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...
11 days 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...
18 days ago • 2 min read
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....
25 days ago • 4 min read
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...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Over the last month, I moved the MacSparky Labs and Field Guides over to a new home in Circle. I’ve spent a lot of time on that space. Colors, tone, the little details that make a place feel like somewhere instead of just software. Then I'd click back over to macsparky.com and wince a little. The old site was grey, black, and white. When I first moved to WordPress, I was just relieved the thing worked. Getting it stable was the whole project. But relief isn't...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I recently saw the new Toy Story 5 movie, and I want to suggest you consider seeing it with any kids in your life. Let me explain. I'll keep the spoilers light, because you should see it. The setup is that a kid gets a new device, and that device becomes the thing the whole story turns on. The movie portrays technology with a subtlety I wasn't expecting. By the end, the device isn't the villain. It has a place. It just has limits, and the story is honest...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
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...
about 2 months 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...
about 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 2 min read