Back in an earlier post, I described the Orchard Report as an idea: a single-page branded PDF built from data Orchard already collects, designed to be printed and handed to an Apple Store employee when you’re actually making a hardware decision. Since then it’s gone through more iteration than any other part of the app. Here’s where it actually stands now.
Two sections, because there are really two questions
The Report splits cleanly into Hardware and Software, and the split isn’t arbitrary — it mirrors the two kinds of data Orchard tracks. The Hardware section pairs each spec with how it actually behaves over time: chip alongside how many apps you typically run at once, RAM alongside memory pressure and swap, storage alongside your free-space trend. The Software section shows three views of your apps — Apps You’ve Used, Your Longest Sessions, and Background — each one showing the app’s real icon, its name, and how much you’ve actually used it. They deliberately overlap instead of forcing each app into exactly one bucket: an app can be both something you open constantly and the source of your longest individual sessions, and collapsing that into a single ranked tier would have thrown the distinction away. Neither section describes what you own. Both describe what you do with it.
No verdict, on purpose
Here’s a decision I want to call out specifically, because it was tempting to do the opposite: the Report carries no Safe / Caution / Wait verdict anywhere on it. Not the current-health verdict, not the upgrade verdict. It would have been easy to add — the data’s right there — but a report that hands someone a “Wait” verdict at the point of sale reads as an ad for new hardware, not information. The Report’s whole reason for existing is to be a neutral, honest profile you bring into that conversation. The verdict lives elsewhere in the app, where it belongs.
Catching myself being wrong about swap
This one’s worth telling in full because it’s exactly the kind of bug that only shows up when you actually compare your own numbers against reality. Early on, the Report’s swap-used figure was a flat average across the whole time window. It read low — technically accurate, and completely misleading, because swap usage ratchets up after your Mac boots and rarely comes back down on its own. A 30-day average blends today’s real pressure with three weeks of post-restart idle time, so the report can say “1.4 GB average” in the same moment Activity Monitor is showing 7.7 GB, contradicting the report’s own pressure warning one line above it. The fix was to stop averaging a number that doesn’t behave like an average — the Report now shows the average of each day’s peak, plus the single highest peak in the window. It’s a small statistical correction, but it’s the difference between a number that’s defensible and a number that actually agrees with what you’d see if you opened Activity Monitor right now. That agreement is the whole point.
Built to fit one printed page, on purpose
A few of the original chart ideas — a concurrency line, a storage trend line — turned out to be low-signal once they were actually on the page next to real numbers, so they’re gone in favor of a stat and a simple bar. What stayed is genuinely useful: a plain storage fill-rate line (“filling about 6 GB a month — critical in roughly 3 months”) that tells you something a chart alone wouldn’t. Every group is capped so the whole thing holds to one page, because a report that only makes sense as a PDF you scroll through defeats the point of a report you’re supposed to print and hand to someone.
A helper can generate one too
This ties directly into the sharing system from the last couple of posts: if you’re the IT Helper for a family member’s Mac, you can open their Orchard Report from your own device, built entirely from the same synced daily summaries that power the shared verdict view — never the raw event data, which never leaves their Mac in the first place.
Where it actually stands right now
It’s real. It opens in its own window from the menu bar, and it exports to an actual PDF you can print or share. During the beta window specifically, the time range (7, 30, or 90 days) and the app-group cutoffs are adjustable on purpose — I’m using that to find the defaults that should ship, instead of guessing. What’s left is one blunt question I’m putting to beta testers directly: if you were buying a new Mac tomorrow, what on this page would you actually hand the Apple Store employee? Whatever doesn’t get an obvious answer gets cut before launch.
Next up: the compatibility engine’s remote feed — and the much harder problem of curating real per-app compatibility data by hand instead of by algorithm.
Follow along at theorchard.app, where you can “Follow the Build” and sign up to be notified when early access opens.
Thanks for reading.