We’ve cut off the free trade policies that made doing business with the world a straightforward endeavor for us and for those who wanted to invest in the United States.

What we’ve become is scared, sad, and afraid, in our leadership. We’ve become less dedicated to even the flawed Reagan model of a shining city on a hill. What we’ve become is a cruel castle, meant to subjugate others, instead of to lead them.

I have a trip coming together for April right now, to visit friends in the United Kingdom and Netherlands, and I am beginning to question whether going abroad is even wise right now. This morning, the President issued direct threads to the leadership of Norway, and we remain threatening to our NATO allies in Denmark over Greenland.

After World War II, the United States negotiated for bases in Germany and throughout Europe. We didn’t demand them, we negotiated for them. Their leases were paid for, their presence was agreed to through treaties and process. If the US felt that presence in Greenland was necessary beyond the one Space Force (sigh, what a dumb name) base, we could be negotiating with our allies. Instead, we’re threatening them with conquest.

Our friends.

We’re doing this to our friends out of fear, out of a pathological need to be seen as strong, when soft power instead is enough to be strong. We’ve quit wielding that power, while the fringe leaders basically say that soft power and negotiation are “gay” and “weak.”

We’ve been fucking around for a year. We’re about to do a whole lot of finding out.

I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that the world you inherit will be smaller for Americans because of all that. It used to be that if you had a US Passport, the world was your oyster. We had negotiated, through that soft power policy, that Americans were free to come and go as they pleased throughout the world. We’ve burned that down over the last ten years. We’ve withdrawn from the world our economic partnership and technical skills. We’ve withdrawn our aid from the parts of the world that need it. We’ve replaced a helping hand with a fist.

The world will be smaller for you, and I am sad for that, as some of my best friends are Australian, Dutch, English, German, Brazilian, and French. There was a time when I could have landed on any one of three non-North American continents and had dinner plans, and an invitation to stay, with my friends in those places. I fear now that those days are behind us. That you won’t be able to build those international relationships that magically make the world smaller and more navigable and richer.

It is my most fervent hope that, as the people of Minneapolis have done, that we present a unified resistance to the continued tyranny of this government’s desire to subjugate its own people and ruin our reputation abroad. We have work to do to stand up for what we believe in. Watching Minnesotans put their bodies on the line for each other gives me hope that we will continue to do the same.

We’re not done fighting, and there aren’t nearly enough of them to bring us all the way down. One thing I appreciate is that we have some touchstones to hold on to in our society. Our indomitable culture produced some absolutely stellar works of anti-tyranny literature. As Nemik said, “[their] need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of [their] authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.”

We’re working as hard as we can to wrest back control of this government from those sad, weak, and afraid people who run it now. They cannot do this forever. My hope is that, by the time you’re ready to be an adult, there will still be something of the America I remember left for you. Or, that at least, I can hand you one that you can help shape into a newer, better, version of it.

I love you, always,

Dad

I’d keep going until the problem was solved, the task was complete, or I was too drained to continue. If something was still broken or unanswered, I felt pressure to push through it before logging off. Ending the day with loose ends felt like failure, like I wasn’t completing my tasks.

Over time, I realized that approach was quietly working against me.

Not because unfinished work is bad, but because how you leave work unfinished matters.

Ooooooo, that’s an interesting one. I work from to-do lists constantly, but in a dynamic environment where we’re constantly doing one-offs, repetition can be a bit of a challenge. I’ve been thinking a lot on what it takes to disconnect from the day to day grind of it all for 2026, and how you make space for better habits.

This past year, I’ve talked to a lot of people about two major thoughts in this space.

Journaling

I love Field Notes notebooks, not just because of their amazing product, but their workflow that goes into it. They gave me a key part of my ethos for the year: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” I’ve had boxes and boxes of their books, but the habit to keep using them was hard to create. I think I’ve got a good combo of calendar reminders and nudges now to get this going. Here’s the plan:

Bullet Journal Style with what happened. Track Key conversations, track deadline progress. Key reminders for tomorrow after that. A note about the weather, my mood, and my energy level at the end. Keep it to a page a day, or if I need to really unpack something, that’s what the Apple Journal is for.

Make Time For This by putting 15 min on your calendar as Focus Time to end your day. Don’t let anyone schedule over it. Just block that space. You’re doing tomorrow’s you a huge favor and setting it up for success by doing this. Pay it forward.

