2026-04-11 10:13:14
A collection of 16 retro-inspired wallpapers for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
Introducing Sound.wav, my latest wallpaper collection for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
I’ve been wanting to create a series of wallpapers inspired by retro tones and patterns, and Sound.wav is the first release in that new direction.
Sound.wav
CA$4.99
A new collection of retro-inspired wallpapers. The collection includes eight sets to choose from (Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, Sky Blue, Silver, and Yellow), with each pattern available in both light and dark colour-matched variations. The collection includes wallpapers for the Mac (6016×3900), iPad (2732×2732), and iPhone (1320×2868).
Dynamic .heic wallpapers are also available that change when switching Light to Dark mode on the Mac.
Thank you for your support.
A new collection of retro-inspired wallpapers. The collection includes eight sets to choose from: Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, Sky Blue, Silver, and Yellow), with each pattern available in both light and dark colour-matched variations.
Dynamic .heic wallpapers are also available that change when switching Light to Dark mode on the Mac.
Read more about my approach to making wallpapers available for purchase over at The WinRAR Approach.
You can also support the me/the site through tips. Every bit is truly appreciated!
Once purchased, a download link will be emailed to you to download the .zip file (21.4 MB) containing all 16 versions for Mac (6016 × 3900), iPad (2732 × 2732), and iPhone (1320 × 2868).
The digital download link will expire 24 hours after the first download. If your link expires and you need to redownload the files, please send me an email with your order number and I can send along a new link for you.
The collection includes eight sets to choose from, with each pattern available in both light and dark color-matched variations. That also allowed me to create dynamic Mac wallpapers that automatically shift when you switch between Light and Dark Mode.
This first wave, pun not intended, features colours inspired by the iMac, including Blue, Green, Orange, Purple, Red, Silver, and Yellow. All of these wallpapers are available in sizes that perfectly fit your Mac iPad and iPhone. Enjoy!
I’m a one-person operation, working in healthcare by day & running this site as a passion project in my off time.
If you enjoy my work (the articles, the wallpapers, my general demeanour… anything really), consider leaving a tip & supporting the site. Your support is incredibly appreciated & goes a long way to keep this site and the works I produce ad-free & free of charge.
☕️ Tips ☕️ Tips
2026-04-09 04:32:37
As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on the role it’s played in my life over the years.
Apple turned 50 on April 01, 2026. Founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it has grown from a scrappy, outmatched upstart into one of the most valuable and recognizable brands in the world.
But that was not always a given. Apple nearly went bankrupt in the late ’90s, and had it not been for a $150 million investment from, of all companies, Microsoft, the Apple we know today might never have existed.
My first visit to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop in 2010.
Wherever your journey with Apple products began, whether with the Apple I in 1976, the Macintosh in 1984, the iPod in the 2000s, or the first time you picked up an iPhone, few would argue that there has always been something captivating about using Apple’s technology. And so, on the occasion of Apple’s 50th anniversary, it felt like as good a time as any to reminisce and reflect on my own journey with Apple, and the many ways it has shaped my life along the way.
My journey with Apple began with a Blue Dalmatian iMac G3 in my junior high shop class. Whether my teacher saw me as a hopeless case destined never to master the tools in that room, or simply noticed how completely I had fallen for that Mac, I will never know. What I do know is that I spent hours in front of it, filming little projects, tinkering with audio, and making things for the joy of making them. Long before I understood why, it was the first time I experienced the ability to create on a computer rather than be told to use one.
iPod shuffle.
That early infatuation eventually turned into my first Apple purchase: the third-generation iPod I bought at the start of high school. With a 90-minute bus ride to and from school each day, I spent countless hours slumped against the window, half-asleep, listening to whatever angsty teenage music felt like it understood my life best. I still remember the flutter in my chest when I got to share an earbud with my crush and the times we spent at lunch listening to music together. And I remember spending far too many hours in iTunes building playlists, all legally obtained, of course, for studying, for sleeping, for trying to woo said crush, and inevitably for crying when our three-week relationship came to an end.
My first Mac: the incomparable 12-inch PowerBook G4. Equipped with a 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 512MB of DDR RAM, an 80GB 5400-rpm hard drive, a DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive, and a 1024 × 768 display.
