Let’s face it: there’s so much stuff on the web that you’ll never be able to read it all. So, every month we’ll be bringing you no more than a handful of slightly longer — but always worthy of your time and attention — reads about the wonderful world of Apple. Instapaper account not included, Kindle sold separately.

  • May was the month Apple VP Corporate Communications Katie Cotton announced she was leaving Apple, and anyone who works in PR could stand to learn a few things.

Cotton was VP of worldwide corporate communications at Apple, and while PR people aren’t always seen as super important, Katie Cotton was. She controlled how Apple dealt with the outside world, and she shaped how the company was viewed by the media and the general public.

  • When faced with a problem, former Apple hardware engineer Todd Beauchamp grabbed the closest thing and visualised the problem to be solved. In this case, the closest thing just happened to be a scrap piece of blue tubing, which ended up saving audio in the original iPhone.

When Todd Beauchamp was 18, he couldn’t afford a new lighting kit for his camera. So he decided to make his own out of a piece of all thread, leaving the spool on his shelf for future use. It’s a habit that has stuck with him ever since: crafting hardware solutions out of whatever objects he can find.

Ok, yeah, we know, we’ve all heard the arguments. Mobile games are too dumb. Too brightly colored. Too greedy. It’s irritating to see ads, to be asked for money. They make too much of their money from compulsive “whales.” We’re nerds, and grannies are sneaking into our seekrit kewl gamer basement.

  • We’ve heard from almost everyone on the subject about stalling iPad growth and what that means (or doesn’t mean, depending on who you read), but the one thing that really matters is that the iPad is still the future of Apple.

The mathematics here aren’t complicated: If iPads last a long time, and Apple is still selling a respectable 15 million to 20 million per quarter, most of them to people who have never owned one in the first place, the rate at which Apple sells iPads can stall even as iPads continue to take over the world—or at least the US and other rich markets.

There’s no denying that WWDC 2013 was one of the most exciting in recent years – however, for all the new technologies Apple announced the thing that struck me most – the thing that excited me most as someone building things for the Apple ecosystem – was a single phrase in many of the sessions: “Also available on the Mac”.