Michael.team by Michael Sliwinski

⭐️ Is Apple making the European Union a scapegoat with Siri AI?

2026-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

I used to fly all the way to California for Apple’s Developer conference, called WWDC. I’ve been an Apple fan for nearly two decades, I’m still iPadOnly, and I’m still a developer on their platforms with Nozbe. I even have a selfie with Craig Federighi taken at WWDC’19. However I keep being increasingly disappointed in Apple as to how they seem NOT to love us here in Europe. This week Apple announced the new “Siri AI” feature which when it ships, it will only be available in English and won’t be offered in the European Union. They wrote a whole press release about it, blaming EU’s DMA legislation (Digital Markets Act). What they don’t tell you are the real reasons behind this decision. IMHO it comes down to three words: greed, control and excuses.

Greed — “we want all the money… or else!”
Control — “we know what’s best for you”
Excuses — “we can’t ship it, so we’ll buy ourselves time”
Can Apple do better? I sure hope so!
Bonus: Siri’s history by Joanna Stern

Greed — “we want all the money… or else!”

Apple is fighting everyone — the DOJ in the US, regulators in Japan, the EU, and many new places — about its App Store dominance.

And to be fair, they earned that dominance. The iPhone is the most popular smartphone on the planet. Together with Android, they’ve built a duopoly where two companies hold the keys to two mobile platforms. That’s exactly why the EU treats them as a “gatekeeper.”

I feel this firsthand. To get Nozbe on the App Store, I must use Apple’s IAP (In App Purchase) payment system and I’m not allowed to link to our own pricing page. All I want is to offer both — Apple’s system and an alternative — and let my customers choose. That way Apple’s payment system would have to compete instead of being forced on everyone.

Instead of loosening their grip while still collecting commissions from most customers, Apple wants all the money from all iPhone users. That’s greed.

In the EU they’ve been practicing malicious compliance by introducing additional fees like CTF - Core Technology Fee and very convoluted rules to offer alternate payment methods which essentially keeps us, developers, forced to maintain the status quo.

So what does this have to do with Siri AI? By withholding it, Apple keeps a bargaining chip in its fight with the EU over the App Store — and tries to turn EU customers against our own governing bodies. Good luck with that.

Control — “we know what’s best for you”

The DMA wants Apple to allow competing app stores, let developers offer direct downloads, and open core iPhone features to third parties. I don’t find these requirements unreasonable. They’d make the iPhone I own actually feel like mine.

The same logic applies to Siri AI. If only Apple’s model can access the data on my phone, they’re effectively shutting out OpenAI, Anthropic, and every AI model that hasn’t been invented yet.

Apple frames this as “protecting user privacy” — but without letting me, the user, decide. Sure, most people won’t want to give another AI access to their data. But some of us would. Even if the new Siri AI is good — and given Siri’s decade of disappointing us, that’s a big “if” — maybe I’d like to connect a smarter model to be more productive. They don’t want to let me, the iPhone owner, to do that!

I genuinely used to applaud Apple’s stance on privacy. That’s what makes this hard to watch: “privacy” has quietly become the justification for control. And once a principle becomes a convenient excuse, it stops being a principle.

Excuses — “we can’t ship it, so we’ll buy ourselves time”

Here’s the part Apple least wants to talk about.

This isn’t the first time Apple announced Siri AI. They made a near-identical announcement back in 2024. They never shipped a smarter Siri — it got a nice new animation and stayed just as clueless.

They’ve also never meaningfully expanded Siri’s language support. I’m Polish, and in Poland you can’t even buy a HomePod, because Siri doesn’t speak Polish. A fast-growing country of 40M+ people is treated as a rounding error. To quote the late Michael Jackson: “All I wanna say is, they don’t really care about us.” And that stings — because they used to make me feel like they did.

Now here’s the kicker. Siri AI is powered by Google’s Gemini. Gemini speaks Polish. So do ChatGPT and Claude — and dozens of other languages. Yet Siri AI will launch in September in English only.

So Apple — the $4T juggernaut — can’t organize itself to ship this faster, in more languages, even though the underlying Gemini model already supports them all.

What do you do when you can’t deliver? You buy yourself time, and you find someone to blame. You search for excuses. And the EU is a convenient target, because it’s a union of countries that speak 24 official languages. Far easier to hide a language-rollout problem behind a regulatory villain than to admit you’re behind.

Can Apple do better? I sure hope so!

Remember that Federighi selfie? Here’s the same guy, with a straight face (emphasis mine):

“Our hope is to eventually bring Siri AI to the EU, and we will continue to engage with EU regulators on a path forward. However, their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.”

The EU refused, you see. Apple refused nothing — except to let go of any of the total control it holds. Yeah… no.

I want to be clear: I’m writing this because I’m still a fan. I want Apple to fix this. I want the company I fell in love with back — the one that made me dream of owning a Mac. But the leadership steering it today feels greedy and controlling, and spinning our laws to cover their own delays is beneath the company I used to know.

Prove me wrong, Apple. Stop blaming the EU.

I know you can do better than this.

Bonus: Siri’s history by Joanna Stern

✈️ 🕹️ Why I prefer a 2-in-1 Peak Design backpack instead of a carry-on?

2026-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favorite companies that makes backpacks and other pouches and accessories is Peak Design and they’ve just completed a new Kickstarter campaign with a 2-in-1 backpack which I totally had to get and last week it arrived. Now, why would I get such a big backpack with a size of a carry-on? Here’s why:

#BackpackOnly travel is the best
2in1 Backpack - two backpacks joint together!
Huge main compartment that opens entirely
Big side pockets for water bottles
Good straps with magnetic attachments
Grab handles on all sides!
I’m really impressed with this 2-in-1 backpack!

#BackpackOnly travel is the best

When I travel for a week, especially for a Nozbe Reunion, I prefer to have a backpack with me with all my tech gadgets inside so that I can move around faster and my hands are free.

This way I can breeze through airports, jump into a taxi quickly or (what I really like) rent a public bicycle and cycle around. With a carry-on it’s more hassle. With a backpack it’s just easier.

Now, my favorite weekend-trip backpack is the Peak Design ZIP which is just enough for a short trip and counts as a “personal item” by most airlines. However, when I’m traveling for a week, I need something bigger and recently on Kickstarter I got their latest invention - Peak Design 2in1 Travel backpack and it’s exactly what I need.

2in1 Backpack - two backpacks joint together!

This might be just the perfect solution for me as it incorporates two really good backpacks together: one bigger as the main luggage compartment and the smaller one for walking around town when you’re there.

Here’s me (5.6”/168cm) with this backpack in three options:

Just the big part of the backpack, without the small one attached. I don’t think I’d ever use it like this, but it can be done.
The entire backpack - 2in1 - the default mode.
Just the small backpack to use when I arrive at the destination.

As you can see, you can easily split them to two separate backpacks. Both have everything I need: good straps, laptop/iPad compartments and water bottle pockets. They look really solid:

Now, let’s dive deeper into more subtler features of this 2-in-1 backpack.

Huge main compartment that opens entirely

This backpack behaves the same way as a carry-on roller, it means it opens entirely so you can pack and unpack it easily and have access to the whole thing.

Especially when you’re like me and you love putting your clothes into the Peak Design’s pouches.

Big side pockets for water bottles

I love traveling with a refillable water bottle and I’m happy that most airports and many other places around town now offer you easy access to filtered water.

I like this new mesh material as it’s very flexible. It’s good for small bottles or items as well as a big water bottle.

Good straps with magnetic attachments

As I mentioned, both backpacks offer very good straps. What very often annoys me when handling a backpack is that the straps are loose and are in the way. These don’t as they can be attached to the backpack with magnets:

I think it’s a brilliant solution. This way the straps are easily accessible yet out of the way.

Grab handles on all sides!

Peak Design is known for this. Even my small ZIP backpack has grab handles from all three sides. This one has from all 5 sides! Even in the back and at the bottom.

This way it’s so easy to pick up this backpack and place it somewhere. You can just pick up any way you want.

I’m really impressed with this 2-in-1 backpack!

I’m glad I bought it. It’s not cheap as it retails for $400 which is steep for a backpack, but as you’re getting 2 backpacks for the price of one, it’s bearable. I got it a little cheaper thanks to the Kickstarter campaign.

