I am not the first person to end a newsletter, to be clear. Others do it with much less fanfare than I. But I think giving things a distinct end, rather than just announcing one day, randomly, that it’s over, is not a way I’ve ended something I cared about before.

But before I go … I have written about what I eventually found frustrating with MidRange. Now, with the final piece of this great experiment, let’s talk about what I liked.

Now, I think that if you’ve read my work over the years, you know a couple of things about it. It tends to be regimented in terms of how it’s built, and also heavily planned out.

MidRange was not that. It was me, trying to figure out how to build a newsletter based on a random idea I had, which I then followed through on, and turned into two years of newsletters and 310 issues of goodness. Some were better than good. Others stayed the course.

I literally had the idea, and then, without thinking about it, I just did it. No infrastructure, no building it up in my head. It was what it was. If it got 10 subscribers or 10,000, it didn’t matter as much as the fact that I had an outlet to share my thoughts that didn’t require pulling out the whole convoy just to get that thought down.

This was something I felt I needed to do to improve my writing style at the time, to give myself the ability to write and think more quickly.

I launched this as an experiment, which gives me the ability to end it on my own terms. That it lasted two years just means that the idea suited my overall style and approach, and I learned something important from the process.

But I think it is important to continue to learn and improve. And MidRange, while it was great as a way to throw ideas on the wall, it has something strongly in common with Tedium: It is ultimately about whatever I feel like it should be about.

And that, I think is its limitation. It’s not to say that I didn’t find value from that approach, but that I think it may be better for me, as a writer, to build around a distinct direction, one that is sharply formed around a theme. That theme can help me as a writer to build skills and to talk about things I’m excited about. And ultimately, I grow as a person, as a writer, and as somebody who needs to have three things in a list so I can get that Oxford comma.

So, as a user, what does this all mean for you? My plan is to keep you on this list and share with you my next project, NextGeist, when it gets going in a few weeks. It will be about social media in the post-viral era. And it will be different, fun, and interesting.

I promise I will keep this parlor trick of writing in 30 minutes around, and even encourage you to follow the template I’ve made. If you have your own MidRange you’d like to share, send it to me. Would love to see someone else take up the 30-minute mantle. All you need is a timer.

(Ivy.D Design/Unsplash)

So anyway, this is the abyss. Let’s jump. You never know what you might find on the other side.

Here is a list of my 10 favorite MidRange issues, out of a total count of just over 300. I wrote a lot over the past two years. Even as it ends this week, it was still a worthy endeavor.

Sticking to a reverse chronological order for this one. Anyway, enjoy.

I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Song 🎹: This piece, diving briefly into the story of a Philadelphia rocker who never quite became a rock star, was inspired by the discovery of one of his music videos by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I wish we all knew more about him.

Should Elon Musk Buy Twitter? 🪺 The “time left on clock” on this one (28 minutes, 6 seconds) was never replicated, which is as it should be, because of the amount of white space that came baked in. For better and worse, Elon became a muse of this newsletter, but honestly, I never topped this when discussing him.

The Culmination 🔎 Seeing further developments in a story that you heavily worked on over the years is a nice thing, and being able to write this piece about the release of SNESticle was a really fascinating moment for me. (Also worth diving into: The time I met Zophar of Zophar’s Domain, someone who I’ve known in digital form for a quarter century.)

Don’t Look Through the Microscope 🔬 Call this a self-critique of sorts, a discussion of how it is all too easy to get pulled in by slights, and to have that mindset force you to spin out creatively. I think that something great about this newsletter was that I didn’t hold back my neuroses and frustrations.

The FrankenMac 🍏 As my personal history goes, this is as unvarnished as it gets. This story is who I am.

Don’t Be the Straggler 🗂 A couple of days after I posted this, Dropbox found itself at the center of a huge controversy because it seemed to not be prioritizing the M1 transition to Apple Silicon. I caught the problem days before anyone else did.

