We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, elaborate spreadsheets that make a lighthearted hobby look like the desk of an air traffic controller. Not that I know what that looks like.

I tried doing all of it. And I hated it. I like four or five colors, and they are all blue. Jokes aside, throw in some gray, just black, lavender, pine green and purples — but everything with an undertone of blue. If blue was good enough for Miles Davis, it’s good enough for me.

My point is that the whole inky contortion was beyond my abilities. And then my friend Gailyn of Fountain Pendulum changed everything completely. By presenting a new way to fix this equation of pens and inks.

She announced her 2026 ink theme: tea. Every ink she uses this year would connect, in some way, to the world of tea — its colors, its moods, its quiet ceremony. Not a random rotation. A story.

I saw her video, and felt the particular feeling that only comes when someone solves a problem you didn’t quite know how to articulate.

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

I spend most of my time in California. I don’t have any major trips planned. At least for now.

That’s not a complaint. California contains multitudes, and more specifically it contains San Francisco, which means I have access to some of the most atmospheric light on earth roughly half the year, and the other half I’m under a fog bank so beautiful it makes my heart ache. I moved to San Francisco 23 years ago for a couple of years. Now you know why.

Fog. I have penned enough pieces about fog and its magic, and its metaphorical meaning, by now. “I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey and the silence that comes with fog,” is how I once described its hold over me.

George Sterling, over a century ago, wrote “The Cool, Grey City of Love” and there is this one most beautiful passage that just makes me stay:

The winds of the Future wait
At the iron walls of her Gate,
And the western ocean breaks in thunder,
And the western stars go slowly under,
And her gaze is ever West
In the dream of her young unrest.

Whether it is life itself. Or appreciation for a place where everyone is trying to invent the future. Or embracing the idea of all of us trying to exist in their own alternative universes. Or a combination of all those. Those are broad brushstrokes of why I have stayed.

So I asked myself: what if the city was the palette?

San Francisco sits between ocean and bay, between the Pacific and the hills, between cold water and coastal air. The colors it produces are not the bright primaries of a travel poster. They are layered. They shift. They have the quality of light that painters chase and photographers wait hours for. I have spent days, hours and now almost a lifetime waiting for my eyes to embrace the changing hues in the middle of Fogust, on Ocean Beach, or when standing on the Embarcadero, listening to roars coming from the baseball stadium that just sits there like a modern-day colosseum, dedicated to keeping us distracted from the drudgery of life.

What I didn’t realize was that my collection had already leaned this way, without me ever planning it. I have created three custom inks that in a weird way try and capture the entire palette. The good people at Kiwi Inks helped create three magical color potions I call Karl The Fog, Ocean Beach, and SF Summer. But I wanted more than just those three.

So I came up with an arbitrary number. 26, because it is 2026.

Twenty-six inks, almost entirely blue-biased. Iroshizuku Kon-peki, which is exactly the color of a clear Pacific sky. Ainezu, a storm gray-blue that looks like the marine layer coming through at speed. Montblanc’s Coal Blue, smoky and deep like the bay at dusk. J. Herbin’s Vert de Gris, that oxidized gray-copper-green that is precisely the color of tidal water where fresh meets salt.

The bottles kept piling up in the closet of my overflowing home office.

I didn’t plan it this way. I just kept buying what looked right. What looked right, it turns out, was home.

Anaïs Nin said it: we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. I’ve been looking at the same body of water for years. Apparently it has been looking back.

I created a simple system. And I mean actually simple. Two favorite pens that never change, always inked with the same inks that are meant to do the heavy lifting. Two vintage pens that need the safest, most forgiving formulas. And half-a-dozen rotating inks each month, shifting with the season. These inks allowed me to indulge in the pens from my collection.

January gets Colorverse’s Blue & White Porcelain and Hachimonjiya’s Gassan Blue Moon as an homage to the winter skies, cold and clear. March brings Pilot Kon-peki and Octopus Fluids’ Minze, because March in San Francisco means the first green is starting to show. August comes in with Hello Small Things’ Good Night Blue and Montblanc Great Gatsby, because August evenings here are warm and strange and go on too long in the best way. December closes the year with Pilot’s Fuyu-syogun — literally “winter general” — a gray that looks like morning’s mystical mix of mist, fog and cloud over the bay from the Embarcadero.

The calendar writes itself when you let the place do the work.

I wanted this system because I wanted it to solve an even bigger problem. The problem of too many inks. Anyone who collects anything eventually arrives at this reckoning. The collection stops being a source of pleasure and starts being a source of obligation. You feel guilty about bottles you haven’t opened. You buy something new and feel the weight of everything that came before it.

William Morris put it plainly: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. He was talking about furniture. He was really talking about every collector who ever lived.

Twenty-six inks. A city. A year. No new purchases required. No FOMO, wondering if the new limited edition is the one that changes everything. It won’t be. It never is.

The palette is already here. I’ve been looking at it through my window for years. I just wasn’t seeing it.

Gailyn’s tea theme gave me permission to think this way — to treat a collection not as an accumulation but as a statement about what matters to you and where you are. Her year will taste like sencha. Mine will look like the view from the top of Twin Peaks on an August morning, when the fog is below you and the bridge just disappears. The fog horns sound distant. The world muted.

That seems like enough.

The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the sea-gull is her dove.
Cleanly and strong she is—
My cool, grey city of love.

— George Sterling

March 10, 2026. San Francisco

Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Fabric, the best way to organize your notes, tasks, and projects in one place.

Tokie

Ok, this is cool. A macOS file manager that turns your folder into a database for better file management, with some very cool integration with your AI agent, built-in Markdown editor, custom fields for file management, and a ton of other capabilities.

A proposal for Markdown on ATProto

Providing a Lexicon for putting Markdown in the ATmosphere.

Fits nicely into my thoughts about a Markdown Web and has a fair amount of thought and feedback already in the spec.

GitHub Actions for WordPress

I know this has a limited audience, but if you develop WordPress plugins and haven’t explored 10up’s GitHub actions, you really should. The deploy one is infinitely useful and means you never have to deal with SVN after intial repo setup.

rhsev/matterbase

Ralf keeps putting out cool stuff: “A database-like TUI for querying frontmatter and YAML in Markdown notes with field filters, full-text search, and table view. For macOS and Linux.”

