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 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.

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.

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.

This is the worst time of year for my RSS feed as every website I follow spams hundreds of Amazon Prime deals across their feeds. I don’t blame them for doing so because they have to make money somehow (Google sure isn’t helping them out), but it’s annoying as hell. For one, I’m not in the US anymore, so most of these deals don’t apply to me. Two, I don’t buy from Amazon as much as possible.

Even past Prime Day, I have noticed a huge uptick in rss articles being nothing more than affiliate link promo messages. Again I don’t blame them, but it does sully their reputations in my mind. It’s especially bad for sites like Wired, which I pay, for to do such a thing. At least they could do is offer an ad-free feed for subscribers.

I need to find an RSS app for Mac and iOS that can do some keyword filtering. I know a RSS service like Feebin or Inoreader could do this, but I have subscription fatigue as it is, and I won’t use the rest of the features enough to gain the benefit. So I guess I am stuck complaining on the internet.

With the completion of the fence I am working through the new logistical matters that have been brought to light its existence. Most of them are boring mundane things but I do wish I had given them more consideration before we started the project.

Pros

1. Its very nice the dog can be let loose in the back without having to leash him. He loves this freedom now that he is used to it.
2. The dog can now poop all over so the spots by the house where his leash ended will finally get to grow back.
3. The privacy is REAL, its awesome to feel as if I am in my own little contained outdoor space. I have I not truly had that since I lived at home 26 years ago.

Cons

1. The dog can now poop all over the yard. I have no idea where he does it now and will have to go searching.
2. The gate is great but I it means more work for me in the morning. I have to go out the back yard door, come around and open the gate, pull the car out of the garage, then close the gate before I go to work.
3. With a fence I will need to be more judicious with where I blow the snow this winter. If I throw it against the fence I may cause it to lean. I also have less room to place snow now that some of it can’t just go into my neighbor’s backyards.
4. A similar issue with the gate, its very close to the ground on the left hand side. During winter I am going to have to work to keep that portion of the gate able to swing fully.

You can say a lot about Signal and its mission to provide secure and private chat to the world. They have earned all the goodwill given to them through hard work and maintaining their values. The problem is, “The Tyranny of the Default”. I use an iPhone, and most of my friends do as well. Hence, they tend to use Messages for their communications.

I have tried over time to get friends to hop on Signal with limited success. Those who do join tend to not use it for long because I might be the only person they have in their chat list. So I really don’t blame them when they just start texting me through Messages again. The same has happened to me. I only have two people left on my Signal list, and it makes me wonder if I should just give in and move them back to Messages.