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Lake Tahoe Boat Tragedy Claims Longtime Apple Employee Paula Bozinovich

Some sad news. The San Francisco Chronicle (News+ link):

The eight people killed in a sudden storm while boating on Lake Tahoe over the weekend were a close-knit group of friends and family members who had gathered for a birthday celebration, according to a spokesperson representing some of the victims.

The boating trip was a part of the 71st birthday celebration for Paula Bozinovich, one of the people who perished in the lake, when their 27-foot powerboat capsized during a sudden, violent storm on Saturday. Authorities on Tuesday released the names of those killed when the boat sank near D.L. Bliss State Park, overwhelmed by 8-foot waves and wind gusts topping 35 mph.

Bozinovich’s husband Terry and son, Josh — a DoorDash executive — were among the victims. Via email, Brian Croll, who worked in product marketing at Apple for a long time before retiring a few years ago, wrote the following, which I’m publishing with his permission:

Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs and then DVDs shipped on time and correctly packaged in a box. She knew all the systems and the right people to make things happen. She was always committed to getting things better than just right — perfect. Paula’s extraordinary commitment, along with all the hundreds of other unheralded employees, translated the vision of Steve, the designers, the engineers, and the marketing people into a shipping product.

One of the secrets behind Apple’s success has been its ability to execute. Paula was an important part of that fine-tuned machine. She was also quite a character!

I’m sending you this because I’ve seen front page obituaries of executives who probably did way more harm than good to their companies, and yet when you scratch the surface of a successful company you find that people like Paula make all the difference.

Nothing but my warmest thoughts to her friends and family.

Update: Chris Espinosa:

I’m shattered to hear that Apple software ops stalwart Paula Bozinovich was killed in a boat capsize on Lake Tahoe. She truly embodied the spirit of the company in everything she did. A joy to work with and a tragedy to lose her.

I’ve heard from a bunch of folks today about her, and all of them emphasize two things. First, she was very, very good at her job. Second, she was very, very fun. One person said she exemplified what has always made Apple so unique: that her personality was such that she probably never would have gotten any job at all at any other big company, but she was absolutely perfectly an Apple person’s Apple person.

Sorry, MacOS Tahoe Beta 2 Still Does the Finder Icon Dirty

Stephen Hackett:

Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:

Screenshots of the Finder About box, showing the Finder icon, left to right: MacOS 18 Sequioa, MacOS 26 Tahoe Beta 1, MacOS Tahoe Beta 2

I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.

The Finder logo is the Mac logo. The Macintosh is the platform that held Apple together when, by all rights, the company should have fallen apart. It’s a great logo, period, and the second-most-important logo Apple owns, after the Apple logo itself. Fucking around with it like this, making the right-side in-profile face a stick-on layer rather than a full half of the mark, is akin to Coca-Cola fucking around with the typeface for the word “Cola” in its logo. Like, what are you doing? Why are you screwing with a perfect mark?

There are an infinite number of ways Apple could do this while remaining true to the original logo. Here’s a take from Michael Flarup that glasses it up but keeps it true to itself:

Michael Flarup's take on a Liquid Glass style Finder icon.

Especially in the field of computers, no company can be a slave to tradition and history. But you ought to respect it. This new Finder icon doesn’t.

Update: And here are some excellent takes on an updated Finder icon by Louie Mantia, along with some astute commentary. Mantia writes:

I really, really do not like spending my time pointing this out. I could write a whole blog post but I don’t want to seem angry about it. I just think the right solutions are simpler than what they’re doing.

No surprise, but Mantia’s icons look perfect to me. Perfectly Liquid Glass-y, perfectly Finder-y.

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macOS Tahoe Beta Forces Sharing FileVault Key

Jeff Johnson: Wait, what? macOS Tahoe beta 2 automatically enabled FileVault and uploaded a recovery key to iCloud. I did not have a choice in the matter. First, they silently enable iCloud Keychain, then they upload your FileVault key to it without asking. Sarah Reichelt: Beta 1 did this too. I turned it off immediately. […]

macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2

Andrew Cunningham: We are not highlighting this second round of developer betas because we think you should go out and install them on the Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that you use daily. These are still early versions, and they’re likely to have significant performance, battery, and stability problems relative to the current publicly […]