By John Gruber

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MacOS 26 Tahoe Drops Support for Some Intel-Based Macs, and Will Be the Last to Support Intel Macs at All ★

Stephen Hackett has a list of the Intel Macs that MacOS 26 Tahoe supports, and the ones they’re dropping support for this year.

Apple has gone through three CPU architecture transitions in the Mac’s history:

• 68K to PowerPC starting in 1994
• PowerPC to Intel starting in 2006
• Intel to Apple Silicon, starting 2020

With the 68K–PowerPC transition, they supported 68K Macs through Mac OS 8.1, which was released in January 1998. With the PowerPC–Intel transition, they only supported PowerPC Macs for two Mac OS X versions, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (which initially shipped PowerPC-only in 2005) and 10.5 Leopard in October 2007. The next release, 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, was Intel-only. (Mac OS X dropped to a roughly two-year big-release schedule during the initial years after the iPhone, when the company prioritized engineering resources on iOS. It’s easy to take for granted that today’s Apple has every single platform on an annual cadence.)

With next year’s version going Apple Silicon-only, they’ll have supported Intel Macs for five major MacOS releases after the debut of the first Apple Silicon Macs. I think that’s about the best anyone could have hoped for.

Tuesday, 10 June 2025

Joanna Stern With Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak: ‘Apple Executives Defend Apple Intelligence, Siri and AI Strategy’ ★

Tight 7-minute video at the WSJ (and also at YouTube):

Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak to talk about the future of AI at Apple — and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.

‘Apple Retreats’ ★

Ben Thompson:

To that end, while I understand why many people were underwhelmed by this WWDC, particularly in comparison to the AI extravaganza that was Google I/O, I think it was one of the more encouraging Apple keynotes in a long time. Apple is a company that went too far in too many areas, and needed to retreat. Focusing on things only Apple can do is a good thing; empowering developers and depending on partners is a good thing; giving even the appearance of thoughtful thinking with regards to the App Store (it’s a low bar!) is a good thing. Of course we want and are excited by tech companies promising the future; what is a prerequisite is delivering in the present, and it’s a sign of progress that Apple retreated to nothing more than that.

Monday, 9 June 2025

Apple’s Introduction to Liquid Glass ★

I’ve got iOS 26 installed on a spare phone already, and I like the new UI a lot. In addition to just plain looking cool, Apple has tackled a lot of longstanding minor irritants.

For example, the iOS contextual menu for text selections — the one with Cut/Copy/Paste. For years now there have been a lot of other useful commands in there, including “Share…” at the very end. But to get to the extra commands, you had to tediously swipe, swipe, swipe. Now, with one tap you can expand the whole thing into a vertical menu. Elegant.

There’s some stuff in MacOS 26 Tahoe I already don’t like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall my first impression of Liquid Glass on MacOS is good too. It’s fun, and lots of little details are nice — joyful and useful in an old-school Mac way.

Tahoe Flips the Finder Icon ★

Stephen Hackett, noting the biggest news of the day:

Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed. […]

The Big Sur Finder icon has been with us ever since, and I hope Apple reverses course here.

I’m obviously joking about this being the biggest news of the day, but it really does feel just plain wrong to swap the dark/light sides. The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.

Sunday, 8 June 2025

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025: Tuesday at 7pm PT in San Jose ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): Indeed
Price: $50

A different type of show this year, and I’m excited for it. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

An Eve of WWDC Spitball Theory on the Rumored New ‘Games’ App ★

Filipe Espósito, in a scoop for 9to5Mac all the way back in October:

9to5Mac has learned details about the new project from reliable sources familiar with the matter. The new app combines functionality from the App Store and Game Center in one place. The gaming app is not expected to replace Game Center. In fact, it will integrate with the user’s Game Center profile.

According to our sources, the app will have multiple tabs, including a “Play Now” tab, a tab for the user’s games, friends, and more. In Play Now, users will find editorial content and game suggestions. The app will also show things like challenges, leaderboards, and achievements. Games from both the App Store and Apple Arcade will be featured in the new store.

Even before Mark Gurman corroborated this report last week, I’ve had a spitball theory about what it might mean. Perhaps this is about more than having one app (Games) for finding and installing games, and another (App Store) for finding and installing apps. It could signal that Apple is poised to establish different policies for apps and games. Like, what if games still use the longstanding 70/30 commission split (with small business developers getting 85/15), but non-game apps get a new reduced rate? Say, 80/20 or even 85/15 right off the top, with small business developers and second-year subscriptions going to 90/10?

Having separate store apps for apps and games would help establish the idea that games and apps are two entirely different markets. Thus: two different stores?

Update: MG Siegler offered the same spitball — back on May 28. Great minds think alike.

Breaking Down Why Apple TVs Are Privacy Advocates’ Go-To Streaming Device ★

Scharon Harding, writing at Ars Technica:

“Just disconnect your TV from the Internet and use an Apple TV box.”

That’s the common guidance you’ll hear from Ars readers for those seeking the joys of streaming without giving up too much privacy. Based on our research and the experts we’ve consulted, that advice is pretty solid, as Apple TVs offer significantly more privacy than other streaming hardware providers.

But how private are Apple TV boxes, really? Apple TVs don’t use automatic content recognition (ACR, a user-tracking technology leveraged by nearly all smart TVs and streaming devices), but could that change? And what about the software that Apple TV users do use — could those apps provide information about you to advertisers or Apple?

In this article, we’ll delve into what makes the Apple TV’s privacy stand out and examine whether users should expect the limited ads and enhanced privacy to last forever.

tvOS is perhaps Apple’s least-talked-about platform. (It surely has orders of magnitude more users than VisionOS, but VisionOS gets talked about because it’s so audacious.) But it might be their platform that’s the furthest ahead of its competition. Not because tvOS is insanely great, but it’s at least pretty good, and every other streaming TV platform seems to be in a race to make real the future TV interface from Idiocracy. It’s not just that they’re bad interfaces with deplorable privacy, it’s that they’re outright against the user.

Apple Researchers Publish Paper on the Limits of Reasoning Models (Showing That They’re Not Really ‘Reasoning’ at All) ★

Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar, from Apple’s Machine Learning Research team:

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. [...] Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counterintuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low-complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse. We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles. We also investigate the reasoning traces in more depth, studying the patterns of explored solutions and analyzing the models’ computational behavior, shedding light on their strengths, limitations, and ultimately raising crucial questions about their true reasoning capabilities.

The full paper is quite readable, but today was my travel day and I haven’t had time to dig in. And it’s a PDF so I couldn’t read it on my phone. (Coincidence or not that this dropped on the eve of WWDC?)

