By John Gruber

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M5 MacBook Pro Does Not Include a Charger in the Box in Europe ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U.S. and all other countries outside of Europe, the new MacBook Pro comes with Apple’s 70W USB-C Power Adapter, but European customers miss out.

Apple has gradually stopped including chargers with many products over the years — a decision it has attributed to its environmental goals.

In this case, an Apple spokesperson told French website Numerama’s Nicolas Lellouche that the decision to not include a charger with this particular MacBook Pro was made in anticipation of a European regulation that will require Apple to provide customers with the option to purchase certain devices without a charger in the box, starting in April.

I’m not sure why there’s no power adapter in the box in the UK (I double-checked). The cited regulation is for the EU, and the UK, rather famously, left the EU in 2020.

But, still, amazing stuff continues to happen in Europe.

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: ‘A Cartoonist’s Review of AI Art’ ★

Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes:

When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral — whatever.

Until I find out that it’s AI art.

Then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.

I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion about a work of art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. If you refuse to watch Woody Allen movies because of his personal life, that’s a choice, but you’re choosing not to watch some of the best movies that have ever been made.

Stanley Kubrick said, “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically. Or whether a movie was shot using digital cameras or on film. Or whether a novel was written using a computer or with pen and paper.

I think most “AI art” today completely sucks. But not because it was made using AI generation tools. It just sucks period. Good art is being made with AI tools, though, and more — much more — is coming.

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Wednesday, 15 October 2025

TiVo Stops Selling DVRs ★

Luke Bouma, writing for Cord Cutters:

In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of early October 2025, the company’s official website has scrubbed all references to its hardware DVR products, including the once-revered TiVo Edge models designed for cable subscribers and over-the-air antenna users. Visitors searching for these devices now encounter a streamlined catalog that omits any mention of physical recording hardware, signaling a complete withdrawal from the retail DVR market.

This move culminates decades of gradual decline for TiVo’s hardware ambitions, which peaked in the early 2000s when the brand became synonymous with effortless time-shifting of television programming. Launched in 1999, TiVo’s DVRs introduced features like one-touch recording, commercial skipping, and intuitive search capabilities that made traditional TV schedules feel obsolete. At its zenith, the company boasted millions of subscribers, forcing cable providers and networks to adapt to empowered viewers who could pause live broadcasts or binge-watch at will. The TiVo Edge, introduced in 2021 as a hybrid device supporting both cable cards and streaming, represented the final evolution of this hardware legacy, blending OTA tuners with 4K support and expanded storage options. Yet, even as it garnered praise for superior interface design and reliability, sales dwindled amid the cord-cutting revolution.

The writing has been on the wall for years. We’ve been a TiVo house for 25 years, but their hardware has gotten worse over the years. I forget what our second-to-last TiVo model was, but it died in 2021, and we bought a TiVo Edge. The Edge was often unreliable, and sometimes needed weekly reboots to keep working. (System software updates eventually fixed that.) But the hardware failed this summer. We’d only had it four years.

And, the Edge system software UI was a disaster, and a huge regression from the old TiVo interface. Almost everything was worse in the new “modern” TiVo interface from the old one: navigating shows you’d already recorded, the live-right-now TV guide, the interface for setting up a show to record — all of that went from really good and intuitive to clunky and confusing and slow. The one and only thing our TiVo Edge remained excellent at was playback. Fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing — nothing else compares to TiVo for that. Even Apple’s own TV app on an Apple TV box doesn’t fast-forward or rewind with anything close to the precision and low latency TiVo’s devices have always offered. My first TiVo from 25 years ago had better fast-forward and rewind than anything on Apple TV (let alone other, lesser streaming boxes) today.

But the overall TiVo experience has been so bad — and getting worse — for so long that I’m not sad at all that they’re getting out of the game. TiVo’s one job was to provide a best-of-breed experience and they lost the plot on that a decade ago. Fuck ’em.

‘Halo Fund Announces Strategic Secondary Investment in 1Password’ ★

Halo Fund:

Halo Fund, a new $1 billion growth fund founded by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney, today announced a strategic secondary investment in 1Password, a leader in identity security and pioneer of Extended Access Management. Halo Fund is joined in this investment by legendary technology leaders, including Flume Ventures with Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy and former Zscaler Chief Strategy Officer Manoj Apte. This transaction underscores strong demand from innovators and investors to join 1Password’s journey.

