An amazing story by Steven Levy from 1984(!) about the creation of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet and possibly the first PC “killer app”:
It occurred to him: why not create the spreadsheets on a microcomputer? Why not design a program that would produce on a computer screen a green, glowing ledger, so that the calculations, as well as the final tabulations, would be visible to the person “crunching” the numbers? Why not make an electronic spreadsheet, a word processor for figures?
An amazing bit of history. As Levy points out, “This was so long ago that I had to define what a cursor was!”
Spring has sprung, and with it comes the onslaught of tech companies announcing the latest updates to their products. This week, it was Google’s I/O keynote that took the main stage, as the Mountain View company catalogued all of the new devices, features, and promises it had targeted for 2019.
Many of the features that Google talked about were a clear attempt to catch up in areas where Apple already excels: privacy, for example, or distribution of security updates. I’m not about to suggest that Apple needs to crib from anybody, but the whole purpose of competition is to drive innovation.
With that in mind, I’ve laid out three areas that Google touched on during its keynote where Apple might benefit from following the lead of one of its most prominent frenemies.
Google this week announced the Pixel 3a, a $399 phone with most (but not all) of the features of last year’s flagship Google smartphone, the $799 Pixel 3. While this move definitely puts some pressure on Samsung and Apple, who continue to reap most of the profits in the smartphone market, it’s not likely to end the era of the premium smartphone.
It’s likely that getting your iOS app to run on a Mac will just be a matter of flipping a switch in Xcode. Steve Troughton-Smith has been converting apps using nothing more than a Simulator build, his marzipanify tool, and a lot of clever tweaks with frameworks.
It will be exciting for a lot of developers, including yours truly, to press that button. But it’s also important to temper this enthusiasm with reality: that build setting is just the first step on a long and complicated road. Good interaction doesn’t come for free.
I have no doubt that Apple execs will stand up on stage in San Jose next month and demonstrate how iOS apps can move from iOS to Mac with just one click. It will be a great demo, with amazing applause. But as Craig points out—and as Apple will no doubt point out on stage, as well—the flipping of that switch is the start of the journey, not the end of it.
To make good Mac apps out of iOS apps will require care and consideration and some actual work. After basking in the glow of that first click-and-run moment, iOS developers should expect to spend the rest of the summer doing the detail work to take an apps that run on macOS and make them into apps that excel on macOS.
As macOS and iOS keep getting closer in terms of functionality (including low-level fundamentals and a shared software platform), I hear a lot of fear from Mac users who are concerned that the Mac is in danger of becoming a locked-down platform that will lose a lot of the capabilities that advanced users have come to expect from their devices.
The security philosophy Apple has nurtured over the past decade as it has built iOS is one that’s based on strictly limiting what third-party software can do, in turn limiting what users are able to do. But I’m optimistic that Apple isn’t planning on barring Mac power users from some of the best things about using a Mac, and there are many ways Apple can create a fundamentally more secure platform without destroying its appeal.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Logitech has been making keyboard cases for the iPad Pro since the very beginning. Its case for the original 9.7-inch iPad Pro was close to perfect. With the $130 Slim Folio Pro for the 2018 12.9-inch iPad Pro (the 11.5-inch model is $120), Logitech continues its commitment to making very good iPad keyboard cases—that just don’t seem to fit with the way I prefer to use my iPad Pro.
Logitech’s iPad cases have always wrapped the device in protection. Unlike the approach of a company like Brydge, which builds aluminum keyboards into which you clip the iPad by its corners, Logitech’s cases generally cover all four corners of the device. In the case of the Slim Folio Pro, you tuck the non-Apple Pencil side of the iPad into a large rubberized bumper, and then push two small rubberized bumpers over the other corners.
The result is a case that feels sturdy and protective, but it also means that every time you want to extract the iPad from the case, you’ve got to push those corner pieces off. If you’re someone who prefers to leave the iPad in the case most of the time, this is fine, but the Slim Folio Pro is a thick, bulky case, and I have a hard time believing that anyone would want to keep it on their iPad when they weren’t actively using the keyboard. (The Slim Folio Pro weighs 704 grams, almost identical to the Brydge Pro—but the Brydge is denser and slimmer.
