THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, This past week, Apple took the wraps off the new iPhone Pro and the brand-new iPhone Duo. It’s a big deal, and a lot of ink has already been spilled over it. But something else happened that I’d like to shed more light on. John Ternus gave his first keynote as Apple CEO. And his opening remarks in that job carry real weight. He chose to use that moment to make his case for Apple’s place in AI. (Yes, he called it AI.) It starts at the 3:32 mark in Apple’s...
14 days ago • 5 min read
MPU 865: Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom On this episode of Mac Power Users, Teddy Svoronos returns to compare the iPad and Mac in his teaching workflow, explain why he replaced Keynote with PowerPoint plus a custom AI-built remote, and share tools ranging from OpenIn and Macuse to LookAway and Wispr Flow. The conversation turns to the harder question of teaching in the age of AI: preserving judgment and brainstorming, rethinking take-home assessment, and checking what...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Friend, Robot Builders Club Season Two starts tonight, and it comes with the Robot Assistant Field Guide. Hooray! Get the Robot Assistant Field Guide Get $50 Off for the next week with code: ROBOT50 Also, I put a new video up today. Six minutes of my robot assistant doing actual work. So what do I mean by "actual work"? It reads the overnight email and hands me a short list of what needs a human, with the routine replies already drafted. It files the receipts and forwards the tax ones to...
20 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Growing up and watching Star Trek, one thing that made it feel futuristic to me was the interaction with the “computer.” You didn’t see Captain Picard updating software or managing user interfaces. Instead, he just said something out into the air, and then the computer responded politely and efficiently, giving him whatever he needed. At the time, that made total sense to me as something that would be natural in a few hundred years, but it never occurred to...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Friend, I spent the past year building a personal assistant with AI tools. It’s not a chatbot. It’s a system that knows my projects, processes my email, runs my daily planning, files my documents, and handles the repetitive admin I used to lose hours to. I call that stuff the donkey work. The Robot Assistant Field Guide teaches the method so you can build your own version of it. Not a copy of mine. Yours. The Robot Assistant Field Guide was a big success. Folks who knew nothing about...
25 days ago • 2 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I made a video about this week's newsletter. Enjoy! I wear a bracelet with a Latin phrase on it, which is exactly as insufferable as it sounds. Materiam Superabat Opus. This phrase is so important to me that I had a box of pencils made with it etched on the side so I see it every time I write something down. I also laser engraved it on the inside of my belt so I think about it when I put my pants on in the morning and take them off at night. Today, I want to...
28 days ago • 3 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Something interesting is happening in the app world. With the arrival of more powerful AI, everyone is building their own. We do weekly meetups in the Robot Assistant Field Guide, called the Robot Builders Club. We cover all sorts of angles for the intentional use of this technology, and several people who have gone through the course have made their own apps. John Voorhees over at MacStories had an insightful post on the utility app flood and why he thinks...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I’ve mentioned a few times in the MacSparky Labs that I pay for web search. That always raises eyebrows. So I thought I’d explain. Even Google now injects AI slop before giving you search results, and there’s a good argument that search is going the way of the dodo. I use AI often, and yet I still find use for search. When researching, I often don’t want an AI synthesis (or I just don’t want to burn unnecessary and expensive tokens). Search is very much a...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
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...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read