By John Moltz

April 2, 2026 9:00 AM PT

Missed connections: Me and Apple

Sadly, unlike so so many of my fellow long-time Apple fans, I have no picture of me with my first Mac.

It’s probably just as well. You would not be able to handle the sheer hair of it all. Most of it on me, some of it inexplicably on the Mac. But, for the record, it was an SE FDHD with two floppy drives and an external 30 MB hard drive. I bought it used in 1990.

And I loved it.

I was hooked. It helped that I had just started grad school and could stay up all night playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Shadowgate and Strategic Conquest when I should have been studying.

I continued to buy Apple products throughout the ‘90s — an LC, then a Quadra 610, a Performa 6400, a PowerBook 520c, two Newtons and finally a Power Mac — when everyone in my family was buying PCs. (Now they’re all on Macs.)

I followed Apple rumors like crazy. Apple was working on a game system! A set-top box! Taligent was going to save the company! No, it was going to buy BeOS!

By 2001, it hit me: it was the rumors that were crazy, not me. Most of these people didn’t know what they’re talking about. I could write this stuff!

Hey! I could write this stuff!

So I did. I started writing Crazy Apple Rumors Site. And guess what? Yeah, it changed my life. But it also just led to some funny stories.

The first one I remember is after publishing a story one night (I wrote most of them after coming home from work), I woke up the day to find a message in my inbox from one Phil Schiller.

Normally that would be cool! An Apple executive! Emailing little ol’ me! Wow!

But there was a problem. The piece I had published the previous night was… less than flattering. Because the Enron trials were going on at the time and Schiller had given a speech at the annual QuickTime conference (yes, there used to be a QuickTime conference) that some said paled in comparison to a Steve Jobs show, I wrote that attendees wished Schiller had just pled the Fifth as so many Enron executives were doing.

So, when I saw his name in my inbox I did not think “Wow!” — I thought “Oh, crap.”

To his credit, Phil was extremely good natured about the jab and we went on to exchange emails over the years about various pieces I wrote. Schiller became a CARS staple, launching any number of my patented bad Photoshop jobs. My last exchange with him was to express my condolences on the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

Some of my ideas were certainly better than others. One piece joked that Apple was introducing “iPorn.” That was it. That was the joke. In my defense, I was very young.

OK, I was in my late 30s. There. Are you happy? I’m not.

To create evidence of this claim, I took a screenshot of Apple’s homepage, added a blurred out pornographic picture to it and posted it with the article. I really could have and should have been doing literally anything else.

The day after posting that gem, the phone rang. Because I had a PowerBook in for repair at the time I was thrilled to see that the caller ID read “APPLE LEG”. If only I’d known what the truncated last two letters were. Instead I naively thought “Ah! News about my repair!” It was not that at all.

When I answered the phone, the woman on the other end identified herself as being with Apple Legal.

Ah. “AL”. Those were the missing two letters. She explained she was calling to demand that I take down the screenshot of their homepage with the porn added, claiming it violated the company’s copyright on the images. Presumably the non-pornographic ones. Upon hearing this, I immediately referred her to my lawyer who informed her of the fair use doctrine and hahaha, no, I folded like a cheap suit. I hand-drew a version of the image and posted that in its place.

(It is now hilarious that one of my current beefs with the company is that it continues to offer up apps that make non-consensual porn. Who says irony is dead?)

There were many other fun stories, including the time I wrote a piece saying that, for reasons unknown, the then 43-year-old Avie Tevanian was going through puberty again; slamming doors, pouting, stomping around the Apple campus and generally making all the other executives miserable. Do I know why I wrote this? I do not. This also prompted contact from the upper echelons of Apple corporate. Tevanian emailed me the next day to point out the big mistake in my article: I got his age wrong. He was actually 42.

But the big story was the one I would not find out the rest of until watching The Talk Show Live from WWDC back in 2019 seventeen years later.