Anyway, for a #BackpackOnly guy like me, this backpack looks like an ideal companion for my future travels. And if you do want a carry-on, Peak Design has Roller Pro which I don’t really like. Or you can get a Samsonite one just like my wife’s (on the picture above).

Here’s a video review I found which shows how this backpack performs on a 7-day trip:

🔗 Formatting lists in Shortcuts

2026-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

In Apple Shortcuts I use “lists” a lot. Especially in my Journaling shortcut and my upcoming new “Clipboard Manager” which I’m using every day. The lists are not very well documented so it’s a question of trial and error to figure out how to format them the way you want. Here are two tricks that I use:

Standard list

If I want just the list of items, I can list them in a text field and add action “split items” by “line breaks” and that’s it.

However, when testing this feature I realized that you can also put a multi-line item to the list and it will display the entire paragraphs inside the lists.

List instead of an alert?

The feature of displaying long paragraphs is especially useful. I started using “choose from list” in many places in my shortcuts instead of a simple “alert” because the alert would trim the paragraph or display it incorrectly.

As you can see, an alert doesn’t have a scroll and it goes over the “Cancel/OK” buttons. The list has a scroll and you can just tap on the list or add an “OK” button as another list item.

Lists formatted with Dictionaries

I realized recently that you can have a list formatted a little differently when you use a Dictionary object, but in that way you actually lose the ability for the list to display entire paragraphs. The long paragraphs will be trimmed to one-liners if you go that route:

What to watch out for:

Key is the bigger item on the list
Value is the sub-item on the list
If Key and Value are the same AND short, only the Key will be displayed. That is the case of Value being “Text”.
As mentioned above, every item is trimmed to one line
And there is a bug that if the Key and Value are the same but they are long, they will be both displayed, contrary to point (3).
If the Value is “Number” then contrary to (3) the Value will be displayed. Not the Key.
If the Value is “Array” then the Key will be displayed as the bigger item and the sub item will be the number of items in the array.

Try it yourself!

Here’s a Shortcut I built to demonstrate the different behavior of lists and their items:

🔗 Lists

P.S. There are many more formats of lists which are non-standard!

Of course, the lists also behave differently if you send them data that’s very specific like Contacts (and people often hack those!) or other items which are custom to their apps.

We’re currently working on a whole suite of Shortcut Actions for Nozbe and these will display completely differently. Stay tuned.

🎧 The Podcast #225 - Tim Cook vs Apple fans

2026-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Apple’s Developer conference in 2026 is happening and it’ll be the last one when Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple as he already named John Ternus as his successor. Even though Tim Cook built a 4 trillion empire as Apple Inc, one of the places I think he missed is their relationship with developers like myself, creator of Nozbe, a productivity app available on the iPhone, iPad and the Mac. I’ve written an entire essay about this and I’ve let the AI co-hosts comment on it. Do you agree with my position here? Enjoy!

🎙️ Listen to “Tim Cook vs Apple fans”

📝 Show notes:

My essay Where Tim Cook looked the other way
Or about Apple - the company I used to know
Book where Apple lost its soul

🟣 Apple Podcasts
🟡 RSS
🟠 Overcast

😎 Japanese style toilet with built in bidet is glorious

2026-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

One of the key takeaways from my recent Japanese trip was how even the public toilets have built-in bidets that clean your butt. I mentioned in that article that I installed one of these bad-boys in the toilet adjacent to my home office more than a year ago and as people were asking me about it, I decided to share my setup here.

🚽 Old-school toilet with a new-school built-in bidet?

That’s right. My home office is on the last floor of a late-90s town house and the toilet that I have next to it has been built with 90s styling and has never been remodeled. It’s got these 90s tiles on the walls and a very typical toilet made by the Spanish company Roca. Nothing fancy, really.

However, the same company also produces Japanse-style toilet covers that include a bidet so I ordered one and because it’s from the same company, it fit right in. After installation it looks like this:

I know, doesn’t look impressive with the cables running so crudely, but this is a toilet basically I only use, so I don’t really care and by cleaning my butt after number 2, I feel like it’s Christmas Morning.

All you need is an additional connection to water and a power source. Again, my setup is not impressive but it gets the job done.

🇯🇵 Japanese hygiene at your home?

We have a much cleaner setup in our bedroom’s en-suite toilet with a remote control on the wall and the connections to power and water done much better. We installed our first smart toilet 12 years ago when we were remodeling our bedroom, so we could plan it well.

Turns out, having a butt-cleaning built-in bidet is great. Better hygiene, not using toilet paper as much and just refreshed feeling after getting that awful number 2 out of your system. I highly recommend it.

Also, before publishing this article I realized that there are many aftermarket solutions for this - like this SmartBidet thing for around $300 or even better, an Ultra-Slim Bidet Attachment for $50 bucks that can be installed almost anywhere.

In western world we use toilet paper, while the Japanse have discovered “sea shells”

Having a smart bidet like this reminds me of that scene from Demolition Man (1993) 🍅 67/67 when they are in the future and the main character, played by Sylvester Stallone wants to use the old-school toilet paper instead of innovative sea shells.

💌 My Japanese is better… 🇯🇵

2026-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

In April I was in Japan — my first trip there in 12 years. And as I drove around in a rented Toyota Prius, meeting people, admiring their culture and heritage, one Placebo lyric from “Pure Morning” song kept looping in my head: “My Japanese is better…”

Note: this is a transcript of the email Newsletter I sent to my 1500+ subscribers a while back. If you want to be one of them, sign up for my free Newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime! or if you use LinkedIn, you can subscribe there, too!

Because so many things there are simply… better. Here’s the nutshell — the full post has all 19 observations, photos, and the song at the end.

🌸 Timing is everything. Visit at the end of March and cherry blossoms make every photo look better. Every memory feels better. Flights and hotels might cost more but it’s worth it. So worth it.

🛒 The convenience store is your best friend. Family Mart, 7-Eleven, Lawson — fresh food, great coffee, ATM, clean toilet, 24/7. Book accommodation next to one and you’re set. (Fun fact: 7-Eleven is now Japanese-owned.)

🚽 Even the public toilets are glorious. Free public restrooms with built-in bidets that leave you feeling like it’s Christmas morning. I liked them so much I installed two at home.

📦 Space and order are a religion. Tiny boxy cars, fuel pumps that drop from the ceiling, trays for your coins (so you don’t pay like a Neanderthal), boxes for your backpack (so you don’t put it on the floor like an animal). Marie Kondo didn’t invent anything — she just wrote down what Japanese already do.

🪪 The tech that actually helps a traveler: add a Suica transit card straight into Apple Wallet, top it up with Apple Pay, register on Visit Japan Web before you fly for painless tax-free shopping, and grab an eSIM (25GB for ~$25). One warning: don’t screenshot your QR tickets — they must load live, and a bus driver will shout “no screenshot!” at you.

🧭 One productivity tip from the road: Apple Maps was the only navigation app that consistently showed me directions in English. Waze was useless, Google Maps was random. If you’re driving in Japan as a foreigner — default to Apple Maps and save yourself a few wrong highway turns.

❤️ And the real reason I went: to reunite with my friend Zono-san after 12 years. Some friendships — like some habits — are forever.

👉 Read the full post (with photos + the Placebo song): at michael.team/japanese

Their Japanese is definitely better 🤪

Yours productively,

マイケル (Ma-I-Ke-Ru = Michael)

P.S. Work isn’t a place you go to — it’s a thing you do. Even from a tiny rental Prius between Kyoto and Osaka. If you want to keep your work and life organized as simply as the Japanese keep their rooms, give Nozbe a try.

🕹️ ⭐️ How to set up Meta Ray-Ban Glasses with maximum privacy…

2026-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not a fan of Facebook/Meta but I’ve been using their smart glasses 😎 for a while now. Recently there was much controversy around their AI features, as apparently sub-contractors from Kenya were reviewing private footage of people, recorded with these glasses. In this post I’ll explain why I like still like my smart glasses, how I use them and why I’ve turned off all the AI features to hopefully make sure my photos or videos are NOT reviewed by some strangers sub-contracted by Meta.

