Someone tried to pull a “shoebox” scam on me while I was traveling in NYC this week for work. By “shoebox” scam, I am referring to Charlotte Cowle’s The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. If you haven’t done so already, I implore you to read it.

I don’t typically answer many calls from unknown numbers, but one came in while I was at work that was very possibly from our kiddo’s spring camp. Upon answering, a person on the other line identified himself as a deputy with the county sheriff. After confirming the name and address that this person already had, I was told that I had missed a summons. The implication being that there was some warrant out for my arrest. Already suspicious, I politely told the person that I would call him back at the number listed on the sheriff’s website. He seemed bothered by this and my suspicions were confirmed when he demanded that he call me back from that number. This experience was exactly like one Charlotte had described in her piece.

He told me his name was Michael Sarano and that he worked for the CIA on cases involving the FTC. He gave me his badge number. “I’m going to need more than that,” I said. “I have no reason to believe that any of what you’re saying is real.”

“I completely understand,” he said calmly. He told me to go to the FTC home page and look up the main phone number. “Now hang up the phone, and I will call you from that number right now.” I did as he said. The FTC number flashed on my screen, and I picked up. “How do I know you’re not just spoofing this?” I asked.

“It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.”

Caller ID can be spoofed, even government numbers. Sure enough, before I could get my call out, another call came in from the number on the website. I could have ignored it, but answered out of curiosity. The person on the other side was not the same person who I was talking to before, but a different man. This man had a southern sounding accent, apt for Texas, and was immediately more intense. When I reiterated that I would call the number back, the intense southern sounding man became threatening. I don’t remember his exact wording, but it was something along the lines of “if you hang up this call, I am going to send a squad car right now and have you arrested.” His threat didn’t really worry me and not because I was in New York at the time, but because it was clearly a gambit to keep me from calling the number. Spoofing Caller ID is just that. It makes a phone call from one number look like it came from another number. In my case, the number spoofed at this point was the one for the actual sheriff’s department so any call back would be received by the actual sheriff’s department and not the scammers. My adversary surely knew this, so his only move was to try and bully me into staying on the call he had started.

I hung up on him and called the actual sheriff’s department using the number listed on their website. Eventually a nice operator sent me to non-emergency dispatch who told me they were aware of the scam and asked if I had given any money to the perpetrators. I told him I hadn’t and asked if there was any way to actually confirm whether there was some sort of summons I missed for ultimate peace of mind. The dispatcher wasn’t really sure, but didn’t seem too worried about it. I then called my wife to let her know what happened, lest the scammers tried her next. Alas no one called her, I assume because they correctly figured that I would warn her immediately.

I have been privately skeptical of Charlotte’s account and not because I thought these scams didn’t exist, rather because there are many aspects of her story that require her to fall for some truly unbelievable aspects. The most notable of which for me was that the FTC/CIA was going to let her take cash out before freezing her accounts, or as redditor Creative_Instinct put it:

CIA: We’re probably freezing your assets because you’re under investigation or under arrest. I don’t even know anymore. But I like you. So. Go take all your money out. This is standard protocol. We warn you, THEN freeze your assets.

That said, I find her more believable having now experienced this sort of scam in person. I was definitely a little rattled by the experience despite having identified the scam early on and can’t imagine what I might have done had I not. Furthermore, that I did suss it out was at least partially due to having read Charlotte’s piece in recent months. I don’t know if I could have been rattled to the extent of putting $50,000 dollars into a shoebox, but having her account top of mind certainly helped regardless.

The Mac turns 40 today, so I figured I’d use the occasion to write about my first Macintosh. Before he retired, my Dad was a consultant at a firm. What he did was niche, but he was top three in his field. While I was in elementary school, my dad threatened to go independent and went so far as to set up a home office. We’d already had an Apple //c in the house, so he bought another Apple for his new business, a Macintosh LC II. I was immediately enamored with it. I loved the Apple //c, but this was so much better. The problem was I wasn’t allowed to touch it.

Fast forward three more years.

My dad’s employer had long convinced him to stay, I was in middle school, and my older brother had just gone off to college. It was Christmas, and all I wanted was a CD player like the one my older brother had. We opened presents. No CD player. That’s when my mother said the following.

