Watching the Apple Ecosystem

6FPS V7#7: July 7, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Welcome to July, the month in which my personal calendar ticks over. We’ve had our first hot days, but this summer seems cooler than others we’ve seen recently, perhaps because of the end of the La Niña.

We are into that time of year where I look for reasons to go out birding, and find nothings. There’s a Trumpeter Swan hanging out about 30 minutes from here with flocks of Canada Geese, but I’ve tried for it three times and missed three times. When birds like this don’t migrate, it’s often illness or injury, so while this one looks healthy from the reports I’ve seen, it shouldn’t be here.

I did my survey route for Audubon and all went well. We’re going to adjust a few of the survey points for November, so I need to do more scouting, but it can wait. A nice bonus to doing the survey was I picked up two live birds: Olive-Sided Flycatcher and MacGillvary’s Warbler, each at a different survey location. Both are summer residents here in small numbers, and I’d been chasing the flycatcher a bit without luck, so that was nice to tick off the list.

And with the Puffin trip (see writeup below), I added Tufted Puffin to the life list, which now stands at 312. My year list now stands at 143, which has already beaten my 2024 total of 132 for the entire year, and is by far my best birding year since moving north, and very close to my better years back in California.

Definitely looking forward to fall migration now.

Minidramas Resolved

Well, June was a super busy month, but it allowed me to resolve all of the ongoing mini-dramas. The cats have met their new vets and all seems well. Tatiana has met her new vet and I’m really happy with her and the new practice, even if it’s across the bridge — but in reality, it’s 45 minutes drive instead of 25, not a huge change, but there’s this psychological “it’s far away” tied to crossing the bridge. And we found a new irrigation team, and they’ve come out, fixed a couple of things, and we’re all good there again, too.

And where I thought the spring landscaping work was pretty limited, it turned out to need two half+ days by the main crew, a half day of tree removal (four pines and a dead walnut) by the owner, and I still have a another 1-2 hours of planting waiting for a free slot in their schedule.

And I look at my schedule for July and things I have to accomplish, and, well, it’s empty, except for that one bit of planting left to do. So, yay me.

Bill Atkinson, RIP

Sad news in the Apple universe: Bill Atkinson, who created huge chunks of the early technology of Macintosh computers, passed away, age 74, of cancer.

Bill was the architect behind core technologies for the Mac, including QuickDraw, MacPaint, and later on, HyperCard. It’s hard to describe just how important the work he did was to my life and career — as a 17 year veteran of Apple and in my day a fair HyperCard nerd, it’s hard to conceive what my life would have been without Bill’s contribution to it.

As it turns out, I never worked with him directly while at Apple, but later in life, I got to interact with him a few times because he became quite an accomplished photographer, also. Everyone I knew at Apple who knew him loved working with him, and the few times I talked to him, he was a joy to be around.

It my sound a bit hyperbolic, but he was, I think, just as foundationally important to the existence and success of the Mac as Steve Jobs was.

Remember Palm, and WebOS?

An interesting article was published by Phil McKinney about how Palm was bought by HP, and how HP then proceeded to screw it up massively. As someone who was working for Palm at the time, I got to watch this happen from the inside, and, well, if anything, he’s too kind with HP.

When this went down, the reality was that Palm had failed, and it was either find a buyer or die. There were many reasons for this, but mostly, Palm was simply not well managed by the executive team, and I drop that on the shoulders of Jon Rubenstein.

In many ways, for better and worse, HP was the best opportunity for Palm — rumors were rolling through Palm about who the possible buyers were, and the one that seemed most likely was Amazon, and it seemed they wanted the intellectual property, and would jettison the rest of it (meaning: all the employees). When word came out that HP was buying us, there was both hope and trepidation.

It didn’t take long for reality to set in. HP wasn’t a good place for me to be, since I never finished my C.S. degree, but I didn’t immediately update my resume, but I was sitting on the fence from day one. HP fairly quickly convinced me I didn’t want to be there, so I started looking around.

And then the Mark Hurd thing happened, and he was out as CEO, and then Leo came in as new CEO, and he had this grand idea that HP needed to be a software only company, and, well, we literally woke up one day to find out all of our hardware products had been cancelled.

Yeah.

WebOS today still exists, primarily as the OS that drives LG televisions. It could have been much, much more, but early fumbles by Palm, followed by the utter disaster that was Leo’s tenure at HP, killed any chance of us succeeding.

We could have been a contender. Oh well.

On Moving to Washington

A friend of mine asked me why we decided to move to Washington, since they were starting to consider something similar.

It's always been a possibility. My family owned a cabin up here and spent July's up here for many years, before they got too old to make the trip. They ended up selling it when I let it be known we weren't interested in taking it over (which I don't regret). But spending time up here every summer got me to learn about the area (and fall in love with Victoria BC), and so I've always thought of it as an option.

My reasons for leaving California and Silicon Valley are kind of complex, but cost of living, the increasing impact of climate change and the fact that by having a nice job that was 100% remote, Laurie and I no longer had a need to be in Silicon Valley, and by selling the house we had there we could pull a nice hunk of money into savings AND get a really nice house up here in Kitsap.

This region is bluer than other rural areas around here, which is nice, but in general, it's a quiet, laid back area. We're on 4+ acres, mostly undeveloped, and it's a much slower pace. One county over it gets definitely redder, but it's not terrible like the eastern parts of the state can get.

At one point, Portland was a primary option, but Portland is pretty screwed up right now. I have some friends that just moved to the Oregon coast and love it, and that was a second option for us (somewhere between Cannon Beach and Astoria) but moving to the Poulsbo area was always the first choice, because of our history with it. I think Washington is in better shape overall, although right now there's nowhere that's really "safe".

See you next issue!