Well I’m sure this will halt 1Password’s descent into enterprise/cross-platform shittiness.

Tuesday, 14 October 2025

‘How to Turn Liquid Glass Into a Solid Interface’ ★

Adam Engst, at TidBITS:

Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each.

Comprehensive, illustrated overview of the various Accessibility settings (and, on MacOS 26 Tahoe, hidden command-line defaults settings) that let you adjust the transparency and contrast of Liquid Glass across the various Apple OS 26 interfaces. A useful guide for today — and, I bet, a useful look back at the first versions of Liquid Glass for the future.

‘Looking for the Red Flags in Apple’s Formula 1 TV Deal’ ★

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

The entire point of a streaming-only product is that once you’re off traditional TV, you can go beyond the single stream and provide interactive options. The whole point of streaming TV, especially sports, should be that you can leave the flat video stream behind and build something cool using software.

That is, by the way, what F1 TV Pro is: A sophisticated bit of software that merges track data with multiple cameras to let viewers choose how they want to watch races. It’s absolutely the product that Apple should aspire to build, or co-opt, in this deal.

I understand that Formula 1 owner Liberty Media is reluctant to lose a profit center, but if Apple’s paying them an extra $50 million, isn’t that the proper trade-off? Also, working with Apple in the U.S. could be part of a longer-term tech partnership between F1 and Apple that could extend worldwide.

I don’t really care about Apple obtaining sports streaming rights if all they’re going to do is stream a traditional linear broadcast of the games/events/races. I want to see Apple do the Apple thing and think deeply about what a software-based broadcast can be and offer — and then create it. So, to me, Apple’s Friday Night Baseball has been a wash. It’s a good broadcast (that, rumors suggest, may be coming to an end), but it’s just a good traditional baseball broadcast. It could be on any streaming service. The only Apple-y aspects are the designs and typography of the on-screen graphics and scorebug. I want something like F1 TV Pro, but for baseball — and eventually, for all sports.

Monday, 13 October 2025

Apple Renames ‘Apple TV+’ to ‘Apple TV’ ★

At the bottom of Apple’s press release announcing that F1 The Movie will be available for streaming on December 12:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity. Ahead of its global streaming debut on Apple TV, the film continues to be available for purchase on participating digital platforms, including the Apple TV app, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango at Home and more.

About Apple TV

Apple TV is available on the Apple TV app in over 100 countries and regions, on over 1 billion screens, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro, Mac, popular smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Sony, VIZIO, TCL and others, Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles, and at tv.apple.com, for $12.99 per month with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers.

In some ways, I get it. Like, if you’re telling someone how much you enjoy Slow Horses and they ask how to watch it, it’s more natural and conversational to just say “It’s on Apple TV”. That’s what most people say. That’s what I say — and as part of my job, I completely understand the difference between Apple TV the device, Apple TV the (free) app, and Apple TV+ the (paid) streaming service.

But right there in Apple’s own “About Apple TV” description, you see just how overused “Apple TV” now is. You can watch Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV — the paid service in the free app on the set-top box. But you can watch any streaming service you want on the box, in that service’s own app. But many of those services are also available in the Apple TV app. And the Apple TV streaming service is also available on just about all other popular set-top hardware platforms. So you don’t need an Apple TV to watch Apple TV. It’s a bit like Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First” routine.

Apple Announces the End-of-Life for Clips ★

Apple Support:

The Clips app is no longer being updated, and will no longer be available for download for new users as of October 10, 2025. You can continue to use Clips on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 or earlier.

Clips is such an interesting story. It really was a great app. Back in 2017, when version 2.0 arrived (just six months after 1.0), I described it as “the single best example of a productivity app designed for iOS”. I stand by that. Clips was a very ambitious app that really pushed the state of the art in iOS UI design forward in so many ways. The general knock on iOS has always been that it’s a platform for content consumption, not creation. Clips was all about creation.

But, for as many great ideas as Clips contained (and debuted), it clearly never clicked with the public. Most people — even just only counting people who create and share edited videos to social media — probably have never even heard of Clips. There was something essential missing: a use case. Edits, Meta’s new-this-year video editing app for mobile, has a clear use case: it’s meant for editing videos destined for Meta’s popular social media networks. Clips had no clear target destination. It could have, but never did.

