By Glenn Fleishman

April 13, 2026 9:30 AM PT

Change what Time Machine backs up

Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.

Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.¹ I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.

Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.

Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.

Via the main System Settings interface

Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.

As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.

You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are excluded from Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.

Dial in your Time Machine exclusions

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)

For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:

tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item

Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item

The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the absolute path.

A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:

1. In the Finder, select a file or folder.
2. Hold down the Option key and choose Edit.
3. Note the Copy “name” as Pathname option: choose it. You can also press Command-Option-C.

The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:

/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png

If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:

tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item

You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.²

For further reading

Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.

[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.]

By Jason Snell

April 8, 2026 10:08 AM PT

Rethinking RSS, newsletters, and how I read every morning

Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.

Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.

It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

This makes me realize that, rather than being frustrated that so many of my news sources these days offer newsletters but not RSS feeds, I might actually be better off subscribing to more newsletters, and unsubscribing from the equivalent RSS feeds of those sources. Yes, I’m frustrated that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t offer RSS, but it offers several daily newsletters that pop up in my newsreader in the morning, featuring links I can tap on to read stories in its app or on its website. Maybe that’s… better?

Similarly, I’ve started to look at some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and realize that they’re just not important enough to drop multiple items in my feed over the course of a day. I’d actually rather have their posts collected into a bundle, whether that’s via a newsletter, my reader app, or some sort of script I write that turns the source’s new posts into a list of links.

That’s not quite the same thing as what Godier is trying to do, but it’s similar, because it suggests that the big-list-of-posts interface for RSS readers might not be quite right. If my RSS reader offered me the ability to select certain RSS feeds and display them as a single summary item with links to the stories, that would probably fit better into my reading approach. (And again, I can probably code up a simple script that generates these newsletter-like summaries and sends them to Feedbin.)

While I didn’t end up clicking with Current, I really like how Godier is challenging the entire idea of the “email inbox” RSS interface that’s been predominant forever. My insertion of newsletters into my Feedbin interface was the first clue that what I want to do is not actually read RSS, I want to read what I want using an app that makes that easy.

What is that app? What would we even call it? If it’s all email newsletters, should I just be reading in my mail client every morning? Mail clients are nice and all, but I wouldn’t call them optimized for longer-form reading. Read-later apps like Instapaper are sort of similar, but focused more on long-term storage. News apps tend to be siloed or impossible to personalize. (I am not visiting Apple News in the morning.)

I don’t have an answer here, but I’m enjoying the uncertainty. After five years of a system that has served me pretty well, I’m realizing that it’s got more rough edges than I had really noticed before. It’s okay, but it should be a lot better.

Maybe we should all revisit the assumptions we make about when and how we read. That was really Terry Godier’s point, and it’s a good one.

By Dan Moren

April 7, 2026 2:34 PM PT

A PC user spends two weeks with the MacBook Neo

Like millions of people around the world, I have a mixed marriage: I’ve long used Macs, but my wife Kat’s personal computer is a Windows PC.

That categorization isn’t entirely fair, though—because Kat also uses an iPhone and wears an Apple Watch every single day. We have an Apple TV in the living room and a HomePod mini in the kitchen. She’s certainly no stranger to the world of Apple devices. If anything, the Lenovo laptop that largely lives underneath our TV is the odd one out in the house.

When we bought her that laptop for personal use a year or so back, price was one of the primary drivers—until the MacBook Neo, the $500-ish computer range was a market in which Apple simply didn’t compete. But when the Neo arrived last month, I thought this seemed like an ideal time to see what would happen if we took advantage of Apple’s two-week return period and tried to replace her personal PC with a Mac. So, I ran down to our Apple Store one Sunday and picked up an Indigo MacBook Neo with 512GB of storage for her to put through its paces.

This wasn’t just an opportunity for her, though—it was also a chance for me to see what it was like for someone who has largely only used a Mac in passing to switch up their habits and use it full time. The result was, honestly, illuminating. In addition to jotting down some thoughts about our experiment, we’ve also recorded a podcast in which Kat and I discussed her experience, including what won her over and what areas didn’t quite work for her.

Making the jump

One thing that jumped out at me when I was first helping her set up the MacBook Neo was the acclimation process. There are plenty of things that we long-time Mac users take for granted as the way things work, but if you’re switching from another platform, they can seem not only unobvious, but downright hostile.

For example, I noticed she ran into a lot of problems with two-finger clicking. Apple’s trackpads are often considered best of breed, but they can be jarring to somebody who’s not used to them. She would frequently bring up context menus by accident, because she’s used to resting her second finger on or near the trackpad while clicking. This is one of those habits that simply takes time and muscle memory to adapt to, but it can definitely get in the way when all you’re trying to do is click a button.