Let Fabric be your second brain, with an all-in-one AI workspace and smart organizer for all your projects, ideas, notes & links. Check it out today.

Like or share this post on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.

BrettTerpstra.com is supported by readers like you. Click here if you'd like to help out.

Find Brett on Mastodon, Bluesky, GitHub, and everywhere else.

Friends,

I’ve launched a new round-table format podcast: This Week in AI

100% AI, and we’re getting the most amazing founders in the space.

Podcasts are my way of committing to lifelong learning, networking with driven people, and sharing with like-minded folks.

You can sign up for the podcast at:

Substack

YouTube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Excited to hear your feedback!

all the best, JCal

x.com/jason

As we announced and TechCrunch covered, my.wordpress.net has soft-launched.

What this means is you need to fundamentally shift how you think about WordPress.

From the beginning, WordPress has always been open source, giving you freedom, liberty, autonomy, and digital sovereignty. Open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.

For the past few decades, WordPress was software you got from a cloud provider or web host, such as WordPress.com, Bluehost, Hostinger, or Pressable (the currently recommended WordPress hosts). You could self-host it on a Raspberry Pi or home server, but few people did.

The experience of downloading WordPress, as my Mom did, is that it unzips a bunch of PHP and various code files onto your desktop. Very confusing!

But now, thanks to incredible advances in WebAssembly (WASM), we can spin up a web server, a database (SQLite or MariaDB), and a full WordPress installation inside your browser in about 30 seconds. Instantly. No server needed. I introduced Playground at State of the Word in 2022.

You can even use it to cross-publish apps to the web, desktop, and iOS, like Blocknotes did in 2023. You can get the latest Blocknotes at Blocknotes.org. One codebase, multiple platforms.

These WordPress Playground containers are fully composable and atomic. You can track and roll back any change. Undo for everything. Stop thinking of WordPress as just on a web host and worrying about maintenance and management, and more as a self-contained unit of open source goodness, a fun little package where you own and control the code and data and can run it however you like.

How perfect is that for AI to work with? Playground makes WordPress local, fast, and trivial to spin up multiple instances, test code changes, and save them.

Next up, we’re going to add peer-to-peer sync, version control integration, and cloud publishing so other people can access it.

I believe this will take us from millions of WordPresses in the world to billions. Hosting isn’t going away; in fact, I think demand for cloud syncing will increase drastically as we radically open up what people can build on top of WordPress.

In an AI age where it’s trivial to spin up software from scratch, consumers will have to give much more thought to brands they trust to be in it for the long term. We’ve been relentlessly iterating on WordPress since 2003. I plan to work on it the rest of my life, and there’s a broad community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who make their living on top of WordPress.

On WordPress.com we offer 100-year plans and 100-year domains, and I believe we’re one of the few companies where that’s credible. It’s led by Zander Rose, who ran the Long Now Foundation (one of my favorite non-profits) from 1997 to 2023, a quarter century.

In core WordPress, we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress. I’ve stumbled on decade-old installs, and the built-in auto-upgrade took everything to the newest version.

At Automattic, for better and worse, unlike Google, we almost never shut things down. We obsess about maintaining or redirecting permalinks. We make it easy not just to get your data in, but take it out too. We build businesses that lower churn not by locking you in (Wix famously has no export) but by making it easy for you to leave. If you love somebody, set them free.

In the next few years, there will be a Cambrian explosion of software and services. You’re going to have a lot of choices about where to put your most precious data and software. You should demand open source and bet on those who are clearly in it for the long-term.

Today, everyone gets a phone number and email when they grow up. That will expand in the future, everyone will have a domain and a WordPress. A part of the internet that you own.

Technology is best when it brings people together. Technology is best when it puts you in control, gives you ownership, digital autonomy, freedom, and liberty. That’s open source. It’s so exciting to see how AI is supercharging open source.

Join the WordPress community. It’s fun! We have cookies that don’t track you.

I wrote my first post about Looking Glass nine years ago, after Shawn Frayne sat me down in Jeff Clavier’s office and showed me a volumetric display that made me call John Underkoffler and say “John, I finally saw what you were trying to create with your holographic camera.” I invested immediately. I’ve been on the board ever since.

Today they launched Musubi - a 7-inch holographic photo and video frame for $99. It hit its $10,000 Kickstarter goal in minutes. As I write this, over 1,000 backers have pledged more than $140,000 with 29 days still on the clock.

The idea is simple. You take a regular photo or video, drop it into Looking Glass’s free desktop app, and AI-powered Gaussian splatting converts it into a hologram. Transfer it to the frame via USB-C. No Wi-Fi setup, no subscription, no special glasses. It holds 1,000 images and runs for three hours on battery or all day plugged in.

I’ve wanted this specific product for a long time. Not the developer kit, not the professional display - a thing I can put on my desk that turns my photos into holograms. The Musubi is that thing. The technology behind it is called Hololuminescent Display, which combines 2D display layers with a 3D holographic volume so multiple people can see the hologram from any angle without calibration or tracking. It is indistinguishable from magic.

When I wrote about the first Looking Glass in 2018, I called it “Apple II stage” technology - built for creators and hackers. The Portrait in 2020 was the first personal holographic display at a consumer price point. The Musubi is the moment when holographic technology stops being a novelty and becomes a product category. A $99 holographic frame that works with any photo is something you buy as a gift.

Back the Musubi on Kickstarter .

Paul Krugman’s essay The Billionaire’s War covers why the wealthy won’t feel the consequences of Trump’s war; instead they’ll fall on the mainstream American. His has particularly harsh judgment of the technology elite.

…the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic. If Americans are being brutalized and murdered by rogue ICE agents…well, that’s not their problem. If the Justice Department and the FBI are totally subverted and operate as Trump’s enforcers, they know that vindictive, unlawful tactics will never touch their lives. If Republican budget cuts decimate rural hospitals and deprive hundreds of thousands of health insurance…well, they have their own private doctors and clinics. If Trump starts an ill-conceived war that doubles the price of oil…well, they can certainly afford the higher gasoline bills for their limousines and yachts. And it won’t be their kids hunkered down in a bunker in the Middle East.