My basic understanding after a skim is that the paper shows, or at least strongly suggests, that LRMs don’t “reason” at all. They just use vastly more complex pattern-matching than LLMs. The result is that LRMs effectively overthink on simple problems, outperform LLMs on mid-complexity puzzles, and fail in the same exact way LLMs do on high-complexity tasks and puzzles.

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Saturday, 7 June 2025

Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 ★

From his family, on Atkinson’s Facebook page:

We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home in Portola Valley in his bed, surrounded by family. We will miss him greatly, and he will be missed by many of you, too. He was a remarkable person, and the world will be forever different because he lived in it. He was fascinated by consciousness, and as he has passed on to a different level of consciousness, we wish him a journey as meaningful as the one it has been to have him in our lives. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, stepson, stepdaughter, two brothers, four sisters, and dog, Poppy.

One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here’s another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons’s heart) with this kicker of a closing line: “I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.”

Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware. Atkinson’s genius dithering algorithm was my inspiration for the name of Dithering, my podcast with Ben Thompson. I find that effect beautiful and love that it continues to prove useful, like on the Playdate and apps like BitCam.

In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editors — Photoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard (“inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985”), the influence of which cannot be overstated.

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

Swift 6 Productivity in the Sudden Age of LLM-Assisted Programming ★

Kyle Hughes, in a brief thread on Mastodon last week:

At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. They are able to support all the way back to Android 10 (2019) with the latest features; we are targeting iOS 16 (2022) and have to make huge sacrifices (e.g Observable, parameter packs in generics on types). Swift 6 makes a mockery of LLMs. It is almost untenable.

This wasn’t the case in the 2010s. The quality and speed of implementation of every iOS app I have ever worked on, in teams of every size, absolutely cooked Android. [...] There has never been a worse time in the history of computers to launch, and require, fundamental and sweeping changes to languages and frameworks.

The problem isn’t necessarily inherent to the design of the Swift language, but that throughout Swift’s evolution Apple has introduced sweeping changes with each major new version. (Secondarily, that compared to other languages, a lower percentage of Swift code that’s written is open source, and thus available to LLMs for use in training corpuses.) Swift was introduced at WWDC 2014 (that one again) and last year Apple introduced Swift 6. That’s a lot of major version changes for a programming language in one decade. There were pros and cons to Apple’s approach over the last decade. But now there’s a new, and major con: because Swift 6 only debuted last year, there’s no great corpus of Swift 6 code for LLMs to have trained on, and so they’re just not as good — from what I gather, not nearly as good — at generating Swift 6 code as they are at generating code in other languages, and for other programming frameworks like React.

The new features in Swift 6 are for the better, but, in a group chat, my friend Daniel Jalkut described them to me as, “I think Swift 6 changed very little, but the little it changed has huge sweeping implications. Akin to the switch from MRR to ARC.” That’s a reference to the change in Objective-C memory management from manual retain/release (MRR) to automatic reference counting (ARC) back in 2011. Once ARC came out, no one wanted to be writing new code using manual retain/release (which was both tedious and a common source of memory-leak bugs). But if LLMs had been around in 2011/2012, they’d only have been able to generate MRR Objective-C code because that’s what all the existing code they’d been trained on used.

I’m quite certain everyone at Apple who ought to be concerned about this is concerned about it. The question is, do they have solutions ready to be announced next week? This whole area — language, frameworks, and tooling in the LLM era — is top of mind for me heading into WWDC next week.

Thomas Ptacek: ‘My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts’ ★

Thomas Ptacek:

LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.

Think of anything you wanted to build but didn’t. You tried to home in on some first steps. If you’d been in the limerent phase of a new programming language, you’d have started writing. But you weren’t, so you put it off, for a day, a year, or your whole career.

I can feel my blood pressure rising thinking of all the bookkeeping and Googling and dependency drama of a new project. An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. That dopamine hit is why I code.

Ptacek says he mostly writes in Go and Python, and his essay doesn’t even mention Swift. But the whole essay is worth keeping in mind ahead of WWDC. There is no aspect of the AI revolution where Apple, right now today, is further behind than agentic LLM programming. (Swift Assist, announced and even demoed last year at WWDC, would have been a first step in this direction, but it never shipped, even in beta.)

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

A Long Lost Never-Published DF Post From 2014 ★

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 drafts feature in Movable Type — my drafts are stored locally as text files in BBEdit or unpublished posts in MarsEdit. I didn’t recall ever saving a draft in Movable Type, but, I thought to myself, I probably did it from my phone — which is the one device where I do publish and edit posts through the MT web interface because (to my knowledge) there’s no equivalent of MarsEdit for iOS.

It was a Linked List post pointing to Bob Lefsetz’s reaction to the then-new Beats acquisition by Apple for $3 billion, which was considered a lot of money for an acquisition at the time. The blockquote wasn’t fully Markdown-formatted yet — which is sort of tedious for me on the phone, but a single keyboard shortcut in either BBEdit or MarsEdit on my Mac. That’s probably why I left it as a draft. So, just now, I finished the formatting, and changed it from draft to published. Voila — a post I wrote on 1 June 2014 that hadn’t been published until a few minutes ago. I suspect many of you will think Lefsetz’s 2014 remarks on Tim Cook ring more true today than they did then. Others (I’m more in this camp) look at Lefsetz’s 2014 remarks as more than a little absurd — the only mark Jimmy Iovine left at Apple was the record for being the least prepared executive ever to appear on stage in a keynote. He was like Biden at the debate up there.

Lending strong credence to my theory that this forgotten draft was created on my phone is that 1 June 2014 was the Sunday before WWDC 2014, when I’d have been travelling, and thus using my phone for posting. Funny coincidence that I happened to notice it today, on the cusp of WWDC 2025.

You Can Recharge Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack Without a Lightning Cable ★

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 cleverness, Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack supports another cool feature: when attached to your phone, you can plug the charging cable into the phone, and after the phone gets to 100 percent charge, the phone will recharge the connected battery pack. So, if you own a MagSafe Battery Pack, you can recharge it even if you don’t have a Lightning cable handy. Just attach it to your iPhone and plug your USB-C cable into the phone, not the battery pack. I’m not aware of any other battery packs that support this.

That said, I still keep that one Lightning cable in my travel bag for the MagSafe Battery Pack because I want to be able to charge it whenever I want. Like, say, if I want to leave it behind, recharging, while I go elsewhere with my iPhone. Also, I like using the MagSafe Battery Pack as my bedside MagSafe charger. I like being able to check my phone from bed without worrying about a cable. In fact, I use one of my MagSafe Battery Packs as my bedside charger at home, not just while travelling.

