January 30, 2026

Good morning. Who’s ready for some newsletter?

Item 1: a link

This is an outline for a computer designed for the Person In The Street (or, to abbreviate: the PITS); one that will be truly pleasant to use, that will require the user to do nothing that will threaten his or her perverse delight in being able to say: "I don't know the first thing about computers," and one which will be profitable to sell, service and provide software for.

You might think that any number of computers have been designed with these criteria in mind, but not so. Any system which requires a user to ever see the interior, for any reason, does not meet these specifications. There must not be additional ROMS, RAMS, boards or accessories except those that can be understood by the PITS as a separate appliance. For example, an auxiliary printer can be sold, but a parallel interface cannot. As a rule of thumb, if an item does not stand on a table by itself, and if it does not have its own case, or if it does not look like a complete consumer item in [and] of itself, then it is taboo.

If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements.

Back in May of 1979, Jef Raskin wrote a memo, called Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer, to help guide a nascent project a handful of nerds in Cupertino were working on. Amusingly, he does not define what an “anthropophilic computer” is, but you can figure it out in context (including the excerpt above).

In the memo he goes on to describe some specifics, and some general characteristics, of what would eventually become the Macintosh computer. But these considerations would inform pretty much everything Apple ever did, most especially iPhones and iPads, the devices that turned the company from a marginal computer seller to a corporate behemoth with the power, but apparently not the desire, to tell heads of state to stop brutalizing people.

Item 2: a list

Types of tree, ranked

1. Deciduous
2. Evergreen

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Amanuensis

Don't think of it as AI agent that you've foolishly empowered to screw up your life. Think of it as one of history's worst amaneunses.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Well, that was a rollercoaster. Thanks for reading. See you next week.