“We can get you a CD player or you can have Dad’s computer, and we’ll get you a CD drive and some speakers.”

So I got my dad’s Macintosh LC II. The LC II wasn’t a great computer to begin with and certainly wasn’t anything to write home about in 1995, but that Mac started my passion for technology and opened up my world in incalculable ways.

Since June, I have been thinking of Vision as being more Mac-like, in part because both were built for multitasking¹. The more I think about it however, the more I think that Vision is really a rethinking of how multitasking iPad apps should work.

Almost a year ago, I argued that multitasking on iPad suffered because you can’t have touchability, productivity, and portability. An 11” iPad Pro can’t have the information density of a Mac while retaining both its portable size and its touch friendliness. In that piece, I used the term “information density” to describe how pointer driven interfaces can display more information because their controls (button, menus, etc…) don’t require nearly as much affordance as those needed to do touch interfaces well.

“Density” is really only a means to being “information rich“. My conclusion was that the only way Apple could deliver an information rich multitasking experience with iPads Pro would be better support for large screens. An iPad Pro connected to a hypothetical “Studio Display Touch” could be significantly more information rich. The trade off, of course, would be portability.

My thinking at the time was that portability had to be dictated by screen size, because historically that was the case. A device could only be as small as its screen, regardless of its OS or user experience. Headsets are the very recent exception. They can provide portability without sacrificing screen size. Even without any modifications, windowed apps that feel cramped in Stage Manager on iPad will suddenly feel much more natural on Vision because they can be maximally information rich without having to be information dense.

Throughout the 2010s, there was always a question of whether the iPad could supplant the Mac. How that would actually happen always seemed like the underpants gnomes’ plan, with no clear line from A to B, and step two perpetually filled with question marks. There is a clear line how Vision could supplant another Apple product line, but the closest target isn’t the Mac, it’s the iPad Pro.

Products and features need to resonate with an audience in order to succeed. People feel, sometimes immediately, when a feature resonates with them, and it’s that feeling that gives them a sense of whether a related product is revolutionary and not the other way around. The iPhone was almost immediately and universally recognized as a revolutionary device because its features resonated with anyone who hated their existing mobile phone, which was practically everyone. Conversely, the original Macintosh was also truly revolutionary, but struggled initially because the graphical user interface only resonated with a relatively small audience.

Sometimes a widely resonant feature requires a revolutionary product, but I would wager that most features that resonate with a wide audience don’t come via revolution, but through iteration. In the 2000s, Apple excelled at adding features that resonated with buyers to existing products. MagSafe, the pulsing sleep indicator, and hidden LEDs to show battery charge are just a few examples of widely resonant features that were added iteratively to Apple’s laptops that buyers immediately understood and desired. Apple was so good at finding these sort of features that many in the tech world painted the company as some sort of pied piper, one that used gimmicks to trick buyers into paying more for computers that didn’t even run Windows.

One of my criticisms of Apple during the 2010s is how often the company would chase “revolutionary” rather than embrace iteration and emphasize features that would resonate most with customers. A good example of this is the now defunct 3D Touch. In my mind, the killer feature of 3D Touch was “trackpad mode”, wherein pressing anywhere on iOS’s keyboard would turn it into a trackpad for precisely moving the insertion point and selecting text¹. Most people, even Apple enthusiasts, probably don’t remember this version of the feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if many didn’t even know it existed in the first place. That’s because Apple itself didn’t mention it when 3D Touch was announced.²

Apple instead chose to pitch 3D Touch as the “revolutionary” follow up to multitouch, and primarily promoted Quick Actions and Peek and Pop³. While still useful, I would argue both were “nice to have” features, each looking for a problem to solve. A quicker way to take selfies or preview a message was nice, but no one was really stymied by taking selfies or browsing email before 3D Touch. It was obvious from the start that 3D Touch was not revolutionary, and these features didn’t resonate with enough iPhone users even if it was. Precise intuitive text editing, on the other hand, would have resonated with anyone who has ever become frustrated while trying to edit text on a smartphone, which I would wager was most smartphone users⁴. By artificially inflating 3D Touch to “revolutionary”, Apple steered the messaging away from its most resonant feature.

In more recent years, Apple has made progress in delighting users by bringing back features that resonate. MacBooks have MagSafe and iMacs have color. That being said, I still think today’s Apple often struggles to identify which features resonate with their customers. A good example of this is the Apple TV.

