By Jason Snell

Quick thoughts about the new MacBook Pro

Hello from Los Angeles, where I’ve gotten a first look at the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display. This is an all-day event, so I expect to learn much more as we get going, but the hands-on area is completely backed up, so I’m going to put some stray thoughts here right away.

It’s not the MacBook Ultra

I was standing right next to John Gruber when John Ternus announced on stage that we were about to see the new MacBook Pro, and he gave a shrug of resignation. John had come around to thinking that it might be called the MacBook Studio. I didn’t think Apple would go there, and I guess I was right?

In the long run, technology introduced at the high end comes down to the lower end eventually. Creating a whole new line of MacBooks above the MacBook Pro would imply that Apple is more or less permanently committed to having an additional differentiated product line. I didn’t think it would go that far, when presumably all Mac laptops will get touch and OLED… eventually.

However, these new laptops are still a cut above when it comes to what they cost… and as a result, Apple is still selling the older MacBook Pro M5 Pro and Max models as well. This is very much what the company did when the first Retina MacBook Pro models hit the scene—and were so expensive that it needed to keep the more affordable non-retina models around. For a while.

But again, inevitably, every MacBook Pro and then every Mac became a Retina Mac. And so it didn’t really make sense to create a new category of MacBook, nor does it today.

An unusual upgrade

Usually, a new MacBook Pro brings powerful new chips—but not this time. These new laptops have the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that are in the still-available previous models. According to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that’s because Apple decided not to release M6 Pro and Max chips and instead jump straight to M7 next year.

So… no new chips. But the body design is entirely new, something that happens only once every few years. In addition to that PROLED XDR display (it’s a pun and all in caps and I don’t know what to think about the name?) that is a real touchscreen, the big change is that the new laptops are appreciably lighter—about 15% lighter. The 14-inch model weighs 3.0 pounds (1.38kg), compared to 3.5 pounds (1.60kg) on the previous models. The 16-inch model goes from 4.7 pounds to 4.0 pounds. The new 14-inch model is closer to a 13-inch MacBook Air in weight than the old 14-inch model is.

It’s also almost imperceptibly smaller—hundredths of an inch thinner, less than a tenth of an inch wider, and about two-tenths of an inch less deep. So, smaller, but not so much that you’d notice. Obviously the priority was getting the weight down.

You know what weighs the most in a laptop? The battery. And Apple’s claiming 22 hours of battery life (24 for the 16-inch model) on these systems, which is unchanged from the older ones. That’s good news in that they managed to be lighter without sacrificing battery life, but it’s bad news for anyone who was hoping for Apple to maybe stretch battery life a bit more.

Minor touch affordances

Another question I had coming into this event was just how much effort Apple would make to adapt the macOS interface for touch. The answer is: A little, but not a lot. When you touch the screen, the interface makes subtle adaptations—more spacing in menus, more feedback when selecting and dragging items—but what it doesn’t do is flip into some new Touch Mode that looks and behaves totally unlike the Mac.

Not surprising, really—this is a conventional laptop with touch, not a convertible with a fold-back or flip-around hinge that makes it into something more like a big tablet. If Apple wants to make that laptop in the future, it can—and it can add a more complex touch mode then. Instead, this interface strikes me as Apple doing right by its own MacBook Pro users by making the touch interface nice, but also acknowledging that for most people, touch will be an additive part of interfacing with their Mac, on top of keyboard and trackpad.

That said, one portion of Apple’s intro video showed a developer using Xcode to test an iOS app, and they were touching the app in the iOS simulator. That… is a really cool use case. For the first time, developers will be able to touch their apps right on their laptop screen during development.

Apple sees the light

“I think you’re all really going to like this,” Ternus said on stage as he revealed the light-up Apple logo on the back of the new MacBook Pro. Spoken like someone who has been at Apple for many years and remembers the Old Ways.

Lighting up the Apple logo on the back of the display was always a fun feature. I’m sure there were all sorts of practical reasons why it made more sense to put a metallic laser-cut Apple or whatever back there, but not only did it feel less fun, it deprived the world of cafés full of little glowing Apple logos. Imagine the lost branding opportunities, Apple!

So… it’s back. I look forward to hearing Apple’s storytelling behind that decision, if there is any beyond the obvious, “why not?” But it warms my heart to see a glowing Apple logo and I hope that this retro design trend makes its way to every Apple laptop over time.

(Next up: Bring back the “breathing” sleep indicator.)

By Glenn Fleishman

Sorry, new developers, it’s vibecodetown

If you're like me, you receive three to five emails each day extolling the virtues of a new iPhone, iPad, or Mac app. If you're like Jason, you get dozens of these emails. If you're lucky, you're like neither of us—in that one respect.

