2026-03-19 22:30:03
What a funny coincidence that celebrations of Apple’s 50th anniversary would hit the same month that the company introduced the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop that has the potential to take the Mac to new heights.
The facts that Apple was founded in 1976 and the MacBook Neo exists in 2026 shouldn’t have anything in common but that they both involve a corporation called Apple. But that’s not right: Apple’s product philosophy is more continuous than you might imagine, and that string that starts with the Apple I ends, 50 years later, in a colorful new MacBook Neo.
Apple was born in a chaotic world. Dozens of personal computer companies were building early devices, and each of them was its own island with its own software running on custom hardware. New chips and new hardware innovations like floppy disk drives (did you know that the earliest Apple computers could only read data from audio cassettes?!) meant that as a computer company, you evolved rapidly or you died.
Most of them died, of course. But Apple didn’t, in part because it was always adopting the next big thing in order to survive. It was a mindset that I always connected to Steve Jobs, a man with absolutely zero sentimentality. Apple has always been a company that knows that it needs to move forward rapidly to survive.
This has been a factor that has remained in the corporate culture, to varying degrees of strength, for 50 years. It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about taking care of its customers—it’s managed three chip transitions and one operating system transition on the Mac while providing solid support over a transitional period.
One reason this culture got reinforced is that Apple has never been the dominant ecosystem player in any market it’s competed in. (The iPod was dominant, but not really much of an ecosystem.) When you’re dominant, like PCs driven by Microsoft’s DOS and Windows operating systems, the name of the game is compatibility. Once you’ve got the bulk of the market, it’s all about consolidation.
2026-03-19 04:51:25
How far off we are from full self-driving cars, the software systems we wish would never update, the app launchers we use on our Macs, and the ATProtocol moment.
2026-03-19 04:46:24
Technology professional Chris Devers1 has taken a close look at Photos’s concert feature, where it tries to tag pictures you take at musical events with the name of the show. Unfortunately, it’s a feature that’s rife with inaccuracies. Here’s just one class of example:
Apple’s software struggles with understanding who the headline act is in a multiple-band lineup.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that the listings for these shows are a metadata mess, with the names listed in seemingly any order: the headliner might be at the top of a sign, at the bottom of a poster, or in a big font on the middle of a web page.
In any case, mixing up an opener for the headliner is a common mismatch in Apple Photos concert event tagging.
For the first example, in what will become a theme, getting the tagging right for Pixies concerts seems to be a chronic problem in my Photos library. In this case, Franz Ferdinand opened for them, but FF gets top billing according to Apple Photos.
Chris has the receipts, including plenty of pictures with incorrect captions. The problem isn’t limited to confusing headliners and openers: music festivals are incorrectly labelled as a single artist, concerts are confused with shows at nearby locations or even venues with multiple rooms, and photos taken on the same date are assumed to all be at the same event, even when they’re not.
I confess this is a feature I rarely think about because I don’t go to that many live concerts. Searching my Photos library (which you can do specifically for “concerts” to see the images it’s tagged) did find a correctly identified Guster concert from June 2023—though it doesn’t mention that they were playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—but the vast majority were wrong, including several pictures of the Relay 10 celebration in London in July 2024, which were identified as a “Liang Lawrence Concert.” (That concert appears to have taken place the same night at a nearby venue).
All of this certainly feels like a machine learning feature just making its best guesses based on the information available with no way to determine whether something is true or not, an all-too-common occurrence. Ultimately it’s just not doing it well enough to be—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—reliable or useful. To my mind, though, the real failing—as Chris points out—is that Apple doesn’t provide any way for you to fix this. You can’t manually re-tag or even simply remove the incorrect tag. That feels like a real oversight and turns this feature from half-baked to totally uncooked.
2026-03-19 04:27:41
AppleVis released its fourth annual Vision Accessibility Report Card, a survey of visually impaired Apple users inspired by the Six Colors Report Card:
This year saw our highest level of survey participation to-date, as well as our highest-ever level of engagement thus far with the low vision-specific questions.
Our survey results indicate that across almost all categories, satisfaction with Apple’s accessibility offerings for blind, deafblind, and low vision users decreased when compared to 2024.
For VoiceOver and Braille users, dissatisfaction with software quality and the presence of long-standing accessibility bugs were overarching themes throughout participant comments. For low vision users, participant comments show that Apple’s 2025 liquid glass user interface redesign had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.
Overall, AppleVis readers gave Apple a B (3.7 out of 5). That score is down slightly from 2024’s 3.9. The survey asked readers’ opinions of VoiceOver, Braille and low-vision broken out by platform, along with scores for their overall impression of new accessibility features. Respondents also rated user experience with each OS platform and accessibility category.
iOS and iPadOS scored highest in most categories, including VoiceOver features, Braille features and low-vision features, with a 4.2 average for each. iOS and iPadOS user experience also netted 4.2 ratings.
AppleVis users believe Apple continues to struggle when it comes to fixing bugs in VoiceOver and Braille, giving the company a C – a 3.0 rating – in this category, which covers all platforms. Also at the bottom of the ratings were macOS VoiceOver user experience, with a 3.1, and three tvOS categories, which scored between 3.2 and 3.5. Low-vision features in tvOS took the greatest ratings tumble, from 2024, slipping from 4.1 to 3.2.
As usual for this survey, the comments section features a lot of strong opinions.
2026-03-18 22:00:00
Dan has complaints about Spotlight, Lex has complaints about Tim Cook and Moltz has complaints about those damn kids.
2026-03-18 00:40:01
Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, in a post reviewing the MacBook Neo, makes this observation about how Apple got the ARM transition right and why Microsoft got it wrong:
Apple’s software secret was this constant upgrading of the OS and the ecosystem (from drivers up). Microsoft’s secret was “run everything forever”. As is almost always the case in business and product development, your greatest strength (in any of the 4 Ps) becomes your greatest weakness. The pull and push of forever compatibility was not just “Windows DNA” but it was the soul of what made Windows successful and was sacred. But it was obvious then and now that it was the part that needed to change.
This is absolutely right. It’s not that Microsoft didn’t know where it needed to go with Windows and PC designs—it absolutely did. For years, you could watch what it was doing and see it trying to push things forward—only to be dragged backward by its entire business being built on stability, legacy, and compatibility. The thing that made Windows so sticky also made it almost impossible to effect real change.
Apple, on the other hand, has never shied away from pushing compatibility changes and breaking old software and forcing users to new OS versions. That can be annoying, for sure, but it’s also gotten the Mac to where it is today, with Apple silicon in general and a product like the MacBook Neo in particular.