My sense is that the company doesn’t quite know how to pitch the Apple TV. Apple TV is not a revolutionary product, especially in 2024, and on paper doesn’t offer much more than what is already included with modern day smart TVs. Apple’s inability to pitch the Apple TV means the conversation around it is dominated by its price, which is foolishly oversimplistic. Sure, in relative pricing, an Apple TV at any price will always be infinitely more expensive than whatever crap software that comes free with a smart TV. Macs are more expensive than Chromebooks too. In absolute pricing however, an Apple TV costs $129. Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than the cheapest iPod Apple ever sold. Apple TV is a steal if you care about the experience of watching TV, and has great features that I think would resonate with many buyers if Apple actually promoted them. The best example of this in my mind is audio.

I have been pairing my Apple TVs with HomePods to get Home Theater Audio for a few years now. Despite the name, the feature I think would resonate with most people is not immersive audio, because Home Theater Audio isn’t truly immersive. The resonant feature is really good audio that makes it possible to understand what the hell characters are saying without having to install a complicated five-plus speaker system for surround sound. Apple has even already done the ad for that second part.

AirPods support is another Apple TV audio feature that I think would resonate with a lot of people. Being able to connect multiple AirPods to an Apple TV was a godsend when my wife and I were sleep training our kid and has since proven useful when one of us wants to watch something while the other sleeps. That may not resonate with everyone, but I would wager there are more people interested in watching a show without disturbing a sleeping family member than those interested in playing iOS games on their TV.

Another feature that would obviously resonate with Apple’s customers that the company seems to be outright avoiding is emoji Tapbacks. Messages currently only lets you “Tapback” with six emoji-like and subtly animated glyphs. People want and have become accustomed to using any emoji to react to a given message. To my knowledge, Apple never claimed Tapbacks were revolutionary, but its insistence on excluding emoji is actively dissonant to what its customers want. While the most recent version of Messages does support using emoji as stickers, the implementation spitefully obscures text. Even with a better implementation, the feature would still be dissonant, because stickers aren’t what their customers expect.

Revolutionary products necessarily have features that resonate with a wide audience, but most resonant features happen through iteration. Eschewing iteration in the pursuit of “revolutionary” risks increasingly forgoing features that resonate with customers. Always chasing features in lieu of a revolutionary approach is indeed penny wise and pound foolish, but repeatedly doing the opposite might just be worse.

Joe Rossignol, at MacRumors:

When the feature is turned on, iPhone users are required to authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID for additional actions, including viewing passwords or passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple Card, turning off Lost Mode, erasing all content and settings, using payment methods saved in Safari, and more.

For especially sensitive actions, including changing the password of the Apple ID account associated with the iPhone, the feature adds a security delay on top of biometric authentication. In these cases, the user must authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID, wait one hour, and authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID again. However, Apple said there will be no delay when the iPhone is in familiar locations, such as at home or work.

This is very similar to an idea I floated to a friend back in September. Here’s what I wrote back then (with some minor grammatical corrections):

Here’s an idea for the nefarious actors who reset iCloud passwords after getting an iPhone passcode. Require biometric authentications to change the iCloud password and add a 24 hour delay to modify Face/Touch ID.

Maybe 24 hours is too long of a delay, but I can’t see how given the exemption for familiar networks. Conversely, one hour does not seem like nearly enough time considering the scene of the crime is often a bar. With libations and socializing, victims may not immediately notice their phone is missing, especially those that keep their phone in a bag. Even if they do notice right away, they may be over an hour away from being able to access their Apple account or call Apple support. Getting home from a happy hour in Manhattan regularly took me over an hour when I lived in south Brooklyn.

Update: Having read Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen’s article that MacRumors cited, I misunderstood the feature. It’s not that changing biometrics using just the passcode will be delayed by an hour, it’s that any biometric or passcode changes will take effect after an hour delay. This, in addition to requiring biometrics (Touch ID/Face ID) to modify biometrics, seems much better than what I had originally understood.

Inspired by the folks over at MacStories adding a new section dedicated to their setups, I figured now would be a good time to write about my own workspace. It’s actually something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now as I’ve made several upgrades over the past year and have never been happier.

