The Lights Were the Last to Leave: A Loving Challenge to Apple

This morning the lights left Apple. The automations that switch the lights in my house on and off used to live in Apple Home. Now they live in Philips Hue. It was a small move, and the latest in a long line. Almost everything my bots need had already gone.

Before the lights, my notes left. They lived in Bear, one of the most beautiful writing apps ever made, and Bear syncs through iCloud and nothing else. My tasks lived in Things, which is just as lovely and just as closed: it syncs only between Apple devices, through its own cloud, with no door for anything else. My notes now live in Google Drive, and my tasks live in my mail, as starred and snoozed threads my bots manage for me. I don’t need a beautiful task app anymore, because I’m no longer the one keeping the lists: my bots keep every overview up to date, and they keep it better than I ever did. My Apple calendars moved to Google Calendar. My files moved from iCloud Drive to Google Drive. Numbers and Keynote, programs I genuinely admire, I stopped opening a long time ago. Yesterday I needed a pitch deck. My bots built it in under an hour, as an interactive website. Keynote was never asked. Even my health moved. Apple Health is a fantastic piece of work, the most complete picture of my body I have ever had, and my bots can’t read a line of it. Withings opens a door in the cloud, so my bots now read my sleep, my heart and my weight there, and my health questions run through Withings.

None of these apps did anything wrong. Every one of them is beautifully made. They left for one reason only. My bots couldn’t reach them.

Let me explain who the bots are.

Most of what I do now, I do by talking to a handful of them. One screen, a few threads, each bot with its own specialty. For my private life there is the one that keeps my diary, reads my mail and handles what can be handled, keeps my tasks and my lists, cleans up and updates the documents in my Google Drive, and watches my health with me. For work there is a chief of staff. It reads my Slack and my tickets, answers what it can, follows up on what it can’t, goes through the open tasks with me, and writes code. Grok Bot is now well over seventy percent of how I touch anything, private or business.

In the car I just talk to them. A thread opens, a bot answers, and by the time I’m parked something has moved.

And the apps that are left? They still do their job. I just stopped caring what they look like. I couldn’t tell you what my inbox looks like this week. Slack is a mess, and it doesn’t matter, because I never go there. The apps have become plumbing. Good plumbing, mostly. Invisible.

This is the part I find quietly wonderful. For thirty years the screen asked for my attention, and I gave it. Now the screen has stepped back. The bots do the sorting, the chasing, the remembering. What comes back to me is time and attention, which turn out to be the same thing. That is what abundance feels like from the inside. Not more stuff. More room in your head.

But plumbing has one hard requirement. It has to be reachable.

My bots work when I don’t. They run on a computer in the cloud, around the clock, while my phone is in my pocket or on the nightstand. So without ever deciding to, I started asking every app the same question, and only that question. Can my bots get in at three in the morning, without me holding anything?

That question is the whole exodus. Bear couldn’t answer it. Things couldn’t. Keynote couldn’t. Apple Health couldn’t. Apple Home, this morning, couldn’t either.

Google says yes. Mail, calendar, Drive: proper doors, with keys I hand out and can take back. Hue says yes. It has a real door in the cloud, built for exactly this. Withings says yes, so at three in the morning a bot can look at how I slept before I have even woken up.

Apple mostly says no. My iCloud mail and calendar still have an old side door, the one built twenty years ago so other mail apps could log in with a special password. Notes, reminders, my home, and Apple Health itself: no door at all. The only way in is to be an app on an Apple device, with a human holding it.

So, one by one, the things my bots couldn’t reach moved out. Today it was the lights.

I want to be fair here, because I mean this as love, not as a breakup letter. I have used Apple since the early nineties. I still carry an iPhone. The apps I left behind are some of the best software I have ever used.

On Friday Apple told developers it will make one particular permission on the Mac, Full Disk Access, much harder to grant. That permission was built so backup apps could work. Some apps now use it to read everything on your machine, including your mail, your messages and your browsing history. In Apple’s words: “As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.” From now on, it will take “very explicit user action.”