As much as the iPod became part of my daily life, it also dragged me further into Apple’s ecosystem, and eventually led to my first Mac, the 12-inch PowerBook G4. I have owned an “I’d rather not say” amount of Macs since then, but the 12-inch G4 remains one of my favourite and most memorable computers to this day. At the time, it felt unlike almost anything else on the market. It ran a beautiful operating system, looked stunning, and somehow managed to feel both impossibly compact and remarkably capable.
Excitedly installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009.
Most importantly, it scratched that creative itch I always had. On the Mac, I effortlessly burned hundreds of mix CDs for my iPod-less friends, edited photos in iPhoto, spent way too many hours using CandyBar to customize my system icons, journaled, and designed in Photoshop. The PowerBook was always at the ready to help me take the ideas bouncing around in my head and turn them into something real.
My MacBook on the morning I prepared to defend my master’s thesis.
Throughout university, the Mac and iPod remained a formidable duo as I slogged through course after course over half a decade to earn my degree. At the time, I was using a 15-inch MacBook Pro alongside a first-generation iPod nano. Together, they carried me through every paper and presentation. The Mac was where the work got done, while the iPod played the soundtrack that helped me stay awake during all-nighters, get fired up before exams, and enjoy the guilty pleasure of occasionally listening back to some of those angsty songs from my teenage years.
Capturing mundane moments became so much easier following the launch of the iPhone. I have thousands of photos capturing subtle details about my life over the past two decades that I never would have captured otherwise.
Perhaps the most significant change the iPhone brought to my life when the iPhone 3G arrived in Canada in 2008 was giving me a convenient way to capture memories. By today’s standards, early iPhone photos were nothing special. The original iPhone camera was, to put it kindly, pretty rough. But that was never really the point. Their value to me was not in how sharp they were or how impressive they looked. It was in what they captured. The iPhone made it easy to start preserving the smaller moments too: my study setup, little moments that caught my attention, and the ordinary details of my life that would otherwise have slipped away.
But beyond any single product, one of the things I came to appreciate most about Apple over the years was the creative world that seemed to exist around its platforms. The apps made for the Mac were not only useful, they were beautiful too. There was a quiet care to the experience, a level of craftsmanship that seemed to extend into nearly every detail. And I think that rubs off on a person. Because when you are surrounded by beautiful, elegant, thoughtful designs, I like to think you get inspired and start to think about the things you create a little differently too.
Essentially locked inside for months during the COVID-19 pandemic gave me an allowance of time to create in a way I've never had access to before.
In a lot of ways, all of that had been building toward something. The COVID pandemic was perhaps the first time that I truly had a truly unlimited space to create in. In the years leading up to it, life always felt like it was moving week to week. I was focused on getting my licensing hours, managing clients at the clinic, preparing to get married, moving, and handling all the usual adult responsibilities that gradually fill every spare corner of life. But when COVID hit, so much of that momentum suddenly stopped. Locked inside for months on end, I found myself with a once-in-a-lifetime abundance of time, and out of that quiet stretch came BasicAppleGuy.
I finally had the time and focus to bring together my love of writing, my passion for design, and my admiration for all things Apple into a persona, a social media presence, and a website that is now entering its seventh year. It has been a privilege to carve out a space where the three things I care most about can work in harmony together. Maybe that is part of why this all sounds so affectionate in retrospect.
Now, I know this reads like I’m a big homer for Apple. Fair enough. I would fail trying to defend it. They are, after all, a company that had an S-tier charismatic CEO, an incredible design team, and a best-in-class marketing machine, all working together to build one of the most compelling brands in the world and, apparently, turn me into a sucker for their products. And yet, even with all of that being true, some of the most meaningful moments of the past couple of decades have still happened with those products by my side.
Creating on the Mac.
At the end of the day, it was never really just about the devices themselves. It was about what they made possible. The things I got to create, the moments I was able to capture, and the parts of myself I slowly came to understand along the way. If Apple’s first fifty years were spent building hardware and software, then my own story has always been about what I was able to build with them.
2026-04-02 01:50:09
Introducing the Little Finder Guy Blind Box from Apple.
