The Steve Jobs Archive’s Letters to a Young Creator →

Source: Steve Jobs Archive.

The Steve Jobs Archive has published a collection of Letters to a Young Creator featuring reflections from luminaries in a wide range of fields answering questions posed by SJA Fellows.

Contributors include Tadao Ando, Paola Antonelli, Mario Bellini, Larry Brilliant, Anders Byriel, Ed Catmull, Jon M. Chu, Lee Clow, Tim Cook, Brunello Cucinelli, Es Devlin, Pete Docter, Mickey Drexler, Lord Norman Foster, Davis Guggenheim, Jenny Holzer, Bob Iger, Jimmy Iovine, Jony Ive, Rashid Johnson, Alan Kay, David Kelley, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ben Okri, Dieter Rams, Alice Rawsthorn, Arthur Rock, Ruth Rogers, Samuel Ross, Cindy Sherman, Mona Simpson, and Anna Deavere Smith, as well as an introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs.

Released on the anniversary of what would have been Steve Jobs’ 71st birthday, Powell Jobs explains:

To live a life of creativity and curiosity, one must constantly ask questions. Steve thrived by seeking out people who could offer new knowledge and fresh perspectives, and he surrounded himself with diverse voices—musicians, artists, scientists, designers, engineers, writers, and humanitarians. He would often pose a thought and then pause to listen, understanding that learning and growth can only come from having the courage to challenge our limits and broaden our horizons.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the collection, but I can tell that this is my sort of catnip. Powell Jobs captures the essence of the collection well:

This is a time to live your questions. The beauty of answers, when they do come, is that they allow us to ask new and better questions. Life is learning how much we have yet to learn.

Letters to a Young Creator is available online, from Apple Books, and as a downloadable EPUB file.

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Apple to Make Mac minis in the U.S.

By John Voorhees

Source: Apple.

Apple announced today that it is expanding its manufacturing operations in Houston, Texas where it will make Mac minis. The company also said it will expand its AI server production and training in Houston later this year. The announcement is unsurprising given the Trump administration’s plan to impose a new 10% global tariff on non-exempt imports to the U.S. in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that prior tariffs were unconstitutional.

In Apple’s press release, CEO Tim Cook was quoted as saying:

Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’re proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year. We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further.

If you’re curious about what Apple and its suppliers are building in the U.S., The Wall Street Journal has a behind-the-scenes look at the supply chain taking shape in Texas and Arizona. It’s a massive undertaking that will cost billions of dollars and years to build, but it’s a tangible sign of progress that’s part of the $600 billion previously pledged to be spent on U.S. manufacturing.

AppStories - Ep. 473 - 30 minutes

App Intents and the Road to a Smarter Siri

Federico

John

This week, Federico and John revisit App Intents to discuss where it came from, what it can do today, and the challenges Apple faces in integrating it with Apple Intelligence.

On AppStories+, John and Federico migrated their server setups and found themselves playing IT administrator.

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AppStories Episode 473 - App Intents and the Road to a Smarter Siri

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The Sentence allowed subscribers to describe the music they wanted to hear based on a Mad Libs-style sentence construction. Every sentence was structured as “I’m [location] & feel like [mood] with [person/group] to [music genre].” The feature was a fantastic innovation that made playlist creation fun and easy. As Federico described it in 2014:

It’s The Sentence, though, that steals the spotlight in how it combines regular, Pandora-like song shuffling with a context/mood-based menu to tell Beats what you want to listen to. The Sentence, as the name implies, lets you construct a sentence using variable tokens for location, mood, user, and music genre. You can request things like “I’m at my computer and feel like dancing with myself to pop”, “I’m in the car and feel like driving with my friends to indie”, or more absurd contexts such as “I’m underpaid and I feel like shoveling snow with my lover to metal”. As reported by Re/code [Ed. note: This is a dead link], Beats explained that “the content, and the filters, are selected and tuned by humans, and an algorithm generates the playlist from your choices”.