What I love about Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses
Generation 2 is much better?
No AI? Here’s how to set them up!
Meta AI app settings - making sure it’s not creepy
- Turning it off on cellular
Examples of photos I take with these glasses
Tricks and Tips with Meta Ray-Ban Glasses
Overall, despite being a Meta product, I love these glasses!

What I love about Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses

I initially bought the first generation of these glasses in October of 2024 - I bought the Wayfarer model, size 53 with transition lenses.

Here’s what I love about these glasses:

1. Transition lenses - indoor and outdoor!

These lenses cost extra but they are worth it. This makes them great sunglasses and just regular indoor glasses. While I don’t need correction glasses, I can just keep wearing them when I’m entering a house or when the weather is cloudy.

They are completely transparent and quickly can turn almost totally dark in full sunlight as you can see on the first photo in this post. This transition from dark to full transparency happens very quickly. When I drive a car in full sunlight and enter a dark garage, I don’t have to fiddle with my glasses. I can see where I’m driving with near-seamless adjustment.

2. Integrated speakers for podcast listening

I like to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and with these glasses I can tap to listen to things when I walk or drive the car (or cycle!). No headphones necessary.

3. Good microphones for hands-free talking

When people call me or I call them, the phone can stay in my pocket. I just talk to myself by speaking to the microphones integrated in these glasses. These microphones also tune out other noises around me so people on the other side don’t know I’m talking to them through glasses.

4. Photo camera for impromptu picture taking

When I see something and don’t want to pull out my iPhone Air I just take the picture with these glasses. It’s so quick to just snap it and people around me don’t even notice that. This way I’m not making anyone awkward by pulling out my iPhone and making a gesture of taking a picture.

And no, I’m not posting these pictures on social media and I’m not taking any creepy photos. Just quick snaps I want to get back to.

5. Video camera for first-person perspective

Especially when I drive a car or ride a bike and I want to record what I’m seeing, having a video camera mounted to your head is very convenient. The portrait mode is not my favorite aspect ratio, but hey, better this than nothing!

Also, my friend Thomas from Nadgryzieni podcast suggested I record a video when unboxing a new gadget I buy. It’s a cool way to celebrate it and something to keep in case of any warranty problems.

6. Meta AI? Well, I don’t think so…

I tried Meta AI and it was interesting to be able to take a picture and ask AI to describe what I’m seeing or translate what I’m trying to read. But I can do it on my iPhone, too. To me the privacy is more important and having AI enabled I’m not sure which footage people sub-contracted by Meta are reviewing. Only AI footage or all the photos and videos I’m taking? I don’t trust Meta so I disabled this.

Generation 2 is much better?

After a year of usage, my first-generation glasses broke. Actually the glue that holds the nostrils gave away and my year-old glasses looked like this:

When I contacted Ray Ban, they accepted the warranty claim but they didn’t have gen 1 transition glasses anymore so they wanted to offer me different ones. After lots of back-and-forth they finally gave in and sent me gen 2 glasses instead. I even offered to pay the price difference but they graciously sent me the new ones for free. 🙏

The cameras are a little better and the quality of photos and videos is better, but what’s more important is that the battery life almost doubled. This is a big deal as I tend to wear them for an entire day and now they last as much.

So to me, the gen 2 glasses are a substantial upgrade.

No AI? Here’s how to set them up!

When I got the new gen 2 glasses the whole scandal with Meta sub-contractors was all over the news so I decided to set them up from new without any AI and with maximum privacy in mind. Here are the steps I followed.

Of course, feel free to decide differently than me:

Download Meta AI app.
I went to Settings and removed “background app refresh” for this app so that it doesn’t work in the background doing creepy stuff.
I opened the app again and tapped to set up glasses.
I refused to accept notifications from this app when they asked for them.
I did put my home WiFi information to be able to upload photos faster.
I then went through the entire setup experience.
When asked about Meta AI - I chose to SKIP.
When asked for location - I chose NO. The drawback is that photos taken by the glasses have no location attached to them automatically.
It prompted me to reconsider that as Meta AI needs my location data to function correctly. I ignored it. Sorry Mark, but no.
When asked to share data with Meta - I chose NO.
When asked again if I want to enable AI - I said NO.
When asked to update firmware for my glasses, I did say yes to get them up to date.

Meta AI app settings - making sure it’s not creepy

After the initial setup procedure I re-opened the app and its settings to make sure all is good:

“Meta AI” in the Meta AI app is disabled
App connections - none (didn’t connect to WhatsApp which I actually use a lot, I don’t have Instagram or other socials on my phone anyway) - if you don’t enable “Meta AI” you won’t be able to connect to any app.
Media - auto import from glasses to camera roll - ON.
Share additional data - OFF.
Cloud Media - OFF - this way my photos and videos are NOT uploaded to Meta Cloud and will hopefully NOT be analyzed by sub-contractors.
Find device - OFF (because location is OFF).
Clicked on Photo Gallery and set access to Photos to LIMITED. Meta doesn’t need access to my Photos to be able to import the photos to it.
Video settings - I enabled 3K video recording as I want to get the best video resolution possible.
Audio settings - I used to have “adaptive audio” set to ON, but now I’m testing it with OFF as I don’t like that it listens to the environment and adjusts the audio all the time, I prefer to control it.

All the Photos and videos automatically imported from the glasses to my Photos are put into “Meta AI” album, so it’s easy to track them and later add location manually to them. I have more than 2,000 items there already!

With my wife I’m using a Shared Photos Library and the photos and videos from the glasses don’t automatically go there. I later manually put them there.

Another drawback of this setup is that I cannot use “hey Meta” to ask my glasses to take a picture or video, but then again, it’s not that useful and having the microphones always on listening feels creepy anyway…

Turning it off on cellular

To make sure the “Meta AI app” is not doing any creepy stuff, I went to iPhone Settings and apart from turning off notifications and “background app refresh” I also blocked it from using my cellular connection.

That’s right, you go to “Cellular” and look at the data usage of apps on your mobile connection and find “Meta AI app” and slide the option to disable it.

This way I use this app only at home when I need to update it or update the firmware of the glasses. I don’t use it for anything else.

Automatic import of photos still works! Even when I’m out and about taking pictures with my smart glasses, after a few moments they show up in my camera roll, so this setting doesn’t affect data import between glasses the the camera roll.

Examples of photos I take with these glasses

As mentioned in the 1,5 years of using these glasses I took more than 2,000 photos or videos with them. Just look below as I take these when (1) riding a bike, (2) driving a car or (3) just walking around in a crowded place.

It’s really nice to have these additional cameras always there waiting to be invoked by a push of a button…

Tricks and Tips with Meta Ray-Ban Glasses

Small tricks I got to learn with these glasses:

Take a picture while closing the right eye

When taking a picture, close the right eye and what you see with your left eye is basically the framing you’ll get. It’s because the lens to take pictures is on the left side.

Take a video while closing the left eye

With video do the other way round and close the left eye to get the most accurate frame. Again, it’s because the video camera is on your right, above your right eye.

Switch audio from CarPlay to glasses

When I drive my car, it automatically connects audio to my car speakers through CarPlay. Usually that’s OK, but very often I prefer to just listen to the audio directly through the glasses and there’s a very neat way to switch my audio source:

When the audio plays in CarPlay, tap on the right side of the glasses to PAUSE it.
When it’s paused, tap again on the glasses to PLAY and it will play on the glasses now.

It’s very handy as I can drive the car and don’t have to fiddle with settings to change the audio source.

Overall, despite being a Meta product, I love these glasses!

Use them every day. Don’t love the privacy situation and having to disable features like AI for it, but still find them so useful that they’re my companion every day. 😎

🎂 47 - the four-seven of my birthdays… thanks to my daughters!

2026-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Today I’m turning 47 and my two elder daughters (Milena is 17 and Emilia 14) created a collage of memes for me from my favorite movies. They decided that 47 is like six-seven, so it’s time to be goofy about it.

Jerry Maguire - Show me the money!
Matrix - I can dodge bullets!
Star Wars nerd - the importance of play
Hobbies and Friendships - that’s what it’s all about!
47 and loving my life!

Jerry Maguire - Show me the money!

