For about as long as I have been blogging, there’s been a question of whether and when Apple was going to release some touch-enabled Mac and during those years I’ve mostly been on team “definitely yes, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Here’s what I wrote in 2023:

When it comes to adding touch to macOS, I think there are three camps:

1. Apple shouldn’t add touch to macOS.
2. Apple should add basic touch support to macOS for things like gestures and tapping on buttons to meet the expectation of a population that increasingly assumes touch is supported.
3. Apple should reinvent macOS to create a touch first experience on par with iPadOS that is also somehow as productive as macOS is today.

I have been firmly in camp 2 since 2018, and I really do think there are areas of macOS that either already are or can be made as touch friendly as an iPad Mini without meaningfully sacrificing information density. That said, implicit in “don’t try to make macOS touch friendly” is “don’t try to make macOS touch friendly as iPadOS“. Adding a smattering of touch friendly controls won’t make macOS nearly as touch friendly as iPadOS.

Based on the Design for Touch developer video Apple released alongside this new MacBook Pro, Apple also seems largely in camp 2. While Apple doing more-or-less what I thought they should’ve done does feel like a win, I still came away from this week’s MacBook Pro announcement somewhat baffled.

This could very well be my limited perspective, but the few people I’ve seen throughout the years with touch-enabled PCs almost never use the touch screen. All snark aside, this is because the argument Steve Jobs presented in 2010, that vertical touch screens are ergonomically terrible, still holds true today. As such, my thinking has been and what Apple has seemingly done is implement touch on macOS as an additive experience that is both entirely optional and effectively invisible when not being used. While I think lots of people will be truly delighted on the occasion they tap or swipe on their touch-enabled Mac, I bet almost none of them will ultimately want to use touch as their Mac’s primary input. In that sense, Apple adding basic touch support makes perfect sense to me. What baffled me is how they announced basic touch input as a highest-end pro feature. What I mean by basic in this regard is that there is seemingly no special sauce Apple has done here hardware-wise. There is no complicated hinge or other ergonomic affordance nor does it somehow support Apple Pencil Pro. The screen part certainly looks pro, but the touch part seems entirely bog standard so why pretend otherwise and why limit a largely consumer feature to the highest-end laptop?

I think there are two theories. One theory I’ve heard is that launching touch on expensive laptops lets Apple test their implementation on a smaller segment of the market before releasing more touch-enabled consumer Macs. In other words, these new MacBook Pros are touchscreen dev kits that also happen to be high-end pro laptops. This makes sense to me, especially considering a target market of this high-end MacBook Pro are developers who can, in addition to more easily test touch-first iOS apps, make Mac software work better with touch input. The second theory I have is that these MacBook Pros weren’t originally intended as some separate “ultra” high-end offering, but as a replacement for the current non-base MacBook Pros, and that skyrocketing component costs has basically forced Apple to keep the current models around to meet a still very expensive existing price point. I don’t have any evidence of this obviously, but just look at how utterly iterative these new laptops are compared to the existing models. They look almost identical, are a bit lighter, and have a way better display. At a glance, their most distinctive change is the triumphant return of the glowing Apple logo. Apple calls them MacBook Pros because that’s exactly what they are.

Putting these two theories together makes announcing touch-enabled MacBook Pros start to make sense to me. Imagine there was no component crisis and these new MacBook Pros simply replaced the old ones and with prices in the same ballpark. They would still limit touch to the relatively high-end segment that’s used by developers who can best help adopt macOS’s touch implementation. Instead of “we’ve released touch exclusively on an entirely new ultra high-end laptop”, it would be “these new MacBook Pros are lighter, have tandem OLED, and are the first to have touch”. While the actual difference is effectively negligible in the long run, touch input will trickle down the MacBook line regardless, the perceptual difference in the moment is palpable. I suspect Apple intended to announce these as a revision to the MacBook Pro line in the same way a car company announces a revision to its existing luxury line that introduce a bunch of new luxury and non-luxury features. People in the know can sort out which features will stay luxury and which ones, like a backup camera, will invariably trickle down to other models. Component prices have forced Apple to launch these new MacBook Pros as a new higher-priced tier. That is justifiable for the higher-end capabilities, like the tandem OLED screen, but basic touch input isn’t really high end and that’s what makes this announcement a bit nonsensical. It’s like a car company bragging about their first ever backup camera on their newly announced supercar. It feels baffling, but in Apple’s case and under the current circumstances, it actually makes perfect sense.

