2026-03-31 01:00:34
After I wrote my Wall Street Journal review of David Pogue’s excellent Apple: The First 50 Years (Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books) my editor asked for a sidebar recommending other books about Apple. I consulted my own collection and also asked a few of my friends.
If the 50th anniversary celebrations and talk have made you curious about Apple history, there are a lot of books out there. Here are some recommendations:
Insanely Great (1994) by Steven Levy. This is the definitive story of the original Mac, placed in the context of the 1980s personal computing revolution. Levy, whose 1984 book Hackers is an astounding history of the early days of computing, gets at the heart of what made that original Mac, and the original Mac team, special. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone. If the year of publication doesn’t tell you what this is about, the subtitle will: “How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane.” Recommended by John Siracusa, this is the story of Apple falling apart in the 1990s. (Amazon, used.)
On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (1999) by Gil Amelio and William L. Simon. Of course Gil Amelio’s tell-all about his brief tenure as Apple CEO is self-serving. And yet I enjoyed reading it, because I believe that late-90s Apple was just as messed up as he describes it, especially when it came to the utter failure to replace classic Mac OS that led to Apple buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs. Was Amelio a bozo, like Jobs apparently claimed? Maybe, but you can’t deny that he was there at a pivotal moment and made the single most important decision in Apple’s history. (Used.)
Apple Confidential 2.0 (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer. Prior to the publication of David Pogue’s book, this was probably the best collection of stories about the history of Apple. It’s still an entertaining read. (PDF, used.)
Revolution in the Valley (2011) by Andy Hertzfeld. One of the core members of the original Macintosh team has a lot of amazing stories to tell. We think of the tech industry today as being corporate, but the original Mac was almost a countercultural object. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
The Perfect Thing (2006) by Steven Levy. Levy does his “Insanely Great” thing again, but this time about the creation of the iPod. You may think, well, the iPod’s pretty dated technology now, why does it matter? But this book gives you some clear insight into the entire product development process in the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Creative Selection (2019) by Ken Kocienda. I’m not convinced that the definitive insider history of the creation of the iPhone has been written yet. But between Pogue’s book and this account from one of the creators of the original iPhone keyboard, we’ve got at least some good tales from that vital period. Here’s my original review. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee. This is the definitive book of the Tim Cook era, at least so far, but it also covers as far back as engineering decisions made right after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Even if you’re not interested in the Chinese angle, this book is worth reading because it reveals how Apple became and remains a titan of manufacturing, which is why it seems capable of building products nobody else can build. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)
Steve Jobs in Exile (coming May 2026) by Geoffrey Cain. A detailed look at Steve Jobs after he left Apple, including everything that went wrong at NeXT—and how it made Jobs a better CEO when he returned to Apple. This book isn’t out yet, but I’ve read it and it’s quite good. (Pre-order: Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books.)
(Pro tip: The used books are really cheap, and it’s kind of fun to read an old, beat-up book when thinking about Apple’s history.)
2026-03-31 00:30:06
I have a mostly “love/not-hate” relationship with the Medications feature in the iPhone Health app. Having accrued and had treated a variety of conditions over the years, I found Medications a welcome addition in 2022. You can add drugs you take, the frequency (or as needed), and set them to a schedule. Then you receive a notification at the time you set, plus a reminder.
While I’m generally good at “medication adherence,” I’m not perfect. For many drugs, clinical research is based on regular administration and staying on a schedule. In some cases, you can injure yourself or reduce the effectiveness of a medication if you take it erratically, sometimes even missing a few doses, as with antibiotics or antivirals.
Medications is an oddball feature, though, as it’s kind of shoehorned into Health, and doesn’t use the normal Notifications system for alerts. I am sure that is in part because of the unique elements of ensuring reminders occur and recur. But also, it’s because your medication schedule is akin to time-of-day reminders: they should always occur at the requested time.
When you travel across time zones, that’s where confusion can emerge. While on a flight, you may have seen a notification that says “Time Zone Changed,” which suggests you need to check your medication schedule. You may see this for each time zone you pass through. Tap it, and you’re taken to the Medications view, where you can tap to rewrite the time zone to the local one—that is, 8 am PDT becomes 8 am MDT, GMT, etc.
But I had the opposite problem: traveling west to east the other week, I experienced the failure of negative knowledge—I wasn’t alerted about the time zone change and wound up missing a dose of meds.1 I haven’t had this happen since I started using Medications and traveling, so I don’t know what failed.
Here’s the sequence of what happened (or didn’t):
It was only late that night that I realized what had happened. Looking in Health > Medications and swiping way down to Options, I checked that Time Zone Change was enabled. It was. However, my whole schedule was three hours off. There’s no manual “reset to current time zone” button.
The workaround is to go to Settings > General > Date & Time, disable Set Automatically, switch to the old time zone, then to the new one, and then re-enable Set Automatically. At that point, I received the alert from Medications and was able to visit the app to approve changing the absolute time (8 am PDT/11 am EDT) to the relative time (8 am EDT).
Clearly, Medications has room to grow in its time zone support. Because of our body clocks, we may want to keep our medications on the absolute time: if you travel 12 time zones, you probably want to be sure you take your doses of daily meds about 24 hours apart. But there’s no good way to adjust Medications while traveling unless the alert is triggered. Calendar added an option for Floating events years ago, where they were fixed to a time of day rather than a time zone. Some kind of opposite-to-floating option or time slider needs to be added to make Medications more travel friendly.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2026-03-30 21:56:58
When you think of Apple, you probably think of the iPhone, or maybe the Mac, or perhaps you’ve got fond memories of the iPod. But Apple’s 50-year run of creating tech products that people fall in love with — sometimes a lot of people, sometimes just a hardy few — would never have happened if it weren’t for a product and platform that’s been gone for decades.
