I think maybe John Ternus is more of a “*Hey, what* would *Steve have done here?*” kind of guy. What would Steve Jobs do with this OpenAI situation? He’d go to war. | Continue reading
Remembrances, tributes, and stories. | Continue reading
What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014. | Continue reading
App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary. | Continue reading
Shape was often the most iconic thing about an icon. Now it’s no part at all. | Continue reading
Felix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app. It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest ham … | Continue reading
Cellular download speed and reception is nearly a solved problem for my needs. Battery life is not. | Continue reading
Following up on my earlier post on Valve’s righteous objection to selling game console hardware at a loss, I should have noted that PlayStation Plus starts at $11/month (and goes up to $20/month) and Xbox Game Pass starts at $10/month (and goes up to $23/month). One draw of these … | Continue reading
The great John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s hardware price hikes in response to the global RAM/SSD shortage, and some spitballing on what we like about the UI changes in the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta. Sponsored by: Coax: Defeat the tyranny of choice. Cha … | Continue reading
Google no longer collects this information in a way that is susceptible to geofence warrants, and, more importantly, Apple never did. | Continue reading
Sanders’s tweet is better punctuated and capitalized, but it’s the same argument as Trump’s. Zero economic sense, 100 percent ideological wishful thinking. | Continue reading
This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one. | Continue reading
Some quick thoughts on the hardware prices Apple increased — and didn’t increase — today. | Continue reading
Jason Snell returns to the show for a look back at WWDC 2026, and a look ahead to Designed in California, his and Myke Hurley’s upcoming 50-episode Apple history podcast. Sponsored by: Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free daily greens, wit … | Continue reading
Some follow-up thoughts on my earlier piece, regarding the second-gen iPhone Air’s additional camera lens being a 0.5× ultra-wide, not a 3× or 4× telephoto: Ultimately, it’s the fact that I use my 0.5× lens not so much for photography but for scanning documents and notes, and ta … | Continue reading
Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026. | Continue reading
This is my favorite news from all of WWDC this week. I mean that. In a small way I mean it because I so loathe this aspect of MacOS Tahoe. But in a large way I mean it because it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team. | Continue reading
Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old. | Continue reading
Yours truly, last August: I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than on … | Continue reading
I look forward to pseudoscience like this finally getting some airtime on 60 Minutes. For 58 long years the program has been hopelessly biased toward actual science. ★ | Continue reading
Back in 2011, when he was a tech columnist at The New York Times, Nick Bilton figured out that Apple was soon going to launch an Apple branded-television set, with no remote control. You’d just talk to it. This made no sense of course, as I pointed out. Bilton closed his column … | Continue reading
A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic. I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covid loc … | Continue reading
dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website … | Continue reading
Here’s a fun one. Back in 2014 I linked to a post by Jay Haynes in which he projected that with a very reasonable level of annual growth, Apple ought to reach a $3 trillion market cap within 10 years. At the time of his writing, Apple’s market cap was “just” $450 billion, and no … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court’s typographic style has been stunningly consistent for — no pun intended — well over a century. | Continue reading
It’s not even a feature. It’s just technology. | Continue reading
Adam Lisagor returns to the show to talk about Hovercraft, his new virtual presentation camera app for Mac, and how he’s developing it with AI coding tools. Also, delicious Japanese spite sandwich cookies. Sponsored by: Parcel: Track your packages in one place, with native a … | Continue reading
Nextpad++ feels like a fever dream. Like what Mac apps would be if the Nazis had won WWII. | Continue reading
You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession … | Continue reading
The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Alt … | Continue reading
Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of code tha … | Continue reading
There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing the Kenyan contractors who exposed the privacy fiasco of AI Glasses than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them. | Continue reading
Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook committin … | Continue reading
MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Draft … | Continue reading
It’s certainly possible that this Vision thing isn’t going to work out and Apple *will* throw in the towel on it. But that hasn’t happened, and if it does, it’s not going to come out of nowhere as a story on MacRumors for the people in VPG working on it. | Continue reading
Software brain says *Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow.* Hardware brain says *Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.* | Continue reading
Every single word of the November 2025 Financial Times report, which Mark Gurman derided as “simply false”, was, in fact, exactly correct. | Continue reading
My spitball idea for a generational law to keep more young people from ever starting a tobacco habit — and thus, nicotine addiction — would be through scaled taxation. | Continue reading
I think about this scene more and more lately. | Continue reading
If you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all. | Continue reading
Photos from the New York Subway in the 1940s, by teenage Stanley Kubrick. | Continue reading
I wrote yesterday: And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized. On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded: Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive re … | Continue reading
One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ev … | Continue reading
The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. | Continue reading
Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved fr … | Continue reading
Regarding Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s epic profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker. | Continue reading
I don’t see the path from here to there, where *there* is a justification for a trillion-dollar-ish valuation. | Continue reading
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you … | Continue reading