Todd Dailey, 22 years at Apple, travels with an M1 MacBook Pro running Omarchy instead of macOS
The former Apple employee says plane Wi-Fi, AirDrop and Apple Music all work on his Omarchy Mac, admits the switch is “pretty hard”, and built himself a custom Touch Bar by asking Claude.
Image: Todd Dailey (X)
“After 22 years of working for Apple and always traveling with a Mac laptop, this weekend I brought a Mac but not macOS. My M1 MacBook Pro is running Omarchy Linux.” That is how Todd Dailey (@twid) opened a post on X on November 6, 2026, alongside a photo. By November 8 it was close to 121,000 views and past 1,500 likes.
Dailey is not exaggerating the résumé. He wrote on May 8, 2026 that “I left Apple last month after 22 years,” after years on the team of John Brandon, whom he called Apple’s “longtime head of sales.” His X bio now lists him as the founder of DaywardAI, where he helps companies position and explain their AI.
His verdict on the trip: “Everything works! WiFi on the plane, Apple Music, speakers, airdrop.” He called Omarchy “super fast” and “AI native, you can literally just prompt what you want,” adding that “Claude, grok bot, discord, all my go to apps just work.” In the replies he explained the details. Apple Music runs as a web app from music.apple.com, and AirDrop with his iPhone is “no problem at all, comes with omdrop which just works.”
The prompting part is not just talk. On November 5, Dailey showed off a custom Touch Bar built with barux, with Claude usage, an Omarchy menu button, a battery toggle and an extra row of function keys. “Just told Claude to do it and it made it happen! We can fix everything!” he wrote. Asked later how the Touch Bar works, he answered: “Better than what Apple shipped!”
He is upfront about the rough edges. When someone asked what they were, he replied on November 8: “Sleep and resume mainly but fixes for that should be in in a week or two.” Lid-close sleep works for him, he said in another reply, but deep sleep does not, and “i hear the M team is working on that.” Productivity apps like Excel “aren’t equal,” though “you can turn just about any website into a webapp.”
Nor does he pretend the move is painless. Asked how easy it is to switch, Dailey was blunt: “It’s pretty hard to be honest – whole new windowing system and way of thinking. But it’s a fun experiment!” He also warned that “8GB is a little tight” for anything beyond Netflix and browsing. To another user, he pointed out that Hyprland tiling isn’t mandatory: “The latest update lets you get back to overlapping windows if you want.”
The Apple ecosystem still has gaps. Asked about iMessage, Dailey said he hadn’t tried it, but suggested that with “a Mac at home running Hermes or openclaw” it “should be easy to bridge it to Omarchy.” Email is less of a problem: “grok bot handles my mail,” he said, and he uses Fastmail as a web app when he needs to.
The Omarchy Mac team noticed. Naeem Malik (@tiredkebab), creator of Omarchy Mac, replied: “I’m so happy you like it, Todd! We’ll fix the rough edges.” Dailey’s answer was a line he keeps coming back to: “agree! we can fix everything!”
His pitch to everyone else is short. “It’s still got some rough edges but it’s freeing to have full control of your OS,” he wrote. “Even if you don’t want to daily drive it any good techy should try it to see what an AI-first OS looks like.”
