I'm experimenting with a brand-new app for saving things to read later. I don't know if it's going to stick, but today we're going to see if the grass is actually greener on the other side. | Continue reading
There is a 1895 French short film called L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in English) where a stationary camera was set up on a tripod and filmed a train, well, coming into | Continue reading
Jonathan Maze writing for Restaurant Business: McDonald's Is Ending Its Drive-Thru AI Test McDonald’s is ending its two-year-old test of drive-thru, automated order taking (AOT) that it has conducted with IBM and plans to remove the technology from the more than 100 restaurants t … | Continue reading
Sean Endicott: Ever Put Content on the Web? Microsoft Says That It's Okay for Them to Steal It Because It's 'Freeware.' "With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been | Continue reading
There's been some chatter for a while that the chatbot interfaces we have for LLMs today are not that useful for most people and that the real solution everyone wants is for these tools to be integrated into more traditional user interfaces. While I do agree that many | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: Perplexity’s Grand Theft AI (emphasis mine): “Someone else did it” is a fine argument for a five-year-old. And consider the response further. If Srinivas wanted to be ethical, he had some options here. Option one is to terminate the contra … | Continue reading
Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider: Why AAA Games Promoted by Apple Flop in the App Store Assassin's Creed Mirage was downloaded approximately 123,000 times since June 6, Appfigures says. However, it has only managed gross revenue of $138,000. The report believes that the revenue leve … | Continue reading
This blog exists on the public web, and that means you as a user have a lot of control over both how you consume my work and what you can do with it. I publish to the web, so I suppose the canonical way of reading my work is to | Continue reading
Filipe Espósito writing for 9to5Mac: US carriers enabling RCS for iPhone users running iOS 18 beta 2 Now it seems that these carriers have flipped the switch and are now enabling RCS for users running the latest iOS 18 beta. Amazing! I can’t wait to text | Continue reading
Jason Snell on Six Colors: Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need | Continue reading
Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in you … | Continue reading
I’m closing in on 5 months with the Vision Pro and I thought it was a good time to post an update on how I’m feeling about the product. I know I’ve talked about it on and off since launch, but this is where | Continue reading
John Gruber: WWDC 2024: Apple Intelligence [A]ccording to well-informed little birdies, Vision Pro is already making significant use of the M2’s Neural Engine to supplement the R1 chip for real-time processing purposes — occlusion and object detection, things like that. With M-se … | Continue reading
Below is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave recently at work where I walked through the story of how I built Quick BIN Lookup and how it rose and fell to irrelevancy over the last 8 years. Hello! Today, I wanted to tell the story of how I | Continue reading
It seems like such a simple question, and I thought I had an answer, but I wasn't even close. Today we dive down the rabbit hole and try to get to an answer. | Continue reading
I posted this on Mastodon, showing Perplexity, which is a search engine that says it will browse the web for you and give you the answer, just straight up plagiarizing the first result for the question I asked. And I’m not talking plagiarism like the adamantly anti-LLM crowd | Continue reading
Why does it feel like Pixar movies aren't as significant as they used to feel? Is Pixar just making bad movies, or is something else to blame? | Continue reading
Ari Saperstein writing for The Guardian: Accessible and ‘A Pleasure to Read’: How Apple’s Podcast Transcriptions Came to Be Apple’s podcast app will transcribe every new uploaded episode. “We wanted to do it for all the shows, so it’s not just | Continue reading
Ivan Mehta for TechCrunch: The Apps That Apple Sherlocked at WWDC 2024 In 2002, Apple released Sherlock 3 with features similar to Watson, making Karelia’s app redundant. Since then, people in tech circles have used the term “Sherlocking” whenever they want to refer to a new | Continue reading
Why the hell do I do this to myself every year?! | Continue reading
From Apple’s Machine Learning Research blog: Introducing Apple’s on-Device and Server Foundation Models We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot … | Continue reading
I’ve had a little time to let the WWDC keynote sink in, and wanted to share my overall feelings on Apple’s big announcements in one post. And yes, I’ve installed the developer betas on every single primary device in my life (Mac, iPad, iPhone, | Continue reading
iOS 18 will add the ability for users to theme their home screen by setting all icons to a custom color tint. As someone who is familiar with the Android world as well, my natural reaction is to go, "ooh, how is this similar and different to how Android | Continue reading
Daryl Baxter writing for iMore: iPadOS 18 Looks Great, but It Still Doesn't Fix the iPad's Biggest Problem I want to be clear — the features that Calculator brings to the iPad, as well as the Math Notes that you can use with Apple Pencil and | Continue reading
Chloe Veltman for NPR: Fake Beauty Queens Charm Judges at the Miss AI Pageant Models created using generative artificial intelligence (AI) are competing in the inaugural “Miss AI” pageant this month. In trying to balance my openness to letting people like what they like as well a … | Continue reading
