CATEGORIES · SECTION

Apple Intelligence, iOS 27, and the Modeless Promise: A Raskin Reading

At WWDC 2026, Apple announced what it is calling Siri AI: a rebuilt assistant with onscreen awareness, access to personal context across mail, messages, and calendars, and the ability to execute multi-step tasks across applications from a single spoken or typed request. iOS 27 ships with this as its central intelligence layer, powered by an architecture that Apple describes as combining on-device processing, Private Cloud Compute, and Google Gemini models for broader-knowledge queries.

The Canon Cat at 39: Raskin's Machine That Time Forgot

The Canon Cat went on sale in the United States in July 1987. By the end of that year it was gone — discontinued after roughly six months and estimated sales of around 20,000 units. It cost $1,495, looked like a dedicated word processor, and was designed by Jef Raskin, the man who had originated the Macintosh project at Apple before leaving the company in 1982.

Thirty-nine years is a long time to sustain a cult following for a machine that almost no one bought. The Cat has one, and the interest is not nostalgia. Developers have built emulators and web recreations of its interface as recently as 2025. Hacker News threads on the Cat appear with regularity and attract detailed technical discussion. The machine keeps getting rediscovered by people building text editors, command palettes, and conversational AI interfaces, all of whom find in it a design that addressed problems they thought were new.