Some time around May of 2002, I got an email from Schiller asking me if I would ever consider coming to work at Apple. As someone who spent way too much time thinking about the company, it was like being asked if you want to move up to The Show. But I live in Tacoma, WA, and remote work was not on the table with Apple. My wife and I were both happy with our jobs and loved living in Tacoma (shut up). So, after sweating it for a bit, I replied that, while I was flattered, it didn’t feel like a move I was ready to take right then.

At the end I quipped something to the effect of “If my situation changes and I’m suddenly really desperate, I’ll let you know!”

What I didn’t know until Greg Joswiak told Apple’s side of this story to John Gruber is that hiring me wasn’t Schiller’s idea. Apparently they sometimes used to pass around my articles at Apple’s weekly marketing meetings and, one time, Steve Jobs read one of my pieces at a meeting. Aloud. After what I’m sure was uproarious laughter, Steve said “That guy’s a pretty good writer. Why don’t we reach out to him to see if he wants to come work at Apple?”

Schiller wasn’t just idly asking me a question about my long-term career goals. Steve Jobs was saying “Hey, dumbass, do you wanna come work here, make history and also a bazillion dollars in stock options?”

And I said…

(this is what I said)….

“Only if I get desperate!”

Well, happy 50th, Apple. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]

By Jason Snell

April 1, 2026 1:56 PM PT

Apple releases iOS 18 security updates for iOS 26 holdouts

Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices. If you’ve got auto-update turned on but have not gone through the steps to do a full upgrade to iOS 26, this update can be automatically pushed and applied. This is good news, as those who have opted not to run iOS 26 will get to take advantage of several sets of security releases.

Now the bad news: This is happening because of some really bad security breaches like DarkSword and Coruna. As Apple noted in a security update:

We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword. The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025.

Now, to be clear, security patches on an older operating system are not as effective as they are on an entirely new system, since a new OS like iOS 26 has all sorts of structural changes made for security reasons. As a new Apple security note says, iOS 26 “contains the strongest security protections.” If you’re very concerned about your iPhone being secure, updating to iOS 26 is going to make it more secure than updating to 18.7.7.

But this does mean that Apple’s patches, which seek to break the chain of bugs that led to serious security exploits, are available to many more people.

Bottom line: If you’re an iOS 26 holdout, and you’re not ready to update your iPhone, at the very least you should update to 18.7.7 and protect yourself from some seriously ugly malicious software.

By James Thomson

April 1, 2026 12:17 PM PT

Apple at 50: Gonna be, gonna be golden

A 50th anniversary is a good time to reflect on your relationships, and it seems lots of people have thoughts about their time with Apple today. I would definitely not be where I am in life without the company, for both good and bad, so here are mine.

Technically, my days with Apple started by playing games on my next-door neighbor’s Apple II in the late 70s or early 80s. When enough time has passed, the exact memories naturally become a little bit fuzzy. It was certainly before I got my own Commodore 64 in 1983, I know that much, but I don’t think I can exactly claim to have been there from the very beginning. Anyway, little did I know back then that I would actually get to house sit for the guy who designed the thing. Foreshadowing. 

My best friend’s dad was a university professor from California, and he had brought over an Apple II of some flavor. I don’t remember them being common over here otherwise—the UK had a weird home computer industry all of its own, but this was probably just the perspective of a little kid who only wanted to play video games.

I eventually graduated from my C64 to an Atari STe around 1989, which had many better games than a Mac, and built-in MIDI ports as well. It was also way cheaper than a Mac, and it was totally fine. There was a GUI and a mouse, and those are all the same anyway, right?

Then, just a year later, I started a degree in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, and back then all the computers in the labs were Macs. Generally, Mac Pluses or SE/30s, with the occasional brand new LC in the second-year labs. And so I used them, and I realized quite quickly that Atari had completely ripped off the Mac GUI, and not exactly done an amazing job of doing so. 

Continue reading “Apple at 50: Gonna be, gonna be golden”…

By Dan Moren

April 1, 2026 10:06 AM PT

Apple at 50: From rebel to empire?

