By Jason Snell

June 3, 2026 4:09 PM PT

Road to WWDC 2026: What’s a developer?

Next week is WWDC, which has always represented Apple’s connection to its community of third-party developers, and in recent years has also served as the official start of Apple’s annual operating-system cycle.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of the D in WWDC a lot more. Developers aren’t all programmers, but many of them are. The programmers have always created the code that runs the apps that run on our devices. And yet, this year, things have changed an awful lot.

These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.

Of course, it’s happening because of AI.

Not just AI for the emails I get, though to be clear, I am being inundated with emails that purport to be from humans but are very much the product of an AI agent trying to add a personal touch to media pitches. (It’s a shame, because I used to really be impressed when an actual human emailed me about their product. Those people are entirely invisible now, lost in the wash of the AI pitches. I couldn’t tell the difference if I tried, so good are the imitations.)

But it’s also clear that a decent percentage of these new apps is being generated, in whole or in part, by an AI code assistant. Mac users—some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives—are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.

We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.

Focus on the vision

Federico Viticci of MacStories recently released a command-line app that uses all features of Reminders. He previously released Shortcuts Playground, which lets you generate shortcuts with AI coding assistants. My pal Lex Friedman just released Gnome, a vibe-coded GIF menu bar utility. On the Six Colors Podcast last week, Dan Moren mentioned that he’s been using AI to build himself a simple ePub ebook reader that fulfills his very specific needs as a writer.

And, yes, a couple of weeks ago, I made a Mac app of my own, using Claude Code. I can’t say that I wrote it, because I didn’t write a line of Swift code. It would be more accurate to say that I envisioned it, or produced it, or product-managed it. I knew what I wanted, described it in detail to an AI assistant, iterated a whole lot, and ultimately got something that basically does everything I imagined it would do.¹

It was an astounding experience. I have been using Mac apps for nearly 40 years, but I have never come close to writing one. AppleScript scripts and Automator actions are as close as I’ve ever come. But this week, I sat down at my desk with just an idea, and a couple of hours later, I had a completely functional (if ugly and incomplete) app that did exactly what I wanted it to do.

The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only one part of a much larger process. Great developers aren’t necessarily great coders, though they can be. Apps must be envisioned, their specifications defined. The act of trying to describe an app to an AI coding engine is a clarifying one. The more you describe the app, the harder your brain has to work, because it’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The decisions you make determine what the app comes to be. It’s authorship of a sort, but defined in a way that takes the writing of code out of the equation, which is weird, since the act of coding has usually been an inextricable part of the process of making software.

I guess it still is, but sometimes a human isn’t writing that code.

I have no illusions that the code AI code engines generate is flawless and beautiful, though it may yet improve. If I hired a developer to write my app for me, they might very well create cleaner code than Claude did. But I’d never hire someone to build such a minor app, and no human programmer could generate it in a few hours for the $30 cost of a Claude Pro subscription.

Whatever you call it, whether it’s being a producer or product manager or something else that isn’t a programmer, creating good software in the AI era still requires the power of a human brain: being creative, solving problems, and making decisions. Some people will be better at it than others. It’s a skill, and a bit of an art. I’m excited that modern coding tools have given people with vision and desire the ability to make software.

The next step for developers

Which brings me to a final point: Apple’s development tools, most notably Xcode, are nightmarish. My developer friends are used to them, but as someone who has never really used Xcode before, I was shocked at just how deeply unintuitive it is. As in, Claude would tell me to click on things, and I would have to reply, “I have no idea what that is or where it’s supposed to be.” And I’ve been a Mac user for a long time! I’ve gotten very good at intuiting where stuff is in a Mac interface.

Which is why one of the things Apple should be doing, as quickly as possible, is finding ways to make it easier for people to develop apps on its platforms. The Xcode learning curve is just too high. Either there needs to be a novice mode for Xcode, or Swift Playground needs to be given a boost, or a new tool needs to be built for the task.

While AI tools have made it more possible to build apps on Apple’s platforms, the developer tools themselves are still a formidable barrier. As the definition of “developer” changes, so, too, must the definition of developer tools.