End of the Week Wrap-ups

Friday’s a terrible day to make configuration changes. Says the guy whose business makes its money from Thursday to Sunday. You don’t want to jeopardize the key revenue time with changes when you’re busy, unless you positively have to.

I have an hour block on my Friday afternoon now to combine longterm planning and weekly wrap-ups. But this is where the tool changes for me: these are going into digital records, not just analog. I’m piping this year’s weeklies into Notion pages so I can reference them later. Key points are going to be distilled from the daily pages, plus project timelines and updates.

Building a dashboard out of this is one of my 2026 goals: what did I spend my time on? What did that turn into for the company? For the department? What was I able to move the needle on?

So, Wrapping Up…

What are you adding to your arsenal in 2026? What tools are you embracing to help you? As Scott said:

Productivity isn’t about squeezing every ounce out of today. It’s about making tomorrow easier to start.

What are you doing to be kind to tomorrow you? What are you doing to help smooth that launch each day?

Find the things that feed you, the things that make it easier to start, and focus there first.

Stuff I Bought This Year, Enterprise Software Edition: While I bought Google Workspace Enterprise in March for work, it’s not much to share, since I feel like we’re the last living folks to have done it. There were a couple of big software purchases outside of that that are worthy of note:

1. Nudge Security — We’re not to the point of routing all our authentications through an IDP yet, and there’s a whole lot of brownfield IT happening out there. We deployed Nudge this Fall to find out just what everyone was using, and then we’ll use it during 2026 to figure out what we want to keep and how we push people into our funnels instead. I am so far very happy with this purchase. (They are also MAF sponsors!) We found half a dozen apps in widespread use that we should probably be using more of, and half a dozen apps that we’re paying for with very limited usage. Discovering holes in the IT pipeline has been just great for us so far!
2. Auvik – With eight physical networks that I’m spending time maintaining, it’s critical to know where things may be going sideways in realtime, and Auvik’s been great for that so far. Part early-warning system, part dashboard, part future-proofing, this is a Swiss army knife I’m excited to explore more of in 2026, especially as we undertake replacement of one large network next year. We’ve already used it to spot a couple of pieces of failing equipment, and to plot for a big upgrade next season.

Stuff I Bought This Year, Home Lab Edition: I replaced all of our network core at the house in the Fall, adding Wi-Fi 7, and 10-gigabit links between the floors. UniFi continues to make incredible product decisions for high reliability, low fussiness equipment. Their switch and AP lines right now are crisp products that perform at every level, and I can’t wait to expand their footprint at work. These folks are just hitting on every level, get yourself some.

Worst Decision I Made in 2025: I bought an iPhone Air. I bought it on vibes and promises that a lighter phone that was still capable was going to be just enough. I made it less than 3 months. The battery life is pretty atrocious (I’m averaging 120% charge per day… which means I’m charging intra-day all the time) and I miss the camera flexibility. I thought the external battery pack would suffice, but it wasn’t enough either, and just became something else with a battery meter I had to track.

I’ve ordered a new iPhone 17 Pro to replace it, and I’m trading the Air to my carrier at a several hundred dollar loss. I’m mad, but only at myself for buying the hype. I wanted a lighter phone that could make it all day, not one that I’d have to constantly babysit.

Best Decision I Made in 2025: Prioritizing my own sanity. I didn’t succeed at this 100% of the time, but I feel like a lighter human than I did this time last year. My new job is both more rewarding and something that leverages my own experiences better. I started bike commuting in 2025, and got more gym time in than I had in previous years. More than 500 miles of tracked bike rides this year to and from work, plus more than 50 days in the gym. I’m hoping to double both numbers in 2026.

Album of the Year: No Hard Feelings by The Beaches – Easily my number one album this year. Pop Rock at its best, upbeat, excited, engaged, and utterly heartbroken. Jordan Miller’s vocals are raw and sultry in turn, in front of jangly guitars and frantic drums. It’s a banger from start to finish. Their live set at All Things Go this fall made my top five.

Game of the Year: Blue Prince. I got to this one way late — only in the last week or so! — but wow, what a game. It’s giving Myst vibes, with a ton of great puzzles, and a whole lot of exploring to do. I’m going to be playing this one for a while.

Song of the Year: Oh Lord, by Foxy Shazam – Yes, it’s the title track from this year’s season of Peacemaker, and yes it’s from 2013, but this was the song that I just couldn’t stop thinking about in 2025. What a banger of a track.

