"Harbor is currently in a private preview under Apple’s Claris brand"
There's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Claris (always an Apple subsidiary, since being founded in 1987) renamed themselves to FileMaker in 1998, but apparently they rebranded back to Claris in 2019.
This could actually be interesting for "regular" people. FileMaker was great in enabling non-IT people and SMBs to develop custom software for themselves. Think HyperCard with tables.
Some of that software has been in use since the 90s and still works. Adding AI to the equation will empower a lot of people.
However, FileMaker is not really targeted at software engineers. In fact using it as a developer will likely drive you up a wall. It's things that feel totally fine to non-devs but completely insane if you're used to something else. E.g. I remember having to click a thousand GUI buttons just to edit a few lines in a script once (regular users just "record" them through the UI). It did all work fine though, very reliable.
They added some more developer-specific features later, but it took a long time. E.g. editing scripts as text(-ish) only came in 2015 (FileMaker 14) and an actual programming language in 2020 (JS, FileMaker 19).
If they keep Harbor under the Claris umbrella, that is a nudge that they are doing it for SMB market instead of the consumer market and it will likely be a onerous subscription to use it.
I believe Claris got rolled into Apple when Steve Jobs came back, but Filemaker was jettisoned to Filemaker Inc because it had a Windows version. Steve Jobs was apparently reluctant to have any Windows software within the walls, but lost that fight with Windows iTunes.
A few years ago Filemaker, Inc took on the Claris name.
FileMaker really could have had a moment when iOS devices took off since you could get a basically free native app just by having a database, but (I'd argue) got bogged down by poor pricing models. I would have loved to run it, but it's always been prohibitively expensive for anything not an enterprise, and now it's far too easy to spin up a CRUD API and call it a day.
There's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Claris (always an Apple subsidiary, since being founded in 1987) renamed themselves to FileMaker in 1998, but apparently they rebranded back to Claris in 2019.
Looks like they've mostly just released annual upgrades to FileMaker for the past decade, but they did add MCP to it last year: https://www.claris.com/blog/2025/why-mcp-matters-for-claris-...