I was about to quip that whoever at Apple designed and approved of these multitasking UIs set the entire iPad platform back by a decade. Then I realized that, actually, it was more than a decade. The iPhone Duo is debuting 11 years after iOS 9’s terrible iPad multitasking, and only now has Apple designed and implemented a split-screen multitasking interface that is actually good.

I always enjoy John Gruber’s reviews, but was especially looking forward to his review of the iPhone Duo. I was very confident that not only would he be as interested in the Duo’s new split-screen interface as I am, but also that his takes would very much reflect my own, specifically that Apple has finally nailed split-screen on a tablet and that trying to ship multitasking on iPads with Home buttons set them back by over a decade.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some readers might have been perplexed that my first post after the iPhone Duo announcement was a faux 2018 review of iPad multitasking from an alternative universe. While maybe it was a little self-indulgent (I did have fun writing it), the Duo does feel like an iPad from an alternative universe to me. What struck me in particular and what inspired the faux review was just how utterly intuitive Split View multitasking looks on the Duo.

Apple’s greatest designs elicit an “oh, duh, of course” when revealed. They’re not just good, they’re right. What distinguishes the “right” from the “good” is that the former has a sort of singular-ness. In a given problem space, good designs coexist and compete with other good designs, while the right designs end up standing alone because they are so obvious that any alternatives inevitably, if not immediately, seem backward. A good example of Apple defining the right design is the keyboard and trackball layout of the original PowerBook series. Unlike early PC laptops that had keyboards shifted forward toward their front edge, the PowerBook’s keyboard was shifted back towards the display, which naturally created room for a trackball and palm rests. Because the PowerBook’s layout was the right design, all laptops eventually shifted their keyboard’s back towards the display.

A more recent example of Apple defining the right design is the Home Indicator, which replaced the Home Button starting with the iPhone X. The Home Indicator was also utterly intuitive, even at launch. Swiping up to go home was immediately obvious and other gestures were easily discoverable. My employer recently bought me an Android phone to test with. Like a modern iPhone, its screen goes edge-to-edge and, because the Home Indicator was the right design, this Android phone has what is basically a Home Indicator.

Despite all the incredible engineering that went into making Apple’s first folding phone, the Duo’s most “oh, duh, of course” moment for me was the exceedingly simple and obvious-in-hindsight idea of basically treating each half of the screen as two instances of the same iPhone, each with their Home Indicator. Had the Duo been Apple’s first device that supported Split View on iOS, the “oh, duh, of course” of this design would have been sheer delight. What makes it bittersweet and what inspired my faux review is that Apple has been offering some form of Split View on iPads for 11 years now and it’s always been clunky. Per my review, that was somewhat forgivable when it only ran on iPads with Home Buttons, but it remained clunky even after iPads switched to Home Indicators. Split View was revised in 2021 with iPadOS 15 and it was still clunky. A window manager was added iPadOS just last year and, you know what, Split View is still clunky.

The implication in my faux review was that multitasking on iPads was doomed the moment Apple decided to launch it on hardware that was still locked to a single-app paradigm via a Home Button. I think the Duo is evidence of that. Not being an iPad meant those working on the Duo could look at Split View with fresh eyes, which seemingly led them to the right design¹, one that ironically should have been on the iPad almost a decade ago.

There have been rumors of some sort of iPad with multitasking for years now, with many Apple observers thinking the company might announce something as early as 2015. That clearly did not happen, nor did Apple ship anything in 2016 or even 2017. Only now in 2018, has Apple finally introduced an iPad that supports multitasking.