The World’s Largest, Most Disruptive Botnet Is Exploiting Compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) Devices ★

Brian Krebs:

The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.

Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide.

I guess those people who were declaring a decade ago that the Internet of Things would change the world were right.

Before Taking the Guns Out of the Bond Posters, Amazon Prime Bowdlerized the Poster for ‘Full Metal Jacket’ ★

I missed this story back in 2024, but it’s the same infuriating impulse toward infantilization as with the Bond posters this month. Amazon restored the correct poster art for Full Metal Jacket, but they didn’t learn the lesson: don’t fuck with art.

Let’s Check in on the Mad King’s Spiral Into Dementia ★

The president of the United States, yesterday on his blog:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

No president, of course, can be expected to remember everything that happened during his four-year term. But Trump, of course, was still president on January 6, and the events that day were — to say the least — historically significant. The entire point of the January 6 insurrection — for his role in which, Trump was impeached — was to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president on January 20.

The man is obviously unwell.

Saturday, 11 October 2025

Drata ★

My thanks to Drata for once again sponsoring DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Apple Has Indefinitely Postponed Jessica Chastain’s Apple TV+ Thriller ‘The Savant’, for Political Reasons ★

Nellie Andreeva, reporting for Deadline back on September 23:

The release of Apple TV+’s The Savant has been put on hold. The decision comes three days before the thriller starring Jessica Chastain was slated to premiere on the streamer Sept. 26. No new date has been set.

“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone The Savant,” an Apple TV+ spokesperson said in a statement to Deadline. “We appreciate your understanding and look forward to releasing the series at a future date.”

The streamer would not elaborate on the reasons for the last-minute change but The Savant’s subject matter is believed to be behind it, with the storyline about preventing extremist attacks and some of the imagery considered possibly triggering following the Sept. 10 assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. The series includes a sniper in action and the bombing of a government building among other acts of violence.

Jessica Chastain, in a post on Instagram later that same day:

I want to say how much I value my partnership with Apple. They’ve been incredible collaborators and I deeply respect their team. That said, I wanted to reach out and let you know that we’re not aligned on the decision to pause the release of The Savant. [...]

I’ve never shied away from difficult subjects, and while I wish this show wasn’t so relevant, unfortunately it is. The Savant is about the heroes who work every day to stop violence before it happens, and honoring their courage feels more urgent than ever. While I respect Apple’s decision to pause the release for now, I remain hopeful the show will reach audiences soon. Until then, I’m wishing safety and strength for everyone, and I’ll let you know if and when The Savant is released.

Here we are nearly three weeks later, and it’s still a question of if, not when — Apple TV’s page for The Savant still has it labeled “Coming: At a Later Date”.

Saul Zabar, Smoked Fish Czar of Upper West Side, Dies at 97 ★

Clyde Haberman, The New York Times:

Saul Zabar, who across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread and tangy cheese, not to mention pungent coffee, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 97. [...]

What did he look for in a fish? His response to The New York Sun in 2007 was worthy of a cryptic Zen master: “It’s got to have taste. Not too this, not too that.”

But he was clear about his store’s iconic status. “There’s a romance about what we do,” he said in 2012. “We have a modern appearance, but we really do things the way they were done 40, 50, 75, even 200 years ago.” [...]

“We get asked often why we don’t franchise, because we have a lot of branded products,” he told the magazine Edible Manhattan in 2022.

“Money is not why we do this, not why we’re here seven days a week,” he said. “It’s a way of life for us. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

Many people claim that they’re not in it for the money. Only some of them mean it. And those are the most interesting, and often most beloved, people in the world.

Amazon Hamfistedly Removed the Guns From Prime’s James Bond Movie Posters ★

Garth Franklin, writing at Dark Horizons:

Amazon has quietly walked back new James Bond thumbnail artwork on its Prime Video service following controversy over digital alterations to the original art. As reported here yesterday, the art was unveiled on the weekend to coincide with James Bond Day celebrations on Sunday.

Bond fans quickly noticed that the artwork had undergone some amateur photoshopping, which either cropped or airbrushed out his signature Walther PPK gun from the original image in a variety of ways.

