bentocorp

Calling distillation an 'attack' is exactly what I've been describing as "AI Exceptionalism":

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ai-exceptionalism/

I'd disagree that the article frames that Apple planned this.

But Apple did spend 10+ years pretending that the iPad was the computer of the future, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It also went through a long period where it actively under-invested in the Mac as it thought it could somehow migrate everyone onto iPads, despite protestations from most existing Mac users.

It also took 6 years, from the release of the first Apple silicon Mac, to actually realise that there is no reason that a Mac laptop needs to have a starting price of $999. In this period they had all of the hardware and components that could have easily made a cheaper low-end laptop Mac... as evidenced by the same hardware being sold a lot cheaper when they put it into an iPad.

So at least for the last 5 years, the failure of the iPad and the lack of a cheaper laptop Mac, has all been due to Apple's strategic missteps and biases.

To then release the MacBook Neo without those missteps being acknowledged is fine.

But it's been obvious to anyone with the slightest amount of insight that the iPad is not the future of computing. Apple should have also realised this and corrected course a lot sooner than March 2026.

I am missing the point of Tailwind?

Don't you get the same effect and functionality from simply adding style attributes directly on the elements in HTML?

Why is that approach considered bad practice, while Tailwind, which is effectively the same – but with shortened names – accepted as common practice?

As the article states, at least with Bootstrap you are sharing common behaviour with a single class name that can then be modified globally.

I agree that it says that people are willing to pay more, more often, for a smartphone than they are willing to pay for laptop and desktop computers.

However, how you can then extend this to:

The market has spoken and they love the locked down, walled garden approach.

The market hasn't been given the opportunity to choose a more open iPhone or a closed, locked-down iPhone.

When the market is presented with both options, at variable prices, we can then determine what, if any, people are willing to pay for one vs the other.

This is great news and hopefully makes SwiftUI more feasible as a long term cross-platform UI option.

What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.

What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.

What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.

A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.

I was going to defend Xcode and say it's not that bad... but then I read the article and realised that I have just become so accustomed to these problems that I don't consciously realise the daily hellfire that I experience.

Even when you think you're immune to it, Stockholm syndrome is real.

A similar article I wrote on the 'Dark Side' of Apple Development, brings up many additional issues:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/

Interesting idea.

Ideally the 'Never Monetise' site would record and have a non-removable list of any site which had a hyperlink through to it, as a ledger of the sites that have made this commitment.

If they do then change their policy in the future, this would be independent, verifiable proof of a prior commitment.

I've recently written about a similar topic, regarding an app's commitment to privacy and the cost of not selling user data:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/cost-of-privacy/

My post asked a similar question -- how much money could we make if we sold user data instead of committing to a privacy-first approach?

I would say that currently for mobile, iOS still monetises a lot better than Android.

Once you've developed your brand and own your own distribution channel however, the best strategy seems to be to distribute via the App Store (which in many countries Apple doesn't give you any other choice) but monetise via your own site. Netflix etc do this and seem to not see much downside.

How well it works for smaller or new apps however is debatable.

I recently wrote about how Apple now has the most hostile developer ecosystem of any major platform:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-development/

Good to see VCs and Y Combinator now supporting and pushing for change.

From the reports from Bloomberg etc, yes, it does sound like some Apple AI employees may need rallying.

Though it sounds like what they actually got was fairly in-substantive statements without a clearly articulated AI strategy.

Doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a promising AI strategy though, if so, it wasn't communicated in this Pep Talk: so what was the point?

Perhaps to look like they are doing something? Are empty words better than no words at all?

It is a 991MB website, before optimisations.

The large majority of this comes from large header images for the Insights post content: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/

These are png images that are relatively large in size until optimisation creates smaller, multiple image set versions.

I wouldn't say that this is an unusually large site. Any site with a medium amount of content would likely grow to such a size.

I use Jekyll for my company website [1] and managed to get a lot of speed optimisations simply by using a post-processing tool on the statically generated output.

The tool I use is Jampack and I'd highly recommend it: https://jampack.divriots.com

For my product website, it reduced the overall size by 590MB or approximately 59% in size, along with changing the HTML/CSS to make the optimisations that this article notes.

[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/

Yes it may be entirely based upon AI buzz, but there should be no reason that Apple also couldn't have inflated stock due to AI buzz.

For example, I have questioned why Nvidia has been able to be the unchallenged leader in AI graphics cards.

With Apple's silicon knowledge, access to leading edge TSMC fabs and volume purchasing power (due to selling millions of devices) – Apple could and perhaps should be selling unique processors to AI companies, and also using them themselves – taking a huge amount of revenue and mindshare from Nvidia.

Thanks for the question.

As I noted it took 7 years to actually get any substantial Google traffic – if I was to start again I would potentially change some of what I've written to be more effective or focus on different topics earlier.

However my approach is always to write what will be useful and interesting for humans, if Google search also finds it relevant then that's a bonus. I never write just for machines... as I think that's a long term losing strategy.

The site's primary purpose is as a product site for my app. The content that I have written is for this purpose, with organic Google search traffic being a bonus.

Due to this, Google AI summaries are not a huge consideration.

Author of the article here, re:

You have Apple dragging you by the b-... nose and you say thank you more. That's why everyone dislikes Apple and anyone who uses it.