The future product managers of some great Mac and iPhone apps thank you in advance.

By Jason Snell

June 1, 2026 7:31 AM PT

‘Designed in California’: Help us bring Apple history to life

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that Myke Hurley and I are launching a Kickstarter for a new podcast, Designed in California.

Myke and I have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. For Apple’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, I researched many different accounts of that era and wrote a 90-minute special episode of Upgrade. The reception to that episode was phenomenal—and we loved doing it. So we want to fund an entire year of a new podcast that will tell more stories in that vein.

We’re using Kickstarter for this project because researching and writing these scripts is quite labor-intensive, and I was hesitant to make that time commitment in the hope we would eventually build up enough of an audience to justify the large workload. We’ve set a goal that would allow us to generate thirty 30-to-45-minute episodes over the course of a year, with our first stretch goal to raise that number to a full fifty episodes in a year. (Update: Stretch goal met! Fifty episodes it is! We’re on to new stretch goals that add more content to the cast for backers.)

Kickstarter backers will help make the podcast happen. And backers at the Founding Producer tier or higher will get access to a special backers-only podcast feed for the show’s first year. This includes:

• Ad-free episode
• All episodes on a topic will drop at once in the backer feed so that you can hear the whole story; in the public feed, those episodes will release weekly
• Access to the Relay podcast network membership plan, which includes access to a Discord community and an exclusive Relay members-only podcast
• Bonus content that will be created if we hit stretch goals

We’ve already planned more than enough topics to get through year one. It’s all subject to change, but right now these include:

• The earliest days of Apple, including the release of the Apple II, the fraying of the Jobs/Wozniak friendship, and the calamitous reign of Apple’s first CEO
• How Steve Jobs ended up being ejected from the company he founded and his time in the wilderness, including the founding of NeXT
• Apple’s Mac OS crisis of the late 1990s, which ultimately led to Apple’s buying NeXT, creating Mac OS X, and bringing back Steve Jobs
• A history of Apple’s TV commercials, good and bad
• The origins of the iPod and iTunes, and how they changed how we listen to music forever
• The secret project that ultimately led to the creation of the iPhone
• The story behind why Apple is obsessed with controlling its own destiny, what’s now commonly called the “Tim Cook doctrine”, but is firmly from the era of Steve Jobs
• The long and complicated relationship between Apple and its arch-frenemy, Microsoft

During June, we’ll also be releasing several preview episodes of Designed in California as Upgrade special installments, so you can get an even clearer sense of what this podcast will be like.

One of our inspirations for this project is The Rest Is History, one of our favorite podcasts and one that has proven that an enthusiasm for history and storytelling can make for a magical experience. We want to bring this sensibility and excitement to the incredible variety of stories connected to Apple, the people who have worked to bring Apple products to life, and all the aspects of our lives that have been touched by the technology that has emerged from a few square miles near the south end of San Francisco Bay.

I realized when writing about Apple’s 50th that I’ve covered the company for roughly two-thirds of its existence. I’m looking forward to digging deep into research on topics that were before my time, and getting the chance to bring my own personal experience to bear on events I witnessed personally. And I’m hoping to tap the knowledge of many of my friends and colleagues as the project rolls along.

This will be unlike your other tech podcasts. Myke and I have built a story list that can feed several years of the show, so we know we won’t run out of material. We’d love for you to take the journey with us.

Please check out the Kickstarter at designed.fm and consider helping us make it happen.

By Jason Snell

May 21, 2026 3:30 PM PT

Apple takes soccer immersive with Real Madrid

I’ve been thinking a lot about soccer this week. My team won the Premier League for the first time since I became a fan, and they’ll play in the Champions League final later this month.

What better time to encounter Apple’s latest immersive film for Vision Pro? Spain’s Real Madrid is one of European soccer’s most decorated clubs, and it’s the subject of “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness,” out Friday. According to Apple, the 20-minute-long documentary was filmed with more than 30 Blackmagic immersive cameras to capture the fan and player of experience of Real Madrid’s Champions League match with Juventus back in October.