As Apple hits its half-century milestone, it seems like we’re all of us waxing a bit rhapsodic about the company, its products, and their effects on our lives. So who am I to skip out on a trip down memory lane?¹

Weirdly, I was born almost perfectly in between the founding of Apple on April 1, 1976, and the release of the first Macintosh on January 24, 1984. But the former was only one of two events that occurred around that time that would go on to have a profound impact on my life. Because just over a year after Apple was founded, on May 25, 1977, came the release of the original Star Wars.

Oddly, those two events are intertwined at various points, not only with my life, but with each other. That’s true both in time and in space, where ultimately, these two influences would effectively bracket the San Francisco Bay Area, with Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch just north of the city and Cupertino to its south.

And the connection extends even further—the interplay between the rise of computer technology and its effect on modern moviemaking. John Knoll, the creator of Photoshop, would go on to work for Lucas’s groundbreaking visual effects firm, Industrial Light and Magic. A group within Lucasfilm would later evolve, with funding from Steve Jobs, into the animation studio Pixar (which, along with Lucasfilm, would be eventually acquired by Disney). I definitely had a wallpaper on my Mac in college photoshopped with Steve Jobs and George Lucas in it—what can I say, I know who I am.²

There are thematic ties, too. I wasn’t the only Mac fan amongst my friend group, but in the 1990s we were engaged in pitched battle with the behemoth that was Windows. It lent something to our identity, then—we were no less scrappy underdogs than the Rebel Alliance fighting back against the evil Empire.

(I can admit, from this later date, that I cast envious glances at my friends’ PCs, able to run games like TIE Fighter and Might and Magic, while I had to wait for those to come to my platform—if they ever did. As the years went on, I persevered, reading my monthly issues of Macworld cover to cover, devouring books like the Macintosh Bible and digging up weird shareware, as though I could keep the company going through my sheer persistence.)

For a large part of my childhood, both Apple and Star Wars struggled, falling upon hard times. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, there were no more Star Wars movies. Meanwhile, Apple nearly tumbled into oblivion.

I vividly remember sitting in our kitchen one morning, listening to the news on the radio while my dad made his coffee, and hearing a dire story about Apple. My dad, knowing my enthusiasm for the company, asked if I thought it would survive—maybe the first time I felt like he’d ever asked me a real opinion on something happening in the world.

I won’t say that it had never occurred to me that it was possible Apple would cease to exist, but it was something I didn’t really have the tools to process. So, naturally, I assumed it would survive somehow, as unlikely as that seemed—as sure as there would be new Star Wars movies someday. The narrative’s stronger when you’re a kid, when you don’t really understand how the world works and your only real templates are stories.

So I closely followed all the developments of those dark times: the transition to the Power Macs, the attempts to create a modern successor to Mac OS, devouring every tidbit of information with no less fervor than how I digested every new Star Wars novel. Any port in a storm.

And then in another close coincidence that is too strange for fiction, dual lights at the end of the tunnel: just as Steve Jobs returned to the company he’d founded, George Lucas announced that a trilogy of Star Wars movies was on the horizon. It seemed that faith had been rewarded and hope was once again on the horizon.³

Staying foolish

My life has always been kind of a push and pull between these two influences—forces, if you will⁴—of technology and storytelling: Venn diagram circles with an overlap sometimes larger or smaller. As a teenager, I both wrote and distributed some really terrible shareware on local BBSes and, for several years, collaborated with one of my best friends to publish an online magazine for sci-fi and fantasy.⁵

In college, I majored in English because I loved writing stories, but almost all my work experience, starting in late high school, was in tech: a nascent web company, IT work at a university library during summers and vacations, teaching fellow students about technology at my college. Freshman year, I got a reputation as the English major who would fix all the computers of the engineers on our floor—even though I was only one of a handful who had brought a Mac to college amidst the sea of beige—or, increasingly, translucent blue plastic⁶—PCs.

Even after college, I worked in IT and web development while toiling away on my first novel. The first piece I ever had published was about Star Wars and it led to the conviction that I could get a job writing—and it just so happened that job was writing about Apple. The rest, as they say, is history.