The results were widely derided on social media; films like Dr. No and Goldeneye appeared to have Bond making a rude gesture, while others like A View to a Kill elongated Roger Moore’s arms well past the point of any human.

The updated ones just kinda suck. Amazon’s original “new” posters were downright hilariously bad. This bodes poorly for the Bond franchise’s future.

Friday, 10 October 2025

Apple Newsroom on the Immersive Vision Pro Lakers Broadcasts ★

Apple Newsroom:

In addition to live games for fans in the Lakers’ regional broadcast territory — which covers Southern California, Hawaii, and parts of southern Nevada, including Las Vegas — full game replays and highlights will be available to Apple Vision Pro users in select countries and regions from both the SportsNet and NBA apps. These live games will be captured using the new URSA Cine Immersive Live camera from Blackmagic Design, a version of the camera that launched earlier this year to capture Apple Immersive for Vision Pro, and will be available for purchase next year.

I didn’t catch yesterday that these immersive broadcasts would only be available live within the Lakers’ local broadcast territory, which stinks, but alas, makes sense given how sports broadcasting rights work.

Thursday, 9 October 2025

Some Lakers Games This Season Will Be Broadcast Live in Immersive Video for Vision Pro ★

Jacob Krol, writing for Techradar:

We’ve seen a broad range of content, but I’ve been waiting for something live — specifically, live sports. Seeing that Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball is capturing games with the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max gave me some hope, and now we have a confirmed release. In what might be the start of something new, select Los Angeles Lakers games will be live-streamed in Apple Immersive for the Vision Pro this coming season.

It’s not every game, but for those that are streaming — exclusive to the $3,500 Spatial Computer — you’ll get access to views that put you right in the middle of the action. Special cameras that support the format will be set courtside and under each basket to give you perspectives that amp up the immersion. The Lakers’ games will be shot using a special version of Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine Immersive Live camera.

Kind of weird, to me, that it wasn’t Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball broadcasts first, but I can’t wait to try this.

Apple’s Justification for Removing DeICER From the App Store ★

Pablo Manríquez, reporting for Migrant Insider:

Apple has quietly removed DeICER, a civic-reporting app used to log immigration enforcement activity, from its App Store after a law enforcement complaint — invoking a rule normally reserved for protecting marginalized groups from hate speech.

According to internal correspondence reviewed by Migrant Insider, Apple told developer Rafael Concepcion that the app violated Guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”

But Apple’s justification went further. “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group,” the company wrote in its removal notice.

The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.

Delicate flowers, these ICE agents are. And it’s a lie, anyway. There’s not one story about any of these apps being used to harm ICE agents. And even if such an attack happened, that wouldn’t imply it’s the purpose of these apps. The purpose of these apps is to protect people — citizens and non-citizens alike — from ICE.

Alas, there’s no more courage, conviction, or honesty from Google on the Android side of the fence either.

It’d be both interesting and honest if either Apple or Google justified these app bannings by simply saying the Trump administration demanded them and that they — Apple and Google — fear reprisal from Trump if they don’t comply.

Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses ★

Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

Sometimes consistency is a bad thing.

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Apple Faces French Investigation Over Opt-In Siri Voice Recordings ★

Benoit Berthelot and Gaspard Sebag, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. faces an investigation in France over the use of voice recordings made with its assistant Siri. The probe has been referred to the Office for Combating Cybercrime, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Monday. An Apple spokesperson referred to a blog post the company published in January about its use of voice recordings, and declined to comment further.

Politico earlier reported the investigation.

The investigation concerns Apple’s collection of user recordings through Siri, the digital assistant available on most of its devices. Apple can record and retain audio interactions through Siri to help improve its services, a feature the company says is opt-in. Some of that data can be retained for up to two years and reviewed by “graders”, or subcontractors, according to Apple.

Sending recorded Siri voice interactions to Apple is opt-in, and the opt-in screen is very clear and cogent. It’s not just something Apple claims.

Amazing stuff continues to happen in the EU.

Katie Notopoulos on the Difference Between Sora and Meta Vibes ★

Katie Notopoulos, on Threads:

Me looking at Vibes feed: this is screensaver. So boring. Why would anyone want it?

Me looking at videos I made of my own face in Sora 2: heheh I love this it’s funny it’s ME.

My feelings exactly.