Such a great little device. Really hope they make a sequel.

Turns Out, Since 2023, You Can Use WhatsApp Across Multiple Phones ★

WhatsApp, on their official blog back in April 2023:

Last year, we introduced the ability for users globally to message seamlessly across all their devices, while maintaining the same level of privacy and security.

Today, we’re improving our multi-device offering further by introducing the ability to use the same WhatsApp account on multiple phones.

A feature highly requested by users, now you can link your phone as one of up to four additional devices, the same as when you link with WhatsApp on web browsers, tablets and desktops. Each linked phone connects to WhatsApp independently, ensuring that your personal messages, media, and calls are end-to-end encrypted, and if your primary device is inactive for a long period, we automatically log you out of all companion devices.

When I wrote about WhatsApp finally shipping for iPad earlier this week, I mentioned that you couldn’t use a secondary phone as a linked device to your primary phone. That used to be true, but obviously, I missed that this changed two years ago. Glad to know it. I’ve already added my Android burner and my spare iPhone that I use for summer iOS betas. WhatsApp has a support document on linking devices that explains the somewhat hidden way you do this with a secondary phone. My thanks to several readers who pointed me to this.

This makes it seem all the more spiteful, though, that Meta didn’t allow the iPhone version of WhatsApp to run on iPads (like they do with the still-iPhone-only Instagram app). I heard from a little birdie this week — second- or maybe even third-hand, so take it with a grain of salt — that Meta had this WhatsApp for iPad version ready to go for a while, and has been more or less sitting on an iPad version of Instagram, as a couple negotiating chits with Apple. Negotiating for what, I don’t know. But if that’s true, perhaps some (but definitely not all) of the ice has thawed between the two companies. I don’t see it happening, but it sure would get a big audience response if Instagram for iPad got some sort of announcement during the WWDC keynote, perhaps as part of an “iPadOS is now a fuller, more complete, computing experience than ever” segment.

One other oddity I encountered, when adding my Android phone as a linked device: by design, there is no way to sign out of WhatsApp on your primary iOS or Android device. If you are signed in to WhatsApp using another phone number, the only way to sign out on that device and then set it up as a linked device to your primary WhatsApp account is to delete WhatsApp from your phone and reinstall it. Weird.

Friday, 6 June 2025

Markdown Support in Windows Notepad ★

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge:

“The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language,” explains Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft’s Windows inbox apps. “You can switch between formatted Markdown and Markdown syntax views in the view menu or by selecting the toggle button in the status bar at the bottom of the window.”

Since Notepad is usually used with plain text, you can also easily clear all formatting from the formatting toolbar or from the edit menu in the app. If you’re not a fan of the lightweight formatting options, you can also fully disable this new support in the Notepad app settings. [...]

Like I wrote in my Notepad newsletter earlier this week, it’s amazing that Microsoft barely touched Notepad for decades, and now it’s gone from basic log file reader to writing messages itself. A lot of Notepad’s new features have arrived since Microsoft decided to remove WordPad from Windows, after nearly 30 years.

This is getting ridiculous.

Take That CIRP Survey on Apple Customer Device Ownership With a Giant Grain of Salt ★

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 ones, to say the least. Jeff Johnson pointed out on Mastodon that back in 2023, CIRP published a survey that claimed the Mac Pro accounted for 43 percent of all Mac desktop sales, with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio each accounting for only 4 percent each. That’s just bananas. That’s not like maybe wrong, that’s not gotta be a little wrong, that’s how could anyone publish this? wrong. It’s hard to believe anything from CIRP after they published that.

Gurman’s Mega-Spoiler Report on Monday’s WWDC Keynote ★

I think it’s become tradition for Mark Gurman to run a mega spoiler report on the WWDC keynote the Friday before. Don’t read it if you don’t want to see a lot of genuine spoilers. But here are a few non-spoilers:

The AI changes will be surprisingly minor and are unlikely to impress industry watchers, especially considering the rapid pace of innovation by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI.

I don’t know a single person who will be surprised if Apple’s in-house AI changes are minor. Literally, not one. The only way for Apple to surprise on the AI front would be for the improvements to be major. Who’s the guy who will be surprised by underwhelming advances on the AI front from Apple next week? Artie MacStrawman?

While there has been speculation that the app icons will be round to match the style on the Apple Watch and Vision Pro, the shape is staying largely the same on the iPhone and iPad.

Always beware the passive voice. “There has been speculation”? It was Gurman’s own report, back in March, that left some with the decided impression that Apple was making icons circular across all platforms under the nonsensical argument that users find it jarring to see differently-shaped icons on different devices. Gurman, back in March:

A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another. [...]

VisionOS differs from iOS and macOS in the use of circular app icons, a simplified approach to windows, translucent panels for navigation, and a more prominent use of 3D depth and shadows.

My guess is that if Apple does go with circular icons across all platforms next week (which I sure hope they don’t because that seems dumb), Gurman will take credit for calling it back in March, despite writing today that “the shape is staying largely the same”. Heads, Gurman wins. Tails, Gurman doesn’t lose.

Back to today’s mega-spoiler report:

The Camera app will be revamped with a focus on simplicity. Apple has added several new photo and video-taking options in recent years — including spatial video, panorama and slow-motion recording — and that’s made today’s interface a bit clunky. In iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, Apple is rethinking the approach.

I can’t recall seeing Gurman ever, not even once, crediting anyone else for scooping anything first. Jon Prosser made an entire video about the supposed new Camera app design all the way back on January 17, replete with animated mockups of how it will look and work. (Looks pretty clever to me, starting with a back-to-basics simple focus on two main modes — Photo or Video — and putting all other sub-modes under those.)

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Friday, 6 June 2025

CIRP Survey Suggests 78 Percent of All Apple Customers Own an iPad ★

Ryan Christoffel, writing at 9to5Mac regarding a paywalled survey report from CIRP:

CIRP recently performed a survey of Apple customers to get a sense of how the company’s three tentpole products — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — are performing. One focus was on understanding the power of Apple’s ecosystem, as determined by customers who own multiple products.

Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz write at CIRP:

iPhone remains the most dominant product, with 94% of recent Apple customers owning one. iPads are next, with 78% owning one. Mac computers have much smaller penetration, at 36% of recent customers.

74% of customers, virtually all iPad owners, own an iPad and an iPhone. Only 30% own all three, as that number is limited by Apple customers’ relative lack of Macs.

Different people may draw their own conclusions on the data, but for me, the most interesting element is easily the iPad’s popularity.

