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.

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

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.

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.

I gave Apple $610 dollars CAD today to upgrade my son’s iPad from a 9th generation to the latest model. I didn’t like doing it because I was forced into the decision. Yesterday, Apple raised prices on damn near everything. Looking around I saw that Bestbuy still had the base model iPad for the old price so I struck. My plan was to wait until Christmas but I don’t trust even the new higher prices will stay that same until then. Some analysts are predicting RAM could still double in cost by this time next year!

You can blame AI Datacenters for this trouble and you definitely should. But let’s not forget that Apple has a profit margin of like 37% on their hardware. They chose to transfer almost all of the increased component costs over to the consumer rather than touch that margin.

I’ve mentioned before this before but it seems that the reasons for using Apple products are getting smaller and smaller every year. They chasing the insanity of an unending growth story that will surely end.

With more ads added to the App Store and now ads in Apple Maps I have to wonder what the point is of paying premiums for Apple hardware? I already give Apple money each month for iCloud storage and Apple Music, could I not get a break from the ads with that? Granted these two are minor in comparison to other services like Google’s but it still rubs me the wrong way. Plus there is no indication that it will stop in the future, ads for Apple Music? Ads in Photos?

Subscription creep is another thing that’s been driving me up the wall recently. My wife is a prodigious photo and video taker and we are quickly approaching the 2TB limit on our iCloud storage. To move to the next tier would take our costs from $12.99 CAD a month to $39.99 CAD a month. There are no options in between! In comparison Google has new storage plans available that will give you 5TB of storage for $26.99 CAD a month. I am working to clear out duplicates and low-quality photos (she for some reason takes a ton of pictures of the inside of her pockets) but at some point I will run out of chaff while the wheat keeps growing. Then I am kind of stuck.

This article from Matt Birchler brought up a point I meant to relay when I bought a 4k monitor for my Mac Mini. I kept hearing the usual pundits say that the only real solution for the Mac was something “Retina” i.e. a 27" 5K Display. Looking at the prices of those I couldn’t justify spending more than my Mac Mini for a monitor. So I went with a Dell S2725qs and guess what? Its good! Is the 5k clearer? Probably but I have not seen one in person. Would it be double the cost clearer? Hell no.

As I move back into the Mac ecosystem after years away, I have been content to buy Apple’s lower end products despite the FOMO that you’ll hear from a very vocal subset of the Apple community. In each case so far I have been content with my choices, in fact when I purchase an iPad later this year its going to be the base model, it will suite might needs without fail.

Head’s I Win, Tails You Lose