Mike Allen, in the bizarre notes-hurriedly-jotted-on-a-napkin house prose style of Axios: Kara Swisher, the popular podcaster and pioneering tech journalist, is trying to round up a group of rich people to fund a bid for the Washington Post, she told us. One big problem: Jeff Bez … | Continue reading
Robby Soave, writing at Reason, “Pete Hegseth’s Acceptance to West Point Is a Story”: Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, Hegseth posted on X that ProPublica — which he described as a “Left Wing hack group” — was planning to publish a bombshell report contradicting Hegseth’s acco … | Continue reading
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories “Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together”: In testing the updated Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration, I’ve run into some limitations that I will cover below, but I also had two very posit … | Continue reading
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”: Apple is developing its first server chip specially designed for artificial intelligence, according to three people with direct knowledge of … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge, “Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine”: Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is why I’ve w … | Continue reading
The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of how Pat Gelsinger wound up getting forced out of Intel, “What Happened to Intel?”. A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye: Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job? Not great! There w … | Continue reading
Special guest Allen Pike joins the show to talk about the state of generative AI and how Apple Intelligence measures up (so far). Also: some speculation on Apple’s pending acquisition of the ever-difficult-to-pronounce Pixelmator. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platfor … | Continue reading
My post this week about Shazam’s history got me thinking about Apple’s track record with acquired apps. Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, and soon integrated its capabilities into Siri. But they’ve also kept the Shazam app going, including the Android version. They even still have a … | Continue reading
Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”: We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. Th … | Continue reading
The Hollywood Reporter, which of course is where one now goes to find news of incoming Executive Branch appointments and nominations, “Trump Nominates Dr. Mehmet Oz to Run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services”: “America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Phy … | Continue reading
Joanna Stern returns to the show to talk about our new best friends, AI chatbots, and I chime in with how the Voight-Kampff test got it all wrong. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Squarespace: Make your n … | Continue reading
Here’s the Apple support page listing the devices compatible with iOS 18. They’re listed in chronological order, oldest to newest, and the list begins with the iPhone XR and iPhone XS from 2018. But on this support page, Apple styles the “R” and “S” suffixes as small caps. Screen … | Continue reading
This again. Jiminy. Well, once more, let’s talk around another election, and try, by doing so, to maybe express something about it. Sponsored by: Tiptop: A new way to pay that combines Instant Trade-In and Pay-in-4 at checkout. Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow … | Continue reading
My mom died at the end of June this year. I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 7 … | Continue reading
Hunter S. Thompson, writing in September 1972, a little over one month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection: The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states. Well … maybe so. This may be the year when … | Continue reading
Jeff Bezos, yesterday at 10:29am on X: Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love. Mark … | Continue reading
Jason Kottke, going meta on that one-paragraph hypertext editorial from the NYT that I linked to yesterday: What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for gr … | Continue reading
Dan Moren returns to the show to discuss this week’s introductions of the first M4 Macs: iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pros. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talks … | Continue reading
Jay Peters, The Verge, “Apple Put the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port on the Bottom Again”: Apple’s new USB-C-equipped Magic Mouse somehow still has the charging port on the bottom. While Apple could have used the launch as an opportunity to move the charging port from the underside … | Continue reading
Sewell Chan, writing for Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday, “Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Resigns After Owner Blocks Presidential Endorsement”: Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the … | Continue reading
Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — here’s Techmeme’s roundup of summaries and regurgitations), “Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro”: Apple has sharply scaled back production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset since the e … | Continue reading
The aforelinked piece on Rudy Giuliani losing his possessions to pay the two Georgia election officials he was convicted of defaming made reference to the dispute regarding his four World Series rings, from the Yankees championships during his time as mayor, in 1996, 1998, 1999, … | Continue reading
Kevin Roose wrote a column for The New York Times last week under the headline “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?”, about which Jason Snell quipped, “It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.” The gist of it is Roose positing that Appl … | Continue reading
Daring Fireball: 30 Years of Dave Winer's Seminal Blog, Scripting News. | Continue reading
Tyler Stalman joins the show to discuss the iPhone 16 lineup’s cameras, and the state of iPhone photography. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order. Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your free trial tod … | Continue reading
Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s September product announcements, and Meta’s Orion prototype AR glasses. Absolutely no baseball talk, almost. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Squarespace … | Continue reading
Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16. Sponsored by: Tiptop: A new way to pay that combines Instant Trade-In and Pay-in-4 at checkout. Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order. ★ | Continue reading
I’ll link first to The Verge’s “Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024” roundup because Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s mark. I watched the most of the keynote live an … | Continue reading
A swing-and-a-miss from MKBHD. Criticism of the app is on two separate levels, but they’re being conflated. Level 1: the app is not good. Level 2: a paid wallpaper app? — LOL, wallpapers are free on Reddit. That second form of criticism — that there shouldn’t even exist a paid wa … | Continue reading
One of the many memorable moments in Steve Jobs’s 2007 introduction of the original iPhone was this slide showing four of the then-leading smartphones on the market. Jobs explained: Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface? Here’s four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, th … | Continue reading
Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple’s ‘It’s Glowtime’ Keynote Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”: 17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was so long ago that Field Notes hadn’t yet been created … | Continue reading
Back in July 2007, I contributed this photo to a Flickr group called, self-describingly, “The Items We Carry”: 17 years later, I’ve consolidated. 2007 was so long ago that Field Notes hadn’t yet been created; my back-pocket notebooks are much slimmer now than that hardcover Moles … | Continue reading
There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and two of his goon friends are in a nightclub in the Tangiers casino resort (a fictionalized version of the old Stardust), which is run by Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro). Santoro and Rothstein, who’d … | Continue reading
At the end of August, Apple announced several more DMA compliance changes. They are worth examining in detail. Changes to the Mandatory Browser Choice Screen Developers of browsers offered in the browser choice screen in the EU will have additional information about their browser … | Continue reading
Special guest Taegan Goddard, longtime writer and founder of Political Wire, joins the show to talk about the past, present, and future of independent media. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs. Squarespace: Make your next m … | Continue reading
Chance Miller, ace reporter for 9to5Mac, joins the show to talk about the latest changes to Apple’s DMA compliance plans with iOS, expectations for the September Apple event, and more. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million MAUs. Sq … | Continue reading
Back in the day, on classic Mac OS, there were no “privileges” for software. If you launched an app, or installed a system extension, that software just did what it wanted. Something as (seemingly) innocuous as a game or as necessarily powerful as a disk formatting utility just . … | Continue reading
Jason Snell, “Existential Thoughts About Apple’s Reliance on Services Revenue”: The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sauce as th … | Continue reading
Christina Warren (a.k.a. “Mary Brown”) returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 betas (featuring Apple Intelligence), a little reminiscing about Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs, and the bizarre saga of TUAW, resurrected as a zombie AI slopsite. Sponsored … | Continue reading
Sara Fischer, reporting this week for Axios: Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. The deal provides new validation for Taboola’s business, whic … | Continue reading
Here’s a hot take: last week’s news of a massive AT&T breach revealing the phone call and text messaging records of all AT&T customers for six months in 2022 exemplifies why RCS is a terrible protocol that ought not exist, and why it’s a mistake that Apple is adding support for i … | Continue reading
Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo: Political violence and especially electoral violence strike at the heart of the open, free and democratic choice-making upon which our civic democratic system and the legitimacy of its choices are based. We must condemn it in every i … | Continue reading
John Moltz returns to the show for a holiday-week look at the best of recent prestige streaming content, particularly Apple TV+. And, yes, a bit on the latest Apple/EU/DMA drama. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order. ★ | Continue reading
Yours truly back in March: After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week. Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back i … | Continue reading
Quinn Nelson, esteemed host of Snazzy Labs, returns to the show to recap the highlights of WWDC: Apple Intelligence, platform updates, and the latest salvos from the EC regarding Apple’s compliance with the DMA. Sponsored by: Trade Coffee: Enjoy 30% off your first month of coffee … | Continue reading
Last week I mentioned Apple’s prohibition on JITs — just-in-time compilers — in the context of their rejection of UTM SE, an open source PC emulator. Apple’s prohibition on JITs, on security grounds, is a side issue regarding UTM SE, because UTM SE is the version of UTM that does … | Continue reading
An oft-told story is that back in 2009 — two years after Dropbox debuted, two years before Apple unveiled iCloud — Steve Jobs invited Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi to Cupertino to pitch them on selling the company to Apple. Dropbox, Jobs told them, was “a fea … | Continue reading
Yesterday, quoting Anthropic’s announcement of their impressive new model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I wrote: Also, from the bottom of the post, this interesting nugget: One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our genera … | Continue reading