Always in motion is the future

As this milestone has approached, I’ve wrestled with my own feelings about Apple. Last year, as I wrapped up my ten-year stretch as a columnist at Macworld, I wondered whether we should even be fans of a company. A year on, I feel even more confident in my conclusion that it’s probably unwise to allow your identity to be dictated in any small part by a for-profit corporation whose needs will not ultimately be aligned with yours.

Frankly, it’s a conversation I’ve had to have about Star Wars over the years—more than once.

The truth is I still view myself as an enthusiast of Apple and of Star Wars, even today. Without the former, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I could have devoted this many years of my life to writing and talking about something for which I don’t have strong feelings. And without the latter, I don’t think I would constantly be writing stories that try to capture the way Star Wars enthralled me as a kid.

But being an enthusiast certainly doesn’t mean being uncritical—honestly, none are so critical as those who view themselves the true enthusiasts. Amidst the recent years’ resurgence of both Star Wars and Apple, there’s been no end of criticism—some certainly less well-founded than others—from those who profess themselves the most ardent enthusiasts.

However, if I can trot out another old trope, you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. That’s the knife edge Apple is poised at now; some might argue that it’s too late, that Apple has already tipped itself over onto the side of full-blown villainy.

But maybe there’s one more lesson to take away from Star Wars here: even Darth Vader managed to redeem himself in the end. You don’t have to be the scrappy underdog to make the right decision. It’s never too late to hoist the pirate flag and think different.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

April 1, 2026 9:00 AM PT

50 years later, Apple still controls its destiny

I am usually so focused on Apple’s present and future that I don’t spend a lot of time ruminating about its past. And yet, as its 50th birthday has approached, it’s been impossible not to think Big Thoughts about the Big Picture.

So here’s one: Apple has been remarkably consistent — across 50 years and numerous CEOs and the vast sweep of late-20th- and early-21st-century history — in a few key areas. The people change (except Chris Espinosa!), but some of the ideas have managed to stay the same. And I think that’s meaningful.

Here’s what it boils down to: Apple is a company that chooses to build the whole product, while controlling its own destiny. That was true in the 1970s, it’s still true today, and it’s perhaps the company’s definitive trait.

In the olden days…

The early personal computer market was a hodgepodge. Different companies rose and fell, all offering different devices that were essentially self-contained and proprietary—compatibility across devices was almost nonexistent. Even programs written in the same language might not run across different systems, since they might each implement the languages differently.

During those days, Apple was playing the game that pretty much everyone else does. Sure, there were some computers using the standardized CP/M operating system—you could install a card on an Apple II to let it run CP/M, even!—but mostly you got what you got when you bought the box. Apple IIs ran Apple stuff, TRS-80s ran TRS-80 stuff, the Atari 400 ran Atari stuff, Commodore PETs ran Commodore stuff… that was it.

But in the early 80s, almost the entire computer industry got flattened, and the reason was the IBM PC. Not that IBM did the flattening itself, but it had that effect: Since the IBM PC had been created using standard computer parts in order to get it out quickly, it became relatively easy for any other company to build equivalents. Its operating system was not actually owned by IBM, but was created by an upstart software company called Microsoft.

What happened next changed the entire computer market: Dozens of companies began making IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS from Microsoft. The generic Microsoft/Intel PC was born, and almost every other competitor was ruined. Atari and Commodore hung on for a while, but by the early ’90s, there were only pretty much two kinds of personal computers anyone would seriously consider buying: IBM PC compatibles running Microsoft software, or the Mac.

That was it. The rest of the market had capitulated. Only Apple hung on. And as someone who started writing about Apple during that time, I can tell you that nobody expected Apple to make it. Analysts either wrote that Apple should become like the other PC makers and just license Microsoft Windows, or that Apple should become like Microsoft and just license Mac OS to PC makers. Those were the choices.

Apple, to its immense credit, stayed true to itself. (Let’s not mention that brief dalliance with Mac clones.)