Did Tumblr Miss Its Shot? 🏒 I thought the combination of unrelated hockey imagery with the topic was really clever on this one.

A Letter to My Robot Namesake 🤖 After learning that Amazon had a robot named Ernie in its warehouse, I decided to take some creative liberties in writing about it. You can do a lot in 30 minutes.

Lessons From a Cleaning 🪥 When done well, you can take this format and do anything with it and make it interesting. Here’s how I turned cleaning my keyboard into an essay.

Get Started ⚡️ I may have lost my rhythm with MidRange, but the original essay about finding it is worth reading.

Being able to find joy in this process was great. Thanks for taking part in this journey with me in your inbox.

Thursday’s issue is the last one. I’ll close it out with some suitably notable thoughts. And unlike today, I’ll hit the deadline.

After two years of doing this, we’re calling it as of this Thursday, reflecting a solid two years of issues that you can go through, collect, and share with others. When all is said and done, there will be more than 300 issues.

(My next project, NextGeist, is being developed as we speak.)

Last year upon the anniversary of this newsletter, I wrote three issues on the “state of MidRange,” discussing the prior year, what I had learned from the experiment, and where I could improve going forward. I’m repeating it this year.

The very third issue of MidRange was about rhythm, building it and creating it for your own creative process. And I largely agree with what I said back then:

There will be a lot of resistance—be it social media, hobbies, or other things. But if you’re passionate about creating, this early point where you muddle through, if you work past it, everything will click.

The challenge is, is what you’re putting your energy into worth the muddling? Will it click? Or will you just get sick of pressing the button?

As I revisited this theory last year, I wrote:

But as I get a year in, I’m a little worried about finding rhythm in areas outside of MidRange, without quite-so-distinct deadlines to them. When given a project and told, “finish it sometime this month,” I often find myself in a place where the white space overwhelms me.

I feel like, in some ways, the opposite happened. I think the white space became filled in by this project, so I couldn’t separate the process of careful creation from the need to publish on a tight deadline three additional days a week.

I think a lot about the bloggers who worked at jobs that paid them based on output or traffic, a role that I myself never had, but I could see as being a challenge to maintain after so many years. At some point, the creative part of your brain loses its elasticity because all of the things that you used to have white space for were now being produced in a limited context.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately how writing, despite something I love doing, feels less fun because it’s seemingly such a dominant part of my life. I have noticed on the other hand that I find energy and excitement from design these days, something I don’t really do quite so much anymore. And I think it’s because the rhythm I have built has become too strict.

I may be a creative person who has been taking on creative pursuits for a long time, but I’m at the point where there are just some mornings that I want to do something else. And I think that it comes down to turning a routine into a grind.

Design can have deadlines, but at its core, it is an open canvas. A good design can be created in 15 minutes, but it can also take hours or weeks to correctly nail down. It requires bending muscles that work differently from simply writing things down. And I feel like that’s what I might be missing from my work right now.

In some ways, arguably, I have made my point. Building rhythm around the work that you do is important. But the muddling has to lead somewhere. And sometimes it requires waking up in the morning and taking a short walk instead of writing a 30-minute article.

Don’t be afraid to throw out the baby and the bathwater sometime.

This competition has led to a lot of different solutions over the years, including moves to new types of chipsets and a strong reliance on fans. One might argue, for example, that Apple moved to ARM because the fans were getting so loud in their computers that it was actually making the experience significantly worse.

But while a ton of work has been put into improving the heat that is produced by computer chips, not quite as much has been put into the cooling element, sadly, which means that laptops of all stripes come with fans that can get loud, noisy, arguably even unbearable.

Try as they might, PC makers have not been able to make the fan experience desirable on high-performance mobile machines. These massive fans have arguably even made desktop machines less desirable as well.