As you might expect, the two corner pieces on this case are shaped the way they are so that they don’t cover up the magnetic charging area for the Apple Pencil. If you want to close the case, though, you won’t be able to charge the pencil—but Logitech does provide a loop on a magnetic flap that’s used to keep the case securely closed, making it less likely that you’ll misplace the Pencil when it’s not attached.
The keyboard itself is good, though the entire keyboard surface is made of gray plastic that feels a little cheap when compared to the aluminum-framed keyboards you’ll find in Apple’s laptops (or Brydge’s iPad Pro keyboard). The keycaps have a smooth texture and typing feel that remind me of classic Apple laptop keys. (That’s a good thing.) There’s a full function row, giving you control over keyboard backlighting, screen brightness, media playback, volume, and other shortcuts that users of Apple’s own Smart Keyboard Folio don’t have access to. The arrow keys are in the familiar inverted-T configuration that Apple has unfortunately moved away from in its own laptops.
While the Slim Folio Pro connects to the iPad via Bluetooth rather than Smart Connector (and charges via a USB-C port), it’s got a clever way of saving power: it only activates when you set the iPad in a magnetic slot on the front of the case.
Like Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, the Slim Folio Pro (and unlike Brydge’s keyboard) places the keyboard at the very front of the keyboard surface. This means it’s a different feel than you’d get on a MacBook, where the keyboard is pushed further back to leave room for a trackpad just below the keyboard. The edge of the iPad lands right behind the function row, about one-third of the way down the plane on which the keyboard sits.
Unfortunately, this design has a few side effects. First, it’s not at all adjustable. If you don’t like the particular angle of the iPad Pro in this case, there’s nothing you can do to change it. Second, at the very back of the horizontal keyboard plane where the case wraps around and provides support to keep the iPad upright, there’s half an inch of flexible material that serves as the spine of the case when it’s closed. I found that when I was typing with the Slim Folio Pro in my lap, the iPad had a tendency to rock back and forth as that flap of material slid back and forth. The result is that the case isn’t as stable on a lap as I’d like.
If you’re someone who doesn’t mind taking extra time to attach and detach your iPad from a case, the Slim Folio Pro provides a good typing experience and some protection for your iPad at a price that’s quite a bit lower than either Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio or the Brydge Pro keyboard.
I get tired of people asking me why I use a keyboard with my iPad Pro rather than just buying a laptop, but I have to admit that if you’re going to snap your iPad into a big keyboard case that’s not particularly easy to remove, that argument gets a little bit stronger. The beauty of the iPad is that it can do something a MacBook just can’t—namely, be a bare screen without attached keyboard when that’s all you want.
The Slim Folio Pro traps the iPad Pro in a less than ideal form. Both Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio and the Brydge Pro let you switch from keyboard to tablet quickly. Apple’s device excels because it’s small enough to carry around as a cover; Brydge’s excels because it provides the full laptop experience. I would choose either of those products over this one. But if you’re seeking value in an iPad keyboard case and don’t mind fussing with getting the thing on and off of your iPad, the Slim Folio Pro won’t let you down. It’s a solid product—as long as you know what you’re getting into. And out of.
I’ve spent six months using the 2018 iPad Pro with Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio and a collection of external USB and Bluetooth mechanical keyboards. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been a solid traveling companion, and it’s a major improvement over the old thick two-layer Smart Keyboard, but I’ve missed what I had on the older iPad Pro, namely the laptop-style keyboard from Brydge that let me convert my iPad into a laptop shape when I needed it.
Six months into the life of the iPad Pro, Brydge’s new iPad Pro keyboards are finally starting to arrive. Back in December I briefly got my hands on a preproduction model, and two weeks ago I received one of the first $170 12.9-inch units off the production line and have been using it on and off since then. (There’s also a $150 11-inch version, which I haven’t used.)
While it’s taken me some time to adapt to some of the changes Brydge has made, I’m happy to report that this is still the best option for people who want the full laptop typing experience on an iPad Pro.
