X is the only place these posts go. Same for Greg Joswiak’s account. Lighthearted stuff too, like Cook “introducing” Ternus to Pikachu back in August. You may not like it that X has re-found its footing under Elon Musk’s ownership, but it has. I’m citing Apple executives here but they’re far from alone. There are hundreds of interesting people and accounts I follow that post on X very regularly and do not post anywhere else at all. As a word nerd I love Merriam-Webster’s account — fun, clever, smart posts every day. That’s just one example among hundreds. Here’s another. Fascinating new apps are being shown and discussed on X and nowhere else.

[Update: I stand corrected — Merriam-Webster does have an account on Bluesky. It contains a subset of the items they post to X. They’ve posted 34 original new tweets on X so far in October; only 10 on Bluesky. Plus on X they’ve chimed in with 11 clever and/or informative retweets from other accounts, including one from those notorious fascists at Sesame Street; there are zero of those on Blueksy. So while I regret the error of implying that Merriam-Webster posts exclusively on X, the 45-10 count for October to date proves my point just as well.]

I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is. Most people don’t want to think about politics so they don’t. Those people, when they want to participate in a Twitter-like social network, go to X.

And I can’t blame anyone. The only network that compares to X, size-wise, is Threads — but Threads’s algorithm is weirder than X’s now, and the content I see there is relatively boring. My Threads timeline is full of engagement bait without being engaging. And if you want to judge a platform by its owner, “I’m grossed out and/or appalled by Elon Musk so I’m going to Mark Zuckerberg’s joint” isn’t a way to avoid being grossed out and/or appalled by the owner. Bluesky and Mastodon are too small for most people to care about — and, worse, they are the networks where politics are, in my experience, unavoidable. You can have a discussion about cool new use cases and tools for AI on X and people just discuss the tools and use cases. On Bluesky and Mastodon it’s difficult to have such discussions without arguments from people who (a) believe all use of AI is unethical, and (b) will shove their viewpoints into your replies.

The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.

If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. (Most of the ones who chime in about it publicly are the lost-their-minds types.)

But the bigger problem is that there’s little action on Bluesky or, especially, Mastodon. There’s a lot of activity on Threads, but little action. There is action on X. I’ve said for years that Mastodon is my favorite of the bunch and in a way it still is, but really that’s because when I go there I don’t have to be diligent to avoid wasting time. I avoid wasting time on Mastodon because there’s so little of interest to see. That’s a feature — for me — but it certainly isn’t what most people are looking for in a Twitter-like posting platform. They want action. The action is on X.

Without any fanfare — perhaps to avoid his ire — X has de-Musked its algorithm. I stopped visiting at all when the algorithm there was putting Musk’s own tweets into my timeline, every time I checked, despite the fact that I never followed him. But they don’t do that anymore. I don’t see much politics of any kind in my timeline, and what I do see is from accounts I chose to follow. I see tech (including a lot of interesting breaking news), sports (including a lot of interesting videos and stats), and stupid stuff that’s actually funny. My only problem with X now is that I do have to pay attention to avoid wasting time when I visit.

Plus, in addition to the tweets, there are now many interesting people using X to post entire essays and blog posts. I wish that weren’t so, for multiple reasons (e.g., no RSS). But it is so.

If you returned from exile on a desert island and took a look at X today for the first time in a year, you might reasonably guess that Elon Musk got bored and sold it while you were away. I do think he got bored micromanaging it, but the rank muskiness that permeated the platform after he took over is — for now, at least — gone.

We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems — including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history — without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

They don’t name names, but clearly this is in response to Meta Muse (cf. Jason Aten’s misadventure with Muse accessing Aten’s iMessages), Grok Bot, Claude, Dots, and the rest. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldn’t function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.

But before we Mac power users riot in Cupertino, we should note that we have no idea how many unsophisticated Mac users are calling Apple and queuing up at the retail store Genius Bars to complain about Muse and these other agents having run amok on their Macs, against their desires, after convincing these users to grant them access. It is a legitimate frustration for the highest-functioning users among us that the Mac has, for years, already seemed “too locked down”. But there are now around 150 million Mac users worldwide. Most of them are unsophisticated technically — a majority of them, profoundly so. Many of them have technical needs that cannot be met by the baby computer OS that is iPadOS. For a lot of them it might just be the ability to run the real version of Google’s Chrome web browser — or even the desktop version of Safari. So there are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access. And then they think it is Apple’s fault that Muse is suddenly able to read their private iMessage conversations.

(Anyone out there who, say, works at an Apple retail store and can confirm whether this is an escalating support issue — one way or the other — I’d love to hear from you, confidentially.)