I even like staring at screensavers sometimes. But the screensavers I like watching are Apple’s aerial (and occasionally, underwater) screensavers on Apple TV. They’re slow, peaceful, and real. Vibes is chaotic, fast, and phony.

‘Sora’s Slop Hits Different’ ★

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation. I previously wrote about how I was an early investor in Vine in part because it felt like it could be analogous to Instagram. Thanks in large part to filters, that app made it easy for anyone to think they were good enough to be a photographer. It didn’t matter if they were or not, they thought they were — I was one of them — so everyone posted their photos. Vine felt like it could have been that for video thanks to its clever tap-to-record mechanism. But actually, it became a network for a lot of really talented amateurs to figure out a new format for funny videos on the internet. When Twitter acquired the company and dropped the ball, TikTok took that idea and scaled it (thanks to ByteDance paying um, Meta billions of dollars for distribution, and their own very smart algorithms).

In a way, Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator.

I don’t want to predict if Sora is a fad or has staying power, but so far I enjoy it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new social network in years. It’s just fun to dash off a stupid video with no more work than a quick text prompt, and the friends I’m following are making some damn funny clips every day.

Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics ★

The New York Times:

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.

“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables. It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.

Can you believe these woke dopes gave this award to three people, and not one of them is Donald Trump?

Tuesday, 7 October 2025

What’s New or Changed in iOS 26.1 Beta 2 ★

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Alarms and timers are now harder to dismiss thanks to a new ‘Slide to stop’ gesture. Both alarms and timers were updated in iOS 26 to utilize a new design with much larger on-screen buttons than before. Now in iOS 26.1 beta 2, Apple has replaced the ‘Stop’ button with a new sliding gesture that requires a little more intentionality. This should make accidental alarm dismissals more rare.

That’s one of several changes that caught my eye. Seems like a great idea. Another notable change: Slide Over returns to iPadOS.

See also: Juli Clover’s rundown of changes in iOS 26.1 beta 2 for MacRumors.

AltStore State of the Union ★

Riley Testut, co-founder of AltStore:

By far our number one request, we’re planning to launch AltStore PAL in more countries later this year in response to various regulatory changes around the world. Specifically, we plan to launch in Japan, Brazil, and Australia before the end of the year, with the UK to follow in 2026. This is great news for the fight to open app distribution, as it will give consumers more options to install apps they otherwise couldn’t from the App Store — such as my clipboard manager Clip.

While we wait to hear more from Apple on exact timing, if you’re a developer interested in distributing your app through AltStore PAL in one of these countries feel free to check out our documentation now to get a head start. Overall though, we couldn’t be more excited to make AltStore PAL available to millions of more people; we truly believe it’s a matter of time before alternative app marketplaces are available worldwide, and each new country brings us one step closer to that goal.

Apple’s cowardly abandonment of ICEBlock in the face of the first whiff of pressure from the Trump administration is perhaps the best evidence yet that Apple’s arguments in favor of their App Store being the single source for third-party software do not hold water. I’m not going to argue that ICEBlock is an essential app, or super duper popular, but it is a very serious app that aims to address a very serious situation. In Apple’s email to developer Joshua Aaron informing him of their decision to pull ICEBlock from the App Store, they justified the decision on the spurious basis that the app contained “objectionable content”. The only content ICEBlock contains is the location of law enforcement activity. Waze — and more notably, Apple’s own Maps app — do the exact same thing for highway speed traps.

Apple’s decision shows that developers cannot trust the App Store to distribute apps that anyone in the Trump administration might “object to”. ICEBlock is an iOS exclusive app and service for serious privacy reasons that are grounded in technical merit. But, exactly as many critics of the App-Store-as-exclusive-distribution-point-for-native-software model have long warned, it’s proven to be a choke point that Apple was unwilling to defend. Apple frequently invokes the word trust as a reason for the App Store model. But their treatment of ICEBlock indicates they are untrustworthy when it comes to showing any sort of backbone regarding Trump’s mad-king slide into authoritarianism, and thus, so too is the entire iOS platform in jurisdictions like the US, where the App Store remains the exclusive distribution source. What good is building the most privacy-focused, user-friendly platform in the world when Apple will disallow an app for which airtight privacy is essential? What happens when Trump lickspittles go after women’s healthcare apps like Planned Parenthood?