All of this is why I’m heartened to see an emerging concept which is getting attention this week. Frore Systems, a San Jose, California-based company, has been working on a project to build solid-state, piezoelectric-based cooling solutions, which essentially work through the use of ultrasonic membranes that run across the surface of a heat spreader, pulsing out the heat from a processor more quickly and efficiently (and quietly) than is possible using traditional fans.

The processor-sized technology has already drawn interest from major players like Intel and Qualcomm, who have helped to support the fledgling technology as it emerges into a potential commercial form, and drew a ton of interest this week after PC World ran a profile on the company on YouTube.

If it lives up to the hype, could be a huge benefit to new laptops, as they will be able to perform faster in smaller spaces with fewer limitations created by space. The Frore website has a case study clearly based on a Steam Deck, which leads me to believe this will also be a boon for portable gaming as well. (Gaming sites have already noticed this.)

All of this sounds great for potential future applications, but I just want to briefly make the case that the real benefit of this new technology may be for existing devices. Unlike a lot of components in computers, fans are fans—and if a fan can plug into a given connector, it will just work, with no concern about the machine it’s connected to. I can’t imagine that a ton of people are raring to open up their machines, but there is likely a market of people with existing laptops, desktops, and yes, Steam Decks that want a high-performance device but find that the experience has degraded in part because the fan simply has not held up over time. If those fans were replaced, the machine might just hold up another year or three. The idea of putting one of these in one of those heat-radiating 2019 MacBook Pros, for example, seems like a no-brainer, if it’s possible.

To me, this new cooler type is a massive opportunity to potentially keep existing devices with tight thermal envelopes working beyond their sell-by date. So my hope for Frore is that they sell these parts directly to consumers, perhaps through a partner like iFixit, rather than just going through the traditional OEM route. There are a lot of loud fans out there that deserve to be retired.

I think there are sometimes cases where, sure, maybe that makes sense. But I like the idea of building in public and saying that you’re doing something out in the open, because it makes the process a whole lot more transparent.

As I’ve built a lot of my sites over the years, like Tedium or ShortFormBlog, I tend to put a lot of work into design, because I see it as a differentiator and a way to tell a story about the decisions I’m making.

With the site that is going to replace MidRange, I am going to do just that. Warning: Some of this stuff is rough and may change. I’m creating in public, and letting the chips fall where they may.

First off, what am I calling it? The name will be NextGeist, which is a play on the German term zeitgeist, a concept referring to the “spirit of the age.” I am admittedly Americanizing the term somewhat by mixing English and German together but I think the result will be flexible enough to roll with the punches. This newsletter/platform will, at least at launch, focus on the evolution of the fediverse and related social networks, like Post, from a cultural standpoint. The guiding mission is to bring back the early vibe of Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, two sites closely associated with the growth of the Web 2.0 era, to whatever is happening in the world of social media right now. I don’t know if it has a name yet, but I am going with “post-viral” for now.

Now, let’s talk about visuals. Simply, I want something that feels like it’s a modern take on a tech outlet from the late ’90s or early 2000s. I’m using a lot of monospaced fonts for this, as that’s a style that is often associated with early technology sites. The primary font I have chosen, JetBrains Mono, is developed by a software company, and it has a bit of a throwback style, reminiscent of a combination of Courier New and, say, Trade Gothic Bold Condensed #20.

I’m also planning to use using Silkscreen as a secondary font, basically for no other reason than that it is an iconic font among vintage web designers, originally developed by Jason Kottke and becoming as hated in some circles as Hobo or Comic Sans. We don’t need Silkscreen anymore—it is a font that exists because web developers needed a font at that time that could be easily readable in small sizes. I am choosing to bring it back.

From an email standpoint, I am using my tool of choice, MJML, to build the basic template, which will integrate alt-story-form elements on top of a short discussion of longer issues. A sample design is shown above.

As far as when this will all run, the plan will be once a week, with some quick-hit updates on the web throughout the week, as necessary.