Show of the Year: This was the hardest decision in this piece. I saw a lot of great shows this year — Doechii at The Anthem, Wilderado at 9:30 Club, The Beaches at All Things Go — but the winner was absolutely Daisy Grenade in support of Stand Atlantic at The Atlantis.

Travel Experience of the Year: Sure, I went to Disney in January and did the VIP Tour with family members, but the award here goes to my Unintentional Invasion of Denmark in early October. After a weather and equipment delay in Göteborg, the replacement plane experienced a sensor failure in the air over Denmark, necessitating an emergency landing in Billund, Denmark.

The experience was a bit surreal, as KLM handled my rebooking without assistance, covered my hotel, covered my meals, and eventually paid me just about $700 for the delay.

It is truly amazing what you can achieve when you require that airlines actually care for the people they’re flinging around in aluminum tubes at high speed. Contrast that with flying in the US where, thanks to the new administration, they recently rescinded rules that made airlines more accountable for their delays and problems.

Travel Stats: This year’s travel was less than half of last year’s, which was another pleasant side effect of changing jobs. The travel I did this year (MacAD.UK, MacSysAdmin) was largely just for the Podcast, but there were also some side jaunts to new places (like Durham in February for the MAF Retreat), and for Spring Break that were just drives:

Here’s the list I settled on, and I’d love to hear what folks think about it, would take away, or would add:

1. What skills did you add to your portfolio this year?
2. What’s something that you’re proud of getting started or done this year?
3. What’s something you wish you’d been more successful on?
4. What’s something (a tool, an approach, a platform) you’re using right now that is really working for you?
5. What’s something (a tool, an approach, a platform) you’re using right now that you want to replace?
6. Who’s someone that’s making a difference in your organization?
7. Who’s someone that you admire in the broader industry?
8. Who’s someone that is great to work with?
9. Who’s someone that you’d love to work with someday?
10. Was there anything you or your department did this year that wasn’t worth the effort?
11. Was there anything you or your department did this year that was absolutely worth the effort?
12. Did you attend an event this year that made you a better practitioner?
13. Did you do any training that resonated with you?
14. What from this year would you do differently?
15. What’s something you learned from this year that you’re carrying as your standard for next year?
16. Was it really the year of {The Linux Desktop | Apple in the Enterprise | AI getting magically useful} or was that just marketing?
17. Who did you help this year that made you feel good when you went above and beyond?
18. A year from now, I will have done…
19. What kept you sane this year?
20. What’s something you did outside of work that made you feel good?

Happy introspecting!

All of these efforts are what I’d call scratchboard work:

• They’re important to help look for patterns
• They’re not mission critical resources
• They don’t prescribe courses of action on their own

I would class them as part of the thinking process, but not the final result of thinking process. LLMs have become very powerful tools in the pursuit of thinking, but by themselves, they are not thinking.

Not one of these tools is one that I would rely on without an engineer to help make sure they’re accurate, performant, and built for the longterm. They’re hacks that I’ve worked on to help solve a problem once, not a piece of engineering that I would rely on for more than one project.

The best thing that we’ve found so far is that we’ve found data that could benefit from a real statistician’s treatment. The LLM couldn’t find what we were looking for, but it’s shown enough signal in the data for us to find and hire someone who can help us build the real predictive analytics that we need to make better choices around a specific set of business decisions.

We are midway through a contract engagement to do that important work, and mine that data for actual signal. The tool was good enough to show us a pattern, we interviewed to confirm our suspicions, and now we’re applying a different set of tools to build a better path forward for the business.

When I was first in IT, I worked for NCEE, helmed by Marc Tucker. Marc had built his career talking about career development and educational development, starting with a report called “Thinking for a Living: Work, Skills, and the Future of the American Economy”. The report made some strong claims that the future of our (meaning, the United States) economy depended on jobs that provided employers with the ability to make big decisions, steer the course of the economy in new directions, and do so based on the strength of the reasoning, skills, communications, and efforts of its employees.

Marc was a spectacular human to work for – empathetic, encouraging, smart, and generous – and he was one of the better CEOs I’ve ever met or worked with. He was constantly encouraging his teams to do more, to stretch their skills, and to go back and learn more. It was his encouragement, and that of another close friend, that encouraged me to go back for my Master’s at Virginia Tech in STS.

Marc was very clear that we all had to go on learning, that we had to build skills throughout our careers, to be truly successful and to be part of a successful economy.