While browsing the GOES Image Viewer a few months ago, I had an idea: with the data frequency that these new GOES satellites provide, I could build a Mac app that pulls the newest image every 20 minutes and sets it as your desktop background.
What resulted was a simple little menu bar app that gives you a near real-time view of Earth all day long. I’ve been using it for a few weeks as I’ve built it, and it is an absolute joy to have a window to Earth all day.
I’ve been using Downlink for the last week and it’s been a lot of fun to see live pictures of the Earth on my desktop. In the future I hope Anthony can add support for zooming in to specific areas and better multiple-monitor support. It’s free on the Mac App Store.
Apple’s quarterly financial conference calls are always an opportunity to peer into the minds of a company that is famously tight-lipped about its intentions. And while most attempts to suss out future plans from the Cupertino-based company are met with an weary sigh and a polite dismissal, Apple is not above letting details of its own choosing slip out.
This most recent quarter was no exception and, especially when it came to the Apple product lines that aren’t the iPhone. As rare as those tea leaves are, we can’t help but use them as a jumping off point to theorize about decisions the company might make or might be thinking about making. So let’s take a look at a few of Apple’s non-iPhone product lines and see where they may be headed.
Steve Jobs introducing Automator in 2004 (left) and Craig Federighi introducing Shortcuts in 2018.
User automation is important. Giving users the power to eliminate repetitive tasks and connect apps together in ways the app designers never anticipated helps harness the power of computers to make our lives easier. Even people who aren’t comfortable with building automation systems themselves can benefit from work created by others. User automation makes computing devices more powerful and their users more efficient.
The Mac is currently at the start of a pretty dramatic transition. This year, the platform will be flooded with apps that are based on the iOS app development system, UIKit, using a system that everyone calls Marzipan because Apple hasn’t given it a name. (My guess is that Apple won’t brand it at all, and will just call it “UIKit for macOS.”
Part of this transition affects user automation. macOS has a bunch of different system-level user automation technologies of various ages, but none of them work with iOS and Apple has shown no intention of changing that now. AppleEvents, AppleScript, and Automator already feel like legacy technologies that are maintained minimally to keep up compatibility, but they don’t feel like the future.
For years, iOS seemed to be a wasteland of user automation, but determined app developers discovered ways their apps could interact, most notably by embedding data in URLs—yep, the same strings of text you use to visit webpages—and passing them back and forth. Apple seemingly endorsed this technique when it bought Workflow, a popular third-party iOS automation app, and renamed it Shortcuts last summer. At the same time, Apple connected iOS automation to Siri through a feature called Siri Shortcuts, which fits right into existing systems already used by developers.
Automation schism
So what happens when iOS apps comes to the Mac this fall? It seems impossible that Apple will allow them to be controlled by AppleScript and Automator. On iOS, they can be controlled by Shortcuts. Does that app make the move to macOS? According to 9to5Mac’s Guilherme Rambo, it might, and Siri Shortcuts will.
Will “classic” Mac apps1 get the ability to be controlled via Shortcuts, too? Or will there be a schism between the two different classes of apps? (It’s not great for Mac users if there are two different kind of apps that live side by side and are supposed to be the same but are secretly “Type A” and “Type B” apps with different functionality. That happened a lot in the early days of Mac OS X and it was not great.)
And what about Automator and Shortcuts, two apps with similar approaches and aims? Do they live awkwardly side by side on macOS, each addressing some percentage of a user’s apps while ignoring the rest?
I’ve got to think Apple won’t leave the developers of “old-style” Mac apps high and dry. My hope is that Apple will provide developers of old-school Mac apps with some tools to integrate their apps with whatever automation system comes along with the new stuff, presumably Shortcuts.
“Run Script Over SSH” can be a gateway to the rest of macOS from the UIKit side.
If the goal is to avoid a complete schism, Apple could allow users to build their own bridges between apps by adding “Run shell script” and “Run AppleScript” commands within Shortcuts. While it might strike you as impossible that Apple would allow this, the truth is that the barn door is already open and the horse is long gone. Shortcuts for iOS has an action that lets you run scripts on a remote server via SSH. If that feature ends up on the Mac, it’s over—all a user will have to do is tell the shortcut to connect to localhost.