I don’t find this surprising. But if it’s true, it truly shows just how much longer people hold onto their iPads than their iPhones. If the average customer replaced their iPad as frequently as they do their iPhone, you’d expect Apple’s iPad revenue to be remarkably close to their iPhone revenue. But they’re not close. In their most recent quarter, iPhone revenue was 7× iPad revenue. And Mac revenue was slightly ahead of iPad revenue — but that might be more a function of average selling prices being so much higher for Macs than iPads, not replacement cycles.

Update: It goes without saying that any consumer survey is only as good as the surveyor. But CIRP, in particular, has posted some dubious ones, to say the least. Jeff Johnson pointed out on Mastodon that back in 2023, CIRP published a survey that claimed the Mac Pro accounted for 43 percent of all Mac desktop sales, with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio each accounting for only 4 percent each. That’s just bananas. That’s not like maybe wrong, that’s not gotta be a little wrong, that’s how could anyone publish this? wrong. It’s hard to believe anything from CIRP after they published that.

Thursday, 5 June 2025

Neven Mrgan on Why Skeuomorphism Is Like a Classic Car ★

Jake Schumacher, director of the 2017 documentary App: The Human Story, sent me a note that Sebastiaan de With’s post this week, “Physicality: The New Age of UI” (my thoughts here), reminded him of a clip from the movie where Neven Mrgan compared Skeuomorphic design to classic cars from the 1940s and ’50s. So true. If you’ve got two and a half minutes to spare, watch this.

The Comma That Might Cost Apple Billions in Europe ★

Jérôme Marin, writing at Cafétech:

The disagreement between Apple and Brussels centers on Article 5.4. In its English version, the article states that the gatekeeper — the term used by the Commission for the seven major tech companies subject to the DMA — “shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions […], and to conclude contracts with those end users.”

This lengthy sentence creates ambiguity: what exactly does “free of charge” apply to? Apple claims it only applies to “communicate” and “promote,” meaning the right to insert redirect links in an app. But not to “conclude contracts,” meaning making purchases. Based on that, Apple argues it can still charge commissions on those external transactions.

The European Commission interprets it differently: contract conclusion must also be free of charge. It relies on the comma before the phrase “and to conclude contracts,” turning the sentence into an “enumeration.” “That ‘free of charge’ applies to all that is being enumerated after”, it explains in its detailed decision sent to Apple as part of the €500 million fine, which was made public last week.

“In other words, the price for app developers to pay [for external purchases] is zero,” writes the Commission. However, its case could be weakened by inconsistencies in the French and German translations of the text, which it acknowledges are “ambiguous.” Still, “other linguistic versions leave no room for interpretation,” notes Brussels.

I understand why EU laws are published in multiple languages, but it’s wild that that can create possible loopholes like this. But it seems rather obvious what the EC’s intention was here, and it wasn’t for Apple to charge commissions — let alone steep commissions — on transactions that take place outside the app after users tap a link to the web. If I were one of Apple’s lawyers, I’d argue about the placement of a comma too, and what it implies about what “free of charge” applies to. But the EC’s intentions are obvious. It’s not really about a comma.

On this particular issue Apple seems to be facing the exact same pushback in the EU as in the US: their anti-steering rules in the App Store aren’t legal.

9to5Mac on The Talk Show Livestream Returning to Theater for VisionOS ★

Nice write-up from Zac Hall at 9to5Mac:

Theater for visionOS premiered a year ago with a clever software launch campaign: exclusively streaming John Gruber’s The Talk Show post-WWDC event live with 3D video.

The Apple Vision Pro app has continued to mature since its debut, adding extensive Plex support and a full-blown immersive planetarium that now hosts the 2025 SXSW award-winning “Resolution” music experience.

Next up, Theater is returning as the exclusive home to The Talk Show Live event stream.

First, as Hall points out, if you haven’t heard or thought about the Theater app for VisionOS since my show last year, there is now a ton of interesting immersive content there. Second, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read commentary, or listened to people on podcasts, wonder why there are hardly any “just make it feel like you’re there, in the audience, for the show” immersive shows for VisionOS.

That’s what Sandwich Vision did last year, and is doing even better this year, with my show. I thought it was kind of odd that it was me, of all people, and my once-a-year, not-that-big-a-deal-outside-the-Apple-nerd-media-world show, who was the first to livestream an immersive show experience for VisionOS. Maybe there were others first for Meta’s low-res headsets, but if there were, I’m not aware of them. My show last year really might have been first for any immersive headset.

Afterward, I figured by this year, while it might not be commonplace — simply because Vision Pro ownership is, you know, not that high — it wouldn’t be unusual. But it still is. I honestly don’t get why that is. Anyway, like I wrote in the previous post, if you can make the show, you really should attend. But if you can’t make the show, you definitely should watch live in Theater.

Theater Announces Immersive Livestream of The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025 ★

Sandwich Vision:

Theater, the premier platform for spatial media, cinema and events on Apple Vision Pro, is proud to announce the immersive livestream of The Talk Show Live from WWDC on Tuesday, June 10, 2025.

Following last year’s groundbreaking first-ever immersive livestream of the event from John Gruber, host of The Talk Show podcast and author of the renowned Apple blog Daring Fireball, Theater returns with an enhanced experience that builds on a full year of platform development and partnerships.

“When we launched Theater last year to showcase The Talk Show Live, we weren’t just experimenting — we were inviting people to experience a new kind of immersion. Bringing Apple executives into spatial media wasn’t just a world first; it was a glimpse of how shared experiences can transcend screens,” said Adam Lisagor, CEO and founder of Sandwich Vision. “This year, we’re not just adding features — we’re refining how people can feel connected, curious, and delighted together, again and again. Our goal is to make presence and participation the new standard for special events, where technology fades away, and what remains is the shared magic of being there.”

The livestream will be available in both 2D and 3D formats. While the 2D stream will be offered free of charge, the premium 3D immersive experience will be available for $11.99 for tickets purchased in advance, increasing to $14.99 on the day of the event. All ticket holders will receive permanent access to a pristine 6K version of the event to watch forever.

Make your purchases right in the Theater app. I’m snarky in the press release linked above, but I actually thought doing this last year was incredibly cool. Afterwards it was like I got to watch myself perform my own show, which was a lot weirder than just watching myself on regular video.

If you can make the show, you really should attend. Everyone tells me it’s fun. But if you can’t make the show, you definitely should watch live in Theater.

