2026-03-05 00:33:02
Apple's MacBook Mini is such an awesome computer. No, it's not the most powerful machine Apple makes, but it is very affordable, which makes it appeal to at least two separate groups. The first group is people who would like a desktop Mac, but would not like to spend typical Mac prices. Because it's so inexpensive, at least in the starting configurations, it also is very compelling as a secondary computer for a lot of people who already have a higher-end Mac or a Mac laptop.
Today, Apple announced the MacBook Neo, although I would suggest the MacBook Mini would be an even better name because I feel like this computer is doing the same exact thing as the Mac Mini. At the same $599 starting price, this laptop achieves both appeals that the Mac Mini has as well. For those who are price conscious, it gives you a brand new, high-quality MacBook at basically half the price of the MacBook Air. I really think it's worth sitting on that for a second. Apple didn't just make this a little less expensive than the MacBook Air, they made it in a completely different price category and a price category that Apple hasn't been in for decades.
But I think it will also appeal to people who own higher-end Macs already. I'm including myself in that camp. I have a 14-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro, and this thing is a beast. It tears through 4K video editing and literally any task I can give it. It's an awesome machine, but it is a little chunky, especially when I travel. I'm often traveling for work, which means I need to bring my work laptop and my personal laptop. And let me tell you, carrying two 14-inch MacBook Pros in your backpack is weight you definitely notice. I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I think I am going to pick up one of these to use as my travel computer and maybe some other things that I want to do with it around the house.
And they did this in a computer that is a far cry from the lazy M1 MacBook Air component swap that some people were expecting from them. And let me reiterate, this thing is half the cost of the MacBook Air…there are compromises for sure, but it's half the price.
Before we get into the weeds, here's the highlights Apple calls out on their marketing page (aka, what they think will appeal to a wide audience):
I'll start by saying I think the colors are a brilliant move, and I'm glad they decided to do it instead of making these boring colors only. I also think it's critical that this does not look like an old Mac. It looks very much exactly like the other current Macs, so it doesn't feel like you're buying an old computer.
Moving on to the specs. I do think people need to set their expectations appropriately. The A18 Pro chip is no slouch, but in the testing I've done, it performs worse than an M1 in some tasks. I'm sure there'll be some things where it's quicker, but I do think that people might be surprised how it performs under load. We'll see how it performs once people have these in hand, but I do worry that some folks expect this to perform like an M4 or an M3, when in fact it could very well be the slowest Apple silicon Mac ever released.
Getting a Mac down to half the price of an Air means making a lot of cuts that are painful, but the removal of Touch ID from the baseline model is the thing that surprised me the most. It's not the end of the world, and honestly, my wife has an M3 MacBook Air, and she literally never uses the Touch ID sensor. She always enters her password anyway. So there certainly are people who will not miss this, but I certainly would.
8 gigabytes RAM is going to be tight. This is definitely a device for light uses, and you're going to start to feel the pain if you try to do too much. 256 starting storage with a single upgrade to 512 gigabytes seems about right to me.
I'll be interested to see the screen in person. The resolution and brightness seem fine and are effectively the same as the Air, but they don't advertise P3 color, it's just RGB. I assume it will be fine, but the absolutely atrocious display in the baseline iPad makes me recognize how terrible a screen Apple is willing to ship in its budget devices, and I hope this is a large margin better than that. I assume it will be.
Despite the smaller footprint, it is exactly as heavy as the MacBook Air, so it's not the mythical return of the ultra-thin MacBook, unfortunately.
The keyboard is not backlit, which I guess is a bummer, but honestly, I don't think I ever use my keyboard's backlight. Honestly, I'm not totally sure why other people use it either. Does your screen not light up the keys already?
I understand that it would cost more, but I do wish that they could have put one USB-C cable on either side of the device. Going back to my wife, her biggest complaint with the MacBook Air is that it only charges from the left side when it would be so much more convenient for every single place she uses her computer to be able to charge from the right.
I'm writing this very quickly on my break at work, and when I go home, I'm going to find my Apple Watch Ultra, see what Apple will give me for a trade-in, and if it gets me close to half the cost, I'll be ordering one when I get home. At a minimum, this will be my travel computer, and at best, it will be my putzing around the house device.