If there were a way to distribute apps outside the App Store in the US (TestFlight doesn’t count, as it has hard limits on how many users can get the app — and it’s not clear that Apple hasn’t blocked ICEBlock from TestFlight too), US iPhone users would still have access to ICEBlock. If that were the case, perhaps the Trump administration would then “demand” that Apple revoke Aaron’s developer account. But if that happened, at least we’d know just how pants-wettingly terrified Apple is of the president, in our purported liberal democracy.

There’s lots of other interesting news in Testut’s AltStore status report, including the news that they’re adding Fediverse support to AltStore to distribute app updates and news (and more); converting to a public benefit corporation; have raised $6 million in funding; and are donating $500,000 of that money to help fund indie iOS Fediverse apps like Tapbots’s Ivory (Mastodon) and Phoenix (Bluesky) clients and The Iconfactory’s Tapestry feed aggregator.

Wiley Hodges’s Open Letter to Tim Cook Regarding ICEBlock ★

Wiley Hodges, a 22-year veteran of Apple product marketing, who retired in 2022, in an open letter he sent to Tim Cook:

I don’t know where this leaves me as an Apple customer, but I do know that it upsets me as an Apple shareholder. I am asking you and your team to more clearly explain the basis on which you made the decision to remove ICEBlock — and how the government showed good faith and strong evidence in making its demand of Apple, or that you reinstate the app in the App Store.

I hope that as a man of integrity and principle you can understand how outrageous this situation is. Even more, I hope you recognize how every inch you voluntarily give to an authoritarian regime adds to their illegitimately derived power. We are at a critical juncture in our country’s history where we face the imminent threat of the loss of our constitutional republic. It is up to all of us to demand that the rule of law rather than the whims of a handful of people — even elected ones — govern our collective enterprise. Apple and you are better than this. You represent the best of what America can be, and I pray that you will find it in your heart to continue to demonstrate that you are true to the values you have so long and so admirably espoused.

When you give a bully your lunch money, they always come back for more.

Disney learned this. Last December, Disney settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against ABC News and host George Stephanopoulos for $15 million. The lawsuit was bullshit; nearly all experts agreed that if Disney/ABC had taken the case to court, they’d have won. Disney settled — with both the $15 million and “a note of regret” — thinking, surely, that this would get Trump off their back. Put them on Trump’s good side. Then came the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco, when they finally stood up and said, effectively, “Fuck you, make me.”

Hodges, earlier in his letter, makes reference to Apple’s 2016 standoff with the FBI over a locked iPhone belonging to the mass shooter in San Bernardino, California. The FBI and Justice Department pressured Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow them to backdoor the iPhone’s passcode lock. Apple adamantly refused.

The message Trump and his lickspittles surely took from Apple acceding to their “demand” regarding ICEBlock — a demand made without an iota of legal justification, nor any factual justification that the app was being used to put ICE law enforcements agents in harm’s way — is that when they make a demand to Apple, Apple will respond not with the four words “Fuck you, make me” (as they did in the 2016 San Bernardino case), but instead “Whatever you say goes”. It was, obviously, easier for Apple to stand on principle in 2016, when Barack Obama, a man who deeply respected the Constitution and the principle of rule of law, was president. But it’s more important to stand on those same principles with Trump — a would-be mad king with no respect nor even understanding of the Constitution or rule of law — in office.

If not now, when? Apple will, I believe, find out.

Monday, 6 October 2025

OpenAI Looks to Take 10 Percent Stake in AMD Through AI Chip Deal ★

MacKenzie Sigalos, CNBC:

OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices have reached a deal that could see Sam Altman’s company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker. AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.

OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

It only happens once a decade or so, but the most exciting times in tech occur when there’s a breakthrough that’s severely hardware constrained. That includes hardware like infrastructure — bandwidth was a massive constraint during the dot-com boom. It wasn’t even feasible to download audio, like podcasts, for the first decade of the consumer internet boom, let alone video. But it was inevitable that we’d get there.

Right now we’re severely constrained on compute for AI. In a few years, we’ll look back on today’s state of affairs the way we look back on dial-up modems.