Judge Denies Apple’s Appeal; Ordered to Keep Allowing Link-Outs to the Web in the U.S. App Store ★

Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge:

In April, a federal judge demanded that Apple begin allowing web links, cease restricting how links are formatted, and enable developers to offer external payment options without giving the company a cut of their revenue. Apple promptly appealed and requested that the order be put on hold until the legal proceedings were finished.

But an appeals court has now denied Apple’s emergency request to block the order. The court said it was “not persuaded” that blocking the order was appropriate after weighing Apple’s chances to succeed on appeal, whether Apple would be irreparably harmed, whether other parties would be hurt if the order is halted, and what supports the public interest.

The rejection bodes poorly for Apple’s chance of overturning the order, which stems from a lawsuit by Epic Games.

Here’s the denial from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, nearly in its entirety, omitting only legal citations:

Apple’s Emergency Motion Under Circuit Rule 27-3 for a Partial Stay Pending Appeal is DENIED. In deciding whether to impose a stay, we consider: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.” Apple “bears the burden of showing that the circumstances justify an exercise of [our] discretion.” After reviewing the relevant factors, we are not persuaded that a stay is appropriate.

The earliest this might get overturned, it seems to me, is the end of this year, but I get the feeling this injunction is here to stay.

Marco Arment on Apple’s Decision to Decline Appearing on The Talk Show Live From WWDC ★

Marco Arment, moved to write his first blog post in 11 months:

For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in the meantime.)

Maybe Apple has good reasons. Maybe not. We’ll see what their WWDC PR strategy looks like in a couple of weeks.

In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way.

I hope that’s either not the case, or it doesn’t stay the case for long.

They’ve invited members of the media to a screening of F1 The Movie Tuesday at 7:00pm in the Steve Jobs Theater. Thankfully, my press invitation from Apple has it marked as “optional”, because I have a conflict.

Wednesday, 4 June 2025

9to5Mac Reports Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, You’ll Be Unsurprised to Know, I Have Thoughts ★

Marcus Mendes, in a piece at 9to5Mac with multiple spoilers for next week’s keynote:

Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years. Granted, this is a niche feature, but as a fierce participant in the niche, I can confirm: this is huge.

When this story first started spreading this morning, it was getting repeated as Notes “gaining Markdown support”, which implied something like Bear or Obsidian, where you can type Markdown syntax characters while editing, and perhaps optionally see the Markdown syntax in your notes. “Markdown notes app” is really like a class of notes apps unto itself.

Some people find this surprising, but I personally don’t want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.” Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick’s, from the documentation for Pollen: “Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML.”

The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That’s not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown “everywhere”. It’s quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a “Markdown editor”, even as an option. It’s trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn’t be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes.

Apple Notes offers a great WYSIWYG rich text editing interface that works great on an iPhone and even better on a Mac, which I think is exactly appropriate. Particularly clever are the limited formatting options, where you don’t pick a font per se, but rather only from a set of predefined styles, like headings, lists, and block quote. It’s not nerdy at all. You certainly shouldn’t need to “preview” (let alone keep a separate preview view open side-by-side with your editing view), nor switch between modes for editing and viewing. That’s the Macintosh way. (But that’s why I think Apple Notes’s use of hashtags, rather than real tokenized tags like in the Finder, was an enormous mistake on Apple’s part. Real tokenized tags can contain spaces (so a multi-word tag can just be “Words Written Naturally” not “#WordsCrammedTogether”) and don’t need to be prefixed with an ugly, nerdy-looking # character. Notes using hashtags is like if the Finder disallowed spaces and uppercase letters in filenames.)

But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude — PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.

Apple Might Release an iPhone ‘Air’ Battery Case, But What They Ought to Release Is an Updated MagSafe Battery Pack ★

Wayne Ma, reporting last month at The Information (a paywalled website so obnoxious that they force $300/year subscribers to click through an article-blocking popover pitching them on upgrading to a $500/year subscription), and summarized here by MacRumors:

However, the smaller size of the new thin model will require compromises to its capabilities. The device will contain only a single speaker instead of the two speakers that Apple’s other phones usually have, one rear camera lens instead of the three in Apple’s flagship phones, and reduced battery life. Internal testing shows that battery life for the thin model will fall short of that of previous iPhones. The percentage of users who can go a single day without recharging the thin phone will be between 60% and 70%. For other models, that metric is between 80% and 90%, one of the people said.

To solve this, Apple is developing an optional accessory — a phone case meant for the thin model that also contains a battery pack, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It sort of goes without saying that the super-thin iPhone will have less battery life. How could it be otherwise? If 60–70% of users can still get through the day on a charge while using it, that sounds like it’s the right time for Apple to try such a phone. People who currently run their phones down to the red each day aren’t going to think “Hey, maybe I should try this crazy thin iPhone.”

What disappoints me is Ma’s reporting of an iPhone Air-only battery case from Apple. What I very much want Apple to make is a sequel to its amazing MagSafe Battery Pack with a Lightning connector that debuted in 2020 but was discontinued in 2023 (the year that the iPhones 15 switched from Lightning to USB-C). I’ve got two of these and they’re still, by far, my favorite iPhone battery packs. 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.

There are a zillion third-party “magnetic” (but not “MagSafe”) battery packs that work with iPhones, and most of them have larger batteries than Apple’s. But part of what makes Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack great is that it’s so small, and shaped so comfortably. I don’t need a magnetic battery pack that tries to double my iPhone’s battery life. I just need like 1.5× on occasional phone-heavy days (like next Monday’s WWDC keynote), and Apple’s does just that. No third-party magnetic battery pack I’ve tried comes even close to attaching as securely to the back of the iPhone as Apple’s. And Apple’s has special integration with iOS, which gives you a cool animation on the screen when it’s first attached, and updates the battery life of the pack in the Battery widget alongside the iPhone’s own battery. (Apparently some newer third-party packs do now show the full-screen animation when first attached, but none yet integrate with the Battery widget — someone better call the European Commission.) Most importantly, with Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack, iOS is smart, and doesn’t keep sucking juice when the phone has recharged up to 70% or so. By only slurping juice when it’s more efficient to do so, you get more effective battery life out of a noticeably slimmer battery back. It’s just so much better than any other battery pack I’ve tried.

This supposed iPhone “Air” seems like the perfect time to bring back the MagSafe Battery Pack, this time with USB-C — and unlike a model-specific case, it’d work with all MagSafe iPhones, not just the Air. (Sorry, 16e owners.) See also:

• Chance Miller, writing back in November for 9to5Mac: “Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack for iPhone Shouldn’t Have Been a One-And-Done Experiment”
• Steven Aquino, writing back in September while he was still Forbes contributor: “Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack Is Owed an Ode in Terms of Accessibility”

Meta and Yandex’s ‘Local Mess’ Exploit Seemingly Only Works on Android ★

Dan Goodin, writing at Ars Technica:

This abuse has been observed only in Android, and evidence suggests that the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica target only Android users. The researchers say it may be technically feasible to target iOS because browsers on that platform allow developers to programmatically establish localhost connections that apps can monitor on local ports.