Hold aside the intensity and breadth of Krugman’s statement, I mean, it’s Krugman – I focus more fundamentally about whether the technology upper class is becoming less likely to have to deal with the negative externalities they create, and whether this implicitly changes the way they approach their lives. In a K-shaped economy without a shared definition of what is ethical or moral, one can’t help but if at least year-over-year, decade-over-decade this is true of our community.

Something Substack’s Chris Best said about their partnership with Polymarket stuck in my head: “As Best put it to me [Alex Health]: “I’m a ship and find out guy.”” Combine that with what interviewer Alex Heath posited in the same article: “To this tech leader class, the potentially negative ramifications of how these markets actually work today are secondary to the long-term value they’ll bring.” I don’t want to single out Best specifically – lots of industries and companies — most way bigger than Substack — are rushing to create partnerships like this – I just wonder if they’re all making decisions guided by upside ($$$, engagement, being in the flow) and unrestrained by the downside. What if ‘find out’ is acceleration of Gen Z gambling trends, and lives ruined? How do we balance those risks with market economy needs? With the belief that so long as it’s legal, adults are able to make their own choices?

It’s certainly no purity test that I want to force on others uniformly – I’ll leave it to each person to decide for themselves – but historically Homebrew has not invested in gambling related startups. It’s not as interesting to us and we’re concerned about the impact of turbocharging these models with tech and venture dollars. Founders of these companies likely aren’t bad people and they deserve investors who are passionate supporters of their work. If we don’t think we be that for them, then we certainly shouldn’t ask to be on their cap tables. I don’t think prediction markets need to fundamentally be a mirror of casinos but it’s certainly true that much of their marketing (and a lot of their volume) today is sports-related.

I just encourage people to have their own redlines about what they will or won’t do for money. And to keep in mind that society is based on not just climbing the ladder, but also making sure the ladder is perched on stable ground.

Tip DON’T LET AIRLINE RIP YOU OFF ESPECIALLY AS OIL PRICES CLIMB: I’m using Junova to track purchased airline tickets I’ve taking and auto-reclaim credit if the price drops. It was started by a friend and so far has recouped $2000+ of American and United credits for me. Their business model is: service is no cost, but if they successfully get you credit, they charge 20% of the value to your credit card. If you use this referral link, your first $25 of fees (ie $125 of flight credit) is free. Let me know how it works for you!

My Actual Savings This Year

With the rise of GLP-1 drugs, there’s a trend that magnums are being ordered at clubs to meet minimums but left unfinished.

I think there’s a space for an ultra-high-end wellness drink at clubs. Imagine Erewhon meets Magic Mind meets Kin,  maybe with some effervescence. An elixir that comes out with sparklers but makes you feel great with nootropics not hungover. Priced at hundreds of dollars retail so thousands at a club. It could even be a cold chain, with the freshest ingredients that need to be preserved.

Let’s do some turmeric-ginger-cayenne shots and get crunk.

For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!

I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created.

First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price.

Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn and said, “We want to buy you for $26B,” they just replied, “Sure! That sounds good.”

If you’re very lucky, you get to work with a bank like Qatalyst, which says, “That’s a lovely offer, let’s see who else would be interested.”

Ask yourself why someone wants to buy you? Who else might have the same motivations? That begins a process in which a wide array of parties review the deal.

If you don’t have the connections or a bank to help you, just email the CEOs of other companies that might be interested. Say: “XYZ wants to buy me for $Y dollars. Is that something you’d also be interested in?”

Now you’re creating a market.

Remember that you’re doing this for the first time, and on the other side of the table, they’ve done dozens of deals.

It really pains me to see WordPress-adjacent companies get taken advantage of by sophisticated financial and corpdev players who strong-arm them into not shopping their deal.

A confident buyer doesn’t care if you talk to others because they know they can offer you the best deal, which usually combines money with what happens to the business after it’s sold. This is the magic of Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffett doesn’t care if you talk to other bidders; in fact, he wants you to, so you see why he’s the better outcome for your business if you want to sell it.

It’s tempting to want to celebrate every time a creator sells something. Say it’s good for the community. But if they didn’t sell it through a fair process, it’s more likely they were taken advantage of, and that saddens me.

For public companies, failing to follow the process I describe above can constitute a breach of your fiduciary duty to shareholders and expose you to legal action. But there aren’t any such rules for private entities, which is why they get rolled over so often.

I saw this while perusing my RSS feeds last night, and thought it was interesting. In all honesty, I've completely moved away from WordPress since all the drama a while ago.

But this is quite cool - My WordPress is basically a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser. You visit my.wordpress.net it downloads some files to your machine, and you have WordPress - no install, no sign up. Just a private WordPress instance in your browser that only you can visit.

Obviously if you reset your browser, or switch to another browser, you will lose your instance, but there are backup/restore options available.

I think it might be good as a private journal or something, but I'm sure other people will find some interesting use cases for it. Either way, pretty cool.

Read more about My WordPress

Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud.

This is just a quick note to point out that my port of the linkding browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is now available on both of the respective extension stores.

• Firefox via the Firefox extensions marketplace
• Chrome via Chrome Web Store

Hope you find it useful!

Like or share this post on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.

BrettTerpstra.com is supported by readers like you. Click here if you'd like to help out.

Find Brett on Mastodon, Bluesky, GitHub, and everywhere else.

“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors.”

— Patrick Collison, CEO, Stripe

When I read that, I said to myself, you gotta be kidding me. I mean, palace intrigue has been part of our world. From ancient Egyptians to Romans to the English monarchy, it is way older than the social media and modern internet media machine. Anyway, it got me thinking about Collison’s tweet. I have come to a conclusion. Sometimes a tweet is not just a tweet. Sometimes it is a subliminal confession of symbolic capitalism.

“Symbolic capital is nothing but economic or cultural capital as soon as they are known and recognized, when they are known according to the perception categories they impose, the symbolic strength relations tend to reproduce and reinforce the strength relations which constitute the structure of the social space.”

— French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 1987

If you apply Bourdieu’s proposed idea to the 21st century, you are left with two kinds of capital. The financial capital is obvious. The second kind, the one that really matters, is symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is reputation, prestige, the accumulated weight of being someone worth listening to. That is even more important in our hyper-connected attention-first society. Symbolic capital is what converts better, faster. Whether it is fundraising, or attracting talent, or presenting yourself as the soothsayer sage of the future bedazzled with implied wisdom.