Let me start by saying that I see my workspace as an area worth investing in. That is to say while I am frugal with other things, like my car, my workspace is an area that I am willing to pay a premium for a nicer experience. In addition to using computers for my hobbies, I also work from home. This means I currently spend most of my waking life at my desk. I appreciate a nicer workspace much like someone who drives a long commute appreciates a nicer car. With that said, here is my current workplace.

Ergonomics

Standing Height 4-Leg Table by UPLIFT Desk

I currently use an Uplift Standing Table as my desk. Why a table? The best way to answer that is to talk about its predecessor and my first standing desk, the IKEA Bekant. The Bekant is a typical sit/stand adjustable desk, in that it can be raised and lowered between standing and sitting positions. You don’t have to be particularly observant to notice that the Bekant has only two legs. While I was never worried about its overall stability, I found the two-legged Bekant very slightly, but very noticeably bent with any amount of force on its surface. This bending combined with a VESA arm meant that my display would also ever so slightly bounce while typing. This bouncing was annoying the same way a slightly wobbly chair is annoying. You think it won’t bother you at first, but soon you can’t ignore it.

When I started looking at alternative standing desks, I found almost all of them also had only two legs. While it was possible, if not likely, other desks would be a bit more solid than the IKEA discount special I had grown to loathe. There was no way for me to know. Also and importantly, I never used the sitting position with the Bekant and almost all standing desks on the market are also of the sit/stand adjustable variety.

This Uplift Standing table has four legs and therefore does not bend an inch. Not being sit/stand adjustable also makes it much more affordable, so much so that I could get a much nicer birch butcher block top. I strongly prefer the feel of this butcher block to the laminate of the Bekant it replaced.

Herman Miller Aeron Stool

The reason I don’t need an adjustable standing desk is because I use a stool for my sitting needs¹. My current stool is a Herman Miller Aeron, which I love. I also considered Steelcase. My wife equally loves her Gesture and while Steelcase offers it as a stool, the stool version felt like an afterthought on Steelcases’s own website². By comparison, the Aeron Stool has been around long enough that I never worried Herman Miller might soon deny its existence. Finally, the Aeron has been the standard in office chairs for as long as I can remember. Of course it looks and feels great. I suspect there are only two kinds of people who complain about the Aeron:

1. Those who are dealing with a decades old and poorly treated hand me down that was likely acquired by their employer in the most recent of a series of startup liquidation auctions.
2. Those who lament that their perfection has made them too ubiquitous and thus boring. (See also: some typography nerds with Helvetica).

Peripherals

The Apple Studio Display With Tilt and Height Adjustable Stand

This could just as easily go under the “ergonomics” section above. At six feet, I would say I am on the tall side of average. I have a problem with hunching and tend to hunch even more when using a display that is only raised the typical handful of inches. This originally led me to buy a VESA arm, which raised my display significantly, up to around nine or ten inches. This was great, but it exacerbated the aforementioned bouncing issue I had with the Bekant standing desk. The Apple Studio Display with the tilt-and-height-adjustable stand, combined with an old Satechi riser has worked perfectly for my needs. While standing, the display is a whopping 13.5 inches above my desk, which I lower to 10.5 inches while sitting.

Display wise… look, no one needs a four figure 5K display, especially when there are a plethora of much cheaper non-5K displays on the market, but hear me out. The 5K iMac spoiled me, sort of like how I imagine a luxury car spoils drivers. Once you get used to that many pixels, it’s hard to go back. 4K just isn’t good enough, and you know where perfectly crisp 2x Retina arguably matters most? Text. As an engineering lead what am I staring at most of my days? Text!

My Crazy Semi-Custom Keyboard

This is as much a hobby as it is a tool. Like other old Mac nerds, I imprinted on the Apple Extended Keyboard II . I still love that keyboard, but dear god is that thing an aircraft carrier on the desk. Furthermore, there has never been a better time to get into mechanical keyboards as there is currently a great community and market around them. My current build is the following:

• Keychron Q3
• Drop + BIIP MT3 Keycaps
• Zeal Clickiez Switches

I am not particularly picky with keyboards. I didn’t even hate the feel of the notorious butterfly keyboard on Touch Bar MacBooks, but this keyboard feels and sounds so satisfying to me that I actually look forward to typing on it³.