In contrast to iOS, however, Android imposes fewer controls on local host communications and background executions of mobile apps, the researchers said, while also implementing stricter controls in app store vetting processes to limit such abuses. This overly permissive design allows Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica to send web requests with web tracking identifiers to specific local ports that are continuously monitored by the Facebook, Instagram, and Yandex apps. These apps can then link pseudonymous web identities with actual user identities, even in private browsing modes, effectively de-anonymizing users’ browsing habits on sites containing these trackers.

I’ll note that among the so-called “interoperability” requirements the European Commission is demanding of iOS is for third-party apps to run, unfettered, in the background, because some of Apple’s own first-party software obviously runs in the background. And I’ll further note that Apple made clear, back in its December 2024 report laying out its objections to the EC’s demands, that:

No company has made more interoperability requests of Apple than Meta. In many cases, Meta is seeking to alter functionality in a way that raises concerns about the privacy and security of users, and that appears to be completely unrelated to the actual use of Meta external devices, such as Meta smart glasses and Meta Quests.

This newly uncovered “Local Mess” exploit — which seemingly only works on Android — is exactly the sort of scheme Meta wants to pull on iOS: to track users across millions of websites while they justifiably believe their web browsing is sandboxed from all native apps.

Back to Goodin:

Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica are analytics scripts designed to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica are estimated to be installed on 5.8 million and 3 million sites, respectively.

Every one of the sites that includes these tracking scripts is complicit to some extent in the theft of hundreds of millions of Android users’ web browsing privacy.

Meta and Yandex Have Both Been De-Anonymizing Android Users’ Ostensibly Sandboxed Private Web Browsing Identifiers ★

A team of researchers has uncovered a scheme they’ve dubbed “Local Mess” — used by Meta since September 2024, and Russian search engine Yandex since 2017 (!) — to de-anonymize Android users’ web browsing across millions of websites that include Meta’s and Yandex’s respective tracking scripts. From their extensively detailed report:

These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands from the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica scripts embedded on thousands of web sites. These JavaScripts load on users’ mobile browsers and silently connect with native apps running on the same device through localhost sockets. As native apps access programmatically device identifiers like the Android Advertising ID (AAID) or handle user identities as in the case of Meta apps, this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.

This web-to-app ID sharing method bypasses typical privacy protections such as clearing cookies, Incognito Mode and Android’s permission controls. Worse, it opens the door for potentially malicious apps eavesdropping on users’ web activity. [...]

The entire flow of the _fbp cookie from web to native and the server is as follows:

1. The user opens the native Facebook or Instagram app, which eventually is sent to the background and creates a background service to listen for incoming traffic on a TCP port (12387 or 12388) and a UDP port (the first unoccupied port in 12580-12585). Users must be logged-in with their credentials on the apps.
2. The user opens their browser and visits a website integrating the Meta Pixel.
3. At this stage, websites may ask for consent depending on the website’s and visitor’s locations.
4. The Meta Pixel script sends the _fbp cookie to the native Instagram or Facebook app via WebRTC (STUN) SDP Munging.
5. The Meta Pixel script also sends the _fbp value in a request to https://www.facebook.com/tr along with other parameters such as page URL (dl), website and browser metadata, and the event type (ev) (e.g., PageView, AddToCart, Donate, Purchase).
6. The Facebook or Instagram apps receive the _fbp cookie from the Meta Pixel JavaScript running on the browser. The apps transmit _fbp as a GraphQL mutation to (https://graph[.]facebook[.]com/graphql) along with other persistent user identifiers, linking users’ fbp ID (web visit) with their Facebook or Instagram account.

The same day the researchers published this report, Meta stopped doing it.

I’ve said it before but not in a while: Meta is a criminal enterprise. What they’ve done here may not have broken any laws, but there certainly should be laws against it. And in terms of simple common sense, the entire elaborate scheme only exists to circumvent features in Android meant to prevent native apps from tracking you while you use your web browser. Saying it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t theft. It’s like the privacy equivalent of Trump’s cryptocurrency grift, which might not violate any current laws, but clearly exists as a bribery scheme.

Trump Administration’s ‘MAHA’ Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist ★

Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto, reporting last week for NOTUS (“News of The United States” — a seriously good up-and-coming national affairs publication):

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.

Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.

Shocking that these dipshits would generate their report with whatever came out of an LLM and not actually check — let alone, you know, read — the cited studies.

Joz Teases WWDC on X ★

Hard not to see the invitation and this new animation as a hint that the much-rumored UI redesign/refresh is, indeed, going to be glassy.

James Dyson Proves That Live On-Stage Demos Are Still the Best ★

Dyson:

Join James Dyson as he introduces the new Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones cleaner. Our latest, most advanced floorcare technology — now available in Japan.

Nine minutes, short and sweet. I watched the whole thing and loved it. If it had been pre-recorded, I bet I wouldn’t have gotten more than two or three minutes into it, even though the video would have been more polished. There’s just something compelling about a live demo, even when you’re watching on YouTube.

(The new PencilVac looks cool too, but it seems too good to be true. I’ll be interested to hear from reviewers whether it, uh, actually sucks or kinda sucks.)

Tuesday, 3 June 2025

One Week From Tonight: The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): Definitely, but keep in mind what I announced last week
Price: $50

I’ll have more to announce about the show soon, but one week out, I just want to remind everyone that tickets are on sale now, and selling at about the same pace as the last two years. (In 2018 and 2019, when WWDC was a real in-person conference in San Jose, tickets sold out almost instantaneously.)

Also: at least one sponsorship slot is still available. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to see me promote at the start of the show, shoot me an email.

‘Physicality: The New Age of UI’ ★

Sebastiaan de With, in a wonderfully-illustrated piece (a) examining, in detail, where iOS UI has been, and (b) speculating, with detailed mockups, where he thinks/hopes it’s about to go, starting at WWDC next week:

I’d like to imagine what could come next. Both by rendering some UI design of my own, and by thinking out what the philosophy of the New Age could be.

A logical next step could be extending physicality to the entirety of the interface. We do not have to go overboard in such treatments, but we can now have the interface inhabit a sense of tactile realism.

