Sometimes even the easy things are hard

My formative programming experiences were mostly early Apple machines. Assembly, Basic, and Pascal. College was Wintel, a brief dance with VAX/VMS, Pascal, and Ada at Lockheed Sanders, then embedded C development on various Windows flavors through arcade, console, and PC development.

I watched Jobs’ return to Apple with interest, especially with the switch to OS X. It made sense to port Second Life because we had such a creative audience, so suddenly in 2004. Intel transition — and another port — and now I was really a Mac user.

Even before iPhone, I’d never really looked back. ChromeOS makes for a really lovely way to experience the Google ecosystem, but the lead and quality of Mac silicon and hardware plus “it just works” means I’ve never seriously considered switching off of Apple. But man oh man, the “we’ve taken all the wrong lessons from Material You”-debacle of Liquid Glass, the flailing around AI, the ponderous developer experience does make you wonder.

And then I notice this on my home screen. We could quibble about the design choices, but there’s a bigger issue.

I was nowhere near New York.

The phone had at least 5 distinct signals for where I was and none of them would have suggested I was in New York.

Fingers crossed for you, Apple.