So what took so long?

When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, it came with an elegantly simple single-app paradigm. There was a Home Screen with a grid of icons that each opened a single app when tapped and a Home button that always brought you right back to the Home Screen when pressed. Simple. Apple kept this paradigm when it introduced the iPad in 2010. While this led to criticism that the tablet was nothing more than a big iPhone, my thinking has been that a big iPhone is really what a lot of people want. That being said, 2010 was eight years ago and while people still do love their iPads, an increasing number of iPad users have been feeling constrained by the single-app paradigm. Their ideal iPad is one capable enough that they no longer need a desktop-style computer, all while maintaining the simple paradigm they love. Apple’s problem and what took so long was a navigation built around a Home button and running a single app at a time couldn’t possibly deliver what these iPad customers wanted. A multitasking iPad would require a clean break.

The iPad Pro Apple announced this week is that clean break. While there are lots behind the “Pro” moniker, ditching Lightning for USB-C, a newly introduced Apple Pencil that magnetically pairs and charges¹, and Face ID to name a few, the biggest change is its navigation. Like last year’s iPhone X, the iPad Pro ditches the Home button in favor of a bar, which Apple calls the “Home Indicator” and can be swiped to return to the home screen or invoke the app switcher. This new navigation is even more transformative on an iPad, because a software Home Indicator can support multitasking in a way a hardware Home button never could. Apple demonstrated this and it’s obvious the moment you use an iPad Pro. Managing two apps in the newly released iOS 12.1 is incredibly intuitive because each app has its own Home Indicator that works just how anyone who’s already used an iPhone X or 11 Pro would expect. Want to replace which app is on the left? Swipe up on the left-hand Home Indicator and pick a different app on the revealed left-hand Home screen. Same is true for the right app. Furthermore, the existence of Home Indicators make the new gestures for invoking and arranging the new Split View almost immediately obvious.

People have been wanting something like Split View for years and while I am sure many are still groaning that it has taken Apple this long to deliver, I don’t see how it would be possible given a hardware Home button built for a single-app paradigm. What would happen if you pressed the Home button with two apps open? Maybe it closes both, but then how would you close just one? Could Apple have done something? Sure, but that something would have invariably been an unintuitive mess because any multitasking on an iPad with a Home button would have had to work around and even against the platform’s most fundamental paradigm. Worse, those Home button workarounds would end up codified into the platform, making them harder to change later. In other words, introducing Split View to the iPad in 2015 would have prevented the very polished experience Apple demonstrated earlier this week.

Do I wish Apple released the iPad Pro with Home Indicator three years ago? Of course, I am sure Apple does too. That said, taking longer to support multitasking than anyone wanted isn’t the worst outcome either. The worst thing would have been if Apple tried release multitasking on hardware that simply wasn’t built for it.

One axiom that has held true in my decades of observing tech is that timing is everything. Timing in tech is a product of capability and market. Jobs’s second stint at Apple was so impressive not just because of what was announced under his leadership, but also when. The iMac was a great computer built for the internet that was perfectly timed for when people were ready to buy their very first computer specifically to get on the internet. The iPod was a great portable music player that was perfectly timed for when people were ready to switch from CDs to MP3s. The iPhone was a great always-connected handheld computer that was perfectly timed for when people were craving an always-connected handheld computer. As amazing as each of these products were, they were not without limitations — the iMac didn’t run Windows, the iPod required FireWire, the iPhone ran on AT&T — but they were timed so perfectly that these limitations didn’t defined them. Compare that to the original Macintosh. The Mac was also great and really was the first personal computer for regular people, but it was released at a time when most regular people really didn’t need a personal computer, and so it was at least partially defined by it’s limitations. Of those who still remember the original Macintosh, many remember it as being underpowered, too expensive, and not compatible.

The Cook era is not known for perfectly timed products. Some of that reputation is fair. The Apple Watch took a few tries to find a market while the Vision Pro is arguably still looking for one. That said, there is one product released under Cook’s watch that was as perfectly timed as any.