As part of that program at Virginia Tech, I spent a lot of time learning and thinking about what it means for technology to be in use within an organization. My final projects spent a lot of time on social media adaptation, focusing on patterns of utilization. One of the really important parts of the program was discussion about how technology gets adopted and made. Pinch & Bijker published a lengthy tome called the Social Construction of Technology. It’s a sociology-of-technology book that’s somewhat famous, and has become very central to how I see technological adoption rates in IT.

In the work they contend that:

• Technology does not determine human action.
• How technology is used is highly dependent on its human adoption and adaptation.
• One technology’s superiority over another is not purely technical in origin.

So, too, must it be with modern tools.

In a world with LLMs and other similar tools, what does it mean to be someone who writes? What part of the technological advances allow us to democratize opinion and expression — something promised for a long time by the Internet overall, going back to the early days of blogs — and what stays as authentic craftsmanship of writing in a world where LLMs exist?

I don’t have all the answers. Hell, I’m not sure I have an answer.

I can tell you how it makes me feel when I know I’m reading something that was LLM-enhanced or -derived, and that’s overall negative. Perhaps it comes down to my own processes. Let me explain.

When I write a conference talk — which is most of the writing I do now — I build an outline, starting from index cards. The process is about charting ideas. An index card might have a few words, or a few words plus a sentence or two on the back. Cards get strewn about the table where I’m working, moved and moved again, until I have most of an outline. From there, I gather things into a formal outline, and if necessary, a full script.

Once I’ve got the script, then I start the slides, get them to a rough-and-ready point before working to align everything and testing the process.

A conference talk, from start to finish is anywhere between 40 and 100 hours worth of work to put together, done all by myself. What I get from the experience is the process of thinking through all the parts of the talk, crafting a narrative from start to finish, and opportunities for engagement from the broader audience.

Could I do it in less time?

I’m sure I could. I’m not sure I want to, though.

The process I have works well for me in terms of getting myself into the talk, understanding all the parts of it, exploring the concepts well, and creating the final process. I think my talks have been well received the last few years: my speaker ratings have been high, and my invitations to speak have continued to arrive. Neither are a perfect way of evaluating a talk’s success, though: ratings are not compulsory, and it’s hard to know if there are other reasons I might be invited to speak.

In the end, for me it comes down to craft: what does it mean to think for a living and communicate well? Does it mean building a list of points and then using an LLM to sort out the flowery bits of writing and connective tissue? Or does it mean spending the time to choose the right words, the right level of clarity?

For the sort of blogging I do now, I think I far prefer the latter, but it’s become impossible to spot what’s good writing done by hand, and what’s been done by an AI with a good prompt.

So, I have to turn back to Pinch & Bijker, and my education, which taught me that perhaps how something is built could provide key understanding as to how something is used. A friend recently compared LLMs for writing to the typewriter, the word processor, and spell check. Each of these felt not-quite-right to me as analogs.

Typewriters changed how legible writing was, but it didn’t make word choice for the author. Word processors made it easy to store and recover writing, but it didn’t do the writing for the author. Spell check could help you avoid embarrassing mistakes (well, some of the time!) but wasn’t doing the writing.

At the end of the day: for me, writing is thinking. Writing is the physical expression of a thought process, of the communication that makes us all humans, and in wont of expressing our ideas and evidences.. Perhaps that’s why I am not in line with some of my friends and peers in the industry with the use of LLMs for writing.

The professional writing that’s done publicly (some might say performatively if they’re not being charitable), is the sort of reputational writing that has become a part of professional culture. Those articles get re-shared on LinkedIn, or passed from Slack to Slack, because they represent a memetic kernel of knowledge that Cory Doctorow once called “whuffie” in Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom as a way of building street cred.

But then I realize that for some out there, coding is thinking, also. The tools that I benefit from in the opening are the same ones that I struggle with when others use them for communicating.

None of this is straight forward. None of this has clear answers.

What this calls for is exploration, for patience, for “no hard decisions,” while we see how the rest of things shake out. There are challenges with LLMs that are also outside the technical realm that may make their point-of-use more controversial for the more human adaptations: cost of use, cost of environmental use, corporate structures and ethics, etc. There’s no shortage of options here.

It’s time for us to ask more of the questions regarding authenticity, disclosure, and utilization of these new tools, before we just embrace their wholesale use. What are we gaining? What are we losing? What does this mean about how technology works? What does this do to productivity? Is what we’re getting good? How can we be sure?

There’s plenty to question.

