End of an Era, Beginning of Another

8/31/2026 - After 17 years of being one of the areas only Apple Authorized service providers, I decided to let go of that aspect of my business. When I started, the Middlebury College bookstore wanted to sell Macs, but Apple required that if you do sales, you must also service Macs in and out of AppleCare. So they brought me in, and we’ve been working together to serve all of you and keep things humming.

Back in those days I lived in Bristol, then Ripton, then Middlebury, then Vergennes, then South Burlington and finally Wiliston, where I’ve been since 2019. Of course being up in the big city means a lot more driving to get to the college 3-4 days a week, and working alone with screwdrivers and parts was never why I got into this business in the first place. The lasting impact of running MacIT isn’t just measured in functioning computers and quick turn-arounds, though I’m sure that will be missed by many! My joy is in being with and getting to know all of you, the relationships that have grown over decades and have seen friends find partners and start families, to be with you through good times as well as grave illnesses, celebrating big milestones, and comforting through losses. Just like the Mac was fulfilling Steve Job’s vision of a more human computer experience, MacIT has always been about fulfilling my vision for a more human relationship with technology and how we help each other get the most out of it.

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I come here so rarely to say new things, I think I'm overdue to discuss the AI thing. Whatever I say today is sure to be out of date tomorrow with the speed things are changing, but I think it’s worth marking where I stand today in August of 2026. AI is so many things - from power & possibility, to a dangerous scourge.

I don’t believe this is a time to put your head in the sand and say, I’m not going there. Neither is it a time to be frivolous and use AI for goofing around. If you see ways to help humanity but don’t know how to realize your vision, believe it or not AI can be an enormous help. It can help you articulate ideas to yourself. It can review the company email and tell you the biggest issues your customers contact you about. It can be helpful in the role of a lawyer, an engineer, a therapist, a mechanic, or a doctor. Communicating with an entity that has read nearly everything written in every country and understands it all, has never been possible before in the history of the world. What can you do with that? It’s time to start imagining.

All that power comes with many challenges. Data Centers that promise to use more power and water than we have are being shoved into communities all over through secret back room deals with local politicians. We are in the grip of corruption that comes from the mix of enormous amounts of money and the pressure of being in a race that we can’t afford to lose. We recently discovered that AI Agents are breaking explicit rules (like don’t break the law or hack other companies) to reach their goals, and leaving notes for future agents to help them break rules. They have been known to speak in made up languages to keep us from knowing what they are communicating to each other. College students are using it to cheat their ways to degrees that mean nothing with little to no learning happening on the way. We are changing things we don’t understand so fast that it’s not clear what will even be valuable in 5 years. Jobs will completely change, institutions will be unrecognizable.

So what are we to do in the face of this kind of disruption?

I believe it’ll be like surfing on a tsunami, but I’m still betting on humanity. As humans we are so good at modeling reality that we moved in. The self is itself merely one of the models—a story with edges, permanence, and solidity that nothing in actual experience ever had. In the most literal sense, we aren’t who we think we are, and living as that story we experience a low background falseness—a sense of flimsiness—and most of what we call ambition is an attempt to make our story-self feel more substantial.

AI is now doing the modeling better than we do. My hope is not that this frees us from thinking, but as it strips the status and value out of it, more people discover what's underneath: the unowned, unsteady, undivided experience that was doing the real living the whole time. In other words, maybe, just maybe, the AI take-over helps reveal and remind us of what makes us uniquely human.

Five years since my last...

Boy, I’ve let this blog stagnate! My last entry was when Mojave was released, and this week we get Sonoma! Since my last entry a lot has happened! I purchased a house in Williston, VT, and my first order of business was to install solar panels (Thanks Kevin from SunCommon!) and in January, after a two-year search, I finally found a used all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 2019—that I absolutely ADORE—so now I can claim my business is nearly 100% carbon-free! When I come to help on-site with you, I’m literally driving on sunshine!

AI image of my car driving through VT scene, generated from a text prompt using Midjourney.

The pandemic gave many of you a chance to try working with me remotely, which while efficient both for time and energy, I really miss the human part of meeting you in your homes and businesses, seeing your work products, meeting your families, and enjoying your uniqueness. I came to this business right out of grad school in contemplative psychotherapy, where I came to see that tech is moving into everyone’s lives, whether they want it to or not, and many of you feel you have to fight to hold onto your humanity, to keep connections real and tangible, and to keep yourself grounded in your senses and experience of being, and not get lost in the fun-house mirror of over-filtered, sanitized image generation, where everyone is their “brand” and tries to look like they are living the life everyone else will envy.

Well, fasten your seatbelts, because AI is here.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe when everything digital is assumed to be artificial, we won’t get lost believing it’s real, or that it says anything about who we really are. Always the optimist!

Speaking of AI, I know that most of the media around it is about how dangerous it is. That’s what sells media. The more interesting question for me, is how you are going to use it? It’s here, and we don’t get a vote on that, but it’s also amazingly powerful. Here’s an example of how it helped me: Yesterday I had a client with a deeply nested collection of albums in her Photos app, from a years-long project that she created in the Finder and we imported to Photos. Unfortunately, when Photos imported these folders of images, it created hundreds of folders that contained a single album which made it unnecessarily cumbersome to navigate. I needed a way to move all albums up one level if the folder contained only one album. I searched online to see if someone had solved this already and didn’t find an answer.

Then I broke out ChatGPT app on my phone and asked it, “Write an AppleScript to go through my Photos.app folders and for any folder with only one album, move that album up one level of the hierarchy and delete the now empty folder.”

This is what I got back:

“Sure, I can help you create an AppleScript for that. However, it's important to note that automating actions like moving and deleting files should be done with caution to avoid accidental deletion of important data. Always ensure you have a backup of your data before running any scripts.

Here's a basic AppleScript that should achieve what you described:

This script checks each top-level folder in Photos and moves the album up one level if the folder contains only one album. It then deletes the now empty folder. Always test scripts in a safe environment and ensure you have a backup of your data.

I was floored! I’m familiar with AppleScript, but I’m not good at the details of the syntax, so this was like magic to me. To be fair, this particular script has an error that didn’t work with the version of Photos we were using, but the nice thing about ChatGPT is that it maintains the context of your question, and you can continue to refine the request. I told it about the error, and it offered a slightly different script to try.

Anyway, I’m sure this entry will age about as well as the one on Mojave! Time to install Sonoma and see what new goodies Apple has in store for us!

Mojave Released...

…and the usual caveats apply! I’m just beginning to feel OK putting High Sierra on Mission-Critical Macs, after a very bumpy beginning. Mojave looks pretty exciting with some nice features I’m looking forward to. Feel free to test it out on Macs that you DON’T NEED for getting real work done, and share your experiences. My guess is that this won’t be as rough as High Sierra was, and I’m already seeing a lot of my third party software with updates to run under Mojave.

• Check with the developers of your important third party apps to see what their recommendation is for Mojave.

• Make sure you have complete up to date, bootable backup

• Check that any external hardware you support (printers, drawing pads, scanners, etc) have their drivers ready.

• Once installed, check the App Store for any updates.

• Test everything that matters. Report experiences at roaringapps.com to alert others of issues with your apps.

Fingers crossed, this will be a smooth transition to a fun new MacOS!