The whole widget

To me, this is the core of what Apple is as a company: It makes the whole product. It is not a licensee adding value, like so many of its competitors. This is an attitude that started with Woz designing the hardware and software to work together, leaving a deep impression on Steve Jobs. That impression combined with Jobs’s innate focus on creating a complete product (in an era where most computers were still sold as assemble-it-yourself “kits”) and created an enduring legacy.

People often call Apple’s obsession with owning and controlling the primary technologies behind its products the Cook Doctrine, after current CEO Tim Cook, but that’s a value that goes back to Steve Jobs. Among the more modern examples of this approach:

• Safari came to be because, as the Web rose to prominence, the Mac was increasingly judged based on its performance at Web browsing, and the default Mac browser was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s allocation of Mac development resources helped determined the success of Apple’s key product. That was a no-go.

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) exist because it means that every Mac, iPhone, and iPad can work with Microsoft Office apps and documents right out of the box, without any extra purchase required. In releasing its own productivity suite, Apple provided instant Office compatibility and no longer needed to rely on Microsoft to do the right thing with its Mac software releases.

• Apple silicon itself is Apple’s reaction to being held hostage by the long-term plans of chip suppliers who didn’t have Apple’s interests at heart. Every Intel chip that appeared in a Mac came from an Intel road map that was built based on the overall needs of the computer market, of which Apple was a tiny part. Every Apple silicon chip in a Mac comes from Apple’s own product road map, and the chip improvements are based entirely on Apple’s needs and synchronized with Apple’s software-development road map.

• The C1/C1X chips that serves as the cellular connection in the iPhone 16e, iPhone 17e, iPhone Air, M4 iPad Air, and M5 iPad Pro—and will eventually power every new Apple device with cellular connectivity—is a reaction to Apple’s frustration with the dominant cellular radio provider, Qualcomm. Apple can now tune its own cellular chips to its own specific needs rather than relying on the parts Qualcomm builds for the entire market.

(Are AI models a primary technology? Who knows. Apple tried to build some, failed, and has decided to pivot to use Google’s AI models… for now. But if Apple ever feels that it absolutely has to have its own AI models running on its devices and in its data centers, I have no doubt that it will spend whatever it costs to make that happen. It’s just in the company’s DNA.)

You may have your own favorite examples of Apple going its own way, and counter-examples of Apple going with the crowd. Certainly, Apple has chosen to pick its battles. The G3 iMac, for example, dumped all the proprietary connectivity that Macs used to have, and just supported the industry-standard USB. Compatibility can be valuable to Apple, to a point. But beyond that point, the company knows it must go it alone—or it’ll end up being just another face in the crowd.

Over 50 years, that’s one thing that has remained true about Apple: You never forget that you’re using an Apple product. It doesn’t do generic—not in 1976, and not in 2026.

By Philip Michaels

April 1, 2026 7:00 AM PT

Apple at 50: My 10 most memorable moments

It’s Apple’s 50th anniversary — you might have read something about that lately. And I’ve been writing about the company for more than half of that time, roughly 27 years if my math is correct. Companies may last a good long while, particularly when they have a track record of great products, but the writers who report on them invariably crumble to dust.

Still, my bones haven’t entirely blown away in the lightest of breezes just yet, so I figured I would weigh in with a few insights gleaned from chronicling Cupertino’s comings and goings for half my existence on this planet. Honestly, I might as well get something out of the deal.

The challenge is, you’ve probably had your fill of listicles chronicling Apple’s Best Products of All Time or the Most Memorable TV Commercials or Steve Jobs’s Most Viral Moments or what have you. I know that I have. Besides, while I know my onions when it comes to Apple, my opinion on the most significant Apple product (the iPhone 3G) or the best commercial (the sage iMac G3 serenaded by Kermit the Frog, naturally) or the most memorable thing Steve Jobs ever said (“Just avoid holding it that way”) carries no more weight than anyone else’s. In fact, there are folks whose Apple knowledge is far more encyclopedic than my own who are better equipped to weigh in on all that.

But what I can do is empty out my reporter’s notebook, with some random stories, stray observations and items I’ve largely kept to myself over the last 27 years. With tech reporting seemingly done with me, there’s no reason to keep this stuff under my hat any longer.

