www.macrumors.com/2025/04/11/a...

Used one at my first internship out of high school for 3D modeling. Bought one for my home collection years later. Still runs great.

Not Corinthian leather, but more than monotone UI with dark & light mode variants. Borrow materials from visionOS where prudent. Keep app icons square on iOS, round in AR & watch, mixed in macOS.

I think we have seen the high water mark of the Tim Cook growth stage. Maybe put hardware SVP John Ternus at the helm to usher in a plan for ARM chips to not only adapt but excel at the discrete parallel processing needs that onboard AI demands, not bundling compute on one dye and sprinkling on RAM.

Even with all the forward looking initiatives and mind-blowing tech like VisionOS, it’s all rooted in a very 2022 outlook & investment in the future. It’s not that that they weren’t paying attention, they are painfully more aware than anybody. It’s hard for a cruise ship to turn on a dime.

Poised for decades of dominance in hardware + software innovation, perfect messaging, user experience unmatched—they didn’t account for the asymmetric threat of the entire human-computer interaction model changing so quickly.

LLMs are not just a software innovation. They are fundamentally reshaping the computing experience from the inside out. Just as GPUs were once an alien concept that evolved into a standard piece of hardware, so too chips will evolve around discrete processing of AI on the local device.

Now they’re faced with a dilemma of a decades-long ARM-centric hardware ecosystem and manufacturing pipeline vision that will suffer in AI without bundling devices with insane amounts of RAM to make up for it. HistoricallyApple starves devices in RAM, so it’s a bitter pill for leadership.

They dismissed Large Language Models as a software-only technology because their 10-year plan with ARM chips focused on a path of shared architecture instead of discrete parallel processing. The reason why Mac gaming sucks is the exact reason why Apple missed AI.

2. They shaped the market around personal computing and polished the experience as much as any company in history. And while focused on serious innovation and next-generation HCI patterns they missed something right under their noses. Even with legions of machine learning engineers, they missed it.

Internally Apple ships the bare minimum hardware necessary in devices that is required by their OS and software teams to give the appearance of speed & performance gains, despite epic marketing campaigns of mind boggling improvements. Being coy about hardware specs is a lucrative strategy for them.

The cracks in the foundation were two-fold: 1. Hiring the best hardware talent in a generation to rebuild the company around a mobile ARM chip architecture that made Apple products appear blazing fast at most consumer computing tasks. They shipped devices that were starved for RAM and hid the specs.

Cupertino has enjoyed building a walled fortress of patented hardware and software that saw very little threat because of their relentless focus on user experience, immaculate messaging, and a seamless product ecosystem. How could anybody or anything even pose a concern for such a juggernaut?

The slop is the map.

These are excellent, thanks!