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.]

By Will Carroll

March 26, 2026 9:30 AM PT

Vision Pro and Cosm: Two of a kind?

The Apple Vision Pro feels like a product that’s waiting for the world to catch up, but the reality is closer to the opposite. The world is waiting for a reason to use it and that reason hasn’t quite shown up yet.

There’s very little wrong with the hardware. Apple built something that works in a way first-generation devices rarely do (says the guy old enough to have bought a Newton at launch) with displays that feel natural rather than novel and an interface that disappears quickly enough to let you focus on what you’re seeing.

The problem comes the moment you take it off. There isn’t a strong pull to put it back on. It’s impressive, even remarkable in bursts, but it doesn’t yet fit into a daily rhythm. That’s not a hardware problem. It’s a content problem, and more specifically, a cadence problem. Apple has treated immersive content like a prestige release schedule, carefully curated and spaced out, which works for television but not for behavior. If you want people to build a habit around something, you need volume and consistency, not occasional brilliance. Right now, Vision Pro feels like something you check in on rather than something you live inside, and that distinction matters more than anything on the spec sheet.

Neal Stephenson’s skepticism lands because it recognizes that gap. If the content never reaches a point where it becomes necessary, the headset remains optional, and optional devices rarely scale. What’s interesting is that the missing piece isn’t hypothetical. It already exists in a different form, outside of Apple’s ecosystem, and it’s showing up in a place that Apple understands better than most companies: people paying for experience.

Cosm is the cleanest example of that. It’s easy to dismiss it a high-end gimmick, a giant dome with a better screen, but that misses what’s actually happening inside those venues. People are buying tickets, planning nights around it, treating it as something closer to attending a game than watching one. The technology matters, but the behavior matters more.

Cosm is already generating meaningful revenue and drawing repeat customers, which tells you this isn’t just novelty value. It’s tapping into something real, the idea that proximity, or at least the feeling of it, has value even when the event is happening somewhere else.

The challenge for Cosm is that scaling that experience is difficult. These are expensive builds that require the right locations, the right partnerships, and enough capital to expand without diluting the quality that makes them work in the first place.

That is exactly the kind of problem Apple has solved before. It’s not just about having the cash, though Apple certainly has that. It’s about having the discipline to build a system that can expand without losing its identity and the distribution to make it visible at scale. If Apple owned something like Cosm, it wouldn’t just be a set of venues. It would be a front door. You could put an Apple Store in the lobby and it wouldn’t feel forced. It would feel like a natural extension of the experience, a place where people encounter the hardware in the context of something they already understand.

From there, the path to the home becomes clearer. Vision Pro, or whatever lower-cost version follows, doesn’t need to stand on its own as a category. It becomes an extension of something people have already bought into. The idea of watching a game “from somewhere else” is no longer abstract because they’ve already felt it in a room with other people. At home, it becomes a different version of the same experience, missing the crowd and the waiter, but gaining convenience and access.

The critical shift is in how Apple approaches rights. Trying to own sports outright is a losing strategy. The costs are too high, the competition too entrenched, and the fragmentation too deep. Apple has made smart moves with MLS, F1, and selective partnerships, but doubling down on exclusivity won’t unlock this. The better path is to work alongside the existing ecosystem. Install Cosm camera systems at major events, not as replacements for the broadcast but as an additional layer. Let networks and leagues sell that immersive feed as a premium product, with Apple taking a share for the technology and distribution. It’s additive rather than competitive, which makes it easier to scale and harder for partners to resist.

Apple has always been at its best when it connects behavior to technology in a way that feels inevitable in hindsight. Right now, Vision Pro still feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem, or more accurately the opportunity, is already there in how people respond to immersive sports experiences. Cosm has shown that people will pay for that feeling. The hardware is close enough to deliver it at home. The gap is building the bridge between those two things in a way that feels continuous rather than experimental.

If Apple gets that right, the conversation around Vision Pro changes quickly. It stops being about whether people want to wear a headset and starts being about what they’re missing when they don’t. That’s the point where adoption tends to take care of itself.

[Will Carroll was an early writer at Baseball Prospectus who covers injuries at Under the Knife and talks about them on Injury Territory. He frequently co-hosts Downstream with Jason Snell on Relay.]

By Jason Snell

March 26, 2026 1:00 AM PT

“For All Mankind” returns with more Mars drama

The fifth season of Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” premieres March 27—really, the evening of March 26 for those of us on the West Coast. For the last few years, Dan and I have been reviewing episodes on our “NASA Vending Machine” podcast and I’m excited to have the show back.

