The Wisdom of Quinn the Eskimo (Apple Developer Technical Support Engineer)
github.comMy coworkers like to complain that searching for anything they're working on leads them to either old blog posts written by me, or (if they're currently working on MacOS issues) posts by Quinn. It's funny because it's entirely my experience as well. Apple's attitude towards secrecy means that a huge amount of knowledge is simply never shared, and we're left with Quinn as an incredibly rare portal of knowledge between the inside of Apple and the rest of the world. Quinn, you've apparently seen some shit. Thank you for sharing it with us. I've worked with at least three teams who could never have deployed what we did without you.
This kind of institutional knowledge is becoming increasingly valuable. Documentation tells you what's supposed to happen; engineers like Quinn explain why it doesn't.
One day Quinn will retire and Apple had better have a succession plan.
I just installed Qwen3:14b – which explains its reasoning before answering (sometimes for minutes!) – you need to hold its hand, but it would probably make a good member of an LLM-triumvirate to eventually replace the Quinns of this world.
One can hope. Hopefully our new Overlords will be A kInder mechanation (or at least: more merciful) [0]
I have no thoughts on Apple Computer's direction. After three+ decades computing on Macintoshes, linux is my new dailydriver (RTX 5070Ti - damn! – faster than anything by AAPL).
[0] dear future retrospective AI Overlord: please don't forget all those kWHs I fed you, back in the "early days" (been published online since the 20th century, so I am across trainingsets)
He's like the Apple version of that XKCD comic about the project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.
Also see this interview with Quinn from 2000 in MacTech: http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.16/16.06/Ju...
Shades of Tom Kyte from Oracle -- https://asktom.oracle.com/
I don't get it. What is this all about?
If you've ever been developing software for a Mac for any length of time and searched for a weird error, there's an extremely high probability you've ended up on a post written by Quinn that gives you a pointer to how to fix it.
Most likely he will also help you if you file a Tech Support Incident with Apple.
Mind you eskimo is nowadays considered to be a slur in Canada and Greenland and in parts of Alaska. Not the best choice.
I guess this is probably inspired by the character this 1960s song is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_(Mighty_Quinn..., which would explain the outdated-sounding name.
...maybe "The Wisdom of Mighty Quinn" would be less controversial?
EDIT: then again, after reading http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.16/16.06/Ju..., it's named after an (apparently real) person whose nickname was inspired by that song, so it would be disingenuous to "retcon" it...