Mark Gurman, in his eve-of-WWDC Power On column at Bloomberg: The Liquid Glass interface is going to be the most exciting part of this year’s developer conference. It will also be a bit of a distraction from the reality facing Apple: The company is behind in artificial intelligen … | Continue reading
Mark Gurman, in his eve-of-WWDC Power On column at Bloomberg: The Liquid Glass interface is going to be the most exciting part of this year’s developer conference. It will also be a bit of a distraction from the reality facing Apple: The company is behind in artificial intelligen … | Continue reading
I don’t use the web interface to Movable Type, my moribund-but-works-just-great CMS, very often. But I was using it today and noticed something odd. Next to the small-text metadata that says I’ve written 35,086 entries in total, it said I had one draft. One. I don’t use the draft … | Continue reading
A brief follow-up to my love letter to Apple’s discontinued MagSafe Battery Pack this week. I wrote: They’re the only Lightning devices left in my life and they’re so good I’m happy to still keep one Lightning cable in my travel bag to use them. Among its other unique bits of cle … | Continue reading
I posted this update a bit ago, but it’s worth making a separate post so you don’t miss it if you read the original post before I added the update: It goes without saying that any consumer survey is only as good as the surveyor. But CIRP, in particular, has posted some dubious on … | Continue reading
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, “The Trump-Musk Feud Has Been Great for X, Which Jumped Up the App Store Charts”: The feud between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump may be bad for the MAGA camp, but it’s proven to be beneficial for X, which has seen engagement soaring over the past 2 … | Continue reading
From my 2011 post linking to Fantastical 1.0: Fantastical’s primary innovation is its natural language parser for event creation — you type something like “Yanks-Rays tonight at 6:40” and Fantastical not only parses that into a new event, but, using some very clever animation and … | Continue reading
Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac: Apple has appealed parts of the Digital Markets Act law citing user privacy concerns. Specifically, Apple is contesting the interoperability requirements that say data like notification content and WiFi networks should be made available to third … | Continue reading
Patrick McGee joins the show to discuss his must-read new book, Apple in China — one of the best books about Apple anyone has ever written. Sponsored by: Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. Notion: Your notes, docs, and projects in … | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett, proprietor of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay (purveyor of many fine podcasts), joins the show. Topics include: IO (or if you will, io), the new joint venture of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom; the sheer fantasy of “Made in America” iPhones; and Fortnite’s ret … | Continue reading
The New York Times ran a really dumb Tripp Mickle piece yesterday under the headline “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” The answer should have simply been “Yes, it’s sheer fantasy”, perhaps with explanations why. Instead, Mickle twists the piece into pretzels to mak … | Continue reading
Some “thank god some of you remembered because I thought I was going nuts” follow-up regarding my remembrance the other day, “15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’”. I wrote: So, what would you do if Steve Jobs was quoted in a viral blog post saying, “We think «Your … | Continue reading
Earlier this week Nilay Patel was working on the show notes for the episode of Decoder I guested on, and he texted me to ask if I could recall the time Steve Jobs sent some random developer a link to an article I wrote about the App Store. He wanted to cite it as an example of Da … | Continue reading
Some interesting follow-up on that piece yesterday about the warning — with a prominent red “!” icon — in App Store listings for apps in the EU that use their own payment processing. Apple told me that exact same warning has been in place since the very beginning of their DMA com … | Continue reading
Following up on my gripe regarding the alternative a glyph used in Apple Notes, here’s Kevin Fox, tweeting on Threads: While we’re waxing nostalgic on the Original Mac, a Daring Fireball post today (below) reminded me of another piece of Mac 128k trivia. Until shortly before the … | Continue reading
I’m linking here to Techmeme’s roundup of news coverage and commentary, but I highly recommend you start by reading Gonzalez Rogers’s 80-page decision. It is excoriating. I’ve read few legal decisions quite like it. But it’s also incredibly cogent and plainly written. From the st … | Continue reading
Craig Mod returns to the show to discuss his splendid new book, Things Become Other Things. Other topics include creating with AI tools (including programming), social media permanence vs. ephemerality, and more. Sponsored by: Dekáf Coffee Roasters: You won’t believe it’s decaf. … | Continue reading
There are two ways to consider a forced divestiture of Chrome by Google, as the U.S. Department of Justice has, for months now, been requesting after Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google has illegally maintained its monopoly in web search. One is from a business perspective (whi … | Continue reading
Aaron Pressman, writing earlier this month in The Boston Globe, “Why I Abandoned Google Search After 27 Years — and What I’m Using Instead”: The UK now requires travelers from America to obtain an electronic travel authorization, or ETA. I wasn’t sure of the exact name of the ETA … | Continue reading
Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show for episode 420 on 4/20, but everyone’s sober, I swear. Topics include Trump’s dumb tariffs and Glenn’s smart new edition of his book Six Centuries of Type & Printing. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talks … | Continue reading
Jen Simmons, writing on the WebKit blog, “Better Typography With text-wrap pretty”: For over 30 years, the web had only one technique for determining where to wrap text. The browser starts with the first line of text, and lays out each word or syllable, one after another until it … | Continue reading
This sounds like one of those puzzles job interviewers often ask, but there’s a practical relevance at the moment: What’s a ballpark estimate for how many iPhones Apple might have hustled to ship into the US on those five freight planes ahead of the new tariffs? Ryan Jones tackle … | Continue reading
Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters under the headline “A $2,300 Apple iPhone? Trump Tariffs Could Make That Happen.”: Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54% tariff. If those levies persist, Apple, opens new tab has a tough choice: absorb the extra expense … | Continue reading
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