AirPods.

AirPods were great wireless headphones that were perfectly timed for when people were ready to switch to wireless headphones¹. Today, AirPods (and AirPod knock-offs) are not only ubiquitous, they are more visible than even iPhones. I personally see them everywhere… on family members, colleagues, strangers, celebrities… everywhere. For that reason alone I would argue that their importance to the Apple brand outsizes their revenue, even as considerable as it is. Apple should be especially careful when it comes to changing AirPods. A dud iPhone will be hidden in cases, pockets, and purses. Dud AirPods have no place to hide.

What makes this relevant at the moment is that leaks have all but confirmed that AirPods with cameras are imminent. While I think there are real benefits to be had with ever-present² cameras and that putting such cameras on AirPods makes a whole lot of sense, I question Apple’s timing. While people might have been ready for camera-based wearables when these AirPods were in development, they seem less ready now. Part of that is Meta, the forerunner in camera-equipped accessories, being the same creepy and tasteless company they’ve always been. The other part is gross humans doing gross human things. Even with good intentions, ever-present cameras are clearly problematic in public spaces even when they aren’t always recording. And then, to top it all off, there’s Flock floating around in our current zeitgeist.

Late-2026 increasingly feels like the worst possible time for Apple or anyone to release anything meant to be worn in public with ever-present cameras and camera-equipped AirPods seems especially risky regardless of how great they are. If Apple released smart glasses next month and those smart glasses were met with huge public backlash for all of the reasons I listed above, the only product affected would be those smart glasses. Whether or not someone was wearing iGlasses would be obvious and only they would have to deal with the stigma. According to that leaked video, the upcoming camera-equipped AirPods look pretty much like any other AirPods. If that’s the case and these new camera-equipped AirPods are met with the same hypothetical public backlash, I don’t see how regular non-camera AirPod users who never had any intention of wearing cameras on their head in public don’t also end up getting caught in the fire. It’ll be like wearing an innocuous red baseball cap after 2016.

I am not predicting a major backlash will happen nor do I really think it’s even likely, but I do think it’s possible and don’t think it would even need to be that major in a world where AirPods suddenly become known as “the ones that might have cameras in them”. The whole line would still suffer in any scenario where public ever-present cameras are seen as distasteful and/or controversial. While I’m sure Apple will rightfully tout its long track record of protecting users’ privacy while introducing a bunch of guardrails and assurances that everything is on device, will any of that matter in world where people still put tape over the cameras on their MacBooks? Even those who know better might start considering other wireless headphones just so they don’t have to field questions about cameras that don’t exist.

AirPods with ever-present cameras could make for a really great AI-assisted wearable, but releasing them in 2026 risks them being defined by increasing negative public sentiment of ever-present cameras. And if camera-equipped AirPods are largely imperceptible from the non-camera models, that negative sentiment could end up infecting the whole line.

Could Apple have “played ball” with the European Commission regarding alternative marketplaces? The assumption is that the European Commission would be more flexible with Apple today for features like Siri AI and iPhone Mirroring had the company simply allowed no-or-low cost support for alternative marketplaces. Ben Thompson said he predicted as much on the most recent episode of Dithering:

I said “don’t Apple.” “This is going to be the problem. If you just chill out on the App Store or else your future integrated products are going to be in trouble.” That’s sort of exactly what’s happened.

While Ben’s take was ultimately a bit more nuanced, I suspect those who see Apple as wholly in the wrong agree with the above assertion without caveat because Apple bringing even more regulatory scrutiny upon themselves through hard-headed spite fits their narrative.

Until recently, the idea that simply playing ball with alternative marketplaces might have helped Apple felt possible to me. It felt possible specifically because Google seemed to avoid the same level of regulatory scrutiny with its ostensibly open Android OS, but that was always an assumption. Alternative marketplaces was clearly a top priority for the European Commission at the start of DMA enforcement and we never really saw them go head to head with Google because Android already supported sideloading. In other words, no one could say the European Commission was going easy on Android because Google played ball with alternative marketplaces because Google was never eligible to play ball with alternative marketplaces in the first place.