Sometimes there are larger differences that just need to be re-learned. For example, Windows has long featured a very keyboard-driven interface in which you can access most of the drop-down menus without resorting to using a pointing device. While this is technically possible in macOS, it’s not quite the same: either you have to use some specific workaround like using the Command-? shortcut to access the Help menu and then search or use the arrow keys, or you have to enable macOS’s Full Keyboard Access, which is an extreme option that can really disrupt the user interface.

We also ran into some idiosyncrasies that seemed particular to this experience. For example, this version of the MacBook Neo shipped with the previous version of the iWork apps, before their inclusion in the Creator Suite. Not only did this lead to some weirdness where you opened an app and were immediately told to download a different version of that app, but there was some sort of bug upon first run that really degraded the performance: in Numbers, for example, we dealt with repeated spinning beachballs as we tried to do anything as simple as enter data into a cell. It’s the kind of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, even if subsequent uses later in the week were fine.

It’s the ecosystem

As for the positives, they tended to fall into two categories. The first I’ll call “quality of life” advantages. The build of the MacBook did not go unnoticed, with the solidity of its aluminum chassis and a keyboard that she deemed excellent. (She remarked several times on how much she enjoyed its clicky-clacky nature.) The Neo also runs far cooler than her Lenovo laptop, despite its lack of fan, and has a vastly superior battery life.

She, did, however knock the MacBook Neo on one hardware feature—or lack thereof. And no, it wasn’t the two USB-C ports or that one is slower than the other. It’s the lack of a touchscreen. That’s a feature that even budget PC laptops have had for a long time, and Apple—arguably the king of touchscreens!—has refused to bring to its computer platform. Coming from the Windows side, I can understand how weird that is—at least for now.

But the biggest win were what I’d call the ecosystem advantages. Since Kat already uses an iPhone and an Apple Watch, having all her passwords synced and at her fingertips—literally, since I sprang for the model with the Touch ID sensor—was deemed life-changing. Likewise, the ability to use apps like Messages on her Mac and have it seamlessly integrate with her phone was a real plus. However, we did run into one small hiccup there: at first, Messages wasn’t showing names of contacts; we discovered that was because Contacts had only synced about a dozen address records. After some further poking around, it turned out that most of her contacts were stored not in iCloud, but in her Google account. Once we set that up to sync, things worked fine, but it was another hoop to jump through to get everything working properly.

Similarly, she really appreciated the integration with Apple Pay and Touch ID. That’s a workflow she’s gotten very used to on her iPhone and Apple Watch, and its ease and simplicity is familiar—and equally good—on the Mac.

Where the Mac doesn’t always Excel

However, despite her generally positive reception to the MacBook Neo—which I think surprised even her—Kat was equally adamant that one place she’d never be able to use the machine is in her work. The main reason: Excel.

Kat spends a lot of her professional life in Excel, doing work like finance or advanced modeling—tasks that I cannot even pretend to understand. Now, Microsoft does of course make a version of Excel for the Mac. However, while it shares most of the same features as its Windows counterpart, most is not all. One key feature that she relies on in her work is a slew of powerful keyboard shortcuts that simply have no Mac equivalent.

I couldn’t believe this was the case in the year 2026, but sure enough. I even uncovered a Reddit post detailing this discrepancy, which itself links to a very lengthy Microsoft support document on all the keyboard shortcuts.

While you could laboriously remap many of these options to a Mac keyboard, the question simply becomes: why? In the strange eventuality where she was forced to use a Mac for her work, it would probably be far more expedient to simply run a Windows version of Excel in an emulation environment than create bespoke equivalents. But retraining all her muscle memory and skills? That’s a non-starter.

Goodbye, MacBook Neo

After two weeks, I’m sad to say the MacBook Neo was packed back in its box and returned to the Apple Store to spend more time with its family. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the poor Windows users.

Honestly, this wasn’t a slight on the Neo itself—the simple truth is that Kat just doesn’t use her personal laptop for much. In fact, the biggest competition to the Neo was not the Lenovo, but her iPhone, which is where she does most of her everyday computing tasks. Like many of us, she’s gotten used to a life that’s phone-first and only turns to a computer when she really needs something like a keyboard.

Ultimately, were that Lenovo to break tomorrow¹, Kat deemed that she would be tempted—perhaps even likely—to replace it with a MacBook Neo. But as it stands today, that PC is still alive and kicking, and thus we don’t have the need to buy a replacement that will, itself, barely get used.

Despite the Neo’s return, I consider the experiment to be an overall success. For someone who has long been frustrated with her experience using a Mac whenever she had to sit down at my desk², Kat ended up surprisingly pleased with the Neo. Were she to end up using a Mac more, I believe she might even find herself delighted with all the other features she has yet to discover. It gives me hope that our house may still someday be united in platform harmony.

[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 Glenn Fleishman

April 6, 2026 11:19 AM PT

Stolen Device Protection may protect you from accessing your own device

You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.