I am still debating the CMS approach. All my tooling at this time is on Craft CMS and I would like to keep that, but I would also like this site to launch with ActivityPub integrations, which Craft does not support at this time. So still debating.

My goal is to launch something sometime in February, with the MidRange list as the starting point. If you’re on the MidRange list, you will stay connected to NextGeist.

I hope that this brings something new to the discussion around social media, which feels like it’s at a real point of change, but one that seems to be harkening back to something older and more fundamental.

If I do my job right, perhaps NextGeist will capture the zeitgeist.

The project, as I’ve made clear in prior issues, will be the one to replace this newsletter in the end. It will not be a three-times-weekly newsletter. It will run once a week. And its focus will be what’s happening in the brave new space that social media finds itself in at the start of 2023.

(There may be a gap from the end date of MidRange to the start date of the new thing. I want to get it right.)

I think the reason why I find social media to be such an interesting topic at this moment is that it feels like non-visual, less-algorithmic, deep-thinking mediums are once again getting their due after a number of years in which imagery seemed to shape the way that interest in social media was growing.

Visuals are great. I enjoy visual things, and I love design. But social media, when too aggressively visually driven, can favor shiny objects over substance, and that means that some of the power of creation is lost in the process.

When we first started on our journey through social mediums, we started with longer works, often published with a lot of thought baked in. Some of the bloggers I recently featured in this list offer good examples of that.

But over time, it became more important to be shaped by visual elements and by algorithms, which meant that the goal was immediacy and shine—the more shiny the object, the more attractive it was to a large group of people, who would then be fed that object by algorithms. In many ways, this had an important impact on culture. It gave the regular person a voice in what goes “viral.” You didn’t need to be a newspaper owner or Ed Sullivan to help get an important new voice shared with a wide audience. You could literally be an individual wanting to speak up about something, anything, and with the right reaction, that voice could scale.

The problem is, this model faced some serious limitations over time. Powerful people increasingly came to realize what they had, and wanted to take steps to shape it. They bought out promising competitors; they tried to crush competition. They flooded the zone with shit, as an infamous adviser once put it. In one case, an extremely rich person bought an entire social network essentially because of the influence it carried.

All because they knew that what went viral could be shaped. It became the new important thing, more important than dominating the conversation. It was about how influence could be forged in new, dangerous directions.

The gatekeepers never truly went away. They just noticed that virality was an important tool for speaking truth to power, then dishonestly tried to siphon the tool’s ability to share truth and ability to share power. So now, to help protect our democracy and our world, we must embrace a “post-viral” world—one in which we learn how to better manage the power and risk that comes with “going viral” but emphasize the more fundamental community-building aspects of social media. They have been shaved down to the nub by an emphasis on what the algorithms want, but we can find ways to bring them back once again, so that we more effectively use the tool we’ve been given but dole its potentially destructive effects out more carefully.

When I use the phrase “post-viral,” I mean it in multiple senses, as well. At a time when an actual virus was endangering millions, people tried to use social media’s influence to turn information viral so it would distract us from the real danger in front of us.

So with new networks and a push away from the gatekeepers that seem to dominate the discussion, I think it’s important that we make room for post-virality, one where the power of “going viral” is to some degree tamped down, but the voices that might have been lost in the midst of algorithms and addictive networks have a place in the conversation once again.

Smarter people than I, who saw the problem before many of the rest of us did, already set the foundation. Let’s start building.

That was the edict of Steve Jobs during a 2011 presentation discussing the nature of touch controls on a laptop.

This take on things seemed to be taken as one of those handful of things that the big company in Cupertino was unwilling to fold on, even in the face of lots of evidence to the contrary. And as a result of this hot take and the internal research that led to it, the Mac never got a touchscreen. At first, fine, whatever, they made the trackpad better. But they also let the edict box them into a corner.