Perhaps continuing to develop an app on Apple's platforms is asking for more, but a couple of items of consideration for perspective:

1. In my opinion, over the last 10 years, Apple's behaviour has gotten a lot worse as they strive for continual profit growth – with services being their only answer and tightening the screws on developers via the App Store their chosen solution.

2. Having used Apple as my primary computing platforms for almost 40 years (yes I'm old), and developing on it for many of those years, it can be hard to walk away to another ecosystem. For many users & developers, the knowledge etc is a sunk cost that can be hard to overcome.

The article was written both as a way to vent and also to hopefully shine further light on the issues in the hope that it could add to the impetus for change.

What would you think would be a solution in this situation?

It's not a lot of articles in total - only 35, with the first being published over 7 years ago.

You can see the full list here: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/

Perhaps the age of the content helps, though I haven't done a deep dive into SEO practices myself. In the last year, when search traffic increased, I've increased the output to almost 1 article per month.

You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made?

I attribute the search traffic growth to:

1. A critical mass of content, after a number of years of writing - without a lot of search traffic for the first few years

2. Re-wrote and polished some of my earlier articles so that they were improved

3. Wrote more guides related to my app which were helpful to users; such as:

Safari Extensions Guide - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/safari-extensions-guide/

Best Web Browser - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/best-web-browser-2025/

Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.

Not a lot myself, except for sometimes helping with polishing and checking of writing and sometimes coming up with options etc.

In my experience AI tools are like having a junior assistant – they can be helpful but you always need to check and polish everything they do.

Great post and congratulations.

Similar approach and story to myself, in that I started a side project for my own use and interest, and then released it to great feedback as a side hustle, went part-time and over the last 2.5 years managed to go full time.

I've yet to reach your $1M ARR though.. but hopefully getting there one day!

Recently wrote up a Year in Review which touches on similar learnings as you've written over the last year:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...

Have also had a keen interest in FIRE over the years and hadn't heard of your product... personally I've just kept my own spreadsheet which runs through scenarios, progress etc.

If Apple was really serious about combating the use of Electron and other cross-platform frameworks they would seriously support (and possibly even fund) a tool like this.

Despite the issues, if Swift and SwiftUI were available and compelling for Android then it may help to give Apple greater mindshare of developers.

Nope, similar to how VPNs and Pi-hole cannot reliably block YT video ads as stated in the article.

In general, I would say Apple's displays are fantastic quality but I would rarely call them competitively priced.

Apple prefers to release displays that have no equivalents and then prices them accordingly.

Apple Weather reliability is an absolute mess since the Dark Sky integration.

It's constantly saying it's not going to rain for hours, then I look out my window and it's raining at this very moment.

They would be better to dump any prediction model they use and just show the raw data sources as it would be more accurate.

It would be interesting to see some thorough research on this topic.

I would say that a large majority of investing, especially newer forms that occur via apps such as Robinhood, in form and outcome would be indistinguishable from gambling.

But unlike a sportsbook, I don't think you have the same risk of abuse.

I doubt this is true.

You see the exact same behaviours between online day traders as you do online gamblers.

Both share tips, have a sense that they are in the know about performance beyond that of the average 'punter' and use apps that are gamified and have dark patterns encouraging continual use and abuse.

I would also say they are primarily used by the same demographics – male, skewing younger who are high risk, low real world experience individuals who either get fully addicted and don't learn their lesson or those that get burned early on, 'grow up' and learn not to continue to waste money on such endeavours.

How is a "prediction market" different to gambling?

In summary, it can be hard to know what the 80% of things you should concentrate on actually are.

Especially in startups and certain endeavours (e.g. Marketing) it really it is a case of continually trying a lot of things to see if something works.

Once you've discovered what works, you could focus all of your time on that one thing. The problem then is that you have no further opportunities to discover something that is even better. You may have hit a local limit.

So you need to keep trying new things, and potentially wasting time on them, until you can evaluate properly to see if they move to the 80% of things to focus on in the future.

The offer is setup as a dichotomy but at least in countries with reasonable workplace laws (which perhaps the US isn't) it's a false dichotomy.

There's nothing stopping an employee from simply continuing to disagree with the company direction and also not accepting the offer. In this case, employment goes along as usual and you can continue to disagree with the direction. With proper workplace laws, a company couldn't fire you in this instance, even if you vocally disagree with what is happening.

When an unreasonable choice is attempted to be forced onto you, sometimes the best approach is to ignore it and continue on as usual.

Wow, thanks for your comprehensive takedown.

I was aware of some of these issues but not aware of the huge developer dislike... it does make a difference to the ability of a system such as Drupal to be able to capitalise on WordPress issues.

It’s mostly built by “click monkeys”, as you can do a lot by clicking around the UI to build stuff.

Isn't this an almost perfect description of WordPress? It hasn't seemed to have done any harm if that's the case.

But it’s old and even the founder abandoned it long ago around 2012.

Are you sure? On drupal.org right now one of the main links is one of the founders in a keynote video presenting the newest version.

That's aging.

When you're young you spend a lot of your time proving that you can achieve what you believe you can achieve - both for yourself and as social proof to everyone else.

Once you've done that, and are comfortable with who you are and no longer feel you need to prove your worth, you need other motivations.

At that point 'growth' may come in different forms.

Go on a holiday, give yourself time to rediscover some interests and passions.

Or just be content that you have achieved what you spent a lot of your time trying to achieve.