Alternatively, you may not have noticed this—several sites reported in February 2026, during the 26.4 beta testing period, that Stolen Device Protection was automatically enabled in the update. Or a dark pattern—a user-interface design that pushes you to a particular decision without removing one or more others—may have caused you to opt in. However, I’ve found no confirmation from Apple, nor do various sites that write about Apple have a definitive answer!

So this is a good time to review Stolen Device Protection, whether or not you had it enabled without your permission.

One who steals my iPhone, steals my Apple Account

Months after a report in the Wall Street Journal about multiple people being assaulted or shoulder surfed to unlock a stolen iPhone, and from there to hijack the owner’s Apple Account, Apple added Stolen Device Protection. This feature flipped the script on iPhone authentication, requiring Face ID or Touch ID to access certain features or make significant changes—a passcode no longer sufficed. It also added a cooldown period, requiring a one-hour delay in many circumstances before those biometrically authenticated actions could occur.

The scenarios are very straightforward:

• Shoulder surfing: You’re at a bar with someone, and a stranger offers to take your picture. Your hand them your iPhone, and they make some attempt and say it’s locked. They hand it back and you enter your passcode. Now they take your photo—and run off with your phone, or someone later grabs it when you’re distracted. What might have happened is that they intentionally locked the phone, and a nearby confederate is using their iPhone or another device to zoom in and record high-resolution video of you as you enter your code.
• Violence: The Wall Street Journal’s account included instances of people being drugged at bars or at people’s homes, then convinced to give out their passcode. If drugging failed, or sometimes instead of it, violence or coercion is used. As recently as February 2025, a news report from Minneapolis quoted both law enforcement and victims.

With a passcode, those with criminal intent can access all sorts of stuff stored on your phone, including bank accounts, and use Apple Pay. What’s worse is that the Wall Street Journal reports documented that with a passcode, a thief or attacker could initiate an Apple Account reset, allowing them to hijack your account, change its password, and render it inaccessible to you—perhaps forever! (Apple is being sued about recovering such stolen accounts.)

Now, it’s unclear how many people suffered this kind of crime. It might have been dozens or hundreds—maybe it was thousands? There’s no comprehensive law-enforcement data, and Apple has offered no insight. Stolen Device Protection can cause minor to major inconveniences, depending on which features you can’t use for an hour, so I assume Apple found the issue significant enough to roll it out in 2024—and to push people to enable it in 2026, if not enable it for them.

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

If you have Stolen Device Protection enabled or want to, let’s go over what that entails.

Manage Stolen Device Protection

On your iPhone, go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection. If it’s disabled and you want to turn it on, you will be unable to do so if you don’t meet a number of requirements:

• Two-factor authentication on Apple Account: Nearly everyone has enabled this, or Apple has upgraded them to it.
• iPhone passcode: If you don’t have a passcode, I’m not sure we should be friends anymore.
• Biometrics: Face ID must be enabled; or, with older iPhones, Touch ID.
• Significant Locations: A slightly obscure feature, you find this in Settings: Privacy & Security: Location Services: System Services: Significant Locations & Routes.¹ Apple stores this information only on your devices, and uses end-to-end encryption to sync the data among them.² You can’t view these locations—only see a few recent ones, and a total number of stored records. You can tap Clear History and confirm to remove them.
• Find My: Find My has to be enabled on your iPhone, and it can’t be turned off as long as Stolen Device Protection remains on.

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

When you try to carry out certain actions, that’s when the protection kicks in. There are two kinds of deterrence:³

• Biometrics required (always): If you try to use stored passwords or passkeys from the Passwords app, view the virtual card number assigned to an Apple Card or Apple Cash, or try to disable Lost Mode in Find My, among other actions, you must use Face ID or Touch ID. A password won’t suffice. If someone stole your passcode and iPhone, they don’t have your face or fingertip.⁴
• Security Delay: For other tasks, a one-hour countdown timer starts if you have Always enabled or set to Away from Familiar Locations and are in such a place. At the end of that timer, you must use Face ID or Touch ID before proceeding. This includes updating your Apple Account password or signing out of your Apple Account on the device, turning off Stolen Device Protection (a little meta, there), or adding or removing Face ID or Touch ID. This makes it much harder for a thief to perform any critical action. In case of drugging, that has sometimes included still being in proximity of the person—why not add light kidnapping to assault?—but that appears to be rare.

I suspect that with Stolen Device Protection, a thief flings the iPhone away as soon as possible, except in even rarer circumstances than the above.

If you’re not typically in environments in which you might be at risk of the specific kind of theft or violence discussed above, Stolen Device Protection can be overkill and a pain. As noted above, I do spend most of my time at my house, working from a home office, and I avoid crowded bars and other venues.

However, if you like the additional protection and are willing to deal with the timeout or location-based iffiness of Stolen Device Protection, turn it on and give it a try, if Apple hasn’t already done so for you or snookered you into it. And you can always turn it off—it just might take an hour.

For further reading

I write about all sorts of security and protection, mostly focused on people having physical proximity to your devices, in Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.

[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.]

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.]