That boxed corner may soon be last year’s news in a couple of years, as Apple suddenly, finally appears to be willing to renege on its word and give these devices touchscreens, according to a new report from well-sourced Apple beat reporter Mark Gurman, who reported the news in Bloomberg yesterday [subscription, alternate link here].

Obviously, it’s more than past time for Apple to fix this gap. Because after all, it’s not like the rest of the industry slowed down around them, ignoring the feature disparity created by Apple’s big bet on touch-repellant Macs. Microsoft likely wouldn’t have a PC hardware business, at least not one so widely used and admired, had Apple decided that its laptops could handle touch, as that proved to be Redmond’s “in” into that market.

But beyond that, it is making increasing business sense, as the Mac reportedly makes up a bigger piece of the hardware pie these days, per Gurman. One could argue that, based on that metric, the business “bet” that Apple has traditionally made on this issue, that people would buy both, may seem increasingly risky. (Also not helping: iPads, because of OS limitations and Apple’s lapping of every other ARM chipmaker, require upgrades far less often than laptops do.)

I’m almost wondering, though, if part of the problem might have something to do with the broader PC market. Companies like HP and Lenovo have arguably started to lap Apple on the hardware design front, and a big reason for that is the companies’ embrace of touch computing. For example, HP has turned heads with its leather-folio-bound 2-in-1s, which can work effectively in both touch and laptop use cases.

And Lenovo arguably stole the show at CES earlier this month by featuring a series of laptops with extremely experimental capabilities, with the most awe-inspiring being a laptop with two screens that can work effectively in a multi-screen setup thanks to an included stand and Bluetooth keyboard.

Apple used to come up with interesting, highly experimental designs like this, but the company has leaned closer to iteration in recent years, while adding kludgey half-solutions that arguably didn’t please anyone (i.e. the Touch Bar). I’d argue that many of the “bad” additions to the Mac lineup in recent years have been direct results of the company painting themselves into a corner by rejecting touchscreens.

And it’s not like a touchscreen ruins the experience. As a Hackintosh user for a couple of years, I’ll let you know that it is fully possible to use a touchscreen on MacOS with the right hardware and right kernel extensions. The experience is fine—even though Apple did nothing to optimize it, obviously. Maybe it doesn’t make sense everywhere, but sometimes it’s way easier to interact with a webpage by scrolling with your finger than moving around a little cursor.

(Windows/Unsplash)

I’d argue that the real problem is that Apple shut down the touchscreen conversation too quickly. That meant that they couldn’t solve the actual problem Jobs identified—that ergonomics were broken in that particular use case. Now, they have given all of their competitors a 15-year head start on resolving the ergonomics issue in ways that actually make sense for the hardware. Microsoft had its awkward transition period with Windows 8, but at the OS level, it has worked fine for years. And much of its Surface hardware is able to move well beyond the standard laptop paradigm because … well, Microsoft let it do so.

Recently, I was listening to an episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show with Glenn Fleishman in which they discussed the Mac Pro and manufacturing lead times, which usually extend out two to three years. Hearing the proposed 2025 launch date for a potential touchscreen—knowing that Apple still might change its mind—makes me think the company saw something in the market fairly recently that made them change their minds on touchscreens.

Perhaps it was this Lenovo dual-screen beast at CES? Maybe Apple realizes that the MacOS/iPadOS split is untenable long-term? Either way, as I’ve said before, orthodoxy doesn’t suit them if it holds them back. A lack of touch on the Mac has held them back.

Just a reminder, MidRange will gradually be evolving to a new format in a few weeks. It will hew a little closer to this style of post in the future, so here I guess is a sample of our focus.

There’s this concept in technology that I know all too well but may not be all that prominent outside of tech media circles.

Simply put, it’s called the Gartner Hype Cycle, and it refers to the way that something will emerge on the scene, come to dominate the discussion to the point that people will become sick of it, and then bottom out before finding a normal wave of discussion. If it can find that norm, the technology will continue to grow at a normal pace.