And there is a lot of symbolic capitalism to be earned these days, thanks to our social media infrastructure. And how easy it is to earn, given how much of our modern media infrastructure has changed, thanks to the hyperinflation of the “sources go direct” concept first proposed by tech inventor Dave Winer.

Financial capital has always been there, from monarchs to robber barons to billionaires, they are a constant. However, the ones who stand above and accumulate more and more of that are the ones that have symbolic capital. JP Morgan was a rich guy, but he made sure that most of the world knew he was the guy who saved the US Government. There is a reason why rich guys buy newspapers and media companies. There is a reason why Rupert Murdoch is richer than the dollars in his bank.

A hundred years later, we have Elon Musk, who was a rich guy, but became the richest guy after everyone believed he was Tony Stark, and he saw the future better than others. He didn’t need the media. He did it his way. And then bought his own machine to make sure he had infinite symbolic capital. Even more financial capital is just a cherry on top of an ever increasing cake.

Musk is the master. He executed a perfect plan for creating a perpetual machine for symbolic capital.

And the whole Valley took notes.

Everyone worth their opinion is now on social media, pontificating and offering wisdom. That is not an accident. Since Patrick’s tweet inspired this piece, let’s take the Collison brothers, arguably the greatest entrepreneurs out of Ireland, as a case study. Their creation Stripe is worth almost $159 billion. Is that enough?

Not really!

Given every startup and every company is in competition with each other now, you need to keep your company as the center of attention. Like everyone else, the Collisons need to keep the mythology of Stripe going. They need to keep earning that all important symbolic capital. If not, they will be lost in the fumes of the daily minutiae of OpenAI and Anthropic as “news.” Of course, the brothers are way too thoughtful to play the leaks-are-the-news game that is so openly played now.

I have seen the Stripe mythology come together literally and figuratively. The obsessive craft, the decade-long patient building of a financial behemoth. The establishing of Stripe Press to celebrate entrepreneurial pursuits. Aligning with the right kind of intelligentsia to earn the right kind of hype. And more lately, podcasts. This is symbolic capital earned and compounded over a decade. That capital is why hundreds of thousands of people follow Patrick. It is why this tweet got the response it did.

As I said, sometimes a tweet is not a tweet. Sometimes it is subliminal thinking about your own approach to doing things and how the world works.

How does the world work?

Today’s world of media and information is not about facts, or fiction. It is a blend of all that, whipped and thrown into the ether of the network at neck-snapping velocity, to overwhelm the moment, till the next moment arrives. The tweet describes the modern attention machine, the same pervasive dynamic that I have described in my previous essays about velocity as the new authority and how the modern internet media machine works. I am pretty sure everyone who matters around these parts is all too familiar with the modern media dynamic. And if they are not, their ultra-well paid media managers make sure they are.

The podcast ecosystem didn’t happen by accident either. Podcasts exist to provide clips and quips that get shared on social to get attention. Better the clip, the more the likelihood of attention. And the faster it is shared, the more you accumulate symbolic capital. It is like the coins you collected when pretending to be Luigi in Nintendo’s Super Mario. The network does not reward what is true or what is deep. It rewards what moves. Speed is the signal.

Since we in Silicon Valley architected this new dynamic, away from the pearl-clutching East Coast temples of orthodoxy, we know that platforms decide what spreads. This is the game, played at Formula One speeds.

There is a reason why “palace intrigue as role model for media” works, especially in our present. Every stumble, every pivot, every hire and firing gets compressed into a shareable unit of meaning and fired into the feed. The PR machine does not fight this. It feeds it. Carefully timed leaks. Coordinated podcast appearances. Engineered moments of apparent candor. The palace intrigue that reaches reporters is not the unfiltered reality. It is the selected version, packaged to keep the company au courant, in the story, in the feed. As I have said before, the meme is the metastory. It is the headline. And that is the point.

Which is why Twitter, now X, feels unbeatable despite everything. It is not because the product is superior. It is because the people with the most power and the most to gain have turned it into a gaming platform for symbolic capital. They are not users. They are players. And the game is very, very good to them.

We are all playing the same game. Patrick is smart enough to see and tweet about it.

March 13, 2025. San Francisco

Related Articles and Essays:

It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe River. Nothing dramatic.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, and my hand. And with that my words, and my pen. When I stopped and read, it shook me. I had written something I have felt.

The more I look for what I don’t know I’m looking for, the more likely I am to not find it.

So I am likely to be disappointed. Be disgruntled. What triggered this was my reaction to a new nib grind. It wasn’t really living up to its billing. Not every grind or nib should, as they too are creation of a moment, the artisan finds themselves in. It was not about them. But more about me.

It made me realize, the more new nibs, new grinds I try, I end up not thrilled with the new or appreciative of what I already have.

The universe in its own unique way, was slapping me silly and asking me to stop. And just try and be happy with what I have. Not find happiness with what I can have next. After all, in the end, it is about knowing what I am seeking really.

The pattern repeats. Objects are what change.

Things that somehow add up and pile up. Another new pen. Another new nib, new notebook. It’s all a distraction. Things that seem to bring happiness, but in the end are nothing but distractions from life and the emptiness of it.

The doodling led to self-reflection, and realization, that what I was chasing wasn’t a pen. Or a nib. Instead it was an imagined feeling that something new, something novel would produce. This feeling lives in the future, in the imagined version of the experience. We all feel it, one way or the other. We act on it, one way or the other. Nibs for me. Labubus for someone else.

The actual nib and pen, once inked are nothing like what was imagined. When the nib skips, and catches on paper, the imagination has none of that. That feeling of disappointment. But this is not just about nibs.

It never was. Clothes. Books. Another notebook. Swipe left, swipe right. The rhythm is identical. You’re not looking for a thing. You’re looking for the version of yourself you imagine owning it would produce. You can’t get there. Not because the thing is wrong. Because that self doesn’t exist. Acquisition isn’t the answer of finding self. It is always elimination, stripping down to the essence. And yet the trap of our modern now is that the Lego blocks of consumerism will complete the thing that really it wants to keep incomplete.

Buddhists call this Tanhā. Loosely translated it means craving. Tanhā is the addiction to wanting itself. Not the object. The wanting. What makes it hard to see is that the seeking loop feels like aliveness. The browsing, the imagining, the anticipating. It produces an energy that feels like engagement with life.