They're often written in a friendly manner. They start with a reference or two to something I've written, then describe how the developer had an itch to scratch that solved a problem mentioned in my column. (Or not—the emails aren't always on target.) So they wrote TextEdit Genius (a fake name), which dramatically expands the capabilities of TextEdit. Or a Notes exporter. Or an app that lets you frame photos. Or whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. As a long-time tech writer, I love emails from developers.¹ However, these particular messages are obviously, or not so obviously, written by chatbots. Perhaps the prompt is, "Try not to sound like an LLM," and then the developers further edit so they have at least a smidgeon of a voice. The apps they promote are almost certainly vibe coded, a term I loathe that describes using AI to write software or help write it. But not all of those apps are vibe coded—and that's the problem.

If you're a serious developer, whether writing all the code by hand or using agentic assistance, with the intent to support and mature your app for years to come, how do you get the word out? How can you become a BBEdit, PCalc, or A Better Finder Attributes? In our current environment, how do you create an app that pierces through the fog?

Continue reading “Sorry, new developers, it’s vibecodetown”…

By Jason Snell

Apple clears the decks ahead of its biggest announcement

Apple’s thunder keeps rolling this week. First it was the iPad mini, and now it’s a set of relatively minor announcements that would have just gotten lost in the anticipated introduction of OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models on Wednesday.

Apple updated the base-model MacBook Pro from an M5 chip to an M6. This is the low-end model that basically exists to snag buyers who don’t want to use a MacBook Air. (To be fair, it’s got a much better display and active cooling, too.)

But don’t be confused: This is not Apple’s big MacBook Pro announcement of the week. What’s been abundantly clear is that whatever Apple announces Wednesday—whether it’s a set of replacements for the higher-end M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, or an even higher-priced tier of OLED models above the existing high-end—will not impact the design or price of the $1,999 base M5 (now M6) model.

Apple also bumped the iMac to M6, retaining the existing design and colors introduced in the M1 model. There are some minor technical enhancements here, most notably Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, with 2.5Gb Ethernet (on models with the Ethernet power adapter). But Apple does not seem interested in altering the Apple silicon iteration of the iMac in any substantial way.

Finally, Apple announced a slew of Creator Studio updates, showing that the company is not going to stand still when it comes to advancing its new creative software suite. There’s new content in Final Cut, improvements to music creation and an AI helper in Logic, generative fill in Pixelmator, and a bunch of AI features (leveraging both Apple’s own models and ones from OpenAI) sprinkled throughout the bundle.

Busy week already! I’ll be in L.A. Wednesday for whatever Apple’s announcing, and will be sure to report back here.

By Glenn Fleishman

Why Notes will never let us edit Markdown

The Notes app added Markdown import and export in the version 26 operating system releases, and the macOS 27 Golden Gate update lets us copy and paste as Markdown. Why can't we just write natively in that hoary, simple format?

I use Markdown all day, every day. In fact, I'm writing these words in Markdown without you even knowing it. All content-management systems (CMSes) I'm aware of support native Markdown entries when posting, and many writing and note-taking apps integrate Markdown conventions without needing to trumpet them.¹ I typed two hash marks (##) at the start of a line by instinct when writing a Kickstarter post in that company's slightly awkward editor, and it formatted the line as Subhead (heading 2 in its style). Huh!

But Notes is a different animal: it's a rich-media note-taking app, not a text app (TextEdit or BBEdit) or word-processor/layout app (Word or Pages). Or, to paraphrase the humanist computer book writer Robin Williams, "Notes is not a typewriter."²

Continue reading “Why Notes will never let us edit Markdown”…

By Jason Snell

iPhone Duo: 24 hours in the Splash Zone

For a company that’s poised at the cutting edge and focused on innovation, Apple can be quite conservative. It’s a very measure-twice-cut-once kind of company. It prefers innovation of the relentless, iterative sort. It’s harder to feel that pace if you’re the kind of person who buys a new iPhone every year; go without upgrading an Apple device for four or five years and you’ll suddenly see the results of the company’s annual grind.

But while Apple’s careful approach explains why Apple sat on the sidelines for the first years of the folding-smartphone era, once the company decided to get in the game, getting messy was inevitable.

I cover technology professionally, but the reason I do that is because I also love this stuff. There is nothing quite like putting your hand on a new tech product (or, to be fair, a new piece of software!) and discovering all the ways it’s amazing, or weird, or a failure, or—most commonly—a mixture of all of the above.

And that’s why I’m so excited about the iPhone Duo. It is a fascinating mixture, showing off Apple at the top of its game in terms of hardware and software design, while also being fundamentally weird in ways too numerous to count. Apple doesn’t like getting messy, ever, but the first folding iPhone was always going to spatter mud all over Apple’s metaphorical raincoat. Everyone who uses the iPhone Duo is in the splash zone. If you didn’t want to get wet, you shouldn’t have sat in the splash zone!

