Todd Sizemore

Anyone who doesn’t follow the Apple Mastodon drama will have no idea that a lot of the Apple punditry have scaled back or seemingly quit the service. I won’t go into the details as to why because other people have covered it better than I could. But out with the old and in with the new right? Well..wait… where are the new Apple Pundits?

We seem to have had the same cast or characters for a while now. Most have been around since before the launch of the iPad and a few much older than that. In other fandoms there seems to be a churn of people who rise to the top over time but not for Apple. Why is that? A few ideas that crossed my mind.

1. I could be looking in the wrong places. I’m not on TikTok or Instagram so maybe they are all there. Though I find it hard to see how anyone could do extensive thought pieces on those platforms. Maybe that’s not required anymore.
2. We are what the market will support and those established players have essentially become the big fish in a small pond. That could be true, money is in short supply in the podcast market and well youtube doesn’t pay hardly anyone. It’s hard to get into a niche like this without a day job to actually pay the bills.
3. Apple doesn’t command the adoration that it once did. They aren’t the scrappy company fighting for a better more personal computer. If anything they are the corporate megastructure that swallows or kills all in its way. They are the establishment not the counterculture.

If I had to pick which one is most likely I put my bet on 3. I know Apple still holds the culture cachet but it’s the mainstream safe choice now. Being the mainstream choice doesn’t exactly elicit enthusiasm among the youth.

This will be my longest post ever.

A couple of months back our neighbours offered us an old swing set that they were planning to trash. It was around 10 years old and had SUFFERED in the Canadian winter. But my wife and I, being industrial little squirrels, thought we could fix it up. TLDR, we could not. Every time my kids tried to swing on it we feared for their lives and that was after we added new bracing.

So after dealing with it for a couple of months my wife decided we needed to build a new one. While my wife is a wonderful person and incredibly competent, smart, and beautiful (hi sweetie). Carpentry is not one of her multitude of skills. So when she announced this I knew I had a project on my hands. Let me make this clear, I was perfectly fine with building a swing set but I can’t activate project mode like my wife can. It takes me weeks of thinking about it before I get over that mental hill and begin.

So we bought some premade brackets to handle attaching the legs to the beam and got the wood. Once I started the build, I quickly realized that it would not be as simple as bolting everything together. For one, the brackets we purchased were built with a lot of tolerance. Meaning I needed to use shims to fill in the extra space. Second, it calls for a 4x6 wood beam to act as the main piece but that’s not a common size here. So I had to take a 4x4 post and a 2x4 board and screw them together.

Even the leg holds on the bracket had a bunch of tolerance meaning that even after I bolted in the 4x4s legs they would wiggle. So I needed to add some (a lot) of bracing. That wouldn’t be a hard thing with the right tools but I didn’t have a mitre saw or even a mitre box. The latter would have been useful anyway because mitre boxes only have a set number of angles they can cut unless you get something expensive. So I did it all by freehand with my tiny little battery-powered circular saw. Speaking of which, that thing is fine for 2x4 boards but cutting 4x4 is a nightmare with it. If I ever get into a big project again I will definitely buy a corded model.

Bracing is great if you can find the right type of screw to connect them. As it turned out Home Hardware sells some serious structural screws that are amazing. They grip like no other and are really easy to insert. Even my lowly little drill was able to zip these guys right in like butter. Finally to ensure they the swing would be incredibly rigid, I bought a number of metal plates and L brackets.

With the basic structure ready the last thing I needed to do was to install the swings themselves. We decided to reuse the ones from our older set since they were still in decent condition and this project was already racking up the cost. All I needed was the right eye bolts and quick links. The problem is that I live in Sault Ste Marie Canada and the hardware needed to be tough. So I elected to buy stainless steel hardware rather than zinc-plated. This doubled or tripled the cost of the items I needed in comparison to the zinc versions. But with that final bill I was able to let my kids test the swing and it was excellent! Super rigid, sturdy.

This whole thing took me 5 days between rain, work and life but I am overall pretty happy with how it turned out.

We are a little over 2 weeks away from John Ternus stepping into the head role at Apple and despite Tim Cook’s best efforts he has a serious uphill climb to manage. Let me get the major thought out of the way, John Ternus won’t be able to keep Apple’s growth story going. The headwinds between the RAM and storage crisis as well as regulation coming on board across the globe will make it difficult for Apple to keep growing. Sure they could take over the rest of the mobile phone market and the PC market as well but that’s trench warfare nowadays, the big grabs are over.