The occasion may call for 50 of these — one for each year of Apple’s existence — but let’s be honest: you’d stop reading after around 17, and I’d be scrapping the bottom of the tank long before we got to the last item or two. (“No. 33: Didja ever notice that Apple employed both a guy called Woz and a guy called Joz? That’s pretty weird, huh?”) So let’s stick with 10 random thoughts about Apple as the company celebrates its golden anniversary.

Continue reading “Apple at 50: My 10 most memorable moments”…

By Shelly Brisbin

April 1, 2026 6:00 AM PT

Another life changed by the Mac

When I saw my friend Antony Johnston’s post on Six Colors, I instantly thought, “yeah, me too.” And as it happens, the very Mac model that changed Antony’s life put me on an entirely new road, too.

Just before I got my journalism degree in 1984, a professor named Jim Haynes sat me down and warned me that I would have more trouble finding a job than almost anyone in my class because I have low vision. I choose to believe that he meant it kindly, a warning to get ahead of any potential employers’ doubts, rather than as a pessimistic prediction about my future.

But he was right. My job search was painfully long, and I realized that at least part of the struggle had to do with the expectation that young communications specialists working for non-profits or government – a niche I thought I could play in – needed to physically paste up newsletters, brochures and other typeset publications. I’d already learned how unsuited I was for that during a college internship, what with the need to cut straight lines of galley copy and wield an X-acto knife on rubylith. I simply wasn’t equipped to do that sort of visual work.

Somewhere along the way, I went to an Apple demo of something called “desktop publishing.” With a Macintosh computer and a high-resolution printer called a LaserWriter, you could design, lay out and print a complete publication — no knives required. When I arrived for the demo, I was intrigued. By the time I left, I would have sold a kidney for a Mac-LaserWriter combo.

In my unemployed state, the only available source of funds was my parents. Ever the practical sort, they suggested that I learn more about what I now knew as DTP, before they would be willing to hand over more than $6,000 for my pipe dream.

So I rented my first Mac (a 512Ke), a copy of PageMaker 1.2, and an external floppy drive. The guy I rented it from, Robert Jagitsch, would go on to found PowerLogix, a company that sold Mac processor accelerators. I used to run into him at Macworld Expo in the 90s. But just then, his stock of Mac stuff for sale or rent appeared to live in the trunk of his car.

Without a LaserWriter, I couldn’t do much more than teach myself PageMaker. But my local AlphaGraphics offered laser prints for $1 a page. It didn’t take me long to realize I might be able to make desktop publishing work as a freelance business.

Pretty soon, my mom – who had given my sister a used VW Rabbit during college – agreed to fund a brand-new Mac Plus. It was my equivalent “welcome to adulthood” gift. I added PageMaker and a SuperMac DataFrame hard drive that cost an eyewatering $625 for 20 megabytes.

I launched the publishing business, creating everything from brochures to fancy reports for graduate students to newsletters for a city council member. AlphaGraphics was still my source for laser prints, but I quickly fell in with a group of interlocking businesses that offered scanning, full-service printing and access to Linotype typesetters that offered 1200 dpi output, versus the LaserWriter’s 300 dpi.

Eventually – four years out of college – I landed my first full-time professional job. With a Mac Plus on my desk, I edited and laid out monthly trade magazines for enthusiasts of supercomputers, DEC minicomputers and various UNIX systems. Despite a solid portfolio of published writing, I could never have talked my way into that gig without my Apple desktop publishing skills. Those years I spent at home cranking out newsletters had also made me a pretty good Mac system administrator and troubleshooter – skills that have followed me throughout my career

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Antony Johnston

March 31, 2026 4:00 AM PT

This machine changed my life

Let me tell you how the Mac changed my life.

In 1988 my high school form tutor, who was also head of the art department, got a Mac Plus. It was the only one in the school, as the computer room was all BBC Micros. In fact, so he said, it was one of the only school-owned Macs in England. It was kept in a locked office room, annexed off his classroom.