On iOS (and its tablet variant, iPadOS), you can say OK to every single thing an app like Muse asks for and Muse still won’t be able to read your email or end-to-end encrypted messages from iMessage or WhatsApp. There is no level of permission that grants third-party apps permission for such things. (The EU wants to force Apple to allow that under the DMA.) MacOS isn’t like that. You still need to grant apps permission for such things, but if you say OK to everything an app like Muse asks for on the Mac, you’re granting that app access to, effectively, almost everything on your startup drive. There are still some things it can’t see, but not many. A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this. They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because that’s how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works. So they just click OK to every access request from Muse and presume they’re still largely protected.

Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.

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That’d be a lot to introduce all at once. Maybe they hold one event/keynote movie for all of it, or maybe they split it in two — one for “home” stuff, and one for new Mac stuff. (Not sure where the iPad Mini would go in that split.) Or maybe they announce it all in one keynote but split the product availability, like they did with the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo at the keynote three weeks ago. Maybe the new MacBooks, if they really do have touchscreens, get announced in October but won’t ship until November to give developers time to adopt touch APIs — just like with the Duo. Apple is secretive, but they stick to predictable patterns if you pay attention.

The dates we do know are those for the iPhone Duo, with pre-orders beginning on Friday, October 16 and shipments beginning one week later on October 23. Apple, in my experience, sticks to a very predictable schedule for review units. They typically go into reviewers’ hands mid-week (Tuesday or Wednesday) during the week when pre-orders begin (usually a Friday, sometimes a Saturday, like this month, when the iPhones 18 Pro and new Apple Watches went on sale Saturday, September 12). Reviewers typically get only six or seven days with hardware before the embargo lifts for publishing reviews. (Most reviewers have their reviews ready to publish by that time; others enjoy the whooshing sound the embargo deadline makes as it goes by.) The review embargo thus typically lifts on the Tuesday or Wednesday of the same week when the product is set to begin shipping to customers on Friday.

I have been told absolutely nothing about when, or even if, Apple plans to seed advance units of the iPhone Duo to reviewers. In my experience, even off the record, Apple never talks about these things in advance, nor offers hints. But if they do seed review units of the Duo, I would expect that to start on Tuesday, October 13 or Wednesday the 14th, with the embargo lifting on October 20 or 21, two or three days ahead of the Duo reaching customers on Friday the 23rd. It’s also my experience that Apple does not like shipping review units of high-profile new products like the Duo before they are released to the public. They prefer handing review units like the Duo to reviewers in person. You sign the embargo agreement in person, and they hand you the product in person. One natural way to hand reviewers iPhone Duo units in person would be to hold a media event, for other new products, on October 13 or 14. Kill two birds with one stone.

If they hold such an event in New York that week, it would be really nice if it coincided with a Yankees home game in the ALCS. But now I’m really getting ahead of myself.

The Muse iOS app is sandboxed — because it has to be. So that’s the only version I’m personally tinkering with. But the Mac app is the more powerful one, because, well, it lets Muse drive your Mac. The fact that the Muse Mac app is so powerful is why it has to be downloaded from the web. It’s not in the Mac App Store because apps that do what the Muse Mac app does aren’t permitted in the Mac App Store — or are only permitted with hard-to-get entitlements. There are a lot of good reasons why good Mac developers have long been frustrated by those rules. (Users too.) But the upside of Apple’s restrictive Mac App Store policies is that users can blindly install apps from the Mac App Store and trust that those apps cannot run amok on their system.

The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesn’t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Muse’s creator. I wasn’t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and I’m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On a Mac, maybe. But not my Mac.

Same thing for granting Muse — running in the cloud, not on my Mac — access to my email, or calendar, or banking. I wouldn’t grant a stranger access to my email. So why would I grant a robot? But my refusal to grant Muse access to anything like that means that it’s basically just a toy for me to poke at.

A lot of people hire personal assistants — humans — and give them access to their email (and calendar, files, bank accounts, etc.). I’ve never done that, but I’ve long considered it. I see the appeal. But if I hired a personal assistant, I’d get to know them first. Develop some trust. My time is valuable, but not as valuable as my comfort, and I’d be excruciatingly uncomfortable giving anyone — or anything — I didn’t trust access to my life. I’m not saying I will never grant access to such things to an AI agent. In fact, I bet that sooner or later I will, to some carefully measured extent. But not now.

One of my favorite teachers in high school was a history teacher named Gary Choyka. I had him for morning homeroom too, and I loved that he had a daily subscription to The Philadelphia Inquirer, a real newspaper, not just our Podunk suburban rag. Mr. Choyka was a great teacher, full stop. I learned a lot about the world, and a ton about our civil rights and liberties here in the U.S., from him. It was from Mr. Choyka that I learned that you do not have to allow the police to enter your home just because they’re at the door claiming that they’re going to enter the home. That came in handy at some high school parties (and made me the designated knock-at-the-door answerer).