Apple’s immersive productions are really benefiting from the larger selection of immersive cameras, now that Blackmagic is apparently cranking out its URSA Cine camera in volume. The doc has shots from a wirecam above the pitch, various angles around the pitch, and separate cameras observing fans in a bar, a 94-year-old fan at home, and even a taxi driver watching on his phone from inside his car.

I admit that I’m still hungry for real sporting events in immersive, not short edited highlight packages interspersed with training ground footage overlaid with inspirational music and sound bites about how it’s all one for all, all for one, supporting the legacy of the team, and all the usual stuff. “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness” has all of that.

But the soccer looks great. I really, really loved watching the shots from the “suspended above the pitch” view, which gave me a perspective (literally and figuratively) on strategy that I’ve never had before. And the near-the-goal shots really show off the incredible athleticism and technique of soccer players that does not come across on most TV broadcasts, even if they’re in 4K.

Alas, Real Madrid was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Champions League this year, depriving it of its 16th title. I guess someone else will have to hoist that trophy in Budapest on May 30.

By Jason Snell

May 21, 2026 2:20 PM PT

BBEdit 16 offers speed boosts and Shortcuts and Emoji upgrades

The latest version of Bare Bones Software’s venerable text editor, BBEdit, arrived on Thursday. Version 16, the first full-version update in more than two years, offers an array of new features including dramatic performance improvements, much greater Shortcuts support via App Intents, and even support for vi keybindings.

As you might expect for an app that’s several decades old, BBEdit benefits from occasional checks by its lead developer, Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel, to see if older areas of the code are performing as well as one might expect. In this cycle, he’s looked for areas to improve performance and found several, most impressively an improvement of an order of magnitude or greater when it comes to remote file transfers via SFTP.

With Apple heading toward an automation universe where many features of apps are broken out into App Intents, BBEdit 16 offers a load of new actions accessible straight from Shortcuts, including access to some of its best text utility functions, like Delete/Extract Lines Containing and Process Duplicate Lines.

Searches in projects will now find text in images, thanks to support for Apple’s VisionKit. There’s a new index in the side of Notebooks. The app now supports separate settings to deploy projects to both test and production environments. Emoji support is seriously improved, which is great news if you’ve ever pasted an emoji into BBEdit and stared into the Zero Width Joiner abyss as your emoji was blown into its component parts.

Other new features include support for the W3C’s online HTML checker, speed improvements for AI worksheets, and with some big changes to syntax coloring. Bare Bones counts more than 100 new feature additions, cataloged by its usual detailed release notes.

Perhaps most importantly, the app—which is probably the single most important one on my Mac—offers a great many of its features for free, and has for years. In my opinion, every Mac user should have a copy of BBEdit handy.

The release of 16.0 also resets the clock on the free trial mode that lets you use all of its features. The paid version of the app is $60, and users of older versions can update for $30 (version 15) or $40 (earlier). It’s also available on the Mac App Store for a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

By Jason Snell

May 20, 2026 3:30 PM PT

Review: ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ recounts Apple founder’s tough mid-career lessons

I recently got to read an advance copy of Geoffrey Cain’s new book, “Steve Jobs In Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,” which was published this week. It’s a surprising and sometimes gruesome (in a businessy way) story that does not show off the famous man at the center of the story as much as depict all the ways he failed in what turned out to be preparation for his career-defining role as Apple CEO. (I also got to interview Cain about the book this week on Upgrade.)

Contrary to popular opinion, Jobs did not get fired from Apple—he got parked in a useless role until he quit out of frustration, as Cain recounts. Jobs was motivated to start NeXT Computer for two reasons: He saw a potential market for a high-end workstation in education and industry, and he knew that this was a market Apple wasn’t especially interested in, so he could avoid expensive and distracting lawsuits with the company he was being pushed out of. (That didn’t work.)

As depicted in the book, the same cycle seems to repeat again and again. Out of the gate, Jobs decides what his new company will focus on by cannily identifying a potential market—the demand for “3M” machines, workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a processor capable of handling a million instructions per second. Scientists and researchers, Cain recounts, said they would buy them in large numbers—assuming they cost no more than about $10,000 each.

