1. What goes around comes around
Back in the day, everyone hated Quark. And I mean everyone, at least unless you worked there. If you worked in publishing you had to use QuarkXPress. They knew it, and charged accordingly. It was very expensive software, customer services was awful, etc. But you had no choice about using it.
Then, in 1999, Adobe InDesign was released, and the creative people cheered. Everyone loved Adobe. InDesign was great! It was fast. Adobe were a great company. And I have never seen an industry switch so fast. A few years, and Quark's hold on the market crumbled.
Fast forward to today, and everyone hates Adobe. Having driven off Quark and bought most of its competition (Frame, GoLive, Macromedia, etc etc) Adobe now rents you its software, for about £800 a year for the lot or, if you just need Photoshop, £263 per year. AI included, whether you like it or not.
Isn't it odd how that happens when a company gets a monopoly, eh? Almost like jacking up prices and forcing you into subscriptions is what companies naturally do when you no longer have a choice about going elsewhere.
Enter Apple and it's new Creator Studio. £12.99 a month, and you get its entire suite of creative software, covering not just image editing, drawing and video, but also music and audio production. For a fifth of the cost of Adobe, you get more. Oh and it's £2.99 a month if you're a student or educator.
Not only does this make Adobe's life difficult (and relations between Apple and Adobe have been a little "spicy" for a while) it's just a genius piece of marketing for the Mac. If you're in music, audio or visual production that "cheap" looking Windows PC just got £50 a month more expensive.
Even I'm tempted, although I'm not keen to lock any more of my life into AppleLand. But I am reasonably cheered that Adobe is having what it did to Quark done to it. A plague on all their houses, and all that.
2. One dead app store at a time
Who amongst us could possibly have predicted that the stroppy way Apple implemented alternative app stores in the EU would have led to enough fear, uncertainty and doubt to make companies quite tentative about staying in the space?
Everyone, that’s who.
As Steve Troughton-Smith noted, “Apple's DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place”.
And I agree with John Gruber that “Apple is getting away with what some describe as “malicious compliance” because they’re under no popular demand from their actual customers to comply in any other way.” However, I wonder if that state of consumer indifference will last that much longer, particularly in areas outside the US where “product of a US company” is becoming a mark of shame rather than pride.
Look — I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro and it remains a wonderous machine. But I can’t see myself buying much more from Apple in the future. Tim Cook’s toadying to the Orange Emperor has left a bad taste in the month of a lot of people, including me. Notably, the software I’m writing this on – the wonderful iA Writer – isn’t based in the US, and that is a deliberate choice. My cloud storage is from Nextcloud, and hosted in the EU. My mail is migrating into the EU and out of the clutches of Google. Whenever I look into something new, one of my questions is “where is it based, where is the data held?”
3. Your personal assistant (with added ads)
This was always going to be Google’s next stage. And — honestly — it makes sense! If I have bought into a complete ecosystem like this, I want the have a computer personal assistant that knows all about me, and can do helpful things.
But I trust Google not to misuse this in the same way I trust a cat not to react when a mouse crosses its path.
4. This week’s obligatory post involving Peter Thiel, officially one of the most odious men in the world
A UK government that talks up “sovereignty” is happily wiring critical defence systems into a Trump‑adjacent US surveillance firm. This piece on Palantir’s deep entanglement with the British state is a reminder that power is increasingly exercised through opaque software contracts, rather than debates in Parliament. The “war on truth” line stops being a metaphor once you outsource your critical systems to people who think democracy is an inconvenience.
(For those who can’t face Substack – here’s a link which means you won’t have to wash your eyeballs.)
5. Markdown, the accidental standard
Markdown was never a corporate standard. It was a hack so ordinary people could write for the web without learning HTML. Anil Dash’s history of how it took over is a lovely reminder that the most durable bits of the internet often come from individuals solving their own problems, rather than the heady competition of capitalism.
6. Cowardice in the app stores
Apple and Google like to present app review as a kind of benevolent gatekeeping, where in exchange for your feudal loyalty, they protect you from the worst of the internet. In practice they’re very selective about who gets protected. The Verge’s column on Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai’s refusal to act on X is brutal, and deserved. If your store policies can hammer small developers over trivia but somehow can’t cope with child‑exploitation content at scale, the problem isn’t capacity. It’s courage.
7. When notarisation isn’t reassurance
And of course, it’s not just that who gets into an app store is inevitably a decision about politics and power. It’s also that company paternalism will always fail.
Apple’s notarisation system is meant to be the comfort blanket of the Mac ecosystem: if an app is notarised, you can relax. Except you can’t. Michael Tsai documents a notarised Mac app cheerfully downloading malware, complete with remote scripts and data theft. It’s a useful case study in why “we scanned it once” is not a serious security model, and why platform trust should never be blind.
7. Gramsci’s nightmare goes automated
Large language models don’t just autocomplete text. They autocomplete culture. Ethan Zuckerman’s “Gramsci’s Nightmare” talk lays out how AI systems trained on WEIRD assumptions (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) quietly reinforce existing power structures. If you care about pluralism, you probably don’t want a handful of Silicon Valley firms acting as global editors‑in‑chief for language itself.
8. AI, diffusion and who actually benefits
2026 is being pitched as the year AI stops being shiny demos and starts showing up in everyday tools. Steven Sinofsky’s sketch of the year ahead emphasises “diffusion” — AI woven into workflows rather than living in labs. The big question is who gains: do we get more headcount cuts and pointless copilots, or better public services and less drudge work? At the moment, the balance isn’t exactly tilting towards social good.
9. Remembering Stewart Cheifet
Before tech YouTube personalities, there was Computer Chronicles. Stewart Cheifet’s weekly TV show quietly documented the rise of personal computing for ordinary viewers, long before launch events were live‑streamed theatre. This obituary is a small but affectionate portrait of a presenter who treated his audience as adults, not “users to be captured”. It’s a great reminder that tech journalism doesn’t have to be breathless to be useful, and I’m really glad that most of the episodes can still be watched online.
10. Freedom or convenience?
I can’t believe that in the space of one post I have ended up talking about digital sovereignty and procurement twice, but this (excellent) summary of the state of Europe’s attempts to stop just throwing money at Trumpland was too good not to include.
As the post notes, “the real blocker is still procurement behaviour”. Governments and major institutions still see buying European solutions as risky compared to good ol’ Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Migration risk is treated as importance, while dependancy risk is ignored.
Similar to the decision which individuals face, big organisations default to short-term convenience rather than long-term stability and freedom. We are long past the point when this should be seen as anything but a self-desctructive option.