The way I see it, John has two possible paths.

1. Keep degrading Apple’s products with more ads, more services, and more penny pinching to try and keep the growth going.
2. Keep Apple on the high road and provide a better experience.

The first is the path Tim Cook has already started down, degrading Apple’s products with bad ads and more of them. This has led to some, including me, to start to wonder if the costs are worth it anymore. Apple built a reputation on being the premium choice, but as they go down this road its starting to look like the BMW Spiderman situation.

The second path takes a lot of backbone. It would mean suffering at the hands of the stock market for the idea that your brand is worth more than the latest quarterly results. Providing the consumer with a better experience as the prices of all tech products rise would set Apple apart from the rest of the market who will no doubt double down on any method to improve margins. But John shouldn’t just look to be slightly better than the rest, he should look at this as an opportunity to entrench the Apple brand with consumers even more. Doing so could lead to Apple being in a much stronger position when these current crises subside. Is he willing to take the hit now for better outlook later?

I’ve largely quit listening to most Apple fan podcasts over the last few months. Make fun of me if you wish listening to them in the first place, but I also listen to a variety of tech podcasts. Linux and OSS podcasts, general tech podcasts and even a couple of Windows ones. I like to get a wide perspective on the tech world. Out of all of these though, I feel as if the Apple guys have gone off the deep end with nonstop AI talk.

I do understand that AI is THE big topic right now and frankly almost everything else about it is a bummer. I guess I am just burned out about it all and I don’t feel as if I’m getting anything from them other than their latest escapades in Claude Code/Codex/Vibe Coding. Maybe they don’t feel as if they are the right ones to talk about the detriments of AI? Maybe they don’t think they can contribute to the narrative? Maybe they just don’t care?

The second part is frankly that Apple is just an awful company. They are anti-competition, anti-openness, arrogant to the extreme. Hearing a bunch of well-off guys Stan for a 5 trillion dollar company is pretty pathetic. The worst part is that Apple is still the best of a bunch of bad choices. I am sitting here writing this post on a Mac Mini after all with an iPhone on the table beside me.

This is a good article about how I feel like Apple is losing its lustor by adding so many ads. If I wanted those I could go back to Android and Windows and at least get them at a cheaper price. Always Choose the Good Soap

While at home I took part in one of my favourite pastimes. Catching various animals around my parents house. This summer’s haul was a bit on the low side. Just an Eastern Box Turtle and a Broadhead Skink. I don’t keep them, I just catch them to take a picture and release.

I think my brain has become too inflexible to switch from Apple Podcasts. When I objectively examine Apple Podcasts versus Overcast or Pocketcasts, it’s easy to see where it comes up short. Queue building is very basic and well hidden, intro and outro skip settings are not there. But I still keep using it over what seem to be better choices. Maybe I should just stop thinking about it since it obviously doesn’t matter enough for my brain to break the connection.

With all that said, the AI generated chapters are really useful to me. One of the few uses I have seen for the tech that makes sense.

I don’t give a shit about these two companies fighting.

It occurred to me that Microsoft has always tried to forcibly change the market with their gaming ambitions. The problem is that they were always doing so from third place. It’s pretty rare that the weakest contender can somehow find an idea their bigger rivals haven’t considered and flip a market to their advantage. In their history, they had only had one slight chance at it (the 360 to One transition) and they blew it.

My opinion is that they should have hunkered down and kept trying to make a top-tier gaming platform rather than turning the Xbox One into some sort of multimedia home hub idea. They could have still felt out their ideas overtime and seen what if any of them the market would accept without degrading their money driver (games!).

Microsoft suffers from a desire to make big bets rather than do the hard job of building up overtime. I won’t go into why they have always tried to shortcut their way to the top, because frankly I don’t know. I guess the desire for money makes you dumb? To quote a hockey term, “gotta do the reps boys”.

Having a Mac with non Apple accessories can be like death from a 1000 paper cuts. I have a Logitech G305 mouse and it does not support smooth scrolling on MacOS. I know it can be done because both Linux and Windows scroll smoothly with this mouse Fortunately there is a little app called Mos that’s solves this problem. Why you need a third party app to make non-Apple mice support smooth scrolling? It’s not in Apple’s interests I guess, open ecosystems aren’t really their thing but you would think that Logitech might get a little bit better treatment since they have worked with Apple on several accessories. I guess everyone is a second class citizen in Apple’s eyes.