I was the first developer in Brazil to sign up for Apple’s official developer program. I think this was at one of the first WWDC‘s in San Jose around 1989, so long ago that I couldn’t find an artifact or email to remind me of the exact date. Since then I faithfully renewed my membership every year, sometimes with difficulties caused by constantly changing payment details and evolving technology. I had to keep an old FAX machine around for years just because of that!

But 2025 marks the end of that era. This past November 11th I did not renew my membership and now I’m officially a common user of Apple products. Not that I plan to change platforms at my age (0x4A as I write this), but several factors have made it both necessary and convenient to cancel.

Special membership privileges have continually eroded and now are essentially reduced to “able to publish in the various Apple app stores”. WWDC attendance is virtual and the cool parts are open to anyone; special hardware are gone, as far as I know; public software betas have gone up in quality and are widely available.

On September 30th, 2018 I sunsetted all my available applications and my hopes of writing anything new have been sidelined by my eye issues. I’m glad to report that my eye seems to have stabilized, courtesy of regular injections, but it won’t get any better — reading huge screens of small text (or even medium text) — is over. I can still read a lot, drive a car under good conditions and play regular table tennis championships; that covers my current requirements.

I have been following the evolution of the Swift language with some trepidation. The idea of providing memory safety, clean concurrency and correcting other programming issues of the C/ObjC era is excellent, but, at the same time, exploring programming syntax and overlaying these concerns on current hardware architecture seems doomed to failure IMHO. I think I’m becoming that old man shouting at clouds that the old Burroughs mainframe architecture solved all that! But things like the recent ARMv8.5 Memory Tagging Extension show that Bob Barton was right.

At the start of the COVID pandemic (is it over yet?) I finally decided that my computer science-fu had become insufficient to follow all the theoretical talk about Swift programming and that the language/compiler features were changing to fast to adopt my usual program-by-exploring tactics. Furthermore, macOS was constantly curtailing my ability to hack around in the OS for beneficial purposes and the App Store rules were becoming more and more restrictive and confused, so my favorite type of utility was becoming very difficult to write. Finally I gave up altogether.

If you need up-to-date utilities that delve into macOS internals, Howard Oakley’s Eclectic Light Company site is an excellent resource which I can’t recommend enough. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it.

So, wishing you-all a better 2026. I look forward to write more here about computer history and table tennis. Let’s see how that works out.