Part of what made Mr. Choyka a great teacher is that he had a wonderful presence, a mastery of the classroom. And he had one devastatingly effective technique. If he was giving a lecture and a bit of chatter between students grew to the point of even slight disruption, he’d just stop talking, mid-sentence, stare at the chattering students, and after waiting a few beats, say, “I’ll wait.”

Having been the disruptive whisperer more than once, I still feel small thinking about that phrase. It was like getting zapped by Rick Moranis’s kid-shrinking machine. Thirty-some years later and I can still hear him saying it. I’ll wait. It worked because he meant it. He wasn’t going to compete for attention.

It’s not really an analogous situation at all. But somehow it’s Mr. Choyka’s signature line that comes to mind when I ponder how I feel about AI agents — at least the sort of ones like Muse that want control over my personal computing, and really, personal life. I’ll wait.

The event was held in Apple’s Town Hall auditorium at the old Infinite Loop headquarters. Town Hall is a tiny venue but it wasn’t full. It opened with Jonathan Mann’s “The iPhone 4 Antenna Song” (refrain: “If you don’t want an iPhone 4, don’t buy it; if you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back”), then Steve Jobs took the stage for what he said would be a 15-minute presentation but which took 30 minutes. Then Jobs had COO Tim Cook and hardware chief Bob Mansfield join him on stage to answer questions from the assembled members of the media.

Apple itself hosted video of the presentation — minus the Q&A — for some time after the event. But after a few years they took their copy down. There have been copies on YouTube, but the only one that seems to be left is this 14-year-old copy from the YouTube account Tech Knowology. It’s got Mann’s opening song and Jobs’s half-hour prepared presentation, but it cuts off right as Jobs invites Cook and Mansfield to join him on stage. To my recollection this is where Apple’s own official video cut off too — I think this version on YouTube is just a copy of Apple’s.

The Q&A was on the record (which is the entire point of a Q&A), and was reported widely, but I don’t think there’s ever been video of it. Here’s a report by Jeff Carlson at TidBITS, published the day the event was held, which states, “The video omits a long and interesting Q&A at the end.”

Then, yesterday, video of the Q&A hit YouTube. I don’t know what truck it fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”,¹ but I’m sure glad it did. There are parts of this Q&A that I remembered, and parts I didn’t. Carlson was exactly right: it was long and it was interesting.

One part I remembered was my own question, asked at the 18:45 mark, which was answered — by all three executives — visually, not verbally. It really was an answer best shown not told, but heretofore I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t in the room has seen this. There were photographs (e.g. AllThingsD and MacRumors), but not video. Now you can watch.

My main takeaway, though, watching the whole thing for the first time since I was in the room, is how goddamn thoughtful Steve Jobs was. He takes a long time to think before answering many of the questions. A few minutes after my question, Jobs was asked what he’s learned from this experience. Jobs takes several seconds to think and then his answer lasts five minutes. It’s a good answer.

I seldom suggest you spend 47 minutes watching a video, but this one is worth your time. (And, given that it clearly fell off the back of a truck, you might want to put a copy on your own truck sooner rather than later.) A lot of times with a long Q&A the whole thing gets repetitive, with the same questions asked in rephrased ways, and the same answers (or, worse, non-answers) regurgitated from the same set of prepared talking points. Not this one. In fact, one of Jobs’s most interesting answers comes over 40 minutes into the Q&A segment, when he re-articulates what Horace Dediu coined “The Cook Doctrine”. (Which Cook deserves credit for, having expressed it a year prior while Jobs was on a medical leave of absence.) Here’s part of that answer:

To understand Apple, it helps to realize that one of our biggest insights came about eight years ago. We didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary technology. Because if somebody else owns the primary technology, they’re going to beat you in the end. Because you’re going to have to buy that from them and add your stuff on top. But if their technology is the most important one, they’re going to beat you in the end. So we wanted to own or control the primary technology for those businesses that we’re in. And in the computer business, even though we didn’t make our own microprocessors, we thought software was the most important technology. And we made our own operating system.

Our big insight about eight years ago was that for most areas of consumer electronics going forward, it was going to shift from big displays being the most important component, or electro-optical laser pickup heads for DVD drives being the most important component, or radios and cell phones being the most important component, to software being the most important component. And we realized that we were pretty good at software.

Watch the whole thing, I implore you. I mean if you’re only going to watch a minute, sure, skip to my question. But you should watch the whole thing — if only to hear Jobs pronounce “component”.