But we can’t stop thinking for a living if we want to be successful.

Thankfully, in an update to their documentation today, Apple announced that they now support Managed Apple Accounts for TestFlight builds. Fantastic news! One less missing stair. There are two important notes with their use however:

1. The account address must be able to receive email.
2. The account address cannot be on the reserved domain.

There are still some limits to Managed Apple Accounts that remain, and those include:

• 5GB Maximum Limit on iCloud storage, with no purchase possible for more space.*
• No support for AirTags or other Find My features.
• No support for App Store login, even to accept and use free applications.**
• Organizer account for your Apple Developer Program cannot be a Managed Apple Account.

We’re getting closer and closer to having full support for Managed Apple Accounts in the Enterprise.

* Yes, I know about Apple Business Essentials. No, that is not a sufficient solution.

** This is maybe not a desirable solution, but I would definitely be on board with it being a possible solution.

When I started looking for a technical subject, I didn’t find one that fit the last year of experience. This past year has been very different for me, moving from product management back into IT Leadership.

Content Warning: This talk contains stressful subjects, including work performance management, burnout, corporate politics, and mental illness. This isn’t a happy go lucky talk.

There is a coda to this talk that I ran out of time to give.

When I return to the US later this week, I will be able to share that coda, recorded in my office.

IT Leadership is about more than just pushing software and fixing computers. It’s about understanding your role in the business, what you need to do to provide value as a supporting player, and how you can drive meaningful change from that role.

This talk was very cathartic to write, as it’s the result of burnout, recovery, and re-engagement.

I’ve learned so much from having written it, and it was a privilege and an honor to share it.

colophon

I used a lot of things to write this talk, including a lot of books, external resources, and music. Here are some of them!

Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – Overdrive and Amazon

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant – Overdrive and Amazon

https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/favorites-mix/pl.pm-20e9f373919da080500652a65185b713

This Spring, we visited the site of the surrender at Yorktown, where the British Army were defeated by the Continental forces lead by Generals Washington and Rochambeau in 1781. It was the sixth year of the Revolutionary War which gave the United States its birth. We walked through the museum at Yorktown to talk about what caused the Revolution, and to talk about how the charges of freedom and liberty were all about recognizing the rights of the people instead of recognizing only the commands of Kings and tyrants.

In July of 1776, representatives of the several colonies met in Philadelphia. Lead by Virginian slaveowner and politician Thomas Jefferson, the Congress drafted the Declaration of Independence, separating the colonies from Great Britain and King George III. The burden of an unruly tyrant’s demands on the people of the colonies to fund the wars of England elsewhere had grown too much, the will of the people was to separate themselves from this brutal treatment.

Violent incidents in the Northeastern states had been occurring for more than a year, with colonists at Lexington and Concord coming under fire from the British Army. Battles at Ticonderoga,

Among their complaints of inequitable treatment, in specific, they cited:

• He [King George III] has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

As we take stock of 249 years of history, especially the last few months, the colonists’ rebuke of King George III’s cruelty feels a lot more like the present than any of us would care for. The unitary executive that the Trump Administration has sought to pursue has twisted our nation’s leadership to look more like the tyrants your great great great grandfather Andreas Hauff fought while in that Continental Army, a brand new immigrant to this continent.

These times are not easy ones, and indeed they test the very liberty and freedom that were signed into being with the Declaration of Independence. But as we mark that right choice — a choice sworn to with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — we have to recognize that we are called on through the generations to make similar choices.

There may come a time in the future where we have to revisit the circumstances that Jefferson called “the consent of the governed,” as when forms of government become destructive to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish that government. The risks that our forebears took, and the sacrifices that they made to take those risks, are a permanent reminder that the price of free society can be high.

But the alternative, to see people placed in subjugation, to see others jailed abroad without due process, to see a corruption of our laws, and of the executive authorities, and do nothing?

That isn’t it, either.

For now, we resist these instinctual tyrannies through protest, through electoral politics, and through reminding each other of those inalienable rights in the Declaration. We remind each other that the need for control across our great nation is a brittle thing that tyrants cannot long enforce because it requires constant effort that their lazy aims cannot hold. We hold forth our values of hospitality, of care for others, of care for country from attack from within by tyrannical forces.

Every act of care is, in a sense, an act of Independence from their cruelty.

Every act of hospitality, every hug, every kind word to a friend, every chance to lift someone up that you take, those are all actions that help rebuild the future.

Happy Independence Day.