Jerry Maguire (1996) 🍅 86/79 is one of my all-time favorite movies and they decided to replicate the “show me the money” scene with me instead of Tom Cruise:

It’s one of the most iconic scenes in the history of cinema:

Now it’s time for me to take my job and the founder, leader and CEO of Nozbe seriously and help thousands of smart business owners get things done better, and take our company’s revenues to a whole new level.

Matrix - I can dodge bullets!

The Matrix (1999) 🍅 83/85 is a movie that my eldest daughter really likes and I love it how she put me as her “Neo” - to her, I’m the dad that can dodge anything.

Yep, that’s who you are as a dad. That’s my life. Now that my daughters are getting bigger, they’re turning into women who look up to their dad. It’s a big responsibility that I’m feeling particularly strong today.

Star Wars nerd - the importance of play

I’m a huge fan of Star Wars franchise as you can tell from my lego collection: Baby yoda, R2D2 and Smart Brick - Darth Vader.

Even though my daughters are getting older, it’s important to keep playing with them. Keep goofing around. Keep teaching them the ability of having a distance to yourself.

Speaking of that, in 2 days the Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu 🍅 61 will be played in the cinemas and I’m planning to take my entire family for it. Can’t wait!

Hobbies and Friendships - that’s what it’s all about!

In my age I get to appreciate friendships and hobbies much more. I show it to my girls that these things let me stay sharp, youthful and curious. Here’s a poster from one of my favorite movie franchises - Bad Boys (1995) 🍅 46/78 with my best friend Steve - we are truly bad boys for life.

The other thing is my fascination with cars - and both shows - Top Gear and The Grand Tour are my favorite and my daughters know how much interest I have in cars and how I love driving…

47 and loving my life!

In my previous birthday posts I mentioned how much I appreciate life and how I love having the freedom to choose what I get to do. After last year when 3 people close to me lost their loved ones, I’m reminded even more how important it is to truly appreciate life and be thankful that I love what I do and I still get to do it.

Happy birthday me! Getting closer to 50 but not afraid of it! 💪

🎙 No Office FM #93: Why Most Teams Drown in Chaos

2026-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Does your team constantly lose track of things, waste time searching for information, or spend the whole day putting out fires instead of doing meaningful work? In this episode I invited my friend and productivity expert Augusto Pinaud to talk about how GTD (Getting Things Done) principles — adapted for teams — can reduce chaos, improve accountability, and help everyone stay aligned without endless meetings and nonstop messaging.

Listen to the audio:

Full episode show notes at NOOFFICE.FM/93

🟣 Apple Podcasts
🔵 Google Podcasts
🟡 RSS?c=michaelteam)
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🔴 YouTube on Nozbe channel

✔️ 🎬 Cognitive fitness 🧠 how to make your brain fit?… by Cal Newport

2026-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

I love Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions” - my Weekly Template is inspired by Cal and I’ve read all his books, including the Deep Work which is one my top 10 books of all time. In one of the recent episodes of his show he talks about 5 different components of cognitive fitness or better yet - how to avoid brain rot and stay mentally fit. Here are my notes:

1. 📖 Read every day - it rewires your brain!
2. ✍️ Write - writing is thinking!
3. 🚶‍♂️ Go on thinking walks - without a phone!
4. 🔌 Plug in your phone in the house!
5. 🔨 Learn a hard skill
📺 Watch Cal Newport explaining this!

1. 📖 Read every day - it rewires your brain!

To Cal, this is his base level 🧠 fitness. According to him, the more time you spend reading, the more you develop your brain and cognitive fitness. Reading long form content, especially books, rewires our brain to be capable of smarter thought.

Additionally, when you read a book, you’re getting practice directing your mind’s eye 👀 in a way that will help you actually take advantage of that rewiring.

Cal’s 3 steps to a consistent reading habit:

Start with things you’re excited to read - no profound books - just focus on the act of reading - even if it’s nothing ambitious. Start with 15-20 pages a day - read with your lunch and before you go to sleep in bed.
Create a reading habit - get to 30-50 pages. Create this association: when you have time, you’re going to read as your first choice (and not scroll social media).
Introduce harder books - once you get the hang of the habit, start introducing books that require more concentration from you.

2. ✍️ Write - writing is thinking!

Cal says we should NOT avoid writing and that’s one of the reasons I have this personal blog and I like to journal daily.

Cal says that writing is hard and he compares it to an intense gym workout when your muscles must really work hard. His tip is to force yourself to write for the first 10 minutes, knowing it’s tough. Once you’re over the 10 minutes hump, it’ll get easier.

It’s funny that to me writing is not that hard. I love writing. I enjoy writing. This is how I think. That’s why I’m a proponent for written task-based communication. Adding comments to tasks makes you a better communicator and writer!

To me the previous point of reading is more challenging because I read slowly and I don’t enjoy it as much. I prefer listening to audiobooks.

What I also need is to get better at taking notes from the books I read - especially when I listen to them.

3. 🚶‍♂️ Go on thinking walks - without a phone!

He’s encouraging us to go on a thinking walk several times a week. Not only for meetings. Just to be with your thoughts. If you need to have a smartphone for others to be able to contact you, put it in a backpack so that you can’t be tempted to easily reach for it. I don’t need to, as my Apple Watch Ultra has a cellular connection.

Think of something important you want to solve. You need a solitary target. Something to think about. He argues that this kind of self reflection is truly important. Start with short walks around the block and as you get better, try to go for longer ones. Remember to journal your thoughts after each walk.

Honestly, I’ve never tried that. I always walk listening to something. Challenge accepted!

4. 🔌 Plug in your phone in the house!

I’ve always been a MagSafe fan but now I’ve put even more Qi2 MagSafe chargers around the house. Not only in my home office:

As you can see, I like the “watch stand” mode of the iPhone when it shows the time and calendar. I have several more MagSafe chargers in different rooms around the house, including the kitchen:

This way the phone is not in my pocket, so it’s not tempting to pick it up and read news or messages or shop online. At least I removed social media from it, but still. When I want to listen to something, I use AirPods Pro.

Bonus is that the Phone is regularly being charged and I have set up my iPhone Air battery to charge up to maximum 90% and not more to preserve battery life. I still have 100% capacity after half a year of intensive usage.

Cal argues that people report to him that “the weight has been lifted from their brain”. I can relate to it, because the “pick up your phone” temptation is very strong!

5. 🔨 Learn a hard skill

Cal argues that we should master a skill that requires us to focus and that also helps us get a clear reward that we’re getting better. To many people this can be sports (I’m getting better at tennis).

To me also this is my Shortcut building because it’s fun, requires lots of focus and the reward is a new Shortcut that helps me get better at Journaling or take advantage of the Action button. I’ve recently also started posting my tips on managing JSON files or creating options dialogs.

I’m in the process of finishing version 5 of my Journaling Shortcut and I’ve been using for months my own Clipboard manager which I haven’t published publicly yet. And as I use these Shortcuts daily, I keep improving them.

📺 Watch Cal Newport explaining this!

In case my notes are not sufficient, listen or watch Cal Newport explain this himself:

🔗 Selecting multiple different options in Shortcuts à la “Radio button”

2026-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

I’m working on version 5 of my popular Journaling Shortcut App where I want to add support not only for saving journal entries to a markdown-formatted text file, but also Apple Notes, Nozbe and more… I want to give the user an option to choose from these various destinations for their journal entries to be saved. Something like a Radio button. Turns out, it’s not easy to do it in Shortcuts so here’s my solution.

How to show all options and select only few…

There are two main Actions in Shortcuts that let you show a list of items to choose from: “Choose from Menu” and “Choose from List”. When I’m using the latter one but the problem is I cannot determine easily which options should be selected when showing the list. I can only decide if I want for all the items on the list to be selected or none.

I can’t define specific items to be selected. So…

🚀 Emoji to the rescue!

That’s why I decided to use two emojis as my main determination if the option is selected or not: “👍” or “❌”.

Now I’m using a simple regular expression and simple if statements to see if an option is selected or not.

I define and save the data in a JSON file called: options.json

I’m saving the selected options in one text field separated by spaces, which lets me later use a simple “if… contains” statement to see if the one option that interests me is selected or not.

Get the “Options” Shortcut

You can download the Options Shortcut as well as the accompanying options.json file to test this in action.

