In this week's "Reboot" column, the Apple Experience is a supply chain play, mini versions of old Macs are cute, and Godzilla's drone show record.
Reboot is a new weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.
This week, we saw Apple Store closures due to the Iran attacks, regulatory action in Brazil and Spain, Taiwan invasion fears, and more age verification shenanigans. At least next week will distract us with product launches.
The Apple Experience is the point
Unless you have been on a digital detox for a few weeks, you will almost certainly have heard about an Apple Experience occurring on March 4. If you follow Apple, it's nigh impossible for anyone to miss.
Taking place in three cities, the Apple Experiences will cap off a series of announcements that will happen from Monday onward. Those announcements are said to include things like the iPhone 17e, the often-rumored budget MacBook with an A-series chip, and possibly the M5 Pro and M5 Max introductions.
We have discussed what Apple is rumored to be bringing out quite a few times, and I won't be going into those details here. I actually want to talk about the event itself, which is probably more important.
Expect Apple to do a spring "Experience" regularly from now on.
The Apple Experience has a nice layered glass version of the corporate logo.
Going back to May 2025, there were claims that Apple planned to shake up its release schedule, starting with the iPhone 18. It was said that the iPhone 18 Pro models will launch as usual in September, but the standard iPhone 18 would be delayed by six months.
The shift would mean an iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and iPhone Fold in September 2026, and the iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and whatever else Apple comes up with in Spring 2027.
There are a few good reasons for this. The obvious one is that Apple's not loading its eggs into a single fall-shaped basket, and by spreading its launches out across the year, revenue becomes far less seasonal.
The bigger benefit will be to the supply chain, which has to deal with Apple's exceptionally seasonal iPhone demand. Every year, the supply chain swells in worker numbers to cope with iPhone launch demand, before numbers shrink down as manufacturing orders wane.
Splitting the iPhones up into two broad launches gives the supply chain two points in the year to work around instead of one. To suppliers, this would give a reason to retain employees instead of regularly casting them off.
They can also do more work throughout the year, rather than going to maximum capacity for a brief period. This is a far more efficient use of resources all round.
The only negative to this approach is that spreading iPhone sales across the year will affect Apple's revenue pattern. If it's successful, the Q1 figures will stop being record-breakers, but Q3 will be better and more in line with Q2 and Q4 numbers.
It'll be a more reliable income for the iPhone giant's investors to enjoy.
Mini Macintoshes
Occasionally, a story arises where someone gets historic hardware going, or retrofits older computers with modern hardware so they work like a current-generation machine. This week, we had two stories in that vein, all about "Macintoshes."
On Monday, we ran a report about YouTube channel This Does Not Compute and its project to turn a Mac-inspired clock into a functional computer. Yes, it's a Mini Mac that actually works.
It did require some soldering and elbow grease, as well as a 2.8-inch LCD screen, a Raspberry Pi, and a 3D-printed bracket. But the end result from a bit of effort and $100 in parts is a palm-sized replica of a well-known historic Mac.
Later on, we re-posted our review of the Wokyis Mac mini dock, which we originally published in August 2025. It got resurfaced due to the prospect of there being a Mac mini with an M5 chip on the horizon.
We loved the idea, as it was effectively a casing that sits on top of the Mac mini, making it look like a retro Mac. That is, one with extra ports at the front and back, expanding its utility.
Except, it also had a five-inch display and the capability to directly connect to the Mac's HDMI port. Doing so left you with a self-contained miniature Macintosh that ran on current-gen hardware.
Wokyis M5 Mac mini Dock
Yes, we're swayed by hardware that works well while still looking like retro hardware. We're also fans of miniature versions of things.
They are cute items that happened to follow a trend this week. They just happened to come from two completely different technical directions.
We're all waiting for the new hotness, yet we yearn for the better bits of yesteryear.
King of the Drones
One very early in the week story was about a drone show. To promote the second season of the Apple TV epic "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," Apple and Legendary commissioned a drone display in Los Angeles on February 20.
It was a nice display, with 3,000 drones used to make the effects over the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for about 12 minutes. In that time, various monsters were made in dot form, including Godzilla, King Kong, and the new one, Titan X.
You really could call it a Kaiju-sized display, as some drones flew as high as 500 feet. Which led me down two unexpected garden paths.
The first was researching the height of Godzilla. It turns out the monster varies in height depending on what it appears in.
In the early days, it would be around 50 meters (164 feet) in height, but it's grown since then.
Even in the current "Monsterverse" era under Legendary, the height changes. In the 2014 film "Godzilla" it was 355 feet, but by the 2019 sequel it was 393 feet tall.
The second oddity was discovering that drone records are plentiful. Probably too plentiful.
The Apple TV display secured the Guinness world record for the "Tallest aerial display of a fictional character formed by multirotors/drones" at 457 feet, 8.126 inches.
If you think that the record is oddly specific, you'd be right.
A quick search of the Guinness World Records site comes up with 638 results under the phrase "aerial drone image." On the first page alone, you do get the big ones for things like largest aerial image, but it gets really granular, really quickly.
Just reading the first page, you can get drone records for making a big display forming a cowboy hat, a planet, a bone, a landmark, a logo, a seashell, "traditional clothing," a gingerbread village, and a trophy.
With so many very specific drone records available, it kinda diminishes Apple's big record-achieving effect. It also weakens the magic surrounding being a record holder at all.
Apple did a nice display, the record is the cherry on top. But only if you don't think about it for too long.
Last week's Reboot covered Video podcast changes forcing us all to get into shape, Apple TV on CarPlay, and how Formula 1 is impacting Apple TV beyond the popular movie.
