John Ternus is now in charge of Apple. While the iPhone Duo was undoubtedly started during Cook’s tenure, it sure sounds like his fingerprints were all over it. And it’s been interesting to see the coverage that he thinks Apple needs to try more things and move faster.

If I’m reading the tea leaves right (I’m probably not, but go with it), that means Apple might make weird stuff again. Like, say, a folding phone.

I have my own list of weird stuff I’d like Apple to make, and on the off chance that John Ternus is one of my small readers (he is not), I thought I’d share the list. I really want the first five or six. Everything after that is something I’d consider if I were the CEO (probably for the best I’m not).

1. A Surface Studio-style Mac that allows to angle the monitor to a drafting table level so I can use the Pencil Pro on my desk. 
2. Also add that feature to the Studio Display.
3. A 32″ Studio Display XDR. You could call it Studio Display Ultra Pro Max. Investors will love that product synergy.
4. An iPhone mini Pro with the high-end Pro camera system in a tiny phone. People used to write books on their iPhones before the Great Embigenning, which can be traced to the iPhone 6 and has never ceased.
5. A MacBook Pro with cellular.
6. Bring back the Mac Pro. Make it a loss leader. Maybe you only sell a thousand of them to a few AI developers, but Apple should have a halo Mac. Make an all new chip for it. The chip lineup becomes the MX, MX Pro, MX Max, MX Ultra, and MX Quadra. (Name pending.) This is the go-for-it computer; it’s the one that ever AI researcher wishes they could afford, and John Siracusa will somehow end up with two. Add in the ability to add discrete GPUs again and patch things up with Nvidia.
7. Form a team who works exclusively on building relationships with video game developers. Make the tools those developers need, because you sure don’t now. Get more games on the Mac. Make porting games from macOS to iOS and iPadOS as easy as checking a box when submitting. 
8. Make a mesh network router system. Seriously, you bolted a screen on to a Homepod before you thought to reintroduce a router?
9. Completely rethink iPadOS. Just throw it out and start again. Work from Steve’s original vision: what can a tablet do that a laptop or a phone can’t? Right now, it’s a terrible Mac, and it’s only half as good a tablet as it could be. If you’re never going to add Terminal or let people build apps on the iPad, and it’s always going to be locked down, it’s time to turn it into an incredible tablet, and stop bolting on Mac features that it wasn’t designed for. (It’s Apple’s first Toaster Fridge, John, and that’s a reference.)
10. Buy Sketch. I don’t know what you should do with Sketch, but it’s really weird that you own Pixelmator and Final Cut Pro, but not a design tool. I think there’s a lot of space left to innovate in design tools, and Apple could obviously benefit from owning the tool that they use for UI design. (Unless everybody at Apple still uses Keynote? In which case, congrats.) I’d love it if you could get Sketch on the iPad too. Let me draw my designs with an Apple Pencil. Turn my hideous drawings into high-fidelity UI, if you please.
11. Put a nano-texture display option on the iPhone. 
12. Make a fitness band that looks like the Livestrong armbands. Let it track your workouts and steps. Multiple vibrant colours. Stretchable rubber. $100. (Send me a cheque for this idea John. It’ll sell like hotcakes and it’s so obvious I can’t believe you haven’t done it.)
13. Reboot the iPod Classic. Load up your own music or stream from Apple Music. Wifi, or wifi and cellular. Monochrome screen, no touch. Up to 256gb of storage is probably enough, since streaming can help reduce storage needs. Add in podcasts, and add the audio features Marco Arment popularized with Overcast to the app to make it the killer feature of this thing. This would probably be a dud, but I’m not a sentimental person, and I’d punch a penguin to get a functional Click Wheel back in my house. Plus, it’s almost retro enough to be cool with young people again.
14. A foldable iPad. No outer screen. Just an iPad.
15. Throw out the Music app on the Mac. Entirely discard it. Now build it again, but make it suck less. (Things to check: can you type more than one character into the search bar without breaking the app? Will audio output work every time you hit play, and not just some of the time? Do network connection interruptions mute audio playback entirely? Does music you add from Apple Music rot over time, with metadata seemingly fracturing and rotting under your fingers? I could go on. Things to add: let me easily browse albums. Let me view albums in a playlist, not just songs. When I view by artist, I want to see their albums in my library by release year, from oldest to newest, in a grid. I don’t want to see all the songs listed out.)
16. Bring third-party app stores to iPhone. If your app store is so fantastic, let it compete.
17. Let me install apps directly on my phone, like I can on a Mac. (If your app store is is so fantastic, let it compete. Is that an echo?)
18. Make a cheese grater.