What’s more, one of macOS’s shell commands is osascript, which—you guessed it—executes AppleScript scripts. Which means I can already run AppleScript and command-line commands on my Mac via my iPad. So why shouldn’t I be able to do so from my Mac? Doesn’t make sense.
Siri Shortcuts gateway?
Then there’s Siri Shortcuts, which 9to5Mac says are almost certainly coming to macOS. Since this is a system based on iOS technology, it would seem like classic Mac apps and features might be entirely left out. It’s a break-up that doesn’t need to happen, so long as the proper bridges are built.
Something funny happened in macOS Mojave. Apple actually brushed off some very old Mac OS X technology, Services, and gave it a rebrand as Quick Actions. Quick Actions are commands you can find in Quick Look previews, the Finder’s new Gallery view, and on the Touch Bar. Some are pre-built by Apple, but users can add their own by saving Automator actions as Quick Actions.
I have no idea what prompted Apple to bubble up Automator actions into more places in the macOS interface with Mojave, but Quick Actions strikes me as a pretty good companion to Siri Shortcuts. Imagine a scenario where apps originating on iOS can support Siri Shortcuts via the same methods they use on iOS. Now imagine that Siri Shortcuts can also use Quick Actions as a source for potential commands. Quick Actions are contextual, those old-school Mac apps can bring their own Quick Actions to the party, and users can build their own Quick Actions to do whatever they want. It would be a simple way to bridge the gap between the two different app types that Mac users will be using together, at least for a while.
I don’t know if Apple’s planning to do this, but it’s hard not to imagine macOS 10.15 causing a pretty dramatic class division between apps, and that’s bad for the user experience. Some weirdness is inevitable when you’ve got different apps using different System Folders, APIs, and the rest. But the more bridges that exist—ones that let the different apps work together for the benefit of users—the better.
It’s just the beginning
I have a million questions about the future of user automation on Apple’s platforms, beyond just the scope of the changes in macOS 10.15. Are URL schemes really the future of inter-application communication, or is Apple working on a new system that’s a successor to AppleEvents that will offer a more robust pathway than a giant string of plain text? Is Shortcuts going to gain more low-level capabilities on both platforms? Will third-party automation utilities like Keyboard Maestro be able to control UIKit apps effectively?
In the end, I’m not as concerned with how user automation is preserved on macOS as I am concerned that it is preserved. Shortcuts is a remarkably powerful app, and even URL schemes can be richer than you might think—though they’re definitely inelegant. The Mac can help push automation technology forward across all of Apple’s platforms, if Apple wants to go in that direction. But whatever happens, it’s clear that iOS and macOS are going to face the future of user automation together, not separately.
We are probably about to enter an era where all the Mac apps built using AppKit, the development system that’s “native” to macOS, are going to start being referred to as “classic” Mac apps, and the new UIKit apps are going to be called “new” Mac apps. ↩
After the collective freak-out about Apple’s poor showing during its last financial quarter, this quarter’s results were refreshingly boring. Apple had $58 billion in revenue, more or less what they said they’d do three months ago. The company made $11.6 billion in profit, which is a really good kind of boring.
Still, there are always tidbits from Apple’s mandated disclosures, and the hourlong conference call with financial analysts that follows them, that can give us some hints about how Apple’s business is doing. Here are five of them.
There was a time—a very long time, in fact—when Apple didn’t need to make much of an attempt to actually sell iPhones. I don’t want to imply that the act of creating new iPhone models and new versions of iOS wasn’t an enormous task—it was. My point is, after the phones arrived on the scene, people really wanted them. And Apple just needed to make as many as it could and make them available in Apple retail stores and other locations, and they’d fly off the shelves.
That era ended last fall. And as Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri made clear on Tuesday’s conference call with analysts as a part of reporting the company’s latest quarterly results, Apple is now turning around iPhone sales by being more active when it comes to selling those iPhones to customers.