As always, “For All Mankind” is about taking big swings. There’s always a dramatic, history-changing moment or shocking twist that’s not too far away. Set in an alternative past where the Space Race kept going after the Soviets landed on the moon (yep!), season four took us to a 2003 where Mars colonists sought more autonomy by hijacking an asteroid.

This season, which takes place in 2012, is still primarily set on Mars, though there’s also some space adventure in the offing. Apple tech fans will enjoy that we’ve finally reached the iPhone era, though the iPhones on “For All Mankind” are a little thicker than the ones we remember, and they might actually be Newtons. There are also a lot of early-2010s iMacs on display.

While the first episode has to do a lot of work reminding you of what’s happened recently and setting up the new power dynamics at play this season, subsequent episodes get pretty intense, pretty fast. At times the show plays with police procedural, mystery story, even car-chase adventure… familiar TV genre stuff, except it’s all on Mars! Mireille Enos of “The Killing” plays an important new role as an investigator for the Mars Peacekeeping force who is suspicious that several different crimes might have been committed out on the surface. There are also a bunch of returning faces, some expected and some quite surprising. (And also, yes, Joel Kinnaman is still in the show even though Ed is now basically in his eighties.)

I’ve seen the first six episodes thus far, so I don’t know where it’s all going, but I’ve sure enjoyed the ride. “For All Mankind” continues to use its alt-history setting to tell dramatic, almost operatic stories that can also disturbingly have relevance to current events in our own world.

By Joe Rosensteel

March 25, 2026 3:18 PM PT

How can Siri automate Shortcuts when it’s so opaque?

I’m pretty skeptical that Apple’s new Siri-wrapped Gemini will be able to accurately and reliably assist with automation. Gemini will be the foundation to Apple’s foundation models, but there’s no there there. Apple has no well-documented, debuggable, inspectable system to execute automation with, unless you count ancient and inscrutable AppleScript, and you shouldn’t.

Sure, LLM chatbots will spit out code (even AppleScript!) if you ask them to, but it might not work. It gets substantially worse when you’re asking LLMs questions about Shortcuts.

Go ahead and ask any chatbot to describe how to make a Shortcut to perform some automation that you’ve been wanting to do and then try to assemble what it suggests. It’s extremely tedious, prone to user error, and isn’t in any way guaranteed to work even when it’s all put together.

Agents that hook into development environments are much better than a bare chatbot because they can inspect, run, and debug the code they are generating. They aren’t perfect, but if you have an agent like Claude Code hooked up to an development tool like VS Code and start describing some Python script you want, it’ll execute and iterate until the output is what you asked for.

If humans don’t have access to documentation, to actionable debug output, logging, the ability to bypass/ignore actions as part of testing, and the ability to copy and paste snippets of code, then how can the new Siri do it?

Right now, Shortcuts works with AI models by passing some input and then receiving the output. When something goes to the model, the model transforms the data, and delivers a result back to Shortcuts. That’s a non-deterministic workflow, so any change to the model, or even just randomness in general, can produce different output. This means you can’t reliably troubleshoot or adjust it without introducing uncertainty in what new outputs you’ll get.

When working with an agent to assemble automation in an IDE, the code it builds is deterministic, so it will keep working even if the model changes. Not everything you want to automate requires LLM functionality when it runs, but not everything you automate should require hours of labor to fabricate the deterministic workflow version of it.

I really hope that the magic of new Siri isn’t going to be that it will just do things with bare actions and App Intents, magically, without any user-accessible process, or as a blob inside of a Shortcut you need to make. If I ask Siri to reorder a list, and it doesn’t do it correctly, I want to be able to access the scaffolding it created to see what went wrong, not just keep asking Siri to do it again in slightly different ways until I get output I like.

If Siri doesn’t produce anything inspectable, or it produces a Shortcut, then there’s not much work humans or AI can do to fix things.

AI cut below the rest

The problem the Shortcuts app is supposed to solve has never been solved, because no one really knows how to use Shortcuts unless they become a Shortcuts expert. Shortcuts is user-friendly in appearance, but not in practice. It’s meant to welcome people who don’t know anything about programming with its friendly drag-and-drop interface, and searchable actions panel.

Unfortunately, the names for actions don’t always say what they do, and the documentation is often a vague piece of filler that’s frequently reused for more than one Shortcut action. Even experienced programmers can get flummoxed when they try to search the available actions for seemingly standard functions, like reversing a list.

Magic connections are magic, until your script gets any longer than the length of your screen and you need to start dragging actions around, inevitably breaking connections and making unintended ones. With a text-based script you’d have to keep track of the names and spelling of your variables, but they don’t change out from under you if you add more lines of code above or below them.