While the relationship between the European Commission and Google tells us nothing about playing ball, it tells us exactly how inconsequential support for alternative marketplaces is when it comes to regulatory scrutiny of integrated features. Apple hasn’t played ball with alternative marketplaces and now its new AI-based features are being withheld from the EU lest they get scrutinized for fines by the European Commission. Google hasn’t had to play ball with alternative marketplaces and now its new AI-based features are either being scrutinized for fines by the European Commission or being withheld lest they also get scrutinized. The European Commission is, rightly so in my opinion, regulating both operating systems equally and regardless of their support for alternative marketplaces. I say “rightly so” because the alternative would be a sure sign the European Commission isn’t evenhanded.

If in another universe Apple had satisfied the European Commission by adding support for Android-style sideloading to iOS, I think Siri AI and iPhone Mirroring would still be subject to the same regulatory environment that led to those features being withheld in the EU in this universe. We know this because Gemini on Android is getting the same level of regulatory scrutiny as Siri AI on iOS. Apple couldn’t have played ball with alternative marketplaces because there was no ball to be played.

Imagine if instead of speed limits, all reckless driving was enforced purely on the present sheriff’s ad hoc judgement, and that infractions came with a maximum penalty of 10% of perpetrators’ income. How fast would you drive?

To me, the fundamental question since the dawn of the DMA has been “is Apple solely acting out of some toxic mixture of greed and spite or is the DMA as it is currently being enforced by the European Commission really that hard to work with?” I believe the answer to this “a or b” question is “yes”. Yes, Apple is acting out of greed and spite (see their hairbrained fee structures for alternative marketplaces as an example), but also yes, the DMA and enforcement thereof seems like a particularly difficult and capricious regulatory dynamic.

From my view here in the US, it really doesn’t seem like most iPhone customers in the EU have needed to care regardless of who is being spiteful or who is being unreasonable. Areas where Apple has already complied, maliciously or otherwise, really hasn’t meaningfully affected how most Europeans use their iPhones one way or another, and the features Apple is withholding have all been relatively niche so far. I say “so far” because Siri is finally about to get it’s first real major revision since it launched a decade and a half ago and way too early indications suggest that it might actually be good.

Rather than jump right into considering the implications of a semi-polarizing mandate with an unreleased version of an mildly polarizing major feature being upgraded to use the most polarizing tech, let’s first consider them with an existing well-liked minor feature already being withheld from the EU, iPhone Mirroring. My rough understanding is that for Apple to release iPhone Mirroring in the EU in a way that satisfies the DMA’s interoperability mandate, iOS and iPadOS would have to support screen sharing and notification forwarding on other platforms such as Windows, Linux, and Android. While I might be off on some of the details, I haven’t seen anyone argue that Apple could release iPhone Mirroring in the EU without offering third parties some version of these capabilities. Bringing this back to Siri AI for a moment, I think it’s reasonable to assume that if interoperability for iPhone Mirroring means Apple would have to give third parties a means to remotely access an iPhone’s screen and notifications, then interoperability for Siri AI means Apple would have to give third parties means to access an iPhone’s personal user data.

While I think everyone agrees on what the DMA demands from Apple at a high level, they disagree how practical it is for Apple to meet them. My sense is that those who have taken a cynical view of Apple think the company could just release a version of iPhone Mirroring that allows for interoperability and is simply refusing to do so out of spite. Apple’s stance is that the nature of the DMA and how it’s being enforced by the European Commission means there is no clear direction for how the company should support iPhone Mirroring in a way that, with certainty, would satisfy the interoperability mandate even if they wanted to. Would merely adding some screensharing protocol for other platforms to independently support iPhone Mirroring satisfy the mandate? Would Apple also have to make Windows, Linux and Android apps? Under what circumstances should a third party have access to a user’s notifications? Could those iPhone Mirroring apps still use even iCloud or would Apple have to implement support for an iPhone Mirroring that works independent of Apple’s service? Those arguing that Apple is acting purely out of spite seem to suggest there is some obvious solution for iPhone Mirroring that would satisfy the interoperability mandate, but they never go into what that obvious solution is because they don’t know. They don’t know because I would guess no one does, not even Apple and certainly not the European Commission.