Then the second cycle happens: Jobs ends up getting focused on all sorts of little details that matter to him, but don’t necessarily serve the original product goal, from the design of the factory that would build the workstations to the expensive physical design of the workstations themselves, made unlike any other computer in existence.

The end result was pretty much what you’d expect: The computer that NeXT ended up building didn’t satisfy the requirements of those original higher-ed buyers who were the target market. Jobs had followed his bliss, and his good taste, in interesting directions. NeXT made an interesting product. But the product failed at being a successful product, just as NeXT kept failing at business.

And it just keeps happening, as the book details. Early investor and Jobs believer H. Ross Perot (yes, the former independent presidential candidate!) had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government.

A deal with IBM had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to take the ecological niche of Microsoft Windows before it had been firmly established on the world’s PCs. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM.

Time and again in “Steve Jobs in Exile,” you see Jobs act like his company’s own worst enemy. He makes decisions for perfectly understandable personal reasons, but they go against the entire premise of the company he had established. (How does a guy with a fundamentally anti-establishment worldview end up building a company designed for elite institutions, industry, and the government?) The situation at NeXT becomes increasingly untenable, and to Jobs’s credit, he does seem to have learned that his mistakes are what led the company to the cliff.

When Jobs discovered that a small piece of the overall NeXT software picture, WebObjects, had a potential market in revolutionizing early web commerce, he recognized it, and the company benefited. But you get the sense that Jobs was not comfortable changing the world of selling things on the Internet, when he really still wanted to change the world.

In the end, NeXT’s investment in a forward-looking Unix-based operating system underpinned by the Mach microkernel made it an acquisition target for Apple, which was desperately looking for a replacement for the classic Mac OS. The rest is history, though Cain points out just how dramatic and fraught the merger of the NeXT staff with Apple’s late-90s engineers really was.

If you think Jobs’s years at NeXT were some sort of graduate education in which he grew older and wiser so he could emerge, fully formed, as Apple CEO, you’ve got it wrong. As Cain expertly points out, the NeXT era was one in which Jobs was humbled again and again, until he started to realize that his instincts were not infallible, his distortion field did not reflect reality, and that he had to modify his behavior to have any hope of success. (In fact, Jobs’s greatest success during the period came with Pixar—where he had a much more hands-off relationship with the company’s executives.)

The Jobs who sold his company to Apple was not tanned, rested, and ready for action. He was beaten, battered, bruised, and humbled. But he had learned enough lessons that he was able to give Apple a better version of himself, the second time around.

[Steve Jobs In Exile (Portfolio), available at Amazon, Bookshop, and everywhere else.]

By Jason Snell

May 14, 2026 10:00 AM PT

Apple escalates macOS defenses while honoring its open nature

One of the big differences between the Mac and Apple’s other platforms is that, by design, it’s an old-school “general computing” platform—you can install and run whatever software you want, from any source.

That’s a good thing. It’s what makes the Mac the Mac. But it also makes the Mac more vulnerable than Apple’s other platforms, where the company can strictly limit what software is allowed to run on the device behind layers of developer memberships, code signing, scanning, and App Store approval.

For the last decade or more, as the Mac has become more popular, Apple has been trying to ratchet up Mac security. But because the Mac is open, securing it brings some unique challenges, as I found out when I got a chance to discuss these issues with some members of Apple’s security team recently.

Back in 2018, the company introduced notarization for apps, a system that used developer code signing and automated scans to provide a slightly increased level of scrutiny and security. While you can run apps that aren’t notarized on your Mac, it’s become increasingly difficult to do so—on purpose.

That’s because as Apple gradually ratchets up its Mac security approach, it’s increasingly playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with malware makers and scammers who are trying to take advantage of Mac users. Adding notarization made it harder for users to install malware without taking additional steps, so scammers switched to social engineering, talking users through the process of bypassing the warnings for non-notarized software. Apple eventually made bypassing the warnings so onerous that most scammers moved on.