This is usually reserved for bigger concepts in technology, rather than ideas. And I think it’s important that when we look at a concept like federation or open-source social media, we’re looking at it through that lens, rather than the more binary success-flameout cycle often associated with new social networks like Clubhouse.

For that reason, I found myself taking issue with The Guardian’s assessment of Mastodon’s growth at this time, in a piece by Josh Nicholas. It’s not that the numbers don’t tell an interesting story—that a site that drew in 2.5 million users immediately after the Elon Musk blowup is now a little down in its active user count—but I think they focus on the wrong story.

And I think the tell is by the social media expert they quote, Meg Coffey, who says this: “It’s like the people that said ‘I’m moving to Canada’ when Donald Trump was elected. They never actually moved to Canada.”

The thing is, Mastodon is at its heart a noncommercial network that isn’t really doing much in the way of marketing beyond word of mouth. It is not actively trying to dominate the App Store or using algorithms to juice up its user count. (If it does, happy accident.) In fact, it is actually trying to do the opposite by discouraging taken-for-granted features like quote-posting and granular searches.

And it is built on a new paradigm for social media, the fediverse concept, which is still relatively new on the mainstream stage and hasn’t had enough chances to really have its tires kicked.

So really, the sign of success for this new type of social network is that it has a large enough number of users, a critical mass, that a large portion of people who are already there feel the desire to continue to post there, that most of their social media needs are met by federated social media and they as a result can continue to offer their voice within the feedback loop.

And I think given that, it should be allowed a spot on the hype cycle as an emerging technology that isn’t trying to maximize numbers, but continuing to improve. It will have its moments of hype, but what matters is that it reaches normalized growth and improvement.

It needs to be seen as what it is—not as social network that will get a little attention from time to time, but as an open-source project built on an open network that needs the space to improve. The network just hit critical mass for the first time a few months ago, and that critical mass will help it improve in important ways, including by encouraging developers to improve the processes of onboarding, navigation, and other kinks that might have scared those curious users off.

Mastodon, and fediverse technologies like it, are doing something significantly harder than just building yet another social network with central ownership and a single point of failure. We owe it to this work to not measure it like it’s just another social network, because it’s trying to do something harder—it’s trying to build a foundation for social media that doesn’t have to be commercial.

Measuring a new paradigm based on the old paradigm’s ROI misses the bigger picture.

So, I will never spend a night at Noma, the Copenhagen fine-dining establishment that has dominated the discussion of high-end food for decades, before its just-announced closing at the end of 2024.

But I will say that the New Nordic restaurant’s just-announced closing is nonetheless fascinating to me. The announcement, revealed by The New York Times on Monday, touches on a number of reasons for this sudden shift, with the fundamental issues at play taking on a mix of financial and cultural.

Founder and creator René Redzepi, a deeply influential chef in the food world, told the Times in an interview that rising prices were getting too expensive, but the human costs of doing such aggressive and laborious food production approaches—exemplified if spirit, if not in cuisine, by the popular FX show The Bear—is no longer realistic.

“We have to completely rethink the industry,” he told the newspaper. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.”

(Redzepi, for his part, was recently asked about The Bear by Toronto’s Globe and Mail, admitted it was not an easy watch. “I don’t think there’s a cook who can see it and not be triggered a little bit,” he said.)

(Peter Burka/Flickr)

This is a big deal in the context of Copenhagen’s complex dining industry, as Noma has inspired so much of it since its 2003 opening. A Financial Times piece last year, wrapped around the story of Lisa Lind Dunbar, a longtime Danish restaurant worker who saw much of the dark side of this industry, suggested an industrywide rot:

But what I ultimately heard, in dozens of hushed conversations with restaurant workers in corners of cafés all over the city, was not a story of a few bad apples, but of a rotten orchard. For Dunbar, and for most people I spoke to, the problem is the restaurant industry itself, a system that relies on unpaid or low-paid labour and a culture of fear that slowly erodes the lives of its workers. One that is specific to Denmark but also representative of a global industry.

