On this episode of Intentional AI, Chris and I look at how dictation went from a nine-thousand-dollar tool that needed hours of training to something you can whisper into your watch. We compare cloud and local options, including Wispr Flow, MacWhisper, Superwhisper, and Whisper Memos, along with the privacy tradeoffs that come with each.

We also talk about using your voice to give robots better context, then wrap up with Claude’s new browser and background computer use.

This episode of Intentional AI is sponsored by:

• Making Light: Craft a daily ritual to focus on what matters most. Get $10 off your first order with the code ‘INTENTIONAL26’

The post Intentional AI 8: Whisper to Write appeared first on MacSparky.

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I work through practical questions about capacity, chronotypes, delegation, accountability, and what to do when a careful plan collapses. We also talk about task overload and the difference between getting human help and handing work to a robot.

In Deep Focus, we look at systems for bad days and why my automated daily note lost to the paper cards sitting on my desk.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

• Gusto: Payroll, HR, Benefits. Simplified. Get 3 months free.
• Keeper: Get 60% off personal and family plans.
• Daylite: The only made-for-mac CRM solution. Start your free trial today.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code FOCUSED.

The post Focused 264: The Accountability Shaped Hole appeared first on MacSparky.

Joe Moyer explains how his iPad mini became his go-to reading device. I’ve got an old iPad mini serving the same purpose. Wouldn’t it be nice, however, if I could fit it in my pocket?

Totally unrelated, I’m looking forward to the iPhone event tomorrow.

The post A 7″ Reading Device appeared first on MacSparky.

This post is sponsored by Rogue Amoeba.

This week, my friends at Rogue Amoeba are back to sponsor MacSparky. On September 30, they’ll be marking 24 years of making great audio tools for the Mac. To celebrate, MacSparky readers can save 24% off anything in the Rogue Amoeba lineup. Use discount code SPARKY24 in their online store through the end of September.

Rogue Amoeba has a full suite of audio tools for the Mac. Audio Hijack is their flagship recording tool.

Audio Hijack records audio from anything on your Mac: your web browser, a Zoom or Teams call, a microphone, a hardware interface, or your entire system audio. It’s easy to build your sessions, using a visual block-based canvas. Drop in your audio sources, add any effects you want, and hook up recording and monitoring. Audio Hijack makes sure it all connects automatically, and you get exactly the audio you expect.

They just released Audio Hijack 4.6, with refinements to their fantastic Transcribe block. Drop it into a session, and Audio Hijack turns audio into text locally on your Mac. Nothing gets uploaded, nothing goes to a server, and there are no accounts required. If you’ve been looking for a way to get transcripts of your calls and recordings without handing the audio to somebody else, Audio Hijack is your answer.

There’s a fully functional free trial, so you can put Audio Hijack through its paces before you spend anything. Download it today from Rogue Amoeba’s website. And don’t worry – Audio Hijack is already updated for compatibility with macOS 27 (Golden Gate).

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for supporting MacSparky, and for keeping Mac audio in such good hands for 24 years. Check out Audio Hijack, and the rest of their lineup, and don’t forget discount code SPARKY24 to save 24% off everything this month.

The post Record Any Audio on Your Mac, with Audio Hijack appeared first on MacSparky.

The Relay for St. Jude 2026 fundraiser is underway. Hooray! Since 2019, the Relay community has raised more than $4.8 million for St. Jude. This year, we’re within reach of the $5 million mark.

The case is simple. You give money and they use it to take care of kids with cancer. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food. The hospital has also helped push the U.S. childhood cancer survival rate from 20% when St. Jude opened in 1962 to more than 80% today. Donors make that work possible. I plan on helping. You can too. Even five dollars helps.

The post Help Relay Reach $5 Million for St. Jude appeared first on MacSparky.

Hazel turns twenty this weekend. I’m a fan. People ask if I’m still using Hazel in the age of AI, and the answer is absolutely yes. Hazel still does a lot of great file management on your device without burning tokens or sacrificing your privacy. There’s definitely space for it on my hard drive still.