It would be an understatement to say that, over the past several weeks, I’ve become a little obsessed with Lil Finder Guy. The tiny mascot launched onto the scene out of nowhere when Apple introduced the MacBook Neo in March, and Apple has since started to embrace its popularity, releasing ad after ad on TikTok featuring the adorable little character.
Apple Homepage mockup.
Since Lil Finder Guy first debuted, pockets of social media have taken to bringing the creature to life, including my own effort with Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels to create a 3D-printable model so anyone can make their own little Finder Guy.
Introducing the Little Finder Guy Blind Box - Series 1
Given that today is April Fools’ Day, I figured I’d lean into the moment Lil Finder Guy seems to be having and create a mock product page imagining Apple had started selling blind boxes featuring randomly assorted Lil Finder Guy figures.
Some of the Lil Finder figures Apple has featured on it’s TikTok account.
For those unfamiliar, blind boxes are sealed collectible packages where you do not know which specific figure or item is inside until you open them. They became hugely popular across East Asia, including in countries like Japan, which I visited over the winter, although their popularity is broadening to other markets as well. Each blind box looks identical on the outside, but inside is one figure from a larger series, with some variants produced in rarer quantities than others.
Sadly, no such product exists (yet... right Apple?!?). It was all a little April Fools' Day joke. But as a small consolation, there are some real Lil Fin stickers available for purchase…
Lil Fin
from CA$5.00
Introducing Lil Fin stickers, an adorable little mascot ready to brighten just about anywhere you choose to place it. Each sticker is made from thick, durable, die-cut vinyl that is dishwasher safe. Lil Fin stickers are available in four versions:
Flat Lil Fin:
Small: 1.16″ × 1.5″
Regular: 1.72″ × 2.25″
3D Lil Fin:
Small: 1.29″ × 1.75″
Regular: 1.65″ × 2.25″
2026-03-29 01:37:29
A collection of monochrome Apple “MAC” Wallpapers.
As an Apple has been apt to do for the past several years, anytime it releases a new product, it tends to feature a wallpaper on that device that has the product name or the product suffix hidden within the design.
In Apple’s current lineup, the iPad Air, iPhone Air, and MacBook Air all have wallpapers that spell “AIR.” The iPad Pro, iPhone 17 Pro, and MacBook Pro all say “PRO.” The iPad mini features a cursive “mini,” the Studio Display uses cylindrical text to spell out “STUDIO,” and the current iMac has color-matched “iMac” wallpapers, though it previously used wallpapers built around different snippets of the word “hello.”
Examples of Apple products in recent years with the product name incorporated into the wallpaper.
Apple clearly loves doing this, and with the introduction of the new MacBook Neo, it has once again released colour-matched wallpapers that subtly hide the word “MAC.” But I didn't care for the colours, and I wanted something that felt a bit more muted. So what I did was take the wallpapers, bring them into Pixelmator Pro, and experiment with the full range of sliders to create a set of 14 “MAC” wallpapers, inspired by the colours Apple uses across the seven iMac finishes. They don’t carry over the duotone gradients of the originals, but I think they have a charm of their own.
They're available in a light mode and a dark mode version. And I've also created some dynamic files (hosted on Google Drive due to file size) that should change as you switch from light to dark mode. Enjoy!
Yellow: Light | Dark | Dynamic
Orange: Light | Dark | Dynamic
2026-03-27 11:42:31
Apple ended the fraught and fumbled era of the Mac Pro on March 26, 2026.
On Thursday, March 26, 2026, Apple officially brought the Mac Pro era to a close. It marks the end of a product line that was often fumbled throughout its existence and struggled to find firm footing within Apple’s ecosystem. In the end, the Mac Pro belonged to a different era, one that existed before Apple silicon reshaped the Mac lineup.
In information provided to 9to5Mac on March 26, Apple shared that “the Mac Pro is being discontinued...” and that Apple has “has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.”
In late 2024, I bought a 2013 Mac Pro. It was a computer I could never have afforded or justified when it was first released, but it made for a lovely addition to my modest Mac collection.