In my first day with the iPhone Duo, I have experienced the highs and lows that I was expecting. It’s fascinating to see carefully constructed iOS interface conventions crumble under the onslaught of radically new hardware. Control Center is now an icon on the side of the screen. Face ID is gone, replaced with a Touch ID side button that is frequently where you least expect it.

Just as one example, I knew immediately that my iPhone home screen icon placement, honed over many years, was entirely inappropriate for the iPhone Duo. Even the apps I chose to place in my Dock were wrong, because the Dock serves a different purpose on the iPhone Duo! (Dock icons are now smaller, and they’re on the side rather than right at the bottom of the device, so my old approach of using them as a quick-access tab has vanished.)

Among the lows I’ve experienced thus far: Encountering apps not optimized for iPhone Duo, even if they worked perfectly fine on the iPad. As someone who uses the iPad an awful lot, it’s been a constant reminder that even when open, the iPhone Duo is not an iPad; it’s a tablet-like iPhone. And some of my favorite iPad apps open on the iPhone Duo in the “shame rectangle” that makes them essentially unusable (or at the very least, deeply unappealing), because they haven’t explicitly been updated to support the iPhone Duo.

I understand the push and pull between Apple and its developers here, and I’m as sympathetic to why Apple chose not to let iPad apps adapt to the iPhone Duo as I am to the developers who may not have the ability to invest time in updating their apps for the iPhone. Still, the fact remains that I’m shopping for new RSS readers again after several years of settling on one, because it’s going to be hard to test reading on this thing if I’m using an unoptimized app.

I’m sympathetic to reviewers like Brian X. Chen of the New York Times, who apparently had to review the phone in a day, start to finish. If your editor wants it, you gotta do it. But as the editor of Six Colors, I have to be honest: I don’t see the point. All the embargoed reviews that dropped Wednesday were based on a week’s worth of use and consideration; it will take another week before any later reviewers can match that level of experience and consideration.

So I’m taking the slower path. I’m going to use this thing a lot (it’s my phone now, for the time being, and I’m traveling right now so it’s going to get a lot of use!) and I suspect it’s got a lot to teach me—surprising, frustrating, delightful, all of it. I’m excited to see Apple let its freak flag fly a little, and there’s no place I’d rather be than in the splash zone.

By Jason Snell

The iPod, which set Apple on its course, turns 25

We drove down the freeway from San Francisco to Cupertino with a pretty good idea of what Apple would be announcing, but with no idea how it would transform Apple forever.

“Hint: It’s not a Mac,” read the invitation to an event at the Town Hall conference center on Apple’s campus at Infinite Loop. Rumors abounded that Apple was going to announce a music player, but the details were hazy.

Three of the Macworld editors in the car (but not the other one) were primed to understand what Apple was announcing—we all had multi-gigabyte iTunes libraries already, and when we saw the iPod we realized just how transformative it could be.

Every five years when we hit an anniversary, I struggle to recontextualize the iPod. But this year, for the 25th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about Apple’s little music player a lot more.

That’s because I ended up writing a 12,000-word script for the current series of Designed in California about the origins of the iPod, leading up to its announcement on Oct. 23, 2001, and its release a couple of weeks later.¹ I’ve had the iPod front and center in my brain for a while now, in a way it hasn’t been for years.

While Apple had (famously) experimented with non-Mac handheld devices—“Eat Up Martha!”—the iPod was the one that stuck, and changed the company’s fortunes. It’s the moment Apple Computer began its irrevocable journey from being a Mac-only company to becoming Apple Inc., a company that makes all sorts of connected devices.

In researching the Designed in California series, I was struck by just how quickly the iPod’s importance was overshadowed by the iPhone. There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.

That’s a shame, in a way, because I think people who didn’t live through this era don’t understand just what a hit the iPod was. It completely changed Apple’s fortunes, rehabbed its brand identity, gave people reasons to go into Apple’s relatively new retail stores for the first time, and taught Apple lessons that it needed to learn before it could build a smartphone. (The iPhone’s hardware was largely built by the iPod team, even if the software came from the Mac.)

I’m also struck by how quickly Apple built the iPod. It basically went from idea to product launch in a year. I will admit that things were different then, and Apple’s current scale complicates its ability to launch any product quickly—but even new CEO John Ternus seems to agree that the company should be able to move faster when it needs to.

Not every product can, or should, be made at a breakneck pace. But Apple should have the ability to shift into that higher gear from time to time, when the opportunity arises. I’m not sure today’s Apple is wired that way, and maybe remembering how quickly the iPod came to fruition could serve as a little bit of a prod for Apple to work on getting that capability back.

(If you want to hear much, much more about the iPod, I recommend you listen to or watch the current series of Designed in California.)