Philosophically, if I was Apple, I’d describe this as finally having an interface that matches the beautiful material properties of its devices. All the surfaces of your devices have glass screens. This brings an interface of a matching material, giving the user a feeling of the glass itself coming alive. [...]

I took some time to design and theorize what this would look like, and how it would work. For the New Design Language, it makes sense that just like on VisionOS, the material of interactivity is glass.

I hope, very much, that what Apple has been working on is along the lines of what de With has mocked up. It both looks great (and better than what we have now) and makes sense. I also agree with him that it would be a competitive advantage for Apple to establish a new visual design language that no existing design tools can create. You can’t make the sort of things de With is describing with Figma. Competitors could (and I guarantee will) superficially copy the look, but not the interactive responsiveness of lighting effects.

In a profound way, a UI language comprised of glossy and matte glass, running on phones and tablets that themselves are made of glossy and matte glass, would hark back to the early days of Mac OS X, when the “lickable” translucent Aqua UI theme felt of a piece with the colorful translucent plastic enclosures of the iMac, PowerMac, and iBook. Right down to the pinstripes. (Apple never did make an Aqua-style PowerBook along those lines, instead going straight from classic black plastic to the Titanium PowerBook G4, the styling of which augured the post-Aqua look-and-feel of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and the much-beloved 10.6 Snow Leopard.) I’ve been clamoring for buttons to look like buttons again ever since iOS 7.

But as much as I truly love de With’s mockups, they’re all for iOS. What I’m left unsettled by is my failure to imagine how this design language could be brought to the Mac. Macs aren’t made of glass; they’re all made of aluminum. But the main difference is that the way many of us use MacOS is with a lot of stacked windows atop each other. The last thing MacOS needs is more transparency/translucency than it already has. Some depth to its UI controls, though? That’s something MacOS is in almost desperate need of. A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a Mac UI theme where you can tell, instantly, whether a button is enabled or disabled or which item in a tabview controller is selected.

We’ll soon see.

Event Creation Still Largely Feels Like an Unsolved UI Problem ★

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 design work, shows you what it thinks you mean before you hit return to actually create the new event. Watch their screencast to see what I mean.

Four years ago I wrote a piece called “Deal With It”, about how some UIs feel like going uphill and some feel like going downhill. An uphill UI feels like you’re fighting against the app; a downhill UI makes it feel like the app is helping you along. The example I chose to illustrate my point was event creation in iCal (uphill, and steep) vs. 37signals’s Backpack (downhill). Fantastical is an even better downhill UI for event creation.

A friend texted me after my post earlier today, in which I wrote about Fantastical’s new AI-driven email forwarding service. My friend wrote that he does this sort of thing with ChatGPT frequently, using photos of event posters he sees on the street or screenshots from event images in Instagram, with a prompt like “Create a Google Calendar link for these.” He concluded, “IMO calendar event entry is one of the most tedious UI problems that we’ve never truly solved.”

I hadn’t revisited my 2007 “Deal With It” piece in a while, but I just re-read it, and it holds up. I still feel like the UIs that most annoy me are the ones that give me the most fields to deal with. I mention instant messaging vs. email a lot in the piece, coming out squarely on the side of IM for communicating with friends, even for things that I admit probably should have been an email. The predominant messaging platforms of 2007 are now long gone — AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. But those platforms lost only because they were surpassed, not because the basic idea was wrong. Messaging itself — iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, etc. — is a zillion times more popular today. I almost never today think “Maybe that should have been an email...” when I text a friend. There’s just so much less to deal with. Today it’s more likely that I’ll send someone an email and think to myself “I probably should have just texted them that...”

This is one way to frame the explosion in popularity of ChatGPT and its many competitors. They help you accomplish tasks that would feel far more tedious to do on your own than just telling them to do it for you with a sentence or two of plain English describing what you want done, perhaps including a photo or two. LLM chatbots are able to turn feels like pedalling uphill tasks — often just everyday ones — into feels like coasting downhill tasks.

Fantastical Now Supports Event Detection From Forwarded Emails ★

Flexibits:

Just forward emails to [email protected] from any email address linked with your Flexibits Account and Fantastical will convert them into events or tasks to quickly add to your calendar. After a few seconds you’ll see detected events appear in Fantastical where you can quickly add them as an event or task. [...]

Emails are processed by Flexibits servers and Google Cloud and then deleted immediately after they are processed. Emails are not used or retained by Flexibits or Google Cloud for AI training purposes.

Events that are detected in emails are stored on Flexibits servers and deleted when you add or discard them in Fantastical.

There are a lot of events in email messages that have always been easy to get into Fantastical (or any other calendar app) because they include an ICS file attachment. Like when I book a flight — I always get an email with an ICS attachment containing the flight details, and I just open that in Fantastical to import it. Forwarding that email to Fantastical would take longer than just opening the attachment. But what about a casual email from a friend or family member that doesn’t come with an attachment?

Here’s an example email I sent to myself from a sort of burner account I have for testing and for doing things like this.

From: Heywood Floyd <heywood••••••••@icloud.com>  
Subject: Party for Hal on Saturday  
Date: June 3, 2025 at 1:22:45 PM EDT  
To: John Gruber <••••••••@daringfireball.net>  

Party at my house is on this Saturday, 12-3 or so.
You don’t have to bring anything.

That was the entire email, which I deliberately wrote in a very casual way (e.g. “this Saturday” instead of an actual date, and “12-3” as the time, without an explicit “pm”). Forwarded to Fantastical’s new event detection address, well under a minute later I got the following suggested event notification from Fantastical on my Mac:

Title: Party for Hal at Heywood Floyd's house  
Location: Heywood Floyd's house  
Date: 7 June 2025, 12:00pm – 3:00pm  
Note: "You don't have to bring anything."

Also included in the Note field was a link to the original message in Mail.

In Apple Mail, Siri also suggested an event from the original email. After clicking “Add”, that event had the following details:

Title: Party with Floyd  
Location: «empty»  
Date: 7 June 2025, 12:00pm – 3:00pm  
Note: «empty»

Nothing in Siri’s auto-detected event was wrong. Both got the date and time right. Siri’s title is fine — in real life, I’d know what that meant. But Fantastical’s title is perfect — it’s a party for Hal, at Heywood’s house. And Siri doesn’t include anything in the Note field, not even a link back to the original message, so it would be up to my own memory to remember where the party was.

To be clear, Fantastical doesn’t just add these events to your calendar. It shows them as suggestions, and there’s a “Preview” button in addition to “Add”. I’ll still preview before adding, but using this service does seem like a decent timesaver for creating new events from casual emails.

Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs, Interviewed in the Financial Times ★

Matthew Garrahan, in the Financial Times:

Sir Jony Ive remembers the day in 1997 when he first met Laurene Powell Jobs, outside the house she shared with her late husband, Steve. [...]

“I was often at the house,” Ive says. “Certainly on the weekends,” says Powell Jobs, sitting across from him on a long table. Ive nods. “It feels to me like we grew up together,” he says. “We’ve gone through hard things and happy things...”

“... family and children and work,” says Powell Jobs.

“There’s that Freud quote,” Ive says. “All there is, is work and love. Love and work.”

On the device(s) Ive is spearheading development of at io:

Ive deftly dodges my attempts to get him to tell me what it is but hints he was motivated by a disillusionment with how our relationship with devices has evolved. “Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment,” he says. I’m guessing this includes screen addiction and the harms caused by social media. Whatever the device is, driving its design is “a sense of: we deserve better. Humanity deserves better.”

On Powell Jobs as the owner, committed to the cause, of a major US news publication:

The Signalgate story prompted a furious response from the US president, who called Goldberg a “sleazebag” before inviting him in for an interview weeks later. “It’s very important to emphasise that, despite having the majority ownership stake in The Atlantic, I’m involved in the business side and not the editorial side,” Powell Jobs says. “We feel very strongly that freedom of the press means they are free to write the truth as they find it, and follow a story as they find it. It’s not up to us to approve or disapprove.”

In the years after Steve Jobs’s death, while Ive still worked at Apple, I took note that at keynote events, Powell Jobs and Ive always sat next to each other. Always. The media seats are never all that close to the VIP seats in the first two rows, but both of them are rather easily identified by the backs of their heads. I observed, a few times, that in those anxious moments of prelude before a show, the two generally only chatted with each other. I know those first few post-Steve keynotes were emotional for Ive. But I can’t even imagine what they were like for Powell Jobs.

It always moved me to observe that they went through them together, almost literally leaning on each other in their seats.

---

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Monday, 2 June 2025

WhatsApp for iPad, Finally ★

WhatsApp:

As one of our biggest requests, we’re excited to announce that WhatsApp is now available on iPad.[...]

We’ve made WhatsApp for iPad ideal for multitasking so you can get more done. Take advantage of iPadOS multitasking features such as Stage Manager, Split View, and Slide Over to view multiple apps at once, so you can send messages while browsing the web, or research options for a group trip while on a call together. WhatsApp also works with your Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil.

One of the weird things about Meta’s companywide obstinate refusal to adapt its iOS apps for iPadOS is that for WhatsApp, they’ve had a fairly decent Mac app for years. Surely it was less work to adapt their iOS app for iPadOS than it was to create a passable Mac app using Catalyst.

Famously, Instagram doesn’t support iPad screen sizes. You can run and use the iPhone version of Instagram on iPads — and I’m guessing tens of millions of people do — but it’s the clumsy thing where it launches as an iPhone-sized window in the middle of the big iPad display, and you can hit the “double arrows” button to zoom the window to 2× size. You can also use Instagram via the web, on either Mac or iPad, and it’s a pretty full-featured app-like experience.

What was frustrating about WhatsApp’s lack of iPad support until now is that you just couldn’t use WhatsApp at all from an iPad, other than as a web app. Because of the way WhatsApp handles security, you’re really only able to sign in to one “primary” device at a time, and that device must be a phone. Then, what you do to use WhatsApp on other supported platforms is set up those other devices as “linked devices” from the WhatsApp app on your primary phone. WhatsApp still doesn’t let you use the same account from more than one phone, which is highly frustrating for those of us with somewhat unusual edge cases like writing reviews of new devices. WhatsApp’s phone apps — for both iOS and Android — can only serve as primary devices. There’s no way to use one phone as “primary” and use WhatsApp on a second phone as a linked device. I’d go nuts if iMessage worked that way. But that’s why, prior to Meta creating a proper iPad app for WhatsApp, you couldn’t just launch the iPhone app on iPad. [Update, 7 June: Turns out, WhatsApp added support for using phones as linked devices two years ago. We regret the error.]

Mark Gurman reported over the weekend that proper iPad support for Instagram is forthcoming too:

Fifteen years after the first iPad went on sale, WhatsApp is now on the tablet. And, yes, it’s just a precursor to the most highly anticipated iPad app ever: Instagram. I’m told that employees on the Meta Platforms Inc. campus are actively testing Instagram for the iPad and that development work is full steam ahead.

Script Debugger Retired ★

Mark Alldritt, Late Night Software:

The day has finally come. After 30 years of continuous development, Script Debugger has been retired and will no longer be available for sale. Please see this post for more information.

Over the last few months we have received a wonderful outpouring of well wishes and stories from our customers describing how Script Debugger has helped them over the years, via email and on our forum. [...]

Script Debugger is now a free download. Links to all versions of Script Debugger from 8.0 to 4.0, along with registration numbers, are available on the Downloads page. These free versions of Script Debugger are provided AS-IS and without warranty, maintenance or support.

Those seeking a version of Script Debugger for the Classic MacOS should go here.

That last paragraph speaks to what an incredible run this has been. 30 years ago was 1995 — which was so solidly in the classic Mac era that the OS was still named “System 7”, not “Mac OS 7”. I forget when I first started using Script Debugger, but it was definitely in the classic Mac era. The oldest license number I still have is for Script Debugger 3.0 in 2005, but I’d been using it for years at that point.

Script Debugger isn’t just a spectacularly good Mac developer tool. (Indispensable, I would say. A lot of the problems many scripters have with AppleScript aren’t just mitigated by using Script Debugger instead of Apple’s free Script Editor — they go away.) It has also always come with spectacularly thorough and exceedingly well-written documentation — a good user manual describes what a product does, but a great one also explains how to use it.

But even better than that, the product always fostered a community of users. You could email tech support for help and get world-class expert personal assistance, or, you could participate in their (still vibrant!) user forum. Late Night Software always was a small team — Mark and Shane Stanley for the last decade or so, big contributions from Matt Neuburg, and, for a long (but not long enough) while prior to that, Mark’s late wife Gerry Tubin — whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Macworld Expos of yesteryear. Late Night Software never felt like a “company” per se. It always felt like a team. They exemplified all of the ideals of the indie Mac developer community and culture. At this point, it’s fair to say Late Night Software helped define those ideals.

But all good things come to an end. I haven’t really spent much time thinking about “apps” retiring, even while at the top of their game, but here we are. To Mark and Shane, I offer my profound thanks and sincere congratulations. What a run. Script Debugger is going out on top.

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