To mark the occasion, everything in the Noodlesoft store is 35% off through Monday night. No code required, the sale price is already showing:

• Hazel 6: $42 → $27.30
• Family Pack, up to five Macs in one household: $65 → $42.25
• Upgrade from an earlier version: $20 → $13.00

For giggles, I’ve also marked the Hazel Field Guide 50% off for the week. Code: HAZELIS20

Happy Birthday, Hazel.

The post Hazel Turns 20 appeared first on MacSparky.

Teddy Svoronos returns to the Mac Power Users. Teddy explains how he uses tech to teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the challenges of teaching in the age of A.I.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

• Ecamm: Powerful live streaming platform for Mac.
• 1Password: Never forget a password again.

The post Mac Power Users 865: Harvard Professor Teddy Svoronos on AI in the Classroom appeared first on MacSparky.

Growing up and watching Star Trek, one thing that made it feel futuristic to me was the interaction with the “computer.” You didn’t see Captain Picard updating software or managing user interfaces. Instead, he just said something out into the air, and then the computer responded politely and efficiently, giving him whatever he needed.

At the time, that made total sense to me as something that would be natural in a few hundred years, but it never occurred to me that we would get there in my lifetime. And yet, we are rapidly approaching the Star Trek moment.

Through a variety of technologies – flawless text-to-speech dictation, modern processors, and artificial intelligence – we are getting to that point where you can just yell something into the air and digital problems get solved. Heck, if you’re willing to go out on the end of the spear, we are already there.

In essence, this lets you separate the user from the software. It’s putting another level of abstraction between you and the work. This doesn’t mean we’re replacing the software, at least for the time being, but it does mean you can step away from it. Rather than being an operator of your software and systems, you become more of a director of it.

Smart productivity app developers are already seeing that, and that’s why you’re seeing so many of them release MCPs and other techniques for their software to work with artificial intelligence. They are, in effect, adding their software to your voice-controlled stack.

I expect that to only accelerate. We’ll be getting Siri AI very shortly, and you’ll see how Apple is doing the same thing within the confines of their own operating system and, of course, under their terms.

We are spending a lot of time talking about these technologies in the MacSparky Labs and the Robot Assistant Field Guide. Over time, what this will achieve is to make all of us power users provided we can get comfortable with the additional abstraction and use our imaginations. What I’m here to tell you is that normal folks in the not-so-distant future are going to work very similarly to Jean-Luc Picard.

The post The Approaching Star Trek moment appeared first on MacSparky.

Last week Apple updated the Magic Keyboard, replacing text key labels with glyphs, which is kind of nice. I have a similar keyboard on my laptop, and I like it.

However, I was hoping they would fix a different injustice that’s been around for a while. Specifically, you can buy the extended keyboard with black or white keycaps, but the standard Magic Keyboard only comes with white keycaps. I find this baffling.

There are plenty of us picky users who want an Apple keyboard on our desk (with Touch ID) that is not 16 inches wide. And yet, still no dice.

The post For Those of Us Particular About the Things on Our Desks… appeared first on MacSparky.

The Things 3 team released a nice update recently, dramatically improving its repeating tasks feature. I first learned of this when we interviewed the Things CEO on Mac Power Users, but I’ve heard from several of you Things users that are really digging it. If this was the feature holding you back from Things in the past, it may be time to take another look.

The post Things 3’s Repeating Task Feature Restructured appeared first on MacSparky.

We got news that Apple has settled the App Store fee dispute with the European Union, which is good. If Apple can get out of this mess with a negotiated deal instead of years of litigation and penalties, they should consider themselves ahead of the game.

When I first saw the headline, however, I was hoping it meant a more global agreement with the European Union. I talk to European Apple enthusiasts every day in the MacSparky Labs, and they are all incredibly frustrated that Apple fails to release features in the EU that are available elsewhere.

I’m not going to pretend to know who’s to blame, but European citizens and Apple customers are the ones paying the price.

Back in my days as a lawyer, I was a party to enough ongoing negotiations to know that the people outside the negotiations have no clue what’s actually going on. But I can hope this is merely a first step and that my European Apple-using friends can get access to Siri AI sooner rather than later.

The post A Truce on App Store Fees, Still No Siri AI in Europe appeared first on MacSparky.

