This week we reached an agreement with a certain Mac software publisher to create a book on a product that a lot of people have been asking about. Details will come later, and we expect the book to be published in the fourth quarter of the year, but this has been in the works for a very long time and I’m delighted that it’s finally real.
The other thing, of course, was WWDC.
Boy oh boy do I want that 15-inch MacBook Air. Midnight, please, with max RAM and SSD. But I also need a new iPad, and a new Apple Watch, and later this year, a new iPhone, so…geez. There are only so many dollars. If money were no object, I’d buy a fully loaded Mac Studio with M2 Ultra and six Pro Display XDRs for (checks notes) $45,000 plus tax. However, money is very much an object.
The updates to the various operating systems look mostly OK. Not exciting, and they don’t scratch any of my particular itches, but, I mean, about what I expected. I have already (just barely) started writing Take Control of Sonoma, and I now have to make further revisions to Take Control of Your Passwords before we release the next update. As usual, Josh Centers will be writing about iOS 17 and iPadOS 17. Many of our other books will also need updates, and I expect that we’ll have a busy fall as those books make their way through the publishing process.
One change in Sonoma that has not yet been widely publicized is that Mail no longer supports third-party plugins. (It does support Mail Extensions, of which hardly any exist, because the API is incredibly limited—extensions can do only a tiny fraction of what plugins can.) I have said for many years that the only reason I can stand to use Mail in macOS is that I supplement it with plugins that add features I need; without those (especially SmallCubed Software’s MailSuite, Mail is unusable for me. But that’s OK, because I’ve been working with SmallCubed on their new MailMaven app, which will be out later this year featuring documentation (plus a Take Control book) by yours truly.
I watched the introduction of Vision Pro, and I’ve read many articles and hands-on reviews. It looks…kind of interesting, I guess? The technology is quite impressive, but for my personal needs, there is no way whatsoever that the utility of such a product would be worth $3,500 to me. It doesn’t solve any problems for me, and although I’m sure it would be fun to use, the ratio of cost to usefulness is far too high.
I was chatting with a Mac developer about this product, and I quipped that it will be a hot winter day in Saskatoon before we write a Take Control book on VisionOS. He replied, “So with climate change, in about 5 years?” And you know what? That might be an accurate prediction (on both counts).
Regardless of whether I’m personally interested in a product or app, there are some basic requirements that have to be met before we can create a book about it. First and foremost, we have to be able to sell enough copies to turn a profit. As a very rough rule of thumb, I consider a book to have passed the “minimally worth doing” threshold at 1,500 copies sold. (That’s not resounding success or anything, just the point at which it was a better use of the author’s time than flipping burgers.) So, I ask myself: are there 1,500 people within our audience (the people we’re able to reach via email, our website, and so on) who will own a Vision Pro and want a book about it? I can 100% guarantee the answer is no, at least for 2024.
We would also need to have an author and an editor who each own a Vision Pro and who are sufficiently knowledgeable and enthusiastic about it to write and edit the book, respectively. I would be pretty shocked if that were the case in 2024. Our authors and editors are not wealthy and we certainly don’t have the budget to buy that hardware for them. Or, more accurately, it would mean that we’d have to sell about a thousand more books just to break even.
But maybe, in a few years, when the price and weight have come down, the battery life has gone up, and the ecosystem has matured to make a more compelling case for ordinary users, conditions will be right for a book after all. Time will tell.
Here in Saskatoon it is quite hot, but at least there are millions of mosquitos. My garden is growing. I would not have predicted that on June 9, my potatoes would be the tallest plants in the garden by far, keeping my poor lettuce plants perpetually shaded. But we’ll see how the summer progresses. This was intended as an experimental year, a time of learning, and that is indeed happening.