Here we go again. The webkit team writes about new iPhone Duo-specific features in Safari:

In Safari 27.1, web content does not currently extend to fill the space behind these controls. Just like on other platforms, Safari looks at the web page and extends its background color to fill the space.

We would like to give web designers and developers the ability to design and use that space in more creative ways. Perhaps you want to extend your header background across the full width of the display, for example. It might seem like there’s just one obvious way to make this possible, but really there are many possibilities.

Apple has done Safari users dirty for a while (see Liquid Glass, their terrible tab designs, etc). I use Safari day in and day out every day, and I do not love it anywhere. It’s not as bad of an app as Music on the Mac (which breaks my heart every day), but Safari hasn’t had a great UI for a couple years.

But this drives me nuts. Their image example of how bad Safari looks on the outer screen of a Duo is insane to me. I don’t know how they didn’t think to improve this in the many months before the Duo launched. (Maybe the Safari team was kept in the dark on the Duo. Who knows?)

It seems obvious to me that the answer is to use environment controls to solve this problem, but the Webkit people say this:

We could use the HTML viewport meta tag with viewport-fit="cover" to extend the webpage into that space, hoping developers also use the appropriate environment variables to scoot important content away from system controls. But as we research how today’s sites are built, we see a lot of projects that fail to inset all four edges correctly. 

A lot of projects fail to inset all four edges correctly because nobody has had a reason to before! This is like Apple saying, before the Duo released, that third-party iOS developers have shown no interest in making folding phone apps because they’ve never made them before. If you don’t give people a reason to use a tool, they won’t invest the effort. Web development is filled with enough landmines and gotchas as it is.

Also, the viewport sizes the Webkit shares for the Duo are very odd. Only 382 points wide in some cases! I haven’t seen a viewport that small since the last iPhone mini. If this thing takes off, which it appears to be, I’m going to end up needing one of these just for testing. (That’s an expensive test device. If your organization needs outside design help, hire me.) It’s such an unusual size that I imagine it’s going to be hard to simulate how Safari feels to use in the browser inspector. 

Jen Simmons is in charge of this, and you can share your thoughts on this with her on Bluesky or Mastodon

Twenty-five years ago, Apple released the iPod. Jason Snell has done the best writing on the topic, and covered the iPod for Macworld from its launch event to its eventual demise. He reflects on the iPod’s launch at Six Colors:

There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true ​“iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.

That’s a shame, in a way, because I think people who didn’t live through this era don’t understand just what a hit the iPod was. It completely changed Apple’s fortunes, rehabbed its brand identity, gave people reasons to go into Apple’s relatively new retail stores for the first time, and taught Apple lessons that it needed to learn before it could build a smartphone. (The iPhone’s hardware was largely built by the iPod team, even if the software came from the Mac.

The iPod really hit the peak of its popularity when I was in high school. I can confirm that they were their own sort of Cool Currency. Every cool kid had one, or wanted one. If you had one, the music on them became a part of your personality. People wanted to scroll through your iPod and see what was on there. The music on your iPod was a second, deeper level of Cool Currency: were you into whatever was sick at the moment, or were you out?

It was normal to give one earbud to a friend and sit in the hallways during lunch, listening to each other’s music. That was how a lot of us discovered new music. Death Cab for Cutie and Arcade Fire spread through the iPods in my high school like viruses.

Those listening sessions were how I discovered music that was formative to my taste now. A friend introduced me to Slipknot with his iPod (it was ​“People = Sh”, as it’s known in search engines, and it amazed my little teenage mind and upset my parents). My guitar teacher introduced me to Metallica around the same time, and both of those bands changed the trajectory of my life in unexpected ways. 

Another friend introduced me to Nine Inch Nails (“The Hand That Feeds”), which ignited a love for industrial rock and metal, then a love for techno. Exposure to Trent Reznor would later lead me to David Fincher (see ​“Closer” appearing in Seven), which would help turn me into a lover of movies. Reznor also led me, like so many others, to Johnny Cash (you know the song — a cover so wildly powerful that Reznor has said the song is no longer his, but Johnny’s).

The iPod was how a bunch of kids in youth group snuck Jay‑Z and Eminem into their homes. No jewel cases necessary. It was my trojan house to counterculture. I mean, we torrented everything. Of course we did! It was high school in the early 2000s; we ripped off every record label under the sun. We didn’t think of it as stealing. Nobody even thought of it as piracy. To us, it was the same as burning each other discs, which we did all the time before the iPod came along. This was just more convenient, and a little more private. Besides, there was no iTunes Store at the time. Apple Music didn’t exist. How were a bunch of thirteen-year-olds supposed to afford a CD collection?