Apple is right. Nobody is better at keeping private things private. Nobody else designs the chip, the operating system and the cloud with one idea of what belongs to you. If anyone can build a bot that touches everything on my iPhone and still never leaks it, it’s Apple.

Picture it. An Apple agent that can read my mail, my notes, my reminders, my health data, my photos, my home, all of it, with the locks Apple already knows how to build. Thinking on the phone where it can, in Apple’s own private cloud where it must. One clear place where I decide what it may touch, and see what it did. If that had existed, Bear and Things would still be on my phone. My health questions would still go to Apple Health. The lights would still be in Apple Home. That is not a nightmare. That is the best version of what I already live in every day.

It just doesn’t exist.

What exists is Siri AI, shipped on the fourteenth of September as a beta. It is a real step: on-screen awareness, quick actions, Siri in the camera. MacStories, which knows Apple better than almost anyone, called it “a smarter Siri that doesn’t aim to replace your favorite agent (yet),” and noted slow responses and requests that time out. It is a better assistant, not an agent. It doesn’t keep working after you put the phone down.

Now look at the three weeks since. Meta’s Muse, an agent with its own secure computer in the cloud, passed three million weekly users, according to The Information. On Tuesday OpenAI launched Dots, always-on agents that work in the background across thousands of apps. My own bots gained new tricks almost every week. And the clearest agent news from Apple in those same weeks was a careful warning about a permission. A good warning. Still a warning.

That is the mismatch in one picture. Agents live in the cloud and improve every week. Apple’s world opens only to whoever is holding the phone, and it changes once a year.

The yearly cycle made sense when the product was the phone. You design a device, you design its software, you show both on stage, you ship in September. But people now feel how fast AI moves. When the thing on your screen gets noticeably better from one week to the next, waiting a year for the next version of Siri starts to feel like waiting for a letter in the age of messaging.

And here is what happens when the front door stays shut. People don’t stop. Their bots find other ways.

Full Disk Access was one of those other ways. Meta’s Muse on the Mac can read your Messages if you grant that permission and switch on a connector, and a public row about exactly that came just days before Apple’s statement. And people like me simply move. The notes, the tasks, the calendars, the files, the decks, my health, and now the lights. Every closed door Apple adds without opening a better one pushes another piece of my life into somebody else’s cloud, outside the vault Apple built.

That is a real cost, and I see it. My private life is now spread over more companies than it was a year ago. The bots I use ask before they do anything sensitive, and so far they have earned my trust. But Apple’s enclosure was a gift, and I am giving parts of it up for reach and for speed. I would rather not have to choose.

For twenty years, the reason to stay with Apple was that everything worked together. The phone talked to the laptop, the laptop to the watch. That was the magic, and it was real.

But seamless has moved. It used to mean my devices talked to each other. Now it means my bots talk to everything. When I sit at a Windows laptop today, I install Grok Build and the machine is easy again. The glue is no longer the ecosystem. The glue is the agent.

Three weeks ago, on this site, I asked Apple to make iOS 28 a bot operating system. I was too patient.

Don’t wait for iOS 28. Don’t make this a feature of next year’s keynote. Build Apple Agents now, as a service that gets better every week, and let the operating system do what it does best underneath: guard the keys.

And act like you invented it. You did. In 1987 Apple made a short film called Knowledge Navigator. A professor comes home, opens a tablet, and a software butler in a bow tie tells him which calls are waiting, pulls up the research he needs, and connects him with a colleague. Apple imagined the personal agent nearly forty years ago. It belongs in Cupertino more than anywhere.

So make it better than Grok Bot, Dots and Muse combined. Let it reach everything on my iPhone and in my iCloud. Give my other bots a clean, narrow, revocable door, so they stop climbing through windows. And then sell the one thing nobody else can say with a straight face: it is safe, and what is private stays private.

Tonight the lights in my house will come on through Hue, where my bots can reach them. They were the last to leave.

Open the front door, Apple, and I’ll bring them all back.