Max one weird thing

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose the option that describes exactly what I want to do? It’s interesting to me to think how we got here: QuickTime is a 1990s brand, an offshoot of QuickDraw. Instead of QuickAnimate or QuickPlay, Apple called it QuickTime because it felt cute: time is what separates static images from video. The branding was much more prominent in the 1990s and 2000s, but mostly fell out of use – searching for “quicktime” in system settings today, for example, yields zero results. Long ago, the Player was the only free, consumer-facing part of QuickTime, so it needed special branding. You could purchase QuickTime Pro – you would even get aggressive ad banners for it inside Mac OS! – and its…