Just like my previous JSON manipulation Shortcut this Shortcut doesn’t do anything useful as such. It’s just a proof of concept and a hack that I will incorporate into my latest Journaling Shortcut.

I hope you’ve found it useful, too.

✅ A letter from founder to a fellow entrepreneur?

2026-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

How about adding such letter on main Nozbe home page? Just to show the prospective buyer that the same tool we’re selling is the same tool we’re using and it’s reflecting our values and the way we want to work? What do you think? Would that convince you?

✍️ Dear fellow entrepreneur,

In 2007, I built the first version of Nozbe for one reason: to get myself organized. An audience of one — me.

Twenty years and hundreds of thousands of users from all over the world later, Nozbe is a company of almost 20 people and we still use Nozbe to run it as our real, daily, this-is-how-we-work tool. Thanks to it:

We have few very meetings. On average I have 1-3 meetings per week. Decisions happen inside tasks, in writing, where everyone can see them.

I’m not the bottleneck. My team doesn’t wait for me to unblock them. They see what’s happening across every project and move forward without asking permission.

Nothing falls through. Decisions live in tasks. Context lives in comments. My future self always finds what my past self left behind.

I sleep better. I don’t carry the company in my head anymore. I open Nozbe, see where things are, close the laptop. The stress of not knowing is gone.

My team enjoys using it. No training. Our tool is powerful yet simple to use, so we all feel productive.

This is the company I always wanted to run. Calm, clear, built on trust. With shared values of Passion, Simplicity, Freedom and Fairness.

👊 And the tool that makes it possible is the same one I’m offering you.

Try it free. Invite your team when you’re ready. See what happens when work… just works.

Yours,

Michael Sliwinski

Founder & CEO, Nozbe

✈️ ⭐️ Is Japanese better? Technology, culture, perfection…

2026-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I was on trip to Japan after 12 years. I’ve noticed many things that in Japan are different than here in Europe, and very often… better. Which reminds me of the lyrics of one of my favorite Placebo songs: “Pure Morning” where they sing that: My Japanese is better… (check out the song at the bottom of this post). So anyway, here are the things I noticed while being in Japan and what I think about them:

🌸 Cherry blossoms make everything look great
🛒 Convenience stores
🚗 Renting a car in Japan
🧭 Navigation with Apple Maps
📦 Space efficiency
🚓 Cars are small. Minivans are really mini.
🏎️ Sport cars can be also cool.
🚽 Hygiene and butt-cleaning toilets!
👞 Shoes in Japan
👟 Buying shoes in Japan is worth it now.
🛂 Tax-free shopping. Register or carry your passport.
🪪 You can set up a transit card in Apple wallet
🥋 Marie Kondo is ingrained in their DNA
💼 Japanese order in shops and restaurants
👕 Uniqlo clothes and other brands, also very zen…
✂️ Nail cutters and scissors
🇬🇧 Their English is really bad…
❤️ Japanese friends are forever!
✍️ Japanese like writing beautifully
🎸 Placebo - Pure Morning

🌸 Cherry blossoms make everything look great

Cherry blossoms are amazing in Japan. This is after all the country of blossoming cherry.

When you visit at the end of March you’ll see cherry blossom flowers everywhere. They make everything more vivid, every photo looks better with cherry blossoms in it. Yes, the accommodation and flights can be a little more expensive when you plan your trip at that time, but it’s worth it. So worth it. Especially when you visit the Ueno Park:

Even when you look at the green woods in Japan, they are not entirely green as there are blossoming cherry trees scattered everywhere…

🛒 Convenience stores

Family Mart, Seven Eleven and Lawson are the leading convenience stores in Japan. They have everything. Supermarket stuff, fresh food, great coffee, ATM, clean toilet, and they are usually open 24/7.

Japan didn’t just copy the convenience stores concept from the US — they reinvented the idea completely. So much so, that now the 7/11 brand is owned by a Japanese company, Ito-Yokado, which was initially only a franchisee of it. When you book accommodation in Japan, make sure you’re next to a convenience store and you’ll be fine.

🚗 Renting a car in Japan

Normally you’d travel in Japan using bullet trains called the Shinkansen but if for some reason you have to rent a car, make sure to get the ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) card so you can drive on all the highways and automatically pay for them.

To drive in Japan you need to get an “International Driver’s Permit” in your country which is valid only for a year. Remember that they drive on the wrong side of the road, meaning “Left hand traffic” like in the UK. My rental car which was the latest Toyota Prius, not only had the steering wheel on the wrong side, but also the indicators were moved to the right side, so in the first few days when I was switching lanes I was automatically cleaning my windshield…

The new Prius doesn’t use much gasoline. The latest model has a larger battery so on the highway as I was going 80-100 km/h I saw it just maintain this speed on cruise control with electricity. And it was aggressively charging the battery any time it could. Very efficient car.

Choosing a navigation app in Japan as a foreigner is not easy. My usual favorite Waze is shit in Japan. The app somehow doesn’t understand that just because I’m physically in Japan, doesn’t mean I know how to read Japanse characters, even though my iPhone is set up in English. Google Maps is less worse in that it shows directions sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English and sometimes in both… you never know what you get. And don’t get me started on its inability to save recent addresses correctly. What are these talented Google engineers working on???

Apple Maps was the best as it was always showing things in English for me. In Japan on the highways all directions are written in both Japanese and English, so it baffles me why Waze chose Japanese, Google Maps chose random and only Apple Maps understood my needs.

The trick when driving on the highways in Japan is that they are very packed and sometimes they have several levels, so even if you turn to a wrong level, GPS still can think you’re on the right track when you’re really not. Also, many times you have different lanes to turn to different highways and if you choose a wrong lane, there’s very little room to maneuver and correct yourself. Once I had an ETA to my hotel of only 30 minutes and then I ended up on a wrong lane, went on a wrong highway and then suddenly my ETA increased to 50 minutes. High price for a small mistake.

📦 Space efficiency

Japanese are very efficient with space. After all it’s a big population living on a small island with lots of mountains. For the first time in my life I was using a gas station which have designated spots where you stop your car and then the fuel pump comes from the distributor mounted on the roof.

It really looks weird but works!

🚓 Cars are small. Minivans are really mini.

Because Japan is so small they also drive small cars. Not wide. Not long. But tall. Very boxy. Even the sports cars can be very tiny and cute. Companies like Daihatsu, Isuzu, Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, Mazda, or Honda are manufacturing these small cars mostly for the Japanese market.

All this while in Europe or USA the cars are just getting bigger and nobody buys vans, everyone wants SUVs.

🏎️ Sport cars can be also cool.

Japanese are famous for their “drifting scene”. They have these aggressively tuned cars that can drive sideways while smoking rubber of their wheels. They drive both Japanese-made tuned cars like Nissan GTR or Toyota Supra, but they also drive European sports cars…

Very often they import automobiles from the western world with the steering wheel on the left side. Apparently having an inconveniently-located steering wheel in your sports car is considered cool.

🚽 Hygiene and butt-cleaning toilets!

In Japan free public toilets can clean your butt! They have an electronic bidet built-in in their toilets that can spray to clean your rear end. And not only are these available in hotel rooms but also in most public toilets. I was amazed how clean and modern the free public toilets were and when they wipe your butt it feels like it’s Christmas morning.

Inspired by this I installed two such toilets in my home. I bought the first one after my last trip to Japan 12 years ago and a year ago I decided to splurge and upgrade the toilet in my home office… and it’s glorious.

In many toilets when you flush them, the water that is being used to fill up the water tank can be used for hand washing. This is a space- and water-saving measure. You just use the water that is anyway going to be used to flush the toilet to rinse your hands. Brilliant.

👞 Shoes in Japan

When you’re in Japan you’re gonna walk a lot and you will be asked to take your shoes on and off in many places. Again, it’s about hygiene and not brining dirt to your home, or museum, or a restaurant. That’s why it’s critical to wear comfortable shoes that feel great.

I’m a fan of Callaghan Adaptation Technology shoes which have served me well here. These particular shoes have been designed to be easily slipped on and off and have no laces.

👟 Buying shoes in Japan is worth it now.

I bought new running New Balance shoes and a pair of Air Jordans. Not only the currency exchange is in your favor, but you’re also getting them tax free (so around 10% less).

