Writing
Product teardowns and pro insights — close reads of real products, and the design decisions behind why they work or don't.
Google Health: Extraction by Design
To most reviewers, Google Health looks like the old Fitbit app with a chatbot bolted on. The chatbot is not the point. It is the bait. A passive tracker can record what your body did; it cannot record what you want. The coach can.
20 July 2026
Apple Health: Infrastructure by Design
Apple Health reads as an overstuffed, mediocre free app. It is neither mediocre nor really free: it is infrastructure built on purpose, and the purpose is not health but hardware retention.
8 June 2026
Raycast: The Interaction Model and Its Ceiling
Raycast built the cleanest keyboard interaction model on macOS. That same model structurally cannot hold AI. Glaze is the receipt the team wrote to itself.
3 June 2026
Dia: The Budget Transfer
Dia is the same team's second draft of the same idea. It did not get smarter. It got more familiar. The reduction from eight invented concepts to three borrowed ones was not simplification. It was a budget transfer, and the budget moved to AI.
3 June 2026
Arc: The Moving List
Arc didn't die from complexity. It died from inviting the wrong audience, asking them to learn too much, and running that bet on a business model with no room for retention to slip.
3 June 2026
Linear: The Restraint Tax
Linear's moat is not speed. It is restraint used as a customer filter. Every subtraction quietly tells one kind of user "this is for you" and tells everyone else to go and buy Jira.
3 June 2026