Our attitude was that, if you could never buy it in the first place, it wasn’t stealing. It was a license to enter the culture for ourselves and to make something ours, without having to ask for permission. Honestly, our blasé attitude towards piracy reminds me a lot about the ethical issues surrounding LLMs today. Even then, the world wasn’t prepared for how radically technology would challenge the law.

The iPod was also an introduction to the Mac — not just for the market, but for me.

For a lot of people, the iPod was what persuaded them to try out that other thing Apple makes — the iMac. As Jason points out, the iPod changed Apple’s fortunes forever. It had a tremendous ripple effect.

I know a couple people who started buying Macs after the iPod came out. One was my high school drama teacher, who put a bondi blue iMac in one of his classrooms. 

It was my first experience with a Mac. I just happened to sit at it one day to do some word processing. It wasn’t special. But it just made sense to me. Computers hadn’t made sense to me before, and yet, it felt like I intuitively knew how to use this one. Apple says this stuff a lot in their marketing, and I know it’s not true for many people, but for me, it seriously worked out.

I loved it so much I spent years convincing my parents to buy me a Mac. I talked about it so much they bought me my university laptop when I was in the twelfth grade, just to shut me up. I wore the plastic in that white MacBook down to the… well, down to whatever is beneath the plastic.

I didn’t live near an Apple Store. I don’t know how I would have experienced a Mac if it weren’t for that drama teacher in high school. And without the Mac, I would never have ​“discovered” design. I wouldn’t have my job.

I can directly trace or relate the iPod to my career, my passions for music and film, and much of the music I still love and enjoy today.

Long live the iPod.

(Jason Snell also wrote twenty-five things you might not know about the iPod for Tom’s Guide, which is also an excellent read.)

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the iPod, Apple recreated the entire device and its UI as the 404 page for Apple Music. (You will need to copy and paste that link into your web browser if you’re on an iPhone or iPad; it will open the Apple Music app otherwise.) 

The iPod recreation is extremely feature complete: it’s got music, artists, playlists, and yes, the games, all lovingly rendered on a monochrome display inside your browser window. And yes, the click wheel works with your grubby little thumbs the same way it did twenty-five years ago.

I’m particularly impressed with the music selections. This iPod comes virtually loaded with a selection of iPod-era classics. It’s a lot of pop punk and nü metal, among other things, including a host of Green Day, No Doubt, and even P.O.D.‘s ​“Youth of a Nation” (a song I hadn’t heard since I owned an iPod, if I’m being honest).

(Via Lex Friedman.)

Of course there is only one guy who maintains PHP packages. His name is Ondřej Surý. He saved the internet this week. The Atlantic interviewed him (it’s a great interview; that’s a gift link). Surý is the absolute epitome of XKCD 2347.

This whole PHP debacle was a real mess this morning. I have spent several hours since debating whether or not I should start building client sites on headless CMS solutions like Sanity going forward. No pun intended, but lower-case sanity has prevailed, and I came to the very obvious conclusion that whatever fits my clients’ needs best is what I should suggest. (That will never be WordPress, but there are plenty of great PHP-driven CMS options out there.)

Related: The people holding up the internet.

If you need to use a printer (sigh), and you use a Mac, you might be surprised to learn that you will need to pay attention to printer drivers for the first time since you bought a Mac thanks to macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Most (if not all) of the printer drivers Canon, Brother, HP, et al supplied to Apple were for Intel processors. Intel is gone and Rosetta, Apple’s translation software for running Intel apps on its own chips, is going the way of the dodo bird too. So until the afore-mentioned printer manufacturers update their printer drivers (and they don’t seem to be in a hurry), no printing for you. 

Thankfully, the wonderful world of open source software has already solved this issue. Apple Silicon Printer Drivers, a free, easy-to-install download from developer Can Çetin, makes this problem go away entirely. I can confirm this works for my Pixma. 

Just sharing it in case anybody else has problems.

Zeitgeist is a new-to-me journalling app from Marcel Wichmann, whose website I’m a big fan of. This looks like the kind of journalling I’d be interested in: short posts, almost like tweets, along with some data that’s automatically collected as you go about your day. I’ve used Day One sporadically for fifteen years, and this is close to how I use that app now.

Angine de Poitrine became one of my favourite rock groups after their viral YouTube performance earlier this year. Now Bill Ward has immortalized them in a LEGO set. This is insanely cool.

One of the co-founders of Sketch is building a new design tool called Elyx. I’m very interested in trying the beta. They claim it’s a design tool made for the AI era. We’ll see. It’s certainly provocative.