As far as I can tell, the European Commission doesn’t see it as their responsibility to help gatekeepers design features ahead of time in a way that should be compliant with the DMA. What they want instead is to decide whether or not a given feature runs afoul of the DMA after its released in the EU and presumably after they’ve gotten feedback from third parties. That kind of sounds reasonable at a high level, but it’s bonkers in practice. What company, gatekeeper or not, is going to invest millions of dollars building features to satisfy a regulation without knowing if said features are going to actually satisfy said regulation? And that’s assuming best intentions, which I doubt is the case here. Even if every European Commission regulator is entirely on the up and up, many of the third parties they are seeking input from are provably not. With iPhone Mirroring, it’s easy to imagine Meta citing their smart glasses when asking the European Commission for access to iPhone users’ notifications, but with the intention of using that access mostly to target ads.

I suspect Apple is less concerned with the work involved with making features interoperable than the uncertainty that the results won’t ultimately satisfy the European Commission. I also believe this is specifically the situation Apple is alluding to with their statement about Siri AI being delayed in the EU.

(Emphasis added.)

Given the serious risks to users, Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact, *the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals**.

Apple will continue working to bring these features to the European Union as safely as possible. However, given the clear dangers to EU users and the regulators’ failure to acknowledge these risks, there is currently no timeline for Siri AI’s availability in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.

Some might read this and think the EU only rejected Apple’s proposal to release Siri AI as-is while they roll out Trusted System Agent, and that these capabilities will merely be delayed by 18 months for EU customers, but that’s not what I think Apple is saying here. I think Apple means it when they wrote that “there is currently no timeline” for Siri AI in the EU, and that the reason there is no timeline is because the European Commission can’t or doesn’t want to preemptively approve Trusted System Agent or any other proposed interoperable solution before Siri AI is released in the EU¹.

Because Apple was already on “digital marketplaces” road when the new sheriff was elected, they only had two options: go as slow as possible or find out just how fast they can still go by spitefully slowing down in the smallest increments possible until they stop getting cited for reckless driving. With new features such as iPhone Mirroring and Siri AI, Apple has a third option, which is to simply avoid those roads altogether.

Count on good old Tom Warren to come up with the take that the MacBook Neo is actually good news for Microsoft in an article titled, and I shit you not, The MacBook Neo is the best thing to happen to Windows in years. In the article, Warren argues that Microsoft has always responded well to competition and from Apple in particular.

If there’s one thing I know about Microsoft after covering the company for more than 20 years, it’s that it will always respond to a competitive threat. Apple’s MacBook Air convinced Microsoft and Intel to launch thin and light laptops with the Ultrabook initiative, the iPad pushed Microsoft to create its own tablet hardware, and the threat of Chromebooks saw Microsoft try to match the security and simplicity of ChromeOS with S mode versions of Windows.

Ultrabooks are indeed a good example of the PC industry responding to a product released by Apple, but as far as I am aware, the initiative to flood the market with off-brand MacBook Airs didn’t come from Microsoft. It came from Intel. I can’t speak to Windows S mode and honestly confused it with the now defunct Windows 10 S operating system, but I would like to know how many buyers were swayed from buying a Chromebook. My best case scenario guess is that maybe it kept a few schools on PCs.

This brings me to Microsoft’s tablet hardware, something that Warren doubled down on in a later paragraph.

It’s no coincidence that Microsoft announced these Windows changes around the same time as the MacBook Neo. Just like how former CEO Steve Ballmer held up an HP tablet PC days before Apple’s original iPad announcement in 2010, Microsoft has always closely followed Apple, be it with the Zune or making Windows Mobile a touch-friendly OS.

