TV is hard, and Apple not only never shipped a TV set, but it also never quite figured out the whole Apple TV branding (hardware, software, service). Removing the + from Apple TV won’t help unless something else comes along. I’m betting that Apple will double down on the HomePod brand moniker1.

  1. The HomePod TV is a good bet. ↩︎

The Illusion of Decline: Apple, Complexity, and the Myth of Falling Quality

Reading The Great Software Quality Collapse by Denis Stetskov reminded me of a recurring conversation in the Apple community: that Apple’s software quality isn’t what it used to be. Every release cycle brings the same chorus—bugs, regressions, performance oddities—and the sense that the polish once synonymous with Apple is fading. But Stetskov’s essay helped me reframe that perception. Modern software isn’t just “worse”; it’s exponentially more complex. Apple now maintains multiple platforms—macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS—each with deep integrations and overlapping technologies. What once felt like craftsmanship at the scale of a single ecosystem is now a sprawling web of dependencies that even Apple struggles to tame.

So, maybe the cracks we see aren’t evidence of negligence but of scale. Perfection doesn’t scale well. The discipline that Stetskov calls “boring engineering” still exists within Apple, but it’s buried under layers of ambition, abstraction, and velocity. His piece is a reminder that our expectations of elegance must evolve alongside the complexity of what we ask these systems to do. The problem isn’t just that software breaks—it’s that we’ve forgotten how miraculous it is that it works at all.

As reported by 9to5Mac, AltStore is to support Fediverse with its own Mastodon instance:

AltStore is embracing ActivityPub and the fediverse, with its own Mastodon server, allowing developers and users to have a more direct channel of communication and interaction.

This is, among other things, what we are missing with Apple’s tight control on its App Store.

I agree with Eric Schwarz, yep, it’s utterly curious:

Curiously, I am surprised that the iWork suite, as well as GarageBand, Pixelmator Pro, and other Apple apps have not been updated—it’s a really weird thing when Cupertino’s own have been sent to squircle jail.