They generally moved on… to the Terminal, which is why macOS 26.4 introduced warnings about code being pasted into Terminal. Scammers were giving users long strings of mostly unreadable code to paste into Terminal to “fix” problems—and this code would, when entered, grant permission and download software. In 26.4, Apple looks for specific strings on the clipboard and blocks them with a warning—while also looking for the presence of various developer tools on the system as an indicator that the user is more sophisticated and therefore the blocking should be a bit more lenient. It’s a clever approach to spare confused novice users without getting in the way of more expert ones. (Malicious AppleScript scripts are also being checked these days. You can’t be too careful.)

Apple has also, over the years, increased Mac security by structuring the way macOS is stored on disk. Much of the operating system is stored on sealed volumes that are cryptographically signed, meaning they can’t be tampered with. System Integrity Protection prevents tampered OS versions from booting. Drivers have been moved into limited-access user areas, out of full-access admin areas. Admin users, who used to have ultimate power (without ultimate responsibility), are now more limited in what they can do.

A few years ago, I complained that Apple’s warning dialogs were out of control, especially when migrating to a new system. Since then, Apple has made a bunch of improvements, including honoring many older permissions choices when migrating. The security team seems to have also acknowledged that there are certain circumstances where installing a lot of software might not be as big a security threat. That’s why during the first 24 hours of setting up a new machine, Apple’s security warnings are now throttled.

Among other recent changes in macOS 26 updates are new background security improvements that allow Apple to install small updates in the background between normal system updates.

And as our own Glenn Fleishman reported last year, Apple began syncing FileVault keys via iCloud. What began as a gentle roll-out is now mandatory in macOS 26.4, where all users who are syncing FileVault keys will have them stored via this method.

The Mac is never going to be as secure as iOS, and that’s okay. That extra insecurity is the trade-off for the Mac being an open system, and that’s what makes the Mac special. In 2018, at WWDC, I watched as a representative of Apple’s security team stood on stage and promised that Apple would never prevent Mac users from running any code they wanted. He never promised it would always be easy, and it’s not—but that promise has been kept, and I get no sense that Apple envisions a world where it will ever be broken.

In the meantime, the good news: When you consider that the game of Whac-a-Mole has reached the “paste long strings of text into the Terminal” phase, it makes you wonder how desperate those scammers have gotten. Maybe after years of ratcheting up security, Apple’s made it just too hard to talk users into installing malware on their Macs. That has required a lot of extra effort that’s not necessary on the iOS side—and I’m glad Apple is making that effort to keep the Mac as safe as possible while it still remains open.

By Jason Snell

May 13, 2026 4:40 PM PT

Indigo unifies the Mastodon and Bluesky timelines

Indigo, from Soapbox Software, is a new social media client that combines Bluesky and Mastodon timelines in one place. I’ve been using it for the last month or so as my primary social-media client—and it’s so good that I’ve largely stopped using individual clients dedicated to the two services.

Indigo makes it easy to cross-post to the services, which is unsurprising given its pedigree—its creators, Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy, made the cross-posting app Croissant before they made this. Since the services offer different character limits, Indigo shows you countdowns for both in one place. The app offers some other cross-service niceties, like identifying very similar posts on both services and de-duping them—though I still see not-quite-identical posts from time to time.

Indigo excels at scrolling through a timeline. Get too far beyond that, though, and you’ll find that it’s still definitely a 1.0 product. There’s no way to search within your timeline, tapping to expose an entire thread can be very slow, there’s no support for Bluesky lists, mute filters aren’t applied immediately to all items in a timeline, and occasionally I found that it just wouldn’t let me interact with some posts until I quit and re-launched the app. I also found the app’s choice of colors—blue for Bluesky, purple for Mastodon—to be impossible for me to differentiate as a colorblind person. (Fortunately you can add a badge on each account’s avatar, but it would sure be nice to pick a better color scheme.)

While I prefer Indigo because I want to scroll a timeline once and only once, it’s not yet at the level of a dedicated app like Tapbots’s Ivory for Mastodon. But this is a brand-new app, so I accept that it’s got room to grow. Ben Rice McCarthy has a nice blog post about how the project came to be, and another about how its design evolved.

Indigo is available for free on the App Store. For the Ultraviolet level, which allows interaction with posts, you can pay $5/month, $35/year, or $120 for a one-time purchase.