Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”: France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let users cons … | Continue reading
With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogan as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood. Two episodes in … | Continue reading
Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until October 27, and didn’t start shipping t … | Continue reading
Yours truly back in May 2023, in a thread on Mastodon (at the time, you needed an invitation code to get into Bluesky, and it was just a few months after Musk’s takeover and remaking of what was once Twitter): Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually re … | Continue reading
MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about the drama surrounding Siri and Apple Intelligence. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Check out their latest features from Launch Week. BetterHelp: Give online t … | Continue reading
My number one tip for becoming a Mac power user is to get into Keyboard Maestro. Using Keyboard Maestro feels like gaining superpowers. I keep meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro, and so I’m just going to start documenting all the little use cases I find for it. Here’s o … | Continue reading
Here’s an update I just appended to my post yesterday, after linking to Gus Mueller’s suggestion that Apple open up a semantic index to third-party AI apps: HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission … | Continue reading
My post Friday commenting (read: wise-cracking) on Mark Gurman’s explosive report on an all-hands Siri team meeting at Apple was begging for a bit of meta commentary on the reporting itself. But I’ve been doing so much of that regarding Gurman lately that I thought it best to hol … | Continue reading
As a postscript to that last item, it occurred to me that because we’re close friends, I have a lot of photos of Paul Kafasis in my library. Here’s one from a year ago you can use as a reference. I wondered how Genmoji would do with “An owl who looks like Paul Kafasis, wearing a … | Continue reading
In the two decades I’ve been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at myself for missing a story than I am about Apple’s announcement on Friday that the “more personalized Siri” features of Apple Intelligence, scheduled to appear between now and WWDC, would be delayed until “th … | Continue reading
Ben Lovejoy, writing at 9to5Mac: Our editor-in-chief Chance Miller wryly commented that a radical new look would serve as a great way to distract from the ever-slowing progress on the new Siri. But in truth, I think many more Apple users will be wowed by a new look than would eve … | Continue reading
Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal tim … | Continue reading
Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim: “Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and produc … | Continue reading
Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight: On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual meeting with the FiveThirtyEight tea … | Continue reading
Nora Deligter, writing for Screen Slate in June 2023, “Elegy for the Screenshot”: About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just beco … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the last six days using the iPhone 16e, and the experience has been a throwback. In many ways, the iPhone 16e both looks and feels like the modern-day progeny of the early Steve Jobs era iPhones. Early iPhones like the plastic 3G and 3GS, and the glass-back/metal-sides … | Continue reading
Special guest: Paul Kafasis. Special topics: Siri/Super Bowl nonsense, “Gulf of Mexico/America” nonsense, the iPhone 16e gets announced, and a veritable Bond villain buys the rights to the James Bond movie franchise. Sponsored by: Listen Later: Turn articles into podcasts and lis … | Continue reading
I’ve been meaning, since it came out in December, to link to this video from Linus Sebastian of “Linus Tech Tips” fame, and with the iPhone 16e dropping this week, now seems like a good time. It’s a common genre that dates back decades before YouTube was even a thing: longtime us … | Continue reading
Apple, in a very precisely worded statement issued to the media (including me) this morning: Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature. ADP protects iCloud … | Continue reading
Last week Tim Cook teased a “newest member of the family” product announcement coming today; turns out it was the iPhone 16e, a device whose name briefly paralyzed me with indecision regarding how to capitalize it,1 which replaces the three-year-old iPhone SE (3rd generation) in … | Continue reading
You saw the news last week, I’m sure, that both of the major mapping-app providers, Google and Apple, have updated their maps to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. Microsoft’s Bing Maps, which I would describe as a minor provider, has made the change too.1 It’s … | Continue reading
A scorebug is industry jargon for the sub-genre of chyron (itself jargon) that shows ever-present information about a televised sporting event while you’re watching. These graphics display the teams, the score, the time remaining, and other metadata pertaining to the current situ … | Continue reading
Well, the Philadelphia Eagles, of course, won the actual Super Bowl, winning in a romp so one-sided that they would have embarrassed the Chiefs less if they had pantsed Patrick Mahomes at the 50-yard line. But the second contest is for best commercial. And my vote goes to Nike. T … | Continue reading
This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024. As I’ve done in the past — 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve tran … | Continue reading
Dave Nanian, last week at the Shirt Pocket blog: Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with Erase, Then Copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary (but feel free to install our v3.10 … | Continue reading
From an AltStore announcement yesterday: iPhone turns 18 this year, which means it’s finally old enough for some more ~mature~ apps… Introducing Hot Tub by c1d3r, the world’s 1st Apple-approved porn app! The screenshots and video previews are blurred-for-obfuscation by default, b … | Continue reading
Editors note from The New Republic: As The New Republic reported on Friday, The Los Angeles Times — currently in a race to the bottom with The Washington Post to determine which of the two venerable institutions can sell out to Donald Trump the hardest — found itself in a fresh c … | Continue reading
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company … | Continue reading
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the sudden absence … | Continue reading
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the absence of Byt … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch “Automattic and Others Back Openvibe, an App That’s Unifying the Open Social Web”: Launched in 2024, Openvibe initially supported three of the more prominent open social networks, all of which operate using different protocols: Mastodon uses ActivityPub, B … | Continue reading
Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge, “Oppo’s Next Foldable Is About as Thin as USB-C Allows”: Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou Yibao has now shared photos that highlight its size, add … | Continue reading
Sareen Habeshian and Russell Contreras, reporting for Axios, “Mayor Accuses ICE of Detaining Vet, U.S. Citizens in N.J. Immigration Raid”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a Newark, New Jersey, business venue on Thursday and detained undocumented immigrants … | Continue reading
If you’re the sort of reader who reads new articles here as soon as they’re posted, you might have missed footnote 4 today. I’ll delete this post in a few hours, but for now here’s the footnote for your convenience: When this Apple-OpenAI partnership was announced, there was much … | Continue reading
Writing about the current state of Apple Intelligence yesterday, I mentioned how utterly stupid and laughably wrong Siri is when asked the simple question, “Who won Super Bowl 13?”, and mentioned that that particular example came from a friend. That friend was Paul Kafasis, and h … | Continue reading
Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR, under the dreadfully incorrect headline “Trump Signs Executive Order to Pause TikTok Ban, Provide Immunity to Tech Firms”: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable for doing s … | Continue reading
Unsurprisingly, time expired without ByteDance selling TikTok, so the U.S. ban went into effect last night at midnight and (also unsurprisingly) it’s been chaotic and confusing. TikTok was down, but now (as I type this Sunday afternoon) it’s back. Sort of. First, the whole thing … | Continue reading
A few days ago Nokia unveiled their Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. Fahad X spotted a real gem — an internal confidential slide deck shared within the company the day after Apple had introduced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo in January 2007. To the credit of … | Continue reading
Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, but 26 hours felt pretty long — especi … | Continue reading
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But most interesting to me was the scale o … | Continue reading
2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today: The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta software, where by … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg today announced major changes to the way Meta is going to apply content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and (I presume, Threads). His main announcement is a video, for which there’s an unofficial transcript here. Zuckerberg himself summarized his own points … | Continue reading
Liv McMahon and Natalie Sherman, reporting for BBC News: The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence syst … | Continue reading
From an un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday: The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again need to raise more capital t … | Continue reading
Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first … | Continue reading
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