It’s my understanding that, starting last fall, every floor employee at Apple’s retail stores has had it emphasized to them that the goal is to boost iPhone sales. Even positions that would theoretically be bad fits for a focus on sales—people teaching Today at Apple classes, for example—are expected to show off the latest phone hardware in an attempt to get people interested in buying. If you take a photography course that roams the streets around the store for subject matter, you may be allowed to borrow a shiny new iPhone XR to shoot those pictures—all the better to tempt you with an upgrade.
What, employees at a retail store are expected to move product? It’s hardly earth-shattering stuff, but this is Apple. Apple didn’t need to pull those levers—until last fall, as iPhone sales started to dip. Now it’s pulling all the levers.
“Our retail and online stores continue to be a key point of innovation,” Cook said on Tuesday. “As we mentioned in January, we’ve been working on an initiative to make it simple to trade in a phone in our store, finance the purchase over time, and get help transferring data from the old phone to the new phone. As part of this initiative, we rolled out new trade-in and financing programs in the U.S., China, the UK, Spain, Italy, and Australia. The results have been striking. Across our stores, we had an all-time record response to our trade-in programs, and with more than four times the trade-in volume of our March quarter a year ago.”
Emphasizing the trading in of older models in order to get a discount on a new iPhone has worked around the world, including in China, where sales have really lagged. Apple is still experimenting with its approach in different markets, but the company is now motivated to learn, when it wasn’t before.
Or as Cook said: “Clearly what we’ve learned here—and it’s not a surprise, really—is that many, many people do want to trade in their current phone. From a customer or user point of view, the trade-in looks like a subsidy. And so it is a way to offset the device cost itself. And many people in literally every market that we’ve tried this in… want to take and pay for something on installments instead of all at once. And so, it’s a little different in each market in terms of what the elasticity is. But you can bet that we’re learning quickly on all of those.”
Apple’s also being aggressive in the prices that it offers to trade-in customers. “The incentives we’re offering, currently in our retail stores, a trade-in value that is more than sort of the ‘blue book’ [price] of the device if you will, for lack of a better description. And so we have topped those up to provide an extra benefit to the user,” Cook said, noting that iPhones of numerous generations are being traded in. Some people are replacing a two-year-old model, but some are replacing every year, and others are waiting three or four years. “It’s really all over the place,” Cook said.
In some markets, most particularly China, offering an installment plan that allows you to pay a monthly fee on your new iPhone rather than a lump sum has proven quite successful as well. As Cook put it on the analyst call, Apple is now learning about iPhone buying psychology in different markets, and changing its approach as it does.
“You can bet that we’re learning on each of these [approaches], finding the parts that the user likes the most. I think the key is, we’re trying to build something into the consumer mindset that it’s good for the environment and good for them to trade in their current device on a new device. And we do our best to getting the current device to someone else that can use that, or, in some cases if the product is at an end of life, we are recycling the parts in it to make sure that it can carry on in another form,” Cook said.
There was a time when Apple didn’t need to exert much effort to sell iPhones. Those times may be over, but it’s still got a lot of tricks up its sleeve. I’m not surprised to hear that, as Cook and Maestri both pointed out, iPhone sales are already turning around. The execs said that November and December were the worst months of the current iPhone dip, that March was the best of the bunch, and that the last couple of weeks of March were the best weeks of the entire quarter.
That’s why Apple projected a much smaller dip in revenue between its second and third financial quarters than usually happens. The company’s executives seem quite confident that their iPhone sales techniques are working and that the product’s downturn has been smoothed out or stopped.
A couple of other notes based on the results today:
Lots of talk about the growth in the App Store search advertising business. For those who don’t know, this is a business in which Apple takes money from its own app developers to provide prominent results when someone in the App Store searches on particular keywords. If you develop an iOS app and don’t buy your keywords out, your competitors will—and you’ll lose sales.
Tim Cook said that App Store search ads are “growing very, very fast… I think it was up around 70 percent over the previous year. We’re expanding into new geographies as well, and we still have more geographies out there that we think can move the dial further. So it is definitely a a business that is big and getting bigger.”