Apple Magic Trackpad 2

Some people still prefer a traditional mouse. I respect their choice, but can’t imagine myself going back to one outside of gaming for three reasons:

1. Trackpads make horizontal scrolling and pinch to zoom as easy and intuitive as vertical scrolling, which is super nice when I’m editing spreadsheets or images.
2. Using a trackpad at my desk keeps things consistent with using the trackpad built into the laptop.
3. Scrolling the wheel on a wheel mouse always felt like something that would accelerate carpal tunnel.

AirPods Max

The AirPods Max sound great. They also have excellent noise cancellation, which I find myself using regardless of whether or not I am listening to music. Wearing noise cancelling headphones without any audio may seem ridiculous, especially for someone who works in a relatively quiet home office, but something about dulling my hearing helps me focus. Finally, their integration in Apple’s ecosystem makes them easy to use with both my work and personal laptops.

Elgato Stream Deck

The much maligned Touch Bar actually made sense once I started using it to run automations. Now that the Touch Bar is no more, I have an Elgato Stream Deck. Using it with Apple’s Shortcuts, I now have hardware buttons for some of my most common tasks, like rating music, setting common Slack statuses, joining Zoom meetings, or getting a song from my local radio station. These hardware invoked shortcuts have saved me countless minutes while removing friction.

CalDigit TS4

Being a remote worker means this workspace is shared between my work and personal laptops. Switching back and forth between the two easily is paramount. Thunderbolt docks provide a one cable solution that make sharing peripherals between multiple laptops a breeze. The dock I have been using is the CalDigit TS4. There are now a multitude of Thunderbolt docks on the market. I chose the TS4 because the CalDigit Thunderbolt 2 dock I was using before lasted me seven years and still works today. Connected to it is ethernet, a backup disk, the Studio Display, my keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and the Stream Deck, all through one cable that also charges whichever MacBook Pro is connected⁴.

Western Digital MyBook Raid and Nightly Time Machine

This is what I use for my Time Machine backup disk. It’s a decade old, uses Thunderbolt 2, and is connected via my dock using Apple’s pricey adaptor. Nightly Time Machine is my solution for preventing Time Machine backup disks from automatically mounting on my personal laptop until just before backing up in the middle of the night. I have separately prevented my Time Machine disk from ever mounting on my work laptop⁵. Functionally this means that it’s almost always safe for me to unplug my Time Machine backup disk from either laptop without getting the dreaded “disk not ejected properly” notification of shame. It also means the disks inside the MyBook aren’t spinning during waking hours, keeping my workspace free from technological hums.

Honorable Mention

Szeged Hot Hungarian Paprika Tin

A friend of mine introduced me to paprikash, a deliciously spicy Hungarian dish with noodles or rice, onions, sour cream, and chicken. The recipe calls for hot paprika, and the first company I found that offered hot paprika was Szeged. It comes in a fun tin that works great for holding writing implements.

Figuring out how to best utilize any new space has always taken me considerable time. My workspace is no different. I’ve been working from home full time for just over half a decade. While I’ve never felt uncomfortable in my various workspaces over those years, it’s taken until this year to finally settle on a workspace I truly enjoy. Tastes differ and I don’t expect anyone would enjoy this workspace as much as I do. My hope is that the items and reasoning on this list helps others find build their own perfect workspace.

Update: Added Photos of my workspace.

I spent a few minutes on Black Friday messing around with ChatGPT. Given how much I enjoy Columbo, the series of made for TV murder mysteries, I asked ChatGPT the following:

Write me the synopsis of the perfect Columbo murder mystery.

What I got in return was I think the perfect example of the power and perils of ChatGPT at this moment in time.

Title: “Fading Echoes”

Synopsis:

In the heart of New York City, renowned art gallery owner Victor Drake appears to have it all—wealth, influence, and a pristine reputation. However, beneath the façade of success, a dark secret lurks. When a celebrated artist is found dead in Drake’s gallery, seemingly the victim of a tragic accident, the enigmatic Lieutenant Columbo senses a more sinister undercurrent.

As Columbo begins his investigation, he discovers a meticulously crafted plan to cover up a premeditated murder. The artist’s death is not the result of a tragic fall but a carefully staged event designed to divert attention from a hidden motive—one that connects back to Drake’s vast empire and the cutthroat world of high-stakes art dealings.