These days we call it FOMO, the fear of missing out. It is the algorithmic, bastard child of Tanhā. Social media didn’t invent this. It surely industrialized it. Every pen post, every rotation photo, every “new pen day” thread is engineered to make your current pen feel insufficient. Not because it is. Because the platform needs you to keep scrolling.

The cost of infinite options is that you never fully inhabit any of them. You hold everything lightly because the exit is always visible. Nothing becomes what it could be if you stayed.

It is ironic. Till recently, I had been using a version of the same camera I started taking photos with over a decade ago. My new camera is a more constrained version of the original. I know it intimately. Like the crook of the hand of a beloved with whom you have walked many walks that go nowhere, but end up somewhere. I know the images before they are captured.

I am also the same person who ruthlessly edited his wardrobe down to one hundred pieces, where the new one comes only when something has to go. It is a restricted palette of colors, choices, and clothing that are determined from knowing myself, what I like, and why I like things a certain way. It is unusual to be so precise in one thing and yet wayward in the other.

The person who writes with one pen for ten years knows things about it. I should know. I used the same pen from 1990 through the turn of the century before buying a new one, to celebrate the new century. So, I should know better. Yet, the whole modern social edifice is built on the new, the novel, and the next.

As a lifelong lover of ghazals, and having grown up in northern India, my first understanding of the word Tanha comes from Urdu. It means alone.

Solitary.
Craving.
Loneliness.

Somewhere in the linguistic memory, craving and loneliness were understood as the same condition.

The seeking loop. The new nib, the new ink. The swipe left or right. The next thing. This isn’t just desire. It’s modern society’s reality of finding meaning and company in objects. It makes you wonder if one is not filling space with things, and instead it is about filling an aloneness that things can’t actually reach.

The answer is not in wanting more.

Buddhists call the practice sati, bare attention. To be with what’s in front of you long enough to see it clearly. And so attention, then, isn’t just a practice. It’s learning to be alone without reaching. To sit with the tanhā, the loneliness, the craving, without immediately converting it into a search. Concrete, in my case: I probably don’t know what my best pen can actually do. I’ve never spent enough consecutive hours with it. I switch before I find the edge. It is strange, because I spent hours, days, weeks, and months with my camera. I should have learned.

It is getting late. The notepad is still on the desk. A few more pages have been used. The ink has dried. Somewhere in the middle of doodling and testing nibs I had stopped being a collector and started being a writer again.

I wonder if subconsciously I had come to a point where I now know it is time to start paring back. Finding the joy in the intimacy of knowing something longer. A lot longer. Just as my favorite clothing. My only camera. My favorite watch.

Is this what it feels like when a pen stops being a collector’s object and becomes a writer’s tool?

I don’t know how long this feeling lasts. But something inside me says, this is the point.

Travis is back. It was only a matter of time.

Given his old compadres Emil Michael and Shervin Pishevar are back in the news, how could he, the king pooh-ba, stay in the shadows?

To a lot of us who have been in the know, Travis Kalanick has never really gone away. He has always been doing his thing, away from the limelight which ultimately became his undoing. For eight years, he was busy building Cloud Kitchens. I heard second-hand stories of progress and stories of challenges. That’s life and that’s business. And that’s startup life.

Still, the return of Travis as a spectacle has been amazing to watch. It has been worthy of putting some popcorn, firing up the (MacBook) Neo, and sitting down and consuming it all. The return says as much about him as it does about the new hype machine, aka whatever passes for media right now.

As an entrepreneur, I love Kalanick, because he makes for a great story. He knows how to do bombast right. And he knows how to play the victim right. He has the right quotes. And he knows how to stumble over himself. In short, a media person has to love Kalanick.

So for most of the day yesterday, I watched him earn his symbolic capital. (If you missed that short essay, I would suggest you read it.) It was fun to watch him drop wisdom on a streaming video podcast. It was good to see him share his very clear, coherent and convincing vision of the physical world and how AI and robotics dovetail with that world. It stands in sharp contrast to the somewhat unclear vision of physical AI shared by academic-turned-Facebooker Yann LeCun, who recently raised over a billion dollars.

Given I have covered Travis for almost two decades, I can say he has aged, as his gray beard shows. For most of my media life, I was not the guy he gave interviews to, or scoops. For those he had more compliant reporters in media. Most of my scoops were earned, and he didn’t like that one bit.

We did enjoy an occasional drink or two, and a slice of pizza. I got to know him when he was still finding his feet with Redswoosh, a company he ultimately sold to Akamai. I was with Red Herring. I was literally in the proverbial room when he and Garrett Camp had a wild and wooly idea for an on-demand limo service at Le Web in Paris. The origin story is infused with just enough typical Silicon Valley mythology. Anyway, the point is I know the man and how he plays the game. As a founder, as a CEO and most importantly as orchestrator of media.

Given all this, and considering how much I can’t stand fluff in memos and media, I decided to do my typical steam wash of the Atoms vision manifesto. Separate the fluff from the fantastic. But first, a word about the pattern. Because it matters, and will help you understand the new manifesto.

At Uber, Kalanick consistently framed external forces such as regulators, competitors, the press, and board members as the problem. The company’s internal failures were always someone else’s move on the chess board. When Susan Fowler published her essay about sexual harassment and a culture that systematically protected high performers over the people they harmed, the initial response was to investigate the investigator. When Greyball, a tool Uber built to deceive regulators and evade law enforcement, became public, it was framed as a misunderstood safety feature.

That pattern held. The company, and by extension Travis, was always being persecuted by people who didn’t understand what it was trying to do. The mission was always too important for ordinary rules to apply.

The Atoms manifesto is pretty much the same playbook. The unnamed investor, though everyone knows who it is, who timed his power grab during a family tragedy becomes the defining event of his departure. Gone are the issues and problems at Uber. Instead what remains is the Horatio Alger-like story of a man who built something transformational, was betrayed at his most vulnerable, and is now back.

What Is Real

The strongest idea in the Atoms vision is the simplest one. Kalanick calls it “Digitizing the Physical World.” I know this because I have written about it. In my life as an investor this has been a recurring theme. The physical world is messy, chaotic, and stubbornly analog, but someone will undo this Gordian knot eventually.