And Noma, given its deep influence in both Copenhagen dining culture and globally—the $500+-per-person restaurant is seen as a hotbed where young chefs put in a tour of duty and then take their lessons to their own restaurants—has, if anything, inspired imitators worldwide, in all the bad and good contexts in which that can be taken.

The model is costly to pull off, especially amid COVID restrictions and inflation—the restaurant lost nearly a quarter-million dollars in 2021, its first posted loss since 2017—but even in good times requires a huge amount of physical labor to correctly pull off. And for most of its history, much of it wasn’t even paid—the organization offered an internship program that only started paying in October, adding $50,000 a month to the restaurant’s payroll. (Which presumably suggests they had a lot of interns.)

Redzepi has said he would likely transition to an e-commerce model where he plays more of a creative director role, and if that’s what’s necessary to turn this fine-dining experience into something that doesn’t overly burden its customers, so be it.

But I think that the fact that this conversation is even coming up suggests that the human toll of fine dining is not being lost on the people responsible for creating that toll. And that’s progress in some small form.

Apple was fashionably late to the wireless charging trend, then a few years in, developed its own proprietary approach to wireless charging, which it called MagSafe (which is unrelated to the other MagSafe). This was annoying, but it was still compatible with Qi and added a bunch of extra features to the wireless charging spec that made it somewhat more useful for certain things like accessorizing or charging wirelessly while still using the phone.

For years, the rumor seemed to have been that Apple was doing this because they were eventually going to remove the Lightning port from the iPhone in favor of MagSafe, rather than give into the standards Gods at the USB Implementers’ Forum.

But this week, that theory seems to have gone up in smoke, as Apple appears to have given the Wireless Power Consortium its proprietary MagSafe technologies to use for its Qi2 standard. Which means that all of the advantages of MagSafe—the stronger connection with the magnet, the potential for more creative accessorizing—will now come to Android devices as well. This is awesome, and will make Qi a much more interesting standard down the road—especially as the new standard will allow for faster charging speeds which have been, up until now, an Achilles’ heel of the standard.

It will also, potentially, remove a lot of confusion from the market, according to the Wireless Power Consortium’s executive director, Paul Struhsaker.

“Consumers and retailers have been telling us they’re confused concerning what devices are Qi Certified and those that claim to work with Qi but are not Qi Certified. This confusion can lead to a poor user experience and even safety issues,” Struhsaker said in a news release. “Our standard assures consumers that their devices are safe, efficient, and interoperable with other brands. Qi2 will be the global standard for wireless charging and provide consumers and retailers with that assurance.”

Admittedly, for the last couple of years, I’ve been buying cases with magnetized backs just so I can leverage some of the MagSafe accessories on my Android devices. For example, wallet attachments are much more useful than wallet cases, and come with the added side benefit of being easy to move from one device to another, and better, to use without the case if you so choose. Logically, it’s very smart and it will be even smarter when all the flagship Android devices also support it.

This is actually very smart, but even beyond the standard itself, it reflects perhaps how Apple should approach new innovations it brings to the market. The company brought out this feature that was unique to the iPhone, then a couple of years after the release of said feature, the company essentially gave all the work to a standards body, which then shared it with the rest of the tech industry. This sounds like a significantly better state of affairs than what happened with Lightning and USB-C, where Apple stuck with a proprietary technology long after the technology had been leapfrogged by an open standard in many ways.

(Though there is certainly reason to we wary of ulterior motives. Some, like The Verge, suggest that this may be a play by Apple to gain some control over an accessory ecosystem, as the new Qi standard will require authentication on the device.)

If Apple wants technology to work closer to how it works, it should take its innovations and, after they are no longer marquee features, give them to the rest of the industry. It’ll keep those pesky regulators off their tail, for one thing.