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Hi Friend, I recently took a flight and following touchdown, a crew member made a surprise announcement: this landing marked our captain’s final flight after 30 years piloting aircraft. We all applauded. As we disembarked, the captain stood in the aisle, offering each passenger a farewell. When it was my turn, I congratulated him. I actually thought about what I’d say. “I hope your next adventure is as exciting as this one was.” His eyes met mine, serious and somber, as he quietly replied, “This was it.” I was swept onward by the flow of passengers, but he held my eye for just a moment longer. The sadness on his face has stayed with me. Life is full of transitions. I’ve faced many — shifting careers, watching my kids grow up, leaving behind the identity I had built as a lawyer. Most big changes in life aren’t surprises. Retirement doesn’t sneak up overnight, and children don’t grow up in secret. Yet, some of us still find ourselves flat-footed when life’s inevitable curves appear. It’s tempting to ignore change, to stick our heads in the sand, pretending it’s far away, until suddenly we’re facing a stark realization: “This was it.” I’ve written before about the importance of continuously Knitting Your Parachute. Asking yourself often, “What’s next, and how do I make that work?” is a practice I deeply believe in. It’s an approach that keeps hope alive, turns anxiety into anticipation, and keeps you engaged with life. This week, I encourage you to spend a few quiet moments reflecting: What’s your next move, and how can you embrace it? Whether you’re graduating, shifting careers, or facing retirement, don’t wait until change feels overwhelming. Life’s bends in the road are inevitable, but how we meet them, that’s entirely up to us. Let’s commit never to find ourselves in a position where we have to quietly say, “This was it.” It’s stories like this that led me to make the Productivity Field Guide. In the NewsM6 MacBook Pro RedesignThere’s a lot of murmuring about next year’s hypothetical M6 MacBook Pro update. (Not this year’s hypothetical M5 update.) The M6 is supposed to have an OLED screen (hooray!) and be thinner (ruh-roh). I have thoughts. glassOSThere are also increasing rumors that Apple is updating the look of its user interface for the operating system updates getting released at WWDC in June. If you look at the Vision Pro interface and the look of Apple’s new Invites app, it’s all a lot glassier than anything we’ve seen from Apple in quite a while. I hope it’s true. I’m ready for a new look. Your Pal, David P.S. We had a lot of fun in the MacSparky Labs in March. Notable events was a meetup of Vision Pro users to reflect on the first year with Apple’s new device and a deep dive on e-books in light of Amazon tightening the screws on downloading your purchased books.
If you’d like to be a part of the MacSparky Labs, you can get more information and join right here. |
In a world where technology is increasingly conspiring to steal our focus and attention, my goal is to teach you how to be more productive with Apple technology. I want to help you achieve what is most important to you and enjoy your life at the same time using technology instead of becoming another one of its victims. Pretty much everything I make points at that North Star. I believe in this message so much that I’ve staked my livelihood on it.
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, As we all experiment with AI and how it can help, I went down a rabbit hole over the last month that I wanted to share. I called it “The Daybook”. It was an automated daily note. It ran every night, pulling in my calendar, my open tasks, my repeating chores, and anything else I might need before the day started. It was pretty advanced and I enjoyed building it. But I found myself not looking at it. So I tinkered with it. And I still didn’t read it. The...
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Back when I was practicing law, I created an automation that used the terminal, AppleScript, and chewing gum to make a weekly status report for the staff. It was formatted beautifully. It went out like clockwork, and I spent too much time building it. Then one day in a meeting I asked about something from that week’s report. Nobody had read it. Not once, not ever. I want to tell you the lesson there was about automation. It wasn’t. The report ran perfectly....
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I’ve been running Apple’s beta software this year and I keep forgetting it’s there. And that got me thinking. This is the smoothest beta cycle in years. Apple shipped one genuinely big new thing, Siri AI, the one we’ve all been waiting on, and then spent the rest of the summer fixing bugs and sanding down rough edges instead of stacking six more headline features on top. They delivered on a prior promise instead of making three shiny new ones they couldn’t...