On this episode of Focused, Mike and I are joined by Cat Mulvihill to look at a frustrating productivity problem: having a good system and still not doing the work. Cat separates the reasons we get stuck into three categories, logical, biological, and psychological, because each one needs a different answer.

We talk about external accountability, ADHD and task initiation, perfectionism, and the tendency to keep rebuilding the system when the system isn’t the problem. Cat also explains Immunity to Change, a framework for finding the hidden fears and assumptions that can keep one foot on the brake.

Then we get into shiny new objects and what we’re reading. Cat’s Bluetooth home phone may be the best solution I’ve heard for keeping a cell phone out of the bedroom without missing an important family call.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

• Keeper: Get 60% off personal and family plans.

The post Focused 263: Removing the Roadblocks, with Cat Mulvihill appeared first on MacSparky.

For some time now, I’ve believed that while the Vision Pro is on a slow burn at Apple, its future was certain. The incoming CEO, John Ternus, has said several times that he believes this is part of Apple’s future.

We’ve heard lots of rumors about them working on a pair of glasses in addition to the immersive product. Finally, the content for the Vision Pro seems to be flowing pretty steadily. I’m looking forward to the baseball games we’re getting later this month in immersive video.

Last week, we got news of layoffs. And of course that gets you thinking. Right now, Apple’s dealing with a hardware and supply chain crunch where everything is more expensive and harder to get. Vision Pro is the proof-of-concept product that isn’t mainstream.

I’ve never been convinced Apple wanted to sell a lot of these, even when they weren’t dealing with exorbitant prices and supply chain nightmares. Add this to the recent news of layoffs on the Vision Pro team, and I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a slow-burn product, but instead an on-pause product.

The post The Vision Pro’s Uncertain Future appeared first on MacSparky.

We got a nice surprise from Apple this morning with some new Macs. Those of you waiting for that M5 Ultra Mac Studio are finally going to get your wish. You can get the M5 Ultra with up to 36 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU cores. Interestingly, memory tops out at 512 GB. That’s the same ceiling the M3 Ultra had, and it’s the configuration Apple dropped back in March. There’s no mystery why. The M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, up from the $4,000 entry price for the M3 when it launched. Again, no surprise.

If your needs are more modest, the Mac mini also got updated to M6 and M5 Pro variants. That’s right, we can now buy an M6 Mac.

The mini also took a price hike. The base model is $899 now, up from $599 last fall and $699 since June. I’m glad Apple released these things. I expect the AI gang will buy them like hotcakes.

The post New M5 Mac Studio and M6 Mac mini appeared first on MacSparky.

Four members of the SwiftUI team at Apple left the company, and now they’ve started a company that writes SwiftUI for you.

The product is Bitrig. You describe an app in plain English, and it generates real Swift and SwiftUI code. What comes out the other end is a project you can open in Xcode, read, and edit by hand. The pipeline runs all the way to TestFlight and the App Store, provisioning profiles and all.

It started as an iPhone-only app last October and now it’s on the Mac. I’ve only poked around the edges so far, but it seems like a good idea if you want some help with native app development.

I’m putting the Mac app on my machine this week to find out.

The post Bitrig, An AI Development Assistant from SwiftUl Team Members appeared first on MacSparky.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite.

For years I ran a law practice, and the hardest part of client work was never the work. It was keeping track of it. Where that email went, what we agreed to on a phone call, which version of the document was current, who I owed a call back. Some of it lived in Mail, some in a folder somewhere, and too much of it lived only in my head.

That’s the problem Daylite has been chipping away at for more than twenty years. It pulls your clients, projects, tasks, calendars, and communications into one place, so every email, meeting, note, and follow-up becomes part of an ongoing history of that relationship. Open up a client, and you can see what happened, what’s next, and who is waiting on you.

The newest piece of that is Mail in Daylite, which brings your email inside the app alongside everything else. A message stops being one more thing you have to file. It attaches itself to the person, the deal, and the project it belongs to.

I also like that Daylite is built only for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It isn’t a web app wearing a Mac costume, and you can feel the difference in how it behaves.

If you run a service business and you’re tired of carrying the whole client history around in your head, take a look at Daylite. There’s a free trial.

The post Daylite Puts the Whole Client Relationship in One Place appeared first on MacSparky.