THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Lately, I've had an influx of admin work as I'm shifting platforms. And I noticed over the last few days that all my unrelated work has felt harder, as my brain keeps shifting back to the admin tasks I suddenly find on my plate. Put simply, my mode shifting has been broken. I can't seem to leave the last thing when I go to the next thing. I realized that because I've been doing too much, I've not been using my handoff ritual. We talk a lot about how hard it...
11 days ago • 3 min read
MPU 855: Shortcuts with Viticci Federico Viticci, founder of MacStories and the resident Shortcuts master, joins David and Stephen for Shortcuts with Viticci. The three get into everything iOS 27 brings to Shortcuts, starting with Describe a Shortcut and how far natural-language automation can really go. They cover the smaller wins too, including Else If support, new automation triggers, and built-in data storage that finally gives Shortcuts global variables. Viticci also talks about his...
17 days ago • 1 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Right now, the frontier AI models are, at best, getting $200/month from AI consumers. And Sam Altman has said publicly that OpenAI loses money on every one of those subscriptions. The compute bills are just that large. Apple is doing something entirely different. At WWDC this year, they started making the case for local AI. Not with a frontier model of their own. They don't have one, and they're not trying to win that race. What they did instead was double...
18 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I spent the last month setting up a new community for the MacSparky audience. I'm not going to walk you through the build today. That's a piece for another week. What I want to tell you about is where the actual decisions came from. I worked through option after option. Names, structures, pricing, rooms, access tiers, onboarding flow. By the end I had a draft set labeled A through H. Yes, eight versions. I went in deep. Claude was useful for a lot of that....
25 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I got beta access to the new Siri AI and the first thing I asked was, “Can you check the weather for where I’ll be this weekend?”. I’m going on vacation. I never told Siri that. It read my calendar, figured out I’d be in Hawaii, and gave me the forecast. Old Siri would have read me the weather at home, or handed me a list of web results and wished me luck. That one answer tells you most of what changed. For years, the truth is that Siri made a fine kitchen...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
THE ROBOT ASSISTANT FIELD GUIDE Purchase the Robot Assistant Field Guide Get 10% Off with Code: STILL-TIME-ROBOT Hi Friend, Over the past few weeks I've been getting the same question from a lot of people: "Is it too late to get the Robot Assistant Field Guide?" No. Not even close. And actually, the timing is interesting. Apple's new Siri AI features are impressive. I've been using them, and I genuinely mean that. But they don't come close to what you can build with this system. Siri doesn't...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Back in 2017, the night before the WWDC keynote, I wrote a short post about table stakes. I’d spent a year living on the iPad, and a lot of it still felt like swimming upstream. My argument was that fixing the iPad’s file management and multitasking wasn’t the impressive part of the story. It was the price of admission. As I put it back then, that’s the starting point, not the ending one. In a few days, we’ll get another WWDC keynote, and I keep coming back...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH My new podcasts with Chris Bailey Hi Friend, I'm proud to announce I just released a new podcast, and I've been wanting to tell you about it for months. It's called Intentional AI, and it's a show about using AI to actually get your work done. Not the doom. Not the hype. The practical, useful stuff that gives you your time back. The origin story for this goes back to my co-host, Chris Bailey, and me looking, in vain, for a show like this. Everywhere we looked, the AI...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, At the top of my daily note, there are five little checkboxes. Shop. Bonsai. Exercise. Reading. Meditation. They aren't on the calendar. They have no time blocks assigned. They just sit there. For a while, I thought of them as "non-negotiables". Every box had to get checked every day. That was the deal I made with myself. But it started to feel like a burden, and I kind of lost the thread. I love all five of them. The shift happened gradually. I started...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read