The vision he outlines, sensors on streets, tracking trash trucks and traffic patterns in real time, routing around chaos before it happens, has been tried successfully, if not at scale, in Porto, Portugal almost a decade ago. It was built on a company True had backed, Veniam. The concept of smart city infrastructure, physical world data, the whole thing, was tried and worked at small scale. No one cracked how to scale it. That is still the problem. That is still the opportunity.

Same with mining automation, where companies big and small are doing self-driving automation of earth movers and trucks.

I still believe in this future. The time is now. The technology is knocking on the door. What you need is someone willing to break down the old way of doing things by sheer force of will and refusal to accept that the incumbent way is the only way. A blockhead, in the best sense of the word. If you can beat the cab cabal, one of the most entrenched, politically protected, locally organized industries in the world, then you can do things most people call impossible. That’s Kalanick in a nutshell. It is not nothing.

The second real argument is about specialized versus generalized robots. The industry is currently infatuated with humanoids. Kalanick pushes back, and he is right to. I mean you know how I feel about it. I talked at length with robotics pioneer Rodney Brook about this in my interview for Crazy Stupid Tech.

The humanoid is for bespoke, low-volume, human-designed spaces. The specialized machine is for industrial scale. This distinction matters, and not enough people covering robotics are making it clearly.

Third, the physical AI tech stack he lists, sensors, compute, models, manipulation, software, operations research, manufacturing, real estate, energy, and chemistry, is genuinely intimidating as a scope of work. His point that no single company has to own all of it but cross-stack competence is the advantage is an honest and useful framing.

Fourth, and this one is underappreciated, is land. Kalanick argues that real estate is a critical and overlooked input to physical world AI. Where do you mine the minerals? Where do you manufacture? Where do you store energy? The companies that control that land have an advantage most people are not pricing in yet. That is worth watching.

The last reason I buy this vision is because he has been on this digitizing physical world theme for more than a decade and a half. We talked about it. Often. In a column I wrote for Fast Company, I compared Uber to Google. When I asked Travis if he agreed that Uber is Google-like in that they’re both data-deterministic, he said “Uber’s task is much harder, because it is about taking bits and translating them into atoms and vice versa. Google, in other words, never has to worry about a search result getting stuck behind a trash truck. The real world is a lot more complicated.”

Now you know why the new company is called Atoms.

What Is Fluff

There is a lot. I hate this kind of bullshit, and if you have read me long enough, you know that I don’t suffer nonsense like “Valuable Unknown Truths.” The entropy-and-death framing around it is grandiosity, and lacks all substance. It is venture-speak dressed as philosophy. In plain English, what he is saying is that his company is going to look for insights others miss. Every damn startup says that in their pitch to every venture fund. Of course, you can now see this phrase show up in slide decks around the valley.

My head exploded when I read “Moore’s Law squared.” It is not a thing. The claim that the cost per unit of intelligence is dropping ninety percent per year is unverifiable and uncited. Without actual hard evidence, this is not an argument.

The Tesla and Amazon autonomous futures scenario, lights-out factories, self-driving freight, autonomous delivery, reads like a 2017 pitch deck. The vision is familiar. You know that might be good as vision, but the Chinese are already doing it. Now. Shein and others have invented the new commerce. Xiaomi and BYD have rolled out lights-out factories, and created scale like none before. Self-driving is no longer a vision, it is a feature. But still, it does sound great on TV.

And lastly, the Henry Adams quote about chaos and order is garnish at best. As I said before, Travis knows how to tell a great story with a lot of emphasis. I mean you don’t raise billions if you can’t tell a story with the forcefulness of a tornado.

What Is This Then?

Bloomberg does a good job here. City Storage Systems, the company Kalanick has been running quietly since being pushed out of Uber, is being renamed Atoms. It is going after three major verticals: food, mining, and transport robotics. That is the news.

The rest is a rebranding, a reintroduction, and an attempt to reenter the public conversation on his own terms. To me, this is a specific strategy, and it did not happen by accident. (Whoever the person is behind Travis’ comeback strategy, they were criminally underpaid.)

The vision page at atoms.co is engineered content. Not a press release. Not an interview where a reporter can push back. It is a controlled document, published direct, designed to establish the terms of the story before anyone else can. This is Sources Go Direct in action.

Sources going direct has collapsed the distance between a founder’s worldview and the public’s first impression of it. The press pickup that follows is not independent verification. It is amplification of a frame that was already set. This is symbolic capitalism at work, the accumulation of reputation and attention as a form of currency. Kalanick spent the day earning it back, in real time, in public.

The coverage of Atoms has largely worked exactly as designed. The vision is treated as the news. The rebranding is treated as a launch. The Horatio Alger story, knocked down, wandered, returned stronger, is irresistible to a media world that rewards narrative over nuance and speed over depth. You gotta fill airtime and make people buy your subscriptions.

Kalanick knows this. Uber was built, in part, on the ability to move faster than the institutions trying to contain it. The same instinct is visible here.

The real story is messier and more interesting. A complicated man, with real ideas, trying to rebuild reputation and company at the same time, using the same tools and instincts that made him famous the first time. It worked at Uber, until it didn’t.

Atoms is the next test of whether it works again.

I’ll be damned if I am not interested. And I’ll be damned if I don’t want to see what he does next. That doesn’t mean I need to gulp his MBA-speak as wisdom. I will call the game as I see it being played.

March 14, 2026. San Francisco.

I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 7 years for a beautiful wedding. My Mom’s side of the family emigrated here in the 1860s, and there’s a deep comfort in the art, traditions, and weirdness of Creole culture. Good music and food are ubiquitous.

I met up with WordPresser Blake Bertuccelli-Booth to catch a set by Jason Marsalis at Snug Harbor, featuring some great originals and surprising arrangements of Maroon 5’s “This Love” and the music from the Bejeweled Butterflies game. Great artists find inspiration everywhere.

Afterward, we went to see my friend Troy, aka Trombone Shorty, at his studio. (Troy and I met when we both received the Heinz Award in 2016.) He was with Silkk the Shocker and Reggie Nicholas Jr., working on beats and songs. Though I was there for just a short while, it was inspiring to see the act of musical creation.