Even in their outlet store they had these fancy feet measuring devices so I could get the sizes of my shoes right.

🛂 Tax-free shopping. Register or carry your passport.

Speaking of tax free, before you go to Japan you need to sign up and register on their “visit Japan” web site so that you don’t have to fill out any additional forms when you land and you can also use a special QR code to validate your passport when buying tax free stuff.

There are QR codes for everything in Japan now. And you have to have active Internet connection in Japan to use them, because they don’t let you screenshot these, you need to load a live web site with live time to make sure your QR code is authentic. This happened to me when I bought an all-day ticket for a bus and I screenshotted the ticket and the bus driver was shouting at me “no screenshot”!.

As to the Internet, I got a 25GB package for a month for $25 bucks and I just disabled online access for some apps and it worked great. I used an eSIM from Airalo.

🪪 You can set up a transit card in Apple wallet

This surprised me. Instead of getting a physical transit card, I could just go to Apple Wallet, tap to add a new card and go to “transit cards” and choose the most popular - Suica.

Later I could top it up directly with Apple Pay.

🥋 Marie Kondo is ingrained in their DNA

When you visit a museum or castle in Japan, you see that their rooms are very… zen. There’s barely any furniture there and barely any things… it’s all clean. They put stuff away after they use it and they have dedicated spaces for each of the things.

That’s why their best-selling author of “Life Changing Magic of Tyding”, Marie Kondo didn’t really invent anything. She just codified the Japanese way of cleaning things in a book that’s approachable by the western civilization.

💼 Japanese order in shops and restaurants

They have trays in all the shops and cafes. So you could put your coins, cards, bills not on a table like a Neanderthal but on a nice tray.

They very often also offer you boxes for purses and backpacks. This way you don’t put them on the floor like an animal.

👕 Uniqlo clothes and other brands, also very zen…

The clothes they have are amazing. Great quality, no logos, very zen, very practical, very good and comfortable fabric and also the process of buying is very easy - you just put them in the basket and they automatically count your total.

And again, your total is not much. Uniqlo is priced very competitively and in Japan because of the exchange rate and the tax free shopping, buying clothes becomes addictive. Half of my wardrobe is now Uniqlo!

✂️ Nail cutters and scissors

In Japan the old Japanese factories that specialized in manufacturing samurai swords are now also producing excellent nail cutters, scissors or tweezers.

I got fingernail clippers from the company called “Green Bell” and they are amazing. They cut my nails like champs. I also got smaller ones from Kai.

🇬🇧 Their English is really bad…

They use signs with English that’s really weird. It’s not even Google-Translate-bad, it’s worse. It’s like they look up each word in a dictionary and try to translate things themselves. “Sorry for the inconveniences”, or “You must out the parking” are just a few examples…

And yes, they apologize for everything. Basically when you’re in Japan you need to know two words: “Sumimasen” (“I’m sorry”) or “Arigatou” (“Thank you”) and you either apologize or thank them. They do the same for you. They are very kind. ☺️

❤️ Japanese friends are forever!

Back in 2011 when I was in Japan during the biggest earthquake I became friends with Kurazono Keizo. He is the author of the first Nozbe book in Japanese. Also, we’ve been through a lot at that time. We met again in 2014 and now after 12 years we met again. It was very emotional and very cool. I’m so happy that both of our missions are still aligned. What we do with our app and what he does writing amazing books. He showed me the manuscript of the sequel to his book “Good Vibes. Good Work”.

Meeting Zono-san again was one of my main reasons to go back to Japan this time. Together we’d like to change the attitude to work of Japanese workers…

✍️ Japanese like writing beautifully

They are big on calligraphy. They are famous for it. It was a treat for me to visit the museum of the famous author of “The Great Wave”: Hokusai.

In his museum I could see how he developed drawing and writing to perfection.

🎸 Placebo - Pure Morning

Time to end this long post with the song “Pure Morning” by Placebo where they just state that:

“My Japanese is better…”

Well, their Japanese is definitely better 🤪

🎧 The Podcast #224 - The 2-Minute Rule

2026-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a great fan of GTD - Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen and as the founder of Nozbe, I love my simple structure of projects, tasks and comments. However, there are tasks that don’t even go there, because if getting them done takes me less than 2 minutes, I just do them without even adding them to my system. Recently, I’ve been taking the 2-minute rule to a whole new level and you can read all about it in my essay at michael.team/2min or you can just listen to the AI co-hosts discussing all the examples where I’ve successfully applied this rule to improve my productivity. Enjoy!

🎙️ Listen to “The 2-Minute Rule”

📝 Show notes:

The 2-minute rule essay that inspired this episode.

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🤖 StarWars Day with a Smart Brick

2026-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Today is 4th of May, so “May the 4th… be with you” or in Star Wars parlance: “May the force be with you”. I’m celebrating this “Star Wars day” by building the Darth Vader’s ship: Tie Fighter from Lego with a Smart Brick and it’s weird and fun:

Let’s build a Tie Fighter

It starts with the figurine of Darth Vader and a simple chassis of the Tie Fighter starship:

Smart Brick charging…

There’s a yellow charger for the “smart brick” and there’s a dedicated space for it in the starship, that’s why the back of it is kinda empty:

Finishing the starship

Each Tie Fighter has these prominent sides to it. First I’m building the to bases for these wings:

And then I’m building the proper wings that bend into the iconic shape of a starship associated with the “Dark side”.

Flying with the Smart Brick

Now that it’s done, you can put the “Smart Brick” inside and it makes noises. From my understanding it’s based on NFC and gyroscope, so depending on which kind of brick we put next to it, it responds. When the Darth Vader sits inside the ship, it plays the “Imperial March”.

When you move the starship, it makes whooshing sounds as well, but these are pretty underwhelming.

Of course I modified the starship!

In the end, I had to modify the ship so that the Smart Brick is not so firmly fixed and can be taken out easier (1) and of course there had to be a place for the light saber (2)!

🍎 💼 ⭐️ Where Tim Cook looked the other way…

2026-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Last week Tim Cook sent a letter to all of us Apple customers where he announced his transition from being a CEO of Apple and naming his successor in John Ternus. While most of the comments about this revolve around Tim Cook’s achievements of growing Apple to a $4T company… I want to focus on a different narrative and spoil the party a little by commenting on all the places where Tim Cook looked the other way and I believe he shouldn’t have. Where I believe he missed.

What does Apple mean to me?
Developer relations as seen by Epic Games drama…
European Union and lack of DMA compliance…
Cost cutting… at all costs!
Tim Cook was great for Wall Street, but not so good for Apple’s soul…
Bonus: A Tim Cook Documentary…

What does Apple mean to me?

Apple has always been an aspirational brand for me. When I was rocking Windows laptops, I was dreaming of a Mac. I finally bought one in 2008 and never looked back. Together with my friend Augusto I coined the term #iPadOnly and to this day M4 iPad Pro is my main computer. I’m all in on Apple ecosystem having most of their products myself and in my family with many Macs, iPads and iPhones around me, as well as Apple Watches, HomePods and AirPods and the highest-tier iCloud Family subscription. On top of that I’m a developer of a productivity app called Nozbe which is available on all Apple’s platforms and is both on the iOS and Mac App Stores.

Saying I’m deep in the Apple’s ecosystem (aka “walled garden”) is an understatement. That’s why I care about Apple and I care about what Apple does.

And while many hardware decisions over the years by Apple have made me happy - just check out my current setup: iPad Pro, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra, AirPods Pro, Mac Mini… many software and other decisions have been lacking in the Tim Cook era.

Developer relations as seen by Epic Games drama…

A few years ago CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney sued Apple over the in-app purchase fees. They opposed the fact that they have to pay Apple 30% of all of the transactions on the platform.

Basically the way it works is this:

If you have an app that wants to be available on an iPhone or iPad, you have to submit it to the App Store which only Apple controls. They can accept or reject your app.
If you want to charge for things in your app you have to pay 30% of these transactions to Apple. Yes, if you buy Nozbe on an iPhone, we also pay this fee.
However, what pisses Apple off is that social networking apps don’t pay any percent. They are free to scroll, so they don’t give Apple a dime…

Tim Cook’s Apple acts like by being on the App Store, a developer must pay for the privilege.