But the writing had been on the wall for a very, very long time. At first I was optimistic when Apple announced the redesigned Mac Pro in 2019. It replaced the infamous 2013 “trash can” Mac Pro and, at the time, felt like an attempt to atone for the sins of the previous generation. This new Mac delivered massive expandability, powerful server-grade processors, and a thermal architecture built to handle the most demanding workloads. But less than a year later, Apple introduced Apple silicon, which overnight delivered the kind of performance and architectural structure that rendered that level of cooling unnecessary and expandability largely irrelevant.
Apple also released the 2019/2023 Mac Pro in a server rack mounted config.
Since then, the Mac Pro has struggled to justify its existence. It remained Apple’s most expensive Mac, yet as Apple silicon advanced, other Macs in the lineup began outcompeting the Mac Pro’s x86 Intel architecture. With the introduction of the Mac Studio in 2022, Apple demonstrated it could exceed that level of performance in a package a fraction of the size (1/14th) and weight (1/6th) of the Mac Pro.
Mac Pro in Toronto, Canada in June, 2023
There may have been a brief glimmer of hope for the Mac Pro in 2023, when Apple transitioned it to Apple silicon with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra. But the move ultimately stripped away one of its defining advantages: upgradable graphics. At the same time, its expansive cooling system became vastly over engineered for what the machine actually demanded. And when the M4 Pro Mac mini launched in late 2024, outperforming the Mac Pro by 39 percent in single-core and 6 percent in multi-core performance while costing one-fifth as much and being 1/60th the size, its fate was sealed.
By 2023, when the Mac Pro was updated to Apple silicon, its interior had become a vast, empty expanse.
So, on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday afternoon, Apple quietly scrubbed all mention of the Mac Pro from its website, bringing a confusing and somewhat melancholy chapter for the product to a close.
Although I’m not surprised at all, the loss of the Mac Pro is still bittersweet. In my view, the Mac Pro has always been home to some of Apple’s most beautiful industrial design. It was the place where Apple could flex both its design ambition and raw power without restraint. But the form-over-function misstep of the 2013 trash can Mac Pro, followed by a poorly timed transition to Apple Silicon, ultimately crippled the Mac Pro’s appeal in what was already an exceptionally niche market. Like I wrote back in 2022:
“In the past decade, Apple has been guilty of both not doing enough to replace an aging computer and, second, of outclassing its top-of-the-line hardware at a fraction of the cost only a few years after the 3rd generation Mac Pro was announced. From one extreme to the other, it's been hard to trust what was going on with the Mac Pro.”
Apple selling a set of optional Mac Pro wheels for $699 will never stop being funny.
It’s history is flawed, but I look back fondly at the machine and sometimes I like to kid myself into thinking I was ever someone who truly needed something like a Mac Pro. And I never missed a chance, when visiting a larger city (my tiny mall Apple Store never carrier the Mac Pro), to admire and tinker with the one on display. Even at its most impractical, there was always something undeniably special about it.
2026-03-13 08:51:42
Apple turns 50 on April 01, 2026.
On Wednesday, April 1, 2026, Apple turns 50. The company that began in an unassuming garage in Palo Alto has grown into one of the largest, most valuable, and most recognizable icons in history.
And on March 12, 2026, Tim Cook published this letter on the website about Apple’s upcoming anniversary:
Fifty years ago in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief — radical at the time — changed everything.
April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day — the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud, and Apple TV — we’ve spent five decades rethinking what’s possible and putting powerful tools into people’s hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us — that the world is moved forward by people who think different.
That’s because progress always begins with someone — an inventor or scientist, a student or storyteller — who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. But it has never belonged to us alone.
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.
So here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
Here’s to you.
Apple’s newsroom release also states that “In the coming weeks, Apple and its global community will celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary, recognizing the creativity, innovation, and impact that people around the world have made possible with Apple technology.” What exactly that means remains to be seen, but it seems we may be in for a couple of weeks of reminiscing about Apple and the community that has grown around it over the decades.
But Tim’s post and the newsroom article also featured this crayon-like sketch of a six-colour Apple logo, and I figured I might as well try turning it into a wallpaper for everyone’s devices. You can download it for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad, available on both a white (technically #F5F5F7) and black background. Enjoy!