One of the delicious generation apps was Disco, a CD/DVD disc-burning utility. When it burned a disc, it rendered smoke coming out of the app’s main window. It wasn’t a simple “poof” animation. It was fully interactive. From their own description:

With Disco we tried pushing the boundaries of interface, usability, and utter functional simplicity. Well, once you realize that Disco is emitting real time interactive smoke as you burn, we start redefining the boundaries. Want to push it out of the way? Blow into your microphone and the smoke will react accordingly. Or, go ahead and flick at it with your mouse. Remember, you’ll need a recent Mac to play with the full interactive smoke.

Here’s a video of Disco in action.

Another delicious generation peer was AppZapper, from Austin Sarner and Brian Ball. AppZapper was a utility to uninstall apps along with all of the apps’ associated files and folders, and its gimmick was that, well, you zapped the apps with a Zap button and a supposedly fun sound. Totally boring premise with a fun implementation and presentation.

Two things brought that trend to an end. The first was the launch of the iPhone App Store in 2008. Indie developer attention that had previously been single-mindedly focused on the Mac was now split between the Mac and iPhone, and given the iPhone’s novelty and larger market, it soon was more like the attention went single-mindedly to the iPhone. The delicious aesthetic was a niche novelty on the Mac. On the iPhone, in those early years, it was the aesthetic of the platform. Apple’s own iBooks app had page-turning animation that tracked your finger; the built-in Calendar app had a UI rendered in rich Corinthian leather; the Notes app used a silly handwriting font. But then iOS 7 arrived in 2013, wiping the slate clean. Deliciousness was out. Blandness was in. And the whole industry has never really recovered.¹

I bring very good, very fun news. After a decade-plus hiatus, AppZapper is back, perfectly renamed for a long future as AppZapper 3000. It’s completely over-the-top and I love it. Just look at it.

There’s long been a whole cottage industry of Mac “app uninstallers”, a sort of subset within the larger category of system “cleaners”. Some of these apps are scams, and some are borderline scams that prey on the false notion that users should be worried about the detritus that deleted apps leave behind. A lot of people who come to the Mac from Windows are uncomfortable with the idea that you don’t typically run installers for apps — you just copy the .app bundle from your Downloads folder or from a disk image to your Applications folder, and that’s it. It’s installed. It’s a beautiful system, to me, because it teaches you how the system works. There ought not be any hidden magic behind “installing” an app on the Mac.

And to uninstall an app, you just drag it to the Trash. Some users are more uncomfortable with that than they are with just-drag-to-Applications-to-install, because deleting the application’s .app bundle doesn’t delete anything else it might have left behind. Like its preferences, or any associated files it might have left behind in subfolders within your ~/Library/ folder. The simple truth is that you don’t really need to worry about that stuff. I sometimes prefer leaving a deleted app’s preferences behind, just in case I ever re-install the app. The Mac’s NeXT-derived defaults system for software preferences is designed such that it doesn’t get bogged down by unused preferences from long-ago deleted applications. (The Windows Registry leaves people forever scarred.)

But sometimes apps download large associated files and stash them in ~/Library/. Those files aren’t bogging your system down but they are taking up space. Storage space has never been free of charge, and, on one side of the AI coin, it’s become a lot more expensive. On the other side of the AI coin, there are a lot more new Mac apps coming out these days. I’m trying more new apps every week than I have since the earliest days of the App Store. Sometimes I really just want to nuke all traces of them after taking a test drive.

AppZapper 3000 does that job well, and it makes it fun as hell. You drag an app you want to uninstall to its main window, and AppZapper lists all of the app’s associated files (including, of course, the app itself). Then you shoot the ones you want to delete. Zapped files are safely moved to your Trash, and AppZapper itself supports Undo if you get trigger happy. It’s terrific fun. There’s even a “Zap All” button for the lazy. It re-launched last Monday but I’ve been testing AppZapper 3000 since a few weeks before that. My Applications and Library folders haven’t been this trim in years.

Way, way back in the day with The Grouch system extension for System 6 and 7, there were stories claiming that people who had the Grouch installed would let their young kids play with their Macs, and come to find that the kids had deleted gobs of important files and folders, just to make Oscar pop out of the Trash and sing his songs. (Oscar only sang when you emptied the Trash.) The Grouch seemed old even when the original AppZapper was new. But AppZapper 3000 brings back that sort of fun — while being genuinely useful. And the Mac has never in its history been more in need of new UI fun. Is it absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary to make an uninstall utility with an exquisitely detailed 3D laser gun as its UI? Fuckin’-A right it is.

If you’ve got a fun bone in your body you should check AppZapper 3000 out. It’s a free download with a free trial. Licenses cost $18 for a single user, $29 for a 5-user family pack, and $99 for a 25-Mac enterprise license. One-time purchases, not subscriptions. Sarner was kind enough to create a 20 percent discount code for DF readers, good through next Monday: DARING. This is not a sponsorship. I’m sharing this code (and writing this article) simply because I’m so happy to see such a much-needed injection of pure fun on the Mac.