Just so we’re clear: This is a way for Apple to claw back more money from app developers by getting them to pay Apple to get more visibility in search (and to prevent their competitors from paying to jump over them in search results). I am not a big fan of this technique, but apparently it’s effective!
More than that, though: Since the people who buy search ads are app developers, who make money by selling apps in the App Store, this is essentially Services revenue that gets counted twice! First, people buy apps and Apple counts that revenue. Then, the app developers with whom Apple shares App Store revenue turn around and pay Apple some of their earnings in exchange for ads. I doubt this is a major mover in Apple’s rapidly growing services revenue line, but I have to admire the moxie of running those dollars through the Services revenue line twice.
Analyst Louis Miscioscia of Daiwa Capital Markets1 asked Cook about what services he expected to be the most successful in the short term and long term, the CEO expertly deflected that one. But he did talk a little bit about his vision for the future of Apple TV+:
“The TV+ product plays in a market where there’s a huge move from the cable bundle to over-the-top,” Cook said. (Over The Top is TV industry slang for getting channels via internet streaming rather than traditional cable or satellite. Tim’s practically a TV exec already.) “We think that most users are going to get multiple over-the-top products and we’re going to do our best to convince them that the Apple TV+ product should be one of them.”
Not to go too overboard with parsing specific words in Tim Cook statements, but I was struck by the phrase “one of them.” Apple is not trying to be the winner, to beat Netflix—and in fact, Cook is saying that he just thinks Apple TV+ can be part of a larger diet of streaming subscriptions. Maybe. I have some doubts that Apple’s current mid-tier streaming offering can compete in a world where streaming services from giants Disney, Warner Media, and NBCUniversal are battling it out with Netflix and Amazon, but for now Apple is in the game.
Finally, Services. What can I say? This is why Apple keeps talking about them and had a whole event about them. Services revenue made up 20 percent of Apple’s revenue this quarter, making it larger than the Mac and iPad put together. $11.5 billion dollars in one quarter. Consistent growth for years. It was the best quarter of all time for the App Store, Apple Music, Apple’s cloud services, and that App Store search ad business, and Apple says that AppleCare and Apple Pay set records for the second financial quarter.
If you’re sick of hearing about Apple’s services, you might want to sign up for a service that cures that, because it’s not going to stop. Right now when viewed from a distance, Apple’s a company with two primary businesses: the iPhone (50%) and services (20%). The iPad, Mac, and wearables each count for another 10 percent. They are individually enormous businesses—as Apple loves to say, each of them is basically a Fortune 200 company—but they are small compared to the scale of the iPhone and the services business.
Hat tip to Mikah Sargent for finding him, because I couldn’t figure out what name they were saying on the call! ↩
[Every quarter Apple’s CEO and CFO talk to financial analysts on an hourlong call. This is the transcript of that call from Tuesday, April 30, 2019. While you’re here, check out our charts of the quarter and analysis of the results.]
Tim Cook: Thanks Nancy, and good afternoon, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. This has been an exciting and productive quarter for Apple. In my letter to investors at the beginning of January I wrote that one of Apple’s great strengths is our culture of flexibility, adaptability, and creativity. This quarter featured some important announcements that speak to the power of our commitment to innovation and long-term thinking. I’d like to start with some topline highlights and then move into greater detail with you.
Apple’s quarterly results are in. The company posted revenue of $58 billion, down 5% from the same quarter a year ago. iPad revenue was up 22% and Services revenue was up 16%, but Mac revenue was down 5% and iPhone revenue was down 17%.
We’re still about a month away from WWDC, but I know that the hardworking folks at Apple may need a little lead time when it comes to developing new ideas, and I want to be considerate about that.
Fact is, I’ve noticed a few shortcomings in my Apple devices over the last few years, and those gaps in functionality have gone spectacularly unaddressed in recent updates. So, it occurs to me, maybe the teams at Apple don’t realize just how annoying these problems are.
In that spirit, allow me to share with you (and with our good friends in Cupertino), my top three features still needed in Apple products, all of which I’m sure could be easily added to the upcoming versions of the company’s operating systems.