Apple would never have made it if it weren’t for the Apple II, the company’s first hit product and the first one to generate the amount of devotion we’ve now come to expect from fans of Apple’s products. Their slogan was, and still is, “Apple II Forever!”
2026-03-28 00:00:11
My thanks to Unite Pro for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Safari web apps and PWAs are a nice start, but they’re limited. Browser tabs are messy. And most tools for turning websites into apps still feel more like wrappers than real Mac software.
Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.
What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.
Six Colors readers can get 20% off Unite Pro this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/unite.
2026-03-27 05:19:01
Chance Miller calls the time of death at 9to5 Mac:
It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.
Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.
A quiet end to what was once the flagship of the Mac product line. But time comes for us all.
Over the years, as laptops rose in prominence and other Mac desktops added power, the Mac Pro increasingly became a niche, high-end device. After the disastrous trash-can Mac Pro design, Apple made good on a promise to return the Mac Pro, and shipped a new take on the “cheese grater” enclosure. But the move to Apple silicon really killed the product dead, since Apple’s modern chip architecture doesn’t support external GPUs, which was one of the last reasons to buy a Mac Pro.
In the interim, the Mac Studio has become the top-of-the-line desktop. It’s great. RIP to a real one, but it’s time for us all to move on.
2026-03-27 00:30:45
The Apple Vision Pro feels like a product that’s waiting for the world to catch up, but the reality is closer to the opposite. The world is waiting for a reason to use it and that reason hasn’t quite shown up yet.
There’s very little wrong with the hardware. Apple built something that works in a way first-generation devices rarely do (says the guy old enough to have bought a Newton at launch) with displays that feel natural rather than novel and an interface that disappears quickly enough to let you focus on what you’re seeing.
The problem comes the moment you take it off. There isn’t a strong pull to put it back on. It’s impressive, even remarkable in bursts, but it doesn’t yet fit into a daily rhythm. That’s not a hardware problem. It’s a content problem, and more specifically, a cadence problem. Apple has treated immersive content like a prestige release schedule, carefully curated and spaced out, which works for television but not for behavior. If you want people to build a habit around something, you need volume and consistency, not occasional brilliance. Right now, Vision Pro feels like something you check in on rather than something you live inside, and that distinction matters more than anything on the spec sheet.
Neal Stephenson’s skepticism lands because it recognizes that gap. If the content never reaches a point where it becomes necessary, the headset remains optional, and optional devices rarely scale. What’s interesting is that the missing piece isn’t hypothetical. It already exists in a different form, outside of Apple’s ecosystem, and it’s showing up in a place that Apple understands better than most companies: people paying for experience.
Cosm is the cleanest example of that. It’s easy to dismiss it a high-end gimmick, a giant dome with a better screen, but that misses what’s actually happening inside those venues. People are buying tickets, planning nights around it, treating it as something closer to attending a game than watching one. The technology matters, but the behavior matters more.
Cosm is already generating meaningful revenue and drawing repeat customers, which tells you this isn’t just novelty value. It’s tapping into something real, the idea that proximity, or at least the feeling of it, has value even when the event is happening somewhere else.
The challenge for Cosm is that scaling that experience is difficult. These are expensive builds that require the right locations, the right partnerships, and enough capital to expand without diluting the quality that makes them work in the first place.
That is exactly the kind of problem Apple has solved before. It’s not just about having the cash, though Apple certainly has that. It’s about having the discipline to build a system that can expand without losing its identity and the distribution to make it visible at scale. If Apple owned something like Cosm, it wouldn’t just be a set of venues. It would be a front door. You could put an Apple Store in the lobby and it wouldn’t feel forced. It would feel like a natural extension of the experience, a place where people encounter the hardware in the context of something they already understand.
From there, the path to the home becomes clearer. Vision Pro, or whatever lower-cost version follows, doesn’t need to stand on its own as a category. It becomes an extension of something people have already bought into. The idea of watching a game “from somewhere else” is no longer abstract because they’ve already felt it in a room with other people. At home, it becomes a different version of the same experience, missing the crowd and the waiter, but gaining convenience and access.
The critical shift is in how Apple approaches rights. Trying to own sports outright is a losing strategy. The costs are too high, the competition too entrenched, and the fragmentation too deep. Apple has made smart moves with MLS, F1, and selective partnerships, but doubling down on exclusivity won’t unlock this. The better path is to work alongside the existing ecosystem. Install Cosm camera systems at major events, not as replacements for the broadcast but as an additional layer. Let networks and leagues sell that immersive feed as a premium product, with Apple taking a share for the technology and distribution. It’s additive rather than competitive, which makes it easier to scale and harder for partners to resist.
Apple has always been at its best when it connects behavior to technology in a way that feels inevitable in hindsight. Right now, Vision Pro still feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem, or more accurately the opportunity, is already there in how people respond to immersive sports experiences. Cosm has shown that people will pay for that feeling. The hardware is close enough to deliver it at home. The gap is building the bridge between those two things in a way that feels continuous rather than experimental.
If Apple gets that right, the conversation around Vision Pro changes quickly. It stops being about whether people want to wear a headset and starts being about what they’re missing when they don’t. That’s the point where adoption tends to take care of itself.