Unraveling the layers of deception, Columbo must navigate the intricacies of the art world, decoding cryptic clues left behind like strokes on a canvas. As he engages in a battle of wits with the suave and sophisticated Victor Drake, Columbo exposes the subtle details that betray the perfect crime.

In “Fading Echoes,” the perfect Columbo murder mystery, viewers are taken on a suspenseful journey where the detective’s disarming demeanor conceals a razor-sharp intellect. As the noose tightens around the cunning killer, Columbo’s persistent questioning and unassuming charm peel away the layers of deception, revealing a motive rooted in betrayal, rivalry, and the insatiable desire for artistic acclaim.

As the truth emerges, viewers are left in awe of Columbo’s unparalleled ability to turn seemingly insignificant details into the linchpin of justice. In the end, “Fading Echoes” stands as a testament to the enduring brilliance of Lieutenant Columbo, proving that even the most meticulously executed crimes cannot escape the watchful eye of the iconic detective.

ChatGPT nailed almost every aspect of what makes a Columbo murder mystery. Almost. Like many of the detective’s foils, it made one glaring mistake that cannot be overlooked.

Columbo works in L.A.

According to Walter Isaacson’s¹ authorized biography, this is what Steve Jobs had to say about Apple’s lawsuit against HTC in 2011:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion² in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this.

Apple settled that lawsuit two years later, in 2012, a year after Jobs had passed. While that was the year when Apple arguably got the upper-hand on Google, it was not because of this settlement or by going thermonuclear on Android. 2012 was also the year Apple eschewed Google Maps by releasing its own completely in-house mapping solution.

The version of Apple Maps released with iOS 6 in September of 2012, was summarily and unanimously reviled. Here’s what David Pogue, then at The New York Times, had to say:

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

The critics weren’t wrong. Apple Maps was embarrassing and unusable, so much so that Apple sent out a formal letter of apology and then fired its mobile head of software for not signing it. Software-wise, there was no justification to ship Apple Maps in 2012. Strategy-wise however, there was no justification not to ship it.

Launching its own mapping service was Apple’s biggest gambit in its war with Google, way more than any lawsuit. The lawsuits were about iPhone verses Android and while many Android device makers did borrow liberally from iPhones and iOS, it turns out Apple’s fight with Google wasn’t really about one phone platform versus the other. It was about platforms versus services, and which one might commoditize the other. Up until Apple Maps, Google had the undeniable upper hand because it was a win-win for them as long as Apple had to use its services. Google would certainly win more if everyone suddenly started using Android, but they still won even if people stuck with iOS.

Maps in particular strengthened Google’s position. Apple’s original Maps app, using Google’s backend³, shipped as one of the twelve built-in apps on the very first iPhone. More than just a key feature, Maps was table stakes. By 2012, those table stakes increasingly meant including turn-by-turn navigation, a feature Apple’s app couldn’t support under the existing agreement with Google. With that agreement expiring at the beginning of 2013, an extremely confident Google used their advantage to push for more say in Apple’s app. They were so confident in their position of strength that they were apparently caught flatfooted when Apple announced the switch to their own mapping data.

Here’s what Nick Wingfield and Claire Cain Miller had to say at the time of the switch:

One reason that it will take Google some time to build the iPhone app: it expected the app with Google’s maps to remain on the iPhone for some time, based on the contract between the two companies, and was caught off guard when Apple decided to build a new application to replace the old one.

Google did release their own maps app on iOS later that same year in December. As embarrassing as it was for Apple that the terrible state of its own mapping service left people clamoring for Google to come to the rescue, that Google did come to the rescue was a victory for Apple. It proved that Google needed iOS, and specifically its users, so much so that they gave up on what would have been a huge competitive advantage for Android. Furthermore, it meant iPhone users could still get Google Maps, replete with vector tiles and turn by turn directions, all without Apple having to concede anything to Google. Apple was then free to then iterate and improve on its abysmal service until it genuinely became good enough.

Ending a reliance on a competitor for a table stakes feature wasn’t the only strategic gain Apple got from Apple Maps. The other, arguably more valuable and definitely more lucrative benefit is how Apple Maps shifted the power dynamic with that same competitor in Apple’s favor.