Spam Destroyer
The advent of modern spam filtering has helped weed out a lot of junk email, but it’s still a problem that we all have to deal with, day in and day out. Recent versions of the Mail app have added tools to help improve the process of getting off mailing lists, like a smart Unsubscribe button, but they simply don’t go far enough. No, what you want is a button that, when pressed, roots out evil at its very source, destroying its capability of ever sending email again. I’m talking frying their computers from stem to stern, from soup to nuts, from CPU to keyboard. Disproportionate, you might say, but is any price too high not to have to get campaign fundraising emails ever again?
Vacation Scheduler
Machine learning has gotten better and better at anticipating our actions, but we’ve yet to really give it the wheel. Sure, it makes suggestions about things we might want to do, but sometimes you just want the computer to go ahead and do them. Case in point, Apple’s Calendar app. Who really wants to keep track of their calendar when they have a computer that could just as easily do it for us? So here’s the Holy Grail: one-touch vacation scheduling. At the tap of a button, Calendar could go ahead and block out a week at the time of year when it knows you aren’t busy and don’t have any other commitments (rescheduling any pesky dentist appointments), and then use information gleaned from your emails, social media posts, and iMessages to reserve that treehouse Airbnb you sent your partner, book cheap and comfortable flights, and create an itinerary that lets you check items off that Bucket List you made in Reminders. All you have to do is approve it via Apple Pay. And, optionally, go.
Novel Writer
By this point, my Macs and iOS devices have lived through me writing at least half a dozen novels, some of which have even seen the light of day. You’d think with that much exposure that Pages could easily help me concoct the next book that I’m contracted to write on a timeframe that is just way too short. It’s the only reasonable explanation as to why publishers only give you nine months to write your next book when they know perfectly well it took years to finish the first one. Hey Siri, do you have a paper bag to breathe into?
[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.]
Okay, chances are if you’ve been a Mac user for any length of time, you know about Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper. And if you don’t, well, consider this a public service announcement: you need SuperDuper. You might think you don’t, but you do. Because, simply put, without a backup of your Mac, your data is all worthless. And trust me: having spent the last couple months bringing a Mac mini back from the dead, I know of what I speak.
Sure, Macs have come with Time Machine built in for many a year now, and that’s all well and good—it’s certainly better than nothing when it comes to backup. But Time Machine’s utility is limited, and there are cases where even it isn’t enough to get your data back. Plus, it has more than its fair share of unreliability, which is really the last thing you want in your backup software.
Whereas Time Machine operates on the level of files, tracking changes as you make them and updating the backup accordingly, SuperDuper is designed to clone your drive, bit-by-bit. That means that you end up with an exact copy which not only has all the same information but is also—and this is the clutch part—bootable on its own. Which means that when your computer goes down, as mine did a couple months back, all you have to do is restart from the clone to be back up and running and ready to start the restore process (which SuperDuper can also handle).
SuperDuper offers a variety of other features to improve your backup experience. Its Smart Update functionality speeds up backups, only copying files if they’ve changed. If you have somewhat more limited space on your backup drive, you can back up just your user files, rather than the whole Mac, or exclude certain files. You can back up to a disk image if you don’t have another disk handy. And, of course, you can schedule backups to happen at a certain time or only when you connect your backup disk.
SuperDuper was instrumental in getting my Mac mini back to life, as was its creator Dave Nanian. (Full disclosure: I’ve known Dave for a number of years, and consider him a good friend, but I used SuperDuper long before we’d ever met.) You can download SuperDuper for free and use it to backup your drives without restriction, but to unlock the more advanced features, it’ll cost you $27.95—a price well worth paying since all subsequent updates are free, and have been since before I bought the app back in 2006(!).
I’ve now got SuperDuper clones running for all three of the Macs in my household, which is in addition to Time Machine backups and Backblaze for offsite backups. In the era of cloud storage, it might seem like backup software is an added luxury, but frankly it’s protection and peace of mind that you can’t afford not to have.
[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.]