The cynic in me knows that WWDC is a corporate event meant to get people excited about what Apple is working on so that people like me buy more products from them. The keynote is a marketing event, I get it. But also, I don’t really care, and | Continue reading
YouTube might be my favorite website in the world, and apparently that’s at odds with the opinion of many people I see online. People complain about ads, about the UI, and about THE ALGORITHM, but I just don’t have these issues. Today I wanted to quickly | Continue reading
Carl Colglazier, Nathan TeBlunthuis, and Aaron Shaw in their study, The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: In this study, we investigated the effects of defederation events on the activity levels and toxic posting behavior of accounts in the Fediverse. The … | Continue reading
There are a bunch of things that are different about macOS and iPadOS, but the thing that separates these platforms the most for me is how each one works when you run into a limitation. What can you do if a feature you need doesn’t exist? What can | Continue reading
I promise I won't do this for every episode, but how can I not post when it's the debut episode?! It would be irresponsible, right? In the first episode, I talk about why I've been using the Quest 3 more than the Vision Pro | Continue reading
Behind the scenes of how we got to the debut of Comfort Zone! | Continue reading
Tom Warren: Windows AI feature that screenshots everything labeled a security ‘disaster’ Despite Microsoft’s promises of a secure and encrypted Recall experience, cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont has found that the AI-powered feature has some potential security flaws. Beaumont … | Continue reading
I'm excited to announce Comfort Zone, a new podcast featuring myself, Christopher Lawley, and Niléane! Comfort Zone is the newest member of the MacStories family, and we're extremely excited to be working with them to bring this show to life. It's fair | Continue reading
David Remnick: Donald Trump Is Guilty in His New York Hush-Money Trial | the New Yorker The conviction on these felony charges is only the most recent stain on the legal history of the former President. Last year, in a civil trial, another New York jury found Trump liable for sex … | Continue reading
We all have a finite amount of resources to move around, and today I'm exploring how I can make decisions that subtly shift what type of businesses and hobbyists I want to support. Oh, and time is a cruel, unflinching monster. | Continue reading
Jeff Benjamin writing for 9to5Mac: Improving iPadOS != making it macOS For years, the iPad Pro has sported hardware under the hood that’s more than capable for getting things done. For some users, it has been iPadOS’ shortcomings and idiosyncrasies that have make it challenging t … | Continue reading
Carly Thomas for The Hollywood Reporter: Alfonso Cuarón Says He Directed ‘Harry Potter’ Movie Only After Guillermo Del Toro Called Him an “Arrogant A**hole” del Toro knew how massive the movie franchise was, especially after Chris Columbus’ first two films, so the | Continue reading
Paul Thurrott: Windows 11 Recall Is Not a Privacy Concern But we all knew this was coming, that privacy advocates would immediately stomp all over this functionality without taking the time to understand how it even works. To be fair, it doesn’t help that we’re still | Continue reading
404 Media: Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a | Continue reading
Andy Edser writing for PC Gamer: Alleged Harassment and Bullying at Linus Tech Tips 'Not Substantiated' and 'False' According to Third-Party Investigation Organised by Tech Channel Roper Greyel—the Vancouver-based legal firm specialising in labor and employment law—found the clai … | Continue reading
Over the last few years I've developed a small case of pain when using a mouse and keyboard. It's not something I feel everyday, but I do have it crop up on a semi-regular basis and it's quite disruptive to my work when it | Continue reading
You already know this is about Macs with touch, so let’s just jump into a few compelling arguments I found from Googling around for a minute: I'm in the camp where I don't want touch support. It's a laptop, not a tablet. | Continue reading
Today I explore why I'm frustrated with the opinions of others, and why I need to remind myself that there's gray area basically everywhere in the world. | Continue reading
Tim Hardwick for MacRumors: Microsoft Says New Surface Pro Is Faster Than 15" M3 MacBook Air Microsoft is already pitting the Surface Pro against Apple's M3 MacBook Air, and in marketing materials, claims that the Surface Pro has superior processing power and battery life. Compar … | Continue reading
Benj Edwards for ArsTechnica: New Windows AI Feature Records Everything You’ve Done on Your PC At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past ac … | Continue reading
Turns out I'm not done with this topic… A couple days ago I saw this post pop up on Threads and it’s the “checkmate” move people like to bring up when dismissing the idea that macOS could ever work on a touch screen | Continue reading
Over the past 4 years I’ve really come around on PC being my favorite gaming platform. Part of that is the ability to play at higher visual fidelity than is possible on any console, part of it is more flexibility with playing older games, and a third critical | Continue reading
Today Ben Lovejoy posted Touchscreen Macs: The idea that will not die on 9to5Mac and as someone who has weighed in here more than a few times, I figured I’ll do it one more time and then let this topic rest for a while. First, we bust out | Continue reading