Because there’s only one App Store and one approved form of payment, Tim’s Apple focused on forcing it on all developers. They are a monopoly and they don’t have to compete with anyone — not even improve their poorly-done in-app purchase system.

During the trial, many documents surfaced proving not only that Apple wants “all the money” but that they feel entitled to it. I lost respect not only for Tim Cook, but also for Phil Shiller and others. And while Epic’s Tim Sweeney is no role model either, he exposed Apple’s attitude towards all of us developers.

Tim Cook shouldn’t have let it drag to trial. He should have made the 30% cut and in-app purchase optional — many apps would still use it, Apple would have to compete and keep improving it, and it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line. Instead, because of his obsession with collecting rent, they now have a tough relationship with many developers including some large ones like Netflix (no official Netflix client for Vision Pro and no big rush of new apps for this new platform).

Next time you hear Apple say “Services”, think “Fees” or “Rent”.

European Union and lack of DMA compliance…

I’m from Europe so I am biased, but here goes. As I mentioned earlier, App Store is the only way to put apps on your iPhone. There are no other App Stores… but there should be.

Europe has put pressure on Apple for years to open their platforms to competition. But Tim’s Apple wants to control it all. Our iPhone, our App Store, our Lightning port, our everything…

The Lightning port story is a perfect example. When they announced the iPad Pro in 2018 with USB-C, they essentially admitted their own port was holding the iPad back. Yet they still pushed four more iPhone generations with Lightning — all the way until the iPhone 15 lineup in 2023 — and I’m convinced they’d have waited even longer if the EU hadn’t mandated USB-C for all mobile devices.

The same stubbornness plays out with the App Store. Tim’s Apple doesn’t want competing stores, even though their own is littered with scam apps — and yes, Apple collects 30% from every transaction those scam apps generate. That’s a conflict of interest Tim Cook never wanted to acknowledge. Instead of embracing competition, he invented new rent-seeking schemes like the CTF (Core Technology Fee) — essentially a punishment for developers who dare to use alternative distribution. It hinders innovation and has pushed developer sentiment to an all-time low.

What makes this especially frustrating is the double standard. When the EU says DMA, Apple says “nah”. When China says remove the Taiwanese flag, Apple says “yes, right away”. When the current US administration expressed displeasure about the “ICE Block” app, Apple removed it without a valid court order. Apple fights hardest against the regulations that would actually benefit its own users and developers, while caving to authoritarian pressure without raising any issues.

If you want to understand the China dimension more deeply, I strongly recommend Patrick McGee’s book “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” (Amazon / Audible). The uncomfortable truth is that Apple’s deep dependency on China wasn’t forced upon them — it was a deliberate choice to maximize profits. They built the trap themselves and now they’re caught in it.

Cost cutting… at all costs!

When you cut costs you make more profits. And Tim Cook delivered profits over the years in spades. He was obsessed with profits and profit margins to a fault. The thing is, if you cut too much, you very often don’t make the best products. Here are some of the examples of how I believe he overdid it:

5 GB of free iCloud storage announced back in 2011 when Steve Jobs was still alive, alongside an iPhone 4S which had base storage of 16GB. Today, 15 years later, the base storage for an iPhone is 256GB and the free iCloud tier is not 31% of that or 80GB like it was back then… but it’s still only 5GB! Only 2% of the iPhone’s storage! Two percent. Two.
16GB base storage for iPhones far too long… which meant that in the following years on some of these iPhones you couldn’t physically install the latest iOS operating system.
8 GB of RAM on base Macs for 8 years (and more for the MacBook Pros) from 2016 to 2024 until finally they doubled to 16GB because of the needs of AI.
60HZ refresh rate on iPhones from iPhone 13 Pro to iPhone 17… where all the other competing smartphones had it. They kept it as a differentiation not for 1, but for 4 iPhone generations.
Butterfly keyboard on all the Mac laptops even though they knew from the 12” MacBook that this keyboard was bad. The reputation for their computers went from Mac laptops being known for having the best keyboards to the ones with the most problematic one… and keeping at it for 4 more years.
Mac Pro completely neglected where now in AI era a Mac like this with support of NVidia cards would be very much needed…
Disabled blood oxygen sensor on US Apple Watches because they didn’t want to settle with the owner of a patent…
Low investment in Operating Systems for both the Mac and the iPad - I’m #iPadOnly in spite of the OS being bad, just because I love the hardware so much!

You can learn more about Tim Cook’s cost-cutting and spreadsheet-first mindset in the book I already reviewed for this blog: After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost its Soul by Tripp Mickle (Amazon or Audible).

Tim Cook was great for Wall Street, but not so good for Apple’s soul…

Tim Cook grew Apple into a $4 trillion company. That’s an achievement nobody can take away from him. But along the way, he made a series of choices that prioritized next quarter’s results over long-term trust — with developers, with regulators, and with users like me who care deeply about this company.

The three things I described — the adversarial relationship with developers, the reluctant and often dishonest compliance with fair regulation, and the relentless cost-cutting that to this day offer us a ridiculous free tier of 5GB iCloud storage, aren’t isolated mistakes. They’re symptoms of a leadership philosophy that treated Apple’s ecosystem as a rent-collecting machine rather than a platform to nurture.

Steve Jobs was obsessed with making the best possible product. Tim Cook was obsessed with making the most possible money from it. Both can coexist — but when money wins every time, you end up with a company that disabled a health sensor on Apple Watch not because of safety concerns, but because they didn’t want to pay a patent settlement.

John Ternus inherits a company that is still the most valuable in the world, still makes products I use and love every day, and still has the potential to be truly great. But he also inherits the cultural baggage of fifteen years of rent-seeking, developer alienation and regulatory bad faith.

I want to be proven wrong. But with Tim Cook remaining as executive chairman, the man who built this culture still has his hand on the wheel.

Think different, John.

Bonus: A Tim Cook Documentary…

John Prosser and his team created a documentary that is worth re-visiting now, called “Apple - The House that Tim Cook Built”:

😎 🎬 Porsche - 75 years of doing everything wrong

2026-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a huge fan of Porsche cars. There’s a reason I’ve got Porsche 911 GT3RS and Porsche 911 RSR as my collector’s Lego cars and I have a few other smaller models, too. That’s why when I saw this promo video of their 75th anniversary, I smiled, it’s so good:

Is Porsche doing things wrong really?

Here’s how they start:

For over 75 years, we’ve done everything wrong.

Talking about Porsche 911:

When they said, engines go in the front, we put them in the back…
When they said, ignition’s on the right, we put them on the left…

Then about Porsche Cayenne - the SUV that saved their company:

When they said, a real sports car can’t have 4 doors, we built 4-door models faster than most 2-doors out there…

And then their all-electric Porsche Taycan:

When they thought, you couldn’t build fully-electric sports cars, we built the Taycan…

They they refer to the fact, that you don’t have to be a millionaire to drive their cars:

Luxury is for the few, they said, until we built the biggest car community out there…

And lastly…

If being us means being wrong… then it is just the right thing to do!

Maybe this video resonates with me also because I can imagine a similar video about me running a #NoOffice company… but that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway, congrats to Porsche for celebrating more than 75 years of building sports cars (actually, the celebrations started 3 years ago in 2023, as their first sports car Porsche 356 was built in 1948, but this video is new). Just being a (15th?) part of their history is a privilege.

It drives like a Porsche…

Their cars are so good, that as my favorite YouTuber, Doug DeMuro points out, their “most hated by enthusiasts” 996 generation of the 911 model drives like a Porsche:

🎬 AI co-hosts trying to prove they are human?

2026-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

How about AI generated co-hosts trying to prove they’re real? Yesterday I posted a new episode of “The Podcast FM” where the NotebookLM-generated co-hosts were commenting on my essay about AI productivity. When they got to the bit about me using them to generate an automatic podcast episode, they were trying to prove they were real people… 🤪

NotebookLM co-hosts are trying hard…

What really gave me pause was Google’s Notebook LM. The synthetic podcast generator.

Michael takes his written text based I magazine column, drops it into NotebookLM, and it automatically generates a highly realistic, incredibly nuanced audio conversation between two virtual hosts. They banter, they take breaths, they interrupt each other, and they summarize this article perfectly.