A few days ago, Ed Sheeran went on the new Benny Blanco / Lil Dicky / Kristin Podcast Friends Keep Secrets. I haven’t watched the entire episode, but the twenty minutes from about 1:09 to the end where Ed and Benny come up with a new song I’ve seen 4 times now, it’s magical. Check it out, it’s one of the coolest things you’ll see this week.

I’ve seen Ed Sheeran loop his songs live, but this act of creation is very special, and I love the dynamic between him and Benny. It reminds me of that magical moment in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary where you see Paul McCartney and the band come up with the idea for the classic song Get Back.

As I sit here on Sunday morning, reflecting on what has been one of the most hectic writing weeks in a long time, I can’t help but ask, why?

Of course, there was a lot of news and action. Not that any of that matters to me, but still, there were new Apple products that were up for review. I have had iPad Air and MacBook Neo in my hands, and ended up writing about them. Neo got me philosophical and took me on a different tangent from a regular review.

And there was that great story in the Financial Times about Softbank and its founder playing with fire (aka OpenAI). Something about it compelled me to write about it. That and a tweet by Stripe CEO led to me writing about Symbolic Capital, and as if to make my point, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick emerged from shadows to talk about Atoms. So, that turned into a breakdown of his manifesto.

This week, I moved my “pen newsletter” over to the “backpages” of this website. I am not much of a reviewer, and much prefer to write either short posts or longer pieces. So for me makes sense to just have it all in one place. I wrote two pieces, one about developing an ink-color palette from life itself, and a long reflection on the why of idle consumerism.

So, but the real answer to the “why” I wrote so much this week is that it is eleven years since my company shuttered. And I react to the emotion of loss in the only way I do, by writing. A lot.

Here’s what’s worth reading this weekend.

• Mac Neo and My Afternoon of Reflection and Melancholy. Steven Sinofsky picked up a MacBook Neo and found himself staring at what might have been. The former head of Windows writes that everything they tried to do with Windows 8 and Surface RT in 2012, a $599 laptop built on a phone chip with a new app model, is exactly what Apple just shipped. “We were early, but not wrong.” [Hardcore Software]
• The Human Condition or the Conditional Human? A genetic-testing company offers embryo selection for higher IQ. Meta’s chief AI officer says he’ll wait to have children until Neuralink is ready for implantation from a young age. Microsoft’s former head of research describes the “holy grail” as building intelligence superior to any human. David Polansky in the Hedgehog Review points out that they are all part of the same idea, one that is quietly redefining what it means to be human. Great read. [Hedgehog Review]
• How Chinese Labs Race for the Next First-in-Class Breakthrough. In its 15th five-year plan, China laid out plans for scientific self-sufficiency by spending liberally on basic research across materials, energy, and biomedicine, halving clinical trial review times to match the US. It won’t be enough as it needs a mindset change. One biotech CEO admits China is still “more about engineering and applications, not about original concept and novelty.” [C&EN]
• What Sports Betting Is Doing to America. You know how I feel about sports betting and how invasive it has become. But to get a first-person understanding of the disease? Read this brilliant piece in The Atlantic. They gave McKay Coppins, a practicing Mormon, $10,000 to gamble with over an NFL season. He had never placed a bet. What started as a journalistic experiment turned into something he describes as “unnerving.” This is the exact problem I’ve been writing about, except someone lived inside it for a season and came back to tell you what it looks like. [The Atlantic]
• The Slavery Scandal at the Chinese Takeover of a Brazilian Ford Plant. The Washington Post reviewed 5,000 pages of court records and interviewed 41 people to tell the story of what happened when BYD took over a shuttered Ford factory in Camaçari, Brazil. Brazilian prosecutors accused BYD and its contractors of trafficking and conditions “analogous to slavery.” BYD’s response was to blame “cultural differences” and accuse unnamed forces of conspiring against China’s rise. This is what the global EV supply chain looks like when nobody is watching. [Washington Post]
• In 1844, Chess Was Already Online. Every generation thinks that their technology is so special that it will change the world, and humans. I was reminded of that when I read this story. Six months after Morse sent “What hath God wrought” over the first US telegraph line, someone used it to play chess. Washington challenged Baltimore, moves were transmitted as numbered squares, and seven games were played without a single transmission error. A good reminder. Every new communication technology gets used for play before it gets used for business. The telegraph, the telephone, the internet, and now AI. Human nature doesn’t change. The wires do. [IEEE Spectrum]
• Goodbye, Tesla-Style Giant Touchscreens. The buttons are back, thanks in part to China mandating physical controls for essential car functions. Europe will now mark down cars that rely only on touchscreens for things like turn signals. So, VW and Mercedes have already reversed course. And the Jony Ive-designed Ferrari Luce interior is full of knobs and switches. Turns out, sleek and futuristic is not the same as safe and usable. I don’t drive, so I don’t know. But I wonder if all this even matters when invisible robots are driving the cars? [Domus]

Things I wrote this week, ICYMI:

• Symbolic Capitalism
• The Fact & Fluff of the Return of Travis Kalanick
• The Essence of a Machine
• The Debt Beneath the Dream
• The 2026 iPad Air M4: Early Impressions
• Tanhā: Our Modern Consumerism
• Life Has a Hex Code

March 15, 2026. San Francisco

You are never alone – there’s always at least one other person working through the same questions. That’s something 20+ years of blogging has consistently proved to me via private responses to my public posts. In asking about Paul Krugman’s assertions regarding our industry’s billionaires, and expanding it to include more of us (the tech elite), I received several versions of “I share your concerns but also just living in my corner of the world, trying to do good work,” which is totally normal. ‘Can you be part of the system without also being part of the problem’ is something I wonder as well. I am 25+ years in technology; I’ve held positions of responsibility on notable products; as an investor I’ve committed other people’s money – and now our own – into hundreds of startups. While you’d likely list many techies ahead of me on the current list of ‘their decisions have global impact,’ historically I’ve been in some of those rooms. So, can you be part of the system – the commercial tech industry – without also being being part of the problem? I’ve decided the answer is Yes, But….

Yes, but you have to believe that the system itself isn’t corrupt at its core. I believe in capitalism and I believe in technology as forces that have incredibly powerful and positive implications for the world.

