I don’t always link to my work on The Sweet Setup, but HEY is too important. In two short weeks, HEY has proven itself to be the most revolutionary app or service I’ve ever used.

Seriously. I tried to steer clear here of hyperbole. But I mean it.

I had to write an exam this past Monday. It was one of those exams I was supposed to write back in December (but we had a baby) and then in April (but COVID), so the result was the first exam I’ve written in my own basement. It was quite the experience.

Do Not Disturb worked wonders to keep any devices at bay during the exam. But after I was done writing, it was clear I had missed the-day-before-the-tax-deadline-day-of-work in terms of messages and phone calls. I’m very glad Do Not Disturb works as well as it does.

But email?

Normally, there’d be at least 30 spammy marketing emails pestering my inbox that I’d have to comb through to find the important work or personal emails.

HEY flipped this experience on its head.

So while I expected to have 4 or 5 missed phone calls, 10 or 11 missed messages, and 35 missed emails, I instead had 4 or 5 missed phone calls, 10 or 11 missed messages, and only 2 missed emails.

This has been revolutionary for me. I can only imagine how revolutionary it would be for someone with double, triple, or 10 times my amount of daily email.

To drive the monumental change home for me: I’ve switched more correspondence to email in the last two weeks, I’ve subscribed to more newsletters in the last two weeks, and I’ve checked email less often in the last two weeks than ever before.

Email is finally great.

HEY costs a cool $99/year, which is more than $0.00 if you’re used to doing email for free, but which isn’t all that far off from Gmail or Exchange if you normally pay $10 or so per month.¹ I think anyone used to paying for email will look at $99 like it’s a steal, while those who are used to free email may balk, but will feel instantly happy if they purchase the annual subscription.

I have many, many more thoughts about HEY over at The Sweet Setup. I do warn you though: I’m going to have to seek someone out to write a follow up piece that is substantially more negative just so the coverage is more balanced.

Though, of course, in the case of both of these services you receive far more than just email. I will still be paying for Exchange through a Microsoft account when HEY debuts its business-specific email service. ↩

A few of my close friends have noted, year after year, how dramatically far ahead the iPad’s hardware is in relation to its software. Year in, year out, the iPad’s pure processing power jumps through what seems like an impossible ceiling.

This is what hit me today when watching Apple’s secret underground computing lair show off the seamless transition to Apple’s own ARM chips. In short, we saw an iPad Pro chip inside a Mac running Adobe Lightroom on a Pro Display XDR, all without skipping a beat.

I’ve chosen to edit photos on an iPad for the better part of 18 months now. Which is especially due to how smoothly Lightroom runs on an iPad (at least in comparison to how it runs on a Mac). If you want to compare the two, take any Mac and make a selective edit in Lightroom with a mask overlaid on top of where you want to edit the photo. Now make that same edit on the iPad with the Apple Pencil.

Yes, now you know how bad things have become in Adobe land on the Mac.

Now that the iPad’s ultra-smooth editing performance is coming to the Mac, you can bet I’ll be buying that ARM iMac as soon as it’s available.