Sunday, 5 October 2025

S&P Global ★

My thanks to S&P Global for sponsoring this last week at DF. S&P Global believes that the future of information delivery is AI — and AI thrives on clean, trustworthy metadata. That’s why they’re embracing open web standards to make data more accessible and machine-readable. Explore their open data at dunl.org, their open data portal, and discover rich metadata at S&P’s Metadata Marketplace.

Saturday, 4 October 2025

Cheap Batteries Are Dangerous ★

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Lumafield has released the results of a new study of lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. The company used its computed tomography (CT) scanners, capable of peering inside objects in 3D using X-rays, to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries. It found dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries that could potentially lead to fires and explosions.

My gut feeling has long been that cheap battery packs and cheap products with integrated batteries (like all the junk Temu sells) are dangerous. This analysis basically proves it. (I’d have linked directly to Lumafield’s report, but it’s only available by submitting your name and email address, so Liszewski’s summary at The Verge is a better quick read.)

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Friday, 3 October 2025

‘Fuck You, Make Me’ ★

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, uh, last week, regarding Disney’s initial (but brief) caving to Trump’s demands that they suspend or even fire Jimmy Kimmel for his having the temerity to mock the mad king for being a sociopathic ghoul sliding into the depths of dementia:

Look, at some point you’re going to have to draw a line. So I’d argue, why not draw it right here? And when they come to you with stupid, ridiculous demands, picking fights that you know you could win in court, instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don’t tend to teach you in business school? Not, “OK, you’re the boss.” Not, “Whatever you say goes.” But instead, the only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away. And that is, “Fuck you. Make me.”

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness (who even suffered from swollen legs and feet, which rings yet another bell with our current wannabe mad king). And it needs to be our response to Trump.

Thursday, 2 October 2025

MLB Average Game Time Under Three Hours for Third Straight Year ★

Jason Foster, reporting for MLB.com:

Nine-inning games during the 2025 season have, on average, clocked in at 2 hours, 38 minutes through Thursday, marking the third straight season in which the average game time was 2:40 or shorter.

Regular Season nine-inning @MLB games of three hours and thirty minutes (3:30) or longer:

• 2021: 391
• 2022: 232
• 2023: 9
• 2024: 7
• 2025: 3 (through 9/25)

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) September 26, 2025

The trend marks the first time since 1983-85 that the average nine-inning game time was 2:40 or shorter in three consecutive seasons. The average nine-inning game time was 2:36 last season and 2:40 in 2023.

I disagree with many of MLB’s recent rules changes (e.g. the 10th-inning “Manfred Man” ghost runners), but the pitch clock and limit on mound visits have been unambiguous changes for the better. They don’t make the game feel hurried at all, but prior to the pitch clock, the game often felt ponderous.

Folder Quick Look ★

New Mac app from Martin Lexow, the developer behind App Ahead (which offers a slew of good and intriguing Mac apps):

Preview folder and archive contents (ZIP, RAR, and more) instantly in macOS Quick Look. Just select a folder and press the Space bar.

It’s just that simple. Install it from the Mac App Store — free of charge — and you can Quick Look inside archives and folders. Looks, feels, and works like a feature that ought to be built into the Finder itself. Cool.

Adobe Premiere Ships for iPhone and iPad ★

Adobe:

Today, Adobe announced that the company is bringing its industry leading Adobe Premiere video editor to mobile in a powerful new iPhone app that empowers creators to make pro-quality video on the go. The Adobe Premiere mobile app makes it fast, free and intuitive for creators to edit their videos with precision editing on a lightning-fast multi-track timeline, produce studio-quality audio with crystal clear voiceovers and perfectly timed AI sound effects, generate unique content and access millions of free multimedia assets, and send work directly to Premiere desktop for fine tuning further on a larger screen. The new mobile app offers all the video editing essentials for free, with upgrades available for additional generative credits and storage.

It’s a little thing, but from Adobe’s press release, you’d think this new mobile version of Premiere is only available for iOS, but, as you’d hope, it’s in fact a universal app that properly supports iPadOS too. The word “iPad” doesn’t appear in Adobe’s press release.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

U.K. Makes New Attempt to Access Apple Cloud Data — This Time, iCloud Backups of U.K. Citizens ★

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, reporting for the Financial Times (updated link to a syndicated version at Ars Technica, outside the FT’s parsimonious paywall):

The UK government has ordered Apple to allow access to encrypted cloud backups of British users, after a previous attempt to issue a broader demand that included US customers drew a furious backlash from the Trump administration.