2026-03-04 09:48:45
M83’s Midnight City is one of my favorite songs of all time, and this video recreating it is brilliant.
2026-03-04 07:34:20
Chapters in podcasts are super important, in my opinion, and I make sure to add them to everything that I create. Here's the process I use to get them into my shows faster than ever before.
The best thing you can do to speed up this process is to write down what chapter breaks you want as you record. I do this in Obsidian, which is the app I use to write the show notes, and I just have a little section at the bottom as we go where I write down the chapters. We edit the podcast, so I don't know exactly what the timestamps will be when I'm recording them, but just having them in order is helpful.
You can ask AI to generate the chapter titles for you as well, but I find it god-awful at that. Put in a little human work, it's worth it.
Step one is taking the final audio file and generating subtitles for it. I obviously use my own app, Quick Subtitles, which works great. I personally use the Whisper model as it is much slower, but it is more accurate to the point that it's worth it to me. Paired with the cleanup feature in Quick Subtitles, my transcripts are usually very good with little effort.
You certainly don't have to do this if you're not comfortable with it, but this is what I tend to do. I take those chapters I wrote out and use a short prompt to tell Claude what to do with it. Obviously, LLMs are pretty interchangeable, so use whichever one you prefer, including a local model if that's your preference.
This will get you a response something like this.
Copy that to your clipboard and you're ready to move on.
Now you can drag your audio and .srt files in ChapterPod, and hit Command + i to import chapters from text. That will give you all your chapters ready to go.
However, the AI will not be perfect and you will want to go into the transcript view to see exactly where it placed these chapter markers so you can fine-tune it down to the second. In my experience, language models tend to put the chapter marker 5 to 10 seconds later than I would. So it's just a matter of dragging the chapter marker from the transcript view up a little bit.
And that's it, you're done! Export the file and you'll have your fully-processed podcast file with chapter markers in less time than ever.
2026-03-04 06:55:16
Ben Thompson: Technological Scale and Government Control, Paramount Outbids Netflix for Warner Bros.
This is a lot more complicated than the nuclear question, where government control and ownership was a given; the sort of actions taken by the government over the last week fly in the face of the concept of private decision making and property rights. Unfortunately, those rights are not set in stone: they are ultimately enforced by someone, and the someone who is doing the enforcement is the one doing the violating. That’s not great, but it’s happening and/or will happen, and it’s important to come to grips with that reality — and I don’t think trying to describe that is at all equivalent to endorsing it.
Ben Thompson posted a clarification today regarding his post from yesterday, which I described as "no good, very bad." Unfortunately, the clarification is for members only, so most people will only see the original post without the added context.
He is surprised that people interpreted his original post as endorsing government seizure of private property, the idea that might makes right, and…well…fascism. I've reread the original post, and I honestly don't know how else you could interpret it. To me, it felt like him sharing his opinions on current events, in the style he always does.
I have two main thoughts left. First, building on what I said yesterday about him vocally disagreeing with one administration far more often than the other, I'm positive that if this had happened under the Biden administration, there would be no ambiguity about whether he supported it or not.
Second, the people who liked his post yesterday weren't really people who thought the government was doing something wrong and that Thompson was just accurately describing it. They supported the government's actions, and they thought Thompson was supporting that argument. Hell, after listening to Dithering this morning, I got the feeling he was doubling down on his support. This means that people who liked the post, and people who didn't like the post, both interpreted it differently than he intended. That's a pretty clear sign that your writing was not as clear as it could have been. That's always something important, but it’s doubly so when your lack of clarity makes wide swaths of people think you're endorsing fascism (and some of them like that!).
Listen, I write for an audience of strangers. They certainly don't live in my head and don’t always understand the intent of my posts. When that happens, you just take it on the chin, clarify what you meant, and move on (see my recent post about iPadOS going away). Ben gave a bit of a classic "I'm sorry if you were offended" sort of clarification, but whatever, I'll get over it.
2026-03-03 23:53:36
Apple announced new MacBook Airs and Pros today, and they’re both boring and mostly excellent.