One bit of information that has come out of the DOJ’s antitrust trial is that Google pays Apple 18 billion dollars a year to remain the default search provider on Safari. While that deal applies to Safari across all of Apple’s platforms, the bulk of its price is for Safari on iOS. You might be wondering why the company whose browser dominates global browser share would be willing to pay so much to be the default search provider on a browser that barely scrapes past a 20% share on a good day. The reason is that most of the 20% is people browsing Safari on their iPhones in the U.S. In fact, so many people use iPhones in the U.S. that Safari has the largest mobile browser share here. That wouldn’t matter if Google were somehow merely just a platform or browser company, but Google doesn’t make its billions on Android or Chrome. They make it on advertising powered by Google search. Google is an ad tech company and in advertising, the U.S. is king.

In summary, Google has to pay Apple billions of dollars for three reasons:

1. Google is fundamentally an ad tech company.
2. Most advertising revenue comes from the U.S.
3. Safari, and not Chrome, is the dominant mobile browser in the U.S.

And there’s a fourth reason.

4. Apple Maps

Google would not be paying billions of dollars annually to be the search default in Safari if Apple needed something equally as important from them. The only thing Apple truly ever needed from Google was mapping data. With its own mapping data, Apple no longer needs anything of significance, and so Google has to pay.

Steve Jobs talked about going thermonuclear over Android, but he was wrong. While Google did commit “grand theft”⁴, Android wasn’t the right battlefield and revenge is a dish best served cold. Going thermonuclear on the thief in court was never going to be satisfying. Having that same thief over a barrel and paying you billions annually just for the mere privilege to be on the platform they stole in the first place?

Priceless.

Update: It was reported right after publishing (naturally) that testimony in the Google antitrust trial revealed Google pays Apple a whopping 36 percent of all search ad revenue that comes via Safari. As John Gruber pointed out, that is even higher than the maximum 30 percent Apple takes for some purchases made through its App Store. The thief is indeed over a barrel and while that’s technically a price, I suspect some of the feelings about this arrangement remain priceless.

Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge:

Nvidia and AMD are both reportedly planning to launch Arm-based CPUs for Windows-based PCs. Reuters reports that Nvidia has started designing Arm-based CPUs in what could be a major expansion of Microsoft’s Windows on Arm work. Nvidia and AMD could both be ready with PC chips as soon as 2025, according to Reuters.

I am sure 2025 will also be the year of the Linux desktop. All kidding aside, I am actually rooting for Windows on ARM for the same reasons I am rooting for cheaper 5K displays. Lower wattage ARM processors, like 5K displays, make for a better computing experience so let’s get as many people on board as possible. Unfortunately for PC folks, better CPUs is only part of the story. Windows developers are historically not nearly as keen to update their apps as Mac developers and, as far as I am aware, Windows’s ability to run software built of x86 on ARM isn’t nearly as performant as macOS’s Rosetta.

Here’s the opening of Satya Nadella’s statement, as reported by The Verge

After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft. Panos has had an incredible impact on our products and culture as well as the broader devices ecosystem. Under Panos’ leadership, the team created the iconic Surface brand with loved products. More recently, as the leader of Windows, the team has brought amazing services and experiences to hundreds of millions with Windows 11 on innovative devices including those from our OEM partners. He will be missed, and I am personally very grateful for his many contributions over the years. Please join me in wishing him well.

I have mixed opinions on Panos Panay.

On the one hand, my sense is that he was a, if not the, driving force behind Microsoft’s Surface hardware. While not a success in marketshare, I think the Surface has been immensely important to the PC industry. In 2015, I speculated it was a “Reference Design” that the rest of the PC could follow that wasn’t just “offbrand MacBook Air“.

On the other hand, I think Panay has a track record of grossly over promising and under delivering outside of the core Surface line-up, and that these frequent missteps have been largely glossed over by the wider tech press because of his undeniable onstage presence and charisma.

Given these mixed opinions, I don’t have a sense for how much Panay was a great product leader versus an overpromising pitchman. Maybe he started out more the former, but ended up being more the later? In either case, the people I know with Microsoft Surfaces love them, and I can’t help but feel Microsoft is worse off without Panos Panay.