Linked List: April 11, 2023

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

‘Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words’ ★

New, from The Steve Jobs Archive:

A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.

From Laurene Powell Jobs’s introduction:

Steve once told a group of students, “You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he — or that any of us — might elevate or expedite human progress.

It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility.

There’s a (very?) limited print edition that is not for sale, but is being given to Apple employees and others who were close to Jobs (such as Jony Ive’s team at LoveFrom, who clearly produced this work and the lovely apple tree logomark). It’s freely available on Apple Books (nice URL), but I think the best way to read it, if you’re not fortunate enough to have access to the printed book, is the website. It’s just lovely.

Sebastiaan de With, on Twitter:

It’s hard to capture the delight of a real book, but this website does a fantastic job coming close. Lots delightful, thoughtful little details.

I say ‘ebook’ because it isn’t a word used anywhere on the website, likely for good reason: there are no good ebooks. The ePub file lacks all the delight of the beautiful website. Books on Apple Books are objectively worse than their written counterparts. This might be nicer.

Try jumping around using the ‘line of contents’. Super nice stuff. The website even remembers where you left off.

Microsoft Now Supports Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs, but Only Through Parallels ★

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge back in February:

Still, Microsoft’s plan to officially authorize Parallels to support this way of running Windows 11 on Apple’s latest Macs is a step beyond what we’ve had so far. Up until now, Microsoft has only licensed Windows versions of Arm directly to OEMs, making it difficult for M1 and M2 users to officially run it in VM.

Parallels started supporting Windows on M1 chips with the Parallels Desktop 16.5 release, but this latest version lets you download and install Windows 11 in a single click. Parallels is also handling the complexity of Windows 11’s TPM and Secure Boot requirements with a virtual TPM that’s paired with Apple silicon.

It’s nice to be able to run Windows at all on Apple Silicon Macs, but I find it a bit strange that Microsoft doesn’t simply allow the direct installation of Windows via Boot Camp, like on Intel Macs. My understanding is that Apple would welcome this and work with Microsoft to make it work as well as possible, and it’s Microsoft’s decision not to license the ARM version of Windows for direct installation on Macs. Note, for example, the existence of Asahi Linux — a project that already has a working (although incomplete, driver-wise) version of Linux you can install directly on Apple Silicon Macs.

[Update: A little birdie at Microsoft reports that running Windows via Parallels was in fact Apple’s preferred solution, and the birdie was left with the impression that Apple does not want to support Boot Camp on Apple Silicon Macs. Interesting then, that installing and booting into non-Mac OSes — like Asahi Linux — is supported at all. You certainly can’t do that with iPhones or iPads or Apple TVs.]

For people who need or just want to run Windows on their Macs: how well does it work going through Parallels? As everyone now knows, MacOS running on Apple Silicon hardware runs both faster and more efficiently (longer battery life) than it does on Intel hardware. Does practical day-to-day usage of Windows, through Parallels, running on Apple Silicon hardware show similar performance and battery life gains? I would imagine that some, but not all, of MacOS’s efficiency on Apple Silicon comes from having the entire OS tuned not just for ARM CPUs in general but for Apple’s M-series SoCs specifically. Anyone out there who’s using this, let me know.

‘Katie Knows Everything’ ★

From the DF archive, my piece in 2014 remarking upon her retirement from Apple, with an anecdote from the iPhone 4 “antennagate” press conference in 2010:

I was wearing a large SLR camera on a strap around my neck. As I filed in to find a seat, I was offered a choice: if I wanted to take photos during the event, I could sit toward the back; if I were willing to forgo taking photos, I could sit up front in the third row. I only had my camera with me on a lark — the advantages of publishing a website that runs photographs only rarely — so I took the seat in the third row. The first two rows, as usual, were occupied by senior Apple executives and employees.

As I took my seat, Katie Cotton, sitting in the second row, smiled and greeted me. “Hi John, glad you could make it. How’s the cold?”

I was feeling fine, the cold not much more than a memory at that point, and told her so. But I had to ask, laughing, “How did you even know I had a cold?”

Before she could answer, Greg Joswiak, sitting directly in front of me, turned around. “John, Katie knows everything.”