Yes, but you should revisit your first principles and maintain dialogue with people you respect from outside of your system. You have to try to truly understand their POV and you have to know that you might be wrong.

Yes, but you need to understand how the physics of the system – the game on the field – itself influence the behaviors and incentives, why the defaults are so strong, and what you want to limit, counter, or reject. And the cost of doing so.

Yes, but it’s healthy to maintain a personal identity and variety of relationships that aren’t system dependent. It’s harder to not conform or to leave a community behind if needed when it isn’t just your livelihood but your everything.

This is a WIP list but helped articulate a basic framrwork; where I’ve been challenging in maintaining those beliefs; and what in the future could make it harder for me to *not* be part of the problem. Next step was asking myself for examples of ‘living’ those values.

What systems have I opted out from? Twitter. Even before Elon I made some meaningful changes to its role in my life and after the sale, I decided it wasn’t for me going forward.

What incentives have I pushed against? Capital We always wanted Homebrew to be small enough to be able to say ‘no’ to investments/areas that we didn’t feel comfortable with from a values perspective. Switching to using our own capital makes this even easier. One reason for creating Screendoor, which backs new VC firms, was the goal of helping new types of excellence debut in the marketplace, to the benefit of founders, and threatening those existing firms which wants to stay mediocre.

Leaving Google helped me start to build an identity outside of my job, but it was really a combination of fatherhood and new hobbies which gave me a set of people where my interactions didn’t start with being on an org chart or cap table together.

All of this is caveated with the fact we might be living in extraordinary times that I’m underestimating the trajectory, or that I implicitly designed a framework to justify my choices. That I’m ‘greenwashing’ per se, to let me stay comfortable. I’ll accept these notions and continue to challenge myself on my own and with the help of others.

Back in 2024 I went through the process of losing weight, and was fairly successful. I went from ~111kg (244lbs) to ~103kg (226lbs). My target was 100kg (220lbs), so I got very close.

But then, in August 2024, I was promoted in work, ended up working way more hours, and my health suffered. I ended up burned out and ultimately I stepped down a few months ago. Which was honestly the right thing to do.

Anyway, for the year or so that I was in that role, my weight slowly crept back up and as of this morning, I'm back at 110.6kg (243lbs). So as of today I'm back on the wagon and trying hard to eradicate my chubbiness.

I found last time that writing about it really helped to motivate me, not to mention hold me to account. It's easy to eat that chocolate bar if no-one knows I'm going to gain an extra half kilo, but if I'm writing about it publicly, I'm less likely to do so. I dunno, my brain is weird. Anyway, expect monthly updates, just like before.

So we start again today and my hope is that I'll be down to my target weight by my birthday, which is in late August.

Wish me luck!

As far as I can see, the majority of MacBook Neo reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Other reviews are simply acknowledging that this new laptop will be a huge success, while also recommending other laptops, including the refurbished MacBook Air. These reviews share the same overall message: the Neo, especially after the August-September back-to-school season, will be an immense hit, potentially becoming the best-selling Mac computer of all time, maybe outselling the previous bestseller, I want to say three to four times (just speculating here).

With this upcoming increased volume of sales in the traditional computer market, i.e. not phones or tablets, and with these millions of users new to the Mac platform, what can this mean for MacOS and the ecosystem?

I have a lot of questions, and very few answers, as you can see below.

Will the Neo become a second chance for the Mac App Store? Will the popularity of the Neo, on the contrary, make the Mac App Store experience even worse? Will it become flooded with crappy apps, trying to take advantage of trusting users new to the platform? Will this change the average app price or business model on the Mac?

Looking at the Top Free Apps list on the Mac App Store as I write this line, the 6th most popular app is called “AI Chatbot · Ask AI Anything 5.2”.*1 It sits right after Microsoft Excel and CapCut, and before Microsoft PowerPoint. No, this app — unrelated to OpenAI — is not fishy at all (!) and the Mac App Store is very safe. The 12th most popular app on the list is “HP: Print and Support”. Great, great stuff. I wonder what will happen with millions of extra Mac users.

Will the Neo help the Mac become a proper gaming platform?

The Neo may not be equipped for “serious” gaming, due to its basic screen and “modest” GPU, but all the casual games and older games like Minecraft would be perfectly fine on this machine: there is definitely an opportunity for Apple and developers here, especially with the Mac being compatible with PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch controllers out of the box.

Will the popularity of the MacBook Neo be an opportunity for Apple to mobilise more third-party developers to build apps for MacOS, now that the potential user base can be significantly larger? How many of these new apps will be truly native, and how many will be built on top of frameworks like Electron, since the majority of these new users probably won’t care? Is the Neo a new opportunity for the Swift language? Will the Neo push Apple to finally update the Stickies app? I guess we will have to wait until WWDC 2026 to have parts of these answers.

Will this increased popularity of the Mac, arguably the first modern Mac for the masses, bring more heat to MacOS when it comes to viruses and security flaws?

This is one of the first questions I asked myself when I started to read about how the MacBook Neo could sell millions, on top of the current Mac sales. I understand that MacOS itself is pretty secure, but if MacOS becomes more appealing to apps and games developers, it will also be more appealing to virus makers.

How much of the iPad market will the Neo capture? How much of an impact will it have on the Safari vs. Chrome market share: will new Mac users just use Chrome on their new Macs or stick to Safari? Will the Neo push Apple to release more frequent updates for Safari? How many Safari extensions will be available by the end of the year?

How many of the new Mac users, brought to the platform via the Neo, will eventually become MacOS enthusiasts? What does it mean for the direction of MacOS? If, by the end of 2026, 80 to 90% of active Macs are MacBooks Neo (again, just speculating), what does it mean for the future of Liquid Glass?*2 Is an increased line of revenue for the Mac a reason for Apple to mobilise more people to work on MacOS?

I am a little worried that a never-seen-before popularity for the Mac would encourage Apple to make MacOS look and behave more like iOS.

Will the increased popularity of the Mac make the Mac less cool in the eyes of others, less exclusive? Is the Mac ready to become more than the cooler alternative to Windows?

I have a lot of questions, as you can see. I’m sure most of these questions have been asked hundreds of times already. Answers to these questions will appear obvious to some, less so to others. We don’t even know if the Neo will be as successful as most people predict. But I’m sure the Neo’s success is the one thing that raises the fewest questions…