Tablet PCs running Windows existed throughout the aughts where they struggled to find a market, mostly because they sucked. The HP branded tablet PC that Ballmer showed at CES just before the iPad was announced was part of a half baked “slate PC” initiative, which involved a line of tablets from different manufacturers and ran Windows 7. Slate PCs turned out to be such a nothing burger that they are basically a footnote in the Table PC Wikipedia entry.

His other two examples are just as laughable. Zunes might have been fine MP3 players, but the first ones were released 5 years after the iPod and less than three months before the iPhone was announced. Speaking of, Microsoft’s response to the iPhone was a textbook example of what not to do. Ballmer first dismissed it out of hand, which his company followed by releasing a few lackluster updates to a struggling Windows Mobile OS before launching an entirely new Windows Phone platform three years later. I actually found Windows Phone compelling at the time, but it was too little/too late and was ultimately canned.

Oh and let’s not forget the unbridled success that’s been Microsoft’s transition to ARM, which as Warren points out, started before Apple decided to finally get its act together and follow suit.

I’m still surprised that I use an Arm-powered Windows laptop daily, especially as Microsoft’s original Windows on Arm launch with the Surface RT was such a mess that it led to the company pivoting to focus on Intel-based Surface Pro devices for many years instead. It wasn’t until 2019 that Microsoft got serious about Windows on Arm again. Microsoft’s Windows chief, Pavan Davuluri, was a key engineer in the effort with Qualcomm to make Windows on Arm a reality. Davuluri worked on the custom Surface processors with AMD and Qualcomm, and helped launch the impressive Surface Pro X model ahead of Apple’s transition to its own silicon.

I’ve already written a whole piece on The Verge’s years long and absurdly positive coverage of Windows on ARM. Taking that aside, Warren is basically arguing that Microsoft responded well to Apple Silicon and also that it didn’t need to respond to Apple Silicon because it was already responding to Apple Silicon before Apple Silicon existed to demand a response. Fourth dimensional check and mate.

There’s at least an argument that Microsoft did eventually after almost a decade get Windows on ARM right, even if it isn’t exactly a shining example of how well the company responds to threats. On the other hand, arguing with a completely straight face that Tablet PCs, Zune, and Windows Mobile are examples of how Microsoft has successfully responded to competition from Apple is inane. His perspective makes me truly wonder if Tom Warren is writing to us from an alternative universe, one where Microsoft has been a bastion of competition replete with a slew of attractive and popular products people love to use.

It’s the only thing that makes sense.

In light of Apple’s recent 50th anniversary, I have been thinking about what the world would look like had the company never existed. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 commercial. While absurdly melodramatic, the ad points to a future antithetical to the one both Steves at Apple were trying to create, one where everyone each has their own personal computer that empowers them to whatever they wanted. While the book 1984 specifically portrays a dystopian communist future, the 1984 ad doesn’t have anything to do with communism. It’s about IBM and the future that IBM represented. That’s not speculation. It’s how Steve Jobs framed the ad when presenting the famous commercial before introducing the Macintosh. His framing concludes with:

IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”

Despite being called the “IBM Personal Computer”, Jobs saw an IBM controlled future as one with computers that weren’t actually personal. That sounds ridiculous, but it doesn’t take much imagination even here in our Apple universe considering how the PC market actually developed during its formative years of the 1980s. In our universe, IBM never did come to dominate the personal computer industry because Microsoft did, and they did so almost exactly how IBM would.

Most people used DOS in the 80s not because they preferred it, but because the companies that employed them did. At first institutions chose PCs running DOS because they were the computers made by IBM, a serious company with “business machines” in its name and decades old relationships with fortune 500 companies. Not long after, however, most companies eschewed IBM for cheaper off-brand PC clones. Corporate purchasers didn’t buy COMPAQs, HPs, or Tandys because they thought they were better than IBMs, but because they were cheaper and ran the same operating system. Within a span of about five years Microsoft commoditized the PC market, which drove down prices and made DOS and Windows the de facto operating systems of increasingly off-brand computers that only a fraction of its users actually chose to use to begin with. When most people did willingly choose PCs in the 90s, it was because they were cheaper and because that’s what they or someone they knew had at work.