The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a backdoor into users’ cloud storage service, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens’ data, according to people briefed on the matter. [...]

In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK.

“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users,” Apple said on Wednesday. “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.” It added: “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

This is, as I understand it, a demand from the UK government to allow warrantless access to all UK citizens’ iCloud backups. And your iCloud backups, once decrypted, contain just about everything on your device. With Apple unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the UK, if Apple complies, there’s no way around it. And, to make it even worse, the perversity of the UK Investigatory Powers Act is such that it’s a crime for Apple to even say they’ve been issued such a demand, to warn their UK users about it. Just brutal. The UK government could not be more wrong about this stance.

OpenAI Launches Sora, a Social Feed App for AI-Generated Short Videos ★

Hayden Field, The Verge:

OpenAI has a new version of the Sora AI video generator that it launched at the end of last year, and it’s arriving today alongside a new social video app, also called Sora, for iPhones. The currently invite-only app resembles TikTok with a feed of videos you can shuffle through. But instead of encouraging people to stitch together duets, it asks you to record short videos that anyone can spin into new AI-generated deepfakes — with your consent.

In a briefing with reporters on Monday, employees called it the potential “ChatGPT moment for video generation.” The Sora app is currently only available to US and Canada users, with other countries set to follow, and when someone receives access, they also get four additional invites to share with friends. There’s no word on when an Android version might be released.

Sora, though invitation-only at the moment, is currently #3 in the U.S. App Store. Meta’s Meta AI app, which contains, in a tab, their Vibes AI-generated video feed, is #97.

Also, I’m sure Sora will eventually come to Android. But, to play with it now, you need an iPhone. So tell me again how Apple is behind on AI? If you have an Android phone, you’re behind on everything except what Google itself offers (which, admittedly, is some great stuff). If you have an iPhone, you’re ahead on everything except what’s baked into iOS. Including the fact that the #1 app on the App Store today is ... Google Gemini.

Wednesday, 1 October 2025

America’s Pants: A Special Investigation Into the Dallas Cowboys’ Pants ★

This exemplary deep dive from Don Patterson at Uni Watch is a nice capper to the Cowboys’ 40-40 victory over the Green Bay Packers Sunday night.

Tuesday, 30 September 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Iconic Pig Lipstick’ ★

John Moltz returns to the show to talk about the iPhone 17 lineup: the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 17, and the no-number iPhone Air. Not one word about baseball, but some Star Wars talk may or may not have snuck in.

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Apple Started Using iPhone 17 Pros as Cameras for Friday Night Baseball Broadcasts ★

Jason Snell:

According to Apple, four iPhone 17 Pros will be positioned at Fenway Park — in the Green Monster, the home dugout, and roaming the stands. In contrast to the secrecy of last week, the Tigers-Red Sox game will feature a bug in the corner of the screen that shows off the shots that are coming from an iPhone.

Is it a self-promotional gimmick? Sure, but Apple is paying a lot of money for MLB rights. Also, it’s not as if the company hasn’t pushed its MLB telecasts in a bunch of different ways. The Friday Night Baseball broadcasts look great, and have featured loads of helmet and body cams, a cinematic depth-of-field camera, and even in-stadium drone shots. Apple has probably earned at least one night of iPhone Pro product integration.

I skipped through the archive of the game and the footage from the iPhones was indistinguishable from the regular cameras. If not for the (subtle!) “Shot on iPhone” bug in the top right corner, I’d never have even suspected they were shot on anything other than the regular cameras Apple has been using for these broadcasts.

Monday, 29 September 2025

The 25th Anniversary of The Onion Classic: ‘William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior’ ★

This one will never get old.

Let’s Check in With HP Employee Imran Chaudhri ★

Allison Johnson, The Verge:

Remember the Humane AI pin? And that serious-as-a-heart-attack TED talk about the future of computing? Well, Qualcomm featured Chaudhri in its Snapdragon Summit keynote today, where he’s talking less about lasers you wear on your shirt and more about the amazing battery life on the OmniBook 5 series. How it started, how it’s going, etc. etc.

Johnson’s link above goes directly to Chaudhri’s bit in Qualcomm’s keynote. Looks like a hostage video.

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