I loved playing computer games, and like all kids, I’d messed around with typing in BASIC programs from magazines. But whenever I strayed beyond the simple commands – LOAD, SAVE, PRINT, GOTO – I was out of my depth. I’ve never been able to get my head around DOS-like command line interfaces, let alone programming languages. They just don’t make sense to me, I’m all at sea.

(I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because I always looked at computers as a tool, a way to do something, rather than a thing to do.)

So I don’t know why my tutor showed off that Mac to me, of all people. But I was gobsmacked by the visual interface and the tangibility of its spatial permanence model. ‘This icon here is your file. This window represents the space inside a folder. If you move the file into the folder, it will still be there, in that same visually-defined place, when you look inside again later.’

I know that sounds like the simplest, most obvious thing now, but in the 1980s it really wasn’t. Crucially, unlike a command line, it made sense to me.

So I was sold on the interface. But then what really blew my mind were the programs you could run on this thing. MacPaint. MacWrite. PageMaker. And the fonts! 12 different fonts you could place anywhere, change their size, make (some of) them bold or italic… again, this is simple and obvious stuff now, but not then.

For some reason, I don’t think any other pupils really took to that Mac. But I was hooked, and spent a lot of time in that cramped office room. I proceeded to use the Mac Plus’s tiny mono bitmap screen, paltry RAM, and single floppy drive to design and lay out two school magazines, one edition of the sixth-form ‘zine, and several judges’ pamphlets for the annual music and drama festivals¹ – plus a bunch of, um, extracurricular stuff for my regular RPG gaming group: character sheets, combat resolution tables, equipment lists…

The ironic thing is, at no point did anyone tell me that what I was doing with this Mac could be a career. My work experience at the local newspaper had shown me that ‘layout’ was something done by chain-smoking men using bromides, cow gum, and rubylith – not computers. The very thought! So after flunking my A-levels (too much partying, not to mention fooling around on that Mac), I was a little unmoored and took the first office job I saw that sounded vaguely interesting: selling stationery.

I was an OK office drone, but my creative bent was obvious to everyone. My free time back then was dominated by games, music, and art. So, encouraged by my boss to go back to school and do something creative, I flicked through the local art college brochure… and found a course called ‘graphic design’. It even mentioned using Macs. Suddenly, I was back in that annexed room, designing a school magazine, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is how small the window of time and opportunity was where all of this could happen. Much earlier, and Macs barely existed; much later, and they were already in professional use everywhere. I was lucky enough to be right in that sweet spot.

I’ve been a professional writer for 30 years now, full-time for 24. That’s how most everyone knows me. But for almost a decade prior to that, I was a graphic designer at various agencies and publishers, eventually specialising in magazines. It was working in those places that gave me access to the net, and an online community that encouraged me to take fiction writing seriously. (Shout-out to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo!)

There’s a whole chain of happenstance and chance events, too long to go into here, that led to me eventually being published. But if you follow it back far enough, that chain started with my form tutor introducing me to a strange new computer, which changed my life.

Happy birthday, Apple.

[Antony Johnston is a multi-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of books, videogames, graphic novels, and more. Can You Solve the Murder? is available now in all good bookstores and online.]

By Jason Snell

March 30, 2026 10:00 AM PT

Apple at 50: Some great Apple history books

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:

• West of Eden (1989) by Frank Rose. A recommendation from Stephen Hackett, this book focuses on Steve Jobs hiring John Sculley, which in turn led to Steve Jobs’s own ejection from Apple. (Amazon, used.)

• 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.)

By Glenn Fleishman

March 30, 2026 9:30 AM PT

Time for your meds, Mr. Fleishman

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):

• I flew across three time zones, from Pacific to Eastern. I was not alerted by Medications about the time zone change.
• I arrived in Boston, and with Settings > General > Date & Time’s Set Automatically option enabled, my iPhone and Apple Watch updated to EDT.
• The next morning, I forgot for the first time in seemingly years to take my morning meds.
• Later that morning, at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT), I must have received an alert that I missed. Medications alerts aren’t persistent in quite the same way as other notifications.

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 glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]