I read a few great things today, and I’m sharing them here with you.

Imagining the next MacBook Neo

Jason Snell at Six Colors games out what Apple might put inside the next MacBook Neo:

In short, the A19 Pro would be an incremental update to the Neo, keeping it roughly in the ballpark of M1 CPU performance and M2 or M3 GPU performance. The A20 Pro, on the other hand, would elevate the Neo to M2-level CPU and M4-level GPU performance.

I don’t own a laptop right now, but if I did, it’d probably be a Neo. These days, though, when I’m away, I use my iPad to control my Mac Studio. It’s pretty great.

John Gruber will wait

John Gruber isn’t letting an AI agent anywhere near his Mac:

The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source? It doesn’t even get to the point of my considering Meta as Muse’s creator. I wasn’t tempted an iota to try OpenClaw, and I’m not tempted to try Muse on my Mac. On a Mac, maybe. But not my Mac.

I’d probably let a stranger use my Mac while I watched, just like I’d let a stranger use my phone to make a call if they needed to. I’d be on edge, but I’d allow it. My rules are different from John’s, but I appreciate his take.

I work with Claude Code, and I’ve dabbled with giving Claude extremely limited access to my Mac — limiting it to the point of annoyance. I make it ask for permission to do anything. It’s saved me some time, but in general it’s stressful to hand a robot the keys to my computer, so it’s confined to specific folders and my watchful eye. I can’t imagine a time I’d ever trust Meta with that level of access.

What if America went completely dark?

A well-designed and heavily researched piece from The New York Times Magazine (gift link) about what would happen if America’s power grid were successfully attacked at scale. Short version: It would be very, very terrible.

The scariest part is that it’s already been rehearsed, on a smaller scale:

They knew which cables to cut. They knew which part of the transformers to hit. And “they knew exactly when the police were coming,” Wellinghoff said. “They knew exactly when to stop, and they got away completely clean.”