This looks like a very basic spec bump, which I’m not mad about. I would like to see this display get an upgrade one day, and I'd love for them to split the USB-C ports to the left and right to add some charging flexibility, but I don't think this design is long enough in the tooth to draw my ire (2027 and 2028 Matt will start to get a little antsy, though).
We were wondering what the storage and RAM crunch would mean for the Mac lineup, and thankfully, it seems Apple is handling this well. The starting RAM has remained at 16GB and the starting storage has bumped up to 512GB from 256GB in the M4 model, but that also does come with a $100 starting price increase, up to $1,099. That's technically $100 less than upgrading to 512GB storage version in the previous generation, but yeah, a $100 higher starting price is still a bit of a bummer.
The new M5 Pro and Max chips look like killers. As an avowed defender of the Pro line of chips, Apple's suggestions of multiple times faster LLM performance and 40-60% performance jumps over the M4 Pro is really exciting for a single generation upgrade from what was already the best mobile computer chips in the game (the Max chips have similar jumps).
What's most impressive to me about this update is that the prices seem to have stayed completely level from last year. I have a 14" M4 Pro model that I bought a year ago. It had the better Pro chip and 1TB of storage, and cost me $2,399 before trade in. Getting that same model (upgraded Pro chip, 1TB storage, 24GB RAM) in the M5 generation would run me the same $2,399. I'm not at all tempted to upgrade myself, as I'm more than happy with the M4 Pro and even with a trade-in I'd be about $1,200 out of pocket, but in a world where everything is getting more expensive and we're in the middle of a supply chain mess, it's good to see Pro Macs holding the line on price.
As for the design, I'm still fine with it, but it seems like this will be the last generation of MacBook Pros with this design. Strong rumors swirl of a decent change coming in the M6 generation with a dynamic island and touch input, so we'll see how that turns out. For now, this is just an incredibly fucking fast version of the great product redesign Apple gave the MacBook Pro back in 2021.
2026-03-03 22:45:47
Apple updated both of their monitors today, replacing the Studio Display with a new model that's very similar to the old one, and they've discontinued the Pro Display XDR in favor of the new Studio Display XDR.
Starting with the updated Studio Display, honestly, I'm incredibly disappointed. I continue to think the Studio Display is for people who care about everything in a computer monitor besides the display itself. In the newsroom post and the new marketing page, Apple boasts about the new camera, better mics, better speakers, and Thunderbolt 5 ports. When comparing the new and old spec pages, there seems to be literally no difference, which leads me to believe we are once again stuck with the same panel Apple has been shipping for over a decade.
There are people who really value physical design, and that's fine, but if you want a great monitor that looks better than this (yes, even at 5K), there are other options, all of which cost a good deal less.
Compared to the $6,000 Pro Display XDR Apple was selling before, this is a steal at $3,300. And truthfully, it looks like a great monitor. 5K 120Hz mini-LED with 2,304 local dimming zones is undeniably a compelling combo. One interesting thing from the press release is that while it's a 120Hz display with variable refresh rates, they don't call it ProMotion like they do on their MacBook Pros and iPhones:
Studio Display XDR features a 120Hz refresh rate, enabling smooth, ultra-responsive motion. Adaptive Sync supports a continuously variable refresh rate between 47Hz to 120Hz, making gaming more fluid with faster frame delivery and lower display latency.
Anyway, this monitor looks really great, but the price is still astronomical. I paid 1/3 of that last year for a 32" OLED with 1,300 nits of peak brightness, although admittedly only at 4K resolution. Admittedly, Apple's monitor is going to be more reliable than the cheaper 5K models out there, and the brightness in particular seems properly high end here, so I get why some people would go for this. And hey, it's nearly half the price of the old XDR and it comes with a stand!
I think what bums me out about Apple's display lineup is that they are only serving the absolute highest end of the market, they have no truly "consumer" displays. I'm sure they think about the normal Studio Display as that, but it's really in another league compared to what any normal person spends on a monitor. I'll say it again to be super clear, my monitor is way higher end than what most people would buy…I'm considered someone who went overkill on their display…and mine cost $600 less than Apple's "consumer" model.