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
A veritable encyclopedia of Apple history. Just a remarkable, essential, and unique work. | Continue reading
Who better to join the show to commemorate Apple’s 50th anniversary than John Siracusa? Sponsored by: Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done togeth … | Continue reading
For your weekend listening enjoyment: Christina Warren returns to the show to discuss Apple big month of product announcements — in particular, the iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. And we pour one out for the Mac Pro. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of … | Continue reading
While I’m bitching about Netflix’s craptacular new video player on Apple TV, let me quote from a piece I wrote two years ago (also complaining about Netflix’s tvOS app): Turns out there are two better ways: If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhon … | Continue reading
Safari is no longer breaking my menu-item-icon despising heart on MacOS 26 Tahoe, but the best trick to block the Tahoe “upgrade” notice on MacOS 15 Sequoia no longer works. | Continue reading
I mentioned the other day that I was mildly irked by a change in iOS 26.4 that moved the list of available updates in the App Store app one additional screen further into its hierarchy. Good news (via Nate Barham on Mastodon): you can long-press on the App Store app on your Home … | Continue reading
Steven Troughton-Smith, over the weekend: Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe: defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO It even preserves the couple of instances you do want icons, like for window zoom/resize. You do not need to restart or log o … | Continue reading
Here’s a post from 2015, linking to Rene Ritchie, then still at iMore, explaining how iMore found itself serving ever worse (and more reader hostile) ads. Not much has changed regarding the state of web advertising in a decade, and iMore — once a truly great site — is defunct. … | Continue reading
When something in your workflow is bugging you, you should figure out a way to address it. Why I didn’t write (and share) this script years ago is a mystery for the ages. | Continue reading
The people making these decisions for these websites are like ocean liner captains who are *trying* to hit icebergs. | Continue reading
Special guest David Pogue discusses his excellent and amazingly comprehensive new book, Apple: The First 50 Years. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain us … | Continue reading
CNBC’s headline is journalistic malpractice. The rest of their report is even worse. | Continue reading
“What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen.” | Continue reading
When I re-read my 2006 piece “And Oranges” today before linking to it, I paused when I read this: And while it is easy to find ways to complain that Apple is not open enough — under-documented and undocumented security updates and system revisions, under-documented and undocu … | Continue reading
The correct order is Fn, Control, Option, Shift, Command — regardless if you’re using the words or the glyphs. | Continue reading