You can’t do one of the most simple, and useful things in scripting, which is commenting out (ignoring/bypassing) something to test or evaluate alternatives.

A lot of the time, when people are using Shortcuts, they’re relying heavily on the run shell script action to do actual programming that lets them write normal, vanilla code, or ssh’ing into a server from iOS to do the same thing. It’s nice that Shortcuts can do that, but shell scripts aren’t cross platform, and ssh’ing into a server is in no way accomplishing Shortcuts’ mission.

Without logging, you can’t ask Siri why your automation that was supposed to run in the middle of the night didn’t run. Maybe it was a permissions issue that was never raised when the shortcut was created. You, and Siri, just don’t know.

AI rising tide lifts all boats

Again, Apple doesn’t have to do these things just for humans, or just for Siri. They are in no way mutually exclusive.

If the concern is that Shortcuts shouldn’t be like a programming language, with tracebacks, and logs which would put off “normal people” then just remember that “normal people” don’t really use Shortcuts. They ask a chatbot to just do it, and Siri, as Apple’s chatbot, could take advantage of those fiddly, programming bits and perform its role better, in a way that was auditable.

I have seen people make frantic posts on Mastodon about how AI is deskilling programmers, but the beauty of Shortcuts is that Apple already applies the deskilling at the factory.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Glenn Fleishman

March 23, 2026 9:00 AM PT

Avoid (or prefer) sharing photos from Camera with your group

I started seeing pictures in Photos that I was sure I didn’t take recently, but often of locations I knew vaguely. After a few days, I realized the issue: my older child, in college on the East Coast, and currently traveling during spring break, had a Camera setting that caused all their images to blend into a shared family library.

Fortunately, our kid is old enough, wise enough—and communicative enough with us parents—that I didn’t see anything they didn’t want me to see, but it is the kind of thing that could be awkward in some shared groups.

The issue is that the Camera app has a tiny icon that’s easy to tap and activate without realizing it. That button’s activation is then persistent for all subsequent photos you take!

Here’s how to work with this feature intentionally, and deactivate it if you never want to use it—with purpose or not!

Share with those who care

The iCloud Shared Photo Library is an oddball: you can create or belong to one, and one only, and it can be shared with the creator plus five others, who don’t need to be in your Family Sharing group, if you have one.¹ The thing that you create is called Shared Library throughout the interface.

Once you’ve created or joined a Shared Library, its availability appears in Photos on your devices with iCloud Photos enabled and, more subtly, in Camera. If you’re viewing both libraries in Photos, images from the Shared Library have the Shared Library two-person icon overlaid in the upper-right corner; videos, for some reason, do not.

On a Mac, Photos: Settings: Shared Library reveals participants and offers a Shared Library Suggestions checkbox. Enable this if you’d like your Mac to say, “Hey, maybe you should add this image to the Shared Library!” (I didn’t find this particularly useful, and disabled it.)

Go to Settings: Apps: Photos, and you’ll note an extra option on iPhones and iPads: Sharing from Camera. That’s the culprit in my offspring’s openness.

Keep Camera shots your own (or not)

You can tap Sharing from Camera or go directly to Settings > Camera: Shared Library: Sharing from Camera. With Sharing from Camera enabled, you see a yellow icon of two people side-by-side in the upper-left corner of the screen in portrait mode or the lower-left corner in landscape. Tap it to disable directly from Camera. A yellow label appears at the top of the Camera interface to indicate which library is in effect after you tap the button. When Sharing from Camera isn’t turned on, the icon appears with a line through it.

The setting is persistent within Camera, so each time you open Camera, your previous Shared Library choice remains. You can override this via Settings or by tapping the icon again.

If you never want to enable Shared Library by accident or intentionally, disable Sharing from Camera in the Photos: Sharing from Camera settings.²

If you found you put media in the Shared Library and want to return them to your own, you can fix this quite easily:

• On a Mac, select the items in Photos, and choose Image: Move X Photo(s)/Video(s) to Personal Library. You can also Control/right-click on any item in the selection.
• On an iPhone or iPad, go to the Library view in Photos, tap Select, and choose one or more items. Tap the More … icon at upper-right, and choose Move to Personal Library.

In a bit of turnabout, a few days after writing this column, I get a text from my youth: “Your photos seem to be going into my account. I think you pressed the share button in the app by accident.” D’oh!

For further reading

Our very own leader, Jason Snell, has a book that covers Shared Library and much more. Pick up a copy of Take Control of Photos to get up to speed on this and other quirky Photos features.

[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.]