It sounds eerily similar to what you and I are doing right now.It is a bit surreal. We are two human hosts discussing an article written by a guy who uses artificial hosts to discuss his own articles. The snake is definitely eating its own tail here.

And now the best part:

I feel the sudden urge to assure everyone listening that I am, in fact, drinking a very real, very lukewarm cup of coffee right now and waving my hands around at a very human way.

Human? Really? 🤣

Anyway, subscribe to The Podcast FM as these co-hosts are doing really a great job of conversing about my best essays in a short 20-minute conversation.

🎧 The Podcast #223 - AI productivity

2026-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Can AI - Artificial Intelligence - become a productivity booster? Oh yes. From an AI skeptic, I’ve been slowly embracing it and incorporating it into my daily work. I’ve shared my experiences in an essay and today I’ve asked the AI co-hosts to talk about them for you. I hope that inspired by this conversation you’ll also start embracing AI to boost your own productivity! Enjoy.

🎙️ Listen to “AI productivity”

📝 Show notes:

AI Productivity essay
Polish version of the essay for iMagazine

🟣 Apple Podcasts
🟡 RSS
🟠 Overcast

🔗 Apple Frames Shortcut modified for the iPhone Air

2026-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Update on April 13,2026: A week after I posted this, Federico posted a new version of his Frames Shortcut which supports iPhone Air, so this post is out of date. Here’s my old post: Over many years I’ve been using the great Apple Frames Shortcut from the MacStories Shortcuts Archive by Federico Viticci to post screenshots from my iPhone on this blog. He’s done a great piece of work with this free Shortcut, which I truly appreciate and I’m grateful for. However, he hasn’t updated it for the iPhone 17 series, which also means I couldn’t use it with my beloved iPhone Air. So I hacked it:

Why I need the “Apple Frames” Shortcut
3 Steps to modifying Apple Frames Shortcut for the iPhone Air
Done! Now I can generate Apple Frames on the iPhone Air!
Thank you Federico and the MacStories team!

Why I need the “Apple Frames” Shortcut

I know there are apps that could help me solve the problem of wrapping screenshots from my iPhone with an elegant frame, but I just wanted a simple way to do it without installing additional apps… so I decided to hack Federico’s Shortcut and make it work with the Air.

All copyright remains with Federico. Make sure to get the Shortcut from his official web site. All I’ve done is just a few simple modifications which don’t make it a pixel-perfect framing Shortcut for my iPhone Air, but a good-enough version.

If you’re using the latest iPhone 17 or 17 Pro or 17 Pro Max, chances are that Apple Frames 3.3 works on your machine because the 17 series of the iPhone have the exact same resolutions as the 16 series…

But not the iPhone Air. It has a 2736-by-1260-pixel resolution of its 6.5” display.

That’s why it doesn’t work out of the box. I asked Federico for help, but he never responded to me and I can totally understand it as he’s busy with running his MacStories empire and I know how much work updating a free Shortcut is. That’s why I decided to hack it and make it work with the Air.

3 Steps to modifying Apple Frames Shortcut for the iPhone Air

Here’s what I had to do (and you can see it all on the screenshots above, made with the modified Apple Frames Shortcut):

Step 1. Replace the height of the iPhone 16 Pro with Air

I decided to simply replace the iPhone 16 Pro with the Air in the Shortcut, so I searched for a place where it checked for width of the iPhone and changed the 2622 pixels to 2736.

Download Apple Frames 3.3 modified for iPhone Air

Step 2. Modify the X and Y positions in Frames.json for the iPhone 16 Pro

I don’t take my screenshots in landscape, so I just modified the “portrait” X and Y positions in the Frames.json file to 72 and 63 respectively.

Download modified Frames.json

Step 3. Modify iPhone 16 Pro frames for the Air

I couldn’t find any good iPhone frames for the Air on the Internet so I simply modified in Pixelmator on the iPad the iPhone 16 Pro Max screenshots to Air sizes based on the proportion of the screen resolution. It worked. You can download these files from here:

Done! Now I can generate Apple Frames on the iPhone Air!

It works and it’s good enough. If you have an iPhone Air and want to follow my lead, simply do these steps:

Get my “hacked” Apple Frames Shortcut 3.3
Follow the installation procedure to download all the files and resources.
Overwrite their Frames.json with mine (link above).
Overwrite their 16 Pro files with mine (links above).
Enjoy!

Thank you Federico and the MacStories team!

Again, I claim no copyright to the official Apple Frames Shortcut as I just modified a few small things to make sure it worked with the iPhone Air.

Thankfully a week after I wrote all this, Federico released Apple Frames 4.0 that works with the iPhone Air ouf of the box.

Michael.team by Michael Sliwinski

⭐️ Is Apple making the European Union a scapegoat with Siri AI?

Greed — “we want all the money… or else!”

Control — “we know what’s best for you”

Excuses — “we can’t ship it, so we’ll buy ourselves time”

Can Apple do better? I sure hope so!

Bonus: Siri’s history by Joanna Stern

✈️ 🕹️ Why I prefer a 2-in-1 Peak Design backpack instead of a carry-on?

#BackpackOnly travel is the best

2in1 Backpack - two backpacks joint together!

Huge main compartment that opens entirely

Big side pockets for water bottles

Good straps with magnetic attachments

Grab handles on all sides!

I’m really impressed with this 2-in-1 backpack!

🔗 Formatting lists in Shortcuts

Standard list

List instead of an alert?

Lists formatted with Dictionaries

Try it yourself!

🔗 Lists

P.S. There are many more formats of lists which are non-standard!

🎧 The Podcast #225 - Tim Cook vs Apple fans

🎙️ Listen to “Tim Cook vs Apple fans”

📝 Show notes:

🎧 Subscribe to “The Podcast FM”:

😎 Japanese style toilet with built in bidet is glorious

🚽 Old-school toilet with a new-school built-in bidet?

🇯🇵 Japanese hygiene at your home?

💌 My Japanese is better… 🇯🇵

🕹️ ⭐️ How to set up Meta Ray-Ban Glasses with maximum privacy…

What I love about Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses

1. Transition lenses - indoor and outdoor!

2. Integrated speakers for podcast listening

3. Good microphones for hands-free talking

4. Photo camera for impromptu picture taking

5. Video camera for first-person perspective

6. Meta AI? Well, I don’t think so…

Generation 2 is much better?

No AI? Here’s how to set them up!

Meta AI app settings - making sure it’s not creepy

Turning it off on cellular

Examples of photos I take with these glasses

Tricks and Tips with Meta Ray-Ban Glasses

Take a picture while closing the right eye

Take a video while closing the left eye

Switch audio from CarPlay to glasses

Overall, despite being a Meta product, I love these glasses!

🎂 47 - the four-seven of my birthdays… thanks to my daughters!

Jerry Maguire - Show me the money!

Matrix - I can dodge bullets!

Star Wars nerd - the importance of play

Hobbies and Friendships - that’s what it’s all about!

47 and loving my life!

🎙 No Office FM #93: Why Most Teams Drown in Chaos

Listen to the audio:

Subscribe “No Office FM”:

✔️ 🎬 Cognitive fitness 🧠 how to make your brain fit?… by Cal Newport

1. 📖 Read every day - it rewires your brain!

2. ✍️ Write - writing is thinking!

3. 🚶‍♂️ Go on thinking walks - without a phone!

4. 🔌 Plug in your phone in the house!

5. 🔨 Learn a hard skill

📺 Watch Cal Newport explaining this!

🔗 Selecting multiple different options in Shortcuts à la “Radio button”

How to show all options and select only few…

🚀 Emoji to the rescue!

Get the “Options” Shortcut

✅ A letter from founder to a fellow entrepreneur?

✍️ Dear fellow entrepreneur,

👊 And the tool that makes it possible is the same one I’m offering you.

✈️ ⭐️ Is Japanese better? Technology, culture, perfection…

🌸 Cherry blossoms make everything look great

🛒 Convenience stores

🚗 Renting a car in Japan

🧭 Navigation with Apple Maps

📦 Space efficiency

🚓 Cars are small. Minivans are really mini.

🏎️ Sport cars can be also cool.

🚽 Hygiene and butt-cleaning toilets!