I’ve been using Figma for six or seven years now, and I used Sketch before that for many years (probably from 2012 on). I haven’t needed the collaborative features of Figma recently, and thought I’d give Sketch a try while working on my portfolio, and I can’t go back. Figma is shockingly faster (and I have a tricked-out M4 Max MacBook Pro, so the problem isn’t my machine).

The thing is, I have a love/​hate relationship with Figma. I think the past few years, with its botched Adobe merger and eagerness to implement AI features, have been a real mess. It’s left a bad taste in my mouth. I want to work with tools that are made with people who have taste, and anybody who wants to sell out to Adobe is probably not somebody I’m aligned with at that level.

So I’m very eager to try Elyx and see what that’s all about.

It was an honour to guest on Episode 181 of The Omni Show to share how I use OmniFocus, how to bring your whole self to your work, and what I’m worried we’re all going to lose if we rely on AI instead of our own ingenuity. I’ve been using OmniFocus for 15 years (since the release of OmniFocus 2), and it is always so much fun to geek out about this tool.

As an aside, my setup hasn’t changed that much since I wrote about how I use custom perspectives in 2017. I don’t use those perspectives anymore, because new additions like the Planned dates have changed how I use the app for the better. (I do have a neat Flagged perspective that I use that replaced the default Flagged perspective for me, but that’s probably for another post.)

OmniFocus has been with me every step of the way through my very unorthodox career. I like tools that have no limits. OmniFocus is that tool for task management.

Once in a while, Seth Godin spits out a banger. He wrote a post about starting an AI business which functions as an excellent resource for starting a totally normal, not-AI business. 

There isn’t much I could quote here without just quoting the whole thing, but he breaks down what people pay for (status, affiliation, freedom from fear), and what businesses pay for (avoid blame, claim credit, reduce uncertainty). He is spot on in his analysis.

I want to send this to every friend of mine who has started or is starting their own business.

What a gut punch of an essay (originally published in 1982 in the Christian Century):

For when all is said and done, are we Jews not being judged guilty of lack of foresight, of gullibility, of inertia, of cowardice, of irresponsibility, of a defeatism by which guilt is transferred to an army of anonymous bystanders who may include the questioner? The surviving victims are put into the grotesque situation of having to explain what others did to them, and of meeting with incomprehension should they refuse, or declare themselves unable, to answer. The surviving perpetrators are not approached; one would not expect a true answer from them. The situation is somehow reminiscent of the law enacted immediately after the Crystal Night requiring the Jews to pay for the damage done to their businesses and homes.

And yet, the victim-survivor is the only reliable ​“expert” and eyewitness to whom to turn and, by the very fact of having survived, is also morally obligated to provide information. So why should we be coy about answering a few straight questions? Therefore, I feel I must overcome my resistance and resentment, must dismiss the feeling of engaging in an unwilling exercise in apologetics, and try earnestly, if not to supply straight and simple answers, at least to clarify and line up some of the evasive arguments that I have harbored for a long time, and to articulate them as well as I can.

Recommendations for typesetting on the web, from Donnie D’Amato. These are some really great tips. 

One thing I wholeheartedly endorse, but have never voiced for some reason: headings should be the only type on your site that fluidly change with clamp() (or similar CSS). While there are exceptions, I think body sizes should probably be static across multiple media queries. 

The entire site is filled with recommendations and insights that are all that good.

The website also includes a fun type playground, which I’m always a sucker for.

Thanks Cyd, because I also nearly missed this. Looks very promising!

While I’m talking about Lea Verou, she responded to a debate about user-selectable themes on websites. I don’t remember how this debate started, but my friend Declan had a genuinely innovative way to handle it. Despite that, I just couldn’t see a reason to make the light/​dark theme a user-selectable toggle at all.

I tucked this thought away and decided to blog about it at some point, and then Lea beat me to it. I agree with her take. I don’t think your web interface should have a theme selector.

First, stats that were passed around on social media last month indicate most people don’t use these settings (we’re talking less than 1%. I find this number hard to believe, but let’s pretend it’s accurate for the sake of this conversation). Second, if they have made a choice on this, they’re likely to have made it at the operating system level, and web developers have access to this choice via media queries should they need them.

So the user already picked if they want light or dark. What makes us think our sites are so special that the reader might want to change their minds just in our case?

On top of that, design is making choices. It’s great if your site can support light and dark mode. If it doesn’t, that is also a choice. But asking the end user to choose between them defers responsibility from you as the designer, and places it on the end user.

If you make something, even if that thing is a personal site, you are the arbiter of taste for that thing. Don’t defer your best judgement to others.