This isn’t to say that I think Microsoft represented the kind of threat Jobs warned about with IBM, rather to illustrate that the early PC market was defined by big businesses and other institutions who represented the vast majority of the market and who quickly consolidated on a single platform. On the contrary, Microsoft has always been very pro-personal computer. Also and most notably, no company screwed IBM better than Microsoft. That said, I think it’s fair to question whether Microsoft would have been able to pull one over IBM in a universe without Apple as they did in ours.

Given Commodore and Tandy also existed and released personal computers in the late 70s, let’s assume personal computers were inevitable and that they would sell enough to garner the attention of IBM. The question then becomes whether any of the other personal computer makers would pose the same threat to IBM as Apple did. If not, it’s easy to imagine a world where IBM doesn’t embrace off the shelf components or get hoodwinked by Microsoft for the sake of speed to market. Eventually big blue would still make something like the PC, which would still run something like DOS. The difference is that it would remain IBM controlled and sold at a price only institutions could justify. Eventually everyone would still use one of these computers, but they would be owned by the employer and only used for work or research, just like mainframes. Laptops would still happen because institutions would embrace their employees being able to take their microcomputer home and on the road for work. There would also without a doubt still be microprocessor-based consumer devices, but they would be more appliance-like. Think the entertainment systems shipped with cars, e-books, smart TVs, and video game consoles.

I’m also confident the internet was also inevitable, but would function entirely differently. Without personal computers, the internet would be defined by the needs of the various institutions who bought and controlled microcomputers and the makers of consumer appliances, sort of like how Amazon Kindles have free cellular connectivity, but only for buying e-books from Amazon. Speaking of cellular, mobile phones would also certainly happen, but there would be little reason for something like an iPhone or Android to exist in a world where computers are by definition work machines. We actually caught a brief glimpse of this. RIM dominated the mobile market because its Blackberry became the device of big business. While a few people did buy personal Blackberries, most bought whatever extremely limited consumer device promoted by their carrier at a given moment. Speaking of carriers, without the context of personal computing or a company like Apple, would anything have broken the carriers’ grip on the mobile phone market?

Could this darkest of timelines have actually happened had Apple not existed? I really think so, but I also think a more likely and less dark Apple-less outcome would still result in personal computers, just crappier and less tasteful ones. And while it’s certainly possible that a timeline without Apple wouldn’t be that much different than our own, I’m sure glad to live in one where Apple does exist and has been a driving force for keeping computers personal for 50 years.

Now let’s see if they can keep it up for 50 more.

Gruber, on whether Apple’s upcoming March “experience” might have something to do with F1:

A reader pointed out that the 2026 Formula 1 season starts in Australia on March 8. You will recall from October that Apple TV is now the exclusive broadcast partner for F1 in the U.S. Apple is already dabbling with live immersive sports broadcasting for VisionOS with a limited slate of Lakers games this season. If they have something planned for streaming F1 races live on Vision Pro, with some level of immersion, March 4 would be a pretty good date to demo that experience to the media.

I love the idea that Apple’s March “experience” might include an F1 Vision Pro tie-in. I could see live sports ultimately being that platform’s killer app, in that watching a television broadcast would immediately feel second rate the moment someone watches their favorite sport in visionOS in the same way WAP browsers immediately felt second rate after using Safari on the iPhone. That’s not to say live sports would make the Vision Pro sell like hotcakes and become as ubiquitous as the iPhone. I still think VR is a relatively niche medium. Rather, I think being the undisputed best way to watch sports would give Apple Vision a very clear consumer reason for existing. I’d wager some people already spend more than $3500 to watch live sports at home. That may sound silly, but it’s also extremely relatable. People get when other people seek out the best version of something they enjoy. Someone spending $3500 on a Vision Pro to get the best version of pointless tech capabilities, by comparison, just sounds silly.